The Harmony Search Algorithm (HSA) is one of the most well-known techniques in the field of soft computing, an important paradigm in the science and engineering community. This volume, the proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Harmony Search Algorithm 2015 (ICHSA 2015), brings together contributions describing the latest developments in the field of soft computing with a special f…
The papers collected in this volume are selected as a sample of the progress in Natural Language Processing (NLP) performed within the Italian NLP community and especially attested by the PARLI project. PARLI (Portale per l’Accesso alle Risorse in Lingua Italiana) is a project partially funded by the Ministero Italiano per l’Università e la Ricerca (PRIN 2008) from 2008 to 2012 for monitor…
During the second half of the twentieth century, the mainstream scholarship presented the democratization process as the outcome of domestic conditions not significantly influenced by actors outside the nation-state. With the end of the Cold War, this perspective was challenged as a result of the third wave of democratization and the subsequent growth of the “good governance” discourse on t…
The International Criminal Court and the End of Impunity in Kenya is a five-year study addressing critical human rights issues with a global reach and is the first detailed account of the ICC's intervention in Kenya. It probes the relationship between the ICC and state institutions, known as positive complementarity, and asks whether the ICC's intervention led to an end to impunity. The author …
This book is about the International Criminal Court (ICC), a new and highly distinctive criminal justice institution with the ability to prosecute the highest-level government officials, including heads of state, even in countries that have not accepted its jurisdiction. The book explores the historical development of international criminal law and the formal legal structure created by the Rome…
Every time a cell divides, a copy of its genomic DNA has to be faithfully copied to generate new genomic DNA for the daughter cells. The process of DNA replication needs to be precisely regulated to ensure that replication of the genome is complete and accurate, but that re-replication does not occur. Errors in DNA replication can lead to genome instability and cancer. The process of repl…
Kristina Yankova addresses the question of what role professional skepticism plays in the context of cognitive biases (the so-called information order effects) in auditor judgment. Professional skepticism is a fundamental concept in auditing. Despite its immense importance to audit practice and the voluminous literature on this issue, professional skepticism is a topic which still involves more…
Although human rights law is a relatively young field of international law, its content and core values today are of major importance for the interpretation of international law as a whole. As we witness a redefinition of sovereignty as a responsibility of states towards the people and a shift to greater relevance of the individual in international law in general, it is a logical consequence th…
Markus P. Urban investigates the influence of large shareholders (the so-called blockholders) on agency costs and firm value, thereby accounting for blockholder characteristics and blockholder interrelationships. The work provides a profound theoretical and empirical analysis on the nature and effect of shareholder engagement with due regard to the specifics of the German institutional environm…
Domna Michailidou addresses the questions above through exploring the inexorable evolution of financialisation into financial crisis through the examination of three middle-income countries: Mexico, Brazil and South Korea. Concentrating on emerging economies, and especially choosing three very different economies that all experienced financial crises in the 1990s, this book explores what lesson…