Download or read book FC Barcelona written by Jim O'Brien and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-04-01 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first critical, in-depth academic study of FC Barcelona (also known as Barça), one of the world’s great football clubs, exploring the historical, political, cultural and commercial dimensions of this global sporting institution. The book examines why and how the club grew from its genesis as a small sporting organisation in the developing urban landscape of Barcelona in 1899 to become a contemporary giant that has both shaped and transcended football. It considers how globalisation, cultural identity and political ideology can help us to understand the development of Barça, but also how the growth of the phenomenon of FC Barcelona helps us to better understand those forces shaping contemporary global societies. It brings together leading scholars from around the world to examine key themes such as governance, regional and national politics, storytelling, fandom, digital media, branding, commercialisation and sport diplomacy, exploring topics such as the European Super League fiasco and the rise of Lionel Messi as a global icon. It also includes a series of chapters looking at the importance of FC Barcelona around the world, including in Latin America, the United States, Africa and East Asia. This illuminating, multi-disciplinary study of FC Barcelona is essential reading for anybody with an interest in football, Catalonian politics and culture, or the history, politics, culture and business of sport.

Download or read book The Barcelona Complex written by Simon Kuper and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-08-16 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With rare and unrivaled access, bestselling coauthor of Soccernomics and longtime Financial Times journalist Simon Kuper tells the story of how FC Barcelona became the most successful club in the world—and how that era is now ending FC Barcelona is not just the world’s highest grossing sports club, it is simply one of the most influential organizations on the planet. At last count, it had approximately 214 million social media followers, more than any other sports club except Real Madrid CF—and by one earlier measure, more than all thirty-two NFL teams combined. It has more in common with multinational megacompanies like Netflix or small nation-states than it does with most soccer teams. No wonder its motto is “More than a club.” But it was not always so. In the past three decades, Barcelona went from a regional team to a global powerhouse, becoming a model of sustained excellence and beautiful soccer, and a consistent winner of championships. Simon Kuper unravels exactly how this transformation took place, paying special attention to the club’s two biggest stars, Johan Cruyff and Lionel Messi, who is arguably the greatest soccer player of all time. Messi joined Barça at age thirteen and, more than anyone, has been the engine and standard-bearer of Barcelona’s glory. But his era is coming to an end—and with it, a once-in-a-lifetime golden run. This book charts Barça’s rise and fall. Like many world-beating organizations, FC Barcelona closely guards its secrets, granting few outsiders access to the Camp Nou, its legendary home stadium. But after decades of writing about the sport and the club, Kuper was given access to the inner sanctum and the people behind the scenes who strive daily to keep Barcelona at the top. Erudite, personal, and capturing all the latest upheavals, his portrait of this incredible institution goes beyond soccer to understand FC Barcelona as a unique social, cultural, and political phenomenon.

Download or read book Barcelona Days written by Daniel Riley and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2020-06-23 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this captivating novel, an erupting Icelandic volcano grounds all flights in and out of Europe, forcing four vacationing Americans to reckon with the problems they'd hoped to leave behind in Barcelona. Whitney and Will are a perfect couple by all appearances, their relationship rock-solid, and their engagement soon to be announced. Before their impending nuptials, however, Whitney suggests a lighthearted experiment: why not give each other three romantic "free passes" before getting married? Three opportunities to imagine other lives before returning with new appreciation for each other. On what's meant to be the last night of a romantic Barcelona vacation, they agree to regale one another with details of these harmless trysts. They grin and bear it, and fall asleep feeling mostly satisfied, and relieved to be firmly together again. But then a volcano erupts overnight, spewing a cloud of ash across Europe and grounding all flights indefinitely. Trapped in Barcelona, their paths intertwine with a star basketball player, his future dashed by a crippling injury, and a foreign exchange student with a double life, about to return home and face reality. Whitney and Will flirt, provoke, dance, and drink. Over the next three days, they will use and be used by their new friends, once again testing the boundaries of their relationship -- but this time, can it survive?

