Human-Inspired Balancing and Recovery Stepping for Humanoid Robots
Robustly maintaining balance on two legs is an important challenge for humanoid robots. The work presented in this book represents a contribution to this area. It investigates efficient methods for the decision-making from internal sensors about whether and where to step, several improvements to efficient whole-body postural balancing methods, and proposes and evaluates a novel method for efficient recovery step generation, leveraging human examples and simulation-based reinforcement learning.
High-resolution sensitivity studies with the regional climate model COSMO-CLM
High-resolution regional ensemble climate simulations with the regional climate model COSMO-CLM are performed for Southwest Germany to study the sensitivity of meteorological and hydrological variables to parameter settings. The soil-vegetation model VEG3D is implemented into COSMO-CLM to assess the impact of the lower atmospheric boundary on simulation results. A statistical-dynamical downscaling method is tested to shorten the simulation time for regional climate studies.
High Temperature Superconductor Cable Concepts for Fusion Magnets
Three concepts of high temperature superconductor cables carrying kA currents (RACC, CORC and TSTC) are investigated, optimized and evaluated in the scope of their applicability as conductor in fusion magnets. The magnetic field and temperature dependence of the cables is measured; the thermal expansion and conductivity of structure, insulation and filling materials are investigated. High temperature superconductor winding packs for fusion magnets are calculated and compared with corresponding low temperature superconductor cases.
High Performance Light Water Reactor : Design and Analyses
The High Performance Light Water Reactor is a nuclear reactor concept of the 4th generation which is cooled and moderated with supercritical water. The concept has been worked out by a consortium of European partners, co-funded by the European Commission. It features a once through steam cycle, a pressure vessel type reactor, and a compact containment with pressure suppression pool. The conceptual design enables to assess its feasibility, its safety features and its economic potential.
Schulenberg, ThomasStarflinger, Jörg [Hrsg.]
Gravity forward modeling with a tesseroid-based Rock-Water-Ice approach – Theory and applications in the context of the GOCE mission and height system unification
Detailed information on the gravitational effect of the Earth’s topographic and isostatic masses can be calculated by gravity forward modeling. Within this book, the tesseroid-based Rock-Water-Ice (RWI) approach is developed, which allows a rigorous separate modeling of the Earth’s rock, water, and ice masses with variable density values. Besides a discussion and evaluation of the RWI approach, applications in the context of the GOCE satellite mission and height system unification are presented.
Framework for Analysis and Identification of Nonlinear Distributed Parameter Systems using Bayesian Uncertainty Quantification based on Generalized Polynomial Chaos
In this work, the Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) approaches combined systematically to analyze and identify systems. The generalized Polynomial Chaos (gPC) expansion is applied to reduce the computational effort. The framework using gPC based on Bayesian UQ proposed in this work is capable of analyzing the system systematically and reducing the disagreement between the model predictions and the measurements of the real processes to fulfill user defined performance criteria.
Forward and inverse problems of electrocardiography : clinical investigations
The non-invasive reconstruction of cardiac activity can significantly improve the quality of cardiac diagnostics. Two major approaches are considered. The model-based method consists in the optimization of an electrophysiological cardiac model until the measured and simulated ECGs are similar. The inverse problem of electrocardiography is solved to compute the cardiac sources distributions from body surface potential maps. The results and their interpretation are shown for several patients.
The formation of patterns in subaqueous sediment
This book investigates the formation of subaqueous patterns by means of high-fidelity numerical simulations which resolve all the relevant scales of the flow and the sediment bed. This is required to provide a space- and time-resolved information on the flow field and the sediment bed. Secondly, detailed analysis of the generated data allows to address the different governing mechanisms involved in the formation of patterns as well as to access the validity of various existing models.
Formation of Intracardiac Electrograms under Physiological and Pathological Conditions
This work presents methods to advance electrophysiological simulations of intracardiac electrograms (IEGM). An experimental setup is introduced, which combines electrical measurements of extracellular potentials with a method for optical acquisition of the transmembrane voltage in-vitro. Thereby, intracardiac electrograms can be recorded under defined conditions. Using experimental and clinical signals, detailed simulations of IEGMs are parametrized, which can support clinical diagnosis.
Fluid Flow and Heat Transfer in Cellular Solids
To determine the characteristics and properties of cellular solids for an application, and to allow a systematic practical use by means of correlations and modelling approaches, we perform experimental investigations and develop numerical methods. In view of coupled multi-physics simulations, we employ the phase-field method. Finally, the applicability is demonstrated exemplarily for open-cell metal foams, providing qualitative and quantitative comparison with experimental data.
Flow control : theoretical concept of absolute instability
At the 37th Prandtl memorial lecture on Regions of Viccous Flow, H.Oertel 1994 developed for the first time the stability theory of local perturbations in boundary layers and wake flows, as well as their practical application in the flow control of vehicle flows and the boundary layer of civil aircraft wings.This work presents how the stability theory concept of absolute instability has advanced and proven in practice in the last 15 years in terms of the efficient flow control.
Flexible Integration and Efficient Analysis of Multidimensional Datasets from the Web
If numeric data from the Web are brought together, natural scientists can compare climate measurements with estimations, financial analysts can evaluate companies based on balance sheets and daily stock market values, and citizens can explore the GDP per capita from several data sources. However, heterogeneities and size of data remain a problem. This work presents methods to query a uniform view - the Global Cube - of available datasets from the Web and builds on Linked Data query approaches.
Finite Element Method (FEM) Model and Performance Analysis of Solid Oxide Fuel Cells
This work presents a numerical FEM framework, capable of predicting SOFC performance under technically relevant, planar stack contacting conditions. A high level of confidence in the model predictions is supplied by using exclusively experimentally determined material/kinetic parameters and by a comprehensive validation. The presented model aids SOFC stack development by pre-evaluating possible material choices and design combinations for cells/interconnectors without any experimental effort.
Financial markets and public information
The last decades have seen dramatic changes in trading technology and the way that financial markets operate. As trading technology advances, news providers have kept pace and deliver news to market participants around the world within fractions of a second using electronic systems. Currently, most news is still interpreted by humans but news providers have started to offer newswire products with machine learning systems that specifically cater to algorithmic traders. In practice, newswire messagesmake up a major part of the public information set available to investors.
Electrofiltration of Biopolymers : Spatially Distributed Process Analysis
In biotechnology the current downstream processing trends are directed towards integrated, faster and more effective processes. Electrofiltration is a hybrid method which is a combination of membrane filtration and electrophoresis in a dead-end process. Spatially distributed process analysis together with the applicability of electrofiltration for technically important biopolymers such as PHB, chitosan and hyaluronic acid enables the implementation of the technology into industry.
Efficiently Conducting Quality-of-Service Analyses by Templating Architectural Knowledge
Previously, software architects were unable to effectively and efficiently apply reusable knowledge (e.g., architectural styles and patterns) to architectural analyses. This work tackles this problem with a novel method to create and apply templates for reusable knowledge. These templates capture reusable knowledge formally and can efficiently be integrated in architectural analyses.
Efficient Algorithms for Large-Scale Image Analysis
This work develops highly efficient algorithms for analyzing large images. Applications include object-based change detection and screening. The algorithms are 10-100 times as fast as existing software, sometimes even outperforming FGPA/GPU hardware, because they are designed to suit the computer architecture. This thesis describes the implementation details and the underlying algorithm engineering methodology, so that both may also be applied to other applications.
Economics of Distributed Storage Systems : an economic analysis of arbitrage-maximizing storage systems at the end consumer level
Increasing the shares of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) and Distributed Energy Resources (DER) is one of the most important levers in many countries to cope with the environmental, political, and economic challenges of future energy supply. The underlying research question of this thesis is whether Distributed Storage Systems (DSS) at the end consumer level can economically foster the integration of intermittent and non-dispatchable resources by providing demand-side flexibility.
ECG Based Analysis of the Ventricular Repolarisation in the Human Heart
ECG recordings provide diagnostic relevant information on the de- and repolarisation sequences of the heart. A modification of the repolarisation sequence is assumed to cause Torsades de Pointes. Especially drug induced effects on the repolarisation processes are in focus, since some non-cardiac drugs have been associated with sudden cardiac death in the 1990s. The analysis of the ventricular repolarisation using a set of parameters depicting the morphology of the T-wave is introduced in this work. Therefore, new methods of fully automatic patient-specific QRS detection, beat classification and precise T-wave delineation are presented.
ECG Imaging of Ventricular Activity in Clinical Applications
ECG imaging was performed in humans to reconstruct ventricular activation patterns and localize their excitation origins. The precision of the non-invasive reconstructions was evaluated against invasive measurements and found to be in line with the state-of-the-art literature. Statistics were produced for various excitation origins and reveal the beat-to-beat robustness of the imaging method.
The book develops a unifying perspective on how learning influences evolutionary dynamics which for the first time explains seemingly contradicting results from the literature. It also reveals formerly unknown facets of the complex interplay of the two major biological adaptation mechanisms. The results apply to models from computational intelligence and evolutionary biology alike, thus contribute to the transfer of principles of biological adaptation to digital processing system.
Divertor Development for a Future Fusion Power Plant
Nuclear fusion is considered as a future source of sustainable energy supply. Since the H-mode discovery in ASDEX experiment ""Divertor I"" in 1982, the divertor has been an integral part of all modern tokamaks and stellarators. The major goal of this thesis is to develop a feasible divertor design for a fusion power plant to be built after ITER. The thesis describes the approach in the conceptual development of a helium-cooled divertor and the methods of verification and validation of the design.
Distributed Transformers for Broadband Monolithic Millimeter-Wave Integrated Power Amplifiers
This work presents methods and techniques to optimize and implement distributed magnetic transformers for their application in matching networks of Monolithic Millimeter-wave Integrated Circuits (MMICs). It describes strategies for the efficiency and bandwidth optimization of the transformers and demonstrates their potential based on an optimized transformer geometry as well as two MMIC power amplifiers.
Discrete Time Analysis of Multi-Server Queueing Systems in Material Handling and Service
In this doctoral thesis, performance parameters of multi-server queueing systems are estimated under general stochastic assumptions. We present an exact calculation method for the discrete time distribution of the number of customers in the queueing system at the arrival moment of an arbitrary customer. The waiting time distribution and the sojourn time distribution are estimated exactly, as well. For the calculation of the inter departure time distribution, we present an approximation method.
Discrete Time Analysis of Consolidated Transport Processes
The objective of this work is to develop models for the analysis of consolidated transport processes. With the discrete time queuing models developed for inventory and vehicle consolidation, in particular milkrun systems, a detailed performance evaluation of different design scenarios can be conducted faster than with simulation. Moreover, it is demonstrated how the models can be connected with each other in form of a network analysis, in order to analyze hub-and-spoke networks.
Discrete time analysis of batch processes in material flow systems
Scope of this work is the development of appropriate models for the evaluation of batch processes in material flow systems. The presented analytical methods support the long range planning in an early planning stage, in which capacities are determined to minimize the facility costs under the condition of cycle time targets.
Determining Cycle Times for Packing in Distribution Centres
Scope of this work is to determine cycle time formulas for packing in distribution centres. No such formulas exist today, even if it is the second most important process after picking. Based on examining packing, morphological boxes showing time influencing parameters are derived. The most significant parameters are identified using analysis of variance (ANOVA). Cycle times are determined and applied to cases. These prove that the formulas can be used to calculate the time required for packing.
Detection and characterization of inclusions in impedance tomography
The topic of this work are two further developments of the Factorization method for electrical impedance tomography.We present a modification of this method that is capable of detecting mixed inclusions, i.e. both inclusions with a higher as well as inclusions with a lower conductivity than the background medium. In addition, we derive a new method to compute the conductivity inside inclusions after they have been localized.
Design for Stability in Transport Logistics - Definition, Concepts and Evaluation
Lean management describes a set of methods combined with a management philosophy which aims at eliminating waste in logistics processes. In production logistics, lean is already widespread and applied successfully. Research has shown that lean also works in a warehousing environment. In transport logistics, lean is still at a low level of maturity in both research and practice. This work contributes to closing this gap by introducing Heijunka leveling to transport logistics.
Design and Application of Quantified Self Approaches for Reflective Learning in the Workplace
Learning by reflection is one of the core processes for improving work performance. We provide a novel approach for reflective learning support by transferring and adapting practices from the Quantified Self to workplace settings. This book contributes with an integrated model for technical support of reflective learning, mobile and web-based applications designed for quantifying and gathering data in the workplace, and empirical insights from thirteen studies in three different use cases.
Design and analysis of a content-based image retrieval system
The automatic retrieval of images according to the similarity of their content is a challenging task with many application fields. In this book the automatic retrieval of images according to human spontaneous perception without further effort or knowledge is considered. A system is therefore designed and analyzed. Methods for the detection and extraction of regions and for the extraction and comparison of color, shape, and texture features are also investigated.
The prevalence of diabetes is on the increase in the UK and worldwide, partly due to changes in lifestyle which predispose individuals to overweight and obesity. It is estimated that about 90% of the currently diagnosed adults have type 2 diabetes, and based on the World Health Organisation (WHO) report, about 422 million adults were living with diabetes in 2014 compared with 108 million in 1980; this condition caused about 1.5 million deaths in 2012
MDPI - Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute
Dietary intake in children is not only associated with current and future health, but also with behavior and learning. Especially during early childhood and throughout the school-age years, adequate food and nutrient intake to support brain development and function are critical. Data on the effect of sugar intake on children’s activity levels, or their ability to focus on cognitive tasks, are mixed. Overall, more research into nutrition and children’s behavior is needed to address the questions: How does behavior affect children’s nutrition and how does nutrition affect children’s behavior?
Dietary fiber has long been recognized for its role in digestive function. However, currently there is scientific debate about definitions (descriptive and analytical), optimal intake, and essentiality in the human diet. Dietary fiber is a key substrate for bacterial metabolism in the colon, which makes research on dietary fiber an important issue that complements current interest in the gut microbiota. Dietary fiber is also important for prevention and management of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, and other chronic diseases.
Dietary Behavior and Physical Activity in Children and Adolescents
In recent years, diet- and lifestyle-related disorders have become a major health threat in Europe and worldwide. The contributions in this monograph include 2 review articles and 19 original contributions from several countries that provide new information on the existing research elucidating important aspects of children’s and adolescents’ nutrition and lifestyle behavior. The data included in this Special Issue are from large epidemiological studies, including several multicenter and multinational studies, as well as datasets from surveillance initiatives.
Hebestreit, Antje --- Bogl, Leonie-Helen
Dietary Antioxidants and Prevention of Non-Communicable Diseases
Numerous epidemiological studies have demonstrated the association between oxidative stress and non-communicable disease, including cardiovascular disorders, mental disease, and several types of cancer. Oxidative stress is commonly known as an imbalance in the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and the biological antioxidant defense system. Exogenous antioxidants have gained great attention because of their beneficial role in preventing chronic disease.
Dietary and Non-Dietary Phytochemicals and Cancer
The role of many phytochemicals in the modulation of the carcinogenesis process has been well documented by combining in vitro and animal studies, as well as epidemiological evidence. When acting in synergy, phytochemicals exert potential anti-cancer properties and much progress has been made in defining their many biological activities at the molecular level. However, an interesting feature in the field of phytochemicals and cancer is the role of some phytochemicals in promoting cancer development.
The purpose of these books is to have an updated systematic overview examining, in detail, the functional role of different diets and dietary components in maintaining glucose homeostasis and preventing long-term complications. The first book includes experimental evidence from preclinical research, whereas the second book provides studies in the clinical scenario.
Diagnosis of Neurogenetic Disorders: Contribution of Next Generation Sequencing and Deep Phenotyping
The contribution of genomic variants to the aetiopathogenesis of both paediatric and adult neurological disease is being increasingly recognized. The use of next-generation sequencing has led to the discovery of novel neurodevelopmental disorders, as exemplified by the deciphering developmental disorders (DDD) study, and provided insight into the aetiopathogenesis of common adult neurological diseases. Despite these advances, many challenges remain.
Diagnosis and Treatment of Thoracic Outlet Syndrome
Thoracic outlet syndrome (TOS) is a spectrum of disorders resulting from the compression of the neurovascular structures within the thoracic outlet. The three main subtypes of TOS are defined by the anatomic structure affected by the extrinsic compression. In the most common subtype—neurogenic TOS—the brachial plexus is compressed and symptoms include pain, arm paresthesias, and sometimes weakness. Venous TOS is characterized by the compression of the subclavian vein and its resultant thrombosis. Arterial TOS is the least common and is distinguished by the compression of the subclavian artery and the development of aneurysms or stenoses with distal embolization.
Julie Ann Freischlag (Ed.) --- Natalia O. Glebova (Ed.)
Diagnosis and Surgical Treatment of Epilepsy
Epilepsy is a common neurological disease that can affect all ages. Although the majority of people with epilepsy can have excellent seizure control with medication, about 30% will fail anti-epileptic drugs. For those with medically intractable epilepsy, recurrent seizures lead to elevated mortality and injury risks, and the seizures themselves are socially disabling. Fortunately, for many people with intractable epilepsy, epilepsy can be cured or seizures better controlled with surgery. Localization of the seizure focus followed by surgical resection provide the best opportunities to cure epilepsy.
Diagnosis and Management of Pediatric Diseases
A screenshot of some the most rapidly evolving fields in Neonatology and Pediatrics with articles reviewing some metabolic dysregulations as well as non-oncologic diseases that may occur in infancy, childhood, youth. The illustrative material with original photographs and drawings highlighting some pathogenetic concepts are keystones of this book.
his Special Issue of Nutrients, entitled "DHA for Optimal Health", consists of evidence-based original research or reviews of the scientific literature. Manuscripts focus on the evidence that underpins dietary requirements throughout the lifespan (from in-utero to the elderly) for optimal brain function and/or prevention (or treatment) of disease.
Development and Application of Nonlinear Dissipative Device in Structural Vibration Control
This book entitled Development and Application of Nonlinear Dissipative Device in Structural Vibration Control contains contributions that focus on the development and application of innovative nonlinear dissipative systems that mitigate the potentially catastrophic effects of extreme loading by incorporating new materials or effective mechanical control technologies. Moreover, new nonlinear analytical methods for distinctive vibrating structures under different excitations are also highlighted in this book.
Zheng Lu (Ed.) --- Tony Yang (Ed.) --- Ying Zhou (Ed.) --- Angeliki Papalou (Ed.)
Development and Application of Herbal Medicine from Marine Origin
Marine herbal medicine generally refers to the use of marine plants as original materials to develop crude drugs, or for other medical purposes. The term ‘marine plants’ usually denotes macroalgae grown between intertidal and subintertidal zones, including Chlorophyta, Phaeophyta, and Rhodophyta. Considerable progress has been made in the field of biomedical research into marine microalgae and microorganisms in the past decade.
Hwang, Tsong-Long --- Sung, Ping-Jyun --- Liaw, Chih-Chuang
Design and Applications of Coordinate Measuring Machines
Coordinate measuring machines (CMMs) have been conventionally used in industry for 3-dimensional and form-error measurements of macro parts for many years. Ever since the first CMM, developed by Ferranti Co. in the late 1950s, they have been regarded as versatile measuring equipment, yet many CMMs on the market still have inherent systematic errors due to the violation of the Abbe Principle in its design. Current CMMs are only suitable for part tolerance above 10 μm. With the rapid advent of ultraprecision technology, multi-axis machining, and micro/nanotechnology over the past twenty years, new types of ultraprecision and micro/nao-CMMs are urgently needed in all aspects of society.
Current Strategies for the Biochemical Diagnosis and Monitoring of Mitochondrial Disease
Mitochondrial disease constitutes a complex and heterogeneous group of disorders resulting from a defect in mitochondrial respiratory chain (MRC) enzyme activity. In view of the dual regulation of the MRC, exercised by both the mitochondrial and nuclear genome, mutations in either mitochondrial or nuclear DNA can result in a MRC deficiency. Whilst a single organ can be affected, MRC disorders often result in a multi-organ system presentation with prominent neurological and myopathic features.
Current Aspects of Radiopharmaceutical Chemistry
Positron emission tomography (PET) and single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) are in vivo molecular imaging techniques which are widely used in nuclear medicine for the diagnosis and treatment follow-up of many major diseases. They use biomolecules as probes, which are labeled with radionuclides of short half-lives, synthesized prior to the imaging studies. These probes are called radiopharmaceuticals. Their design and development require a rather interdisciplinary process involving many different disciplines of natural and health sciences.
Crystal Chemistry of Zinc, Cadmium and Mercury
This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue Crystal Chemistry of Zinc, Cadmium and Mercury that was published in Crystals
The chemistry of silicon has always been a field of major concern due to its proximity to carbon on the periodic table. From the molecular chemist's viewpoint, one of the most interesting differences between carbon and silicon is their divergent coordination behavior. In fact, silicon is prone to form hyper-coordinate organosilicon complexes, and, as conveyed by reports in the literature, highly sophisticated ligand systems are required to furnish low-coordinate organosilicon complexes.
Control and Nonlinear Dynamics on Energy Conversion Systems
The ever-increasing need for higher efficiency, smaller size, and lower cost make the analysis, understanding, and design of energy conversion systems extremely important, interesting, and even imperative. One of the most neglected features in the study of such systems is the effect of the inherent nonlinearities on the stability of the system. Due to these nonlinearities, these devices may exhibit undesirable and complex dynamics, which are the focus of many researchers. Even though a lot of research has taken place in this area during the last 20 years, it is still an active research topic for mainstream power engineers.
Iu, Herbert Ho-Ching --- El Aroudi, Abdelali
Computer Algebra in Scientific Computing
Although scientific computing is very often associated with numeric computations, the use of computer algebra methods in scientific computing has obtained considerable attention in the last two decades. Computer algebra methods are especially suitable for parametric analysis of the key properties of systems arising in scientific computing. The expression-based computational answers generally provided by these methods are very appealing as they directly relate properties to parameters and speed up testing and tuning of mathematical models through all their possible behaviors.
Computational Methods of Multi-Physics Problems
This book offers a collection of six papers addressing problems associated with the computational modeling of multi-field problems. Some of the proposed contributions present novel computational techniques, while other topics focus on applying state-of-the-art techniques in order to solve coupled problems in various areas including the prediction of material failure during the lithiation process, which is of major importance in batteries; efficient models for flexoelectricity, which require higher-order continuity; the prediction of composite pipes under thermomechanical conditions; material failure in rock; and computational materials design.
This book offers a collection of 17 scientific papers about the computational modeling of fracture. Some of the manuscripts propose new computational methods and/or how to improve existing cutting edge methods for fracture. These contributions can be classified into two categories: 1. Methods which treat the crack as strong discontinuity such as peridynamics, scaled boundary elements or specific versions of the smoothed finite element methods applied to fracture and 2. Continuous approaches to fracture based on, for instance, phase field models or continuum damage mechanics.
The educational system leading up to the pharmacy degree, student training, and the continuing personal development of pharmacists are being more and more mapped to the competences pharmacists require to provide the relevant safe and efficient pharmaceutical services to meet the health needs of patients. This book draws on the experience of experts involved in the develoment of competence training for pharmacy education and training in Europe, North America, and Australia. It discusses the philosophy and implications of such an approach, as well as the production and development of models, and their application to existing courses.
This reprint book ‘Communication in Pharmacy Practice’ is launched to help improve communication practices by increasing knowledge of different aspects of communication in pharmacy practice. The book consists of recently published research articles and illustrates that pharmacy communication is a research subject that is investigated globally and from many perspectives. The overall pharmacy communicational themes investigated and discussed in this book are as follows: Communication between health care professionals; communication between pharmacists and patients in the context of both prescription and over-the-counter (OTC) medicines; and factors impacting communication
Sofia Kälvemark Sporrong (Ed.) --- Susanne Kaae (Ed.)
It is well-known that colloid and interface science and petroleum production are inextricably linked. Whether in the reservoir, with its porous structure, or during recovery, crude oil is intimately associated with rock surfaces and with water, often in the form of emulsions. This situation leads to highly complex systems, comprising multiple colloids and interfaces, which require to be optimized if oil is to be recovered efficiently, both in terms of economic cost and with due concern for the environment.
The Special Issue Colloid Chemistry presents a comprehensive overview of what opportunities the colloidal scale, i.e., the nanoscale, offers to scientists from chemistry, physics, materials sciences, and biomedicine. Sophistically designed colloids are used for studying physical and physicochemical phenomena to gain a deeper understanding of interparticle interactions, not forgetting that such insights can be used to create tailored materials for a variety of applications. This Issue covers aspects from the synthesis to the analysis of colloidal properties and presents opportunities for their further application.
Clemens K. Weiss (Ed.) --- José Luis Toca-Herrera (Ed.)
Coastal Resources Economics and Ecosystem Valuation
The practical importance of economic valuation information can hardly be overstated. Coastal and marine resource policy planning and management benefit from complete information on the impact of policy decisions.
Climate Variability and Climate Change Impacts on Land Surface, Hydrological Processes and Water Management
During the last several decades, Earth´s climate has undergone significant changes due to anthropogenic global warming, and feedbacks to the water cycle. Therefore, persistent efforts are required to improve our understanding of hydrological processes and to engage in efficient water management strategies that explicitly consider changing environmental conditions. The twenty-four contributions in this book have broadly addressed topics across
Zhang, Yongqiang --- Li, Hongxia --- Reggiani, Paolo
Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation—ZEMCH 2016
This book explores the current issues around sustainable design and energy efficiency within the construction industry in both developed and developing countries. Sustainable housing; thermal comfort; daylighting; low-income housing; green roofs; energy efficient retrofitting and photovoltaic façades are some of the subjects discussed in the book.
Clean Energy and Fuel (Hydrogen) Storage
Clean energy and fuel storage are often required for both stationary and automotive applications. Some of these clean energy and fuel storage technologies currently under extensive research and development include hydrogen storage, direct electric storage, mechanical energy storage, solar–thermal energy storage, electrochemical (batteries and supercapacitors), and thermochemical storage. The gravimetric and volumetric storage capacity, energy storage density, power output, operating temperature and pressure, cycle life, recyclability, and cost of clean energy or fuel storage are some of the factors that govern efficient energy and fuel storage technologies for potential deployment in energy harvesting (solar and wind farms) stations and onboard vehicular transportation
Chemical and Molecular Approach to Tumor Metastases
Dear Colleagues, Malignant tumors develop distant metastases, e.g., small clusters of cells that detach from the primitive site and colonize distant organs and tissues. Unlike the primary masses, metastases are often difficult to fully eradicate by surgery ablation and are almost always the primary object of chemo- and/or immune-therapies. The presence of metastases at tumor diagnosis is responsible for the unfavorable prognosis and of relapses even after initially successful tumor therapies.
Gianni Sava (Ed.) --- Alberta Bergamo (Ed.)
Central Places and Un-Central Landscapes. Political Economies and Natural Resources in the Longue Durée
Modern developments of Fourier analysis during the 20th century have explored generalizations of Fourier and Fourier–Plancherel formula for non-commutative harmonic analysis, applied to locally-compact, non-Abelian groups. In parallel, the theory of coherent states and wavelets has been generalized over Lie groups. One should add the developments, over the last 30 years, of the applications of harmonic analysis to the description of the fascinating world of aperiodic structures in condensed matter physics.
Papantoniou, Giorgos --- Vionis, Athanasios
Cellular Entry of Binary and Pore-Forming Bacterial Toxins
Bridging cellular membranes is a key step in the pathogenic action of both binary and pore-forming bacterial toxins. The former use their translocation domains, containing various structural motifs, to ensure efficient delivery of the toxic component into the host cell, while the latter act on the cellular membrane itself. In either case, the integrity of the membrane is compromised via targeted protein–lipid and protein–protein interactions triggered by specific signals, such as proteolytic cleavage or endosomal acidification.
Causes and Consequences of Species Diversity in Forest Ecosystems
What are the causes and consequences of species diversity in forested ecosystems, and how is this species diversity being affected by rapid environmental and climatic change, movement of invertebrate and vertebrate herbivores into new biogeographic regions, and expanding human populations and associated shifts in land-use patterns? In this book, we explore these questions for assemblages of forest trees, shrubs, and understory herbs at spatial scales ranging from small plots to large forest dynamics plots, at temporal scales ranging from seasons to centuries, in both temperate and tropical regions, and across rural-to-urban gradients in land use.
Natural products have been a source of inspiration for chemists and chemical biologists for many years, and have a special relevance in the chemical space. In recent years, several novel synthetic strategies have appeared, such as diversity-oriented synthesis (DOS), biological-oriented synthesis (BiOS), and function-oriented synthesis (FOS), for accessing complex and functionally diverse molecules. In this manner, the synthesis of natural products has evolved towards simpler and ecological methods using biotransformation, combinatorial chemistry, or organocatalysts.
Catalytic, Photocatalytic and Electrocatalytic Processes for the Valorisation of CO2
Increasing attention is being paid to the development of effective technologies for the sequestration of CO2 and its storage. Hopefully, this will result in processes that can lead to its valorisation as a chemical, e.g., for the regeneration of fuels, but also for the production of intermediates. These are usually energy demands and rather slow processes, requiring energy input and catalysts.
Catalytic Processes for The Valorisation of Biomass Derived Molecules
In the last decades, inedible lignocellulosic biomasses have attracted significant attention for being abundant resources that are not in competition with agricultural land or food production and, therefore, can be used as starting renewable material for the production of a wide variety of platform chemicals. The three main components of lignocellulosic biomasses are cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin, complex biopolymers that can be converted into a pool of platform molecules including sugars, polyols, alchols, ketons, ethers, acids and aromatics. Various technologies have been explored for their one-pot conversion into chemicals, fuels and materials.
Mauriello, Francesco --- Galvagno, Signorino --- Espro, Claudia
Catalysts Deactivation, Poisoning and Regeneration
Catalyst lifetime represents one of the most crucial economic aspects in industrial catalytic processes, due to costly shutdowns, catalyst replacements, and proper disposal of spent materials. Not surprisingly, there is considerable motivation to understand and treat catalyst deactivation, poisoning, and regeneration, which causes this research topic to continue to grow. The complexity of catalyst poisoning obviously increases along with the increasing use of biomass/waste-derived/residual feedstocks and with requirements for cleaner and novel sustainable processes.
Carotenoids are a group of approximately 600 compounds synthesized by photosynthetic organisms. These pigments are abundant in fruits and vegetables, as well as in certain animal products such as eggs and salmon, being responsible for their colorful appearance. The bioactive properties of certain carotenoids in human health are clear, as some of these compounds have antioxidant properties and serve as the only precursors of vitamin A in nature. The aim of this Special Issue entitled “Carotenoids and Human Health” is to provide the scientific community with an updated perspective of this exciting and growing research area.
Carboxylic acids are truly central compounds in cellular metabolism. Carbon dioxide is captured from the atmosphere through formation of carboxylic groups and is also released, in part, by decarboxylation reactions. The reactivity of the carboxylic group with amino- or hydroxyl-groups enables the formation of peptide and ester bonds. The functionality of the carboxylic group is also of huge importance in our industrial world for a wide range of applications. The loosely bound hydrogen provides weak acid functionality, much desired for food industry applications in preservatives and flavour compounds.
Carbonic anhydrases (CAs; EC 4.2.1.1) are metalloenzymes present in all kingdoms of life, as they equilibrate the reaction between three simple but essential chemical species: CO2, bicarbonate, and protons. Discovered more than 80 years ago, in 1933, these enzymes have been extensively investigated due to the biomedical application of their inhibitors, but also because they are an extraordinary example of convergent evolution, with seven genetically distinct CA families that evolved independently in Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya.
Carbon, Nitrogen and Phosphorus Cycling in Forest Soils
The majority of carbon stored in the soils of the world is stored in forests. The refractory nature of some portions of forest soil organic matter also provides the slow, gradual release of organic nitrogen and phosphorus to sustain long term forest productivity. Contemporary and future disturbances, such as climatic warming, deforestation, short rotation sylviculture, the invasion of exotic species, and fire, all place strains on the integrity of this homeostatic system of C, N, and P cycling.
Carbon Fibers and Their Composite Materials
Carbon fiber is an oft-referenced material that serves as a means to remove mass from large transport infrastructure. Carbon fiber composites, typically plastics reinforced with the carbon fibers, are key materials in the 21st century and have already had a significant impact on reducing CO2 emissions. Though, as with any composite material, the interface where each component meets, in this case the fiber and plastic, is critical to the overall performance.
Climate change is one of the main threats to modern society. This phenomenon is associated with an increase in greenhouse gas (GHGs, mainly carbon dioxide—CO2) emissions due to anthropogenic activities. The main causes are the burning of fossil fuels and land use change (deforestation). Climate change impacts are associated with risks to basic needs (health, food security, and clean water), as well as risks to development (jobs, economic growth, and the cost of living).
Carbohydrate Metabolism in Health and Disease
Carbohydrate metabolism is a fundamental aspect of health and a crucial function in a variety of species, including humans. A primary disfunction in major global diseases, such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, is dysregulation of thecarbohydrate metabolism. Furthermore, certain disease outcomes may be impacted by the amount and type of dietary carbohydrates consumed. Finally, carbohydrate obtainability is essential for optimal performance and endurance during sporting events. This book collates articles that either describe original research, or review the scientific literature on the topic of carbohydrate metabolism in health and disease. .
Carbohydrate Intake in Non-communicable Disease Prevention and Treatment
In 2011, carbohydrates provided 63% of the dietary energy intake to the world’s population. Historically, carbohydrate-rich diets have been associated with good health and longevity but there has been a move away from traditional carbohydrate-rich diets, with refined carbohydrate taking much criticism for contributing to non-communicable disease. The aim of this Special Issue is to discuss the appropriate use of environmentally sustainable carbohydrate-rich foods in the modern diet in developing and developed countries in the context of prevention and treatment of non-communicable disease.
Cancer Biomarkers and Targets in Digestive Organs
Identification and development of cancer biomarkers and targets have greatly accelerated progress towards precision medicine in oncology. Studies of tumor biology have not only provided insights into the mechanisms underlying carcinogenesis, but also led to discovery of molecules that have been developed into cancer biomarkers and targets. Multi-platforms for molecular characterization of tumors using next-generation genomic sequencing, immunohistochemistry, in situ hybridization, and blood-based biopsies have greatly expanded the portfolio of potential biomarkers and targets.
Cadmium (Cd) is an environmental toxicant of continuing public health concern worldwide, because total diet studies have shown that Cd is present in virtually all foodstuffs. Consequently, foods that are frequently consumed in large quantities, such as rice, potatoes, wheat, leafy salad vegetables, and other cereal crops, are the most significant dietary Cd sources. Moreover, Cd has chemical propensities that confer the potential to interfere with the physiological functions of calcium and zinc. Evidence of a wide range of diverse, toxic effects of Cd is increasingly apparent.
Brain Asymmetry of Structure And/Or Function
This edited book brings together research reports on the asymmetry of brain function in various species, including humans, dogs, birds, lizards and bees. As shown in a wide range of species, and, as we now know, not solely in humans, the left and right sides of the brain process information in different ways and control different responses or patterns of behaviour. Since this discovery, many new methods have become available to reveal the processes involved in the development, function and evolution of this important attribute of the brain.
Human lactation has evolved to produce a milk composition that is uniquely-designed for the human infant. Not only does human milk optimize infant growth and development, it also provides protection from infection and disease. More recently, the importance of human milk and breastfeeding in the programming of infant health has risen to the fore. Anchoring of infant feeding in the developmental origins of health and disease has led to a resurgence of research focused in this area.
The research topic of this Special Issue will consider (i) the design of nanostructured boron nitride nanostructures with controlled crystal structures, porosity, and dimensionality, (ii) the functionalization of boron nitride, and (iii) prospective applications of boron nitride nanostructures and materials. It contains six papers dealing with (i) the exfoliation of hexagonal Boron Nitride (h-BN) in liquid phase by ion intercalation, (ii) effective mechanical properties and thickness determinations of Boron Nitride nanosheets using molecular dynamics simulation,
Philippe Miele (Ed.) --- Mikhael Bechelany (Ed.)
Biotechnological Applications of Phage and Phage-Derived Proteins
Phages have shown a high biotechnological potential with numerous applications. The advent of high-resolution microscopy techniques aligned with omic and molecular tools have revealed innovative phage features and enabled new processes that can be further exploited for biotechnological applications in a wide variety of fields. The high-quality original articles and reviews presented in this Special Issue demonstrate the incredible potential of phages and their derived proteins in a wide range of biotechnological applications for human benefit.
