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The article reviews the book "Considering Animals: Contemporary Studies in Human-Animal Relations," by Carol Freeman, Elizabeth Leane and Yvette Watt.

Rarely is a book published with a specific focus on 'Female Psychology'—one of the three branches of the 'Psychology of Women' field of study. It is more common to see texts that focus on 'Feminine Psychology', and arguably the greatest number of texts in this area are in fact dedicated to 'Feminist Psychology'. This makes the annotated psychoanalytic bibliography, edited by Eleanor Schuker and Nadine A. Levinson a rare, but important resource. This book review assesses the re-printed text for its content and novel contribution to the field, but does so framing it in the wider context of studies into the Psychology of Women, the changing times, and the current landscape of similar research. Furthermore, this review frames the text in a wider psycho-socio-cultural academic debate about the similarities, differences, and conceptual meanings of the three (distinct) branches of: Feminist, Feminine, and Female Psychology; concluding the difference in origin of these schools of thought has allowed for their individualization and continued utility as separate areas of study into the Psychology of Women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the latest information and perspectives on global phosphorus scarcity. Phosphorus is essential for food production and modern agriculture currently sources phosphorus fertilizers from finite phosphate rock. The 2008 food and phosphate fertilizer price spikes triggered increased concerns regarding the depletion timeline of phosphate rock reserves. While estimates range from 30 to 300 years and are shrouded by lack of publicly available data and substantial uncertainty, there is a general consensus that the quality and accessibility of remaining reserves are decreasing and costs will increase. This paper clarifies common sources of misunderstandings about phosphorus scarcity and identifies areas of consensus. It then asks, despite some persistent uncertainty, what would it take to achieve global phosphorus security? What would a 'hard-landing' response look like and how could preferred 'soft-landing' responses be achieved? INSET: Life's bottleneck: Key features of a critical element, phosphorus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the turn of the millennium, the world's political leadership adopted sustainable development as a leading model for societal development. However, the terms "sustainable development", "sustainability" and "sustainable" are sometimes over- and misused despite wide consensus about the concept's meaning among sustainability scholars and practitioners. While the concept allows various sustainability views to co-exist, random conceptualizations which do not respect the fundamental sustainability principles undermine the concept's objective to steer action. This lack of understanding of sustainability arguably inhibits its practical realization and a proper understanding of sustainability is urgently needed. In this paper we aim to contribute to a better understanding of sustainability by adopting a bird's eye perspective. We review the rich contemporary literature, with a specific focus on the terminology, genesis, fundamental principles, mainstream views of sustainability, and several governing aspects. Further, using the evolving body of sustainability literature, the paper provides arguments to combat common misconceptions of sustainability. OPEN ACCESS INSET: Box 1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is a summary of a special issue of the journal Applied Sciences titled "Athletes' Performance and Analysis in Combat Sports and Martial Arts." The special issue focuses on the research conducted on combat sports and martial arts, including their impact on physical functioning, motor skill development, and self-defense. The research presented in the special issue covers various aspects of combat sports, such as exercise physiology, biomechanical analysis, and technical-tactical solutions. The articles included in the special issue discuss topics such as the effects of rapid weight loss on heart rate recovery in wrestlers, the influence of body segment movements on taekwondo kicks, and the impact of fatigue on judo techniques. The special issue provides valuable insights for athletes, coaches, and enthusiasts of combat sports and martial arts, and it encourages further research in the field. [Extracted from the article]

