Nova Science Publishers – förlag

The number of studies in combat sports has significantly increased in the last decade, as numerous combat sports are becoming more popular around the world. In this book, authors present current academic research from interdisciplinary combat sports arenas, including MMA, Judo, Karate and Tae Kwon Do. Furthermore, readers can find a review that explores the time-motion analysis of grappling, striking and mixed combat sports, and an overview of physiological responses to typical training sessions in official and simulated combats. Relevant physical and psychosocial changes throughout the process of maturation are addressed along with a comparison between combat sports and other forms of physical activity. This book also addresses links between oxidative stress and exercise in combat sports; injury epidemiology in judo; differences among athletes in different karate disciplines.

According to the Youth Suicide Prevention Program, "e;more than 50% of transgender youth will have had at least one suicide attempt by their 20th birthday."e; This data demonstrates a dire need for caregivers, educators and providers to have a better understanding of youths experiencing gender dysphoria (and gender non-conforming youth, who are often mistaken for transgender youth). Presently, our binary society makes the lives of transgender youth more challenging than they need be. Childhood and adolescence mark the start of our gender identity development, our sexual orientation development, and our racial identity development. Those intersections create enough interpersonal and intrapersonal challenges without the added stress of rejection for belonging to a minority group in one or more of those three developmental areas. These transgender youth are growing into transgender adults who own businesses, become politicians, join the military, and become parents. They are a natural and needed part of our society. This book was created to give a voice to these individuals as they are being silenced by some of their caregivers, school officials, religious leaders, and politicians. Transgender Youth: Perceptions, Media Influences and Social Challenges is about the experience of child development, adolescent development and gender identity development as well as society's positive and unnecessary negative responses. Transgender youth have some experiences that their 1950s and 1960s counterparts did not encounter or have access to - hormone blockers, celebrity role models, and social media. This book brings readers closer to empathy for transgender youth and transgender young adults with the ultimate goal of improving the quality of life for these exceptional children and adolescents. The book introduces the topic of gender dysphoria and explains various terms important to this conversation regarding gender identity. It describes the challenges transgender adolescents experience to include barriers and obstacles not faced by their cisgender counterparts. Some parents and their transgender Christian children discuss gender dysphoria, gender identity development, their families' response to their gender expression, and their experiences within their faith communities. We review the literature on transgender youth and the use of sexual activity as commerce. The audience gets to read narratives of individuals who identify as transgender or transsexual. There are discussions about transgender youth within the foster care system, transgender youth athletes, and the issues they face in school-based and intramural sports programs. Readers are offered suggestions to implement and support transgender youth in their schools and communities.

Quality assurance and its management are common practices in higher education. However, they have only recently become a major concern in open and distance learning (ODL), especially in developing contexts. South Africa has identified ODL as a strategic avenue for expanding access to higher education, and has recently transformed a policy on ODL practices. However, having a policy will not necessarily assure quality unless practices on the ground are aligned with such a policy. The ODL mode of delivery in developing contexts needs to consciously build quality into its management and practices. While internationally there have been attempts to address quality management issues through journal articles and books, generally the literature in this area remains scanty with respect to ODL. This is especially the case in terms of closing the gap between policy propositions and implementation. Assuring Institutional Quality in Open Distance Learning (ODL) in the Developing Contexts seeks to bridge this gap between policy propositions and implementation of ODL in developing contexts, with a focus on South Africa.

This book focuses on the latest developments in psychology research. The author of Chapter One contends that lucid control across states of consciousness can be used to change the negative aspects of mental processes such as nightmares, phobic anxiety, addictions, obsessive compulsive symptoms and hallucinations. Chapter Two reviews how to identify loneliness in intimate relations. Chapter Three explores stereotypic backhanded compliments. Chapter Four reviews and analyzes critically two discourses for guiding the transformation of adolescent girls into young adults, and proposes a meta-discourse for adolescent girls that incorporates the strengths of each discourse and discusses its operationalization. Chapter Five examines the relationships between marital status and excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS) in the general population. Chapter Six aims to investigate the way in which the position of the infant in the family - in regard to birth order – is related to maternal cognitive (attentional focus) and mental state comments of young infants in spontaneous mother-infant interactions. Chapter Seven examines 8- to 10-year-old children’s memory for temporal aspects of naturally occurring distinct personal events in two different contexts: autobiographical memory narratives and a personal photograph-taking paradigm. Chapter Eight speculates about the German Wings Disaster and what we can learn from such a tragedy. Chapter Nine examines the new DSM-V, psychopathology plus neuroscience and the omics sciences.

