Sustainability Networks
Sustainability Networks

Author: Janne Hukkinen

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2008-08-18

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1134043783

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Sustainability is a word that means different things depending on who is using it, thus underlining the potential problems involved in experts from different fields teaming up to tackle sustainability problems. In this book, Janne Hukkinen argues for a reflexive approach to sustainability as a means of coming to grips with the threatening challenges arising out of human-environment interaction. The author illustrates his argument with a case study of natural resource management in Lapland, showing how sustainability is understood holistically by academics and professionals alike. This book reflects an emerging cognitive turn in sustainability sciences, conceptualizing environmental challenges during action on our social and material environments, rather than in isolation. Hukkinen argues that this conceptual blending enables sustainability experts to hybridize themselves: to immerse themselves in the fields of other experts and imagine the other's work - both prerequisites of trans-disciplinary knowledge integration. This book shows how sustainability experts can reveal their intellectual engagements when designing scenarios and indicators and presents a rigorous framework for organizing expert collaboration.

Reindeer Nomads Meet the Market
Reindeer Nomads Meet the Market

Author: Florian Stammler

Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 382588046X

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"Refuting essentialist notions of Nenets culture, the author explores the dialogue between reindeer nomads and the surrounding world and shows how global processes and concepts such as culture, property, and market are expressed in local practices. He demonstrates how reindeer nomads move freely between subsistence and commodity production; state-owned and private reindeer; animism, communism, and market relations; and territorial defence and cooperative knowledge of the land. This study makes an original and significant contribution to wider debates about nomadic pastoralism and to anthropological studies of trade, barter, property, and territoriality."--GoogleBooks

The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Networks
The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Networks

Author: Yann Bramoullé

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-03-01

Total Pages: 857

ISBN-13: 0190216832

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The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Networks represents the frontier of research into how and why networks they form, how they influence behavior, how they help govern outcomes in an interactive world, and how they shape collective decision making, opinion formation, and diffusion dynamics. From a methodological perspective, the contributors to this volume devote attention to theory, field experiments, laboratory experiments, and econometrics. Theoretical work in network formation, games played on networks, repeated games, and the interaction between linking and behavior is synthesized. A number of chapters are devoted to studying social process mediated by networks. Topics here include opinion formation, diffusion of information and disease, and learning. There are also chapters devoted to financial contagion and systemic risk, motivated in part by the recent financial crises. Another section discusses communities, with applications including social trust, favor exchange, and social collateral; the importance of communities for migration patterns; and the role that networks and communities play in the labor market. A prominent role of networks, from an economic perspective, is that they mediate trade. Several chapters cover bilateral trade in networks, strategic intermediation, and the role of networks in international trade. Contributions discuss as well the role of networks for organizations. On the one hand, one chapter discusses the role of networks for the performance of organizations, while two other chapters discuss managing networks of consumers and pricing in the presence of network-based spillovers. Finally, the authors discuss the internet as a network with attention to the issue of net neutrality.

The Herds Shot Round the World
The Herds Shot Round the World

Author: Rebecca J. H. Woods

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2017-10-10

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1469634678

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As Britain industrialized in the early nineteenth century, animal breeders faced the need to convert livestock into products while maintaining the distinctive character of their breeds. Thus they transformed cattle and sheep adapted to regional environments into bulky, quick-fattening beasts. Exploring the environmental and economic ramifications of imperial expansion on colonial environments and production practices, Rebecca J. H. Woods traces how global physiological and ecological diversity eroded under the technological, economic, and cultural system that grew up around the production of livestock by the British Empire. Attending to the relationship between type and place and what it means to call a particular breed of livestock "native," Woods highlights the inherent tension between consumer expectations in the metropole and the ecological reality at the periphery. Based on extensive archival work in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia, this study illuminates the connections between the biological consequences and the politics of imperialism. In tracing both the national origins and imperial expansion of British breeds, Woods uncovers the processes that laid the foundation for our livestock industry today.

The Wealth of Networks
The Wealth of Networks

Author: Yochai Benkler

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2006-01-01

Total Pages: 532

ISBN-13: 9780300125771

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Describes how patterns of information, knowledge, and cultural production are changing. The author shows that the way information and knowledge are made available can either limit or enlarge the ways people create and express themselves. He describes the range of legal and policy choices that confront.

Deep Learning Approaches for Spoken and Natural Language Processing
Deep Learning Approaches for Spoken and Natural Language Processing

Author: Virender Kadyan

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-01-01

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 3030797783

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This book provides insights into how deep learning techniques impact language and speech processing applications. The authors discuss the promise, limits and the new challenges in deep learning. The book covers the major differences between the various applications of deep learning and the classical machine learning techniques. The main objective of the book is to present a comprehensive survey of the major applications and research oriented articles based on deep learning techniques that are focused on natural language and speech signal processing. The book is relevant to academicians, research scholars, industrial experts, scientists and post graduate students working in the field of speech signal and natural language processing and would like to add deep learning to enhance capabilities of their work. Discusses current research challenges and future perspective about how deep learning techniques can be applied to improve NLP and speech processing applications; Presents and escalates the research trends and future direction of language and speech processing; Includes theoretical research, experimental results, and applications of deep learning.