Simple Summary: Dogs have been raised, trained, and exercised by humans for millennia. While new dog training methods keep emerging and other ones vanish, it should be interesting to travel back in time and investigate how dogs were trained throughout history. Interestingly, much of what we know about dog keeping and training has been practiced since ancient times. The oldest dog training guide was written by Athenian writer Xenophon around 420 BC. Later, in the 13th century, Albertus Magnus wrote his extensive work De animalibus, containing an entire chapter about dogs which covers topics ranging from behaviour and breeding to the treatment of diseases. Petrus de Crescentiis had also already reported how dogs could be used for herding and livestock protection. Using the example of these two authors, we delve into the history of ancient dog keeping and breeding. Historical dog training methods reveal that dog training then and now might not have been that different. While some methods that would be considered unacceptable today have vanished over time, much of what we do today has been practiced historically for a long time. Albertus Magnus' De animalibus and Petrus de Crescentiis' Ruralia commodia deliver us historical evidence on how dogs were perceived, kept and trained by our ancestors. Not only were they already kept as pets, but they were also used in a wide range of professions. Dogs were utilized as guard and watchdogs, for hunting and for herding and livestock protection. Dogs are still trained in many of those professions today. From these historical records, we can learn how the perception and use of dogs has been similar or very different from our view on dogs today. We see how certain training methods have persisted over time, giving us an opportunity to ponder on new training and handling methods for man's best friend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Car-sharing practices are introducing electric vehicles (EVs) into their fleet. However, the literature suggests that at this point shared EV systems are failing to reach satisfactory commercial viability. A potential reason for this is the effect of higher vehicle usage, which is characteristic of car sharing, and the implications on the battery's state of health (SoH). In this paper, we forecast the SoH of two identical EVs being used in different car-sharing practices. For this purpose, we use real life transaction data from charging stations and different EV sensors. The results indicate that insight into users' driving and charging behavior can provide a valuable point of reference for car-sharing system designers. In particular, the forecasting results show that the moment when an EV battery reaches its theoretical end of life can differ in as much as a quarter of the time when vehicles are shared under different conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Trout's Lie, Percival Everett seems to be once more exploring pure form as part of a quest for abstraction. Yet the effect of the poems in the collection largely relies on the materiality of language characterizing all poetry—mostly a play on sounds and the visual dimension of the text. How to conciliate the quest for pure form and the unruliness of the bodily? It will be argued that Everett brings them together through a work on forms not only in space but also in time, focusing on endings in both the abstract and the concrete sense of the term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Position data of players and athletes are widely used in sports performance analysis for measuring the amounts of physical activities as well as for tactical assessments in game sports. However, positioning sensing systems are applied in sports as tools to gain objective information of sports behavior rather than as components of intelligent spaces (IS). The paper outlines the idea of IS for the sports context with special focus to game sports and how intelligent sports feedback systems can benefit from IS. Henceforth, the most common location sensing techniques used in sports and their practical application are reviewed, as location is among the most important enabling techniques for IS. Furthermore, the article exemplifies the idea of IS in sports on two applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainability is a "contested" concept introduced at the beginning of the 18th century in German forestry circles concerned about sustainable harvests and rebranded in 1987 as "sustainable development" by the Brundtland Report, which defined it as harmonious economic, social, and ecological development that enhances both current and future potential to meet human needs and aspirations. However, after more than three decades of sustainable development, humanity is on an unsustainable path featuring rampant ecosystem damage, rising social inequality, and harmful cultural homogenization. This paper is a book review of Fred P. Gale's Political Economy of Sustainability, a book published in 2018 by Edward Elgar Publishers. The book advances the innovative idea that the current lack of progress in implementation of the sustainable development goals is due to the narrow understanding by individuals, firms, states, and political parties of the values underlying sustainability. The book thus starts a much-needed conversation about economic values, a conversation ousted from the neo-classical economics discipline in the late 19th century by the marginalist thinkers who wanted to make it a positive science. The book identifies four elemental economic values—exchange value, labor value, use value, and function value—and argues that basing our socio-economic and political development on only one type of value with the exclusion of the others has led to the current dangerously unsustainable path humankind is on. Achieving sustainability value requires a balanced integration of all four types of values in all deliberations about socio-economic activities. How can this be accomplished? The author proposes a pragmatic solution in the form of a "tetravaluation" process, a dialogue involving multiple value holders able to reflexively negotiate and compromise until the pluralistic sustainability value is discovered and accepted by all the parties. The book challenges the unsustainable functioning of existing economic, political, and cultural institutions and invites a rethinking of their governance, which should deliberately embrace the pluralistic value of sustainability. The tetravaluation process has the potential to generate sustainable choices and inform better policy decisions able to protect at the same time the proponents of exchange value (consumers), the promoters of labor value (workers, producers), the beneficiaries of use value (communities), and the holder of functional values (the environment). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this final section, the author makes a final argument for the importance of landscape architecture in enhancing urban resilience against the challenges of climate change. The book examines eleven cities across North and South America and showcases landscape architecture projects that these cities have undertaken to prepare for climate change and mitigate its impacts. Through detailed accounts of each city's climate change adaptation plans and strategies, the author highlights how they are working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enhance their resilience to extreme weather events. [Extracted from the article]

In this review, I will discuss the historical importance of "The Significance of the New Logic" by Quine. This is a translation of the original "O Sentido da Nova Lógica" in Portuguese by Carnielli, Janssen-Lauret, and Pickering. The American philosopher wrote this book in the beginning of the 1940s, before a major shift in his philosophy. Thus, I will argue that the reader must see this book as an introduction to an important period in his thinking. I will provide a brief summary of the chapters, remarking on valuable features in each of them and positions Quine abandoned in his later work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "Air Pollution Prevention and Control: Bioreactors and Bioenergy," by Christian Kennes and Maria C. Veiga.