This book focuses on the latest developments in psychology research. Chapter One analyzes the relationship between being a victim and/or aggressor of face-to-face bullying behavior and the degree of parents’ acceptance/coercion, and parental education styles. Chapter Two outlines difficulties associated with trauma assessment in pre-school children, and identifies recommended measures for clinical use with this population. Chapter Three provides an overview of the empirical evidences available within the last decade for reducing challenging behaviors of children with developmental disabilities. Chapter Four analyzes bereaved children to explore the expression of grief and related experiences in the children’s artworks and narratives. Chapter Five investigates Chinese elementary school students’ motivation to read English and attitude toward learning English using mixed research methods. Chapter Six investigates the pattern of secondary schoolteachers’ emotional experiences in Hong Kong. Chapter Seven focuses on pre-competitive situational anxiety in sports.

Phenolic acids (PhAs), including hydroxybenzoic and cinnamic asids and their derivatives, are the products of secondary metabolism in plants and play important role in their growth and development. In this book, Chapter One discusses the phenolic acids during growth and development of xylem cells in Pinus sylvestris L. stems. Chapter Two evaluates the possible synergism or antagonism of several phenolic acids allowed to concomitantly react in an antioxidant capacity. Chapter Three evaluates the effect of different solvents on the extraction of major phenolic acids from aerial part of wild and greenhouse cultivated heather. Chapter Four focuses on quantification of the antioxidant activity on five varieties of mole produces in the Huichapan region in Mexico. Chapter Five examines antioxidant and cytotoxic activities of phenolic acids and their role in anticancer therapies. Chapter Six reviews the quantification and characterization of phenolic acids in foods. Chapter Seven presents an overview on the physiological effects of phenolic acid in tea and coffee on human health.

The chapters in this volume present the latest developments in medicine and biology. Chapter One reviews parkin and other proteins of Parkinson''s Disease. Chapter Two discusses hyperlipidemia, its impact on the development of cardiovascular disease (CVD), and the use of statins, as well as both yeast polysaccharides and other miscellaneous newer and investigational non-statin agents, to treat hyperlipidemia. Chapter Three summarizes the concept, pathogenesis, variables and treatment of Mitochondrial dysfunction in severe hemorrhagic shock. Chapter Four reviews use of telomerase-targeted replicative adenoviruses for cancer treatment and diagnosis. Chapter Five evaluates the swelling and diffusional behavior of guar gum for the controlled release of bioactive agents. Chapter Six reviews both in vitro and in vivo studies that were carried out to check the activity of phytoestrogens used in topical products. Chapter Seven presents the potential application of phytoestrogens to alleviate the symptoms of climacteric. Chapter Eight provides preventive measure of developing osteonecrosis of the jaw in patients receiving bisphophonate therapy. Chapter Nine investigates the possible mechanisms of the protective effect of glutamine on animal models and its use in the clinic. Chapter Ten presents relevant features of the glutamine role in immune pathways, energy metabolism and exercise, highlighting the relationships between glutamine supplementation and performance in adult subjects with different levels of activity.

Latin America is one of the most diverse but also vulnerable regions in the world that is under continuous anthropogenic pressure due to increasing urban, industrial and agricultural developments. Although there are many research groups studying the impacts caused by those pressures, the results and conclusions obtained by many of them are largely unknown because their studies are mostly published at the local or regional scale. Ecotoxicology in Latin America represents an effort to collect and share research performed in Latin America in the area of ecotoxicology and environmental risk assessment, presenting a collection of relevant and innovative studies focused on the following topics: (i) Contaminant entrance, transportation, distribution and fate; (ii) Environmental risk in freshwater ecosystems; (iii) Ecological risk in coastal zones; (iv) Biomonitoring programs: water, sediment and air; (v) Physiological effects and biomarkers; (vi) Soil ecotoxicology; (vii) Bioaccumulation and human risk; (viii) Toxicity of emerging contaminants; and (ix) Frontiers in Ecotoxicology. This selection of topics aims at covering the most important subjects and applications of ecotoxicology, including classical and novel subjects. Therefore, this book contains chapters related to different environmental compartments prone to contamination (water, sediment, soil and air), to different contamination sources (agriculture, industry, urban discharges and natural emissions), and to multiple biological responses at different organizational levels (individual to ecosystems, including human beings). It is envisioned to have an international projection within and beyond Latin American countries, as it is a great opportunity to increase the networks not only among Latin American research teams working on similar subjects, but also with teams from other regions. The idea of this book was to favor the connection among groups to quickly improve the development of methods and their application in ecotoxicological and environmental risk studies in Latin America. This book will be useful to important sectors of environmental sciences and related areas, and to specific target demographics such as students and researchers acting in environmental studies, and decision-makers (i.e., politicians and environmental organizations). Ecotoxicology in Latin America presents 34 chapters authored by 111 researchers from 12 Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela) and from 6 non-Latin American countries (Austria, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and USA).

