Mori Ogai (1862–1922), one of the giants of modern Japanese literature, wrote The Wild Goose at the turn of the century. Set in the early 1880s, it was, for contemporary readers, a nostalgic return to a time when the nation was embarking on an era of dramatic change. Ogai’s narrator is a middle-aged man reminiscing about an unconsummated affair, dating to his student days, between his class…
How can people in the spotlight control their self-representations when the whole world seems to be watching? The question is familiar, but not new. Julia Fawcett examines the stages, pages, and streets of eighteenth-century London as England's first modern celebrities performed their own strange and spectacular self-representations. They include the enormous wig that actor Colley Cibber donned…
This publication addresses the global challenges of food and water security in a rapidly changing and complex world. The essays highlight the links between bio-physical and socio-cultural processes, making connections between local and global scales, and focusing on the everyday practices of eating and drinking, essential for human survival. Written by international experts, each contribution i…
In grade 10 you learnt about vectors in one dimension. Now we will take these concepts further and learn about vectors in two dimensions as well as components of vectors. As a very short recap, a vector has both a magnitude and a direction. There are many physical quantities, like forces, that are well described by vectors (called or known as vector quantities). We often use arrows to represent…
This book deals with the physical sciences - physics and chemistry. All the sciences are based in the use of experiment and testing to understand the world around us better. The scientific method requires us to constantly re-examine our understanding, by testing new evidence with our current theories and making changes to those theories if the evidence does not meet the test. The scientific m…
This is a calculus-based book meant for the first semester of a first year survey course taken by engineering and physical science majors. It has a traditional order of topics whereby force is discussed before energy. It is divided into 17 chapters that cover a review of high school physics, scaling and estimation, vectors, velocity, acceleration, forces, circular motion, gravity, conservation …
In pregnancy, maternal nutrition sustains and nourishes the developing child. Imbalances in either the direction of nutritional excess or deficiency can have adverse consequences for child health. In addition, more research now suggests that good pregnancy nutrition influences child health beyond pregnancy and delivery. This includes modifying the risk of child health outcomes as they enter chi…
This open access book provides worldwide examples demonstrating the importance of the interplay between demography and disasters in regions and spatially. It marks an advance in practical and theoretical insights for understanding the role of demography in planning for and mitigating impacts from disasters in developed nations. Both slow onset (like the of loss polar ice from climate change) an…
On a global scale, there is a lot of talk about fake news at the moment. The perfidious thing is that even scientific theories with a high level of empirical evidence and methodically demanding proof of evidence are suddenly presented to the public as arbitrary. Climate change caused by greenhouse gases emitted by humans is one such example. However, scientific theories cannot be voted on democ…
Urban heat islands are a new type of microclimatic phenomenon that causes a significant increase in the temperature of cities compared to surrounding areas. The phenomenon has been enforced by the current trend towards climate change. Although experts consider urban heat islands an urgent European Union public health concern, there are too few policies that address it. The EU carried out a proj…