Download or read book Volume 2 Housing and Home written by Brian Doucet and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2021-07-22 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The COVID-19 pandemic was not a great ‘equaliser’, but rather an event whose impact intersected with pre-existing inequalities affecting different people, places, and geographic scales. Nowhere is this more apparent than in housing. Written by an international group of experts, this book casts light on how the virus has impacted the experience of home and housing through the lens of wider urban processes around transportation, land use, planning policy, racism, and inequality. Case studies from around the world examine issues around gentrification, housing processes, design, systems, finance and policy. Offering crucial insights for reforming cities to be more resilient to future crises, this is an invaluable resource for scholars and policy makers alike.

Download or read book The New Urban Ruins written by Cian O'Callaghan and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2023-02 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an innovative perspective to consider contemporary urban challenges through the lens of urban vacancy. Centering urban vacancy as a core feature of urbanization, the contributors coalesce new empirical insights on the impacts of recent contestations over the re-use of vacant spaces in post-crisis cities across the globe. Using international case studies from the Global North and Global South, it sheds important new light on the complexity of forces and processes shaping urban vacancy and its re-use, exploring these areas as both lived spaces and sites of political antagonism. It explores what has and hasn't worked in re-purposing vacant sites and provides sustainable blueprints for future development.

Download or read book Meet Barcelona written by Meet the Earth and published by Meet the Earth. This book was released on with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eco-friendly travel guide. 200+ locations. Hotels, shops, restaurants, bars, car & bike rentals, vegan & eco-friendly stores, public transportation, consulates. Congresses, universities, concerts, festivals. Airport, port and train stations. Main tips and tricks to fully enjoy your trip.

Download or read book Lessons and policy consequences of mathematical modelling in relation to ongoing pandemics written by Theodore Gyle Lewis and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2023-10-31 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Health and the Sustainable Development Goals written by Scott L. Greer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-02 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Factors outside of healthcare services determine our health and this involves many different sectors. Health for All Policies changes the argument about inter-sectoral action, from one focusing on health and the health sector to one based on co-benefits - a 'Health for All Policies' approach. It uses the Sustainable Development Goals as the framework for identifying goals across sectors and summarizes evidence along two causal axes. One is the impact of improved health status on other SDGs, e.g. better educational and employment results. The other is the impact of health systems and policies on other sectors. The 'Health for All Policies' approach advocated in this book is thus a call to improve health to achieve goals beyond health and for the health sector itself to do better in understanding and directing its impact on the world beyond the healthcare it provides. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Download or read book Latin America and international investment law written by Sufyan Droubi and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-12 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Latin America has been a complex laboratory for the development of international investment law. While some governments and non-state actors have remained true to the Latin American tradition of resistance towards the international investment law regime, other governments and actors have sought to accommodate said regime in the region. Consequently, a profusion of theories and doctrines, too often embedded in clashing narratives, has emerged. In Latin America, the practice of international investment law is the vivid amalgamation of the practice of governments sometimes resisting and sometimes welcoming mainstream approaches; the practice of lawyers assisting foreign investors from outside and within the region; and the practice of civil society, indigenous peoples and other actors in their struggle for human rights and sustainable development. Latin America and international investment law describes the complex roles that governments have played vis-à-vis foreign investors and investments; the refreshing but clashing forces that international organizations, corporations, civil society, and indigenous peoples have brought to the field; and the contribution that Latin America has made to the development of the theory and practice of international investment law, notably in fields in which the Latin American experience has been traumatic: human rights and sustainable development. Latin American scholars have been contributing to the theory of international investment law for over a century; resting on the shoulders of true giants, this volume aims at pushing this contribution a little further.

Download or read book Therapeutic Agents and Targets to Minimize Ischemic Brain Injury written by Bruno Meloni and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BM would like to declare that he has filed patents for the application of arginine-rich peptide as neuroprotective agents for stroke and other neurological disorders. RRR patents licensed by Neuronasal Inc., a company that he also consults for and has equity interest in. All other Topic Editors declare no competing interests with regards to the Research Topic subject.

