These ethnographic essays by scholars in anthropology, law, political science, folklore, public administration, medicine, and linguistics show contemporary connections between liberal democracy and ethnography. Each perspective explores a modern democratic site—courts, classrooms, legislatures, the media, academic professions, and bureaucratic routines. Together, they expose a contradiction—that official constructions of identity treat "differences" as both natural characteristics of individuals and the collective basis of interest groups. This contradiction hampers liberal states' efforts to acknowledge and accommodate the cultural diversity of citizens. They also show that official categories do not monopolize the available terms of understanding and identification, given the richness and flexibility of people's self-identifications outside official spheres. This recognition implies an ethnographic project at the heart of democratic change. The book develops two national case studies, the United States and Spain. Both countries have been invoked as models of multiculturalism, but their constitutional discourse and politics take very different approaches to issues of identity. Similarly, ethnographic disciplines have been involved in the officialization of difference in both countries, in different ways. Taken together, these differences and their common roots in the twinned histories of modern liberal democracy and the social sciences, provide ethnographic, reflexive, and comparative themes as well as broader theoretical and practical implications.

Sensors are everywhere. Small, flexible, economical, and computationally powerful, they operate ubiquitously in environments. They compile massive amounts of data, including information about air, water, and climate. Never before has such a volume of environmental data been so broadly collected or so widely available. Grappling with the consequences of wiring our world, Program Earth examines how sensor technologies are programming our environments. As Jennifer Gabrys points out, sensors do not merely record information about an environment. Rather, they generate new environments and environmental relations. At the same time, they give a voice to the entities they monitor: to animals, plants, people, and inanimate objects. This book looks at the ways in which sensors converge with environments to map ecological processes, to track the migration of animals, to check pollutants, to facilitate citizen participation, and to program infrastructure. Through discussing particular instances where sensors are deployed for environmental study and citizen engagement across three areas of environmental sensing, from wild sensing to pollution sensing and urban sensing, Program Earth asks how sensor technologies specifically contribute to new environmental conditions. What are the implications for wiring up environments? How do sensor applications not only program environments, but also program the sorts of citizens and collectives we might become? Program Earth suggests that the sensor-based monitoring of Earth offers the prospect of making new environments not simply as an extension of the human but rather as new “technogeographies” that connect technology, nature, and people.

This book presents the proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Applications of Fuzzy Systems, Soft Computing, and Artificial Intelligence Tools, ICAFS-2020, held in Budva, Montenegro, on August 27–28, 2020. It includes contributions from diverse areas of fuzzy systems, soft computing, AI tools such as uncertain computation, decision making under imperfect information, deep learning and others. The topics of the papers include theory and application of soft computing, neuro-fuzzy technology, intelligent control, deep learning–machine learning, fuzzy logic in data analytics, evolutionary computing, fuzzy logic and artificial intelligence in engineering, social sciences, business, economics, material sciences and others.

WAHROONGA, Australia Howard Dimond continues his exploration of the cosmos with a mixture of discovery, romance and insightfulness in his fourth novel, By Accident or Design: Unscrambling Newtons Code (published by Xlibris AU). Dimond continues the unique and inquisitive story of Michael, his wife Janet and Michaels great friend, Oats. On a scientific quest to objectively discover the beginnings of humanity within the earths planetary past, the trio takes the enlightened approach from an extremely advanced society, which questions our accepted and fl awed theories and asks: Why is it so? Michael, Janet and Oats question key aspects of humanitys history on Earth through which they discover a positive, unifying way forward, and with it a more hopeful future for the human race. Darwins fl awed theories, while having created many early, positive discussions have also seen some adverse and unintended consequences in humanitys progress as a result, Dimond says. With this compelling revision of critical parts of our history and its consequences, it makes this novel essential to us all. By Accident or Design gives readers an easy-to-understand examination of what gives humanity hope, encouragement and purpose in life and the future. By taking an original look at where inspirational enlightenment on Earth has floundered, Dimond offers an innovative approach on how it can be rediscovered and recaptured for the overall betterment of the world today. I would hope that readers learn to question our history and our past more closely and that every human soul who feels characterized by their color, may they find comfort, encouragement and a sense of peace in these findings, Dimond says.