The chapters in this volume present the latest developments in medicine and biology. Chapters One reviews the epidemiology and molecular mechanisms of hepatocellular carcinoma, as well as methods for its diagnosis and treatments with a special emphasis on the latest advances. Chapter Two examines in vitro anti-cancer actions of progesterone on human melanoma cells based on recovery cell growth, adhesion and migration functions. Chapter Three reviews the medical uses, potential complications and advances in spinal anesthesia for ambulatory surgery. Chapter Four evaluates the effects of low dose spinal anesthesia on vital signs of patients for Cesarean Section (CS) and fracture repair. Chapter Five discusses Horner's syndrome after spinal and epidural anesthesia. Chapter Six studies the chronobiology and electrophysiology of the rat heart under pentobarbital anesthesia. Chapter Seven provides literature orientation and personal experiences to discuss patient-specific instrumentation of total knee arthroplasty. Chapter Eight reviews the involvement of the endocrine system in the pathogenesis and clinical course of Meniere's disease. Chapter Nine summarizes recent research reporting several different effects of non-gluten members of the a-amylase/trypsin inhibitors and other nutritional food ingredients on the onset and severity of innate and/or adaptive immune responses.

Postpartum depression (PPD) is a serious mental health condition referring to depressive episodes beginning after childbirth. Recognizing the importance of depression occurring both in pregnancy and postpartum, currently, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders-Fifth Edition classifies a depression with a peripartum onset as a depressive episode beginning during pregnancy or within the first four weeks after birth. This book provides new research on the prevalence, risk factors and outcomes that postpartum depression has on women after childbirth.

The quality of infrastructure services is key to the production and trade of goods and services, contributing to the productivity and competitiveness of an economy. Efficient infrastructure services also promote the wellbeing of the population by boosting labor productivity. Altogether, infrastructure investment tends to promote greater economic growth. Infrastructure provision involves investments in capital intensive assets with long term maturity and high levels of sunk costs. Thus, identifying the risk factors and barriers to the efficient provision of energy, transport, telecommunication and water services, as well as designing policies conducive to such initiatives are essential. Macroeconomic stability, improved governance institutions, and appropriate regulatory measures are some of the aspects which need to be addressed in order to avoid infrastructure bottlenecks that compromise long term economic growth. Political and regulatory matters are particularly relevant to the performance of infrastructure initiatives, especially to those that involve private sponsors, due to the large scale and scope of economies that are often present in most infrastructure ventures. This book aims to provide a thorough review of the fundamental issues being currently discussed with regards to initiatives in infrastructure sectors. Relying on statistical and econometric analyses, as well as on case studies and in depth literature surveys, this text hopes to provide a diagnostic of the relevant aspects to be addressed when planning and executing long term infrastructure investments.

This book provides new research on immunosuppressives. Chapter One focuses on practical issues concerning immunosuppression in nephrology. Chapter Two discusses the global significance of hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection, the clinical scenarios in which immunosuppresive therapy may reactivate HBV, and different management strategies to prevent HBV reactivation. Chapter Three reviews the effect of immunosuppressive therapy in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) patients in response to routine vaccinations, and provides a general framework to the approach of vaccinations to these patients.

Physical disabilities are impairments which limit an individual''s physical function. This book reviews risk factors and the affect physical disabilities have on quality of life. Chapter One examines quality of life theories and models and reviews quality of life and physical activity research. Chapter Two reviews programs and practices that improve the inclusion of people with disabilities in the labour force. Chapter Three discusses enablers and barriers affecting motor vehicle transportation among children and youth with physical disabilities. Chapter Four focuses on abusive behavior towards physically disabled patients by their health providers.