Download or read book Research Handbook on Populism written by Yannis Stavrakakis and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2024-03-14 with total page 605 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining one of the most hotly debated topics in contemporary politics, media and academia, the Research Handbook on Populism brings together a diverse range of academics from across the globe to provide a detailed and comprehensive overview of the developing field of populism research.

Download or read book Advancing STEM Education and Innovation in a Time of Distance Learning written by González-Lezcano, Roberto Alonso and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2022-10-21 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Due to the recent global pandemic, educators of science and technology have had to pivot and adapt their delivery to create alternative virtual means of delivery. The COVID-19 pandemic has influenced a rapid change in teaching and learning in higher education. It is reshaping curriculum demands, the 21st century digital competence challenges, and learning technologies. These changes in education are likely to endure well past the COVID-19 pandemic, making it crucial for educators to consider teaching and learning under the perspectives of digital education and innovation. Advancing STEM Education and Innovation in a Time of Distance Learning highlights the contemporary trends and challenges in science, technology, mathematics, and engineering education. The chapters present findings and discussions of relevant research studies and theoretical frameworks for the provision of science, technology, engineering, and technical subjects. It not only presents successful practice examples from before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, but also provides useful information to assist educators in understanding the demands and challenges of digital education. Covering topics such as ethnically diverse students, foreign language learning, and mobile gamification, this premier reference source is an essential resource for educators and administrators of both K-12 and higher education, pre-service teachers, teacher educators, librarians, government officials, researchers, and academicians.

Download or read book The Future of the Past Paths towards Participatory Governance for Cultural Heritage written by Gabriela García and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2021-06-03 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Future of the Past is a biennial conference generally carried out during the commemoration date of the incorporation of Santa Ana de Los Ríos de Cuenca Ecuador as a World Heritage Site (WHS). It initiated in 2014, organized by the City Preservation Management research project (CPM) of the University of Cuenca, to create a space for dialoguing among interested actors in the cultural heritage field. Since then, this space has served to exchange initiatives and to promote coordinated actions based on shared responsibility, in the local context. The third edition of this conference took place in the context of the 20th anniversary of being listed as WHS and a decade of CPM as the Southern host of the PRECOM3OS UNESCO Chair (Preventive Conservation, Maintenance and Monitoring of Monuments and Sites). For the very first time, and thanks to the collaboration with the Raymond Lemaire International Centre for Conservation of the University of Leuven (Belgium), the conference expanded its local scope. On this occasion, contributions reflected round a worldwide challenge in the cultural field: revealing the paths towards participatory governance of cultural heritage. Participatory governance is understood as institutional decision-making structures supported by shared responsibilities and rights among diverse actors.

Download or read book REINFORCEMENT LEARNING FOUNDATIONS ALGORITHMS AND APPLICATIONS written by Dr. Darío Salguero García and published by Xoffencerpublication. This book was released on 2023-09-18 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reinforcement learning, sometimes known as RL, is a catchall word that refers to both a learning problem and a subfield in machine learning. In the context of a problem involving learning, this refers to the process of determining how to guide a computer toward an arbitrary numerical objective. The process of reinforcement learning may be seen in its usual application in the controller is provided with both the present state of the system under their control as well as the reward earned from the most recent transition. After that, the system will calculate an answer and then provide it to you. Because of this, the system goes through a state transition, and the process starts all over again. Figuring out how to have the most possible impact on the system in order to get the greatest possible advantage from it is the task at hand here. The gathering of data and the measurement of performance are two areas in which the learning obstacles are distinct. In this context, we make the assumption that the target system is, by its very nature, unpredictable. In addition, we make the assumption that the measures of state that are now accessible are detailed enough so that the controller does not need to speculate on how to get state information. The Markovian decision processes, often known as MDPs, provide a helpful framework for modeling issues that include these characteristics. MDPs are often "solved" via the use of dynamic programming, which, in practice, does nothing more than recast the initial problem as one involving the selection of an acceptable value function. Dynamic programming, on the other hand, is impractical in all but the most elementary of situations, namely those in which the MDP has a limited number of states and actions. The RL algorithms that we give here may be seen as a method that can be utilized to turn unfeasible dynamic programming into usable algorithms that can be used to real-world applications on a huge scale. The reason why RL algorithms are able to do this task is due to two key assumptions. The fundamental idea is to illustrate the dynamics of the control issue in a more concise way by utilizing samples. This is crucial for two reasons, which are as follows: To begin, it makes it easier to handle learning circumstances that include dynamics that are unknown.