A selection of more than 75 North American species from across the branches of the animal family can be found in this book that has been updated with recent information about changes in endangerment status and recovery, focusing on developments reported by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

A selection of more than 75 North American species from across the branches of the animal family can be found in this book.

Seemingly simple behaviours turn out, on reflection, to be discouragingly complex. For many years, cognitive operations such as sensation, perception, comparing percepts to stored models (short-term and long-term memory), decision-making and planning of actions were treated by most neuroscientists as separate areas of research. This was not because the neuroscience community believed these operations to act independently—it is intuitive that any common cognitive process seamlessly interweaves these operations—but because too little was known about the individual processes constituting the full behaviour, and experimental paradigms and data collection methods were not sufficiently well developed to put the processes in sequence in any controlled manner. These limitations are now being overcome in the leading cognitive neuroscience laboratories, and this book is a timely summary of the current state of the art. The theme of the book is how the brain uses sensory information to develop and decide upon the appropriate action, and how the brain determines the appropriate action to optimize the collection of new sensory information. It addresses several key questions. How are percepts built up in the cortex and how are judgments of the percept made? In what way does information flow within and between cortical regions, and what is accomplished by successive (and reverberating) stages of processing? How are decisions made about the percept subsequently acted upon, through their conversion to a response according to the learned criterion for action? How does the predicted or expected sensation interact with the actual incoming flow of sensory signals? The chapters and discussions in the book reveal how answering these questions requires an understanding of sensory–motor loops: our perception of the world drives new actions, and the actions undertaken at any moment lead to a new ‘view’ of the world. This book is a fascinating read for all clinical and experimental psychologists and neuroscientists, as well as anyone interested in how we perceive the world and act within it.

What are the links between the "inner" world of our imagination, emotions, and thoughts and the "outer" world where we encounter animals? Can it be that the psychological and ecological are one and the same? This book shows how their convergence might alter our perception of "community." Currently the connection between people and animals appears dysfunctional because of the accelerated loss of species. Since we will not save what we do not love, this book seeks to restore the honor and importance of animals. Dreams, including daydreams (thoughts, ideas, cultural myths) and sleep dreams, have positive and negative consequences in the world. In order to help heal ourselves and the Earth, this book dives deeply into the lives of many animals, documents our relationship to them over time, and shows how to work with dreams and dialogues. A great emotion, transforming in effect, is released when we take the beauty and power of dream animals to heart.

The major reference work for a rapidly advancing field synthesizes central themes, reports on current findings, and offers a blueprint for future research. Scientists' attempts to understand the physiology underlying our apprehension of the physical world was long dominated by a focus on the individual senses. The 1980s saw the beginning of systematic efforts to examine interactions among different sensory modalities at the level of the single neuron. And by the end of the 1990s, a recognizable and multidisciplinary field of "multisensory processes" had emerged. More recently, studies involving both human and nonhuman subjects have focused on relationships among multisensory neuronal ensembles and their behavioral, perceptual, and cognitive correlates. The New Handbook of Multisensory Processing synthesizes the central themes in this rapidly developing area, reports on current findings, and offers a blueprint for future research. The contributions, all of them written for this volume by leading experts, reflect the evolution and current state of the field. This handbook does more than simply review the field. Each of the volume's eleven sections broadly surveys a major topic, and each begins with a substantive and thought-provoking commentary by the section editor that identifies the major issues being explored, describes their treatment in the chapters that follow, and sets these findings within the context of the existing body of knowledge. Together, the commentaries and chapters provide an invaluable guide to areas of general agreement, unresolved issues, and topics that remain to be explored in this fast-moving field.