Erdogan discovered in 2002 that energy policies and the energy sector would create a mechanism to institute his dynasty in Turkey. The energy policies of the Erdogan era include how the Erdogan family engaged in the international energy business in Turkey and neighboring countries, and how they became wealthy.After many years of supporting the Calik Holding, the former CEO, Berat Albayrak, Erdogan’s son-in-law, was appointed Turkey’s Minister of Energy by Erdogan in 2015. Since Erdogan came to power in 2002, many books and articles were published on Turkey’s foreign policy and domestic politics by scholars. However, this is the first book that combines Erdogan’s energy policy actions (country by country in chronological order) as well as describing the underlying corruption allegations, the Zarrab case, and the smuggling of ISIS oil. As a result of the research through official Turkey institutions and international institutions, it is shown that an overseas Turkish energy company was and continues to be involved in the energy blocks of Iraqi Kurdistan, thanks to Erdogan’s agreement with the Barzani administration.This book aims to analyze Turkey’s energy relations with Russia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq-Iraqi Kurdistan, Eastern Mediterranean and Central Asian countries since 2002. One of the notable outcomes of the book is to reveal how Erdogan contributed to Israel’s energy security despite his anti-Israeli rhetoric. The reader will learn the details of the energy projects between Turkey and other countries. In addition, the reader will also learn the roles of Turkey’s energy companies close to the Erdogan family. The book emphasizes the deterioration of Turkey-Russia relations and its impact on Turkey’s energy security, thanks to the Erdogan-Putin rivalry over Syria. Erdogan has been in power since 2002 (President since 2014), and is trying to convert Turkey’s political regime to remain in power for as long as possible. Appointing his son-in-law as Turkey’s Minister of Energy is not a coincidence, but rather a business strategy.

In this next volume of Progress in Economics Research, chapters discuss the nexus between the volatilities of growth rates and crude oil; the growth effect of transportation investment; the economic impacts of a government default in stochastic overlapping generations model under homogeneous investor expectations; a new approach to the estimation of the total factor productivity dynamics and of the rate of disembodied technical change in the context of Cobb-Douglas production function with constant returns to scale; investment dynamics in Solow''s Growth Model; financial performance and intellectual capital; financial integration, house price dynamics and saving rate divergence in an overlapping generations model with intra-EMU and Asian-U.S. trade imbalances; regional competitiveness within the cluster''s territory; and the methodology and implementation of a knowledge management system in a polytechnic school.

In this Yearbook 2016 we cover several aspects of health issues in neonates, economy and declining birth rates, child health in the slums of India, youth leadership issues in Hong Kong, virtual environments, rehabilitation and special needs populations, and finally research on environmental and child health.These chapters will help stimulate more interest and effort in developing and implementing programs for children and youth to ensure a good and positive development for raising future generations of children.

Are your students motivated and able to learn as much as you would like them to? Do they readily apply what they have learned? Do they even remember much of this learned content the next semester? Do they ask meaningful questions or are they mostly concerned with asking what will be on the next examination? This book discusses findings from psychology, education, and other disciplines showing that there are ways instructors can design curricula, classes, and learning experiences to improve the students’ ability and desire to probe for new insights, and to apply them to their own agendas. Although this book reviews many approaches for providing students with the motivation and guidance to learn, it is not a manual of specific classroom techniques. Rather, the book will inspire and equip instructors to ask their own questions about how their classes could better inspire and equip their students to ask and answer their own questions in principled ways.

This book focuses on the latest developments in the field of engineering. Chapter One reviews terrain classification using single-pol synthetic aperture radars. Chapter Two analyzes Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) corrosion monitoring sensors. Chapter Three examines the concept of emergence in agent-based modeling and simulation by modeling several types of agent-based systems and examining simulations for potential emergent phenomena. Chapter Four discusses a mathematical modeling technique traditionally referred to as agent based modeling (ABM) but for purposes here, referred to as Zombie Based Modeling (ZBM). Chapter Five focuses on Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) assistant procedures for future optical communication systems. Chapter Six provides intervention strategies for the operationalization process of building maintenance regarding the design stages. Chapter Seven assesses the performance of auditorium acoustics. Chapter Eight reviews multivariate statistical factor and cluster analysis on selecting the optimum method for the recycling of kitchen waste.

