Böcker utgivna av Springer Nature Switzerland

This book is aimed at everyone preparing for the ISTQB® Certified Tester ¿ Foundation Level exam based on the Foundation Level syllabus (version 4.0) published in 2023. It provides candidates with reliable knowledge based on this document and thus distinguishes itself from all the information about ISTQB® syllabi and exams on the Internet, which is often of rather poor quality and may even contain serious errors. The book expands and details many issues that are described in the new 2023 version of the syllabus in a perfunctory or general way only. According to the ISTQB® guidelines for syllabus-based training, an exercise must be provided for each learning objective at the K3 level, and a practical example must be provided for each objective at the K2 or K3 level. In order to satisfy these requirements, the authors prepared numerous exercises and examples for all learning objectives at these levels. In addition, for each learning objective, one or more sample exam questions are presented which are similar to those that the candidate will see in the exam. This makes the book an excellent aid for studying and preparing for the exam and verifying acquired knowledge.

This book aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the current challenges in one of the most biodiverse regions in the world. Environmental sustainability and climate change implications in the mountain ecosystems in general and mountainous regions of the Global South in particular are key concerns of the present-day world. In particular, the mountainous regions in the Global South are excessively being subjected to haphazard developmental activities making them vulnerable to all possible aspects of climate change. Ecologically fragile and biodiversity-rich (considered ¿hotspot¿ of biodiversity) Himalayan Region (HR) is subjected to high vulnerability due to climate change and unsustainable developmental activities. A major portion of the Indian HR, for instance, has gradually been endangered by intense environmental burden owing to rapid and haphazard urbanization, extreme weather events, etc. Unfortunately, environmental sustainability studies in many parts of the region are still inadequate. Accordingly, in this book, the authors provide a detailed account of the Himalayas in the epoch of Anthropocene¿¿the most recent period in Earth¿s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet¿s climate and ecosystems" (as defined by the National Geographic Society). It is no secret that the haphazard developmental activities in the Himalayas are having tremendous impacts on the local ecosystems. Many of such impacts are irreversible over the next hundreds of years and it should ring an alarm to all of us alike. Therefore, it becomes increasingly imperative that we document the existing anthropogenic challenges in the Himalayas, analyse them and find a way where environment and development can go hand in hand. This book is an attempt in that direction. The authors aim to address issues ranging from unorganized tourism practices to the big dams in the Himalayas and from mining and quarrying activities to climate change implications and sustainable development goals (SDGs).

This book presents a collection of scientific articles on recent research on innovations in biomedical engineering. Articles are divided into two chapters covering broad areas of experimental research and biomedical engineering, engineering of biomaterials as well as informatics and modelling in biomedical engineering. Given its scope, it offers a valuable resource for practitioners, researchers, and students alike. The topics include not only theoretical considerations but also practical applications of research conducted in cooperation between engineers, doctors, and physiotherapists.

The book provides an overview of the Slow Onset Disasters (SLOD) in the urban built environment discussing potential strategies to assess and mitigate multiple climate change related risks. Climate change evidence has been reported in the last decades, suggesting that the anthropogenic activities are accelerating these changes towards a warmer and more polluted environment. In this context, SLODs have been linked to climate change related disasters and have been stated to have a higher impact risk within dense built environment (BE). Therefore, the book presents a description of the most relevant SLODs, their significance, and confluence, the way in which scientists and entities are monitoring their progression at different scales, a structured risk assessment strategy and the deconstruction of the BE characteristics that make it more prone to SLODs risk. In addition, it highlights the necessity of adapting the traditional risk assessment methods, to account for different vulnerabilitytypes, including the morphology and materiality of the BE, and the BE users¿ characteristics. In fact, individual features influence users¿ responses and tolerance to environmental stressors, because of age, health, gender, habits, and behaviour, thus impacting the users¿ vulnerability. Exposure can then amplify these issues, since it defines the number of users that can be effectively affected by the SLOD. Starting from this perspective, the book first traces literature-based correlations between individual features, use behaviour, and individual response to the SLOD-altered open spaces. Then, a novel methodology, to quantify the variations of users¿ vulnerability and exposure, is offered, to support designers in quickly defining input scenarios for risk assessment and mitigation. Lastly, it demonstrates, through a case study, the SLOD risk assessment framework proposed and the evaluation of the efficacy of risk mitigation strategies.

