This perspective of this book views Earth's various layers as a whole system, and tries to understand how to achieve harmony and sustainable development between human society and nature, with the theme of " habitability of the Earth." This book is one effort at providing an overview of some of the recent exciting advances Chinese geoscientists have made. It is the concerted team effort of a gro…
This open access book discusses biogeochemical processes relevant to carbon and aims to provide readers, graduate students and researchers, with insight into the functioning of marine ecosystems. A carbon centric approach has been adopted, but other elements are included where relevant or needed. The book focuses on concepts and quantitative understanding of primary production, organic matter m…
This open access book investigates current issues related to the evolution of research on teaching mathematics and examines up to thirty years of presage-process-product research (PPPR) in mathematics with respect to conceptualization, instrumentation, and design. The book discusses the theoretical and methodological challenges associated with PPPR, critically reviews current research, and expl…
This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Agile Software Development, XP 2018, held in Porto, Portugal, in May 2018. XP is the premier agile software development conference combining research and practice, and XP 2018 provided a playful and informal environment to learn and trigger discussions around its main theme – make, inspect, adapt. …
The objective of this book is to broadly illustrate the key aspects of water governance, mapping the spectrum of decision-making from techno-centric and eco-centric approaches, to hybrid concepts and people-centric approaches. Topics covered include the challenges for water-governance models, the polycentric model, the integration challenge, water in the decision-making hierarchy, and the rise …
This book is open access under a CC BY license. The volume constitutes the proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Agile Software Development, XP 2017, held in Cologne, Germany, in May 2017. The 14 full and 6 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 46 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: improving agile processes; agil…
This open access book focuses on a particular but significant topic in the social sciences: the concepts of “footprint” and “trace”. It associates these concepts with hotly debated topics such as surveillance capitalism and knowledge society. The editors and authors discuss the concept footprints and traces as unintended by-products of other (differently focused and oriented) actions th…
This book contains the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Agile Software Development, XP 2016, held in Edinburgh, UK, in May 2016. While agile development has already become mainstream in industry, this field is still constantly evolving and continues to spur an enormous interest both in industry and academia. To this end, the XP conference attracts a large number o…
To examine the origins, characteristics, and outcomes of resilient governance with Chinese characteristics, this open access book takes Guangzhou, a typical Chinese city from 1990 to 2015, as an example. Through participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and the collection of secondary data, this book finds that (1) the institutional context can be described as an authoritarian land-o…
This is an open access book. This book, first of all, introduces the new unveiled Guangdong-Macao Intensive Cooperation Zone with details as a special mode of the regional collaborative development that is committed to be mutually beneficial to both sides with different political and economic systems. China's central authorities have recently issued a masterplan for constructing the Guangdong-M…