This book explores the dynamic relationships between sites, peoples, objects, and images during the first age of globalization in early modern Europe. It investigates interactions, interconnections, and entanglements on both micro and macro levels, and aims to understand the specific dynamics of processes of translocal and transcultural intersection. Linking global perspectives with the history of material culture, Sites of Mediation highlights the potential of objects, artefacts, and things to connect (urban) cultures and imaginaries. Individual chapters focus on a number of European cities, which all operated on different levels of global and interregional connections and are presented here as sites of connectivity, encounters, and exchange. Contributors are: Tina Asmussen, Nadia Baadj, Benedikt Bego-Ghina, Davina Benkert, Daniela Bleichmar, Susanna Burghartz, Lucas Burkart, Christine Göttler, Franziska Hilfiker, Nicolai Kölmel, Ivo Raband, Jennifer Rabe, Antonella Romano, Michael Schaffner, Sarah-Maria Schober, Claudia Swan, and Stefanie Wyssenbach.

Site Reading offers a new method of literary and cultural interpretation and a new theory of narrative setting by examining five sites—supermarkets, dumps, roads, ruins, and asylums—that have been crucial to American literature and visual art since the mid-twentieth century. Against the traditional understanding of setting as a static background for narrative action and character development, David Alworth argues that sites figure in novels as social agents. Engaging a wide range of social and cultural theorists, especially Bruno Latour and Erving Goffman, Site Reading examines how the literary figuration of real, material environments reorients our sense of social relations. To read the sites of fiction, Alworth demonstrates, is to reveal literature as a profound sociological resource, one that simultaneously models and theorizes collective life. Each chapter identifies a particular site as a point of contact for writers and artists—the supermarket for Don DeLillo and Andy Warhol; the dump for William Burroughs and Mierle Laderman Ukeles; the road for Jack Kerouac, Joan Didion, and John Chamberlain; the ruin for Thomas Pynchon and Robert Smithson; and the asylum for Ralph Ellison, Gordon Parks, and Jeff Wall—and shows how this site mediates complex interactions among humans and nonhumans. The result is an interdisciplinary study of American culture that brings together literature, visual art, and social theory to develop a new sociology of literature that emphasizes the sociology in literature.

At the turn of the sixteenth century, the notion of world was dramatically being reshaped, leaving no aspect of human experience untouched. The Nomadic Object: The Challenge of World for Early Modern Religious Art examines how sacred art and artefacts responded to the demands of a world stage in the age of reform. Essays by leading scholars explore how religious objects resulting from cross-cultural contact defied national and confessional categories and were re-contextualised in a global framework via their collection, exchange, production, management, and circulation. In dialogue with current discourses, papers address issues of idolatry, translation, materiality, value, and the agency of networks. The Nomadic Object demonstrates the significance of religious systems, from overseas logistics to philosophical underpinnings, for a global art history. Contributors are: Akira Akiyama, James Clifton, Jeffrey L. Collins, Ralph Dekoninck, Dagmar Eichberger, Beate Fricke, Christine Göttler, Christiane Hille, Margit Kern, Dipti Khera, Yoriko Kobayashi-Sato, Urte Krass, Evonne Levy, Meredith Martin, Walter S. Melion, Mia M. Mochizuki, Jeanette Favrot Peterson, Rose Marie San Juan, Denise-Marie Teece, Tristan Weddigen, and Ines G. Županov.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First Asian Semantic Web Conference, ASWC 2006, held in Beijing, China, in September 2006. The 36 revised full papers and 36 revised short papers presented together with three invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 208 full paper submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections.

Globalisation, and the vast migrations of capital and labour that have accompanied it in recent decades, has transformed family law in once unimaginable ways. Families have been torn apart and new families have been created. Borders have become more porous, allowing adoptees and mail order brides to join new families and women fleeing domestic violence to escape from old ones. People of different nationalities marry, have children, and divorce, not necessarily in that order. They file suits in their respective home states or third states, demanding support, custody, and property. Otherwise law-abiding parents risk jail in desperate efforts to abduct their own children from foreign ex-spouses. The aim of this Handbook is to provide scholars, postgraduate students, judges, and practioners with a broad but authoritative review of current research in the area of International Family Law. The contributors reflect on a range of jurisdictions and legal traditions and their approaches vary. Each chapter has a distinct subject matter and was written by an author who was invited because of his or her expertise on that subject. This volume provides a valuable contribution to emerging understandings of the subject.

Service-oriented computing is an emerging factor in IT research and development. Organizations like W3C and the EU have begun research projects to develop industrial-strength applications. This book offers a thorough, practical introduction to one of the most promising approaches – the Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO). After a brief review of technologies and standards of the Worldwide Web, the Semantic Web, and Web Services, the book examines WSMO from the fundamentals to applications in e-commerce, e-government and e-banking; it also describes its relation to OWL-S and WSDL-S and other applications. The book offers an up-to-date introduction, plus pointers to future applications.

In today’s modern age of information, new technologies are quickly emerging and being deployed into the field of information technology. Cloud computing is a tool that has proven to be a versatile piece of software within IT. Unfortunately, the high usage of Cloud has raised many concerns related to privacy, security, and data protection that have prevented cloud computing solutions from becoming the prevalent alternative for mission critical systems. Up-to-date research and current techniques are needed to help solve these vulnerabilities in cloud computing. Modern Principles, Practices, and Algorithms for Cloud Security is a pivotal reference source that provides vital research on the application of privacy and security in cloud computing. While highlighting topics such as chaos theory, soft computing, and cloud forensics, this publication explores present techniques and methodologies, as well as current trends in cloud protection. This book is ideally designed for IT specialists, scientists, software developers, security analysts, computer engineers, academicians, researchers, and students seeking current research on the defense of cloud services.

Spon's Architects' and Builders' Price Book 2004 is the most detailed, professionally relevant source of construction price information currently available anywhere. With competition growing fiercer throughout the industry and with increasing pressure to obtain a 'competitive advantage', the A and B's unique tender index will be more valuable than ever before. This is the only price book that publishes details of its cost base in such a way that it can be adjusted to allow for market conditions that affect building prices. A separate minor works section on coloured paper covers contracts of around £65,000 in value. The A and B comes with a 'free' CDROM that enables the reader to view the entire book on screen, cut and paste prices into other tender documents, export to other major packages, perform simple calculations, index search, produce estimate and tender documents and adjust rates and data. This complete package now means that Spon's Architects' and Builders' Price Book 2004 is now better than ever and is a resource that no building firm, surveyor or architect should be without. New features in this 129th edition include: an easier-to-read format; information on, and incorporating, the new CICJ three year wage agreement, effective from Monday, 30th June 2003. It also includes additional items for: hot and cold water piping systems; additional building boards and external wall cladding; further aluminium systems curtain walling; western red cedar external wall cladding; fire retardant steel beams; metal and glazed balustrading; sarnafil roofing and acoustic sliding partitions.