Scientific investigation is often aimed on generation and description of a low dimensional simple form that is, however, an accurate representation of the structure of numerous empirically obtained variables. In despite of this aim, some scientific descriptions of real world structures are difficult to visualize due to their dimensional complexity. This new book considers two such structures, the structure of personality lexicon and the structure of adaptive ability of the sleep-wake cycle.

Emerging imaging techniques have recently enabled visualizing intracellular neurofibrillary tau tangles in human brains in vivo with PET tracers. Results confirm the current notion of the new tau tracer for in vivo labeling tau deposition and the agreement with the tau-pathological Braak stage in early stage of dementia. Recent studies have also identified brain atrophy regions including medial temporal lobe, especially hippocampus and entorhinal cortex, and posterior cingulate cortex as being more predictive of disease progression. The effects of multivitamin supplements on serum homocysteine level, and depression of Korean older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) in care facilities is examined. An investigation was done on the impact of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) on incidence of early and long-term postoperative cognitive dysfunction (POCD) and MCI-related postoperative changes in cortical activity in patients after coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG).

The thrust-area of this book is the connection between imperial anxieties and tropical health situations along with intriguing psychological questions involving race, politics, gender, history and colonial modernity. For a long time, the focus has largely been Eurocentric: the effects of European medicine and healthcare policies introduced to the sub-continental colonies have been viewed in relation to the strategies of governing the colonial subjects. David Arnold’s Colonising the Body considers the State’s role in introducing European medicine as instrumental to the British imperial project in India. In literary representations, especially in the Late Victorian and early twentieth century fiction and memoirs by Rudyard Kipling, Philip Meadows Taylor, Flora Annie Steel and George Orwell, we have several pictures of a palliative, medically-oriented imperialism. Waltraud Ernst’s Mad Tales of the Raj (1998) and Christiane Hartnack’s Psychoanalysis in Colonial India (2001) offer thoughtfully documented analyses of the early developments of psychology and psychotherapy in colonial India. Indian medical historians like Poonam Bala and Projit Mukharji question the tendency of looking at western medicine only in terms of monopoly and power. However, the question of “Indianness” in psychoanalytic philosophy, trying to understand how the East hopes to locate Western psychoanalysis in a post-therapeutic journey, or how the anti-Oedipal or an-Oedipal manifests itself in Indian cultures of psychoanalysis, still remains an area demanding further attention. The present volume seeks to understand such problems in colonial, medical and psychoanalytic discourses, from perspectives that are broadly interdisciplinary yet chiefly based on literary, historical and cultural studies. Containing fourteen chapters, this book hopes to succeed in exploring the medical and fictional literatures of colonial and postcolonial India, both in English and other Indian languages. The book is divided into such sub-themes as: Psychoanalysis , psychopathology and the aesthetics of malady; Literature, medicine and healthcare in colonial India; Historical Studies; Studies in popular fiction: sensational psychiatry; Medicine, gender and colonial modernity.

This handbook is written for transgender people, their families and friends; for professionals who in their day-to-day job may encounter transgender people; and for students, teachers, educators, academics, and members of the public at large with an interest in transgender people.This handbook gives an in-depth overview on a wide spectrum of issues encountered by transgender people, from childhood to later on in life. Key topics addressed include medical and surgical treatments, access to transgender health care, sexuality, mental health issues, fertility, education, and employment.This practical guide is written in a clear and concise manner by more than 40 international specialists in the field of transgender health and well-being.This essential text is extensively referenced and illustrated, and informs the reader on a broad range of important gender-affirming issues.

The signing of the Maastricht treaty created economic structure and institutions, and set in motion the process of adopting a common currency. The euro is, among many things, an economic project that sought to advance standards of living by escalating the competence of resource allocations, taking up the principles of comparative advantage, boosting competition, taking advantage of economies that were to scale and strengthening economic stability. The euro-zone is made up of 19 countries sharing a common currency – the euro – symbolizing the most modern stage of more than 50 years of European integration. Structurally, Europe is caught in a malfunction triangle between national politics, European policies and global markets. Moreover, the democratic politics of the EU have remained national, and a single currency is established without establishing a set of institutions facilitating a region of Europe’s diversity to operate efficiently. The euro-zone has been going through a lengthened period of weak economic activity and very low inflation. There is a need to strengthen Economic and Monetary Union based on political stability, so as to upsurge its resilience to economic shocks. To this extent, uncertainty and political fragmentation amplify significantly in the aftermath of financial crises that are particularly economically destructive, which makes crisis resolution more problematic. The crisis across Europe has led to a failure in confidence in European institutions, leading to a political fragmentation of positions among member states, stirring up nationalistic instincts that impede decision-making and avert the formation of a common growth strategy. Nevertheless, it is essential to move towards the establishment of the United States of Europe in order to avoid the collapse and disintegration of the EU.