Partially Observed Markov Decision Processes
Partially Observed Markov Decision Processes

Author: Vikram Krishnamurthy

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-03-21

Total Pages: 491

ISBN-13: 1316594785

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Covering formulation, algorithms, and structural results, and linking theory to real-world applications in controlled sensing (including social learning, adaptive radars and sequential detection), this book focuses on the conceptual foundations of partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs). It emphasizes structural results in stochastic dynamic programming, enabling graduate students and researchers in engineering, operations research, and economics to understand the underlying unifying themes without getting weighed down by mathematical technicalities. Bringing together research from across the literature, the book provides an introduction to nonlinear filtering followed by a systematic development of stochastic dynamic programming, lattice programming and reinforcement learning for POMDPs. Questions addressed in the book include: when does a POMDP have a threshold optimal policy? When are myopic policies optimal? How do local and global decision makers interact in adaptive decision making in multi-agent social learning where there is herding and data incest? And how can sophisticated radars and sensors adapt their sensing in real time?

A Native American Encyclopedia
A Native American Encyclopedia

Author: Barry Pritzker

Publisher: Oxford : Oxford University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 630

ISBN-13: 9780195138771

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Dispelling myths, answering questions, and stimulating thoughtful avenues for further inquiry, this highly absorbing reference provides a wealth of specific information about over 200 North American Indian groups in Canada and the United States. Readers will easily access important historical and contemporary facts about everything from notable leaders and relations with non-natives to customs, dress, dwellings, weapons, government, and religion. This book is at once exhaustive and captivating, covering myriad aspects of a people spread across a continent. Divided into ten geographic areas for easy reference, this work illustrates each Native American group in careful detail. Listed alphabetically, starting with the tribal name, translation, origin, and definition, each entry includes significant facts about the group's location and population, as well as impressive accounts of the group's history and culture. Bringing entries up-to-date, Barry Pritzker also presents current information on each group's government, economy, legal status, and land holdings. Whether interpreting the term "tribe" (many traditional Native American groups were not tribes at all but more like extended families) or describing how a Shoshone woman served as a guide on the Lewis and Clark expedition, Pritzker always presents the material in a clear and lively manner. In light of past and ongoing injustices and the momentum of Indian and Inuit self-determination movements, an understanding of Native American cultures as well as their contributions to contemporary society becomes increasingly important. A magnificent resource, this book liberally provides the essential information necessary to better grasp the history and cultures of North American Indians.

Native Students at Work
Native Students at Work

Author: Kevin Whalen

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2016-06-01

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0295806664

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Native Students at Work tells the stories of Native people from around the American Southwest who participated in labor programs at Sherman Institute, a federal Indian boarding school in Riverside, California. The school placed young Native men and women in and around Los Angeles as domestic workers, farmhands, and factory laborers. For the first time, historian Kevin Whalen reveals the challenges these students faced as they left their homes for boarding schools and then endured an “outing program” that aimed to strip them of their identities and cultures by sending them to live and work among non-Native people. Tracing their journeys, Whalen shows how male students faced low pay and grueling conditions on industrial farms near the edge of the city, yet still made more money than they could near their reservations. Similarly, many young women serving as domestic workers in Los Angeles made the best of their situations by tapping into the city’s Indigenous social networks and even enrolling in its public schools. As Whalen reveals, despite cruel working conditions, Native people used the outing program to their advantage whenever they could, forming urban indigenous communities and sharing money and knowledge gained in the city with those back home. A mostly overlooked chapter in Native American and labor histories, Native Students at Work deepens our understanding of the boarding school experience and sheds further light on Native American participation in the workforce.

The Economics of Immigration
The Economics of Immigration

Author: Örn B. Bodvarsson

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2009-06-12

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 3540777962

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The inspiration for this book came from a collaborative research project on immigration, begun in 2001, when we were colleagues at University of Nebraska- Lincoln (Bodvarsson was a Visiting Professor there in 2001–05). Our project dealt with the application of Say’s Law to the supply of immigrant labor, meaning that when the supply of immigrant labor grows in an area, the new immigrants, being consumers, bolster labor demand and help to offset the lower wages they may bring about. Our test case was the seemingly obscure Dawson County, Nebraska, where the meatpacking industry experienced a relatively huge increase in Hispanic-born labor supply around 1990. We found for Dawson County this ‘‘demand effect’’ to be signi?cant and our results for this test case generalizable to other, more prominent, test cases. This inspired us to study the famous Mariel Boatlift, where Miami’s labor force grew suddenly by 7% due to the arrival of nearly 125,000 Cuban refugees in the spring of 1980. In that study, we showed that the Marielitos exerted a signi?cant demand effect, which we argue helps to account for the stylized fact that the Mariel in?ux had a relatively benign effect on the Miami labor market. We had the privilege of presenting both studies at various conferences in the USA, Norway, Taiwan and Israel, and these studies have been published in Labour Economics and the Research in Labor Economics series (both studies are discussed in detail in this book).