Sensitive assays are often based on molecular recognition. Often stability problems have limited the use of such assays. The introduction of molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) eliminates such limitations. With the introduction of biosensors combined with MIPs, one gets a strong combination. This volume presents how MIPs are being produced, how MIPs are integrated in different sensor concepts and finally highlights some results in certain applications.
Bo Mattison (Ed.) --- Gizem Ertürk (Ed.)
Biomass for Energy Country Specific Show Case Studies
In many domestic and industrial processes, vast percentages of primary energy are produced by the combustion of fossil fuels. Apart from diminishing the source of fossil fuels and the increasing risk of higher costs and energy security, the impact on the environment is worsening continually. Renewables are becoming very popular, but are, at present, more expensive than fossil fuels, especially photovoltaics and hydropower. Biomass is one of the most established and common sources of fuel known to mankind, and has been in continuous use for domestic heating and cooking over the years, especially in poorer communities.
Biomass Chars: Elaboration, Characterization and Applications
Thermochemical conversion processes convert biomass into gaseous, liquid and solid products named, syngas, bio-oil and char, respectively. Syngas and bio-oil are considered as alternative biofuels to fossil fuels and wide investigations are implemented currently on their production, purification, modification, and applications. Biomass chars have receiving an increasing attention since they lead to carbon sequestration, reduction of the amount of carbon rejected into the atmosphere and represent an friendly carbon source for numerous applications.
Mejdi Jeguirim (Ed.) --- Lionel Limousy (ed.)
The Biology and Treatment of Myeloid Leukaemias
There has been an observed decrease in the global mortality from cancer, mostly atributable to improved, particularly early, detection and prevention. For many carcinomas and leukaemias in adults, once the disease has reached a certain stage there are no therapies that are able to erradicate the cancer cells and cure patients. There has been progress in the treatment of acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) and remissions are achievable; however, the presence of chemoresistent blast cells leads to most patients relapsing, and relapse is difficult to treat and thus patients die due to their disease
Geoffrey Brown (Ed.) --- Ewa Marcinkowska (Ed.)
For at least six hundred million years, life has been a fascinating laboratory of crystallization, referred to as biomineralization. During this huge lapse of time, many organisms from diverse phyla have developed the capability to precipitate various types of minerals, exploring distinctive pathways for building sophisticated structural architectures for different purposes. The Darwinian exploration was performed by trial and error, but the success in terms of complexity and efficiency is evident.
Morales, Jaime Gómez --- Falini, Giuseppe --- García Ruiz, Juan Manuel
The intention of the Special Issue ""Biological and Biogenic Crystallization"" was to create an international platform aimed at covering a broad field of results involving the crystallization of biological molecules, including virus and protein crystallization, biogenic crystallization including physiological and pathological crystallization taking place in living organisms (human beings, animals, plants, bacteria, etc.), and bio-inspired crystallization. Despite many years of research on biological and biogenic crystals, there are still open questions as well as hot and timely topics.
Biological Activity of Natural Secondary Metabolite Products
this text will present the book in all promotional forms (e.g. flyers). Please describe the book in straightforward and consumer-friendly terms. [Natural secondary metabolite products, which are isolated from plants, animals, microorganisms, etc., are classified as polyketides, isoprenoids, aromatics (phenylpropanoids), alkaloids, etc. Their chemical diversity and variety of biological activities have attracted the attention of chemists, biochemists, biologists, etc. The Special Issue on "Biological Activity of Natural Secondary Metabolite Products" is intended to offer biological active natural products as candidates and/or leads for pharmaceuticals, dietary supplements, functional foods, cosmetics, food additives, etc.
The high demand and depletion of petroleum reserves and the associated impact on the environment, together with volatility in the energy market price over the past three decades, have led to tremendous efforts in bio-based research activities, especially in biofuels and biochemicals. Most people associate petroleum with gasoline, however, approximately 6000 petroleum-derived products are available on the market today. Ironically, these petroleum-derived products have not elicited a high level of interest among the populace and media due, in part, to little awareness of the origins of these important products
BioEnergy and BioChemicals Production from Biomass and Residual Resources
Research and technology developments in bioenergy and biochemical production systems are of the utmost importance for the development of next generation, highly efficient biomass conversion concepts, maximizing the total energy and chemical output. The utilization of non-conventional biomasses and unexploited residual resources (e.g., agriculture and agroindustry wastes), innovative solutions for online monitoring and process control, novel biochemical pathways, microbial platforms and reactor technologies are key issues to be addressed.
Dimitar Karakashev (Ed.) --- Yifeng Zhang (Ed.)
Biodiversity of Vegetable Crops, A Living Heritage
Intensive agriculture has generally resulted in higher productivity, but also in a trend towards decreasing levels of agro-biodiversity, which represents a key point in ensuring the adaptability and resilience of agro-ecosystems in the global challenge to produce more and better food in a sustainable way. The biodiversity of vegetable crops includes genetic diversity—both as species diversity (interspecific diversity) and as a diversity of genes within a species (intraspecific diversity) with regard to the vegetable varieties grown—and the diversity of agro-ecosystems (agro-biodiversity).
Renna, Massimiliano --- Santamaria, Pietro --- Signore, Angelo --- Montesano, Francesco Fabiano --- et al.
Biodiversity and Conservation in Forests
Global forest communities cover only about 30% of land areas, but they provide important ecosystem services, such as watershed protection, carbon sequestration, and oxygen production, as well as renewable forest products for human subsistence and markets. Forests also support the majority of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity. Although land conversion for agriculture and pastureland has historically resulted in fragmentation and declining forested areas, forests worldwide are now experiencing change at an unprecedented rate due to various anthropogenic activities and growing human populations.
The interest in biocompatible and biodegradable metals, such as magnesium, is mainly related to their potential use as structural material for orthopedic and cardiovascular applications where a temporary medical device is required. However, in the case of magnesium, in vivo experiments have clearly shown that the corrosion degradation rate of magnesium and its alloys is too high and, hence, results in producing gas cavities that can promote the danger of gas embolism, tissue separation, and premature loss of mechanical integrity.
Compared to conventional chemical technologies and other similar industrial processes, bioprocesses represent a more sustainable and environmentally-friendly alternative for the production of fuels and platform chemicals. In biorefineries, different kinds of feedstocks, such as biomass or lignocellulosic materials in general, can be used and fermented by microorganisms
Biocatalysis and Pharmaceuticals: A Smart Tool for Sustainable Development
Biocatalysis, that is, the use of biological catalysts (enzymes, cells, etc.) for the preparation of highly valuable compounds is undergoing a great development, being considered an extremely sustainable approach to undertaking environmental demands. In this scenario, this book illustrates the versatility of applied biocatalysis for the preparation of drugs and other bioactive compounds through the presentation of different research articles and reviews, in which several authors describe the most recent developments in this appealing scientific area.
Bioactive and Therapeutic Dental Materials
This book focus principally on ions-releasing and other smart dental materials for application in preventive and restorative dentistry, as well as in endodontics in the form of adhesives, resin-based composites, pastes, varnishes, liners and dental cements. Special attention has been given to bioactive materials developed to induce cells differentiation/stimulation, hard tissue formation and exert antimicrobial actions. New innovations are necessary to continue to help reinforcing existing technologies and to introduce new paradigms for treating dental disease and restoring teeth seriously compromised by caries lesions via biomimetic and more biological operative approaches.
Modern robotic technologies have enabled robots to operate in a variety of unstructured and dynamically-changing environments, in addition to traditional structured environments. Robots have, thus, become an important element in our everyday lives. One key approach to develop such intelligent and autonomous robots is to draw inspiration from biological systems. Biological structure, mechanisms, and underlying principles have the potential to provide new ideas to support the improvement of conventional robotic designs and control.
Toshio Fukuda (Ed.) --- Fei Chen (Ed.) --- Qing Shi (Ed)
Beverage Consumption Habits around the World: Association with Total Water and Energy Intakes
Fluid intake has barely been assessed, and hydration status has only rarely been measured in epidemiological studies. This hampers attempts to assess the adequacy of water intake at a population level. However, although guidelines have been established to determine how much water humans require to avoid dehydration and to optimize physical and psychological function, limited data are available on the total water and beverages intake.
Lluis Serra-Majem (Ed.) --- Mariela Nissensohn (Ed.)
Berry Antioxidants in Health and Disease
During the last decade, a high volume of work has been published on the health-promoting effects of berries (e.g., blueberries, cranberries, blackberries, etc.) that are rich in antioxidant phytochemicals, polyphenols. Consuming a diet rich in polyphenols has been documented to attenuate the risk of chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, certain cancers, diabetes mellitus, and neurodegenerative disorders. Recent evidence also reveals that the biological effects of polyphenols extend beyond their traditional antioxidant role.
Portillo, María P. --- Fernandez-Quintela, Alfredo
The composition of the atmosphere is a critical factor in understanding the nature and magnitude of processes associated with the planet’s energy balance, clouds and precipitation, biogeochemical cycling of nutrients, and public health and welfare. A detailed understanding of trace gases, aerosol particles, and hydrometeors is challenging due to the combination of their physicochemical complexity, variable lifetimes, and spatial inhomogeneity. Recent advances in instrumentation have resulted in improved measurements and an increased understanding of atmospheric composition.
Cardiovascular disease is the main cause of death in the West, and vascular disease is the most common cardiovascular clinical problem. The disease results in serious morbidity and mortality, and carries economic cost implications. While conventional risk factors are well established, and their biomarkers regularly monitored, patients may continue to suffer subclinical active disease, even in the absence of risk factors, until they present with sudden cardiac death or stroke. Early disease detection using direct imaging has shown to be more accurate in identifying vulnerable patients and unstable plaques than conventional risk factors.
This Special Issue is focused on breakthrough developments in the field of biosensors, as well as on the current scientific progress in biomedical signal processing. The papers address innovative solutions in assistance robotics based on bioelectrical signals, including the following: affordable biosensor technology, affordable assistive-robotics devices, new techniques in myoelectric control, and advances in brain–machine interfacing.
Fernando Torres (Ed.) --- Santiago Puente (Ed.) --- Andrés Ubeda (Ed.)
Applications of Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers
ca. 200 words; this text will present the book in all promotional forms (e.g. flyers). Please describe the book in straightforward and consumer-friendly terms. [Semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) are considered a key enabling technology for the design and implementation of photonic circuits, subsystems, and networks. Owing to the attractive features of low power consumption, compactness, broad gain bandwidth and ability for integration with affordable cost, SOAs enjoy continuous popularity as core versatile devices within the optical communications research and industrial sector for the accomplishment of critical and indispensable tasks at fundamental and system-oriented level.
Applications of Remote Sensing/ GIS in Water Resources and Flooding Risk Managements
Remote sensing and GIS play critical roles in water resource and flood inundation mapping and risk management. Remote sensing provides data sources for mapping water resources (snow and glaciers, water bodies, soil moisture and groundwater), measuring hydrological fluxes (ET, precipitation and river discharge), and monitoring drought and flooding inundation, while GIS provides the best tools for water resources, drought and flooding risk management and for setting up hydrologic models, inputting data processing and output analyses and visualizations
Hongjie Xie (Ed.) --- Xianwei Wang /Ed.)
Applications of Computational Intelligence to Power Systems
Electric power systems around the world are changing in terms of structure, operation, management and ownership due to technical, financial, and ideological reasons. Power systems keep on expanding in terms of geographical areas, asset additions, and the penetration of new technologies in generation, transmission, and distribution. The conventional methods for solving the power system design, planning, operation, and control problems have been extensively used for different applications, but these methods suffer from several difficulties, thus providing suboptimal solutions.
Application of Essential Oils in Food Systems
This Special Issue will look at the advances made in the essential oils. Essential oils have received increasing attention as natural additives for the shelf-life extension of food products, due to the risk in using synthetic preservatives. Synthetic additives can reduce food spoilage, but the present generation is very health conscious and believes in natural products rather than synthetic ones due to their potential toxicity and other concerns. Therefore, one of the major emerging technologies is the extraction of essential oils from several plant organs and their application to foods.
Juana Fern´andez-L´opez (Ed.) --- Manuel Viuda-Martos (Ed.)
Application of Bioinformatics in Cancers
This collection of 25 research papers comprised of 22 original articles and 3 reviews is brought together from international leaders in bioinformatics and biostatistics. The collection highlights recent computational advances that improve the ability to analyze highly complex data sets to identify factors critical to cancer biology. Novel deep learning algorithms represent an emerging and highly valuable approach for collecting, characterizing and predicting clinical outcomes data. The collection highlights several of these approaches that are likely to become the foundation of research and clinical practice in the future.
Application of Artificial Neural Networks in Geoinformatics
Recently, a need has arisen for prediction techniques that can address a variety of problems by combining methods from the rapidly developing field of machine learning with geoinformation technologies such as GIS, remote sensing, and GPS. As a result, over the last few decades, one particular machine learning technology, known as artificial neural networks, has been successfully applied to a wide range of fields in science and engineering. In addition, the development of computational and spatial technologies has led to the rapid growth of geoinformatics, which specializes in the analysis of spatial information.
Application and Behavior of Nanomaterials in Water Treatment
The book compiles scientific articles describing advances in nanomaterial synthesis and their application in water remediation. The publications treat diverse problems such as dye degradation, heavy metal ion, as well as radioactive element capture and sequestration. There are 10 original research articles and one review article. The latter proposes graphene/CNT and Prussian blue nanocomposites for radioactive 137-cesium extraction from aqueous media. All reports thoroughly characterize the nanomaterials post-synthesis and describe their catalytic, photocatalytic, or ion exchange activities in contaminated water.
Rauwel, Protima --- Rauwel, habil. Erwan --- Uhl, Wolfgang
Antiphospholipid Antibodies and Syndrome
Antiphospholipid syndrome (APS) is an autoimmune disorder caused by antiphospholipid antibodies. It was characterized by excessive clotting of blood and/or certain complications of pregnancy (premature miscarriages, unexplained fetal death, or premature birth) and the presence of antiphospholipid antibodies (such as anti-cardiolipin antibodies or lupus anticoagulant) in the blood. Fifty percent of people with lupus have APS. The exact pathogenesis of APS is inadequately understood, so no specific treatment is available.
Antioxidants in Health and Disease Volume 2
Several epidemiological studies have demonstrated that oxidative stress is associated with a number of health disorders, including cardiovascular malfunction, certain types of cancer, diabetes mellitus, many other auto-immune diseases, and even ageing. The body possesses multiple mechanisms to counteract oxidative stress, which employ antioxidant compounds that are either naturally generated in situ (endogenous antioxidants) or externally supplied through food (exogenous antioxidants).
Maurizio Battino (Ed.) --- Francesca Giampieri (Ed.)
Antioxidants in Health and Disease Volume 1
Several epidemiological studies have demonstrated that oxidative stress is associated with a number of health disorders, including cardiovascular malfunction, certain types of cancer, diabetes mellitus, many other auto-immune diseases, and even ageing. The body possesses multiple mechanisms to counteract oxidative stress, which employ antioxidant compounds that are either naturally generated in situ (endogenous antioxidants) or externally supplied through food (exogenous antioxidants). These antioxidants are able to counteract oxidative stress, thanks to their ability to neutralize excess free radicals and protect the cellular lipids, proteins, and DNA from molecular damage.
Advances in Multi-Sensor Information Fusion: Theory and Applications 2017
The information fusion technique can integrate a large amount of data and knowledge representing the same real-world object and obtain a consistent, accurate and useful representation of that object. The data may be independent or redundant, and can be obtained by different sensors at the same time or at different times. A suitable combination of investigative methods can substantially increase the profit of information in comparison with that from a single sensor. Multi-sensor information fusion has been a key issue in sensor research since the 1970s and it has been applied in many fields, such as geospatial information systems, business intelligence, oceanography, discovery science, intelligent transport systems, wireless sensor networks, etc.
Xue-Bo Jin (Ed.) --- Shuli Sun (Ed.) --- Hong Wei (Ed.) --- Feng-Bao Yang (Ed.)
Advances in Micro-Bioreactor Design for Organ Cell Studies
Micro-bioreactors offer unique opportunities to study biological systems under fluidic conditions. The concept of micro-bioreactors suggests that biological reaction conditions on a large scale can be scaled down to micro-volumes while maintaining performance and functionality. Models and operation principles can be simulated at a smaller scale, either by scaling down organs in the human body, or using bioreactors for the production of biologics. This book highlights these issues with a strong focus on new engineering design.
Advances in Groundwater Flow and Solute Transport: Pushing the Hidden Boundary
In recent decades, the study of groundwater flow and solute transport has advanced into new territories that are beyond conventional theories, such as Darcy’s law and Fick’s law. The studied media have changed from permeable porous and fractured ones to much less permeable ones, such as clay and shale. The studied pore sizes have also changed from millimetres to micro-meters or even nano-meters.
Zhan, Hongbin --- Wang, Quanrong --- Wen, Zhang
The book presents research papers addressing a wide range of environmental topics: water and wastewater treatment and management, soil degradation and conservation, sediment pollution control, environmental impacts of technologies, life cycle analysis (LCA), air quality and indoor environment, and advanced environmental materials. The contributions provide novel and significant scientific results and advanced applications in the field of environmental engineering and provide an integrated view of the trends in solving the problems associated with the achievement of sustainability.
Adriana Estokova (Ed.) --- Magdalena Balintova (Ed.)
This Topical Collection of Molecules provides the most recent advancements and trends within the framework of food analysis, confirming the growing public, academic, and industrial interest in this field. The articles broach topics related to sample preparation, separation science, spectroscopic techniques, sensors and biosensors, as well as investigations dealing with the characterization of macronutrients, micronutrients, and other biomolecules. It offers the latest updates regarding alternative food sources (e.g., algae), functional foods, effects of processing, chiral or achiral bioactive compounds, contaminants, and every topic related to food science that is appealing to readers.
Advances in Computer Simulation Studies on Crystal Growth
Crystals are indispensable in technology, nature, and our daily lives. For example, cooking uses many kinds of crystallized products, such as salt, sugar, and fat crystals; electronic devices contain semiconductor crystals; living organisms produce mineral crystals to maintain biological processes; and snow and ice crystals play a crucial role in climate change. For these and other topics related to crystals, an especially important area of research is crystal growth. Computer simulations of crystal growth have become increasingly important as a result of rapid increases in available computing power.
Catalyst deactivation, the loss over time of catalytic activity and/or selectivity, is a problem of great and continuing concern in the practice of industrial catalytic processes. Costs to industry for catalyst replacement and process shutdown total tens of billions of dollars per year. While catalyst deactivation is inevitable for most processes, some of its immediate, drastic consequences may be avoided, postponed, or even reversed. Accordingly, there is considerable motivation to better understand catalyst decay and regeneration
Calvin H. Bartholomew (Ed.) --- Morris D. Argyle (Ed.)
Advances in Airborne Lidar Systems and Data Processing
Presented to audience as “Airborne Laser Systems and Data Processing”, this book collects the papers in the Remote Sensing special issue “ Airborne Laser Scanning” (November 2016) and several other papers selected from recent, previous Remote Sensing issues. We were approached by Remote Sensing late 2015 to edit a special issue on Lidar remote sensing. After some literature review and careful thinking, we selected the theme for the special issue as “Airborne Laser Scanning”. Having this focus in mind, we made a call for papers and spread it well over Internet and social media. In the meantime, a number of leading experts in their fields were reached out for contribution.
Advances and Applications of Nano-antimicrobial Treatments
Nowadays, great concerns are associated with the resistance demonstrated by many microorganisms towards the conventional antibiotic therapies. The failure of traditional antimicrobials, and the increasing healthcare costs, have encouraged scientific research and the development of novel antimicrobial agents. Particularly, there is a great deal of interest in nanotechnologies and in antibacterial products obtained through the incorporation of antibacterial agents or the deposition of antibacterial coatings for prevention of biofilm-associated infections.
Mauro Pollini Sciprofile, Alessandro Sannino Sciprofile and Federica Paladini Sciprofile, (Eds.)
Advanced Numerical Methods in Applied Sciences
The use of scientific computing tools is currently customary for solving problems at several complexity levels in Applied Sciences. The great need for reliable software in the scientific community conveys a continuous stimulus to develop new and better performing numerical methods that are able to grasp the particular features of the problem at hand. This has been the case for many different settings of numerical analysis, and this Special Issue aims at covering some important developments in various areas of application.
Advanced Memristor Modeling: Memristor Circuits and Networks
The investigation of new memory schemes, neural networks, computer systems, and many other improved electronic devices is very important for the future generation’s electronic circuits and for their widespread application in all the areas of industry. In this respect, the analysis of new efficient and advanced electronic elements and circuits is an essential field of highly developed electrical and electronic engineering. The resistance-switching phenomenon, observed in many amorphous oxides, has been investigated since 1970 and is a promising technology for constructing new electronic memories.
Advanced Hydroinformatic Techniques for the Simulation and Analysis of Water Supply and Distribution Systems
The overall objective of this Special Issue is to improve knowledge on developing and using advanced simulation tools in water supply and distribution systems. The final aim is to propose a suitable framework supporting insightful hydraulic mechanisms to help the decision-making processes of water utility managers and practitioners. Contributions to this Special Issue, exploring new research avenues on urban hydraulics and hydroinformatics, will be of great value for both Academia and those water utility stakeholders.
Manuel Herrera (Ed.) --- Silvia Meniconi (Ed.) --- Stefano Alvisi (Ed.) --- Joaquín Izquierdo (Ed.)
Advanced Glasses, Composites and Ceramics for High Growth Industries
Advanced Glasses, Composites and Ceramics for High-Growth Industries (CoACH) was a European Training Network (ETN) project (http://www.coach-etn.eu/) funded by the Horizon 2020 program. CoACH involved multiple actors in the innovation ecosystem for advanced materials, composed of five universities and ten enterprises in seven different European countries. The project studied the next generation of materials that could bring innovation in the healthcare, construction, and energy sectors, among others, from new bioactive glasses for bone implants to eco-friendly cements and new environmentally friendly thermoelectrics for energy conversion.
Salvo, Milena --- Reece, Mike --- Boccaccini, Aldo
Advanced DSP Techniques for High-Capacity and Energy-Efficient Optical Fiber Communications
The rapid proliferation of the Internet has been driving communication networks closer and closer to their limits, while available bandwidth is disappearing due to an ever-increasing network load. Over the past decade, optical fiber communication technology has increased per fiber data rate from 10 Tb/s to exceeding 10 Pb/s. The major explosion came after the maturity of coherent detection and advanced digital signal processing (DSP).
Advanced Asphalt Materials and Paving Technologies
There has been significant research progress in the area of pavement materials and paving technologies in the past decade. This includes the use of warm mix asphalt technologies, rubber asphalt, bio asphalt, nanomaterial applications, new construction technologies, innovative concrete materials, as well as the application of mechanistic–empirical pavement design. With all these developments, a collection of peer-reviewed articles with the theme of advanced asphalt materials and paving technologies is necessary for industry, researchers, government agencies, and other stakeholders.
Zhanping You (Ed.) --- Qingli Dai (Ed.) --- Feipeng Xiao (Ed.)
Advanced Applications for Smart Energy Systems Considering Grid-Interactive Demand Response
This book covers applied research on smart energy systems, smart grids, smart energy homes, smart energy products and services, and the advanced applications thereof, in the context of demand response and grid interactions. In particular, this book is focused on interdisciplinary research results that combine technical, social, environmental, and economic aspects of smart energy systems and smart energy products
Advance of Polymers Applied to Biomedical Applications: Cell Scaffolds
Since Langer’s seminal work, polymers have been on every corner of tissue engineering. The roles of bioresorbable polymers, as a scaffold, are not merely structural, providing three-dimensional (3D) homing sites to cells, but also functional at their interface with the cells. The polymeric scaffolds actively act as both biochemical and physical cues for cell behaviors, such as adhesion, growth, proliferation, and differentiation. Polymers and cells could interact further with each other mutually, sensing and responding to the signals from the partner.
Insung S. Choi (Ed.) --- João F. Mano (Ed.)
Adolescent Pregnancy: Past, Present and Future Trends and Issues
This collection provides a forum for leading scholars to examine theoretical insights and empirical findings associated with the recent decline in adolescent pregnancy and childbearing internationally, with special attention given to the United States. This recent shift in the incidence of adolescent fertility is notable in its consistency and magnitude; at the same time, however, continuing historic disparities require focused attention on the contemporary meaning of early childbearing in the U.S. as well as across the globe.
Additive Manufacturing Technologies and Applications
The present Special Issue proposes articles in the area of Additive Manufacturing with particular attention to the different employed technologies and the several possible applications. The main investigated technologies are the Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) and the Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM). These methodologies, combined with the Computer Aided Design (CAD), provide important advantages. Numerical, analytical and experimental knowledge and models are proposed to exploit the potential advantages given by 3D printing for the production of modern systems and structures in aerospace, mechanical, civil and biomedical engineering fields.
Salvatore Brischetto (Ed.) --- Paolo Maggiore (Ed.) --- Carlo Giovanni Ferro (Ed.)
Adaptive Catchment Management and Reservoir Operation
River catchments and reservoirs play a central role in water security, food supply, flood risk management, hydropower generation, and ecosystem services; however, they are now under increasing pressure from population growth, economic activities, and changing climate means and extremes in many parts of the world. Adaptive management of river catchments and reservoirs requires an in-depth understanding of the impacts of future uncertainties and thus the development of robust, sustainable solutions to meet the needs of various stakeholders and the environment.
Fu, Guangtao --- Ni, Guangheng --- Zhang, Chi
Acupuncture – Basic Research and Clinical Application
This book focuses on the investigation, development, and modernization of acupuncture in basic research settings as well as in clinical applications. The book contains 13 chapters reporting the latest evidence-based results of acupuncture research and exploring acupuncture in general. Altogether, 44 authors from all over the world contributed to this book.
Actuarial and Financial Risks in Life Insurance, Pensions and Household Finance
The recent regulatory changes, together with the increasing awareness of the variety of sources of uncertainty that affect the activities of insurance and pension funds, have generated increasing attention towards insurance risk management theory and practice. Against this background, this Special Issue collects relevant contributions on a variety of issues encompassing longevity risk modelling, solvency requirements, risk management, and risk sharing.
Acoustic and Elastic Waves: Recent Trends in Science and Engineering
The present Special Issue intends to explore new directions in the field of acoustics and ultrasonics. The interest includes, but is not limited to, the use of acoustic technology for condition monitoring of materials and structures. Topics of interest (among others): • Acoustic emission in materials and structures (without material limitation)
Dimitrios G. Aggelis (Ed.) --- Nathalie Godin (Ed.)
Abiotic Stress Effects on Performance of Horticultural Crops
Horticultural crop yield and quality depend on genotype, environmental conditions, and production management. In particular, adverse environmental conditions may greatly affect crop performance, reducing crop yield by 50%–70%. Abiotic stresses such as cold, heat, drought, flooding, salinity, nutrient deficiency, and ultraviolet radiation affect multiple physiological and biochemical mechanisms in plants as they attempt to cope with the stress conditions. However, different crop species can have different sensitivities or tolerances to specific abiotic stresses
Francini, Alessandra --- Sebastiani, Luca
Abiotic Stresses in Agroecology: A Challenge for Whole Plant Physiology
Understanding plant responses to abiotic stresses is central to our ability to predict the impact of global change and environmental pollution on the production of food, feed and forestry. Besides increasing carbon dioxide concentration and rising global temperature, increasingly frequent and severe climatic events (e.g. extended droughts, heat waves, flooding) are expected in the coming decades. Additionally, pollution (e.g. heavy metals, gaseous pollutants such as ozone or sulfur dioxide) is an important factor in many regions, decreasing plant productivity and product quality.
Urs Feller --- Alison H. Kingston-Smith --- Mauro Centritto
Abiotic Stress Signaling in Plants: Functional Genomic Intervention
Abiotic stresses such as high temperature, low-temperature, drought and salinity limit crop productivity worldwide. Understanding plant responses to these stresses is essential for rational engineering of crop plants. In Arabidopsis, the signal transduction pathways for abiotic stresses, light, several phytohormones and pathogenesis have been elucidated. A significant portion of plant genomes (Arabidopsis and rice were mostly studied) encodes for proteins involves in signaling such as receptor, sensors, kinases, phosphatases, transcription factors and transporters/channels.
Girdhar K. Pandey --- Manoj Prasad --- Amita Pandey --- Maik Boehmer
Non-Equilibrium Social Science and Policy: Introduction and Essays on New and Changing Paradigms in Socio-Economic Thinking
The overall aim of this book, an outcome of the European FP7 FET Open NESS project, is to contribute to the ongoing effort to put the quantitative social sciences on a proper footing for the 21st century. A key focus is economics, and its implications on policy making, where the still dominant traditional approach increasingly struggles to capture the economic realities we observe in the world today - with vested interests getting too often in the way of real advances. Insights into behavioral economics and modern computing techniques have made possible both the integration of larger information sets and the exploration of disequilibrium behavior.
Jeffrey Johnson --- Andrzej Nowak --- Paul Ormerod --- Bridget Rosewell --- et al.
Snow Sports Trauma and Safety: Conference Proceedings of the International Society for Skiing Safety: 21st Volume
This book covers the latest in snow sport epidemiology, snow sport injuries and treatment, and biomechanical/mechanical engineering related to snow sports injuries (mechanisms of injury, injury prevention by equipment design, injury prevention by design of resort features, and more). It brings together a collection of papers from the International Congress on Ski Trauma and Safety (the biennal meeting of the International Society for Skiing Safety) and presents the latest research on the effectiveness of winter sports equipment, the behavior of winter sports participants, and the epidemiology and biomechanics of winter sports injuries.
Irving S. Scher --- Richard M. Greenwald --- Nicola Petrone
Resilience: A New Paradigm of Nuclear Safety: From Accident Mitigation to Resilient Society Facing Extreme Situations
This book summarizes presentations and discussions from the two-day international workshop held at UC Berkeley in March 2015, and derives questions to be addressed in multi-disciplinary research toward a new paradigm of nuclear safety. The consequences of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident in March 2011 have fuelled the debate on nuclear safety: while there were no casualties due to radiation, there was substantial damage to local communities.
Joonhong Ahn --- Franck Guarnieri --- Kazuo Furuta
Error-Correction Coding and Decoding: Bounds, Codes, Decoders, Analysis and Applications
This book discusses both the theory and practical applications of self-correcting data, commonly known as error-correcting codes. The applications included demonstrate the importance of these codes in a wide range of everyday technologies, from smartphones to secure communications and transactions. Written in a readily understandable style, the book presents the authors’ twenty-five years of research organized into five parts:
Martin Tomlinson --- Cen Jung Tjhai --- Marcel A. Ambroze --- Mohammed Ahmed --- et al.
Physical (A)Causality: Determinism, Randomness and Uncaused Events
This book addresses the physical phenomenon of events that seem to occur spontaneously and without any known cause. These are to be contrasted with events that happen in a (pre-)determined, predictable, lawful, and causal way. All our knowledge is based on self-reflexive theorizing, as well as on operational means of empirical perception
This publication addresses the global challenges of food and water security in a rapidly changing and complex world. The essays highlight the links between bio-physical and socio-cultural processes, making connections between local and global scales, and focusing on the everyday practices of eating and drinking, essential for human survival. Written by international experts, each contribution is research-based but accessible to the general public.
Peter Jackson --- Walter E.L. Spiess --- Farhana Sultana
This book compares the lessons learned from a wetland-perspective approach to the changing climate and the requirements of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) with regard to environmental conservation. Examples from Germany and Poland are discussed due to the efficiency of their respective implementations of water conservation policies
Grammatical theory: From transformational grammar to constraint-based approaches
This book introduces formal grammar theories that play a role in current linguistic theorizing (Phrase Structure Grammar, Transformational Grammar/Government & Binding, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Head-​Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Construction Grammar, Tree Adjoining Grammar). The key assumptions are explained and it is shown how the respective theory treats arguments and adjuncts, the active/passive alternation, local reorderings, verb placement, and fronting of constituents over long distances. The analyses are explained with German as the object language.
Anthropometry, Body Composition and Resting Energy Expenditure in Human
Data on nutritional status of human populations are periodically needed, as well as their relationships with anthropometry, body composition, body image and energy expenditure, and also with health lifestyle outcomes. All these parameters contribute jointly to give a complete knowledge on dietary and lifestyle habits, and hence how to proceed to improve it in order to enjoy an optimal healthy status. So, you are kindly invited to submit proposals for manuscripts that fit the objectives and the topics of this Nutrients Special issue.
Tur, Josep A. --- Mar Bibilonic, Maria del
Addressing Food and Nutrition Security in Developed Countries
The Addressing Food and Nutrition Security in Developed Countries Special Issue is a collection of papers from researchers in counties with developed economies who are responding to increasing prevalence of food insecurity. Food insecurity is relatively hidden, and the real extent of the problem is likely to be underestimated in many of these countries. Novel methods to estimate the prevalence of food insecurity in the face of no routine measurement are presented. Population surveys highlight adverse mental health outcomes and new and emerging subgroups that are experiencing food insecurity.
Vocational Teacher Education in Central Asia: Developing Skills and Facilitating Success
This open access volume presents papers on vocational education, project-based learning and science didactic approaches, illustrating with sample cases, and with a special focus on Central Asian states. Thematically embedded in the area of Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET), the book examines the following main topics: project-based learning (PBL), specific didactics with a linkage to food technologies and laboratory didactics, media and new technologies in TVET, evaluation of competencies including aspects of measurement, examination issues, and labour market and private sector issues in TVET, and research methods with a focus on empirical research and the role of scientific networks.
Jens Drummer --- Gafurjon Hakimov --- Mamatair Joldoshov --- Thomas Köhler --- et al.
Visualizing Mortality Dynamics in the Lexis Diagram
The goal of this book is simple: We would like to show how mortality dynamics can be visualized in the so-called Lexis diagram. To appeal to as many potential readers as possible, we do not require any specialist knowledge. This approach may be disappointing: Demographers may have liked more information about the mathematical underpinnings of population dynamics on the Lexis surface as demonstrated, for instance, by Arthur and Vaupel in 1984
Bohk-Ewald, Christina --- M. Muszynska, Magdalena --- Rau, Roland --- W. Vaupel, James --- et al.
Uses of Technology in Upper Secondary Mathematics Education
This survey addresses the use of technology in upper secondary mathematics education from four points of view: theoretical analysis of epistemological and cognitive aspects of activity in new technology mediated learning environments, the changes brought by technology in the interactions between environment, students and teachers, the interrelations between mathematical activities and technology, skills and competencies that must be developed in teacher education. Research shows that the use of some technologies may deeply change the solving processes and contribute to impact the learning processes.
Stephen Hegedus --- Colette Laborde --- Corey Brady --- Sara Dalton --- et al.
Uses of Technology in Lower Secondary Mathematics Education: A Concise Topical Survey
This topical survey provides an overview of the current state of the art in technology use in mathematics education, including both practice-oriented experiences and research-based evidence, as seen from an international perspective. Three core themes are discussed: Evidence of effectiveness; Digital assessment; and Communication and collaboration.
Paul Drijvers --- Lynda Ball --- Bärbel Barzel --- M. Kathleen Heid --- et al.
The Impact of Food Bioactives on Health: In Vitro and Ex Vivo Models
Infogest' (Improving Health Properties of Food by Sharing our Knowledge on the Digestive Process) is an EU COST action/network in the domain of Food and Agriculture. Infogest aims at building an open international network of institutes undertaking multidisciplinary basic research on food digestion gathering scientists from different origins (including food scientists, gut physiologists and nutritionists). The network gathers 70 partners from academia, corresponding to a total of 29 countries.
Kitty Verhoeckx --- Paul Cotter --- Iván López-Expósito --- Charlotte Kleiveland --- et al.
Understanding Society and Natural Resources: Forging New Strands of Integration Across the Social Sciences
In this edited volume leading scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds wrestle with social science integration opportunities and challenges. This book explores the growing concern of how best to achieve effective integration of the social science disciplines as a means for furthering natural resource social science and environmental problem solving. The chapters provide an overview of the history, vision, advances, examples and methods that could lead to integration. The quest for integration among the social sciences is not new.