Download or read book Crosses of Memory and Oblivion written by Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-07-31 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the history and legacy of monuments to the fallen from the Francoist side in the Spanish Civil War. Del Arco Blanco studies thousands of monuments in towns and cities across Spain to provide a detailed account of the history and memory of the civil war, Francoism, and the transition to democracy. Chapters in the book focus on the myth of those said to have 'fallen for God and for Spain'—a phrase that encapsulated and shaped the dichotomy between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Spaniards. They also focus on the use of monuments to control political and ideological ideals and to legitimise the Francoist dictatorship. Further chapters study Spanish society’s struggle to deal with its past of mass killing, denial, and exclusion. Del Arco Blanco also pays attention to the way the Francoist authorities used monuments and memory for their political and ideological advantage and to control people, power as well as the political agenda. The book draws on extensive research to reconstruct both the specific history of monuments scattered throughout the country and their role within manipulative Francoist memory of the Spanish Civil War. In these ways, monuments helped shape the Francoist narrative and memory, but they also became part of the landscape of contemporary Spanish history. This book is an excellent resource for postgraduate students and professional researchers studying the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and the influence of monuments on the construction of national memory, culture, and society in Spain both at the time and through to the present day.

Download or read book The Mitigation of Marine Plastic Pollution in International Law written by Judith Schäli and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The open access publication of this book has been published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation. The massive accumulation of plastics in marine environments is one of the most pressing environmental concerns of our time. This book examines the relevant international legal framework applying to land-based sources of plastic pollution. Against the backdrop of the dynamics of recent policy formulation in this field, it outlines the main developments and provides a snapshot inventory of state obligations related to plastic pollution mitigation. The Mitigation of Marine Plastic Pollution in International Law identifies the main barriers and opportunities, and points out the possible building blocks of an enhanced regime.

Download or read book Smart City Citizenship written by Igor Calzada and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2020-10-23 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Smart City Citizenship provides rigorous analysis for academics and policymakers on the experimental, data-driven, and participatory processes of smart cities to help integrate ICT-related social innovation into urban life. Unlike other smart city books that are often edited collections, this book focuses on the business domain, grassroots social innovation, and AI-driven algorithmic and techno-political disruptions, also examining the role of citizens and the democratic governance issues raised from an interdisciplinary perspective. As smart city research is a fast-growing topic of scientific inquiry and evolving rapidly, this book is an ideal reference for a much-needed discussion. The book drives the reader to a better conceptual and applied comprehension of smart city citizenship for democratised hyper-connected-virialised post-COVID-19 societies. In addition, it provides a whole practical roadmap to build smart city citizenship inclusive and multistakeholder interventions through intertwined chapters of the book. Users will find a book that fills the knowledge gap between the purely critical studies on smart cities and those further constructive and highly promising socially innovative interventions using case study fieldwork action research empirical evidence drawn from several cities that are advancing and innovating smart city practices from the citizenship perspective. - Utilises ongoing, action research fieldwork, comparative case studies for examining current governance issues, and the role of citizens in smart cities - Provides definitions of new key citizenship concepts, along with a techno-political framework and toolkit drawn from a community-oriented perspective - Shows how to design smart city governance initiatives, projects and policies based on applied research from the social innovation perspective - Highlights citizen's perspective and social empowerment in the AI-driven and algorithmic disruptive post-COVID-19 context in both transitional and experimental frameworks