Business management and, more generally, decision makers, are increasingly aware of the importance of corporate social responsibility and ethical choices within the strategic business vision. The number of tools (e.g., board of directors, organization actions), levers (e.g., cultural, social example of direct boss) and rules (e.g., protocols, certifications, law decrees) available, however, makes it difficult for management to identify the set of best practices to be adopted within its own organization. Further, the task is even more difficult when management is called upon to choose these tools for life-long learning programs intended for company staff as well as for new hires. The Italian Association for Managerial Training has promoted a survey that pays particular attention to the «ethical choices» and «behaviors» to be adopted in the organization's management and their training programs. The results of the survey have been modelled through «Carroll's conceptual framework» that, as known, is made of two parts: the most cited CSR pyramid and the least mentioned, but equally important, descriptive types of management. In this work, it has been employed a two steps multivariate analysis, employing an Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and a Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). EFA has been used to identify Carroll's descriptive types (or profiles), while SEMs were employed to verify the plausibility of the causal models that represent, in turn, thought experiments simulating «ethical dilemmas» useful for the company's management during its decision making. The models identified, readable in the form of simple «heuristics», are interpreted in the light of Carroll's «descriptive types» of management (i.e., moral, immoral and amoral). Thereby, any organization, even of a small size, interested in adopting «sustainable policies», can make use of the identified models to establish which guidelines can be adopted by the management during her/his decision making, and, according to Carroll, «to isolate the ethical or moral component of CSR and relate it to perspectives that reflect the three major ethical approaches to management», with the overall objective of managing with «stakeholders in an ethical or moral fashion». [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Safeguarding optimal living conditions for aquatic organisms is one of the most important principles of sustainable water management. Ever-increasing water exploitation, mainly for water supply, irrigation, and renewable energy, has degraded freshwater ecosystems, notably rivers. Further, the climate extremes and water scarcity exacerbated by climate change induce additional stress in freshwater ecosystems and may stimulate conflicts among water users. [Extracted from the article]

The article reviews the book "Handbook of Polymers," by George Wypych.

The article reviews the book "Atlas of Material Damage," by George Wypych.