Rechkemmer, Andreas --- J. Manfredo, Michael --- J. Vaske;, Jerry --- A. Duke, Esther
This work contains updated and clinically relevant information about tuberculosis. It is aimed at providing a succinct overview of history and disease epidemiology, clinical presentation and the most recent scientific developments in the field of tuberculosis research, with an emphasis on diagnosis and treatment. It may serve as a practical resource for students, clinicians and researchers who work in the field of infectious diseases.
Caws, Maxine --- Marais, Ben --- Heemskerk, Dorothee --- Farrar, Jeremy
The Troika of Adult Learners, Lifelong Learning, and Mathematics
This book presents a synopsis of six emerging themes in adult mathematics/numeracy and a critical discussion of recent developments in terms of policies, provisions, and the emerging challenges, paradoxes and tensions. It also offers an extensive review of the literature adult mathematics education. Why do adults want to learn mathematics? Did they enjoy mathematics at school so much that they want to continue? NO! Most of these adults have to learn mathematics because it is part of a formal qualification they need, because their job demands the ability to apply mathematics, or because they need basic numeracy in their daily lives
Katherine Safford-Ramus --- Pradeep Kumar Misra --- Terry Maguire
Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptor Signaling in Neuroprotection
This open access book presents the roles and mechanisms of signal transduction triggered by nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) stimulation in neuroprotection against toxic effects of risk factors of neurodegenerative diseases. Accumulating evidence suggests that nAChRs in the CNS play important roles not only in excitatory neurotransmission but also in neuronal survival and related functions. Neuroprotection mediated by nAChRs in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease is the major topic of this book.
Akinori Akaike --- Shun Shimohama --- Yoshimi Misu
This survey focuses on the main trends in the field of calculus education. Despite their variety, the findings reveal a cornerstone issue that is strongly linked to the formalism of calculus concepts and to the difficulties it generates in the learning and teaching process. As a complement to the main text, an extended bibliography with some of the most important references on this topic is included.
Teaching and Learning About Whole Numbers in Primary School
This book offers a theory for the analysis of how children learn and are taught about whole numbers. Two meanings of numbers are distinguished – the analytical meaning, defined by the number system, and the representational meaning, identified by the use of numbers as conventional signs that stand for quantities. This framework makes it possible to compare different approaches to making numbers meaningful in the classroom and contrast the outcomes of these diverse aspects of teaching. The book identifies themes and trends in empirical research on the teaching and learning of whole numbers since the launch of the major journals in mathematics education research in the 1970s.
Terezinha Nunes --- Beatriz Vargas Dorneles --- Pi-Jen Lin --- Elisabeth Rathgeb-Schnierer
Teacher Quality, Instructional Quality and Student Outcomes: Relationships Across Countries, Cohorts and Time
This volume offers insights from modeling relations between teacher quality, instructional quality and student outcomes in mathematics across countries. The relations explored take the educational context, such as school climate, into account. The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement’s Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is the only international large-scale study possessing a design framework that enables investigation of relations between teachers, their teaching, and student outcomes in mathematics.
How can we design more sustainable industrial and urban systems that reduce environmental impacts while supporting a high quality of life for everyone? What progress has been made towards reducing resource use and waste, and what are the prospects for more resilient, material-efficient economies? What are the environmental and social impacts of global supply chains and how can they be measured and improved? Such questions are at the heart of the emerging discipline of industrial ecology, covered in Taking Stock of Industrial Ecology.
Solving PDEs in Python: The FEniCS Tutorial I
This book offers a concise and gentle introduction to finite element programming in Python based on the popular FEniCS software library. Using a series of examples, including the Poisson equation, the equations of linear elasticity, the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations, and systems of nonlinear advection–diffusion–reaction equations, it guides readers through the essential steps to quickly solving a PDE in FEniCS, such as how to define a finite variational problem, how to set boundary conditions, how to solve linear and nonlinear systems, and how to visualize solutions and structure finite element Python programs.
Social Statistics and Ethnic Diversity: Cross-National Perspectives in Classifications and Identity Politics
This open access book examines the question of collecting and disseminating data on ethnicity and race in order to describe characteristics of ethnic and racial groups, identify factors of social and economic integration and implement policies to redress discrimination. It offers a global perspective on the issue by looking at race and ethnicity in a wide variety of historical, country-specific contexts, including Asia, Latin America, Europe, Oceania and North America. In addition, the book also includes analysis on the indigenous populations of the Americas
Patrick Simon --- Victor Piché --- Amélie A. Gagnon
This book addresses the practice of social innovation, which is currently very much in the public eye. New ideas and approaches are needed to tackle the severe and wicked problems with which contemporary societies are struggling. Especially in times of economic crisis, social innovation is regarded as one of the crucial elements needed to move forward.
Taco Brandsen --- Sandro Cattacin --- Adalbert Evers --- Annette Zimmer
Social and Political Dimensions of Mathematics Education: Current Thinking
This book examines the current thinking on five critical social and political areas in mathematics education. It focuses on material conditions in teaching and learning, and details features of social life and their influence on mathematics teaching, learning and achievement. Following an introduction, the first section addresses equitable access and participation in quality mathematics education. It explores this issue in different contexts and from different ideological perspectives. The second section traces the emergence and development of the notion of activism in mathematics education in theory, in the literature, in research and in practice.
Murad Jurdak --- Renuka Vithal --- Elizabeth de Freitas --- Peter Gates --- et al.
Skills Development for Inclusive and Sustainable Growth in Developing Asia-Pacific
Focusing on the Asia-Pacific region, which in recent years has been the engine of global economic growth , this volume surveys trends and prospects in technical and vocational education and training (TVET) with particular reference to achieving inclusive growth and the greening of economies. Underlying the increasing pressure for new models of TVET provision is the rapid pace of technological change, demand for a work force which is highly responsive to evolving needs and a transforming market place that calls for higher order skills and lifelong learning.
Rupert Maclean --- Shanti Jagannathan --- Jouko Sarvi
This volume discusses semiotics in mathematics education as an activity with a formal sign system, in which each sign represents something else. Theories presented by Saussure, Peirce, Vygotsky and other writers on semiotics are summarized in their relevance to the teaching and learning of mathematics. The significance of signs for mathematics education lies in their ubiquitous use in every branch of mathematics. Such use involves seeing the general in the particular, a process that is not always clear to learners.
Norma Presmeg --- Luis Radford --- Wolff-Michael Roth --- Gert Kadunz
Recent years have seen spectacular advances in the field of circadian biology. These have attracted the interest of researchers in many fields, including endocrinology, neurosciences, cancer, and behavior. By integrating a circadian view within the fields of endocrinology and metabolism, researchers will be able to reveal many, yet-unsuspected aspects of how organisms cope with changes in the environment and subsequent control of homeostasis. This field is opening new avenues in our understanding of metabolism and endocrinology. A panel of the most distinguished investigators in the field gathered together to discuss the present state and the future of the field.
Scaling a Software Business: The Digitalization Journey
Software has changed the rules of the game. The world talks about the digitalization in industry and society – how the focus has shifted from producing tangible things towards software and services. This trend started many years ago, but is now affecting every company, whether it’s a software company or not. There are many companies that have already made a digitalization journey – and many are about to embark on this journey – like you. How do you transform your organization when software is becoming a critical part of your business?
Brian Fitzgerald --- Klaas-Jan Stol --- Sten Minör --- Henrik Cosmo
Satellite Earth Observations and Their Impact on Society and Policy
he result of a workshop bringing together an international advisory board of experts in science, satellite technologies, industry innovations, and public policy, this book addresses the current and future roles of satellite Earth observations in solving large-scale environmental problems. The book showcases the results of engaging distinct communities to enhance our ability to identify emerging problems and to administer international regimes created to solve them. It also reviews the work of the Policy and Earth Observation Innovation Cycle (PEOIC) project, an effort aimed at assessing the impact of satellite observations on environmental policy and to propose a mission going forward that would launch an “innovation cycle”.
MARE-WINT: New Materials and Reliability in Offshore Wind Turbine Technology
This book provides a holistic, interdisciplinary overview of offshore wind energy, and is a must-read for advanced researchers. Topics, from the design and analysis of future turbines, to the decommissioning of wind farms, are covered. The scope of the work ranges from analytical, numerical and experimental advancements in structural and fluid mechanics, to novel developments in risk, safety & reliability engineering for offshore wind.The core objective of the current work is to make offshore wind energy more competitive, by improving the reliability, and operations and maintenance (O&M) strategies of wind turbines.
Wiesław Ostachowicz --- Malcolm McGugan --- Jens-Uwe Schröder-Hinrichs --- Marcin Luczak
Riverine Ecosystem Management: Science for Governing Towards a Sustainable Future
This open access book surveys the frontier of scientific river research and provides examples to guide management towards a sustainable future of riverine ecosystems. Principal structures and functions of the biogeosphere of rivers are explained; key threats are identified, and effective solutions for restoration and mitigation are provided. Rivers are among the most threatened ecosystems of the world. They increasingly suffer from pollution, water abstraction, river channelisation and damming.
Ecological Risk Assessment for Chlorpyrifos in Terrestrial and Aquatic Systems in North America
This book attempts to provide concise, critical reviews of timely advances, philosophy and significant areas of accomplished or needed endeavor in the total field of xenobiotics, in any segment of the environment, as well as toxicological implications.
Cognitive Supervision for Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Laser Surgery
This thesis lays the groundwork for the automatic supervision of the laser incision process, which aims to complement surgeons’ perception of the state of tissues and enhance their control over laser incisions. The research problem is formulated as the estimation of variables that are representative of the state of tissues during laser cutting. Prior research in this area leveraged numerical computation methods that bear a high computational cost and are not straightforward to use in a surgical setting.
Responsive Open Learning Environments: Outcomes of Research from the ROLE Project
This book presents the outcomes of four years of educational research in the EU-supported project called ROLE (Responsive Online Learning Environments). ROLE technology is centered around the concept of self-regulated learning that creates responsible learners, who are capable of critical thinking and able to plan their own learning processes. ROLE allows learners to independently search for appropriate learning resources and then reflect on their own learning process and progress. To accomplish this, ROLE´s main objective is to support the development of open personal learning environments (PLEs)
Sylvana Kroop --- Alexander Mikroyannidis --- Martin Wolpers
Research on Teaching and Learning Mathematics at the Tertiary Level
This topical survey focuses on research in tertiary mathematics education, a field that has experienced considerable growth over the last 10 years. Drawing on the most recent journal publications as well as the latest advances from recent high-quality conference proceedings, our review culls out the following five emergent areas of interest: mathematics teaching at the tertiary level; the role of mathematics in other disciplines; textbooks, assessment and students’ studying practices; transition to the tertiary level; and theoretical-methodological advances.
Irene Biza --- Victor Giraldo --- Reinhard Hochmuth --- Azimeh Sadat Khakbaz --- et al.
Re-engineering the Uptake of ICT in Schools
This book reports on a novel and comprehensive approach to the uptake of ICT in Schools. It focuses on key questions, pedagogically sound ways of introducing ICT, new technical artifacts supporting the approach, the evaluation in a large-scale validator, and future work. While many innovations in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) have emerged over the last two decades, the uptake of these innovations has not always been very successful, particularly in schools. The transition from proof of concept to integration into learning activities has been recognized as a bottleneck for quite some time.
Frans Van Assche --- Luis Anido --- David Griffiths --- Cathy Lewin --- et al.
Clinical Text Mining: Secondary Use of Electronic Patient Records
This open access book describes the results of natural language processing and machine learning methods applied to clinical text from electronic patient records. It is divided into twelve chapters. Chapters 1-4 discuss the history and background of the original paper-based patient records, their purpose, and how they are written and structured. These initial chapters do not require any technical or medical background knowledge. The remaining eight chapters are more technical in nature and describe various medical classifications and terminologies such as ICD diagnosis codes, SNOMED CT, MeSH, UMLS, and ATC.
Self-Reported Population Health: An International Perspective based on EQ-5D
The EQ-5D instrument, as a standardized, cross-culturally validated measure of self-assessed health has a hugely important role in understanding population health within and across countries. Over the past two decades a wealth of international population health survey data have been accumulated by the EuroQol Group from research conducted in many countries across four continents. One of the success factors of the EQ-5D instruments has been the easy availability of national or international sets of EQ-5D data, as well as clear explanations and guidance for users.
Agota Szende --- Bas Janssen --- Juan Cabases
Protecting the Rights of People with Autism in the Fields of Education and Employment: International, European and National Perspectives
Fundamental rights for all people with disabilities, education and employment are key for the inclusion of people with autism. They play as facilitators for the social inclusion of persons with autism and as multipliers for their enjoyment of other fundamental rights. After outlining the international and European dimensions of the legal protection of the rights to education and employment of people with autism, the book provides an in-depth analysis of domestic legislative, judicial and administrative practice of the EU Member States in these fields.
Projection-Based Clustering through Self-Organization and Swarm Intelligence: Combining Cluster Analysis with the Visualization of High-Dimensional Data
This book covers aspects of unsupervised machine learning used for knowledge discovery in data science and introduces a data-driven approach to cluster analysis, the Databionic swarm (DBS). DBS consists of the 3D landscape visualization and clustering of data. The 3D landscape enables 3D printing of high-dimensional data structures.The clustering and number of clusters or an absence of cluster structure are verified by the 3D landscape at a glance.
Programming for Computations - Python: A Gentle Introduction to Numerical Simulations with Python
Today, most people are experienced with computer programs, typically programs such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Internet Explorer, and Photoshop. The interaction with such programs is usually quite simple and intuitive: you click on buttons, pull down menus and select operations, drag visual elements into locations, and so forth. The possible operations you can do in these programs can be combined in seemingly an infinite number of ways, only limited by your creativity and imagination. Nevertheless, programs often make us frustrated when they cannot do what we wish. One typical situation might be the following. Say you have some measurements from a device, and the data are stored in a file with a specific format.
Programming for Computations - MATLAB/Octave
This book presents computer programming as a key method for solving mathematical problems. There are two versions of the book, one for MATLAB and one for Python. The book was inspired by the Springer book TCSE 6: A Primer on Scientific Programming with Python (by Langtangen), but the style is more accessible and concise, in keeping with the needs of engineering students. The book outlines the shortest possible path from no previous experience with programming to a set of skills that allows the students to write simple programs for solving common mathematical problems with numerical methods in engineering and science courses.
Plant Selection for Bioretention Systems and Stormwater Treatment Practices
As cities develop, more land is converted into impervious surfaces, which do not allow water to infiltrate. Careful urban planning is needed to ensure that the hydrologic cycle and water quality of the catchment areas are not affected. There are techniques that can attenuate peak flow during rain events and reduce the amount of metals, nutrients, and bacteria that enter the urban water cycle.
William F. Hunt --- Bill Lord --- Benjamin Loh --- Angelia Sia
This survey provides a brief and selective overview of research in the philosophy of mathematics education. It asks what makes up the philosophy of mathematics education, what it means, what questions it asks and answers, and what is its overall importance and use? It provides overviews of critical mathematics education, and the most relevant modern movements in the philosophy of mathematics. A case study is provided of an emerging research tradition in one country.
Paul Ernest --- Ole Skovsmose --- Jean Paul van Bendegem --- Maria Bicudo --- et al.
The Cellular Automaton Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
This book presents the deterministic view of quantum mechanics developed by Nobel Laureate Gerard 't Hooft. Dissatisfied with the uncomfortable gaps in the way conventional quantum mechanics meshes with the classical world, 't Hooft has revived the old hidden variable ideas, but now in a much more systematic way than usual. In this, quantum mechanics is viewed as a tool rather than a theory. The author gives examples of models that are classical in essence, but can be analysed by the use of quantum techniques, and argues that even the Standard Model, together with gravitational interactions, might be viewed as a quantum mechanical approach to analysing a system that could be classical at its core
Perspectives on European Earthquake Engineering and Seismology: Volume 2
This book collects 4 keynote and 15 theme lectures presented at the 2nd European Conference on Earthquake Engineering and Seismology (2ECEES), held in Istanbul, Turkey, from August 24 to 29, 2014. The conference was organized by the Turkish Earthquake Foundation - Earthquake Engineering Committee and Prime Ministry, Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency under the auspices of the European Association for Earthquake Engineering (EAEE) and European Seismological Commission (ESC).
Hormones, Metabolism and the Benefits of Exercise
The world is faced with an epidemic of metabolic diseases such as obesity and type 2 diabetes. This is due to changes in dietary habits and the decrease in physical activity. Exercise is usually part of the prescription, the first line of defense, to prevent or treat metabolic disorders. However, we are still learning how and why exercise provides metabolic benefits in human health. This open access volume focuses on the cellular and molecular pathways that link exercise, muscle biology, hormones and metabolism.
This in-depth survey of salutogenesis shows the breadth and strengths of this innovative perspective on health promotion, health care, and wellness. Background and historical chapters trace the development of the salutogenic model of health, and flesh out the central concepts, most notably generalized resistance resources and the sense of coherence, that differentiate it from pathogenesis. From there, experts describe a range of real-world applications within and outside health contexts, from positive psychology to geriatrics, from small towns to corrections facilities, and from school and workplace to professional training.
Maurice B. Mittelmark --- Shifra Sagy --- Monica Eriksson --- Georg F. Bauer --- et al.
Ranaviruses: Lethal Pathogens of Ectothermic Vertebrates
This is the first book on ranaviruses. Ranaviruses are double-stranded DNA viruses that cause hemorrhagic disease in amphibians, reptiles, and fish. They have caused mass die-offs of ectothermic vertebrates in wild and captive populations around the globe. There is evidence that this pathogen is emerging and responsible for population declines in certain locations. Considering that amphibians and freshwater turtles are suitable hosts and the most imperiled vertebrate taxa in the world, ranaviruses can have significant impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem function.
Nature-Based Solutions to Climate Change Adaptation in Urban Areas: Linkages between Science, Policy and Practice
This book brings together research findings and experiences from science, policy and practice to highlight and debate the importance of nature-based solutions to climate change adaptation in urban areas. Emphasis is given to the potential of nature-based approaches to create multiple-benefits for society. The expert contributions present recommendations for creating synergies between ongoing policy processes, scientific programmes and practical implementation of climate change and nature conservation measures in global urban areas.
Nadja Kabisch --- Horst Korn --- Jutta Stadler --- Aletta Bonn
Migration, Gender and Social Justice: Perspectives on Human Insecurity
This book is the product of a collaborative effort involving partners from Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America who were funded by the International Development Research Centre Programme on Women and Migration (2006-2011). The International Institute of Social Studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam spearheaded a project intended to distill and refine the research findings, connecting them to broader literatures and interdisciplinary themes. The book examines commonalities and differences in the operation of various structures of power (gender, class, race/ethnicity, generation) and their interactions within the institutional domains of intra-national and especially inter-national migration that produce context-specific forms of social injustice
Tanh-Dam Truong --- Des Gasper --- Jeff Handmaker --- Sylvia I. Bergh
Methods for Measuring Greenhouse Gas Balances and Evaluating Mitigation Options in Smallholder Agriculture
This book provides standards and guidelines for quantifying greenhouse gas emissions and removals in smallholder agricultural systems and comparing options for climate change mitigation based on emission reductions and livelihood trade-offs. Globally, agriculture is directly responsible for about 11% of annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and induces an additional 17% through land use change, mostly in developing countries. Farms in the developing countries of sub-Saharan Africa and Asia are predominately managed by smallholders, with 80% of land holdings smaller than ten hectares.
Todd S. Rosenstock --- Mariana C. Rufino --- Klaus Butterbach-Bahl --- Lini Wollenberg --- et al.
Mergers and Alliances in Higher Education: International Practice and Emerging Opportunities
This volume casts light on mergers and alliances in higher education by examining developments of this type in different countries. It combines the direct experiences of those at the heart of such transformations, university leaders and senior officials responsible for higher education policy, with expert analysts of the systems concerned. Higher education in Europe faces a series of major challenges. The economic crisis has accelerated expectations of an increased role in addressing economic and societal challenges while at the same time putting pressure on available finances. Broader trends such as shifting student demographics and expectations, globalisation and mobility and new ways of working with business have contributed to these increased pressures.
Adrian Curaj --- Luke Georghiou --- Jennifer Casenga Harper --- Eva Egron-Polak
This book describes how man-made litter, primarily plastic, has spread into the remotest parts of the oceans and covers all aspects of this pollution problem from the impacts on wildlife and human health to socio-economic and political issues. Marine litter is a prime threat to marine wildlife, habitats and food webs worldwide. The book illustrates how advanced technologies from deep-sea research, microbiology and mathematic modelling as well as classic beach litter counts by volunteers contributed to the broad awareness of marine litter as a problem of global significance
Melanie Bergmann --- Lars Gutow --- Michael Klages
This volume starts with an elementary introduction covering stem cell methodologies used to produce specific types of neurons, possibilities for their therapeutic use, and warnings of technical problems. In addition the authors report successes in achieving the derivation of a specific type of neuron. The dopamine neuron offers an important example and is discussed in more detail. Additional chapters cover problems obviously approachable with cells derived from stem cells, including their need in surgeries for pituitary cancers
Sexual Reproduction in Animals and Plants
This book contains the proceedings of the International Symposium on the Mechanisms of Sexual Reproduction in Animals and Plants, where many plant and animal reproductive biologists gathered to discuss their recent progress in investigating the shared mechanisms and factors involved in sexual reproduction. This now is the first book that reviews recent progress in almost all fields of plant and animal fertilization. It was recently reported that the self-sterile mechanism of a hermaphroditic marine invertebrate (ascidian) is very similar to the self-incompatibility system in flowering plants.
Hitoshi Sawada --- Naokazu Inoue --- Megumi Iwano
Biotechnologies for Plant Mutation Breeding: Protocols
This book offers 19 detailed protocols on the use of induced mutations in crop breeding and functional genomics studies, which cover topics including chemical and physical mutagenesis, phenotypic screening methods, traditional TILLING and TILLING by sequencing, doubled haploidy, targeted genome editing, and low-cost methods for the molecular characterization of mutant plants that are suitable for laboratories in developing countries
Joanna Jankowicz-Cieslak --- Thomas H. Tai --- Jochen Kumlehn --- Bradley J. Till
The aim of this book is to document for the first time the dimensions and requirements of effective integrated groundwater management (IGM). Groundwater management is a formidable challenge, one that remains one of humanity’s foremost priorities. It has become a largely non-renewable resource that is overexploited in many parts of the world. In the 21st century, the issue moves from how to simply obtain the water we need to how we manage it sustainably for future generations, future economies, and future ecosystems. The focus then becomes one of understanding the drivers and current state of the groundwater resource, and restoring equilibrium to at-risk aquifers.
Anthony J. Jakeman --- Olivier Barreteau --- Randall J. Hunt --- Jean-Daniel Rinaudo --- et al.
Instructional Scaffolding in STEM Education: Strategies and Efficacy Evidence
This book uses meta-analysis to synthesize research on scaffolding and scaffolding-related interventions in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education. Specifically, the volume examines the extent to which study quality, assessment type, and scaffolding characteristics (strategy, intended outcome, fading schedule, scaffolding intervention, and paired intervention) influence cognitive student outcomes. It includes detailed descriptions of the theoretical foundations of scaffolding, scaffolding strategies that have been proposed to meet different intended learning outcomes in STEM, and associated efficacy information.
Innovative Medicine: Basic Research and Development
This book is devoted to innovative medicine, comprising the proceedings of the Uehara Memorial Foundation Symposium 2014. It remains extremely rare for the findings of basic research to be developed into clinical applications, and it takes a long time for the process to be achieved. The task of advancing the development of basic research into clinical reality lies with translational science, yet the field seems to struggle to find a way to move forward. To create innovative medical technology, many steps need to be taken: development and analysis of optimal animal models of human diseases, elucidation of genomic and epidemiological data, and establishment of “proof of concept”.
Kazuwa Nakao --- Nagahiro Minato --- Shinji Uemoto
Methodological Investigations in Agent-Based Modelling: With Applications for the Social Sciences
This open access book examines the methodological complications of using complexity science concepts within the social science domain. The opening chapters take the reader on a tour through the development of simulation methodologies in the fields of artificial life and population biology, then demonstrates the growing popularity and relevance of these methods in the social sciences. Following an in-depth analysis of the potential impact of these methods on social science and social theory, the text provides substantive examples of the application of agent-based models in the field of demography.
Infrastructure and Economic Growth in Asia
Public spending on infrastructure plays an important role in promoting economic growth and poverty alleviation. Empirical studies unequivocally show that under-investment in infrastructure limit economic growth. At the same time, numerous other studies have shown that investment in infrastructure can be a highly effective tool in fighting poverty reduction1. In that context, the financing of infrastructure has been a critical element of most economic growth and poverty reduction strategies in developing countries, since the start of this millennium.
Jean-Yves Duclos --- John M. Cockburn --- Luca Tiberti --- Yazid Dissou
Evolution, Monitoring and Predicting Models of Rockburst: Precursor Information for Rock Failure
This open access book focuses on investigating predicting precursor information and key points of rockburst in mining engineering through laboratory experiment, theoretical analysis, numerical simulation and case studies. Understanding the evolution patterns for the microstructure instability of rock is a prerequisite for rockburst prediction. The book provides a guide for readers seeking to understand the evolution patterns for the microstrucure of rock failure, the predicting key point of rock failure and the rockburst predicting model.
High Mountain Conservation in a Changing World
This book aims to provide case studies and a general view of the main processes involved in the ecosystem shifts occurring in the high mountains, and to analyse the implications for nature conservation. Although case studies from the Pyrenees are preponderant, conclusions are aimed at any mountain range surrounded by highly populated lowland areas. The chapters give emphasis to approaches from environmental geography, functional ecology, biogeography, and paleoenvironmental reconstructions.
Jordi Catalan --- Josep M Ninot --- M. Mercè Aniz
Greening the Financial Sector: How to Mainstream Environmental Finance in Developing Countries
Environmental finance, particularly energy efficiency and renewable energy (EERE) finance, can and should serve as an interface to other sub-sectors of financial sector promotion such as microfinance, housing finance or agricultural finance. For example, existing clients of financial institutions include small and medium-sized enterprises and households, and these are often suffering from high energy prices or have no access to sustainable energy supply.
The Great Mindshift: How a New Economic Paradigm and Sustainability Transformations go Hand in Hand
This book describes the path ahead. It combines system transformation research with political economy and change leadership insights when discussing the need for a great mindshift in how human wellbeing, economic prosperity and healthy ecosystems are understood if the Great Transformations ahead are to lead to more sustainability. It shows that history is made by purposefully acting humans and introduces transformative literacy as a key skill in leading change.
Global Perspectives on Recognising Non-formal and Informal Learning: Why Recognition Matters
This book deals with the relevance of recognition and validation of non-formal and informal learning education and training, the workplace and society. In an increasing number of countries, it is at the top of the policy and research agenda ranking among the possible ways to redress the glaring lack of relevant academic and vocational qualifications and to promote the development of competences and certification procedures which recognise different types of learning, including formal, non-formal and informal learning.
The GEO Handbook on Biodiversity Observation Networks
Biodiversity observation systems are almost everywhere inadequate to meet local, national and international (treaty) obligations. As a result of alarmingly rapid declines in biodiversity in the modern era, there is a strong, worldwide desire to upgrade our monitoring systems, but little clarity on what is actually needed and how it can be assembled from the elements which are already present. This book intends to provide practical guidance to broadly-defined biodiversity observation networks at all scales, but predominantly the national scale and higher.
The Future of the Law of the Sea: Bridging Gaps Between National, Individual and Common Interests
It explores the diverse phenomena which are challenging the international law of the sea today, using the unique perspective of a simultaneous analysis of the national, individual and common interests at stake. This perspective, which all the contributors bear in mind when treating their own topic, also constitutes a useful element in the effort to bring today’s legal complexity and fragmentation to a homogenous vision of the sustainable use of the marine environment and of its resources, and also of the international and national response to maritime crimes.
This book provides insight into the Life Cycle Management (LCM) concept and the progress in its implementation. LCM is a management concept applied in industrial and service sectors to improve products and services, while enhancing the overall sustainability performance of business and its value chains. In this regard, LCM is an opportunity to differentiate through sustainability performance on the market place, working with all departments of a company such as research and development,
The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging network superstructure that will connect physical resources and actual users. It will support an ecosystem of smart applications and services bringing hyper-connectivity to our society by using augmented and rich interfaces. Whereas in the beginning IoT referred to the advent of barcodes and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), which helped to automate inventory, tracking and basic identification, today IoT is characterized by a dynamic trend toward connecting smart sensors, objects, devices, data and applications.
Alessandro Bassi --- Martin Bauer --- Martin Fiedler --- Rob van Kranenburg --- et al.
This book establishes the foundations needed to realize the ultimate goals for artificial intelligence, such as autonomy and trustworthiness. Aimed at scientists, researchers, technologists, practitioners, and students, it brings together contributions offering the basics, the challenges and the state-of-the-art on trusted autonomous systems in a single volume. The book is structured in three parts, with chapters written by eminent researchers and outstanding practitioners and users in the field.
Hussein A. Abbass --- Jason Scholz --- Darryn J. Reid
Food Price Volatility and Its Implications for Food Security and Policy
This book provides fresh insights into concepts, methods and new research findings on the causes of excessive food price volatility. It also discusses the implications for food security and policy responses to mitigate excessive volatility. The approaches applied by the contributors range from on-the-ground surveys, to panel econometrics and innovative high-frequency time series analysis as well as computational economics methods. It offers policy analysts and decision-makers guidance on dealing with extreme volatility.
Matthias Kalkuhl --- Joachim von Braun --- Maximo Torero
This open access book provides a set of conceptual, empirical, and comparative chapters that apply a public policy perspective to investigate the political and institutional factors driving the use of evidence to inform health policy in low, middle, and high income settings. The work presents key findings from the Getting Research Into Policy (GRIP-Health) project: a five year, six country, programme of work supported by the European Research Council. The chapters further our understanding of evidence utilisation in health policymaking through the application of theories and methods from the policy sciences.
Parkhurst, Justin --- Ettelt, Stefanie --- Hawkins, Benjamin
Collider Physics within the Standard Model: A Primer
With this graduate-level primer, the principles of the standard model of particle physics receive a particular skillful, personal and enduring exposition by one of the great contributors to the field. In 2013 the late Prof. Altarelli wrote: The discovery of the Higgs boson and the non-observation of new particles or exotic phenomena have made a big step towards completing the experimental confirmation of the standard model of fundamental particle interactions. It is thus a good moment for me to collect, update and improve my graduate lecture notes on quantum chromodynamics and the theory of electroweak interactions, with main focus on collider physics.
This book presents good practices in Asia and ASEAN countries for effectively promoting advances in response to climate change, which can help to achieve sustainable development in Asia and around the world. As a proposal, the aim is to influence the discussions at COP 21 by providing a positive agenda with concrete actions from an Asian perspective. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 describes the greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction scenario from an Asian perspective and in line with global 2 ° targets.
Education for Children with disabilities in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
The book discusses the influence of environmental factors, especially relationships and attitudes, on the education for children with disabilities in Addis Ababa/ Ethiopia. By including the voices of children, parents and teachers, a special focus has been put on family and issues of educational equity. Additionally, the significance of looking at cultural and societal backgrounds when analysing the efforts of implementing inclusive education is emphasised.
Education and Skills for Inclusive Growth, Green Jobs and the Greening of Economies in Asia: Case Study Summaries of India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Viet Nam
This book presents an overview of the main research findings and case studies concerning education and skills for inclusive growth, green jobs and the greening of economies. Focusing on India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Viet Nam, it discusses government and business sector responses to these issues and how Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) systems and institutions are addressing both the renewal of curricula in the context of green growth dynamics, and patterns of training and skills development to meet demands.
Rupert Maclean --- Shanti Jagannathan --- Brajesh Panth
Atlas of Challenges and Opportunities in European Neighbourhoods
This atlas provides a macro-regional overview of the areas that surround the European Union, from the Sahara to the Middle East, Western Balkans to European Russia, Turkey to the Arctic. Detailing key socio-economic data as well as developmental trends, the maps provide a comprehensive territorial analysis at a local scale and explore the potential for regional integration and cooperation.
Pierre Beckouche --- Pierre Besnard --- Hugues Pecout
Control Theory Tutorial: Basic Concepts Illustrated by Software Examples
This open access Brief introduces the basic principles of control theory in a concise self-study guide. It complements the classic texts by emphasizing the simple conceptual unity of the subject. A novice can quickly see how and why the different parts fit together. The concepts build slowly and naturally one after another, until the reader soon has a view of the whole. Each concept is illustrated by detailed examples and graphics. The full software code for each example is available, providing the basis for experimenting with various assumptions, learning how to write programs for control analysis, and setting the stage for future research projects.
This open access book provides a comprehensive European perspective on the concept of ageism, its origins, the manifestation and consequences of ageism, as well as ways to respond to and research ageism. The book represents a collaborative effort of researchers from over 20 countries and a variety of disciplines, including, psychology, sociology, gerontology, geriatrics, pharmacology, law, geography, design, engineering, policy and media studies. The contributors have collaborated to produce a truly stimulating and educating book on ageism which brings a clear overview of the state of the art in the field.
Governance for Drought Resilience: Land and Water Drought Management in Europe
This book presents the findings of a team of scientists and practitioners who have been working on the project “Benefits of Governance in Drought Adaptation” (in short: the DROP project), which is included in the European Union’s INTERREG IVB NWE programme. The DROP governance team developed a Governance Assessment Tool (GAT), which allows the governance setting of a given region for planning and realizing drought adaptation measures to be assessed
Hans Bressers --- Nanny Bressers --- Corinne Larrue
Communicating, Networking: Interacting: The International Year of Global Understanding - IYGU
This book illustrates the benefits to be gained from digitally networked communication for health, education and transitioning economies in developing nations (Sierra Leone and Papua New Guinea) and developed nations. Growing powers of e-citizenship can help build sustainable futures. This small volume provides a collection of examples and ideas from which the authors hope will help build a wider resource. Understanding how to link everyday lives with global networks in the digital world in ways that add benefit for the world’s people, and the health of the planet, is an ongoing project.
Cohabitation and Marriage in the Americas: Geo-historical Legacies and New Trends
This open access book presents an innovative study of the rise of unmarried cohabitation in the Americas, from Canada to Argentina. Using an extensive sample of individual census data for nearly all countries on the continent, it offers a cross-national, comparative view of this recent demographic trend and its impact on the family. The book offers a tour of the historical legacies and regional heterogeneity in unmarried cohabitation, covering: Canada, the United States, Mexico, Central America, Colombia, the Andean region, Brazil, and the Southern Cone.
Advances in Discrete Differential Geometry
This is one of the first books on a newly emerging field of discrete differential geometry and an excellent way to access this exciting area. It surveys the fascinating connections between discrete models in differential geometry and complex analysis, integrable systems and applications in computer graphics. The authors take a closer look at discrete models in differential geometry and dynamical systems. Their curves are polygonal, surfaces are made from triangles and quadrilaterals, and time is discrete. Nevertheless, the difference between the corresponding smooth curves, surfaces and classical dynamical systems with continuous time can hardly be seen
Emerging Technology Applications to Promote Physical Activity and Health
As technology becomes an ever-more prevalent part of everyday life, and population-based physical activity programs seek new ways to increase life-long engagement with physical activity, these two ideas have become increasingly linked. This Special Issue attempts to offer a thorough and critical examination of emerging technologies in physical activity and health promotion, considering technological interventions in different contexts (communities, clinics, schools, homes, etc.) among various populations, exploring the challenges of integrating technology into physical activity promotion, and offering solutions for its implementation.
Eating Disorders and Obesity: The Challenge for Our Times
Eating Disorders have traditionally been considered apart from public health concerns about increasing obesity. It is evident that these problems are, however, related in important ways. Comorbid obesity and eating disorder is increasing at a faster rate than either obesity or eating disorders alone and one in five people with obesity also presents with an Eating Disorder, commonly but not limited to Binge Eating Disorder. New disorders have emerged such as normal weight or Atypical Anorexia Nervosa.