At a time when digital games are becoming much more commonly used in classrooms, Game-Based Learning: Theory, Strategies, and Performance Outcomes provides a much-needed guide to different forms and applications of digital game-based learning. This book brings together researchers and practitioners from around the world who share their theories, strategies, findings of case studies, and practical approaches to support better performance and learning outcomes when learning with digital games. This book is intended to provide readers with three main parts of information. One is a clear and practical understanding of theory and research-based principles of game-based learning. This first section of the book includes fresh perspectives and an overview of existing and emerging theories in game-based learning, which are also presented in the form of case study findings and implications. The second section of this book gives readers the “how to” information needed to turn the understanding of intellectual grounding into effective practices of digital games for classroom use. The third part of this book also includes some practical approaches for evaluating different aspects of learning within the game-based learning context. This information about practical approaches is presented through chapters on achievements and performance outcomes. Game-Based Learning: Theory, Strategies, and Performance Outcomes synthesizes arguments, practices, and research findings on the effectiveness of different designs and approaches within game-based learning practices. But, a major message of this book is that the joint influence of implementation, context, and learner characteristics interacting with digital games is what determines learning and achievement outcomes. This book is intended for researchers, practitioners, designers, policy makers, and current and future teachers. The teacher/-educator will benefit from topics such as practical strategies to improve student performance, while researchers can use the findings from the case studies presented in this book as a foundation for future explorations and research studies.

Click chemistry, which is also referred to as linkage chemistry, dynamic, combinatorial chemistry or quick linking combinatorial chemistry describes the reaction that joins molecular fragments as simply, efficient and versatile as clicking a mouse. The two units with specific click structures can be linked by a click reaction no matter what is attached to the structure, and only the specific click structures can be joined. It emphasizes the development of new combinatorial chemistries on the basis of the synthesis of efficient and highly selective carbon-heteroatom bonds (C-X-C), and effectively prepares molecules with high diversity via these simple reactions. It significantly simplified and promoted the development of synthesis chemistry. Click chemistry has become one of the most useful and attractive synthetic strategies in many fields.In this book, the definition of click chemistry is explained, the characteristics and types of click chemistry are introduced, and some specific reaction types are focused on. The progress for using click chemistry for the synthesis and functionalization of hydrogels, elastomers, surface modifications, membrane preparations, assemble polyaromatic structures, biomedical fields and optical sensing in biological analyses are described in detail. The problems and challenges for using click chemistry in different fields are analyzed.

Dual inheritance theory (DIT) recognizes the fact that for the last 50 millennia cultural evolution has had a marked impact on our anatomy, behavior and cognition. Unfortunately, by considering ‘cumulative cultural evolution’ as the ‘natural choice’ of all cognitively modern humans, DIT implies that technological innovation is the index of progress, and that the ‘ratcheting’ of innovations becomes the ‘goal’ of cultural evolution. This is accomplished by developing a certain degree of social complexity in which the biased copying of cultural models becomes a technique of cultural transmission. Small and isolated populations are therefore ‘doomed,’ and the ‘treadmill model’ takes effect, in which the lack of demographic strength results in impaired social learning and loss/infidelity in copying. However, the anthropological literature documents small and isolated groups that have—despite these ‘handicaps’—developed intricate exchange networks that do not necessarily rely on technological innovation and function only in low demographical settings. Not only that the parameters upon which cultural transmission is based in DIT—prestige, skills, success—are unknown, but certain ‘leveling mechanisms’ ensure that these parameters become eliminated and thus, no cultural models can rise to prominence. Interestingly, these societies do not seem to be plagued by cultural ‘loss’ and, instead of hopelessly running the treadmill and living in poverty, they have developed egalitarian and, to an extent, ‘affluent’ societies. The cultural evolution of these groups does not rely on accumulation, but rather on ‘reduction.’ The reductive cultural orientations of such ‘primitive’ societies are not an ancestral developmental stage, but rather an independent achievement. Populations following a reductive cultural orientation—known in anthropology as ‘immediate-return’ hunters-gatherers—are often described as ‘pedomorphic,’ due to their markedly neotenous features. On the other hand, populations that follow a cumulative type of cultural evolution are surprisingly ‘rugged’ phenotypes. In the case of the latter, a cultural leap occurred during the Middle/Upper Paleolithic transition, which resulted in the entrenchment of archaic behavioral traits upon which hierarchical societies became established. Conversely, in the case of reductive orientations, a cultural regression seems to have occurred, but only during the early Holocene. The adoption of a cultural primitivism—immediate-return subsistence—offered a degree of flexibility that allowed for a neotenal leap. This enabled the reduction of archaic behavioral traits and the emergence of egalitarian societies.