This book provides a solution to the problem with the energy concept. This problem manifests itself in the fact that physicists clearly diverge regarding the question of what energy is. Some define it but others state that we do not know what it is. Although this is a problem for physicists who need to explain the concept, it is not a problem for physics that can be solved by laboratory means. Penetrating into the origin of the notion of energy, this book offers a clear idea of what was discovered and what was invented to interpret the findings.Following the development of the concept, it provides an explanation of the trends in contemporary textbooks. The author's repetition, in his "History and Philosophy of Physics Laboratory", of Joule¿s famous experiment ¿ the paddle wheel experiment ¿ with a calorimeter as originally used by Joule and with a calorimeter as proposed in textbooks, is presented, yielding new insight into the phenomenon. Thus, science teachers andstudents will benefit from reading the book as well as historians, philosophers, students of the history and philosophy of science, and all who are interested in knowing about what it is that we call energy.

This book reports on innovative research and developments in the broad field of transportation. It covers innovative solutions relating to intelligent vehicles and infrastructure, energy and combustion management, vehicle dynamics and engineering. It also reports on advances in railway transport, air transportation, as well as transportation safety and logistics. Chapters are based on peer-reviewed papers presented at the 14th international scientific conference "Transbaltica: Transportation Science and Technology", held on September 14-15, 2023, at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, in Vilnius, Lithuania. All in all, this book offers extensive and timely information to both researchers and practitioners in the field of transportation, logistics and related interdisciplinary areas.

The edited collection offers a comprehensive and intricate exploration of Ottoman cash waqfs, extending its scope from the early modern era to the onset of the twentieth century. It delves into the historical evolution of these private Islamic financial institutions, shedding light on their enduring influence and drawing insightful parallels with both contemporary Middle Eastern and European financial systems. Leveraging newly uncovered data spanning various regions of the Ottoman Empire, this work scrutinizes the dynamic functions of waqfs, revealing their significant imprint on today's financial paradigms. It advances existing scholarship by employing quantitative methodologies and systematic analysis of these emergent datasets, facilitating a sophisticated, longitudinal study of cash waqfs within the broader spectrum of historical interest rate trends and global credit markets. The chapters trace the transformation of waqfs from entities primarily holding immovable assets to those managing movable assets (cash waqfs), delineating their role in generating revenue for diverse purposes. These encompass funding state debts, fostering infrastructure development, and extending microcredit to economically marginalized segments of society. Additionally, the book explores the challenges and failures encountered in the transition of financial institutions during the Ottoman era, particularly in the context of the emergence of large public banks. The concluding segment of the book offers a comparative analysis of financial systems across various countries, including the shift from private to public banking in Italy, and contemplates the potential applicability of waqf models in contemporary microcredit initiatives and sustainable development strategies. This volume will appeal to scholars of financial history, economic history, Ottoman studies, and Islamic finance.

This book provides a guide for those looking to understand the potential of blockchain technology and its impact on various industries. The book provides an in-depth exploration of blockchain technology, its use cases, and the opportunities and challenges it presents. From digital currencies and smart contracts to supply chain management and decentralized finance, the book covers all the key aspects of blockchain technology. The authors also go beyond the technical details, providing valuable insights and practical advice on how to navigate this new era of decentralization and trustless transactions. The book is an ideal read for researchers, entrepreneurs, investors, or anyone looking to stay ahead of the curve and stay informed about the future of blockchain technology.

The book presents original contributions to the theories and practices of emerging internet, data, and web technologies and their applicability in businesses, engineering, and academia. As a key feature, it addresses advances in the life-cycle exploitation of data generated from the digital ecosystem data technologies that create value for the knowledge and businesses toward a collective intelligence approach.Internet has become the most proliferative platform for emerging large-scale computing paradigms. Among these, data and web technologies are two most prominent paradigms, in a variety of forms such as data centers, cloud computing, mobile cloud, and mobile web services. These technologies altogether create a digital ecosystem whose corner stone is the data cycle, from capturing to processing, analysis, and visualization. The investigation of various research and development issues in this digital ecosystem is boosted by the ever-increasing needs of real-life applications, which are based on storing and processing large amounts of data. Researchers, software developers, practitioners, and students interested in the field of data and web technologies will find this book useful and a reference for their activity.