The quality of drinking water is paramount for public health. Despite important improvements in the last decades, access to safe drinking water is not universal. The World Health Organization estimates that almost 10% of the population in the world do not have access to improved drinking water sources. Among other diseases, waterborne infections cause diarrhea, which kills nearly one million people every year, mostly children under 5 years of age. On the other hand, chemical pollution is a concern in high-income countries and an increasing problem in low- and middle-income countries.
Levallois, Patrick --- Villanueva Belmonte, Cristina
Contested Childhoods: Growing up in Migrancy
This open access book explores specific migration, governance, and identity processes currently involving children and ideas of childhood. Migrancy as a social space allows majority populations to question the capabilities of migrants, and is a space in which an increasing number of children are growing up. In this space, families, nation-states, civil society, as well as children themselves are central actors engaged in contesting the meaning of childhood. Childhood is a field of conceptual, moral and political contestation, where the ‘battles’ may range from minor tensions and everyday negotiations of symbolic or practical importance involving a limited number of people, to open conflicts involving violence and law enforcement.
Marie Louise Seeberg --- Elżbieta M. Goździak
Wearable Electronics and Embedded Computing Systems
Wearable electronics and embedded computing systems have been receiving a great deal of interest over the last two decades in research and commercial fields, with a special focus on biomedical applications. The key benefits introduced by these systems include their small size, lightweight, low-power consumption, and, of course, wearability. Major human-centered applications are related to medicine, enabling outpatient care and enhancing the quality of life for chronic disease patients, maybe preventing unnecessary hospitalization.
Enzo Pasquale Scilingo --- Gaetano Valenza
This survey addresses the use of technology in upper secondary mathematics education from four points of view: theoretical analysis of epistemological and cognitive aspects of activity in new technology mediated learning environments, the changes brought by technology in the interactions between environment, students and teachers, the interrelations between mathematical activities and technology, skills and competencies that must be developed in teacher education.
Turbulence: Numerical Analysis, Modelling and Simulation
The problem of accurate and reliable simulation of turbulent flows is a central and intractable challenge that crosses disciplinary boundaries. As the needs for accuracy increase and the applications expand beyond flows where extensive data is available for calibration, the importance of a sound mathematical foundation that addresses the needs of practical computing increases. This Special Issue is directed at this crossroads of rigorous numerical analysis, the physics of turbulence and the practical needs of turbulent flow simulations.
This book examines the kinds of transitions that have been studied in mathematics education research. It defines transition as a process of change, and describes learning in an educational context as a transition process. The book focuses on research in the area of mathematics education, and starts out with a literature review, describing the epistemological, cognitive, institutional and sociocultural perspectives on transition. It then looks at the research questions posed in the studies and their link with transition, and examines the theoretical approaches and methods used.
Ghislaine Gueudet --- Marianna Bosch --- Andrea A. diSessa --- Oh Nam Kwon --- et al.
Theory and Applications of Ordered Fuzzy Numbers: A Tribute to Professor Witold Kosiński
This open access book offers comprehensive coverage on Ordered Fuzzy Numbers, providing readers with both the basic information and the necessary expertise to use them in a variety of real-world applications. The respective chapters, written by leading researchers, discuss the main techniques and applications, together with the advantages and shortcomings of these tools in comparison to other fuzzy number representation models.
Piotr Prokopowicz --- Jacek Czerniak --- Dariusz Mikołajewski --- Łukasz Apiecionek --- et al.
Theories in and of Mathematics Education
This survey provides an overview of German meta-discourse on theories and mathematics education as a scientific discipline, from the 1970s to the 1990s. Two theory strands are offered: a semiotic view related to Peirce and Wittgenstein (presented by Willibald Dörfler), and the theory of learning activity by Joachim Lompscher (presented by Regina Bruder and Oliver Schmitt). By networking the two theoretical approaches in a case study of learning fractions, it clarifies the nature of the two theories, how they can be related to inform practice and renew
Angelika Bikner-Ahsbahs --- Andreas Vohns --- Oliver Schmitt --- Regina Bruder --- et al.
This survey focuses on the main trends in the field of calculus education. Despite their variety, the findings reveal a cornerstone issue that is strongly linked to the formalism of calculus concepts and to the difficulties it generates in the learning and teaching process. As a complement to the main text, an extended bibliography with some of the most important references on this topic is included. Since the diversity of the research in the field makes it difficult to produce an exhaustive state-of-the-art summary, the authors discuss recent developments that go beyond this survey and put forward new research questions.
David Bressoud --- Imène Ghedamsi --- Victor Martinez-Luaces --- Günter Törner
This book offers a theory for the analysis of how children learn and are taught about whole numbers. Two meanings of numbers are distinguished – the analytical meaning, defined by the number system, and the representational meaning, identified by the use of numbers as conventional signs that stand for quantities. This framework makes it possible to compare different approaches to making numbers meaningful in the classroom and contrast the outcomes of these diverse aspects of teaching. The book identifies themes and trends in empirical research on the teaching and learning
Symmetry with Operator Theory and Equations
A plethora of problems from diverse disciplines such as Mathematics, Mathematical: Biology, Chemistry, Economics, Physics, Scientific Computing and also Engineering can be formulated as an equation defined in abstract spaces using Mathematical Modelling. The solutions of these equations can be found in closed form only in special case. That is why researchers and practitioners utilize iterative procedures from which a sequence is being generated approximating the solution under some conditions on the initial data. This type of research is considered most interesting and challenging. This is our motivation for the introduction of this special issue on Iterative Procedures.
Symmetry is found everywhere, to a greater or lesser degree. It is essential in all sciences and also as the basic substrate in all arts. The same happens with Complex Networks, which are the majority of all those that interest for advanced knowledge, that is, for research. That is why these two themes have been unified here, whose intersection we are dealing with: in its first part, of fundamentals, and in its second part of applications, which are multiple in the world today.
Symmetry has a central role in the study of vision. The concept of symmetry has an ancient origin in considerations of visual appearance; in modern times, abstracted and formalized into Group Theory, it has found spectacular applications, far beyond the visible; but its importance for vision persists in many ways including: • As a non-accidental feature of an image that cues affordances, 3D structure or the semantic categories of object present. • As a redundant aspect of an image which many be exploited for simplicity and compactness of encoding.
Marco Bertamini (Ed.) --- Lewis Griffin (Ed.)
This book contains the successful invited submissions to a Special Issue of Symmetry on the subject of ""Graph Theory"". Although symmetry has always played an important role in Graph Theory, in recent years, this role has increased significantly in several branches of this field, including but not limited to Gromov hyperbolic graphs, the metric dimension of graphs, domination theory, and topological indices. This Special Issue includes contributions addressing new results on these topics, both from a theoretical and an applied point of view.
Symmetries of Nonlinear PDEs on Metric Graphs and Branched Networks
his Special Issue focuses on recent progress in a new area of mathematical physics and applied analysis, namely, on nonlinear partial differential equations on metric graphs and branched networks. Graphs represent a system of edges connected at one or more branching points (vertices). The connection rule determines the graph topology. When the edges can be assigned a length and the wave functions on the edges are defined in metric spaces, the graph is called a metric graph.
Stochastic Processes: Theory and Applications
The aim of this special issue is to publish original research papers that cover recent advances in the theory and application of stochastic processes. There is especial focus on applications of stochastic processes as models of dynamic phenomena in various research areas, such as queuing theory, physics, biology, economics, medicine, reliability theory, and financial mathematics. Potential topics include, but are not limited to: Markov chains and processes; large deviations and limit theorems; random motions; stochastic biological model; reliability, availability, maintenance, inspection; queueing models; queueing network models; computational methods for stochastic models; applications to risk theory, insurance and mathematical finance.
Zeifman, Alexander --- Korolev, Victor --- Sipin, Alexander
Stochastic processes have wide relevance in mathematics both for theoretical aspects and for their numerous real-world applications in various domains. They represent a very active research field which is attracting the growing interest of scientists from a range of disciplines.This Special Issue aims to present a collection of current contributions concerning various topics related to stochastic processes and their applications.
Di Crescenzo, Antonio --- Macci, Claudio --- Martinucci, Barbara
Stark Broadening of Spectral Lines in Plasmas
Experimental and theoretical studies of Stark broadening of spectral lines in plasmas are the cornerstone of a large number of spectroscopic diagnostics of laboratory and astrophysical plasmas. As such, they are very important both fundamentally and practically, the latter being due to the numerous practical applications of plasmas. Examples are studies dealing with: controlled thermonuclear fusion (that would provide a virtually unlimited source of energy), plasma-based lasers for medical and other purposes, technological microwave discharges (especially those used for manufacturing microchips), a better understanding of solar activity, other astrophysical objects (white dwarfs, flare stars, and so on).
The book serves both as a reference for various scaled models with corresponding dimensionless numbers, and as a resource for learning the art of scaling. A special feature of the book is the emphasis on how to create software for scaled models, based on existing software for unscaled models. Scaling (or non-dimensionalization) is a mathematical technique that greatly simplifies the setting of input parameters in numerical simulations.
Hans Petter Langtangen --- Geir K. Pedersen
Finite Difference Computing with Exponential Decay Models
This text provides a very simple, initial introduction to the complete scientific computing pipeline: models, discretization, algorithms, programming, verification, and visualization. The pedagogical strategy is to use one case study – an ordinary differential equation describing exponential decay processes – to illustrate fundamental concepts in mathematics and computer science. The book is easy to read and only requires a command of one-variable calculus and some very basic knowledge about computer programming
Mathematical ecology is an area of applied mathematics concerned with the application of mathematical concepts, tools and techniques, usually in the form of mathematical models, to problems arising in population dynamics, ecology and evolution. This Special Issue is designed to provide a snapshot of the state of the art in mathematical ecology. Topics of interest are (in no particular order) biological invasions, biological control, ecological pattern formation, ecologically relevant multiscale models, food webs, individual movement and dispersal, eco-epidemiology, evolutionary ecology, agroecosystems, regime shifts and early warning signals, synchronization and chaos.
Problem Solving in Mathematics Education
This survey book reviews four interrelated areas: (i) the relevance of heuristics in problem-solving approaches – why they are important and what research tells us about their use; (ii) the need to characterize and foster creative problem-solving approaches – what type of heuristics helps learners devise and practice creative solutions; (iii) the importance that learners formulate and pursue their own problems; and iv) the role played by the use of both multiple-purpose and ad hoc mathematical action types of technologies in problem-solving contexts – what ways of reasoning learners construct when they rely on the use of digital technologies, and how technology and technology approaches can be reconciled.
Peter Liljedahl --- Manuel Santos-Trigo --- Uldarico Malaspina --- Regina Bruder
This book by Helmut Wiedemann is a well-established, classic text, providing an in-depth and comprehensive introduction to the field of high-energy particle acceleration and beam dynamics.The present 4th edition has been significantly revised, updated and expanded. The newly conceived Part I is an elementary introduction to the subject matter for undergraduate students. Part II gathers the basic tools in preparation of a more advanced treatment, summarizing the essentials of electrostatics and electrodynamics as well as of particle dynamics in electromagnetic fields.
Mathematical optimization is the selection of the best element in a set with respect to a given criterion. Optimization has become one of the most-used tools in modern control theory for computing the control law, adjusting the controller parameters (tuning), model fitting, and finding suitable conditions in order to fulfill a given closed-loop property, among others. In the simplest case, optimization consists of maximizing or minimizing a function by systematically choosing input values from a valid input set and computing the function value.
Guillermo Valencia-Palomo (Ed.) --- Francisco Ronay López-Estrada (Ed.)
Operators of Fractional Calculus and Their Applications
During the past four decades or so, various operators of fractional calculus, such as those named after Riemann–Liouville, Weyl, Hadamard, Grunwald–Letnikov, Riesz, Erdelyi–Kober, Liouville–Caputo, and so on, have been found to be remarkably popular and important due mainly to their demonstrated applications in numerous diverse and widespread fields of the mathematical, physical, chemical, engineering, and statistical sciences. Many of these fractional calculus operators provide several potentially useful tools for solving differential, integral, differintegral, and integro-differential equations, together with the fractional-calculus analogues and extensions of each of these equations, and various other problems involving special functions of mathematical physics, as well as their extensions and generalizations in one and more variables.
New Trends in Statistical Physics of Complex Systems
A topical research activity in statistical physics concerns the study of complex and disordered systems. Generally, these systems are characterized by an elevated level of interconnection and interaction between the parts so that they give rise to a rich structure in the phase space that self-organizes under the control of internal non-linear dynamics. These emergent collective dynamics confer new behaviours to the whole system that are no longer the direct consequence of the properties of the single parts, but rather characterize the whole system as a new entity with its own features, giving rise to the birth of new phenomenologies. As is highlighted in this collection of papers, the methodologies of statistical physics have become very promising in understanding these new phenomena.
New Trends in Differential and Difference Equations and Applications
This Special Issue aims to be a compilation of new results in the areas of differential and difference Equations, covering boundary value problems, systems of differential and difference equations, as well as analytical and numerical methods. The objective is to provide an overview of techniques used in these different areas and to emphasize their applicability to real-life phenomena, by the inclusion of examples. These examples not only clarify the theoretical results presented, but also provide insight on how to apply, for future works, the techniques used.
Neutrosophic Multi-Criteria Decision Making
Neutrosophic logic and set are gaining significant attention in solving many real-life problems that involve uncertainty, impreciseness, vagueness, incompleteness, inconsistency, and indeterminacy. A number of new neutrosophic theories have been proposed and have been applied in Multi-Criteria Decision-Making, computational intelligence, multiple-attribute decision-making, image processing, medical diagnosis, fault diagnosis, optimization design, and so on. Neutrosophic logic, set, probability, statistics, etc., are, respectively, generalizations of fuzzy and intuitionistic fuzzy logic and set, classical and imprecise probability, classical statistics and so on.
Florentin Smarandache (Ed.) --- Jun Ye (Ed.) --- Yanhui Guo (Ed.)
Mathematics --- Statistics --- Philosophy
This volume is the first ever collection devoted to the field of proof-theoretic semantics. Contributions address topics including the systematics of introduction and elimination rules and proofs of normalization, the categorial characterization of deductions, the relation between Heyting's and Gentzen's approaches to meaning, knowability paradoxes, proof-theoretic foundations of set theory, Dummett's justification of logical laws, Kreisel's theory of constructions, paradoxical reasoning, and the defence of model theory.
Thomas Piecha --- Peter Schroeder-Heister
The method of densities for non-isotropic Boolean models
This book deals with the Boolean model, a basic model of stochastic geometry for the description of porous structures like the pore space in sand stone. The main result is a formula which gives in two and three dimensions a series representation of the most important model parameter, the intensity, using densities of so-called harmonic intrinsic volumes, which are new observable geometric quantities.
Metasurfaces, the two-dimensional analog of metamaterials, have attracted progressively increasing attention in recent years due to their planar configurations and, thus, ease of fabrication, while enabling an unprecedented control over optical fields. The phase, amplitude, polarization, helicity, and even angular momentum of the reflected or transmitted optical fields can be controlled at will by tailoring optically thin planar arrays of resonant subwavelength elements arranged in a periodic or aperiodic manner. As a result, numerous applications and fascinating devices have been realized by designed planar metasurfaces, including beam deflectors, wave plates, flat lenses, holograms, surface wave couplers, and freeform metasurfaces.
Sergey I. Bozhevolnyi (Ed.) --- Patrice Genevet (Ed.) --- Fei Ding (Ed.)
Measurement and Control of Charged Particle Beams
This advanced textbook and reference is the first comprehensive and systematic review of all methods used for the measurement, correction, and control of the beam dynamics of modern particle accelerators. Based on material presented in several lectures at the US Particle Accelerator School, the text is intended for graduate students starting research or work in the field of beam physics. Relativistic beams in linear accelerators and storage rings provide the focus. After a review of linear optics, the text addresses basic and advanced techniques for beam control, plus a variety of methods for the manipulation of particle-beam properties.
The Mathematics Education of Prospective Secondary Teachers Around the World
This volume shares and discusses significant new trends and developments in research and practices related to various aspects of preparing prospective secondary mathematics teachers from 2005–2015. It provides both an overview of the current state-of-the-art and outstanding recent research reports from an international perspective. The authors completed a thorough review of the literature by examining major journals in the field of mathematics education, and other journals related to teacher education and technology.
Marilyn E. Strutchens --- Rongjin Huang --- Leticia Losano --- Despina Potari --- et al.
Mathematical Modelling in Engineering & Human Behaviour 2018
This book includes papers in cross-disciplinary applications of mathematical modelling: from medicine to linguistics, social problems, and more. Based on cutting-edge research, each chapter is focused on a different problem of modelling human behaviour or engineering problems at different levels. The reader would find this book to be a useful reference in identifying problems of interest in social, medicine and engineering sciences, and in developing mathematical models that could be used to successfully predict behaviours and obtain practical information for specialised practitioners.
Jódar, Lucas --- Carlos Cortés, Juan --- Rodríguez, Luis Acedo
Investigations involving the theory and applications of mathematical analytic tools and techniques are remarkably wide-spread in many diverse areas of the mathematical, physical, chemical, engineering and statistical sciences. In this Special Issue, we invite and welcome review, expository and original research articles dealing with the recent advances in mathematical analysis and its multidisciplinary applications.
Iterative Methods for Solving Nonlinear Equations and Systems
Solving nonlinear equations in Banach spaces (real or complex nonlinear equations, nonlinear systems, and nonlinear matrix equations, among others), is a non-trivial task that involves many areas of science and technology. Usually the solution is not directly affordable and require an approach using iterative algorithms. This Special Issue focuses mainly on the design, analysis of convergence, and stability of new schemes for solving nonlinear problems and their application to practical problems. Included papers study the following topics
Torregrosa, Juan R. --- Cordero, Alicia --- Soleymani, Fazlollah
International Comparative Studies in Mathematics: Lessons for Improving Students’ Learning
This open access book examines the cultural and educational factors that influence how successfully students learn mathematics; focuses on international comparative studies as a means of generating theories and improving students’ learning; and discusses four valuable lessons that can be learned from international comparative studies with regard to improving students’ learning.
Jinfa Cai --- Ida A.C. Mok --- Vijay Reddy --- Kaye Stacey
This book provides an essential introduction to the state-of the-art in interdisciplinary Mathematics Education. First, it begins with an outline of the field’s relevant historical, conceptual and theoretical backgrounds, what “discipline” means and how inter-, trans-, and meta-disciplinary activities can be understood. Relevant theoretical perspectives from Marx, Foucault and Vygotsky are explained, along with key ideas in theory, e.g. boundaries, discourses, identity, and the division of labour in practice.
Julian Williams --- Wolff-Michael Roth --- David Swanson --- Brian Doig --- et al.
This Special Issue of the journal Entropy, titled “Information Geometry I”, contains a collection of 17 papers concerning the foundations and applications of information geometry. Based on a geometrical interpretation of probability, information geometry has become a rich mathematical field employing the methods of differential geometry.
History of Mathematics Teaching and Learning
This work examines the main directions of research conducted on the history of mathematics education. It devotes substantial attention to research methodologies and the connections between this field and other scholarly fields. The results of a survey about academic literature on this subject are accompanied by a discussion of what has yet to be done and problems that remain unsolved. The main topics you will find in “ICME-13 Topical Survey” include: • Discussions of methodological issues in the history of mathematics education and of the relation between this field and other scholarly fields. •
Harmonic Oscillators and Two-by‑two Matrices in Symmetry Problems in Physics
This book consists of the articles published in the special issues of this Symmetry journal based on two-by-two matrices and harmonic oscillators. The book also contains additional articles published by the guest editor in this Symmetry journal. They are of course based on harmonic oscillators and/or two-by-two matrices. The subject of symmetry is based on exactly soluble problems in physics, and the physical theory is not soluble unless it is based on oscillators and/or two-by-two matrices.
The topic of guided wave (GW) propagation comprises a vast research area overlapping with photonics, matter waves in macroscopic quantum media (ultracold gases of bosonic and fermionic atoms, condensates of quasiparticles, such as excitons-polaritons, magnons, and cavity photons), hydrodynamics, acoustics, plasma physics, etc. In many situations, tightly confined GWs naturally acquire high amplitudes, which gives rise to a plenty of fascinating nonlinear effects. In particular, waveguides often provide a combination of nonlinearity, group-velocity dispersion, and low losses which is necessary for the creation of solitons (robust solitary waves).
Geometry and topology of wild translation surfaces
A translation surface is a two-dimensional manifold, equipped with a translation structure. It can be obtained by considering Euclidean polygons and identifying their edges via translations. The vertices of the polygons form singularities if the translation structure can not be extended to them. We study translation surfaces with wild singularities, regarding the topology (genus and space of ends), the geometry (behavior of the singularities), and how the topology and the geometry are related
Geometric Regularization in Bioluminescence Tomography
Bioluminescence tomography is a recent biomedical imaging technique which allows to study molecular and cellular activities in vivo. From a mathematical point of view, it is an ill-posed inverse source problem: the location and the intensity of a photon source inside an organism have to be determined, given the photon count on the organism's surface. To face the ill-posedness of this problem, a geometric regularization approach is introduced, analyzed and numerically verified in this book.
This book contains the successful invited submissions to a Special Issue of Symmetry in the subject area of “Fuzzy Techniques for Decision Making”. We invited contributions addressing novel techniques and tools for decision making (e.g., group or multi-criteria decision making) with notions that overcome the problem of finding the membership degree of each element as in Zadeh's original model. We could garner interesting articles on a variety of setups as well as applications.
This book provides a timely overview of topics in fuzzy mathematics. It lays the foundation for further research and applications in a broad range of areas. It contains break-through analysis on how results from the many variations and extensions of fuzzy set theory can be obtained from known results of traditional fuzzy set theory. The book contains not only theoretical results, but a wide range of applications in areas such as decision analysis, optimal allocation in possibilistics and mixed models, pattern classification, credibility measures, algorithms for modeling uncertain data, and numerical methods for solving fuzzy linear systems
This book is focused on fractional order systems. Historically, fractional calculus has been recognized since the inception of regular calculus, with the first written reference dated in September 1695 in a letter from Leibniz to L’Hospital. Nowadays, fractional calculus has a wide area of applications in areas such as physics, chemistry, bioengineering, chaos theory, control systems engineering, and many others. In all those applications, we deal with fractional order systems in general. Moreover, fractional calculus plays an important role even in complex systems and therefore allows us to develop better descriptions of real-world phenomena.
Fractional Differential Equations: Theory, Methods and Applications
Fractional calculus provides the possibility of introducing integrals and derivatives of an arbitrary order in the mathematical modelling of physical processes, and it has become a relevant subject with applications to various fields, such as anomalous diffusion, propagation in different media, and propogation in relation to materials with different properties. However, many aspects from theoretical and practical points of view have still to be developed in relation to models based on fractional operators.
Nieto, Juan J. --- Rodríguez-López, Rosana
Fractional Calculus: Theory and Applications
Fractional calculus is allowing integrals and derivatives of any positive order (the term fractional is kept only for historical reasons). It can be considered a branch of mathematical physics that deals with integro-differential equations, where integrals are of convolution type and exhibit mainly singular kernels of power law or logarithm type. It is a subject that has gained considerably popularity and importance in the past few decades in diverse fields of science and engineering. Efficient analytical and numerical methods have been developed but still need particular attention. The purpose of this Special Issue is to establish a collection of articles that reflect the latest mathematical and conceptual developments in the field of fractional calculus and explore the scope for applications in applied sciences.
Early Geometrical Thinking in the Environment of Patterns, Mosaics and Isometries
This book discusses the learning and teaching of geometry, with a special focus on kindergarten and primary education. It examines important new trends and developments in research and practice, and emphasizes theoretical, empirical and developmental issues. Further, it discusses various topics, including curriculum studies and implementation, spatial abilities and geometric reasoning, as well as the psychological roots of geometrical thinking and teacher preparation in geometry education. It considers these issues from historical, epistemological, cognitive semiotic and educational points of view in the context of students' difficulties and the design of teaching and curricula.
Early Algebra: Research into its Nature, its Learning, its Teaching
This survey of the state of the art on research in early algebra traces the evolution of a relatively new field of research and teaching practice. With its focus on the younger student, aged from about 6 years up to 12 years, this volume reveals the nature of the research that has been carried out in early algebra and how it has shaped the growth of the field. The survey, in presenting examples drawn from the steadily growing research base, highlights both the nature of algebraic thinking and the ways in which this thinking is being developed in the primary and early middle school student.
Dynamic risk management with Markov decision processes
An important tool in risk management is the implementation of risk measures. We study dynamic models where risk measures and dynamic risk measures can be applied. In particular, we solve various portfolio optimization problems and introduce a class of dynamic risk measures via the notion of Markov decision processes. Using Bayesian control theory we furthermore derive an extension of the latter setting when we face model uncertainty.
The present book contains 14 papers published in the Special Issue “Differential Geometry” of the journal Mathematics. They represent a selection of the 30 submissions. This book covers a variety of both classical and modern topics in differential geometry. We mention properties of both rectifying and affine curves, the geometry of hypersurfaces, angles in Minkowski planes, Euclidean submanifolds, differential operators and harmonic forms on Riemannian manifolds, complex manifolds, contact manifolds (in particular, Sasakian and trans-Sasakian manifolds), curvature invariants, and statistical manifolds and their submanifolds (in particular, Hessian manifolds).
Design Science and Its Importance in the German Mathematics Educational Discussion
This ICME-13 Topical Survey reviews the state-of-the-art by first exploring the roots and scope of design science. Second, it presents two examples of current design science projects that focus on substantial learning environments including a student and a teacher perspective. Subsequently, the book elaborates on how empirical research can be conceptualised within design science. Lastly, it explores developments in design science from a national and international perspective, while also discussing current trends in design research. Within the German-language tradition, considering ‘mathematics education as a design science’ primarily draws on the works of Wittmann.
Marcus Nührenbörger --- Bettina Rösken-Winter --- Chun Ip Fung --- Ralph Schwarzkopf --- et al.
Current Trends in Symmetric Polynomials with their Applications
This Special Issue presents research papers on various topics within many different branches of mathematics, applied mathematics, and mathematical physics. Each paper presents mathematical theories, methods, and their application based on current and recently developed symmetric polynomials. Also, each one aims to provide the full understanding of current research problems, theories, and applications on the chosen topics and includes the most recent advances made in the area of symmetric functions and polynomials.
The Craft of Fractional Modelling in Science and Engineering
This book is a result of the contributions of scientists involved in a Special Issue entitled “The Craft of Fractional Modelling in Science and Engineering” published by the journal Fractal and Fractional (MDPI). Most of the articles were published at the end of 2017 and the beginning 2018. In accordance with the initial aim of the Special Issue, the best published have now been consolidated into this book. The articles included span a broad area of applications of fractional calculus and demonstrate the feasibility of the non-integer differentiation and integration approach in modeling, directly related to pertinent problems in science and engineering
Applied Analysis of Ordinary Differential Equations
One might say that ordinary differential equations (notably, in Isaac Newton’s analysis of the motion of celestial bodies) had a central role in the development of modern applied mathematics. This book is devoted to research articles which build upon this spirit: combining analysis with the applications of ordinary differential equations (ODEs). ODEs arise across a spectrum of applications in physics, engineering, geophysics, biology, chemistry, economics, etc., because the rules governing the time-variation of relevant fields is often naturally expressed in terms of relationships between rates of change.
Algebraic Structures of Neutrosophic Triplets, Neutrosophic Duplets, or Neutrosophic Multisets ( 2 )
Neutrosophy (1995) is a new branch of philosophy that studies triads of the form (, , ), where is an entity {i.e. element, concept, idea, theory, logical proposition, etc.}, is the opposite of , while is the neutral (or indeterminate) between them, i.e., neither nor .Based on neutrosophy, the neutrosophic triplets were founded, which have a similar form (x, neut(x), anti(x)), that satisfy several axioms, for each element x in a given set.This collective book presents original research papers by many neutrosophic researchers from around the world, that report on the state-of-the-art and recent advancements of neutrosophic triplets, neutrosophic duplets, neutrosophic multisets and their algebraic structures – that have been defined recently in 2016 but have gained interest from world researchers.
Smarandache, Florentin --- Zhang, Xiaohong --- Ali, Mumtaz
Algebraic Structures of Neutrosophic Triplets, Neutrosophic Duplets, or Neutrosophic Multisets
Advances in Mechanical Problems of Functionally Graded Materials and Structures
The book deals with novel aspects and perspectives in functionally graded materials (FGMs), which are advanced engineering materials designed for a specific performance or function with spatial gradation in structure and/or composition. The contributions mainly focus on numerical simulations of mechanical properties and the behavior of FGMs and FGM structures. Several advancements in numerical simulations that are particularly useful for investigations on FGMs have been proposed and demonstrated in this Special Issue.
Bui, Tinh Quoc --- Lich, Le Van --- Yu, Tiantang --- Singh, Indra Vir
The Challenge of Chance: A Multidisciplinary Approach from Science and the Humanities
This book presents a multidisciplinary perspective on chance, with contributions from distinguished researchers in the areas of biology, cognitive neuroscience, economics, genetics, general history, law, linguistics, logic, mathematical physics, statistics, theology and philosophy. The individual chapters are bound together by a general introduction followed by an opening chapter that surveys 2500 years of linguistic, philosophical, and scientific reflections on chance, coincidence, fortune, randomness, luck and related concepts. A main conclusion that can be drawn is that, even after all this time, we still cannot be sure whether chance is a truly fundamental and irreducible phenomenon, in that certain events are simply uncaused and could have been otherwise, or whether it is always simply a reflection of our ignorance.
Bayesian Methods in the Search for MH370
This book demonstrates how nonlinear/non-Gaussian Bayesian time series estimation methods were used to produce a probability distribution of potential MH370 flight paths. It provides details of how the probabilistic models of aircraft flight dynamics, satellite communication system measurements, environmental effects and radar data were constructed and calibrated. The probability distribution was used to define the search zone in the southern Indian Ocean. The book describes particle-filter based numerical calculation of the aircraft flight-path probability distribution and validates the method using data from several of the involved aircraft’s previous flights.
Sam Davey --- Neil Gordon --- Ian Holland --- Mark Rutten --- et al.
Observations and Theory of Short GRBs at the Dawn of the Gravitational Wave Era
The book starts with a review of the established facts on the numerical simulations of binary neutron star mergers and simulations of short GRB jets that highlights the issues that need to be revised and further clarified, as the need to understand how the relativistic outflow was launched, what the initial structure of the outflow is, and how it evolved through its interaction with the binary ejecta. Constraints on a local population of faint short duration GRBs are then provided in light of the GW170817/GRB 170817A event at d~40
Stratta, Giulia --- Rossi, Andrea --- Dainotti, Maria Giovanna
Emerging Advances in Petrophysics. Porous Media Characterization and Modeling of Multiphase Flow
Due to the influence of pore-throat size distribution, pore connectivity, and microscale fractures, the transport, distribution, and residual saturation of fluids in porous media are difficult to characterize. Petrophysical methods in natural porous media have attracted great attention in a variety of fields, especially in the oil and gas industry. A wide range of research studies have been conducted on the characterization of porous media covers and multiphase flow therein. Reliable approaches for characterizing microstructure and multiphase flow in porous media are crucial in many fields, including the characterization of residual water or oil in hydrocarbon reservoirs and the long-term storage of supercritical CO2 in geological formations.
Cai, Jianchao --- Sun, Shuyu --- Habibi, Ali --- Zhang, Zhien
Managing the Complexity of Critical Infrastructures: A Modelling and Simulation Approach
This book summarizes work being pursued in the context of the CIPRNet (Critical Infrastructure Preparedness and Resilience Research Network) research project, co-funded by the European Union under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). The project is intended to provide concrete and on-going support to the Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) research communities, enhancing their preparedness for CI-related emergencies, while also providing expertise and technologies for other stakeholders to promote their understanding and mitigation of the consequences of CI disruptions, leading to enhanced resilience.
Roberto Setola --- Vittorio Rosato --- Elias Kyriakides --- Erich Rome
White-Collar Crime in the Shadow Economy: Lack of Detection, Investigation and Conviction Compared to Social Security Fraud
This open access book examines the magnitude, causes of, and reactions to white-collar crime, based on the theories and research of those who have uncovered various forms of white-collar crime. It argues that the offenders who are convicted represent only ‘the tip of the iceberg’ of a much greater problem: because white-collar crime is forced to compete with other kinds of financial crime like social security fraud for police resources and so receives less attention and fewer investigations.
This book compares the lessons learned from a wetland-perspective approach to the changing climate and the requirements of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) with regard to environmental conservation. Examples from Germany and Poland are discussed due to the efficiency of their respective implementations of water conservation policies. Although the general scientific interest in specific issues such as wetlands, climate change, nature conservation and the WFD enjoy a well established position in international environmental research, these four elements are rarely considered together due to the complexity of the processes, biased scenarios of global change and subjective policy background.
How can the Web be made situation-aware? Event processing is a suitable technology for gaining the necessary real-time results. The Web, however, has many users and many application domains. Thus, we developed multi-schema friendly data models allowing the re-use and mix from diverse users and application domains. Furthermore, our methods describe protocols to exchange events on the Web, algorithms to execute the language and to calculate access rights.
The dynamically changing world economy, in an era of intensive development and globalization, creates new needs in both the theoretical models of management and in the practical discussion related to the perception of business. Because of new economic phenomena related to the crisis, there is a need for the design and operationalization of innovative business models for companies. Due to the fact that in times of crisis, the principles of strategic balance are particularly important; these business models can be sustainable business models. Moreover, it is essential to skillfully use different methods and concepts of management to ensure the continuity of business
Second Assessment of Climate Change for the Baltic Sea Basin
This book is an update of the first BACC assessment, published in 2008. It offers new and updated scientific findings in regional climate research for the Baltic Sea basin. These include climate changes since the last glaciation (approx. 12,000 years ago), changes in the recent past (the last 200 years), climate projections up until 2100 using state-of-the-art regional climate models and an assessment of climate-change impacts on terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems. There are dedicated new chapters on sea-level rise, coastal erosion and impacts on urban areas.
Sustainable Smart Cities and Smart Villages Research
ca. 200 words; this text will present the book in all promotional forms (e.g. flyers). Please describe the book in straightforward and consumer-friendly terms. [There is ever more research on smart cities and new interdisciplinary approaches proposed on the study of smart cities. At the same time, problems pertinent to communities inhabiting rural areas are being addressed, as part of discussions in contigious fields of research, be it environmental studies, sociology, or agriculture. Even if rural areas and countryside communities have previously been a subject of concern for robust policy frameworks, such as the European Union’s Cohesion Policy and Common Agricultural Policy Arguably, the concept of ‘the village’ has been largely absent in the debate
Miltiadis D. Lytras (Ed.) --- Anna Visvizi (Ed.)
Innovations in Derivatives Markets: Fixed Income Modeling, Valuation Adjustments, Risk Management, and Regulation
his book presents 20 peer-reviewed chapters on current aspects of derivatives markets and derivative pricing. The contributions, written by leading researchers in the field as well as experienced authors from the financial industry, present the state of the art in: • Modeling counterparty credit risk: credit valuation adjustment, debit valuation adjustment, funding valuation adjustment, and wrong way risk. • Pricing and hedging in fixed-income markets and multi-curve interest-rate modeling. •
Kathrin Glau --- Zorana Grbac --- Matthias Scherer --- Rudi Zagst
The concept of sustainability is important for companies both in the case of SMEs and worldwide multinational companies. Some key factors to help a company achieve its sustainability objectives are based on human resource management. Sustainable human resource management is a typical cross-functional task that becomes increasingly important at the strategic level of a company. Industry 4.0 technologies, Internet of Things, and competitive demands, as signs of globalization, have led to significant changes across the organizational structures and human resource strategies of companies.
The dynamically changing world economy, in an era of intensive development and globalization, creates new needs in both the theoretical models of management and in the practical discussion related to the perception of business. Because of new economic phenomena related to the crisis, there is a need for the design and operationalization of innovative business models for companies. Due to the fact that in times of crisis, the principles of strategic balance are particularly important; these business models can be sustainable business models. Moreover, it is essential to skillfully use different methods and concepts of management to ensure the continuity of business. It seems that sustainable business models, in their essence, can support companies' effectiveness and contribute to their stable, sustainable functioning in the difficult, ever-changing market
Subject-Oriented Business Process Management
Activities performed in organizations are coordinated via communication between the people involved. The sentences used to communicate are naturally structured by subject, verb, and object. The subject describes the actor, the verb the action and the object what is affected by the action. Subject-oriented Business Process Management (S-BPM) as presented in this book is based on this simple structure which enables process-oriented thinking and process modeling. S-BPM puts the subject of a process at the center of attention and thus deals with business processes and their organizational environment from a new perspective, meeting organizational requirements in a much better way than traditional approaches.
