We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected]
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Recent years have witnessed significant research efforts in flexible organic and amorphous-metal-oxide analogue electronics, in view of its formidable potential for applications such as smart sensor systems. This Element provides a comprehensive overview of this growing research area. After discussing the properties of organic and amorphous-metal-oxide technologies relevant to analogue circuits, this Element focuses on their application to two key circuit blocks: amplifiers and analogue-to-digital converters. The Element thus provides a fresh look at the evolution and immediate opportunities of the field, and identifies the remaining challenges for these technologies to become the platform of choice for flexible analogue electronics.
The scientific study of 'wellbeing' involves both objective and subjective variables. While objective wellbeing can be simply measured as tangible aspects of the living environment, measuring subjective wellbeing involves quantifying self-reported feelings. Although reliable and valid measures can be achieved, in a cross-cultural context differences in language and culture present formidable challenges to measurement comparability. This Element begins by describing the behaviour of subjective wellbeing in single cultures, using the theory of homeostasis. Robert A. Cummins then discusses cross-cultural differences in subjective wellbeing, with a focus on measurement invariance as a means of ensuring the validity of comparative results. Cummins proposes that the major barrier to creating such comparability of measurement is a pervasive response bias that differs between cultures. He concludes that current instruments are inadequate to provide valid cross-cultural measures of subjective wellbeing, and that suitable measures may be created as short forms of current scales.
Canonical theories of political economy struggle to explain patterns of distribution in authoritarian regimes. In this Element, Albertus, Fenner, and Slater challenge existing models and introduce an alternative, supply-side, and state-centered theory of 'coercive distribution'. Authoritarian regimes proactively deploy distributive policies as advantageous strategies to consolidate their monopoly on power. These policies contribute to authoritarian durability by undercutting rival elites and enmeshing the masses in lasting relations of coercive dependence. The authors illustrate the patterns, timing, and breadth of coercive distribution with global and Latin American quantitative evidence and with a series of historical case studies from regimes in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. By recognizing distribution's coercive dimensions, they account for empirical patterns of distribution that do not fit with quasi-democratic understandings of distribution as quid pro quo exchange. Under authoritarian conditions, distribution is less an alternative to coercion than one of its most effective expressions.
This Element on cost-benefit analysis provides a summary of recent theoretical and empirical developments and summarizes state-of-the-art stated-preference and revealed-preference valuation methods. The Element discusses how to assess small (or marginal) as well as large (or non-marginal) projects that have a significant impact on prices and/or other economic variables. It also discusses distortions like taxes, market power, and sticky prices. In addition, risk/uncertainty is considered. A novel feature is the elaboration on flexible evaluation rules for reasonably small projects. Conventional point-estimates of projects should be used with care, because they typically give biased results.
This Element is a study of how the power of imagination is, according to Kant, supposed to contribute to cognition. It is meant to be an immanent and a reconstructive endeavor, relying solely on Kant's own resources when he tries to determine what material, faculties, and operations are necessary for cognition of objects. The main discourse is divided into two sections. The first deals with Kant's views concerning the power of imagination as outlined in the A- and B- edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. The second focuses on the power of imagination in the first part of the Critique of Judgment.
This Element describes noteworthy developments in cross-cultural psychology of the past half century. It stresses the author's involvement with the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology and the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology. It presents events in a decade-by-decade format, allowing brief discussion of high points in each decade, such as significant conferences and books, and commentaries on selected scholars. Topics include summaries of IACCP conferences, Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, IACCP Archives, and assessment of introductory psychology texts and their cultural content. Key aspects of culture-centered methodology in psychology and the teaching of culture-oriented psychology conclude the presentation.
Falun Gong, founded by Li Hongzhi in 1992, attracted international attention in 1999 after staging a demonstration outside government offices in Beijing. It was subsequently banned. Followers then created a number of media outlets outside China focused on protesting the PRC's attack on the 'human rights' of practitioners. This volume focuses on Falun Gong and violence. Though the author notes accusations of how Chinese authorities have abused and tortured practitioners, the volume will focus on Li Hongzhi's teachings about 'spiritual warfare', and how these teachings have motivated practitioners to deliberately seek brutalization and martyrdom.
The field of policy studies has always been interested in analyzing and improving the sets of policy tools adopted by governments to correct policy problems, and better understanding and improving processes of policy analysis and policy formulation in order to do so. Past studies have helped clarify the role of historical processes, policy capacities and design intentions in affecting policy formulation processes, and more recently in understanding how the bundling of multiple policy elements together to meet policy goals can be better understood and done. While this work has progressed, however, the discussion of what goals policy designs should serve remains disjointed. Here it is argued that a central goal, in fact, 'the' central goal, of policy design is effectiveness. Effectiveness serves as the basic goal of any design, upon which is built other goals such as efficiency or equity.
The main thrust of this Element is a critical assessment of the theory and evidence concerning the sources of scale effects. It is argued that the analysis of static scale effects is important because scale effects are embedding in our world, and new technologies associated with an evolving economy often allow their exploitation when they cannot be exploited in less technically advanced and smaller economies. So, although static equilibrium theory is not a good vehicle for studying economic growth, showing how scale effects operate when output varies with given technology helps us to understand the scale effects that occur when output rises as a result of economic growth, even though that is typically driven by technological change.