This book argues for the necessity of a re-evaluation of our thinking about responsibly relating to future generations in the context of environmental philosophy. Using long-term nuclear waste disposal as its paradigmatic case, this book makes the case that the predominant mode of thinking the future in terms of continuity and repetition of the present requires a critique informed by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in order to think responsibility adequately. The book begins by surveying contemporary accounts of intergenerational responsibility before outlining the specifics of nuclear waste disposal policy. With these stakes established, the contributions of Jacques Derrida to future-oriented ethics are introduced. These include discussions of communication across contexts, the relationship between inheritance and responsibility, and the political imperatives that result from this critique. This book concludes by arguing for an intergenerational environmental policy that rejectspolicy and infrastructural projects that depend on the present reproducing itself indefinitely.

This book offers a systematic acoustic phonetic analysis of both language and dialect death in the region of Béarn, southwestern France. Focusing on Béarnais, a localised dialect of Gascon which is under pressure from French, the author explores the socio-political process of language shift, whereby members of a speech community cease to speak their indigenous language in favour of an incoming dominant language. Gascon is at an advanced stage of this process, making its remaining speakers excellent candidates for the study of language obsolescence, and this unique study will be of interest to researchers working in a broad range of disciplines, including language variation and change, language and dialect contact, Occitan and French, sociophonetics and phonology.

This book constitutes revised selected papers from the 15th International Conference on Computer Supported Education, CSEDU 2023, which took place in Prague, Czech Republic, during April 21¿23, 2023.CSEDU 2023 accepted 34 full and 54 papers out of 162 papers submissions. Out of these, 8 contributions have been selected for inclusion in this book. The papers included in this book contribute to the understanding of relevant trends in the current research on Computer Supported Education, with a particular focus on: eLearning Platforms, Portals, Feedback and Learning Support, Game-Based and Simulation-Based Learning, Active Learning, Tools to Assess Learning, Learning with AI Systems, Higher Order Thinking Skills, Flipped Classroom, Faculty Development and Constructivism and Social Constructivism.

This book provides a critical account of federal asymmetry in India - its origins, context, forms and functioning - by taking into account the institutional effectiveness of asymmetric institutions in the regions for identity fulfillment, development and governance. It argues that while some asymmetry, de jure/ or de facto, is part of all federations for meeting some special circumstances, in India, which has followed a different path of federation building, asymmetric institutional solutions especially in the border areas have played a crucially important role in accommodating ethno-cultural diversity, ensuring law and order, a level of development and governance in a process that has turned the ¿rebels into stakeholders¿. Indiäs federal asymmetric designs and their working has been a key to holding the peripheries within the Union of India. The book utilizes both archival research and empirical survey data, as well as elite interviews.

This brief recognizes aggression and violent behavior as a public health crisis and provides a review of the role of sleep disruption as a precursor to aggression. It offers clinical practitioners and researchers a synopsis of sleep assessments and intervention strategies that can be utilized to enhance sleep quality/quantity or target sleep disorders along with an overview of the potential effects that sleep interventions may have on aggressive behaviors. The volume also gives special consideration to the possible contributions of sleep disruption in institutional aggression. It provides recommendations for such environments (i.e., correctional facilities, nursing homes, psychiatric institutions, schools) to inform policy and future research efforts.

The book explains the basic concepts of river water quality index, river environments, shifting of river courses, dams and barrages ¿ their merits and demerits, mutual interdependence of river and society etc. in the typical geomorphic set up of West Bengal. In India, West Bengal is a riverine state due to the towering Himalayas to the north and the Bay of Bengal to the south. In between the mountain and sea, due to the location of the Gangetic delta region and its stability with space and time, the rivers of this state are gradually dying. In addition to the stability of the delta, the river channel is being filled with sediments carried along the river course from upstream. The role of dams, barrages and reservoirs in the normal flow of rivers at different geographical locations deserves discussion which is included in the book. It is to be expected that the rivers of West Bengal can be an outstanding example of mutual interdependence of science and society, all of which are included in the book.The use of different physicochemical parameters adopted for the water quality index of different rivers described in this book will provide new directions in this regard. With discussions like water quality index, river environments, shifting of river courses, reservoirs, dams and barrages, and mutual interdependence of river and society, it is the intention that this book, River Systems of West Bengal - Water and Environments, will be useful for the research and higher studies in the river related field. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of riverine environments.