Albert Fleischmann --- Werner Schmidt --- Christian Stary --- Stefan Obermeier --- et al.
Strategic power plant investment planning under fuel and carbon price uncertainty
The profitability of power plant investments depends strongly on uncertain fuel and carbon prices. In this doctoral thesis, we combine fundamental electricity market models with stochastic dynamic programming to evaluate power plant investments under uncertainty. The application of interpolation-based stochastic dynamic programming and approximate dynamic programming allows us to consider a greater variety of stochastic fuel and carbon price scenarios compared to other approaches
Stochastics of Environmental and Financial Economics
These Proceedings offer a selection of peer-reviewed research and survey papers by some of the foremost international researchers in the fields of finance, energy, stochastics and risk, who present their latest findings on topical problems. The papers cover the areas of stochastic modeling in energy and financial markets; risk management with environmental factors from a stochastic control perspective; and valuation and hedging of derivatives in markets dominated by renewables, all of which further develop the theory of stochastic analysis and mathematical finance.
S-BPM in the Production Industry: A Stakeholder Approach
Business and Management ---, Computer Science
This volume presents several case studies highlighting the latest findings in Industry 4.0 projects utilizing S-BPM features. Their potential is explored in detail, while the limits of engineering a company from a communication-centred perspective are also discussed. After a general introduction and an overview of the book in chapter 1, chapter 2 starts by condensing the industrial challenges driven by the German “Industry 4.0” trend to form a concrete vision for future production industries.
S-BPM Illustrated: A Storybook about Business Process Modeling and Execution
S-BPM stands for “subject-oriented business process management” and focuses on subjects that represent the entities (people, programs etc.) that are actively engaged in processes. S-BPM has become one of the most widely discussed approaches for process professionals. Its potential particularly lies in the integration of advanced information technology with organizational and managerial methods to foster and leverage business innovation, operational excellence and intra- and inter-organizational collaboration. Thus S-BPM can also be understood as a stakeholder-oriented and social business process management methodology.
Albert Fleischmann --- Stefan Raß --- Robert Singer
Role and dynamics of 'Late-comers' in the global technology competition
Faster developing cycles and economic developments created many emerging economies in the 20th century. For sustainable economic growth, however, the construction and constant preservation of a profound knowledge base and technological pool is crucial. Brazil, China, India and Russia, experienced constant high economic growth rates and begun to evolve to solid economies which are challenging the established players. This book consists of a profound empirical analysis of these emerging economies.
Risk Measures with Applications in Finance and Economics
Risk measures play a vital role in many subfields of economics and finance. It has been proposed that risk measures could be analysed in relation to the performance of variables extracted from empirical real-world data. For example, risk measures may help inform effective monetary and fiscal policies and, therefore, the further development of pricing models for financial assets such as equities, bonds, currencies, and derivative securities.A Special Issue of “Risk Measures with Applications in Finance and Economics” will be devoted to advancements in the mathematical and statistical development of risk measures with applications in finance and economics.
Risk management of natural disasters. The example of Mexico
The focuses are on the study of risk management of natural disasters from the perspective of complex systems, using the example of Mexico. It develops the theory of an arrival process taking into account an early warning system and we use it to create appropriate actuarial models. Then, it formulates a stochastic optimization problem to find an investment strategy for the management of a fund from the perspective of a risk-averse government. The solution is given with the use of the Föllmer-Schweizer strategy.
Financial Risk Measurement is a challenging task, because both the types of risk and the techniques evolve very quickly. This book collects a number of novel contributions to the measurement of financial risk, which address either non-fully explored risks or risk takers, and does so in a wide variety of empirical contexts.
Research Assessment in the Humanities: Towards Criteria and Procedures
This book analyses and discusses the recent developments for assessing research quality in the humanities and related fields in the social sciences. Research assessments in the humanities are highly controversial and the evaluation of humanities research is delicate. While citation-based research performance indicators are widely used in the natural and life sciences, quantitative measures for research performance meet strong opposition in the humanities. This volume combines the presentation of state-of-the-art projects on research assessments in the humanities by humanities scholars themselves with a description of the evaluation of humanities research in practice presented by research funders. Bibliometric issues concerning humanities research complete the exhaustive analysis of humanities research assessment.
Michael Ochsner --- Sven E. Hug --- Hans-Dieter Daniel
How are users influenced by social media platforms when they generate content, and does this influence affect users’ compliance with copyright laws? These are pressing questions in today’s internet age, and Regulating Content on Social Media answers them by analysing how the behaviours of social media users are regulated from a copyright perspective. Corinne Tan, an internet governance specialist, compares copyright laws on selected social media platforms, namely Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, Twitter and Wikipedia, with other regulatory factors such as the terms of service and the technological features of each platform. This comparison enables her to explore how each platform affects the role copyright laws play in securing compliance from their users
Global Business Strategy: Multinational Corporations Venturing into Emerging Markets
This book presents theories and case studies for corporations in developed nations, including Japan, for designing strategies to maximize opportunities and minimize threats in business expansion into developing nations. The case studies featured here focus on Asia, including China and India, and use examples of Japanese manufacturers. Five case studies are provided, including Hitachi Construction Machinery and Shiseido in China and Maruti Suzuki in India. These cases facilitate the reader’s understanding of the business environments in emerging economies.
Quality in Design and Execution of Engineering Practice
Quality in Design and Execution of Engineering Practice is about quality management focused at fitness for purpose, rather than compliance with specifications, rules and regulations. The focus on getting execution in line with fitness for purpose is supported by a classification of seven different categories of quality, defined by their relevance for purpose, compliance with specifications, and actual execution. This classification facilitates decision making on desirable exemptions from specifications in the interest of both buyer and supplier. The author offers guidelines for quality management in different types of business units: License Giver, License Taker, Jobber and Consultant.
Protecting the Rights of People with Autism in the Fields of Education and Employment
Promoting Social Dialogue in European Organizations: Human Resources Management and Constructive Conflict Management
This volume focuses on describing the social dialogue system in organizations from an Human Resources Management perspective. Based on the NEIRE model for industrial relations, key factors are determined contributing to creative social dialogue in European organizations. Actual data from surveys and interviews from more than 700 CEO and HR managers in eleven European countries give insights in the experiences with and expectations of employers of social dialogue. The volume offers a comprehensive introduction to the historical context and current situation in social dialogue in these countries.
Martin C Euwema --- Lourdes Munduate --- Patricia Elgoibar --- Erica Pender --- et al.
Production cost models with regard to liberalised electricity markets
This book makes a contribution to the formulation and implementation of production cost models for the modelling of liberalized electricity markets by addressing issues associated with the level of detail in the representation of the underlying power system, the accuracy of the results and the modelling effort. To this end a production cost model was formulated and applied to estimate the short-run marginal cost of the power systems of three important European electricity markets.
Process Measurement in Business Process Management : Theoretical Framework and Analysis of Several Aspects
Process measurement deals with the quantification of business process models using process model metrics. This book presents a theoretical framework for the prediction of external process model attributes (as, for example, error-proneness and understandabiltiy) based on internal (structural) attributes. The properties of proposed metrics are analyzed. A visualization technique for metric values is introduced and metrics for process model understandability and granularity are evaluated.
Preparing for Life in a Digital Age: The IEA International Computer and Information Literacy Study International Report
Ability to use information and communication technologies (ICT) is an imperative for effective participation in today’s digital age. Schools worldwide are responding to the need to provide young people with that ability. But how effective are they in this regard? The IEA International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS) responded to this question by studying the extent to which young people have developed computer and information literacy (CIL), which is defined as the ability to use computers to investigate, create and communicate with others at home, school, the workplace and in society
Julian Fraillon --- John Ainley --- Wolfram Schulz --- Tim Friedman --- et al.
Poverty Reduction Policies and Practices in Developing Asia
This book looks at the major policy challenges facing developing Asia and how the region sustains rapid economic growth to reduce multidimensional poverty through socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable measures. Asia is facing many challenges arising from population growth, rapid urbanization, provision of services, climate change and the need to redress declining growth after the global financial crisis. This book examines poverty and related issues and aims to advance the development of new tools and measurement of multidimensional poverty and poverty reduction policy analysis.
Almas Heshmati --- Esfandiar Maasoumi --- Guanghua Wan
Performance and Behavior of Family Firms
Family involvement characterizes a large number of firms around the world and is thought to significantly impact their strategies, behavior, and performance. Family involvement occurs when a family exerts control over the firm through ownership and management. When family involvement leads to intentions to pursue particularistic goals and strategies, controlling families are more likely to exert a significant influence on firm strategies, behavior, and performance. Indeed, intentions imply that a firm’s strategic behaviors will be oriented toward preserving the economic and socioemotional value of the firm for the family in the long term.
The Organizational Aspects of Corporate and Organizational Crime
Corporate crimes seem endemic to modern society. Newspapers are filled on a daily basis with examples of financial manipulation, accounting fraud, food fraud, cartels, bribery, toxic spills and environmental harms, corporate human rights violations, insider trading, privacy violations, discrimination, corporate manslaughter or violence, and, recently, software manipulation. Clearly, the problem of corporate crime transcends the micro level of the individual ‘rotten apple’ (Ashforth et al. 2008; Monahan and Quinn 2006); although corporate crimes are ultimately committed by individual members of an organization, they have more structural roots, as the enabling and justifying organizational context in which they take place plays a defining role. Accounts of corporate fraud, misrepresentation, or deception that foreground individual offender’s motivations and characteristics, often fail to acknowledge that organizational decisions are more than the aggregation of individual choices and actions, and that organizations are more than simply the environment in which individual action takes place (Huising and Silbey 2018).
Organic Service-Level Management in Service-Oriented Environments
Dynamic service-oriented environments (SOEs) are characterised by a large number of heterogeneous service components that are expected to support the business as a whole. The present work provides a negotiation-based approach to facilitate automated and multi-level service-level management in an SOE, where each component autonomously arranges its contribution to the whole operational goals. Evaluation experiments have shown an increased responsiveness and stability of an SOE in case of changes.
Ontology Alignment using Biologically-inspired Optimisation Algorithms
It is investigated how biologically-inspired optimisation methods can be used to compute alignments between ontologies. Independent of particular similarity metrics, the developed techniques demonstrate anytime behaviour and high scalability. Due to the inherent parallelisability of these population-based algorithms it is possible to exploit dynamically scalable cloud infrastructures - a step towards the provisioning of Alignment-as-a-Service solutions for future semantic applications.
Economics of Land Degradation and Improvement – A Global Assessment for Sustainable Development
This volume deals with land degradation, which is occurring in almost all terrestrial biomes and agro-ecologies, in both low and high income countries and is stretching to about 30% of the total global land area. About three billion people reside in these degraded lands. However, the impact of land degradation is especially severe on livelihoods of the poor who heavily depend on natural resources. The annual global cost of land degradation due to land use and cover change (LUCC) and lower cropland and rangeland productivity is estimated to be about 300 billion USD. Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) accounts for the largest share (22%) of the total global cost of land degradation.
Ephraim Nkonya --- Alisher Mirzabaev --- Joachim von Braun
Moral Reasoning at Work: Rethinking Ethics in Organizations
Moral dilemmas are a pervasive feature of working life. Moral Reasoning at Work offers a fresh perspective on how to live with them. How do we cope with situations where no matter what we decide to do, something will be wrong? How do we live with the moral dissonance between what we are tempted to do and what is in line with our moral convictions? What can organizations do to establish a foundation for responsible decision-making and conduct? This book combines research streams from ethics and moral psychology using extensive experience of sessions of moral reasoning with leaders and employees in organizations.
Modeling and Selection of Software Service Variants
Providers and consumers have to deal with variants of software services, which are alternative instances of a services design, implementation, deployment, or operation. This work develops the service feature modeling language to represent software service variants and a suite of methods to select variants for development or delivery. An evaluation describes the systems implemented to make use of service feature modeling and its application to two real-world use cases.
Light and light based technologies have played an important role in transforming our lives via scientific contributions spanned over thousands of years. In this book we present a vast collection of articles on various aspects of light and its applications in the contemporary world at a popular or semi-popular level. These articles are written by the world authorities in their respective fields. This is therefore a rare volume where the world experts have come together to present the developments in this most important field of science in an almost pedagogical manner. This volume covers five aspects related to light.
Mohammad D. Al-Amri --- Mohamed El-Gomati --- M. Suhail Zubairy
Business and Management --- Social Sciences
This collection of essays examines how spatial mobilities of people and practices, technologies and objects, knowledge and ideas have shaped the production, circulation, and transfer of knowledge in different historical and geographical contexts. Targeting an interdisciplinary audience, Mobilities of Knowledge combines detailed empirical analyses with innovative conceptual approaches. The first part scrutinizes knowledge circulation, transfer, and adaption, focussing on the interpersonal communication process, early techniques of papermaking, a geographical text, indigenous knowledge in exploration, the genealogy of spatial analysis, and different disciplinary knowledges about the formation of cities, states, and agriculture.
Heike Jöns --- Peter Meusburger --- Michael Heffernan
Microfinance, EU Structural Funds and Capacity Building for Managing Authorities: A Comparative Analysis of European Convergence Regions
In recent years, the European Commission has attached increasing importance to the use of financial engineering instruments rather than traditional grant-based financing for the microcredit sector, considering these to be the most efficient option available.This book presents a study of capacity building and structural funds in public managing authorities for the microcredit sector. It presents two surveys to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the managing authorities' capacity building. The first survey investigates the authorities' need for and interests in capacity building activities, assessing the areas in which capacity building support is needed, and explores the different types of support offered.
New Horizons for a Data-Driven Economy: A Roadmap for Usage and Exploitation of Big Data in Europe
n this book readers will find technological discussions on the existing and emerging technologies across the different stages of the big data value chain. They will learn about legal aspects of big data, the social impact, and about education needs and requirements. And they will discover the business perspective and how big data technology can be exploited to deliver value within different sectors of the economy.
José María Cavanillas --- Edward Curry --- Wolfgang Wahlster
Market engineering. A structured design process for electronic markets
In this book, the author provides a complete process for electronic markets design together with the required en-gineering methods. As such the book is unique applying tech-niques from engineering design to modern Information Systems and Economics. Mr. Neumann succeeds in presenting a generic but coherent approach that is an indispensable aid in designing markets.
Managing Elevated Risk: Global Liquidity, Capital Flows, and Macroprudential Policy - An Asian Perspective
This book discusses the risks and opportunities that arise in Emerging Asia given the context of a new environment in global liquidity and capital flows. It elaborates on the need to ensure financial and overall economic stability in the region through improved financial regulation and other policy measures to minimize the emergent risks. "Managing Elevated Risk: Global Liquidity, Capital Flows, and Macroprudential Policy - An Asian Perspective" also explores the range of policy options that may be deployed to address the impact of global liquidity on domestic financial and socio-economic conditions including income inequality.
Computing Characterizations of Drugs for Ion Channels and Receptors Using Markov Models
Flow of ions through voltage gated channels can be represented theoretically using stochastic differential equations where the gating mechanism is represented by a Markov model. The flow through a channel can be manipulated using various drugs, and the effect of a given drug can be reflected by changing the Markov model. These lecture notes provide an accessible introduction to the mathematical methods needed to deal with these models. They emphasize the use of numerical methods and provide sufficient details for the reader to implement the models and thereby study the effect of various drugs
This volume explores interdependencies between knowledge, action, and space from different interdisciplinary perspectives. Some of the contributors discuss knowledge as a social construct based on collective action, while others look at knowledge as an individual capacity for action. The chapters contain theoretical frameworks as well as experimental outcomes. Readers will gain insight into key questions such as: How does knowledge function as a prerequisite for action? Why are knowledge gaps growing and not diminishing in a knowledge society? How much knowledge is necessary for action
Peter Meusburger --- Benno Werlen --- Laura Suarsana
S-BPM in the Wild: Practical Value Creation
Computer Science --- Business and Management
This is the first book to present field studies on the application of subject-oriented business process management (S-BPM). Each case presents a specific story and focuses on an essential modeling or implementation issue, and most end with implications or suggestions for further studies. Significant variables and success factors are identified that were discovered during the respective study and lead to suggesting S-BPM novelties. For each case, the authors explain step-by-step how the story develops, and provide readers guidance by detailing the respective rationale.
Albert Fleischmann --- Werner Schmidt --- Christian Stary
Intelligent Business Process Optimization for the Service Industry
The company's sustainable competitive advantage derives from its capacity to create value for customers and to adapt the operational practices to changing situations. Business processes are the heart of each company. Therefore process excellence has become a key issue. This book introduces a novel approach focusing on the autonomous optimization of business processes by applying sophisticated machine learning techniques such as Relational Reinforcement Learning and Particle Swarm Optimization.
Innovations in Quantitative Risk Management
Quantitative Finance; Game Theory, Economics, Social and Behav. Sciences; Finance/Investment/Banking; Actuarial Sciences
Kathrin Glau --- Matthias Scherer --- Rudi Zagst
Innovation in General Purpose Technologies : How Knowledge Gains when It Is Shared
This book tackles the different aspects of the creation and transmission of knowledge in the context of the characteristics of a general purpose technology. Nanotechnology is investigated as showcase example. Particular emphasis is put on the role of the composition of knowledge as well as the corresponding knowledge spillovers on the one hand and on the concrete impact of collaboration and knowledge sharing in innovator networks on the other hand.
Information Management and Market Engineering. [Vol. I]
The research program �Information Management and Market Engineering� focuses on the analysis and the design of electronic markets. Taking a holistic view of the conceptualization and realization of solutions, the research integrates the disciplines business administration, economics, computer science, and law. Topics of interest range from the implementation, quality assurance, and further development of electronic markets to their integration into business processes, innovative business models, and legal frameworks.
Dreier, Thomas Krämer, Jan Studer, Rudi Weinhardt, Christof [Hrsg.]
Information Management and Market Engineering. Vol. II
The research program Information Management and Market Engineering focuses on the analysis and the design of electronic markets. Taking a holistic view of the conceptualization and realization of solutions, the research integrates the disciplines business administration, economics, computer science, and law. Topics of interest range from the implementation, quality assurance, and advancement of electronic markets to their integration into business processes and legal frameworks.
Indicator-based Sustainability Assessment of the German Energy System and its Transition
The energy transition not only has an impact on technical infrastructures but also leads to socio-economic changes. To evaluate the sustainability aspects of the German Energiewende, the authors have developed a monitoring system which includes 45 indicators and their corresponding target values for 2020, 2030, and 2050 as well as a rating system for the year 2020 based on a distance-to-target approach and traffic color lights.
Rösch, ChristineBräutigam, Klaus-RainerKopfmüller, JürgenStelzer,, et al
Melting Hadrons, Boiling Quarks: From Hagedorn Temperature to Ultra-Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions at CERN: With a Tribute to Rolf Hagedorn
Astronomy (General) --- Business and Management --- Physics (General)
This book shows how the study of multi-hadron production phenomena in the years after the founding of CERN culminated in Hagedorn's pioneering idea of limiting temperature, leading on to the discovery of the quark-gluon plasma -- announced, in February 2000 at CERN. Following the foreword by Herwig Schopper -- the Director General (1981-1988) of CERN at the key historical juncture -- the first part is a tribute to Rolf Hagedorn (1919-2003) and includes contributions by contemporary friends and colleagues, and those who were most touched by Hagedorn: Tamás Biró, Igor Dremin, Torleif Ericson, Marek Gaździcki, Mark Gorenstein, Hans Gutbrod, Maurice Jacob, István Montvay, Berndt Müller, Grazyna Odyniec, Emanuele Quercigh, Krzysztof Redlich, Helmut Satz, Luigi Sertorio, Ludwik Turko, and Gabriele Veneziano.
This book deals with the relevance of recognition and validation of non-formal and informal learning education and training, the workplace and society. In an increasing number of countries, it is at the top of the policy and research agenda ranking among the possible ways to redress the glaring lack of relevant academic and vocational qualifications and to promote the development of competences and certification procedures which recognise different types of learning, including formal, non-formal and informal learning. The aim of the book is therefore to present and share experience, expertise and lessons in such a way that enables its effective and immediate use across the full spectrum of country contexts, whether in the developing or developed world.
From Data Modeling to Knowledge Engineering in Space System Design
The technologies currently employed for modeling complex systems, such as aircraft, spacecraft, or infrastructures, are sufficient for system description, but do not allow deriving knowledge about the modeled systems. This work provides the means to describe space systems in a way that allows automating activities such as deriving knowledge about critical parts of the system’s design, evaluation of test success, and identification of single points of failure.
Game theory addresses situations with multiple agents in which the outcome of an agent’s act depends on the acts of the other agents. The agents may be mindless organisms. Epistemic game theory addresses games in which the agents have minds. An agent reasons about the acts of other agents and—if the other agents observe the agent’s act—reasons about the other agents’ responses to the act. The agents use logic to draw conclusions about the prospects of the acts that they can perform. This Special Issue of Games deals with epistemic game theory and the contributions that logic makes to an agent’s practical reasoning about the strategy to adopt in a game. Although behavioral studies are relevant, the emphasis is on rational reasoning.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, modeling of the extreme values of financial risk has become important. Postgraduate programs and PhD research programs in mathematical finance are cropping up in nearly every university. Additionally, many conferences are being held annually on the topic of extreme financial risk. The aim of this Special Issue is to provide a collection of papers from leading experts in the area of extreme financial risk
Saralees Nadarajah (Ed.) --- Stephen Chan (Ed.)
Fulfilling the Promise of Technology Transfer
Universities and research institutes are increasingly expected to contribute to society by creating innovation from the returns of their research results and the establishment of new technologies. Toward that goal, Keio University in Japan held an international symposium titled “Fulfilling the Promise of Technology Transfer: Fostering Innovation for the Benefit of Society.” From that symposium the following contents are included in the present volume: 1) A showcase of ideas and case studies to promote future creation of innovation by universities and research institutes worldwide, including information on the R&D value chain, licensing, income generation, start-ups and mechanisms to encourage entrepreneurship, and the changing role of universities in fostering innovation. 2) Introduction of active research projects that aim to productize successful research results on an international level.
Entrepreneurial Cognition: Exploring the Mindset of Entrepreneurs
This open access book investigates the inter-relationship between the mind and a potential opportunity to explore the psychology of entrepreneurship. Building on recent research, this book offers a broad scope investigation of the different aspects of what goes on in the mind of the (potential) entrepreneur as he or she considers the pursuit of a potential opportunity, the creation of a new organization, and/or the selection of an entrepreneurial career. This book focuses on individuals as the level of analysis and explores the impact of the organization and the environment only inasmuch as they impact the individual’s cognitions.
This Special Issue is devoted to the econometric analysis of income inequality and income distributions. Given the recent surge of inequality research, this Special Issue seeks to combine both theoretical and applied contributions which advance the econometric analysis of income inequality and income distributions. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, statistical inference for inequality measurement, inequality measurement with complex survey data, parametric or nonparametric modeling of income distributions, statistical decomposition methodology, methods to investigate the determinants of distributional change, causal inference in inequality measurement, and applications of such methods to substantive research questions in different fields of economics.
Martin Biewen (Ed.) --- Emmanuel Flachaire (Ed.)
Dynamics of Long-Life Assets: From Technology Adaptation to Upgrading the Business Model
The editors present essential methods and tools to support a holistic approach to the challenge of system upgrades and innovation in the context of high-value products and services. The approach presented here is based on three main pillars: an adaptation mechanism based on a broad understanding of system dependencies; efficient use of system knowledge through involvement of actors throughout the process; and technological solutions to enable efficient actor communication and information handling.
Stefan N. Grösser --- Arcadio Reyes-Lecuona --- Göran Granholm
Dynamic Capacity Control in Air Cargo Revenue Management
This book studies air cargo capacity control problems. The focus is on analyzing decision models with intuitive optimal decisions as well as on developing efficient heuristics and bounds. Three different models are studied: First, a model for steering the availability of cargo space on single legs. Second, a model that simultaneously optimizes the availability of both seats and cargo capacity. Third, a decision model that controls the availability of cargo capacity on a network of flights.
High Density Lipoproteins: From Biological Understanding to Clinical Exploitation
this Handbook of Experimental Pharmacology on “High Density Lipoproteins – from biological understanding to clinical exploitation” contributing authors (members of COST Action BM0904/HDLnet) summarize in more than 20 chapters our current knowledge on the structure, function, metabolism and regulation of HDL in health and several diseases as well as the status of past and ongoing attempts of therapeutic exploitation.
Arnold von Eckardstein --- Dimitris Kardassis
Sustainable Living with Environmental Risks
We are not free from environmental risks that accompany the development of human societies. Modern economic development has accelerated environmental pollution, caused loss of natural habitats, and modified landscapes. These environmental changes have impacted natural systems: water and heat circulation, nutrient cycling, and biodiversity. These changes in natural systems degrade ecosystem services and subsequently increase environmental risks for humans.
Nobuhiro Kaneko --- Shinji Yoshiura --- Masanori Kobayashi
Ship and Offshore Structure Design in Climate Change Perspective
This book summarizes results of longstanding research and scientific contributions from many projects and relevant working groups. It collects and evaluates wind and wave climate projections under changing climate having design needs and marine safety in focus. Potential impact of projected climate change in met-ocean conditions on ships and offshore structures is discussed and illustrated by an example of the expected wave climate change on tanker design.
Elzbieta Maria Bitner-Gregersen --- Lars Ingolf Eide --- Torfinn Hørte --- Rolf Skjong
Science and Technology Governance and Ethics: A Global Perspective from Europe, India and China
This book analyzes the possibilities for effective global governance of science in Europe, India and China. Authors from the three regions join forces to explore how ethical concerns over new technologies can be incorporated into global science and technology policies. The first chapter introduces the topic, offering a global perspective on embedding ethics in science and technology policy. Chapter Two compares the institutionalization of ethical debates in science, technology and innovation policy in three important regions: Europe, India and China. The third chapter explores public perceptions of science and technology in these same three regions.
Miltos Ladikas --- Sachin Chaturvedi --- Yandong Zhao --- Dirk Stemerding
A Celebration of the Ties That Bind Us: Connections Between Actuarial Science and Mathematical Finance
The articles in this volume are contributed by scholars who are not only experts in areas of Actuarial Science (AS) and Mathematical Finance (MF), but also those who present diverse perspectives from both industry and academia. Topics from multiple areas, such as Stochastic Modeling, Credit Risk, Monte Carlo Simulation, and Pension Valuation, among others, that were maybe thought to be the domain of one type of risk manager, are shown time and again to have deep value to other areas of risk management as well.
The rapidly growing world population and increasingly dense settlements demand ever-larger and more complex buildings from today's engineers. In comparison to this technological progress, a building's equipment for emergency evacuation has been hardly developed further. This work presents a concept for a building evacuation system based on mobile devices. Furthermore, various algorithms for route planning with mobile devices and for indoor localization of mobile devices are addressed.
Benchmarking Eventually Consistent Distributed Storage Systems
Cloud storage services and NoSQL systems typically offer only ""Eventual Consistency"", a rather weak guarantee covering a broad range of potential data consistency behavior. The degree of actual (in-)consistency, however, is unknown. This work presents novel solutions for determining the degree of (in-)consistency via simulation and benchmarking, as well as the necessary means to resolve inconsistencies leveraging this information.
This edited volume contains the selected papers presented at the scientific board meeting of the German Cluster of Excellence on “Integrative Production Technology for High-Wage Countries”, held in November 2014. The topical structure of the book is clustered in six sessions: Integrative Production Technology, Individualised Production, Virtual Production Systems, Integrated Technologies, Self-Optimising Production Systems and Human Factors in Production Technology.
Solar Particle Radiation Storms Forecasting and Analysis: The HESPERIA HORIZON 2020 Project and Beyond
Solar energetic particles (SEPs) emitted from the Sun are a major space weather hazard motivating the development of predictive capabilities. This book presents the results and findings of the HESPERIA (High Energy Solar Particle Events forecasting and Analysis) project of the EU HORIZON 2020 programme. It discusses the forecasting operational tools developed within the project, and presents progress to SEP research contributed by HESPERIA both from the observational as well as the SEP modelling perspective.
Interface Oral Health Science 2016: Innovative Research on Biosis–Abiosis Intelligent Interface
Keiichi Sasaki --- Osamu Suzuki --- Nobuhiro Takahashi
We intend this work to be less a bestiary of bad ideas about writing than an effort to name bad ideas and suggest better ones. Some of those bad ideas are quite old, such as the archetype of the inspired genius author, the five-paragraph essay, or the abuse of adjunct writing teachers. Others are much newer, such as computerized essay scoring or gamification. Some ideas, such as the supposed demise of literacy brought on by texting, are newer bad ideas but are really instances of older bad ideas about literacy always being in a cycle of decline.
Trauma-Informed School Practices: Building Expertise To Transform Schools
This textbook represents the combined insight and experience of Morton, a k12 educator, and Berardi, a psychotherapist, both of whom are also university educators with extensive work experience serving districts and their teachers seeking to incorporate trauma-informed principles into their school culture and classroom. The authors identify that the field of education is now ready to deepen its level of response to the paradigm shift created by advances in neuroscience and traumatology.
Responsible Innovation: Ethics, Safety and Technology
This textbook is based on the MOOC Responsible Innovation offered by the TU Delft. It provides a framework to reflect on the ethics and risks of new technologies. How can we make sure that innovations do justice to social and ethical values? How can we minimize (unknown)risks?
Advancements in high-throughput “Omics” techniques have revolutionized plant molecular biology research. Proteomics offers one of the best options for the functional analysis of translated regions of the genome, generating a wealth of detailed information regarding the intrinsic mechanisms of plant stress responses. Various proteomic approaches are being exploited extensively for elucidating master regulator proteins which play key roles in stress perception and signaling, and these approaches largely involve gel-based and gel-free techniques, including both label-based and label-free protein quantification.
200 words; this text will present the book in all promotional forms (e.g. flyers). Please describe the book in straightforward and consumer-friendly terms. [Plants interact with microbes in many different ways and on many different levels. The most obvious interaction results in plant disease, which can be a severe threat to the global food supply. Therefore, research strives to uncover the mechanisms of host plant invasion, learn about the weapons used by pathogenic microbes, and understand the defense strategies of the affected plants.
Jan Schirawski (Ed.) --- Michael H. Perlin (Ed.)
This unique and attractive open access textbook combines the beauty of macroscopic pictures of plant stems with the corresponding colorfully stained images of anatomical micro-structures. In contrast to most botanical textbooks, it presents all the stem characteristics as photographs and shows the microscopic reality. The amount of text is reduced to a minimum, and the scientific information is highlighted with short legends and labeled photographs, allowing readers to focus on the pictures to easily understand how the anatomical structures relate to genetic, ecological, decomposition and technical influences
Fritz H. Schweingruber --- Annett Börner
Biotic and Abiotic Stress Responses in Crop Plants
While the demand for crop products continues to increase strongly, agricultural productivity is threatened by various stress factors, often associated with global warming. To sustain and improve yield, it is necessary to understand how plants respond to various stresses, and to use the generated knowledge in modern breeding programs. Most knowledge regarding the molecular mechanisms associated with stress responses has been obtained from investigations using the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana.
Thomas Dresselhaus (Ed.) --- Ralph Hückelhoven (Ed.)
Pharmacy and materia medica --- Physiology
Infogest' (Improving Health Properties of Food by Sharing our Knowledge on the Digestive Process) is an EU COST action/network in the domain of Food and Agriculture. Infogest aims at building an open international network of institutes undertaking multidisciplinary basic research on food digestion gathering scientists from different origins (including food scientists, gut physiologists and nutritionists)
Kitty Verhoeckx --- Paul Cotter --- Iván López-Expósito --- Charlotte
The Sustainability of Agro-Food and Natural Resource Systems in the Mediterranean Basin
Pharmacy and materia medica --- Nutrition and Food Sciences --
This book is focused on the challenges to implement sustainability in diverse contexts such as agribusiness, natural resource systems and new technologies. The experiences made by the researchers of the School of Agricultural, Forestry, Food and Environmental Science (SAFE) of the University of Basilicata offer a wide and multidisciplinary approach to the identification and testing of different solutions tailored to the economic, social and environmental characteristics of the region and the surrounding areas.
Marginality: Addressing the Nexus of Poverty, Exclusion and Ecology
This book takes a new approach on understanding causes of extreme poverty and promising actions to address it. Its focus is on marginality being a root cause of poverty and deprivation. “Marginality” is the position of people on the edge, preventing their access to resources, freedom of choices, and the development of capabilities. The book is research based with original empirical analyses at local, national, and local scales; book contributors are leaders in their fields and have backgrounds in different disciplines.
Joachim von Braun --- Franz W. Gatzweiler
Universities and research institutes are increasingly expected to contribute to society by creating innovation from the returns of their research results and the establishment of new technologies. Toward that goal, Keio University in Japan held an international symposium titled “Fulfilling the Promise of Technology Transfer: Fostering Innovation for the Benefit of Society.” From that symposium the following contents are included in the present volume: 1)
Environmental Leadership Capacity Building in Higher Education: Experience and Lessons from Asian Program for Incubation of Environmental Leaders
The Graduate Program in Sustainability Science under the Department of Urban Engineering of The University of Tokyo has been running an environmental leadership education program at the graduate student level since 2007 called the Asian Program for Incubation of Environmental Leaders (APIEL). This book describes the University’s experiences in establishing and organizing that program and provides some lessons learned for those who are considering starting environmental leadership education programs.
This open access book includes contributions by leading researchers and industry thought leaders on various topics related to the essence of software engineering and their application in industrial projects. It offers a broad overview of research findings dealing with current practical software engineering issues and also pointers to potential future developments
Ecosystemic Evolution Feeded by Smart Systems
nformation Society is advancing along a route of ecosystemic evolution. ICT and Internet advancements, together with the progression of the systemic approach for enhancement and application of Smart Systems, are grounding such an evolution. The needed approach is therefore expected to evolve by increasingly fitting into the basic requirements of a significant general enhancement of human and social well-being, within all spheres of life (public, private, professional).
Document Image Processing allows systems like OCR, writer identification, writer recognition, check processing, historical document processing, etc., to extract useful information from document images. What we call a document image ranges from images of historical documents written on various surfaces, to synthetic images (useful for creating datasets) and videos including text. In order to succeed, many preprocessing tasks can be required: document skew detection and correction, slant removal, binarization and segmentation procedures, as well as other normalization tasks.
Ergina Kavallieratou (Ed:) --- Laurence Likforman-Sulem (Ed.)
Directional Estimation for Robotic Beating Heart Surgery
In robotic beating heart surgery, a remote-controlled robot can be used to carry out the operation while automatically canceling out the heart motion. The surgeon controlling the robot is shown a stabilized view of the heart. First, we consider the use of directional statistics for estimation of the phase of the heartbeat. Second, we deal with reconstruction of a moving and deformable surface. Third, we address the question of obtaining a stabilized image of the heart.
Coordinating Service Compositions : Model and Infrastructure for Collaborative Creation of Electronic Documents
Electronic documents frequently include contributions from different human and non-human sources. The Web, for instance, offers ever-changing content and services which can perform activities during document creation. This thesis introduces a solution for collaborative document creation which maps contributions of human and non-human participants to software services. The joint flexible composition and coordination of these services leads to a novel understanding of dynamic Web-based documents.
A Contribution to Resource-Aware Architectures for Humanoid Robots
The goal of this work is to provide building blocks for resource-aware robot architectures. The topic of these blocks are data-driven generation of context-sensitive resource models, prediction of future resource utilizations, and resource-aware computer vision and motion planning algorithms. The implementation of these algorithms is based on resource-aware concepts and methodologies originating from the Transregional Collaborative Research Center ""Invasive Computing"" (SFB/TR 89).
A Contribution to Active Infrared Laser Spectroscopy for Remote Substance Detection
n this work we present a stand-off, long wave infrared (LWIR) spectroscopy system for remote detection of hazardous substances. The principle is based upon wavelength selective illumination using External Cavity Quantum Cascade Lasers, that are tunable in the LWIR wavelength range from 7.5 - 10 µm, in which most chemical substances exhibit a highly characteristic absorption behaviour.
