Suchergebnisse

What are some of the most distinctive features of the crisis characterising the social sciences learning today? Can a crisis of this deep-rooted and extremely wide-ranging nature be delimitated to a few specific areas? Can the social sciences diverse dilemmas be reduced to the feature of crisis alone? This book argues that the social sciences are in a deep state of crisis. Kléber Ghimire analyzes how some of the basic problems began from the very inception: uncritical use of empiricism and experimentation methods emulating the natural sciences, internal fragmentation of knowledge along narrow disciplinary lines, and near-exclusive emphasis on the experience of industrial societies. As these difficulties persist, more recent evolutions have brought additional troubles. With a focus on Europe, North America and Asia, Kléber Ghimire examines the effects of university reforms that give prominence to expertise-oriented research, economic rationality and occupational skill development, leading to a widespread marginalisation of the social and human studies. The book ends with a call to reflect upon opening a new horizon for these fields of learning, especially by inventing a new era of social sciences pedagogy, leaving natural sciences for humanities and recognizing the value of culture as a crucial reservoir of social knowledge.

Methodological and analytical contextualization -- Future as an object of inquiry: an introduction / Kléber Ghimire -- Contradictory role of technology -- Physics, science and technology in the future / Junichiro Fukai -- The evolution of future societies with unlimited energy supply? / Claudio Capiglia -- Nanotechnology and future technological evolutions / Ruggero Micheletto -- Meaning and object of progress in the future -- 3d printing: a new industrial revolution? / Juan Pablo Ripamonti -- Technology, work and social conflictuality / Marc Troisvallets -- Economic progress and civilizational changes in the far-off future / Kléber Ghimire -- Organization of collective life in the future -- On democracy and technology in the long term / Mathew Filner -- Ethics and laws of the future / Vesselin Popovski -- Contributors -- Index

"The future as a field of inquiry, debate or forecasts continues to flourish. However, this book differs from existing literature in several important ways. It is not another publication on future scenarios guided by a linear technological fix - nor is it simply a volume of new statistics on economic, demographic or geopolitical developments. Rather, Future Courses of Human Societies explores and builds a general framework for the long-term evolution of human societies. Drawing upon a wide range of insights from across the social and natural sciences, the authors of this title present original, exploratory methodological and analytical approaches to examining the future. Encouraging the reader to deepen their knowledge and encourage critical thinking, three themes are considered in their complexity and multi-dimensionality: technological innovations; future progress; and the critical aspect of organizing collective life in the future. Furthermore, in contrast to previous studies which have embraced a relatively short time-span, this text incorporates perspectives from the immediate to the distant future, extending to several centuries and even millennia. An interdisciplinary and internationally comprehensive volume, Future Courses of Human Societies is a key source for students and researchers interested in fields such as future studies, technology in society, interdisciplinary learnings on social and natural sciences and future economic and political evolutions."--Provided by publisher.

Reimund und Lisa leben mit ihren zwei Kindern auf einer Wolke des Glücks, bis sie eines Tages Personen begegnen, auf deren Bekanntschaft sie liebend gern verzichtet hätten.Eine Geschichte gepaart mit Witz, Leidenschaft und Spannung, die deutlich macht, wie schnell doch Liebe und Hass sich einander ersetzen können. Biographische Informationen K. B. Schmittdhausen studierte Physik und Ingenieurwissenschaften, war jahrelang in Industrie und Forschung tätig und entdeckte vor zwei Jahren seine Leidenschaft zum Schreiben von Romanen

This book gives a unifying framework for estimating the abundance of open populations: populations subject to births, deaths and movement, given imperfect measurements or samples of the populations. The focus is primarily on populations of vertebrates for which dynamics are typically modelled within the framework of an annual cycle, and for which stochastic variability in the demographic processes is usually modest. Discrete-time models are developed in which animals can be assigned to discrete states such as age class, gender, maturity, population (within a metapopulation), or species (for multi-species models). The book goes well beyond estimation of abundance, allowing inference on underlying population processes such as birth or recruitment, survival and movement. This requires the formulation and fitting of population dynamics models. The resulting fitted models yield both estimates of abundance and estimates of parameters characterizing the underlying processes.