Despite a shared colonial past, South American nations experienced different patterns of conflict in the nineteenth century. These differences led to the creation of a variety of states and regimes, from authoritarian military oligarchies to popular democracies. Using a rigorous logic of comparison, Fernando López-Alves explores the roots of state building in five countries and explains why the political systems of these early postindependent societies were prone to militarism, corporatism...

This book provides an overview of advanced digital image and signal processing techniques that are currently being applied in the realm of measurement systems. The book is a selection of extended versions of the best papers presented at the Sixth IEEE International Workshop on Intelligent Data Acquisition and Advanced Computing Systems: Technology and Applications IDAACS 2011 related to this topic and encompass applications that go from multidimensional imaging to evoked potential detectio...

Populist nationalism fuses beliefs that citizens are being exploited by a privileged elite with claims that the national culture and interests are under threat from enemies within or without. Ideologically fluid, populist nationalists decry “out-of-touch” institutions such as political parties and the mainstream press while extolling the virtues of the “people.” They claim that only populists can truly represent the nation and solve its problems, and often call for unorthodox solutions tha...

In The Affinity of the Eye: Writing Nikkei in Peru, Ignacio López-Calvo rises above the political emergence of the Fujimori phenomenon and uses politics and literature to provide one of the first comprehensive looks at how the Japanese assimilated and inserted themselves into Peruvian culture. Through contemporary writers’ testimonies, essays, fiction, and poetry, López-Calvo constructs an account of the cultural formation of Japanese migrant communities. With deftly sensitive int...

Central America, Panama, and the Dominican Republic coped well with the global financial crisis of 2008-09. The impact was generally less severe and shorter lived than in previous episodes, the balance of payments adjustment was orderly, and the stability of the financial system was not compromised. This resilience can be attributed to a large extent to the strengthening of the fiscal frameworks, monetary management, and financial reforms conducted in the years preceding the global crisis. Ne...

This book was specifically written for those interested in the Complementary and Alternative Medical Community and desire a better understanding of how the holistic health industry in America functions as a business entity. The Holistic Business Handbook was designed for the reader’s convenience. With due diligence this text was reduced to a simplified summary of the demographics of customers, holistic business theories, common ethnocentric misconceptions, and the rising list of competitor...

Covering recent developments in maritime transportation and exploitation of sea resources, encompassing ocean and coastal areas, this book is intended for academics and professionals involved in the development of marine transportation and the exploitation of sea resources.

A Queer History of Flamenco offers a groundbreaking exploration of flamenco through the lenses of queer theory and cultural studies. Previous histories have provided a largely distorted image about why, where, and how people have done flamenco—as well as who has performed flamenco. Yet feminists, transvestites, butches, femmes, the Spanish Roma, disabled people, guiris, and “incomprehensible” artists have been determined to do things differently without giving up their flamenco st...

This book provides an overview of advanced digital image and signal processing techniques that are currently being applied in the realm of measurement systems. The book is a selection of extended versions of the best papers presented at the Sixth IEEE International Workshop on Intelligent Data Acquisition and Advanced Computing Systems: Technology and Applications IDAACS 2011 related to this topic and encompass applications that go from multidimensional imaging to evoked potential detectio...

This book provides an overview of the importance of science, technology, and innovation in the history of economic thought. It charts how science has responded to societal needs and global challenges to highlight the way in which knowledge and technology have been used to benefit society. Particular attention is given to modern concerns, such as climate change, technological unemployment, and social unrest, which are contextualised within the work of the Scottish Enlightenment, Marx, Weber...

A study of how coins, riches and lands were gained and distributed among the soldiers, warriors, and mercenaries in the Antiquity and Early Medieval times.Land was the ideal store of wealth in the ancient Mediterranean world. It brought social respectability, and its possession allowed participation in the politics of the cities governed by landowning elites. Crucial defense of the interests of a given polity through armed services often involved the distribution o...

This book provides an overview of the design, synthesis, and characterization of different photoactive hybrid organic-inorganic materials, based on the combination of mainly organic molecules and inorganic nanostructures, tackling their uses in different scientific fields from photonics to biomedicine.There are many examples extensively describing how the confinement of organic compounds (i.e. chromophores, photochromic molecules or photoreactants), or other photoactive compounds (...