Consolidation of Customized Product Copies into Software Product Lines
In software development, project constraints lead to customer-specific variants by copying and adapting the product. During this process, modifications are scattered all over the code. Although this is flexible and efficient in the short term, a Software Product Line (SPL) offers better results in the long term, regarding cost reduction, time-to-market, and quality attributes. This book presents a novel approach named SPLevo, which consolidates customized product copies into an SPL.
Avoiding Unintended Flows of Personally Identifiable Information : Enterprise Identity Management and Online Social Networks
This work addresses potentially occurring unintended flows of personally identifiable information (PII) within two fields of research, i.e., enterprise identity management and online social networks. For that, we investigate which pieces of PII can how often be gathered, correlated, or even be inferred by third parties that are not intended to get access to the specific pieces of PII. Furthermore, we introduce technical measures and concepts to avoid unintended flows of PII.
Automated Improvement of Software Architecture Models for Performance and Other Quality Attributes
Quality attributes, such as performance or reliability, are crucial for the success of a software system and largely influenced by the software architecture. Their quantitative prediction supports systematic, goal-oriented software design and forms a base of an engineering approach to software design. This thesis proposes a method and tool to automatically improve component-based software architecture (CBA) models based on such quantitative quality prediction techniques.
New Developments in Statistical Information Theory Based on Entropy and Divergence Measures
This book presents new and original research in Statistical Information Theory, based on minimum divergence estimators and test statistics, from a theoretical and applied point of view, for different statistical problems with special emphasis on efficiency and robustness. Divergence statistics, based on maximum likelihood estimators, as well as Wald’s statistics, likelihood ratio statistics and Rao’s score statistics, share several optimum asymptotic properties, but are highly non-robust in cases of model misspecification under the presence of outlying observations.
Guide to Sources of Texas Criminal Justice Statistics
This book was compiled as a resource for those needing assistance in locating Texas criminal justice statistics, including students, faculty, researchers, government officials, and individuals in the law enforcement, correctional, and judicial professions. The following types of publications are included: annual, biennial, and biannual reports; reports issued in series; analytic and research reports; statistical compilations; budgets and other fiscal documents; audits, inspections, and investigations; census publications; polls; projections;rankings; surveys; continuously updated online resources; and datasets.
Impact of Information Society Research in the Global South
The second volume in the SIRCA book series investigates the impact of information society initiatives by extending the boundaries of academic research into the realm of practice. Global in scope, it includes contributions and research projects from Asia, Africa and Latin America. The international scholarly community has taken a variety of approaches to question the impact of information society initiatives on populations in the Global South.
Arul Chib --- Julian May --- Roxana Barrantes
The Prototype Laboratory initiated and maintained by the Chair of Product Development at the Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft, has set an example in architectural education for hands-on ‘learning-by-making’ for students. According to the authors of this book, in the current curriculums time spent on practical work is not rewarded and students are educated in an abstract concept of architecture, not getting a proper feeling for materialization. A semester of designing, engineering, producing and building a prototype with their own hands after their own design often gives students a boost in their education.
Cultural Spaces of Design | Prospects of Design Education
The importance of culture and of the creative economy as drivers of sustainable development is increasingly getting worldwide recognition in terms of income-generation, job creation and export earnings. Due to this symbiotic relationship between culture and the creative industries, this study investigates how design-driven innovation can play a leading role to achieve the sustainable development goals of the local economies. Cultural insight has become an integral component of innovative products and services. However, little research has been conducted on how to integrate cultural characteristics into design activities to create emotional interaction between products and users. Investing in culture and the creative sector as drivers of social development can also lead to results that contribute to the overall well-being of communities, individual self-esteem and quality of life, dialogue and cohesion.
Building the Foundation: Whole Numbers in the Primary Grades: The 23rd ICMI Study
This twenty-third ICMI Study addresses for the first time mathematics teaching and learning in the primary school (and pre-school) setting, while also taking international perspectives, socio-cultural diversity and institutional constraints into account. One of the main challenges of designing the first ICMI primary school study of this kind is the complex nature of mathematics at the early level. Accordingly, a focus area that is central to the discussion was chosen, together with a number of related questions.
Bridging Educational Leadership, Curriculum Theory and Didaktik: Non-affirmative Theory of Education
This volume argues for the need of a common ground that bridges leadership studies, curriculum theory, and Didaktik. It proposes a non-affirmative education theory and its core concepts along with discursive institutionalism as an analytical tool to bridge these fields. It concludes with implications of its coherent theoretical framing for future empirical research. Recent neoliberal policies and transnational governance practices point toward new tensions in nation state education. These challenges affect governance, leadership and curriculum, involving changes in aims and values that demand coherence.
Assessment Strategies for Online Learning: Engagement and Authenticity
For many learners assessment conjures up visions of red pens scrawling percentages in the top right-hand corner of exams and feelings of stress, inadequacy, and failure. Although negative student reactions to evaluation have been noted, assessment has provided educational institutions with important information about learning outcomes and the quality of education for many decades. But how accurate is this data and has it informed practice or been fully incorporated into the learning cycle? Conrad and Open argue that the potential in many of the new learning environments to alter and improve assesment has yet to be explored by educators and students. In their investigation of assessment methods and learning approaches, Conrad and Openo aim to explore assessment that engages learners and authentically evaluates education.
urgical infections are caused by the breakdown of the equilibrium existing between organisms and the host. This may occur after a breach in a protective surface, as occurs after surgical trauma, changes in host resistance, or particular characteristics of the organism. The possible outcomes are abscess formation, local spread with/without tissue death, distant spread or resolution. A surgical infection is an infection requiring operative treatment (excision or drainage), and occupies an unvascularized space in tissue, or may occur in an operated site. Common examples of the former group are furuncles and carbuncles, hollow viscus inflammations, such as appendicitis, cholecystitis, and most abscesses. The latter group comprises all surgical site infections.
Evangelos P. Misiakos --- Konstantinos George Tsalis
Non-Vitamin K Antagonist Oral Anticoagulants: A Concise Guide
Surgery --- Medicine (General) --- Biotechnology --- Therapeutics --- Cardiovascular
This book is an essential guide to the medical treatment of thrombosis and presents core principles of anticoagulant therapeutics as well as drug recommendations. Written by recognized experts in the field, this concise, accessible handbook provides a unique and valuable resource in the cardiovascular field, both for those currently in training, and for those already in clinical or research practice.
Interferometry and Synthesis in Radio Astronomy
Electrical and Nuclear Engineering --- Astronomy (General)
The third edition of this indispensable book in radio interferometry provides extensive updates to the second edition, including results and technical advances from the past decade; discussion of arrays that now span the full range of the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum observable from the ground, 10 MHz to 1 THz; an analysis of factors that affect array speed; and an expanded discussion of digital signal-processing techniques and of scintillation phenomena and the effects of atmospheric water vapor on image distortion, among many other topics.
A. Richard Thompson --- James M. Moran --- George W. Swenson Jr.201
Fading Foundations: Probability and the Regress Problem
This book addresses the age-old problem of infinite regresses in epistemology. How can we ever come to know something if knowing requires having good reasons, and reasons can only be good if they are backed by good reasons in turn? The problem has puzzled philosophers ever since antiquity, giving rise to what is often called Agrippa's Trilemma. The current volume approaches the old problem in a provocative and thoroughly contemporary way. Taking seriously the idea that good reasons are typically probabilistic in character, it develops and defends a new solution that challenges venerable philosophical intuitions and explains why they were mistakenly held.
Libraries are places of learning and knowledge creation. Over the last two decades, digital technology—and the changes that came with it—have accelerated this transformation to a point where evolution starts to become a revolution.The wider Open Science movement, and Open Access in particular, is one of these changes and is already having a profound impact. Under the subscription model, the role of libraries was to buy or license content on behalf of their users and then act as gatekeepers to regulate access on behalf of rights holders.
Gender and STEM: Understanding Segregation in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics
Sociology --- Arts in general --- Social Sciences
his volume features thirteen original chapters on the causes and consequences of gender segregation in scientific, technical, engineering, and mathematics (“STEM”) occupations and fields of study. Although women have made great strides in equalizing access to labor markets and higher education, many STEM fields—particularly in the physical sciences and engineering—remain strongholds of gender segregation in the United States and other reputably gender-progressive societies.
Maria Charles (Ed.) --- Sarah Thébaud (Ed.)
Library and Information Sciences: Trends and Research
This book explores the development, trends and research of library and information sciences (LIS) in the digital age. Inside, readers will find research and case studies written by LIS experts, educators and theorists, most of whom have visited China, delivered presentations there and drafted their articles based on feedback they received. As a result, readers will discover the LIS issues and concerns that China and the international community have in common.The book first introduces the opportunities and challenges faced by the library and information literacy profession and discusses the key role of librarians in the future of information literacy education.
Learning in Virtual Worlds: Research and Applications
Three-dimensional (3D) immersive virtual worlds have been touted as being capable of facilitating highly interactive, engaging, multimodal learning experiences. Much of the evidence gathered to support these claims has been anecdotal but the potential that these environments hold to solve traditional problems in online and technology-mediated education—primarily learner isolation and student disengagement—has resulted in considerable investments in virtual world platforms like Second Life, OpenSimulator, and Open Wonderland by both professors and institutions.
Edited by Sue Gregory, Mark J.W. Lee, Barney Dalgarno, and Belinda Tynan
Teaching Crowds: Learning and Social Media
Within the rapidly expanding field of educational technology, learners and educators must confront a seemingly overwhelming selection of tools designed to deliver and facilitate both online and blended learning. Many of these tools assume that learning is configured and delivered in closed contexts, through learning management systems (LMS). However, while traditional "classroom" learning is by no means obsolete, networked learning is in the ascendant. A foundational method in online and blended education, as well as the most common means of informal and self-directed learning, networked learning is rapidly becoming the dominant mode of teaching as well as learning.
Technology enhanced learning integration into organizations
The study presents a framework of responsible and responsive technology enhanced learning integration into organizations. Applying the theories of integration of innovation in an organization, technology enhanced learning integration criteria groups have been identified and validated in this study in the following sequence: 1) Strategy and management, 2) Information communication technologies and infrastructure, 3) Continuous professional staff development, 4) Technology enhanced learning curriculum, 5) Support systems, 6) Quality assurance, and 7) Marketing and business development.
Teaching in Blended Learning Environments: Creating and Sustaining Communities of Inquiry
Teaching in Blended Learning Environments provides a coherent framework in which to explore the transformative concept of blended learningÑthe organic integration of complementary face-to-face and online approaches and technologies. Built upon the theoretical framework of the Community of InquiryÑthe premise that higher education is both a collaborative and individually constructivist learning experienceÑthe authors present seven principles for harnessing the opportunities for teaching and learning available through technology.
Norman D. Vaughan, Martha Cleveland-Innes, and D. Randy Garrison
Mobile Learning: Transforming the Delivery of Education and Training
his collection is for anyone interested in the use of mobile technology for various distance learning applications. Readers will discover how to design learning materials for delivery on mobile technology and become familiar with the best practices of other educators, trainers, and researchers in the field, as well as the most recent initiatives in mobile learning research. Businesses and governments can learn how to deliver timely information to staff using mobile devices. Professors can use this book as a textbook for courses on distance education, mobile learning, and educational technology.
This book provides a practical and self-contained overview of the Gene Ontology (GO), the leading project to organize biological knowledge on genes and their products across genomic resources. Written for biologists and bioinformaticians, it covers the state-of-the-art of how GO annotations are made, how they are evaluated, and what sort of analyses can and cannot be done with the GO. In the spirit of the Methods in Molecular Biology book series, there is an emphasis throughout the chapters on providing practical guidance and troubleshooting advice. Authoritative and accessible,
Business Law I Essentials is a brief introductory textbook designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of courses on Business Law or the Legal Environment of Business. The concepts are presented in a streamlined manner, and cover the key concepts necessary to establish a strong foundation in the subject. The textbook follows a traditional approach to the study of business law. Each chapter contains learning objectives, explanatory narrative and concepts, references for further reading, and end-of-chapter questions.
Mirande Valbrune, Renee De Assis, Suzanne Cardell
This is a lab manual for a college-level human anatomy course. Mastery of anatomy requires a fair amount of memorization and recall skills. The activities in this manual encourage students to engage with new vocabulary in many ways, including grouping key terms, matching terms to structures, recalling definitions, and written exercises. Most of the activities in this manual utilize anatomical models, and several dissections of animal tissues and histological examinations are also included. Each unit includes both pre- and post-lab questions and six lab exercises designed for a classroom where students move from station to station. The vocabulary terms used in each unit are listed at the end of the manual and serve as a checklist for practicals.
Freshwater Microplastics: Emerging Environmental Contaminants?
This volume focuses on microscopic plastic debris, also referred to as microplastics, which have been detected in aquatic environments around the globe and have accordingly raised serious concerns. The book explores whether microplastics represent emerging contaminants in freshwater systems, an area that remains underrepresented to date. Given the complexity of the issue, the book covers the current state-of-research on microplastics in rivers and lakes, including analytical aspects, environmental concentrations and sources, modelling approaches, interactions with biota, and ecological implications.
Business and Management --- Economics --- Manufactures
This book reflects the current state of discussion about agricultural and rural finance in developing and transition countries. It provides insight into specific themes, such as commodity value chains, farm banking and risk management in agricultural banking, structured finance, crop insurance, mobile banking and how to increase effectiveness in rural finance. Case studies illustrate various aspects of agricultural and rural finance in developing economies. The book is based on one of the yearly financial Sector Development Symposia held by the KfW Development Bank.
Innovations in molecular biology are allowing neuroscientists to study the brain with unprecedented resolution, from the level of single molecules to integrated gene circuits. Chief among these innovations is the CRISPR-Cas genome editing technology, which has the precision and scalability to tackle the complexity of the brain. This Colloque Médecine et Recherche has brought together experts from around the world that are applying genome editing to address important challenges in neuroscience, including basic biology in model organisms that has the power to reveal systems-level insight into how the nervous system develops and functions as well as research focused on understanding and treating human neurological disorders.
Rudolf Jaenisch --- Feng Zhang --- Fred Gage
Autonomous Driving: Technical, Legal and Social Aspects
This book takes a look at fully automated, autonomous vehicles and discusses many open questions: How can autonomous vehicles be integrated into the current transportation system with diverse users and human drivers? Where do automated vehicles fall under current legal frameworks? What risks are associated with automation and how will society respond to these risks? How will the marketplace react to automated vehicles and what changes may be necessary for companies? Experts from Germany and the United States define key societal, engineering, and mobility issues related to the automation of vehicles.
Markus Maurer --- J. Christian Gerdes --- Barbara Lenz --- Hermann Winner
Computer Science --- Media and communication
This book discusses both the theory and practical applications of self-correcting data, commonly known as error-correcting codes. The applications included demonstrate the importance of these codes in a wide range of everyday technologies, from smartphones to secure communications and transactions. Written in a readily understandable style, the book presents the authors’ twenty-five years of research organized into five parts: Part I is concerned with the theoretical performance attainable by using error correcting codes to achieve communications efficiency in digital communications systems.
This open access book includes contributions by leading researchers and industry thought leaders on various topics related to the essence of software engineering and their application in industrial projects. It offers a broad overview of research findings dealing with current practical software engineering issues and also pointers to potential future developments. Celebrating the 20th anniversary of adesso AG, adesso gathered some of the pioneers of software engineering including Manfred Broy, Ivar Jacobson and Carlo Ghezzi at a special symposium, where they presented their thoughts about latest software engineering research and which are part of this book.
This book addresses the physical phenomenon of events that seem to occur spontaneously and without any known cause. These are to be contrasted with events that happen in a (pre-)determined, predictable, lawful, and causal way. All our knowledge is based on self-reflexive theorizing, as well as on operational means of empirical perception. Some of the questions that arise are the following: are these limitations reflected by our models? Under what circumstances does chance kick in?
Empirical Research in Statistics Education
Statistics --- Education --- Mathematics
This ICME-13 Topical Survey provides a review of recent research into statistics education, with a focus on empirical research published in established educational journals and on the proceedings of important conferences on statistics education. It identifies and addresses six key research topics, namely: teachers’ knowledge; teachers’ role in statistics education; teacher preparation; students’ knowledge; students’ role in statistics education; and how students learn statistics with the help of technology. For each topic, the survey builds upon existing reviews, complementing them with the latest research.
Andreas Eichler --- Lucía Zapata-Cardona
Early Childhood Policies and Systems in Eight Countries
This report provides an overview of policy strategies on early childhood education settings (from birth to primary schooling) in eight countries. Data were collected using a policy questionnaire addressed to and completed by the National Research Coordinator(s) (NRC) of Chile, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Italy, Poland, the Russian Federation and the United States. The countries that participated provide interesting illustrations of early childhood education policy in action in a range of diverse contexts. Analysis of the systemic and structural results of ECE policy at national and, where necessary, subnational levels, enables transnational comparisons in policy and systems.
Carolyn Kieran --- JeongSuk Pang --- Deborah Schifter --- Swee Fong Ng
The Dynamics of Opportunity in America: Evidence and Perspectives
Across the country, our children are beginning life from very different starting points. Some have aspirations and believe they can be achieved. For too many others, aspirations are tempered, if not dashed, by the sobering realities of everyday life. These different starting points place children on distinctly different trajectories of growth and development, ultimately leading to vastly different adult outcomes.
Diversity and Evolution of Butterfly Wing Patterns: An Integrative Approach
This book facilitates an integrative understanding of the development, genetics and evolution of butterfly wing patterns. To develop a deep and realistic understanding of the diversity and evolution of butterfly wing patterns, it is essential and necessary to approach the problem from various kinds of key research fields such as “evo-devo,” “eco-devo,” ”developmental genetics,” “ecology and adaptation,” “food plants,” and “theoretical modeling.” The past decade-and-a-half has seen a veritable revolution in our understanding of the development, genetics and evolution of butterfly wing patterns.
Manufactures --- Electrical and Nuclear Engineering
this Handbook of Experimental Pharmacology on “High Density Lipoproteins – from biological understanding to clinical exploitation” contributing authors (members of COST Action BM0904/HDLnet) summarize in more than 20 chapters our current knowledge on the structure, function, metabolism and regulation of HDL in health and several diseases as well as the status of past and ongoing attempts of therapeutic exploitation. The book is of interest to researchers in academia and industry focusing on lipoprotein metabolism, cardiovascular diseases and immunology as well as clinical pharmacologists, cardiologists, diabetologists, nephrologists and other clinicians interested in metabolic or inflammatory diseases.
Contemporary Bioethics: Islamic Perspective
This book combines Islamic textual analysis with juridical methodology to engage dominant secular bioethics in the Muslim healthcare institutions. It integrates Islamic textual resources with medical information in order to provide careful analyses of the political, economic and cultural terrains that are necessary for bioethicists to effectively promote social justice
Mohammed Ali Al-Bar --- Hassan Chamsi-Pasha
Designing Sustainable Technologies, Products and Policies
This open access book provides insight into the implementation of Life Cycle approaches along the entire business value chain, supporting environmental, social and economic sustainability related to the development of industrial technologies, products, services and policies; and the development and management of smart agricultural systems, smart mobility systems, urban infrastructures and energy for the built environment.
Enrico Benetto --- Kilian Gericke --- Mélanie Guiton
Designing Sustainable Energy for All: Sustainable Product-Service System Design Applied to Distributed Renewable Energy
This open access book addresses the issue of diffusing sustainable energy access in low- and middle-income contexts. Access to energy is one of the greatest challenges for many people living in low-income and developing contexts, as around 1.4 billion people lack access to electricity. Distributed Renewable Energy systems (DRE) are considered a promising approach to address this challenge and provide energy access to all. However, even if promising, the implementation of DRE systems is not always straightforward. The book analyses, discusses and classifies the promising
Carlo Vezzoli --- Fabrizio Ceschin --- Lilac Osanjo --- Mugendi K. M’Rithaa --- et al.
General and Civil Engineering --- Materials -
We are not free from environmental risks that accompany the development of human societies. Modern economic development has accelerated environmental pollution, caused loss of natural habitats, and modified landscapes. These environmental changes have impacted natural systems: water and heat circulation, nutrient cycling, and biodiversity. These changes in natural systems degrade ecosystem services and subsequently increase environmental risks for humans. Environmental risks, therefore, are not only human health risks by pollution, climatic anomalies and natural disasters, but also degradation of ecosystem services on which most people are relying for their lives.
A Demographic Perspective on Gender, Family and Health in Europe
This open access book examines the triangle between family, gender, and health in Europe from a demographic perspective. It helps to understand patterns and trends in each of the three components separately, as well as their interdependencies. It overcomes the widely observable specialization in demographic research, which usually involves researchers studying either family or fertility processes or focusing on health and mortality.
This open access book raises crucial questions about the citizenship of the European Union. Is it a new citizenship beyond the nation-state although it is derived from Member State nationality? Who should get it? What rights and duties does it entail? Should EU citizens living in other Member States be able to vote there in national elections? If there are tensions between free movement and social rights, which should take priority? And should the European Court of Justice determine what European citizenship is about or the legislative institutions of the EU or national parliaments?
Current and Future Perspectives of Ethnomathematics as a Program
This survey on the modernity of ethnomathematics addresses numerous themes related to both ethnomathematics and mathematics education. It offers a broader view of mathematics, including ideas, procedures, concepts, processes, methods, and practices rooted in distinct cultural environments. In addition, by reflecting on the social and political dimensions of ethnomathematics, another important aspect of this research program is the development of innovative approaches for a dynamic and glocalized society
Milton Rosa --- Ubiratan D’Ambrosio --- Daniel Clark Orey --- Lawrence Shirley --- et al.
Counteracting Urban Heat Island Effects in a Global Climate Change Scenario
Urban heat islands are a new type of microclimatic phenomenon that causes a significant increase in the temperature of cities compared to surrounding areas. The phenomenon has been enforced by the current trend towards climate change. Although experts consider urban heat islands an urgent European Union public health concern, there are too few policies that address it. The EU carried out a project to learn more about this phenomenon through pilot initiatives. The pilots included feasibility studies and strategies for appropriately altering planning rules and governance to tackle the problem of urban heat islands.
Cosmic Ray Neutron Sensing: Estimation of Agricultural Crop Biomass Water Equivalent
This open access book provides methods for the estimation of Biomass Water Equivalent (BEW), an essential step for improving the accuracy of area-wide soil moisture by cosmic-ray neutron sensors (CRNS). Three techniques are explained in detail: (i) traditional in-situ destructive sampling, (ii) satellite based remote sensing of plant surfaces, and (iii) biomass estimation via the use of the CRNS itself. The advantages and disadvantages of each method are discussed along with step by step instructions on proper procedures and implementation.
Ammar Wahbi --- Lee Heng --- Gerd Dercon
Etiology and Morphogenesis of Congenital Heart Disease: From Gene Function and Cellular Interaction to Morphology
his volume focuses on the etiology and morphogenesis of congenital heart diseases. It reviews in detail the early development and differentiation of the heart, and later morphologic events of the cardiovascular system, covering a wide range of topics such as gene functions, growth factors, transcription factors and cellular interactions that are implicated in cardiac morphogenesis and congenital heart disease. This book also presents recent advances in stem cell and cell sheet tissue engineering technologies which have the potential to provide novel in vitro disease models and to generate regenerative paradigms for cardiac repair and regeneration
Toshio Nakanishi --- Roger R. Markwald --- H.Scott Baldwin --- Bradley B. Keller --- et al.
Public Health Ethics: Cases Spanning the Globe
Medicine (General) --- Pharmacy and materia medica
his Open Access book highlights the ethical issues and dilemmas that arise in the practice of public health. It is also a tool to support instruction, debate, and dialogue regarding public health ethics. Although the practice of public health has always included consideration of ethical issues, the field of public health ethics as a discipline is a relatively new and emerging area. There are few practical training resources for public health practitioners, especially resources which include discussion of realistic cases which are likely to arise in the practice of public health.
Barrett, D.H --- Ortmann, L.H --- Dawson, A --- Saenz, C --- et al.
his open access book provides a comprehensive European perspective on the concept of ageism, its origins, the manifestation and consequences of ageism, as well as ways to respond to and research ageism. The book represents a collaborative effort of researchers from over 20 countries and a variety of disciplines, including, psychology, sociology, gerontology, geriatrics, pharmacology, law, geography, design, engineering, policy and media studies.
Contemporary Issues in Human Rights Law: Europe and Asia
his book analyzes issues in human rights law from a variety of perspectives by eminent European and Asian professors of constitutional law, international public law, and European Union law. As a result, their contributions collected here illustrate the phenomenon of cross-fertilization not only in Europe (the EU and its member states and the Council of Europe), but also between Europe and Asia. Furthermore, it reveals the influence that national and foreign law, EU law and the European Convention on Human Rights, and European and Asian law exert over one another.
Ocean-Atmosphere Interactions of Gases and Particles
Business and Management --- General and Civil Engineering --- Materials --- Geography
The oceans and atmosphere interact through various processes, including the transfer of momentum, heat, gases and particles. In this book leading international experts come together to provide a state-of-the-art account of these exchanges and their role in the Earth-system, with particular focus on gases and particles. Chapters in the book cover: i) the ocean-atmosphere exchange of short-lived trace gases; ii) mechanisms and models of interfacial exchange (including transfer velocity parameterisations); iii) ocean-atmosphere exchange of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide; iv) ocean atmosphere exchange of particles and v) current and future data collection and synthesis efforts.
Chemical Technology --- Geology --- Earth Sciences -
This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 2.5 license. This book offers a concise, practice-oriented reference-guide to the field of ocean wave energy. The ten chapters highlight the key rules of thumb, address all the main technical engineering aspects and describe in detail all the key aspects to be considered in the techno-economic assessment of wave energy converters. Written in an easy-to-understand style, the book answers questions relevant to readers of different backgrounds, from developers, private and public investors, to students and researchers. It is thereby a valuable resource for both newcomers and experienced practitioners in the wave energy sector.
X-Ray Contrast Media: Overview, Use and Pharmaceutical Aspects
his open access book is an overview on CT/X-ray contrast media designed for radiologists and other medical specialists who use contrast media in imaging and interventional procedures as well as related scientists on the use and pharmaceutical aspects of X-ray contrast media. The overall goal of this book is to provide a comprehensive overview relevant for the optimal use of x-ray contrast media covering next to the historic development, their structure and properties also practical information for handling of contrast media, and explanation of the relevant risks during use and measures for prevention and treatment of potential side effects
Compositionality and Concepts in Linguistics and Psychology
By highlighting relations between experimental and theoretical work, this volume explores new ways of addressing one of the central challenges in the study of language and cognition. The articles bring together work by leading scholars and younger researchers in psychology, linguistics and philosophy. An introductory chapter lays out the background on concept composition, a problem that is stimulating much new research in cognitive science. Researchers in this interdisciplinary domain aim to explain how meanings of complex expressions are derived from simple lexical concepts and to show how these meanings connect to concept representations.
Compartment syndrome is a complex physiologic process with significant potential harm, and though an important clinical problem, the basic science and research surrounding this entity remains poorly understood. This unique open access book fills the gap in the knowledge of compartment syndrome, re-evaluating the current state of the art on this condition. The current clinical diagnostic criteria are presented, as well as the multiple dilemmas facing the surgeon. Pathophysiology, ischemic thresholds and pressure management techniques and limitations are discussed in detail.
Cyril Mauffrey --- David J. Hak --- Murphy P. Martin III
Community-Oriented Policing and Technological Innovations
This Brief presents new approaches and innovative challenges to address bringing technology into community-oriented policing efforts. “Community-oriented policing” is an approach that encourages police to develop and maintain personal relationships with citizens and community organizations. By developing these partnerships, the goal is to enhance trust and legitimacy of police by the community (and vice versa), and focus on engaging the community crime prevention and detection efforts for sustainable, long-term crime reduction.
Geology --- Earth Sciences --- Transportation
Protocols for Pre-Field Screening of Mutants for Salt Tolerance in Rice, Wheat and Barley
Agriculture (General) --- Plant Sciences
This book offers effective, low-cost and user-friendly protocols for the pre-field selection of salt-tolerant mutants in cereal crops. It presents simple methods for measuring soil salinity, including soil sampling and the analysis of water-soluble salts, and describes a detailed, but simple, screening test for salt tolerance in rice, wheat and barley seedlings, which uses hydroponics. The protocols are devised for use by plant breeders and can be easily accommodated into breeding practice.
Souleymane Bado --- Brian P. Forster --- Abdelbagi M.A. Ghanim --- Joanna Jankowicz-Cieslak --- et al.
This twenty-third ICMI Study addresses for the first time mathematics teaching and learning in the primary school (and pre-school) setting, while also taking international perspectives, socio-cultural diversity and institutional constraints into account. One of the main challenges of designing the first ICMI primary school study of this kind is the complex nature of mathematics at the early level. Accordingly, a focus area that is central to the discussion was chosen, together with a number of related questions. The broad area of Whole Number Arithmetic (WNA), including operations and relations and arithmetic word problems, forms the core content of all primary mathematics curricula.
A Life Course Perspective on Health Trajectories and Transitions
Biotechnology --- Law --- Social Sciences
his open access book examines health trajectories and health transitions at different stages of the life course, including childhood, adulthood and later life. It provides findings that assess the role of biological and social transitions on health status over time. The essays examine a wide range of health issues, including the consequences of military service on body mass index, childhood obesity and cardiovascular health, socio-economic inequalities in preventive health care use, depression and anxiety during the child rearing period, health trajectories and transitions in people with cystic fibrosis and oral health over the life course.
Big Data in Context: Legal, Social and Technological Insights
This book sheds new light on a selection of big data scenarios from an interdisciplinary perspective. It features legal, sociological and economic approaches to fundamental big data topics such as privacy, data quality and the ECJ’s Safe Harbor decision on the one hand, and practical applications such as smart cars, wearables and web tracking on the other. Addressing the interests of researchers and practitioners alike, it provides a comprehensive overview of and introduction to the emerging challenges regarding big data.
Beyond Safety Training: Embedding Safety in Professional Skills
This book investigates why, despite more and more resources devoted to safety training, expectations are not entirely met, particularly in the industrial sectors that have already achieved a high safety level. It not only reflects the most precious viewpoints of experts from different disciplines, different countries, with experiences in various industrial fields at the cutting edge of theories and practices in terms of safety, professionalization and their relationships
Safer Healthcare: Strategies for the Real World
Pharmacy and materia medica --- Medicine (General) --- Biotechnology -
The authors of this book set out a system of safety strategies and interventions for managing patient safety on a day-to-day basis and improving safety over the long term. These strategies are applicable at all levels of the healthcare system from the frontline to the regulation and governance of the system. There have been many advances in patient safety, but we now need a new and broader vision that encompasses care throughout the patient’s journey. The authors argue that we need to see safety through the patient’s eyes, to consider how safety is managed in different contexts and to develop a wider strategic and practical vision in which patient safety is recast as the management of risk over time.
Attitudes, Beliefs, Motivation and Identity in Mathematics Education: An Overview of the Field and Future Directions
This book records the state of the art in research on mathematics-related affect. It discusses the concepts and theories of mathematics-related affect along the lines of three dimensions. The first dimension identifies three broad categories of affect: motivation, emotions, and beliefs. The book contains one chapter on motivation, including discussions on how emotions and beliefs relate to motivation. There are two chapters that focus on beliefs and a chapter on attitude which cross-cuts through all these categories.
Assessment in Mathematics Education: Large-Scale Assessment and Classroom Assessment
This book provides an overview of current research on a variety of topics related to both large-scale and classroom assessment. First, the purposes, traditions and principles of assessment are considered, with particular attention to those common to all levels of assessment and those more connected with either classroom or large-scale assessment. Assessment design based on sound assessment principles is discussed, differentiating between large-scale and classroom assessment, but also examining how the design principles overlap.
Social Sciences --- Ecology --- Business and Management
This book discusses a core question in many fields of the social sciences, namely how to create, share and adopt new knowledge. It creates an original space for conversation between two lines of research that have developed largely in parallel for a long time: social network theory and the geography of knowledge. This book considers that relational thinking has become increasingly important for scholars to capture societal outcomes by studying social relations and networks, whereas the role of place, space and spatial scales has been somewhat neglected outside an emergent geography of knowledge.
Johannes Glückler --- Emmanuel Lazega --- Ingmar Hammer
The Tohoku University Graduate School of Dentistry first introduced the concept of “Interface Oral Health Science”, designed to establish and maintain healthy oral cavities, which are home to a number of mixed systems. Included in those systems are: (1) host tissues such as teeth, mucosa, muscle and bone, (2) parasites and microorganisms cohabiting the surfaces of the oral cavity and (3) biomaterials that are used for the rehabilitation of oral functions. In addition, (4) these systems are subject to severe and complex mechanical forces.
Advancing Human Assessment: The Methodological, Psychological and Policy Contributions of ETS
This book describes the extensive contributions made toward the advancement of human assessment by scientists from one of the world’s leading research institutions, Educational Testing Service. The book’s four major sections detail research and development in measurement and statistics, education policy analysis and evaluation, scientific psychology, and validity. Many of the developments presented have become de-facto standards in educational and psychological measurement, including in item response theory (IRT), linking and equating, differential item functioning (DIF), and educational surveys like the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the Programme of international Student Assessment (PISA), the Progress of International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) and the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS).
Randy E. Bennett --- Matthias von Davier
Access to Online Resources: A Guide for the Modern Librarian
Information theory --- Library and Information Science
The book offers a concise guide for librarians, helping them understand the challenges, processes and technologies involved in managing access to online resources. After an introduction the book presents cases of general authentication and authorisation. It helps readers understand web based authentication and provides the fundamentals of IP address recognition in an easy to understand manner. A special chapter is dedicated to Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), followed by an overview of the key concepts of OpenID Connect.
Shape memory alloys (SMAs) have special property of the shape memory effect. After thermal treatment above the martensitic transition temperature, the alloys come back to the original shape when the alloys heat again after having cooled it to the temperature that is lower than the martensitic transition temperature. By means of this property, many industrial parts and systems were produced. This Special Issue "Shape Memory Alloys 2017" is constructed articles reporting new and progressive research results, as well as reviews of particular classes of fundamental physics of the materials and their applications of SMAs.
Metals Challenged by Neutron and Synchrotron Radiation
Neutron and Synchrotron radiation methods have matured to become powerful techniques for the study of a vast range of materials, including metals. The characterization methods comprise the categories of diffraction, spectroscopy and imaging, which themselves can alter greatly in detail, to include hundreds of variants, problems and sample environments. In a similar way, their applications to metals and hard condensed matter materials cover disciplines spanning engineering, physics, chemistry, materials science and their derivatives such as geology, energy storage, etc
Hydrometallurgy, which involves the use of aqueous solutions for the recovery of metals from ores, concentrates, and recycled or residual material, plays an integral role in the multi-billion dollar minerals processing industry. There are numerous hydrometallurgical process technologies used for recovering metals, such as: agglomeration; leaching; solvent extraction/ion exchange; metal recovery; and remediation of tailings/waste. Modern hydrometallurgical routes to extract metals from their ores are faced with a number of issues related to both the chemistry and engineering aspects of the processes involved.
Suresh Bhargava --- Mark Pownceby --- Rahul Ram
First-Principles Approaches to Metals, Alloys, and Metallic Compounds
Mining and Metallurgy --- Chemistry (General)
Current fundamental electronic-structure theory allows for the accurate prediction and characterization of elemental metals adopting any allotropic structure, intermetallic compounds, and other metal-rich phases. From an engineering perspective, there is a need for structural materials that are suitable for mechanical and civil engineering as well as energy production and conversion. While different microstructural features influence the macroscopic behaviour, quantum-mechanical simulation may enormously accelerate and guide the entire development process since atomistic modelling allows for the generation of structural models and the calculation of enthalpies and other free energies as a function of pressure and temperature
Aluminium is the world’s most abundant metal and is the third most common element, comprising 8% of the Earth’s crust. The versatility of aluminium makes it the most widely used metal after steel. By utilising various combinations of their advantageous properties such as strength, lightness, corrosion resistance, recyclability, and formability, aluminium alloys are being employed in an ever-increasing number of applications. In the recent decade, a rapid new development has been made in production of aluminium alloys, and new techniques of casting, forming, welding, and surface modification, have been evolved to improve the structural integrity of aluminium alloys.
