The European People's Party, the largest political party in Europe, has roots that run deep in history. Founded in 1976 as a Christian Democratic federation, the European People's Party is now a strong centre-right movement and a leading European political family. It has member parties in almost all European countries, and it is very well represented in the institutions of the European Union. This book tells the story of the European People's Party: why it was founded, how it is currently organised and what its guiding ideas, values and principles are. It gives an up-to-date account of the...

Globalization and the Making of Religious Modernity in China, co-edited by Thomas Jansen, Thoralf Klein and Christian Meyer, investigates the transformation of China's religious landscape under the impact of global influences since 1800. The interdisciplinary case studies analyze the ways in which processes of globalization are interlinked with localizing tendencies, thereby forging transnational relationships between individuals, the state and religious as well as non-religious groups at the same time that the global concept 'religion' embeds itself in the emerging Chinese 'religious...

By adopting a complexity-theoretical perspective, he derives general limitations for black-box optimization, yielding lower bounds on the performance of evolutionary algorithms, and then develops general methods for deriving upper and lower bounds step by step.