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Assistive Technology (AT) is the term used to describe products or technology-based services which support those with disabilities or other limitations to their daily activities, enabling them to enjoy a better quality of life. This book presents the proceedings of the 13th European Conference on the Advancement of Assistive Technology (AAATE 2015), held in Budapest, Hungary in September 2015. This biennial conference has established itself as a leading forum in the transdisciplinary area of Assistive Technology, providing a unique platform for the gathering of experts from around the world to review progress and challenges in the interdisciplinary fields which contribute to AT, such as rese...
The book reports on advanced topics in the areas of neurorehabilitation research and practice. It focuses on new methods for interfacing the human nervous system with electronic and mechatronic systems to restore or compensate impaired neural functions. Importantly, the book merges different perspectives, such as the clinical, neurophysiological, and bioengineering ones, to promote, feed and encourage collaborations between clinicians, neuroscientists and engineers. Based on the 2018 International Conference on Neurorehabilitation (ICNR 2018) held on October 16-20, 2018, in Pisa, Italy,, this book covers various aspects of neurorehabilitation research and practice, including new insights int...
Provides a description about biomaterials, classification and fabrication technologies used in the development of nanostructured biomaterials. Provides a brief account of physicochemical attributes of nanoparticles and its role in summarizing applications of nanobiomaterials. Includes an integrated approach that is used to discuss both the biological and engineering aspects of nanostructured biomaterials. Presents an up-to-date and highly structured reference source for students, researchers and practitioners working in biomedical, biotechnological and engineering fields. Proposes novel opportunities and ideas for developing or improving technologies in nanomedicine/nanobiology and nanoremediation.
Assessing health-related quality of life (HRQOL) of Children has been a popular topic in recent years worldwide. However, there are several issues/gaps in this research area which need to be addressed. For instance, previous studies on HRQOL of Children populations have normally used HRQOL instruments designed for adults. These measurements may not be suitable for children as they are in a series of cognitive developmental stages and have different perspectives towards the relative importance of HRQOL dimensions. In order to tackle this issue and to accurately measure children’s HRQOL, a set of dedicated HRQOL instruments should be first developed and validated. The validated instruments could then be applied to the population measuring their HRQOL. In addition, the HRQOL information collected could be translated into health utility score if it is measured by utility instruments (e.g., EQ-5D-Y) for the population. Moreover, the relevant studies on these issues is still lacking especially in non-western countries.
As Brazil and other countries in Latin America turned away from their authoritarian past and began the transition to democracy in the 1980s and 1990s, interest in developing new institutions to bring the benefits of democracy to the citizens in the lower socioeconomic strata intensified, and a number of experiments were undertaken. Perhaps the one receiving the most attention has been Participatory Budgeting (PB), first launched in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre in 1989 by a coalition of civil society activists and Workers&’ Party officials. PB quickly spread to more than 250 other municipalities in the country, and it has since been adopted in more than twenty countries world...
Democratic institution-building experiences, innovative forms of social organization, and the development of multiple state-society interfaces represent a significant political phenomenon in Latin America in the last half-century. By comparing the two largest countries of the subcontinent, Brazil and Mexico, Democratizing the State examines social accountability and social control regimes. These regimes are conceived configurations of relationships between actors, organizational structures, norms, and resources, all arranged in a stable and institutionalized manner to exert social control over state actors and functions. The book addresses the contrasting characteristics and different functions through which the citizenry and civil society exert control over state action in both countries. Characterizing these experiences broadly as regimes is novel and enlightening regarding the work of practitioners and scholars on political participation, social accountability, and democracy in the global South and the global North.
This handbook reviews extant research and offers critical summaries of key topics and issues in the field, enriched by authoritative analyses of specific cases and examples. It displays pluralism across a number of axes: epistemological, theoretical, geographical, cultural, and thematic. The first part offers historical routes through the international development of the field and explores the epistemological grounds of multiple strands of environmental communication studies. In aiming to map the field broadly, as well as stimulating new thinking, the second part is organized along three core perspectives: arenas, voice, and place. It comprises chapters on various public spaces that are critical to the symbolic constitution of the environment, and sheds light on a range of aspects and social agents that have received insufficient attention, including research about – and carried out in – non-Western countries. Crucially, at a time of profound environmental crisis, the final part of this book discusses possibilities and constraints to social change, and the potential contributions of environmental communication research to ways of understanding and responding to the challenge.
"Encompassing multiple and disparate manifestations and phenomena from across both the extreme left and the extreme right of the political spectrum, 'populism' defies neat definition. In this book, Sebastián Moreno Barreneche argues that populism constitutes a specific social discourse brought to life by political actors. Conceiving populism as a series of modes of semiotic constructions based on a conception of the social divided into two groups, 'the People' and 'the Other', this book shows that semiotics is an essential framework for understanding this phenomenon. Exploring how these categories are discursively constructed, the ways in which meaning emerges through the oppositions between imagined collective actors is explained. Through examination of the different dimensions of populism, drawing on examples from Europe, North America and South America, The Social Semiotics of Populism presents a systematic semiotic approach to this multifaceted political concept."--
This text offers a selection of papers on singularity theory presented at the Sixth Workshop on Real and Complex Singularities held at ICMC-USP, Brazil. It should help students and specialists to understand results that illustrate the connections between singularity theory and related fields. The authors discuss irreducible plane curve singularities, openness and multitransversality, the distribution Afs and the real asymptotic spectrum, deformations of boundary singularities and non-crystallographic coxeter groups, transversal Whitney topology and singularities of Haefliger foliations, the topology of hypersurface singularities, polar multiplicities and equisingularity of map germs from C3 to C4, and topological invariants of stable maps from a surface to the plane from a global viewpoint.