We review and summarize Terrence Deacon's book, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine the popular Victorian poem The Light of Asia (1879) and its reception and adaptation in late nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial India. Authored by the popular writer, Sir Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia is typically regarded as one of the foundational texts of modern Buddhism in the western world. Yet significantly less has been said about its influence in Asia and especially in India, where it has as an equally rich and varied history. While most scholarship has focused on its connections to the Sinhalese Buddhist leader Anagarika Dharmapala and his popular campaigns to 'liberate' the MahaBodhi Temple in Bodh Gaya, the singular focus on Dharmapala has obscured the poem's much more expansive and enduring impact on a wide array of colonial Indian publics, regardless of caste, region, religion, ethnicity or language. The article explores the early history of its numerous adaptations, dramatizations, and translations in various regional languages. In providing an analysis of the poem's Indian publics, the article shows how regional, political, and cultural idioms formed in multilingual contexts enable different readings and how literary and performative cultures interacted with colonial conceptions of religion, nation, and caste. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Deamer has written another book, Assembling Life, on the origin of life. It is unapologetically polemic, presenting Deamer's view that life originated in fresh water hydrothermal fields on volcanic islands on early Earth, arguing that this provided a unique environment not just for organic chemistry but for the self-assembling structure that drive that chemistry and form the basis of structure in life. It is worth reading, it is an advance in the field, but is it convincing? I argue that the Origin of Life field as a whole is unconvincing, generating results in Toy Domains that cannot be scaled to any real world scenario. I suggest that, by analogy with the history of artificial intelligence and solar astronomy, we need much more scale, and fundamentally new ideas, to take the field forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A book entitled "Advances in Nanosensors for Biological and Environmental Analysis" published by Elsevier in 2019, is reviewed carefully and critically in this report. In this book, editors explored nanotechnology assisted approaches to develop smart and efficient nanosensors for biological and environmental analysis. Fundamental approaches to prototype development and a focus towards designing miniaturized sensing systems and for point-of-care application, along with considering commercial aspects are key features of this book. This book has potential to serve as a foundation platform for scholars of various disciplines to plan and manage multi-display research in the field of biomedical nanotechnology for diagnostics and environmental monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is on the textuality of handwritten marginal inscriptions, and the often acute difficulty of interpreting them. No poet was more profoundly influenced by the agonistics of this interpretative work than Charles Olson (1910–1970). One way to tell the story of his authorship would be to draw a categorical distinction between his life as a scholar of Herman Melville, and his life as a poet associated with the legacy of modernism and with Black Mountain College. However, the marginalia that Olson wrote in his copy of Ace of Pentacles (one of two he owned), by his former student and protégé, John Wieners, tell another story. At one point Olson seems to compare his marginalia in "John's book" (as he calls it) to those Melville wrote "on the leaf of Shakespeare". The annotated "leaf" he has in mind figures in Call Me Ishmael as decisively formative in the making of Moby-Dick. Evidence indicates that Olson used his copy of Ace of Pentacles to devise strategies of writing his way through a major tragedy—the loss of his wife in a car accident in March, 1964. It is amid his annotations that we find the probable starting place of several poems that he wrote to her memory, all controversially excluded from the posthumously published third volume of The Maximus Poems. Yet the marginalia are every bit as resistant to interpretation as those he had himself confronted in the marked pages of Melville's books, and we will need to think carefully about this analogy and its implications. I argue that his marked-up copy of Ace of Pentacles is part of a textual continuum of uncertain extent, raising questions about how we should read the last volume of The Maximus Poems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates Tamar Yoseloff's different engagements with the visual arts in her ekphrastic poems by focusing on her first collection Sweetheart (1998). There are many critical studies about the poetic ekphrastic tradition, but there is rarely an in-depth investigation into a poet's dedication to ekphrasis. This article suggests that Tamar Yoseloff's dedication to ekphrasis is traceable to her earliest work. With a close analysis of three poems from Sweetheart—'The Two Fridas', 'The Arnolfini Marriage' and 'The Visible Man', I argue that the book is a sustained exploration of the autobiographical and biographical enigmas represented in visual artworks and artefacts, as well as our identification with these enigmas. It is hoped that this article could initiate a discussion about the tradition of poets dedicated to ekphrasis being as long as the tradition of modern ekphrasis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This book is written by a retired grid engineer and deals with renewable sources of energy and the instability of the electrical distribution grid. Derek Birkett carefully goes through the arguments about the electrical supply and the effect of intermittent and variable renewable sources of energy on grid stability. As a result of investment in renewable energy and the increasing costs of carbon taxes levied on fossil fuel fired generation, the government has created a situation which is very expensive for consumers and industry, and is unsustainable. The government has intervened in the energy market and provided subsidies and policy support for renewable energy without considering the consequences for the stability of the electrical grid system. The government has no strategic vision of the future for energy generation and no expertise to draw upon. Consumers experience increasing energy costs, power outages and blackouts which will be costly and hard to recover from. Derek states quite clearly that "... the state should no longer use environmental regulation for political purposes unless there is a clear imperative for national well-being and security." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electricity is important because it is the most common energy source that we consume and depend on in our everyday lives. Consequently, the forecasting of electricity sales is essential. Typical forecasting approaches often generate electricity sales forecasts based on certain explanatory variables. However, these forecasting approaches are limited by the fact that future explanatory variables are unknown. To improve forecasting accuracy, recent hybrid forecasting approaches have developed different feature selection techniques (FSTs) to obtain fewer but more significant explanatory variables. However, these significant explanatory variables will still not be available in the future, despite being screened by effective FSTs. This study proposes the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) technique to serve as the FST for hybrid forecasting models. Aside from the ARIMA element, the proposed hybrid models also include artificial neural networks (ANN) and multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS) because of their efficient and fast algorithms and effective forecasting performance. ARIMA can identify significant self-predictor variables that will be available in the future. The significant self-predictor variables obtained can then serve as the inputs for ANN and MARS models. These hybrid approaches have been seldom investigated on the electricity sales forecasting. This study proposes several forecasting models that do not require explanatory variables to forecast the industrial electricity, residential electricity, and commercial electricity sales in Taiwan. The experimental results reveal that the significant self-predictor variables obtained from ARIMA can improve the forecasting accuracy of ANN and MARS models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]