Advances in Welding Metal Alloys, Dissimilar Metals and Additively Manufactured Parts
General and Civil Engineering --- Materials --- Mining and Metallurgy
Welding technology has been taken for granted as a mature and established technology for too long. However, many new welding technologies have been included among the alternatives to joining materials. They come both from the areas of fusion and solid-state welding. Moreover, a recent approach has offered one more alternative. This is hybrid welding, which couples two or more welding sources in a cooperative or synergic welding mode.
Technology (General) --- General and Civil Engineering
Geomorphometry is the science of quantitative terrain characterization and analysis, and has traditionally focused on the investigation of terrestrial and planetary landscapes. However, applications of marine geomorphometry have now moved beyond the simple adoption of techniques developed for terrestrial studies, driven by the rise in the acquisition of high-resolution seafloor data and by the availability of user-friendly spatial analytical tools. Considering that the seafloor represents 71% of the surface of our planet, this is an important step towards understanding the Earth in its entirety
Structural Control of Mineral Deposits. Theory and Reality
Structural Control"" remains a crucial point that frequently lacks in any scientific and/or economic analysis of ore deposits, whatever their type and class. The case of lode deposits is exemplary, although also other deposits, like breccia pipe, stockwerk, massive sulphides, skarn, etc., can, surprisingly, be concerned. Several concepts like the gold-bearing shear zone have not proven valid during the last few decades in terms of our understanding of gold deposit and have been totally abandoned. Additionally, the relationships between magmatism, regional tectonic context, and mineralization remain uncertain and have been debated in several recent publications.
Arctic Mineral Resources. Science and Technology
The Arctic zone of the Earth is a major source of mineral and other natural resources for the future development of science and technology. It contains a large supply of strategic mineral deposits, including rare earths, copper, phosphorus, niobium, platinum-group elements, and other critical metals. The continued melting of the sea ice due to climate change makes these resources more accessible than ever before. However, the mineral exploration in the Arctic has always been a challenge due to the climatic restrictions, remote location, and vulnerability of Arctic ecosystems. This book covers a broad range of topics related to the problem of Arctic mineral resources, including geological, geochemical, and mineralogical aspects of their occurrence and formation; chemical technologies; and environmental and economic problems related to mineral exploration.
Consideration of Abiotic Natural Resources in Life Cycle Assessments
Criticality of the Rare Earth Elements: Current and Future Sources and Recycling
Rare earth elements (REE) are critical to our modern way of life, although potential primary and secondary sources of these elements and the economics of the REE sector remain somewhat poorly understood. This Special Issue focuses on furthering our understanding of the criticality and potential sources of rare earth elements as well as the economics of the REE sector. The papers in this Special Issue provide further insight into the full life cycle of REE, information that is vital to ensuring the existence of sustainable sources of these critical elements into the future.
Development and Application of Optical Coherence Tomography (Oct)
This special feature issue has been initiated to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT). In OCT, broad bandwidth light is used in order to produce cross sectional images of turbid and translucent samples with high axial resolution (in the order of a few µm). The imaging speed of OCT can be as high as several millions of depth scans (A-scans) per second which allows for various applications in different fields. This special feature issue consists of three overview papers covering OCT angiography, polarization-sensitive OCT and dental applications of OCT. Additional applications and the latest developments in OCT are covered in nine research papers.
The Delft Sand, Clay and Rock Cutting Model
Sand, clay and rock have to be excavated for a variety of purposes, such as dredging, trenching, mining (including deep sea mining), drilling, tunnel boring and many other applications. Many excavations take place on dry land, but they are also frequently required in completely saturated conditions, and the methods necessary to accomplish them consequently vary widely. This book provides an overview of cutting theories. It begins with a generic model, valid for all types of soil (sand, clay and rock), and continues with the specifics of dry sand, water-saturated sand, clay, atmospheric rock and hyperbaric rock
Current Challenges in Modeling Cellular Metabolism
Mathematical and computational models play an essential role in understanding the cellular metabolism. They are used as platforms to integrate current knowledge on a biological system and to systematically test and predict the effect of manipulations to such systems. The recent advances in genome sequencing techniques have facilitated the reconstruction of genome-scale metabolic networks for a wide variety of organisms from microbes to human cells. These models have been successfully used in multiple biotechnological applications. Despite these advancements, modeling cellular metabolism still presents many challenges
Daniel Machado --- Kai H. Zhuang --- Nikolaus Sonnenschein --- Markus J. Herrgard
A topic of utmost importance in civil engineering is finding optimal solutions throughout the life cycle of buildings and infrastructural objects, including their design, manufacturing, use, and maintenance. Operational research, management science, and optimization methods provide a consistent and applicable groundwork for engineering decision-making. These topics have received the interest of researchers and, after a rigorous peer-review process, eight papers have been published in this Special Issue.
Zavadskas, Edmundas Kazimieras --- Antuchevi?ien?, Jurgita --- Bausys,
Networks of coordinated interactions among biological entities govern a myriad of biological functions that span a wide range of both length and time scales—from ecosystems to individual cells and from years to milliseconds. For these networks, the concept “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” applies as a norm rather than an exception. Meanwhile, continued advances in molecular biology and high-throughput technology have enabled a broad and systematic interrogation of whole-cell networks, allowing the investigation of biological processes and functions at unprecedented breadth and resolution—even down to the single-cell level.
Rudiyanto Gunawan (Ed.) --- Neda Bagheri (Ed.)
The subject of this book is ""Biofuel and Bioenergy Technology"". It aims to publish high-quality review and research papers, addressing recent advances in biofuel and bioenergy. State-of-the-art studies of advanced techniques of biorefinery for biofuel production are also included. Research involving experimental studies, recent developments, and novel and emerging technologies in this field are covered.
Chen, Wei-Hsin --- Lee, Keat Teong --- Ong, Hwai
General and Civil Engineering --- Technology (General)
Power electronics technology is still an emerging technology, and it has found its way into many applications, from renewable energy generation (i.e., wind power and solar power) to electrical vehicles (EVs), biomedical devices, and small appliances, such as laptop chargers. In the near future, electrical energy will be provided and handled by power electronics and consumed through power electronics; this not only will intensify the role of power electronics technology in power conversion processes, but also implies that power systems are undergoing a paradigm shift, from centralized distribution to distributed generation.
Blaabjerg, Frede --- Dragicevic, Tomislav --- Davari, Pooya
Aeroacustic and Vibroacoustic Advancement in Aerospace and Automotive Systems
The purpose of this special issue is to highlight the latest advances in vibroacoustics and aeroacoustics applied to aerospace and automotive industries. In proposing this wide topic, we wanted to give scientists and engineers the opportunity to publish their studies of current interest, both in the theoretical and experimental fields of vibration, sound generation, and radiation; and passive and active noise control approaches, which can be of interest for assessing vibroacoustics characteristics of aerospace and automotive vehicles
Roberto Citarella (Ed.) --- Luigi Federico (Ed.)
Technology (General) --- General and Civil Engineering --- Environmental Engineering
The Special Issue on Advances in Water Distribution Networks (WDNs) explores four important topics of research in the framework of WDNs, namely simulation and optimization modelling, topology and partitioning, water quality, and service effectiveness. With regard to the first topic, the following aspects are addressed: pressure-driven formulations, algorithms for the optimal location of control valves to minimize leakage, the benefits of water discharge prediction for the remote real time control of valves, and transients generated by pumps operating as turbines. In the context of the second topic, a topological taxonomy of WDNs is presented, and partitioning methods for the creation of district metered areas are compared.
Chemistry (General) --- General and Civil Engineering
The forming of metals through plastic deformation comprises a family of methods that produce components through the re-shaping of input stock, oftentimes with little waste. Therefore, forming is one of the most efficient and economical manufacturing process families available. A myriad of forming processes exist in this family. In conjunction with their countless existing successful applications and their relatively low energy requirements, these processes are an indispensable part of our future.
Myoung-Gyu Lee (Ed.) --- Yannis P. Korkolis (Ed.)
Advances in Integrated Energy Systems Design, Control and Optimization
In the face of climate change and resource scarcity, energy supply systems are on the verge of a major transformation, which mainly includes the introduction of new components and their integration into the existing infrastructures, new network configurations and reliable topologies, optimal design and novel operation schemes, and new incentives and business models. This revolution is affecting the current paradigm and demanding that energy systems be integrated into multi-carrier energy hubs. It is highly increasing the interactions between today’s energy systems at various scales and future intelligent energy systems, which are able to incorporate an increasing amount renewable energy sources.
Josep M. Guerrero (Ed.) --- Amjad Anvari-Moghaddam (Ed.)
Electromagnetic Technologies for Medical Diagnostics. Fundamental Issues, Clinical Applications and Perspectives
The content of this Special Issue will highlight papers exploring non-commutative Fourier harmonic analysis, spectral properties of aperiodic order, the hypoelliptic heat equation, and the relativistic heat equation in the context of Information Theory and Geometric Science of Information
Optical Methods in Sensing and Imaging for Medical and Biological Applications
General and Civil Engineering --- Medicine (General) --- Therapeutics
The recent advances in optical sources and detectors have opened up new opportunities for sensing and imaging techniques which can be successfully used in biomedical and healthcare applications. This book, entitled ‘Optical Methods in Sensing and Imaging for Medical and Biological Applications’, focuses on various aspects of the research and development related to these areas. The book will be a valuable source of information presenting the recent advances in optical methods and novel techniques, as well as their applications in the fields of biomedicine and healthcare, to anyone interested in this subject.
Dragan Indjin (Ed.) --- Željka Cvejić (Ed.) --- Małgorzata Jędrzejewska-Szczerska (Ed.)
Crystal Dislocations: Their Impact on Physical Properties of Crystals
The proposed existence of the edge and screw dislocation in the 1930s, and the subsequent work showing that dislocation theory could explain the plastic deformation of crystals, represent an important step in developing our understanding of materials into a science. The continued work involved with characterization of dislocations and linking them to a variety of physical properties in both single and poly crystals have made enormous progress over the past 50 years. It is rare to find a technical application involving a material with any crystal structure that is not impacted by dislocations; mechanical properties, massive phase transformations, interphases, crystal growth, electronic properties, the list goes on.
The spin-crossover (SCO) phenomenon originates from the intrinsic bistability of the d-electron configuration, created by the competition between ligand-field splitting and spin-pairing energies in a first coordination sphere of transition metal ions. Since Cambi’s visionary finding of the SCO phenomenon in 1931, considerable knowledge concerning syntheses, crystal structures, magnetic and thermodynamic properties, spectroscopies, molecular orbital calculations, and theories of SCO complexes has accumulated in a very large number of inorganic molecular coordination compounds, and, in addition, inorganic cobaltates and bioinorganic molecular systems.
Enhancing Soil Health to Mitigate Soil Degradation
Five of the top ten problems facing humanity (http://cnst.rice.edu/content.aspx?id=246) over the next 50 years (food, water, energy, environment and poverty) are directly related to the health of soil resources. Several different factors, including: (a) excessive tillage; (b) inappropriate crop rotations; (c) excessive grazing or crop residue removal; (d) deforestation; (e) mining and/or fracking; and (f) construction or urban sprawl, have contributed to the global problem of soil degradation.
Douglas L. Karlen (Ed.) --- Charles W. Rice (Ed.)
We invite you to contribute to a Special Issue of Nutrients, entitled “Dietary Supplements”. The purpose of this Special Issue is to advance dietary supplement science by presenting commissioned overviews on four nutrients of particular current interest and controversy: Vitamin D, iodine, iron, and omega-3 fatty acids. To supplement these contributions, we welcome the submission of manuscripts describing original research or providing systematic reviews related to various issues in dietary supplement science.
Johanna T. Dwyer (Ed.) --- Paul M. Coates (Ed.)
The study of the magnetic properties of molecular conductors has experienced, over the last few decades, a very significant evolution, comprising systems of increasing molecular complexity and moving towards multifunctional materials. In this context, molecular magnetic conductors have emerged at the intersection between the fields of molecule-based conductors and molecule-based magnets as a very exciting class of multifunctional materials in which the interaction and synergy between conduction electrons and localized magnetic moments can lead to new phenomena, complex phase diagrams, and different ground states, with a large potential for technological applications, namely in electronic devices, sensors and spintronics.
Understanding and Managing Emerald Ash Borer Impacts on Ash Forests
The emerald ash borer (EAB) is rapidly spreading throughout Eastern North America and devastating ecosystems where ash is a component tree. This rapid and sustained loss of ash trees has already resulted in ecological impacts on both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and is projected to be even more severe as EAB invades ash dominated wetlands of the western Great Lakes region. We propose a Special Issue that will address current research documenting ecological impacts of EAB in forest ecosystems, as well as management approaches to mitigate those impacts.
Randall K. Kolka (Ed.) --- Anthony D’Amato (Ed.) --- Nam Jin Noh (Ed.) --- Brian J. Palik (Ed.) --- et al.
Groundwater Contamination and Remediation
This Special Issue of Water brings together 10 studies on groundwater contamination and remediation. Common themes include practical techniques for plume identification and delineation, the central role of subsurface processes, the pervasiveness of non-Fickian transport, and the importance of bacterial communities in the broader context of biogeochemistry.
Timothy D. Scheibe (Ed.) --- David C. Mays (Ed.)
Bioinspired Catechol- Based Systems: Chemistry and Applications
Catechols are widely found in nature taking part in a variety of biological functions, ranging from the aqueous adhesion of marine organisms to the storage of transition metal ions. Catechol-based natural and biomimetic molecules have thus been the focus of intense research aimed at mimicking and translating this nature-inspired chemistry into new functional materials and systems with tailored properties. The aim of this book is to present a concise survey of the state-of-the-art of basic and applied research on bioinspired catechol systems. It collects several cutting-edge contributions from leading laboratories with a unifying theme of biomimetic principles and approaches.
Marco d’Ischia (Ed.) --- Daniel Ruiz-Molina (Ed.)
On the Origin (and Evolution) of Baryonic Galaxy Halos
This book covers aspects and achievements of the baryonic (star and gas) component of galaxy halos as presented at the successful conference “On the Origin (and Evolution) of Baryonic Galaxy Halos”, held on the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador, March 13–17, 2017. It can be regarded as a compendium of the prominent results in this field. The main focus is the latest simulations and observations of galaxy halos. This compendium is recommended to researchers, and advanced students, as it contains peer-reviewed high quality papers that will meet their scientific needs and help to initiate new research directions. Everything described in this book is the result of a truly collective effort from the participants of the Galapagos conference.
Ericson D. Lopez (Ed.) --- Duncan A. Forbes (Ed.)
Engineering Dielectric Liquid Applications
Dielectric liquids are used as impregnates of solid insulations or filling products in many kinds of equipment, such as transformers (power, rectifier, distribution, traction, furnace, potential, current), resistors, reactors, capacitors, cables, bushings, circuit breakers, tap changers, and thyristor cooling in power electronics, etc. Their role is paramount in the sense that their presence is one of the fundamental conditions for the proper functioning of such equipment. Similar to blood in the human body, dielectric liquids hold the responsibility of maintaining the entire equipment.
Issouf Fofana, Ph.D. ing. Chairholder (Ed.)
a. 200 words; this text will present the book in all promotional forms (e.g. flyers). Please describe the book in straightforward and consumer-friendly terms.[There is ever more research on smart cities and new interdisciplinary approaches proposed on the study of smart cities. At the same time, problems pertinent to communities inhabiting rural areas are being addressed, as part of discussions in contigious fields of research, be it environmental studies, sociology, or agriculture. Even if rural areas and countryside communities have previously been a subject of concern for robust policy frameworks, such as the European Union’s Cohesion Policy and Common
General and Civil Engineering --- Materials
Presenting very high surface-to-volume ratio, relatively simple processability and low cost, graphene and graphene-related materials were soon identified as promising nanofillers for polymer matrixes. Reports have shown notorious property enhancements for graphene-polymer composites (GPC) at very low filler loadings. Uses of GPC in varied fields, such as energy, electronics, catalysis, separation and purification, biomedicine, aerospace, tribology, etc., have been demonstrated and, in some cases, put into industrial practice. However, challenges still exist
Commemorative Issue in Honor of Professor Emeritus Calvin H. Bartholomew in Anticipation of His 75th Birthday
Chemistry (General) --- Chemical Engineering
This book recognizes the career of Professor Emeritus Calvin H. Bartholomew, who celebrated his 75th birthday in 2018, and his contributions to the science and engineering of heterogeneous catalysis, a field which improves daily life in countless, but often unrecognized ways. Dr. Bartholomew is an eminent researcher, an outstanding educator, mentor, and friend. The nine chapters comprising the book were written by former students, collaborators, colleagues, and respected peers.
Research Methods Pedagogy: Engaging Psychology Students in Research Methods and Statistics
Research methods and statistics are central to the development of professional competence and evidence based psychological practice. Furthermore, the ability to interpret and apply research findings contributes to the development of psychological literacy, the primary outcome of an undergraduate education in psychology. Despite this, many psychology students express little interest in, and in some cases an active dislike of, learning research methods and statistics. This ebook brings together current research, innovative evidence-based practice and critical discourse related to engaging psychology students in learning quantitative and qualitative mixed methods research.
Rangeland Systems: Processes, Management and Challenges
This book provides an unprecedented synthesis of the current status of scientific and management knowledge regarding global rangelands and the major challenges that confront them. It has been organized around three major themes. The first summarizes the conceptual advances that have occurred in the rangeland profession. The second addresses the implications of these conceptual advances to management and policy. The third assesses several major challenges confronting global rangelands in the 21st century.
Epigenetics of B Cells and Antibody Responses
Allergy and Immunology --- Medicine (General)
Epigenetics is the study of changes in gene activity that are heritable but not caused by changes in the DNA sequence. By modulating gene activities, epigenetic changes regulate cell functions. They include DNA methylation, histone posttranslational modifications and gene silencing by the action of non-coding RNAs, particularly microRNAs. It is now clear that epigenetic changes regulate B cell development. By acting in concert with networks of transcription factors, they modulate the activation of B cell lineage specific gene programs and repress inappropriate gene transcription in particular B cell differentiation states.
Manufactures --- Chemical Engineering --- Business and Management --- Political Science
Universities and research institutes are increasingly expected to contribute to society by creating innovation from the returns of their research results and the establishment of new technologies. Toward that goal, Keio University in Japan held an international symposium titled “Fulfilling the Promise of Technology Transfer: Fostering Innovation for the Benefit of Society.” From that symposium the following contents are included in the present volume: 1) A showcase of ideas and case studies to promote future creation of innovation by universities and research institutes worldwide, including information on the R&D value chain, licensing, income generation, start-ups and mechanisms to encourage entrepreneurship, and the changing role of universities in fostering innovation. 2) Introduction of active research projects that aim to productize successful research results on an international level. For example, the book includes results of research on stem cell technologies and regenerative medicine as well as the realization and application of polymer photonics and the development of the core technology of polymer photonics. 3) Case studies from the U.K. in developing industry–academia collaboration with various business partners ranging from start-ups and spinout companies to large enterprises. 4) Reports of the achievements of the technological transfer activities at Keio University supported by the 5-year public fund, with suggestions for future prospects.
Naïve T cells get activated upon encounter with their cognate antigen and differentiate into a specific subset of effector cells. These T cells are themselves plastic and are able to re-differentiate into another subset, changing both phenotype and function. Differentiation into a specific subset depends on the nature of the antigen and of the environmental milieu. Notably, certain nutrients, such as vitamins A and D, sodium chloride, have been shown to modulate T cell responses and influence T cell differentiation.
Power Transformer Diagnostics, Monitoring and Design Features
Power transformers are key components in electric power distribution and transmission systems, and it is essential that they function properly for many years. With increasing age, there are potential risks of extremely high monetary losses due to unexpected failures and outages. A simple solution would be to replace all aging and risky transformers at once with new ones. Such an approach is obviously not a fiscally realistic solution. The main objectives are to extend their service life and optimize their performance through increased availability.
Over the past decades, researchers have gathered data demonstrating that vitamin D and its metabolites possess activities far beyond the classic regulation of calcium–phosphate homeostasis. It is now well established that vitamin D is essential for the proper functioning of the musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, nervous, and immune systems. Furthermore, vitamin D and its analogs were shown to regulate proliferation and differentiation of keratinocyte, immune cells, and numerous cancer-derived cells, both in vivo and in vitro. On the other hand, population base studies have provided evidence that global vitamin D deficiency is correlated with the occurrence and aggravation of symptoms of skeletal, cardiovascular autoimmune, and skin disease; infections; metabolic and cognitive disorders; multiple types of cancers; as well as overall mortality.
Power electronics technology is still an emerging technology, and it has found its way into many applications, from renewable energy generation (i.e., wind power and solar power) to electrical vehicles (EVs), biomedical devices, and small appliances, such as laptop chargers. In the near future, electrical energy will be provided and handled by power electronics and consumed through power electronics; this not only will intensify the role of power electronics technology in power conversion processes, but also implies that power systems are undergoing a paradigm shift, from centralized distribution to distributed generation. Today, more than 1000 GW of renewable energy generation sources (photovoltaic (PV) and wind) have been installed, all of which are handled by power electronics technology.
Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) of Civil Structures
At the current time of writing, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has awarded American infrastructure a grade of D+, meaning poor and at risk. Part of the reason for the low grade is due to the rapid deterioration of structural integrity and the inability of most places to safely meet future demands. Deficiencies in these areas may be remediated by advancements in structural health monitoring (SHM) technologies that provide sensing systems to automatically and economically diagnose structural integrity.
Gangbing Song (Ed.) --- Chuji Wang (Ed.) --- Bo Wang (Ed.)
This Issue contains one communication, six articles, and two reviews. The communication from Paola Vitale et al. represents a work where whole cells were used as biocatalysts for the reduction of optically active chloroalkyl arylketones followed by a chemical cyclization to give the desired heterocycles. Among the various whole cells screened (baker’s yeast, Kluyveromyces marxianus CBS 6556, Saccharomyces cerevisiae CBS 7336, Lactobacillus reuteri DSM 20016), baker’s yeast provided the best yields and the highest enantiomeric ratios (95:5) in the bioreduction of the above ketones.
Advances in Marine Chitin and Chitosan II, 2017
As a result of our call in 2014 for submissions to a Special Issue, Advances in Marine Chitin and Chitosan in Marine Drugs, we are now pleased to tell you that this issue has been published. Twenty high class papers were included in this issue, which we now plan to publish as a book. In addition we now seek to publish a further Special Issue, Advances in Marine Chitin and Chitosan II, 2017, in Marine Drugs. As before, we plan to produce a strong, very exciting issue that will encompass breakthroughs in high value, scientific and industrial chitin and chitosan research.
Hitoshi Sashiwa (Ed.) --- David Harding (Ed.)
Catechols are widely found in nature taking part in a variety of biological functions, ranging from the aqueous adhesion of marine organisms to the storage of transition metal ions. Catechol-based natural and biomimetic molecules have thus been the focus of intense research aimed at mimicking and translating this nature-inspired chemistry into new functional materials and systems with tailored properties. The aim of this book is to present a concise survey of the state-of-the-art of basic and applied research on bioinspired catechol systems. It collects several cutting-edge contributions from leading laboratories with a unifying theme of biomimetic principles and approaches. It is hoped that both practitioners and newcomers to the field will by fascinated by the unique potential of biomimetics to pursue new research and innovative solutions in biomedicine and technology.
The Emerging Discipline of Quantitative Systems Pharmacology
In 2011, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in collaboration with leaders from the pharmaceutical industry and the academic community, published a white paper describing the emerging discipline of Quantitative Systems Pharmacology (QSP), and recommended the establishment of NIH-supported interdisciplinary research and training programs for QSP. QSP is still in its infancy, but has tremendous potential to change the way we approach biomedical research.
Applications of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) Tools in Microbiology of Infectious Diseases
Epidemiology is a discipline intended to systematically investigate, and ideally quantify, disease dynamics in populations (Perez, 2015). Epidemiological assessmentsmay be divided into four large areas, namely, (a) identification and characterization of a pathogen, (b) development of systems for detection of cases, (c) descriptive epidemiology and quantification of disease patterns, and (d) advanced analytical methods to design intervention strategies.
This study investigates the ethical aspects of deploying and researching into so-called climate engineering methods, i.e. large-scale technical interventions in the climate system with the objective of offsetting anthropogenic climate change. The moral reasons in favour of and against R&D into and deployment of CE methods are analysed by means of argument maps. These argument maps provide an overview of the CE controversy and help to structure the complex debate.
Open-source electronics are becoming very popular, and are integrated with our daily educational and developmental activities. At present, the use open-source electronics for teaching science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) has become a global trend. Off-the-shelf embedded electronics such as Arduino- and Raspberry-compatible modules have been widely used for various applications, from do-it-yourself (DIY) to industrial projects. In addition to the growth of open-source software platforms, open-source electronics play an important role in narrowing the gap between prototyping and product development. Indeed, the technological and social impacts of open-source electronics in teaching, research, and innovation have been widely recognized.
UAV or Drones for Remote Sensing Applications
The rapid development and growth of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as a remote sensing platform, as well as advances in the miniaturization of instrumentation and data systems, have resulted in an increasing uptake of this technology in the environmental and remote sensing science communities.Although tough regulations across the globe may still limit the broader use of UAVs, their use in precision agriculture, ecology, atmospheric research, disaster response biosecurity, ecological and reef monitoring, forestry, fire monitoring, quick response measurements for emergency disaster, Earth science research, volcanic gas sampling, monitoring of gas pipelines, mining plumes, humanitarian observations and biological/chemo-sensing tasks continues to increase.
Felipe Gonzalez Toro and Antonios Tsourdos (Eds.)
Sustainability of Young Companies–Contemporary Trends and Challenges
Ensuring the sustainability of early stage companies and increasing awareness of the need for balancing targets against different stakeholder groups among young companies are not well developed. Young companies, in the first place, want to achieve financial success very often without regard for aspects such as the environment, positive relationships with employees, suppliers or other stakeholder groups, fulfilling requirements of labor law, etc. Another issue is that of companies whose business models are based on actuarially-preferred concepts, such as sharing economy, sustainable development, e-comers, e-commerce, renewable energy, social media, and others.
Felipe Gonzalez Toro (Ed.) --- Antonios Tsourdos (Ed.)
Mobile learning has become one of the more influential aspects of the field of educational technology, given the ubiquity of modern mobile devices and proliferation of educational applications or ‘apps’. Within this volume, there are a range of studies and reviews which cover a breadth of current topics in the field, namely user motivations for using mobile learning, issues in evaluation, as well as domain-specific considerations (e.g., use within language learning or audio-based applications). Together, these studies represent the synthesis of a range of methods, approaches, and applications that highlight benefits and areas of future growth of mobile technologies and how they can be useful and most effective in education.
Two-Dimensional Electronics - Prospects and Challenges
During the past 10 years, two-dimensional materials have found incredible attention in the scientific community. The first two-dimensional material studied in detail was graphene, and many groups explored its potential for electronic applications. Meanwhile, researchers have extended their work to two-dimensional materials beyond graphene. At present, several hundred of these materials are known and part of them is considered to be useful for electronic applications.
This Special Issue "Advanced Nanoindentation in Materials" contains some of the latest developments in the field of small-scale contact mechanics for a wide range of materials and biological cells. The featured manuscript revealed a new ultra-high strain rate nanoindentation method that will enable new scientific understanding of time-dependent material properties. The book also presents unique material properties of super alloys and other structural materials characterized by indentation methods. In addition to engineering materials, deformation behaviors of live cancer cells on sharp pillar structures were discussed in this book with the hope to stimulate interest in the mechanical contact behaviors of biological cells.
Geomorphometry is the science of quantitative terrain characterization and analysis, and has traditionally focused on the investigation of terrestrial and planetary landscapes. However, applications of marine geomorphometry have now moved beyond the simple adoption of techniques developed for terrestrial studies, driven by the rise in the acquisition of high-resolution seafloor data and by the availability of user-friendly spatial analytical tools. Considering that the seafloor represents 71% of the surface of our planet, this is an important step towards understanding the Earth in its entirety.This volume is the first one dedicated to marine applications of geomorphometry.
Lucieer, Vanessa --- Dolan, Margaret --- Lecours, Vincent
ctive technological development has fuelled rapid growth in the number of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) platforms being deployed around the globe. Novel UAV platforms, UAV-based sensors, robotic sensing and imaging techniques, the development of processing workflows, as well as the capacity of ultra-high temporal and spatial resolution data, provide both opportunities and challenges that will allow engineers and scientists to address novel and important scientific questions in UAV and sensor design, remote sensing and environmental monitoring.
Active technological development has fuelled rapid growth in the number of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) platforms being deployed around the globe. Novel UAV platforms, UAV-based sensors, robotic sensing and imaging techniques, the development of processing workflows, as well as the capacity of ultra-high temporal and spatial resolution data, provide both opportunities and challenges that will allow engineers and scientists to address novel and important scientific questions in UAV and sensor design, remote sensing and environmental monitoring.T
This book examines the notion of storytelling in videogames. This topic allows new perspectives on the enduring problem of narrative in digital games, while also opening up different avenues of inquiry. The collection looks at storytelling in games from many perspectives. Topics include the remediation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in games such as Spec Ops: The Line; the storytelling similarities in Twin Peaks and Deadly Premonition, a new concept of ‘choice poetics’; the esthetics of Alien films and games, and a new theoretical overview of early game studies on narrative
Micro/Nano Devices for Chemical Analysis
Since the concept of micro total analysis systems (µ-TAS) has been advocated, various kinds of micro/nano devices have been developed by researchers in many fields, such as in chemistry, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, electric engineering, biology, and medicine, among others. The analytical techniques for small sample volumes, using the micro/nano devices, heavily impacted the fields of biology, medicine and biotechnology, as well as analytical chemistry.
Manabu Tokeshi (Ed.) --- Kiichi Sato (Ed.)
Changing Land Use, Changing Livelihoods: Smallholders Today
his book brings together eleven works by scholars within and beyond geography, to argue the case for a continued engagement with smallholder agricultural studies. The research detailed is largely empirical and draws on a wide spectrum of mixed qualitative and quantitative methodologies. The case studies cover a range of geographic locations, including Brazil, Burkina Faso, South Africa, Botswana, Malawi, Madagascar, Vietnam, and the USA, with greatest emphasis in sub-Saharan Africa.
Claudia A. Radel (Ed.) --- Jacqueline M. Vadjunec (Ed.)
Bioeconomy: Shaping the Transition to a Sustainable, Biobased Economy
This book defines the new field of "Bioeconomy" as the sustainable and innovative use of biomass and biological knowledge to provide food, feed, industrial products, bioenergy and ecological services. The chapters highlight the importance of bioeconomy-related concepts in public, scientific, and political discourse. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the authors outline the dimensions of the bioeconomy as a means of achieving sustainability.
Intensive agriculture has generally resulted in higher productivity, but also in a trend towards decreasing levels of agro-biodiversity, which represents a key point in ensuring the adaptability and resilience of agro-ecosystems in the global challenge to produce more and better food in a sustainable way. The biodiversity of vegetable crops includes genetic diversity—both as species diversity (interspecific diversity) and as a diversity of genes within a species (intraspecific diversity) with regard to the vegetable varieties grown—and the diversity of agro-ecosystems (agro-biodiversity). T
Catalysis for the Conversion of Biomass and Its Derivatives
Biomass will play an important role in the future for the replacement of fossil sources for fuels and chemicals. Catalytic processes are required for the efficient conversion of biomass. The development of such processes and the understanding of the catalytic reactions of biomass molecules has recently attracted considerable and increasing attention. In this book, thirteen experts in different fields deliver their views on the state-of-the-art and future development of the use of biomass as a sustainable feedstock for the chemical industry.
Malte Behrens (ed.) --- Abhaya K. Datye (ed.)
Algebra in Cuneiform: Introduction to an Old Babylonian Geometrical Technique
his textbook analyzes a number of texts in “conformal translation,” that is, a translation in which the same Babylonian term is always translated in the same way and, more importantly, in which different terms are always translated differently. Appendixes are provided for readers who are familiar with basic Assyriology but otherwise philological details are avoided. All of these texts are from the second half of the Old Babylonian period, that is, 1800–1600 BCE. It is indeed during this period that the “algebraic” discipline, and Babylonian mathematics in general, culminates.
Reflections on the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident: Toward Social-Scientific Literacy and Engineering Resilience
This book focuses on nuclear engineering education in the post-Fukushima era. It was edited by the organizers of the summer school held in August 2011 in University of California, Berkeley, as part of a collaborative program between the University of Tokyo and UC Berkeley. Motivated by the particular relevance and importance of social-scientific approaches to various crucial aspects of nuclear technology, special emphasis was placed on integrating nuclear science and engineering with social science.
Environmental Sciences --- General and Civil Engineering --- Geology --
Managing Protected Areas in Central and Eastern Europe Under Climate Change
This volume presents an Empirical Model of Global Climate developed by the authors and uses that model to show that global warming will likely remain below 2ºC, relative to preindustrial, throughout this century provided: a) both the unconditional and conditional Paris INDC commitments are followed; b) the emission reductions needed to achieve the Paris INDCs are carried forward to 2060 and beyond. The first section of the book provides a short overview of Earth’s climate system, describing and contrasting climatic changes throughout the planet’s history and anthropogenic changes post-Industrial Revolution.
Sustainable Land Use and Rural Development in Southeast Asia: Innovations and Policies for Mountainous Areas
This book is based on the findings of a long-term (2000-2014) interdisciplinary research project of the University of Hohenheim in collaboration with several universities in Thailand and Vietnam. Titled Sustainable Land Use and Rural Development in Mountainous Areas in Southeast Asia, or the Uplands Program, the project aims to contribute through agricultural research to the conservation of natural resources and the improvement of living conditions of the rural population in the mountainous regions of Southeast Asia.
As cities develop, more land is converted into impervious surfaces, which do not allow water to infiltrate. Careful urban planning is needed to ensure that the hydrologic cycle and water quality of the catchment areas are not affected. There are techniques that can attenuate peak flow during rain events and reduce the amount of metals, nutrients, and bacteria that enter the urban water cycle. This brief gives a short introduction on bioretention systems and documents the effectiveness of some 36 plant species in removing water pollutants. A summary on the maintenance requirements is also presented.
North Sea Region Climate Change Assessment
Geology --- Earth Sciences --- Meteorology and Climatology --- Environmental Sciences
With a wide spectrum of imaging capabilities, Earth observation offers several opportunities for the geoscience community to map and monitor natural and human-induced Earth hazards from space. The objective of this book is to collect scientific contributions on the development, validation, and implementation of satellite data, processing methods, and applications for mapping and monitoring of geohazards such as slow moving landslides, ground subsidence and uplift, and active and abandoned mining-related ground movements.
Model-Driven Development and Operation of Multi-Cloud Applications: The MODAClouds Approach
This book summarizes work being undertaken within the collaborative MODAClouds research project, which aims to facilitate interoperability between heterogeneous Cloud platforms and remove the constraints of deployment, portability, and reversibility for end users of Cloud services. Experts involved in the project provide a clear overview of the MODAClouds approach and explain how it operates in a variety of applications. While the wide spectrum of available Clouds constitutes a vibrant technical environment, many early-stage issues pose specific challenges from a software engineering perspective
Mineralogy of Quartz and Silica Minerals
The present book reports recent contributions from research in the field of quartz and other silica minerals. The various forms of silica (SiO2) represent important constituents of the Earth crust and play a central role in the composition of geological materials. In particular, quartz is widely used as a raw material in numerous industrial sectors. The knowledge of the formation and specific properties of SiO2 rocks and minerals is indispensable for the understanding and reconstruction of geological processes, as well as for specific technical applications. The works presented in this book are contributed by leading scientists and deal with aspects of the formation and processing of SiO2 raw materials, the analysis of high-purity quartz, and the specifics and varieties (e.g., quartz, amethyst, opal, agate) of SiO2 modifications.
