Bøker utgitt av Springer Nature Switzerland AG

This book discusses problems, challenges, and mitigation strategies in the wake of environmental degradation. It suggests proactive solutions to problems of environmental degradation for strategic planning as well as their effective delivery, and problems arising due to growth in population, industry, and land use change. The uniqueness of the book is its broader spectrum of coverage with related interconnections and interdependence of various aspects. Presenting a wide spectrum of viewpoints and approaches, the book covers topics, such as deforestation impacts (land use and land cover, soil erosion); impacts on climate change and human health; treatment of industrial, municipal, biological waste disposal and their impacts on soil, water, and air; recovery/remediation processes and technologies; impacts of pesticides and chemical fertilizers on soil degradation and groundwater; socio-economic environmental sustainability; and socio-economic health impacts. Particularfocus is placed on strategic planning and methodological handling of environmental degradation and remediation through various processes and treatment technologies. This book will be useful to researchers, professionals, policy makers, and environmental engineers.

This book analyses how and why we are living at a critical moment in the history of human life on earth and explores how we find grounds for the hopes that will enable us to address the challenges and crises of our time. The author analyses hope both practically and philosophically as a generative virtue to realistically discern the situations in which we find ourselves, and imaginatively to anticipate possibilities when the future is unknown and uncertain. The author argues that hope is a mean between anomy, disillusionment, and despair, on the one hand, and wishful thinking, dreaming, and fanaticizing, on the other hand. The book not only examines ¿ and analyzes from a historical perspective - the contemporary crises such as climate change, environmental degradation and its effects such as the social costs of these developments, but also further analyzes the character and micro-dynamics of hope and how it makes a difference in how we manage the crises which inevitably emerge.Though contemporary crises are those we tend to focus on, the author also engages with what is involved in a due regard for history and the relevance of a sense of history for addressing the crises of our time. He shows us what we can learn from revisiting some thoughtful reflections by thinkers like Niebuhr, Jaspers, Camus, and Arendt. Finally, the author shows us what is involved practically in anticipating possibilities, by looking at hope as a social practice and noting how hopeful people make a difference.

This book analyses the transformation of European Education Policy from 1973 to 2020. In doing so, it offers a unique insight into the changes of European education from a predominantly national concern to a supranational policy framework, driven by an economic discourse concerning productivity and employability. The book shows that the idea of the ¿Europe of Knowledge¿ did not originate in the Lisbon Strategy of 2000, but rather was the result of a gradual development that started in the mid-1980s. This begun with the establishment of a specific problem definition of education as a solution for Europe¿s lack of competitiveness, a definition that was incrementally constructed by the European Commission and the European business community. Highlighting significant and unexplored questions such as the role of European transnational business in education and the role of the ¿problem entrepreneur¿ in defining policy issues, this book will provide a comprehensive perspective on European Education Policy that will be of interest to all students of European Politics, Education Policy, and Public Policy.

The remarkable progress in computer vision over the last few years is, by and large, attributed to deep learning, fueled by the availability of huge sets of labeled data, and paired with the explosive growth of the GPU paradigm. While subscribing to this view, this work criticizes the supposed scientific progress in the field, and proposes the investigation of vision within the framework of information-based laws of nature.This work poses fundamental questions about vision that remain far from understood, leading the reader on a journey populated by novel challenges resonating with the foundations of machine learning. The central thesis proposed is that for a deeper understanding of visual computational processes, it is necessary to look beyond the applications of general purpose machine learning algorithms, and focus instead on appropriate learning theories that take into account the spatiotemporal nature of the visual signal.Serving to inspire and stimulate critical reflection and discussion, yet requiring no prior advanced technical knowledge, the text can naturally be paired with classic textbooks on computer vision to better frame the current state of the art, open problems, and novel potential solutions. As such, it will be of great benefit to graduate and advanced undergraduate students in computer science, computational neuroscience, physics, and other related disciplines.

This book presents a comprehensive reference source for dynamic and innovative research in the field of cyber security, focusing on nature-inspired research and applications. The authors present the design and development of future-ready cyber security measures, providing a critical and descriptive examination of all facets of cyber security with a special focus on recent technologies and applications. The book showcases the advanced defensive cyber security mechanism that is a requirement in the industry and highlights measures that provide efficient and fast solutions. The authors explore the potential of AI-based and nature-inspired based computing compatibilities in establishing an adaptive defense mechanism system. The book focuses on current research while highlighting the empirical results along with theoretical concepts to provide a reference for students, researchers, scholars, professionals, and practitioners in the field of cyber security and analytics. This book featurescontributions from leading scholars from all over the world.