Current research fields in science and technology were presented and discussed at the EKC2009, informing about the interests and directions of the scientists and engineers in EU countries and Korea. The Conference has emerged from the idea of bringing together EU and Korea to get to know each other better, especially in fields of science and technology.

The Mbos are a large ethnic group in present day Cameroon and an important and powerful group until the Anglo-French partition. Following the defeat of the colonial power, Germany, in the First World War (WWI), the League of Nations in a March 1916 Mandate, partitioned the territory into two unequal halves among the victorious imperial powers of England and France, to be governed in trust as from 1922. As a result of the partition, the Mbos, who happened to find themselves right along the lines of division, were thrust under French and English administration, respectively. Roughly two thirds of the Mbos found themselves in what had then become French (East) Cameroon, while the remaining one third was thrust under British (West) Cameroon rule. Today the Mbos, as a whole, occupy parts of the Littoral and Western (Francophone) and Southwest (Anglophone) regions of Cameroon. While the Francophone Mbos have, over the decades, benefited from all aspects of economic, social, political, and agricultural development, the Anglophone Mbos have been isolated and deprived of all the outward and physical (tangible) aspects of socio-economic and political progress. The persistence of such colonial divisions makes for inequality among the Mbos, despite their common ancestry, ethnicity and cultural heritage. This book seeks to update on diverse aspects of the study conducted on the British Mbos by J.W.C. Rutherfoord and others as a first step toward a comprehensive publication on the Anglophone Mbos.

This volume presents the Proceedings of the 15th Nordic-Baltic Conference on Biomedical Engineering and Medical Physics. NBC 2011 brought together science, education and business under the motto “Cooperation for health”. The topics covered by the Conference Proceedings include: Imaging, Biomechanics, Neural engineering, Sport Science, Cardio-pulmonary engineering, Medical Informatics, Ultrasound, Assistive Technology, Telemedicine, and General Biomedical Engineering.

The two-volume set LNCS 6593 and 6594 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Adaptive and Natural Computing Algorithms, ICANNGA 2010, held in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in April 2010. The 83 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 144 submissions. The first volume includes 42 papers and a plenary lecture and is organized in topical sections on neural networks and evolutionary computation.

Cinema was the first, and is arguably still the greatest, of the industrialized art forms that came to dominate the cultural life of the twentieth century. Today, it continues to adapt and grow as new technologies and viewing platforms become available, and remains an integral cultural and aesthetic entertainment experience for people the world over. Cinema developed against the backdrop of the two world wars, and over the years has seen smaller wars, revolutions, and profound social changes. Its history reflects this changing landscape, and, more than any other art form, developments in technology. In this Very Short Introduction, Nowell-Smith looks at the defining moments of the industry, from silent to sound, black and white to colour, and considers its genres from intellectual art house to mass market entertainment. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introduction series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Eighty years ago, L. S. Vygotsky complained that psychology was misled in studying thought independent of emotion. This situation has not significantly changed, as most learning scientists continue to study cognition independent of emotion. In this book, the authors use cultural-historical activity theory as a perspective to investigate cognition, emotion, learning, and teaching in mathematics. Drawing on data from a longitudinal research program about the teaching and learning of algebra in elementary schools, Roth and Radford show (a) how emotions are reproduced and transformed in and through activity and (b) that in assessments of students about their progress in the activity, cognitive and emotional dimensions cannot be separated. Three features are salient in the analyses: (a) the irreducible connection between emotion and cognition mediates teacher-student interactions; (b) the zone of proximal development is itself a historical and cultural emergent product of joint teacher-students activity; and (c) as an outcome of joint activity, the object/motive of activity emerges as the real outcome of the learning activity. The authors use these results to propose (a) a different conceptualization of the zone of proximal development, (b) activity theory as an alternative to learning as individual/social construction, and (c) a way of understanding the material/ideal nature of objects in activity. Wolff-Michael Roth is Lansdowne Professor at the University of Victoria, Canada. He researches scientific and mathematical cognition along the life span from cultural-historical and phenomenological perspectives. He has conducted research in science and mathematics classrooms as well as having realized multi-year ethnographic studies of science and mathematics in workplaces and scientific research. Luis Radford is full professor at Laurentian University in Canada. His research interests include the investigation of mathematics thinking and knowing from a cultural-semiotic embodied perspective and the historical and cultural roots of cognition. For many years he has been conducting classroom research with primary and high-school teachers about the teaching and learning of mathematics.