This Element aims to achieve three objectives. First, it explores some key institutional characteristics of several Asian economies that are relevant to corporate governance practices. Second, it reviews corporate governance codes or rules in those economies and examines levels of requirements in terms of formal rules. Third, this Element looks at recent trends related to corporate governance such as executive compensation and a proportion of independent directors on boards of large listed firms.
The concept of the developmental state emerged to explain the rapid growth of a number of countries in East Asia in the postwar period. Yet the developmental state literature also offered a theoretical approach to growth that was heterodox with respect to prevailing approaches in both economics and political science. Arguing for the distinctive features of developmental states, its proponents emphasized the role of government intervention and industrial policy as well as the significance of strong states and particular social coalitions. This literature blossomed into a wider approach, firmly planted in a much longer heterodox tradition, that explored comparisons with states that were decidedly not developmentalist, thus contributing to our historical understanding of long-run growth. This Element provides a critical but sympathetic overview of this literature and ends with its revival and a look forward at the possibility for developmentalist approaches, both in the advanced and developing world.
Metamaterials offer the possibility to control and manipulate electromagnetic radiation. Spoof surface plasmon metamaterials are the focus of this Element of the Metamaterials Series. The fundamentals of spoof surface plasmons are reviewed, and advances on plasmonic metamaterials based on spoof plasmons are presented. Spoof surface plasmon metamaterials on a wide range of geometries are discussed: from planar platforms to waveguides and localized modes, including cylindrical structures, grooves, wedges, dominos or conformal surface plasmons in ultrathin platforms. The Element closes with a review of recent advances and applications such as Terahertz sensing or integrated devices and circuits.
The rise of the internet and mobile telecommunications has created the possibility of using large datasets to understand behavior at unprecedented levels of temporal and geographic resolution. Online social networks attract the most users, though users of these new technologies provide their data through multiple sources, e.g. call detail records, blog posts, web forums, and content aggregation sites. These data allow scholars to adjudicate between competing theories as well as develop new ones, much as the microscope facilitated the development of the germ theory of disease. Of those networks, Twitter presents an ideal combination of size, international reach, and data accessibility that make it the preferred platform in academic studies. Acquiring, cleaning, and analyzing these data, however, require new tools and processes. This Element introduces these methods to social scientists and provides scripts and examples for downloading, processing, and analyzing Twitter data.
Bioresorbable electronics that can dissolve away in aqueous environments and generate biologically safe products offer a revolutionary solution to replace the built-to-last electronics predominantly used in implanted devices and electronic gadgets. Their use can reduce the risk of surgical complications by minimizing the number of necessary surgeries, and prevent production of electronic waste by allowing rapid device recycling. This Element presents bioresorbable materials such as metals, polymers, inorganic compounds, and semiconductors that have been used to construct electronic devices, and analyzes their unique dissolution behaviors and biological effects. These materials are combined to yield representative devices including passive and active components and functional systems.
State capacity - the government's ability to accomplish its intended policy goals - plays an important role in market-oriented economic development today. Yet state capacity improvements are often difficult to achieve. This Element analyzes the historical origins of state capacity. It evaluates long-run state development in Western Europe - the birthplace of both the modern state and modern economic growth - with a focus on three key inflection points: the rise of the city-state, the nation-state, and the welfare state. This Element develops a conceptual framework regarding the basic political conditions that enable the state to take effective policy actions. This framework highlights the government's challenge to exert proper authority over both its citizenry and itself. It concludes by analyzing the European state development process relative to other world regions. This analysis characterizes the basic historical features that helped make Western Europe different. By taking a long-run approach, it provides a new perspective on the deep-rooted relationship between state capacity and economic development.
Institutions are the formal or informal 'rules of the game' that facilitate economic, social, and political interactions. These include such things as legal rules, property rights, constitutions, political structures, and norms and customs. The main theoretical insights from Austrian economics regarding private property rights and prices, entrepreneurship, and spontaneous order mechanisms play a key role in advancing institutional economics. The Austrian economics framework provides an understanding for which institutions matter for growth, how they matter, and how they emerge and can change over time. Specifically, Austrians have contributed significantly to the areas of institutional stickiness and informal institutions, self-governance and self-enforcing contracts, institutional entrepreneurship, and the political infrastructure for development.
This Element defends a reading of Kant's formulas of the moral law in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. It disputes a long tradition concerning what the first formula (Universal Law/Law of Nature) attempts to do. The Element also expounds the Formulas of Humanity, Autonomy and the Realm of Ends, arguing that it is only the Formula of Humanity from which Kant derives general duties, and that it is only the third formula (Autonomy/Realm of Ends) that represents a complete and definitive statement of the moral principle as Kant derives it in the Groundwork. The Element also disputes the claim that the various formulas are 'equivalent', arguing that this claim is either false or else nonsensical because it is grounded on a false premise about what Kant thinks a moral principle is for.
For advanced students of network data science, this compact account covers both well-established methodology and the theory of models recently introduced in the graphical model literature. It focuses on the discrete case where all variables involved are categorical and, in this context, it achieves a unified presentation of classical and recent results.
This snapshot of the current frontier of statistics and network analysis focuses on the foundational topics of modeling, sampling, and design. Primarily for graduate students and researchers in statistics and closely related fields, emphasis is not only on what has been done, but on what remains to be done.