This book offers a new reconstruction of Amerigo Vespucci's navigational and scientific endeavours in their historical context. The author argues that all of the manuscripts or texts that Vespucci left to posterity are reliable and true, except for several amendments imposed upon him for reasons linked to the political and economic interests of those who authorised him to undertake his journeys…
The Lawrence and Lynne Brown Democracy Medal, presented by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State, recognizes outstanding individuals, groups, and organizations that produce innovations to further democracy in the United States or around the world. Voting is foundational in a democracy, yet over six million American citizens remain stripped of their ability to participate in elect…
Emphatically revisionist, Bob Pepperman Taylor reveals a Thoreau most people never knew existed. Contrary to conventional views, Taylor argues that Thoreau was one of America's most powerful and least understood political thinkers, a man who promoted community and democratic values, while being ever vigilant against the evils of excessive or illegitimate authority.Still widely viewed as a remar…
Why did the novel become so popular in the past three centuries, and how did the American novel contribute to this trend? As a key provider of the narrative frames and formulas needed by modern individuals to give meaning and mooring to their lives. Drawing on phenomenological hermeneutics, human geography and social psychology, Laura Bieger contends that belonging is not a given; it is continu…
Children and youth are front and center in the context of global mass migration and the social discord around questions of multicultural inclusion that it often ignites. It is young people at the forefront of navigating the complexities of cultural and ethnic diversity in their everyday lives. Imprecise portrayals of their inclination to either embrace diversity or to incite racism are used to …
This is the final publication of excavations conducted by the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem on the Crusader castle of Belmont (Suba) between 1986 and 1989. The account of the excavation is accompanied by specialist reports and concludes with a discussion of the castle's architecture, its military functions, and its economic role. Library of Congress subject headings for this public…
This open access book looks at the dramatic history of ovariotomy, an operation to remove ovarian tumours first practiced in the early nineteenth century. Bold and daring, surgeons who performed it claimed to be initiating a new era of surgery by opening the abdomen. Ovariotomy soon occupied a complex position within medicine and society, as an operation which symbolised surgical progress, whil…
Nonlocality was discovered by John Bell in 1964, in the context of the debates about quantum theory, but is a phenomenon that can be studied in its own right. Its observation proves that measurements are not revealing pre-determined values, falsifying the idea of “local hidden variables” suggested by Einstein and others. One is then forced to make some radical choice: either nature is intri…
This work presents a behavior planning algorithm for automated driving in urban environments with an uncertain and dynamic nature. The algorithm allows to consider the prediction uncertainty (e.g. different intentions), perception uncertainty (e.g. occlusions) as well as the uncertain interactive behavior of the other agents explicitly. Simulating the most likely future scenarios allows to find…