The cirrhotic liver is significantly more vulnerable to injury. This vulnerability is particularly evident after the advent of portal hypertension. In the normal liver, up to 75 percent can be resected without decompensation. By contrast, in the cirrhotic liver with portal hypertension, liver decompensation can occur even after less than 50 percent of the liver is resected. This book, “Portal Hypertension: New Insights” begins with an attempt to provide insights into this unanswered puzzle. The normal liver is soft and elastic. By contrast, the cirrhotic liver is inelastic and rigid. Flow in rigid tubes is governed by the Hagen-Poiseuille law. The law dictates that pressure gradient increases exponentially by the fourth power of the radius of the rigid sinusoid. This makes the cirrhotic liver virtually incapable of accommodating any increase in flow. The increase in pressure gradient is equivalent to the fourth power of the vessel radius. The first chapter explores the major new insight that decompensation in the cirrhotic liver is related to the loss of elasticity and the development of vessel wall rigidity, which thereafter subjects flow in the hepatic sinusoids to the Hagen-Poiseuille law. The rest of the book addresses portal hypertension in its clinical context. It invites the reader to survey multiple avenues associated with portal hypertension, including idiopathic non-cirrhotic portal hypertension, INCPH and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, NAFLD. It also includes chapters on relationships between portal hypertension, the gastrointestinal system and the renal system. In general, the book provides several new insights into portal hypertension.

Marcel Danesi is Full professor of Linguistic Anthropology and Semiotics at the University of Toronto. He has written extensively in both areas and is known in applied linguistics for having developed conceptual fluency theory. He is editor-in-chief of Semiotics and editor of several major book series with Palgrave-Macmillan, Springer, and University of Toronto Press. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1998, an honor to acknowledge his contribution to scholarship. This book is the first comprehensive treatment of conceptual fluency theory, or the view that the basis of successful foreign language learning inheres in the students controlling the figurative conceptual system of the new language. Students tend to transfer their native concepts to the use of the new language, so that typical learner utterances are constructed with the words and grammar of the new language, but they reflect native language concepts. In other words, students lack "e;conceptual fluency"e; which, as studies have now shown, is the source of miscommunication and many errors when communicating in a foreign language.The book is written by the originator of conceptual fluency theory, who takes the reader on a journey through the theoretical and empirical terrain on which the theory is founded. Above all else, conceptual fluency theory is a derivative of conceptual metaphor theory, which claims that the core of semantic systems is figurative, not literal. The implications of this claim are examined in light of previous theories and models of foreign language teaching, and then re-assessed according to the notion of conceptual fluency. Among the topics discussed and elaborated are: Conceptual calquing (imprinting the concepts of the native language onto the second language), conceptual errors (errors due to conceptual interference), conceptual grammar (the explanation of grammar in conceptual terms), and metaphorical competence (the control of the network of interrelated metaphorical concepts that allow native speakers to deliver abstract concepts fluently in speech).The book also makes reference to previous psychological and pedagogical models, comparing them and contrasting them to the conceptual fluency model. Overall, the book constitutes a synthesis of the extensive work conducted on conceptual fluency theory since the mid-1980s, and a framework for investigating second-language acquisition in light of the research on metaphor within cognitive science.Target Audience:Language teachers, Linguists, Psychologists, Cognitive Scientists and Applied Linguists

This book consists of several chapters, each of which focuses upon the different aspects of innovative usage of modern Informational Technology and IT-related fundamental sciences in solution of different theoretical and practical problems.