Mineral Surface Reactions at the Nanoscale
Reactions at mineral surfaces are central to all geochemical processes. As minerals comprise the rocks of the Earth, the processes occurring at the mineral–aqueous fluid interface control the evolution of the rocks and hence the structure of the crust of the Earth during processes such as metamorphism, metasomatism, and weathering. In recent years focus has been concentrated on mineral surface reactions made possible through the development of advanced analytical methods such as atomic force microscopy (AFM), advanced electron microscopies (SEM and TEM), phase shift interferometry, confocal Raman spectroscopy, and advanced synchrotron-based applications, to enable mineral surfaces to be imaged and analyzed at the nanoscale.
Agricultural Implications of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident
Following the Fukushima nuclear accident, a large volume of monitoring data has been collected about the soil, air, dust, and seawater, along with data about an immense number of foods supplied to the market. Little is known, however, about the effect of radioactive fallout on agriculture, information about which is vital. Although more than 80% of the damaged area is related to agriculture, in situ information specifically for agriculture is scarce. This book provides data about the actual movement and accumulation of radioactivity in the ecological system—for example, whether debris deposited on mountains can be a cause of secondary contamination, under what conditions plants accumulate radioactive cesium in their edible parts, and how radioactivity is transferred from hay to milk.
Subseafloor Biosphere Linked to Hydrothermal Systems: TAIGA Concept
his book is the comprehensive volume of the TAIGA (“a great river ” in Japanese) project. Supported by the Japanese government, the project examined the hypothesis that the subseafloor fluid advection system (subseafloor TAIGA) can be categorized into four types, TAIGAs of sulfur, hydrogen, carbon (methane), and iron, according to the most dominant reducing substance, and the chemolithoautotrophic bacteria/archaea that are inextricably associated with respective types of TAIGAs which are strongly affected by their geological background such as surrounding host rocks and tectonic settings
Jun-ichiro Ishibashi --- Kyoko Okino --- Michinari Sunamura
Geomicrobiology and Biogeochemistry of Precious Metals
Biotechnology --- Ecology --- Geology --- Earth Sciences
Precious metals continue to have economic and sociocultural importance, as their usage evolves and diversifies over time. Today, the industrial application of precious metals is increasing with the development of scientific and technological innovations. Especially, the biological cycling of these metals is receiving more and more attention, as the microbiota may be key to a range of issues regarding exploration, ore-processing and metallurgy, and the processing of electron waste. In this volume, we focus on enhancing the fundamental understanding of the biological processes that drive noble metal cycling and examine how this knowledge may be turned into biotechnolical applications.
Frank Reith (Ed.) --- Jeremiah Shuster (Ed.)
Sustainable Manufacturing: Challenges, Solutions and Implementation Perspectives
This edited volume presents the research results of the Collaborative Research Center 1026 “Sustainable manufacturing - shaping global value creation”. The book aims at providing a reference guide of sustainable manufacturing for researchers, describing methodologies for development of sustainable manufacturing solutions. The volume is structured in four chapters covering the following topics: sustainable manufacturing technology, sustainable product development, sustainable value creation networks and systematic change towards sustainable manufacturing. The target audience comprises both researchers and practitioners in the field of sustainable manufacturing, but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students.
he Graduate Program in Sustainability Science under the Department of Urban Engineering of The University of Tokyo has been running an environmental leadership education program at the graduate student level since 2007 called the Asian Program for Incubation of Environmental Leaders (APIEL). This book describes the University’s experiences in establishing and organizing that program and provides some lessons learned for those who are considering starting environmental leadership education programs.
Structural Control"" remains a crucial point that frequently lacks in any scientific and/or economic analysis of ore deposits, whatever their type and class. The case of lode deposits is exemplary, although also other deposits, like breccia pipe, stockwerk, massive sulphides, skarn, etc., can, surprisingly, be concerned. Several concepts like the gold-bearing shear zone have not proven valid during the last few decades in terms of our understanding of gold deposit and have been totally abandoned.
The Arctic zone of the Earth is a major source of mineral and other natural resources for the future development of science and technology. It contains a large supply of strategic mineral deposits, including rare earths, copper, phosphorus, niobium, platinum-group elements, and other critical metals. The continued melting of the sea ice due to climate change makes these resources more accessible than ever before. However, the mineral exploration in the Arctic has always been a challenge due to the climatic restrictions, remote location, and vulnerability of Arctic ecosystems.
Habitats and Biota of the Gulf of Mexico: Before the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill: Volume 1: Water Quality, Sediments, Sediment Contaminants, Oil and Gas Seeps, Coastal Habitats, Offshore Plankton and Benthos, and Shellfish
The Gulf of Mexico is an open and dynamic marine ecosystem rich in natural resources but heavily impacted by human activities, including agricultural, industrial, commercial and coastal development. The Gulf of Mexico has been continuously exposed to petroleum hydrocarbons for millions of years from natural oil and gas seeps on the sea floor, and more recently from oil drilling and production activities located in the water near and far from shore. Major accidental oil spills in the Gulf are infrequent; two of the most significant include the Ixtoc I blowout in the Bay of Campeche in 1979 and the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in 2010. Unfortunately, baseline assessments of the status of habitats and biota in the Gulf of Mexico before these spills either were not available, or the data had not been systematically compiled in a way that would help scientists assess the potential short-term and long-term effects of such events
The book contains a collection of articles dealing with how the extraction of mineral resources can be considered in environmental analyses such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). The consumption of resources, e.g., metals, is increasing strongly worldwide. This is associated with more energy use; environmental pollution; and social, economic, and political consequences. An increase is also expected for the coming decades. At the same time, modern products and technologies, even in the field of renewable energies, require a large number of critical raw materials. A crucial question here is the exhaustibility of natural resources.
Magnetic Records of Extreme Geological Events
Recent advances in environmental magnetism offer the opportunity to link the magnetic signature of marine and continental rocks to the paleoenvironmental and paleoclimatic settings that controlled their formation or deposition, as well as to post-depositional events, such as diagenesis, that can alter their primary signature. This Research Topic assembles studies that used state of the art rock magnetic techniques to unravel the causes and effects of catastrophic geological events, including tsunami, meteorite impacts, Archean oxygenation event, geomagnetic reversals, and global climate changes linked to large volcanic eruptions.
Eric Font -, Alexandra Abrajevitch -. Fabio Florindo
Advanced Signaling Support for IP-based Networks
his work develops a set of advanced signaling concepts for IP-based networks. It proposes a design for secure and authentic signaling and provides QoS signaling support for mobile users. Furthermore, this work develops methods which allow for scalable QoS signaling by realizing QoS-based group communication mechanisms and through aggregation of resource reservations.
Biological Potential and Medical Use of Secondary
Many macro and micro species, from terrestrial and aquatic environments, produce structurally unique compounds and, in many countries, still are the primary sources of medicines. In fact, secondary metabolites are an important source of chemotherapeutic agents but are also lead compounds for synthetic modification and the optimization of biological activity. Therefore, the exploitation of secondary metabolites, or their inspired synthetic compounds, offers excellent opportunities for the pharmaceutical industry.
This open access book describes the results of natural language processing and machine learning methods applied to clinical text from electronic patient records.It is divided into twelve chapters. Chapters 1-4 discuss the history and background of the original paper-based patient records, their purpose, and how they are written and structured. These initial chapters do not require any technical or medical background knowledge.
Technologies for Development: From Innovation to Social Impact
This open access book presents 18 case studies that explore current scientific and technological efforts to address global development issues, such as poverty, from a holistic and interdisciplinary point of view, putting actual impacts at the centre of its analysis. It illustrates the use of technologies for development in various fields of research, such as humanitarian action, medical and information and communication technology, disaster risk-reduction technologies, habitat and sustainable access to energy. The authors discuss how innovative technologies, such as unmanned aerial vehicles for disaster risk reduction, crowdsourcing humanitarian data, online education and ICT-based medical technologies can have significant social impact.
Designed as an easy-to-use, practical guide to tumors of the eye, lids, and orbit, this open access book comprehensively addresses surgical treatment and management of diseases related to ophthalmic oncology. Surgical Ophthalmic Oncology: A Collaborative Open Access Reference is an ideal reference for general ophthalmologists, surgeons, fellows and trainees around the world who encounter these diseases in the care of their patients. Notably, this book includes considerations for those ophthalmologists offering subspecialty care in environments with limited access to advanced technology and instrumentation.
This open access book is an overview on CT/X-ray contrast media designed for radiologists and other medical specialists who use contrast media in imaging and interventional procedures as well as related scientists on the use and pharmaceutical aspects of X-ray contrast media. The overall goal of this book is to provide a comprehensive overview relevant for the optimal use of x-ray contrast media covering next to the historic development, their structure and properties also practical information for handling of contrast media, and explanation of the relevant risks during use and measures for prevention and treatment of potential side effects
White Paper on Joint Replacement: Status of Hip and Knee Arthroplasty Care in Germany
This White Paper details the status of hip and knee arthroplasty care in Germany. Hip and knee replacements are amongst the most frequently performed procedures and usually become necessarily due to age-related wear of the joint, osteoarthritis and fractures of the femoral neck. In light of demographic change, demands with regard to standards of care and the procedures are likely to rise.This book addresses people involved in shaping and representing the healthcare system from a variety of fields including medical professions, health insurances and health sciences as well as journalists and patient representatives.
Principles and Practice of Case-based Clinical Reasoning Education
Practice of Case-based Clinical Reasoning
This volume describes and explains the educational method of Case-Based Clinical Reasoning (CBCR) used successfully in medical schools to prepare students to think like doctors before they enter the clinical arena and become engaged in patient care. Although this approach poses the paradoxical problem of a lack of clinical experience that is so essential for building proficiency in clinical reasoning, CBCR is built on the premise that solving clinical problems involves the ability to reason about disease processes. This requires knowledge of anatomy and the working and pathology of organ systems, as well as the ability to regard patient problems as patterns and compare them with instances of illness scripts of patients the clinician has seen in the past and stored in memory
Anatomy Quizbook: for students studying or intending to study medicine
Anatomy Quizbook is an interactive learning book that will help students and tutors – indeed anyone interested in anatomy – learn, test and improve their knowledge of the human body.Readers are presented with carefully selected questions and diagrams addressing core learning in clinically-relevant anatomy. This selective rather than exhaustive approach will especially suit time-poor scholars. Regular self-testing will also ensure a robust and strategic understanding of the subject matter.In this first Volume, you can develop your knowledge of fundamental anatomy, including clinically-relevant terminology and the significant parts and operation of thethorax focusing on the heart, lungs, and associated bones, muscles, nerves, blood and lymphatic vessels.abdomen exploring the stomach, intestines, pancreas, liver, gallbladder, kidneys, spleen and their supporting structures (muscles, nerves, blood and lymphatic vessels).pelvis examining the bones, ligaments, vessels and nerves of the pelvic region, the features of male and female pelves, and the major digestive and excretory organs (colon, rectum, bladder and urethra).Whilst developed primarily for students who are studying, or intend to study, medicine, the Anatomy Quizbook will reward all readers who seek to explore and learn about the workings of the human body
Galectins in Cancer and Translational Medicine
In the post-genomic era, many efforts have been devoted to better understanding the biological information encoded by the cell “glycome” in normal and pathologic conditions. The glycan signature of human cells plays a pivotal role in regulating fundamental biological processes, which are critical for cell physiology and for cancer as well.Galectins (also worded S-type lectins) are an evolutionarily conserved family of endogenous lectins, which bind carbohydrates with high specificity. These molecules, which can be found both intracellularly and in the extracellular milieu, are functionally active in converting glycan-containing information into cell biological programs.
Sharing Our Knowledge: Best Practices for Supporting English Language Learners in Schools
To complete the course ECUR 415.3: Current Issues in EAL, students are required to submit a final paper that reflects their growing knowledge about English as an Additional Language (EAL). EAL is the term used in Saskatchewan to describe students who speak languages other than English and require adequate levels of English to be successful with the school curriculum. Most students enrolled in the online course ECUR 415 are practicing teachers who are working toward a Post-Degree Certificate in EAL Education (PDCEAL), while continuing to live and work in various locations both within and outside of the province.
This book covers the standard material for a one-semester course in multivariable calculus. The topics include curves, differentiability and partial derivatives, multiple integrals, vector fields, line and surface integrals, and the theorems of Green, Stokes, and Gauss. Roughly speaking the book is organized into three main parts corresponding to the type of function being studied: vector-valued functions of one variable, real-valued functions of many variables, and finally the general case of vector-valued functions of many variables. As is always the case, the most productive way for students to learn is by doing problems, and the book is written to get to the exercises as quickly as possible.
Introduction to Philosophy: Philosophy of Mind
Introduction to Philosophy: Philosophy of Mind (edited by Heather Salazar) surveys the central themes in philosophy of mind and places them in a historical and contemporary context intended to engage first-time readers in the field. It focuses on debates about the status and character of the mind and its seemingly subjective nature in an apparently more objective world. Written by experts and emerging researchers in their subject areas, each chapter brings clarity to complex material and involves the reader through a wealth of examples. Many chapters include applications of the concepts to film and literature that will stimulate readers to firmly grasp the significance of the philosophy of mind. Subjects
This collection of papers describes the recent development of travel health and vaccination services delivered by pharmacists. It is the first dedicated collection of its type and provides a template for the continued growth of pharmacy practice in this area. The articles examine and report on aspects of such services in the UK, US, Canada, Australia, Switzerland, and South Africa, which will provide useful insight for those in other countries developing such pharmacy-based services.
The Poetics and Politics of Alzheimer’s Disease Life-Writing
The introduction gives an overview on sociopolitical and research-related developments regarding dementia, and attempts explanations for why the interest in dementia of critical scholarship continues to be very limited and particularly focused on caregiver accounts. It illustrates that an understanding of the obvious neglect of dementia patient narratives sheds some light onto the ethical implications and challenges of critically reading such narratives: these narratives seem least of all fit to match classical survivor illness literature, and serious impairment in the ability to tell or understand stories has been taken as motivation to neglect patient narratives.
The emerging precision medicine approach aims to tailor disease prevention and treatment to each patient on the basis of individual variability, environmental factors and lifestyle. Fundamental achievements in the last few decades have converged to offer nowadays the compelling opportunity to move towards this innovative approach: i) unprecedented improvements in disease modeling in silico, in vitro and in vivo; ii) acquisition of a wide range of biomedical information combined with the development of computational toolsets for flexible and integrative analyses of multi-assay datasets.
Nano/Micro-Assisted Regenerative Medicine
Regenerative medicine is an emerging multidisciplinary field that aims to repair and restore the normal functions of tissues and organs damaged by aging, disease, injury, or congenital disorders. The basic concept of "Nano/Micro-Assisted Regenerative Medicine" is to use advanced nano/micro-technologies, either alone or in combination with specific cells, such as stem cells, to replace, enhance, or regenerate damaged or diseased human tissues or organs.
This study investigates eighteenth-century medical writing, particularly concerning the elaboration and the communication of medicine in such reference works as universal dictionaries of arts and sciences, medical dictionaries, and handbooks. Most of the vernacular texts under scrutiny here were issued in the second half of the century, a period in which the advancements in medical research, medical education and medical practice favoured the circulation of an expanding medical vocabulary and stimulated medical writing as a whole. A vast amount of reference works was produced for experts and non-experts alike: medical topics were common in social settings, in personal and communal letters, in specialised journals, in pamphlets and in magazines. All this unprecedented activity certainly contributed to the vernacularisation, and the dissemination of medicine in different kinds of works and different text types.
Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks for Smart Cities
Our lives are being transformed by the interplay between mobile networks, wireless communications, and artificial intelligence. This transformation is an outcome of the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) concept and advancements in computer architecture that translate into high computing power, high-performance processing, and huge memory capacities. In addition to the IoT, cyber-physical systems aim for the seamless integration of physical systems with computing and communication resources. Furthermore, in urban areas, the integration of “software-defined sensor networks” and “sensing as a service” concepts with legacy WSN-based systems is leading to the transformation of conventional city services towards smart cities.
he problem of accurate and reliable simulation of turbulent flows is a central and intractable challenge that crosses disciplinary boundaries. As the needs for accuracy increase and the applications expand beyond flows where extensive data is available for calibration, the importance of a sound mathematical foundation that addresses the needs of practical computing increases. This Special Issue is directed at this crossroads of rigorous numerical analysis, the physics of turbulence and the practical needs of turbulent flow simulations.
Computer Science and Engineering Education for Pre-collegiate Students and Teachers
Now more than ever, as a worldwide STEM community, we need to know what pre-collegiate teachers and students explore, learn, and implement in relation to computer science and engineering education. As computer science and engineering education are not always “stand-alone” courses in pre-collegiate schools, how are pre-collegiate teachers and students learning about these topics? How can these subjects be integrated
Mathematical optimization is the selection of the best element in a set with respect to a given criterion. Optimization has become one of the most-used tools in modern control theory for computing the control law, adjusting the controller parameters (tuning), model fitting, and finding suitable conditions in order to fulfill a given closed-loop property, among others. In the simplest case, optimization consists of maximizing or minimizing a function by systematically choosing input values from a valid input set and computing the function value. Nevertheless, real-world control systems need to comply with several conditions and constraints that have to be taken into account in the problem formulation—these represent challenges in the application of the optimization algorithms
Audio signal processing is a highly active research field where digital signal processing theory meets human sound perception and real-time programming requirements. It has a wide range of applications in computers, gaming, and music technology, to name a few of the largest areas. Successful applications include, for example, perceptual audio coding, digital music synthesizers, and music recognition software. The fact that music is now often listened to using headphones from a mobile device leads to new problems related to background noise control and signal enhancement. Developments in processor technology, such as parallel computing, are changing the way signal-processing algorithms are designed for audio.
Flexible Electronics: Fabrication and Ubiquitous Integration
Flexible Electronics platforms are increasingly used in the fields of sensors, displays, and energy conversion with the ultimate goal of facilitating their ubiquitous integration in our daily lives. Some of the key advantages associated with flexible electronic platforms are: bendability, lightweight, elastic, conformally shaped, nonbreakable, roll-to-roll manufacturable, and large-area. To realize their full potential, however, it is necessary to develop new methods for the fabrication of multifunctional flexible electronics at a reduced cost and with an increased resistance to mechanical fatigue
Middleware Solutions for Wireless Internet of Things
Plan Ceibal is the name coined in Uruguay for the local implementation of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. Plan Ceibal distributes laptops and tablets to students and teachers, and also deploys a nationwide wireless network to provide Internet access to these devices, provides video conference facilities, and develops educational applications. Given the scale of the program, management in general, and specifically device management, is a very challenging task. Device maintenance and replacement is a particularly important process; users trigger such kind of replacement processes and usually imply several days without the device
Data available in today’s information society is ever growing in size and complexity—i.e., unstructured, multidimensional, uncertain, etc.—making it impossible to survey and understand this data. Traditionally, most of these datasets are stored and depicted as huge tables, hindering efficient retrieval of salient information—similarities, outliers, structures, origin, etc. Interactive visualization provides an interface to this data that can help gleaning valuable information from it, thus supporting better data understanding by significantly reducing cognitive load on the analyst.
Achim Ebert (Ed.) --- Gunther H. Weber (Ed.)
Quantum Foundations. 90 Years of Uncertainty
We introduce the general class of symmetric two-qubit states guaranteeing the perfect correlation or anticorrelation of Alice and Bob outcomes whenever some spin observable is measured at both sites. We prove that, for all states from this class, the maximal violation of the original Bell inequality is upper bounded by 3 2 and specify the two-qubit states where this quantum upper bound is attained. The case of two-qutrit states is more complicated. Here, for all two-qutrit states, we obtain the same upper bound 3 2 for violation of the original Bell inequality under Alice and Bob spin measurements, but we have not yet been able to show that this quantum upper bound is the least one. We discuss experimental consequences of our mathematical study.
Image analysis is playing a very essential role in numerous research areas in the fields of science and technology, ranging from medical imaging to the computer science of automatic vision. Being involved in several applications, which are mainly based on a constant innovation of technologies, image analysis always requires different approaches and new algorithms, including continual upgrades and improvements of existing methods. Accordingly, the range of the analyses in which it is engaged can be considered as wide as the prospective future technologies.
Multi-agent systems (MAS) allow and promote the development of distributed and intelligent applications in complex and dynamic environments. Applications of this kind have a crucial role in our everyday life, as witnessed by the broad range of domains they are deployed to—such as manufacturing, management sciences, e-commerce, biotechnology, etc. Despite heterogeneity, those domains share common requirements such as autonomy, structured interaction, mobility, and openness—which are well suited for MAS. Therein, in fact, goal-oriented processes can enter and leave the system dynamically and interact with each other according to structured protocols
Flood Forecasting Using Machine Learning Methods
Flood disasters have had a great impact on city development. Early flood warning systems (EFWS) are promising countermeasures against flood hazards and losses. Machine learning (ML) is the kernel for building a satisfactory EFWS. This paper first summarizes the ML methods proposed in this special issue for flood forecasts and their significant advantages. Then, it develops an intelligent hydroinformatics integration platform (IHIP) to derive a user-friendly web interface system through the state-of-the-art machine learning, visualization and system developing techniques for improving online forecast capability and flood risk management. The holistic framework of the IHIP includes five layers (data access, data integration, servicer, functional subsystem, and end-user application) and one database for effectively dealing with flood disasters.
Drugs are generally devised to alter the function of cells in a favorable manner. The actions of drugs can in some cases be represented by mathematical models often phrased in terms of differential equations. Our aim in these notes is to study such models and show how the effect of drugs can be optimized. More precisely, drugs are represented in terms of a set of parameters and we show how optimal drugs can be characterized by tuning the parameters. Our approach is to consider models of a healthy cell and a non-healthy cell and a model of a non-healthy cell to which a drug has been applied.
Hybrid Advanced Techniques for Forecasting in Energy Sector
Electric load forecasting is an important issue for a power utility, associated with the management of daily operations such as energy transfer scheduling, unit commitment, and load dispatch. Inspired by strong non-linear learning capability of support vector regression (SVR), this paper presents a SVR model hybridized with the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) method and auto regression (AR) for electric load forecasting. The electric load data of the New South Wales (Australia) market are employed for comparing the forecasting performances of different forecasting models. The results confirm the validity of the idea that the proposed model can simultaneously provide forecasting with good accuracy and interpretability.
The Google Earth Engine (GEE) is a cloud computing platform designed to store and process huge data sets (at petabyte-scale) for analysis and ultimate decision making [1]. Following the free availability of Landsat series in 2008, Google archived all the data sets and linked them to the cloud computing engine for open source use. The current archive of data includes those from other satellites, as well as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) based vector data sets, social, demographic, weather, digital elevation models, and climate data layers.
Anatomy and Plasticity in Large-Scale Brain Models
Supercomputing facilities are becoming increasingly available in neuroscience, predominantly for simulating the dynamics of electrical activity propagating through neuronal circuits. On today's most advanced supercomputers, large-scale models can be simulated with up to a billion of neurons. However, merely further increasing the number of neurons and synapses will not be sufficient to create biologically realistic full-scale brain models.
Finite Difference Computing with PDEs: A Modern Software Approach
Vibration problems lead to differential equations with solutions that oscillate in time, typically in a damped or undamped sinusoidal fashion. Such solutions put certain demands on the numerical methods compared to other phenomena whose solutions are monotone or very smooth. Both the frequency and amplitude of the oscillations need to be accurately handled by the numerical schemes. The forthcoming text presents a range of different methods, from classical ones (Runge-Kutta and midpoint/Crank-Nicolson methods), to more modern and popular symplectic (geometric) integration schemes (Leapfrog, Euler-Cromer, and Störmer-Verlet methods), but with a clear emphasis on the latter
The subject of this chapter is fuzzy sets and the basic issues related to them. The first section discusses concepts of sets: classic and fuzzy, and presents various ways of describing fuzzy sets. The second section is dedicated to t-norms, s-norms, and other terms associated with fuzzy sets. Subsequent sections describe the extension principle, fuzzy relations and their compositions, cylindrical extension and projection of a fuzzy set. The sixth section discusses fuzzy numbers and basic arithmetic operations on them. Finally, the last section summarizes the chapter.
Controlled self-organisation using learning classifier systems
The complexity of technical systems increases, breakdowns occur quite often. The mission of organic computing is to tame these challenges by providing degrees of freedom for self-organised behaviour. To achieve these goals, new methods have to be developed. The proposed observer/controller architecture constitutes one way to achieve controlled self-organisation. To improve its design, multi-agent scenarios are investigated. Especially, learning using learning classifier systems is addressed.
Modern cities cannot be imagined without traffic lights controlling the road network. To handle the network's changing demands efficiently, the signal plan specification needs to be shifted from the design time to the run-time of a signal system. The generic observer/controller architecture proposed for Organic Computing facilitates this shift. A two-levelled learning mechanism optimises signal plans on-line while a distributed coordination mechanism establishes green waves in the road network.
Time Predictions: Understanding and Avoiding Unrealism in Project Planning and Everyday Life
The time prediction and planning capacity of the human race is particularly evident in some of the early great constructions. An excellent example is the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza, around 4500 years ago. We do not know much about the methods they used to predict the time needed and how they managed to finish the pyramid before the pharaoh’s death. Most likely, their time and resource predictions were influenced by experience from building previous pyramids. However, even if they could use previous experience, they would have to adjust the predictions for differences in the pyramid’s size and location and the availability of resources. This is not an easy task, even for today’s construction planners, with better tools and more historical data.
Finding proper values of physical parameters in mathematical models is often quite a challenge. While many have gotten away with using just the mathematical symbols when doing science and engineering with pen and paper, the modern world of numerical computing requires each physical parameter to have a numerical value, otherwise one cannot get started with the computations. For example, in the simplest possible transient heat conduction simulation, a case re levant for a real physical material needs values for the heat capacity, the density, and the heat conduction coefficient of the material. In addition, relevant values must be chosen for initial and boundary temperatures as well as the size of the material.
Hans Petter Langtangen -, Geir K. Pedersen
The goal of this work is to provide building blocks for resource-aware robot architectures. The topic of these blocks are data-driven generation of context-sensitive resource models, prediction of future resource utilizations, and resource-aware computer vision and motion planning algorithms. The implementation of these algorithms is based on resource-aware concepts and methodologies originating from the Transregional Collaborative Research Center "Invasive Computing"
Advances in Virtual Agents and Affective Computing for the Understanding and Remediation of Social Cognitive Disorders
Recent advances in computer technologies and research now enable to simulate realistic social interaction thanks to the use of increasingly complex computer models. Virtual agents reproducing both human appearance and expressive behaviors are now available for supporting affective interactions with users. Two deeply intertwined fields of knowledge already benefit from such innovations concerning virtual agents and affective computing: psychiatry and social neurosciences
The application of wearable electronics in the biomedical research and commercial fields has been gaining great interest over the last several decades. Small-sized, lightweight monitoring systems with low-power consumption and, of course, wearability allow for the collection of physiological and behavioral data in ecological scenarios (e.g., at home, during daily activities or sleep, during specific tasks, etc.) with a minimal discomfort for the end user [1]. As a result, outpatient-monitoring care can be associated with improved quality of life, especially for patients with chronic disease, possibly preventing unnecessary hospitalizations and reducing direct and indirect healthcare costs.
Enzo Pasquale Scilingo -, Gaetano Valenza
Throughout industry and science it is common today to study nature or technological devices through models on a computer. With such models the computer acts as a virtual lab where experiments can be done in a fast, reliable, safe, and cheap way. In some fields, e.g., aerospace engineering, the computer models are now so sophisticated that they can replace physical experiments to a large extent
Molecular computing and bioinformatics are two important interdisciplinary sciences that study molecules and computers. Molecular computing is a branch of computing that uses DNA, biochemistry, and molecular biology hardware, instead of traditional silicon-based computer technologies. Research and development in this area concerns theory, experiments, and applications of molecular computing. The core advantage of molecular computing is its potential to pack vastly more circuitry onto a microchip than silicon will ever be capable of—and to do it cheaply. Molecules are only a few nanometers in size, making it possible to manufacture chips that contain billions—even trillions—of switches and components.
Social cognition focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in our social interactions [1]. On the other hand, the term cognitive computing is generally used to refer to new hardware and/or software that mimics the functioning of the human brain and helps to improve human decision-making [2]. In this sense, it is a type of computing with the goal of discovering more accurate models of how the human brain/mind senses, reasons, and responds to stimuli.
Computer Vision Metrics: Survey, Taxonomy, and Analysis
In summary, my goal is to survey the methods people are using for feature description— the key metrics generated—and make it easier for anyone to understand the methods in practice, and how to evaluate the methods using the vision taxonomy and robustness criteria to get the results they are looking for, and find areas for extending the state of the art. And after hearing all the feedback from the first version of this work, I hope to create a second version that is even better.
Computer science approach to quantum control
This work considers several hypothetical control processes on the nanoscopic level and show their analogy to computation processes. It shows that measuring certain types of quantum observables is such a complex task that every instrument that is able to perform it would necessarily be an extremely powerful computer.
Computation and the Humanities: Towards an Oral History of Digital Humanities
This chapter begins with an introduction to Digital Humanities (DH) and outlines its development since c.1949. It demonstrates that the application of computing to cultural heritage has been ongoing for some 70 years yet the histories of DH have, until recently, remained mostly unwritten. After exploring some of the particular diffi culties that attend any attempt to write such histories the approach that we have taken in this book is explained in detail. We close by asking why histories of DH are needed and essential to undertake.
Complications and Quandaries in the ICT Sector: Standard Essential Patents and Competition Issues
Today’s technology product markets, particularly in the information and communications technology (henceforth “ICT”) sector, are inherently international. Products designed in California may be assembled in Taiwan from parts sourced from Korea, Germany and Malaysia for sale to end consumers in India. The global character of technology markets underscores the importance of technical interoperability standards such as those enabling wireless networking (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth), wireless telecommunications (4G LTE), digital media storage (DVD, SDRAM) and digital content encoding (MP3/MP4).
This paper is about the incremental computation of control sequences for discrete event systems in uncertain environments where uncontrollable events may occur. Timed Petri nets are used for this purpose. The aim is to drive the marking of the net from an initial value to a reference one, in minimal or near-minimal time, by avoiding forbidden markings, deadlocks, and dead branches. The approach is similar to model predictive control with a finite set of control actions. At each step only a small area of the reachability graph is explored: this leads to a reasonable computational complexity. The robustness of the resulting trajectory is also evaluated according to a risk probability. A sufficient condition is provided to compute robust trajectories
Challenging the Chain - Governing the Automated Exchange and Processing of Business Information
What is digital business reporting? Why do we need it? And how can we improve it? This book aims to address these questions by illustrating the rise of system-to-system information exchange and the opportunities for improving transparency and accountability. Governments around the world are looking for ways to strengthen transparency and accountability without introducing more red tape, which is a source of growing frustration and costs for businesses. In 2004, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Justice in the Netherlands started to investigate the potential of XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) as a uniform data standard for business-to-government information exchange.
Certifying Software Component Performance Specifications
In component-based software engineering, performance prediction approaches support the design of business information systems on the architectural level. They are based on behavior specifications of components. This work presents a round-trip approach for using, assessing, and certifying the accuracy of parameterized, probabilistic, deterministic, and concurrent performance specifications. Its applicability and effectiveness are demonstrated using the CoCoME benchmark.
Building the Infrastructure for Cloud Security: A Solutions View
Security is an ever-present consideration for applications and data in the cloud. It is a concern for executives trying to come up with criteria for migrating an application, for marketing organizations in trying to position the company in a good light as enlightened technology adopters, for application architects attempting to build a safe foundation and operations staff making sure bad guys don’t have a field day. It does not matter whether an application is a candidate for migration to the cloud or it already runs using cloud-based components. It does not even matter that an application has managed to run for years in the cloud without a major breach: an unblemished record does not entitle an organization to claim to be home free in matters of security; its executives are acutely aware that resting on their laurels regardless of an unblemished record is an invitation to disaster; and certainly past performance is no predictor for future gains.
Autonomous Control for a Reliable Internet of Services: Methods, Models, Approaches, Techniques, Algorithms, and Tools
The explosive growth of the Internet has fundamentally changed the global society. The emergence of concepts like service-oriented architecture (SOA), Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Network as a Service (NaaS) and Cloud Computing in general has catalyzed the migration from the information-oriented Internet into an Internet of Services (IoS). This has opened up virtually unbounded possibilities for the creation of new and innovative services that facilitate business processes and improve the quality of life. However, this also calls for new approaches to ensuring quality and reliability of these services.
Ivan Ganchev --- R. D. van der Mei --- Hans van den Berg
Heptaﬂuoropropane (R227ea) is a good refrigerant that reduces greenhouse effects and ozone depletion. In practical applications, we usually have to know the compressed liquid densities at different temperatures and pressures. However, the measurement requires a series of complex apparatus and operations, wasting too much manpower and resources. To solve these problems, here, Song and Mason equation, support vector machine (SVM), and artiﬁcial neural networks (ANNs) were used to develop theoretical and machine learning models, respectively, in order to predict the compressed liquid densities of R227ea with only the inputs of temperatures and pressures.
Android on x86: An Introduction to Optimizing for Intel® Architecture
We wrote Android on x86: an Introduction to Optimizing for Intel® Architecture to provide a one-stop, detailed resource for the topic’s best practices and procedures. The book encompasses the installation issues, hardware optimization issues, software requirements, programming tasks, and performance optimizations that emerge when you consider programming for x86-based Android devices. Having worked on related projects ourselves, we committed to collecting our experience and information into one book which could be used as a guide through any project’s specific requirements. We dove into fine-tuned optimizations, native code adjustments, hardware acceleration, and advanced profiling of multimedia applications
Android Application Development for the Intel Platform
The number of Android devices running on Intel processors has gradually increased ever since Intel and Google announced, in late 2011, that they would be working together to optimize future versions of Android for Intel Atom processors. Today, Intel processors can be found in Android smartphones and tablets made by some of the top manufacturers of Android devices, such as Samsung, Lenovo, and Asus. The increase in Android devices featuring Intel processors has created a demand for Android applications optimized for Intel architecture. This book was written to help introduce developers of all skill levels to the tools they need to develop and optimize applications for the Intel platform.
Analysis and recognition of human actions with flow features and temporal models
This work focuses the recognition of complex human activities in video data. A combination of new features and techniques from speech recognition is used to realize a recognition of action units and their combinations in video sequences. The presented approach shows how motion information gained from video data can be used to interpret the underlying structural information of actions and how higher level models allow an abstraction of different motion categories beyond simple classification.
Optimal scheduling is an important area of operations research, as it has both theoretical and practical aspects. It is clear that efficient algorithms are most desirable for practical applications, since most real-world scheduling problems have large sizes but require fast decisions. Due to this, practitioners often prefer to use rather simple algorithms which provide schedules that may be far from optimal with respect to their quality. This book is based on a Special Issue entitled ”Algorithms for Scheduling Problems”. In the Call for Papers, we invited prospective authors to submit their latest research in the area of the development of scheduling algorithms.
Advancing Electromyographic Continuous Speech Recognition: Signal Preprocessing and Modeling
Speech is the natural medium of human communication, but audible speech can be overheard by bystanders and excludes speech-disabled people. This work presents a speech recognizer based on surface electromyography, where electric potentials of the facial muscles are captured by surface electrodes, allowing speech to be processed nonacoustically. A system which was state-of-the-art at the beginning of this book is substantially improved in terms of accuracy, flexibility, and robustness.
Cyber-Physical Systems of Systems: Foundations – A Conceptual Model and Some Derivations: The AMADEOS Legacy
A System of System (SoS) stems from the integration of existing systems (legacy systems), normally operated by different organizations, and new systems that have been designed to take advantage of this integration. Many of the established assumptions in classical system design, such as e.g., the scope of the system is known, that the design phase of a system is terminated by an acceptance test or that faults are exceptional events, are not justified in an SoS environment. This is well represented by Table 1. In this chapter we present the fundamental concepts for Systems of Systems engineering established within the AMADEOS1 project, with the objective of proposing a shared System of Systems vocabulary and define an implicit theory about the SoS domain.
Modern societies cannot function without information and communications technology (ICT) systems. When ICT systems such as electronic government (e-government) systems, e-payment infrastructures, and mobile phone networks fail,users can still access alternative systems based on older technologies, but these alternatives are rapidly disappearing. E-government services are introduced on the Web to improve services to citizens and to free up the human resources needed to tackle the increasing health care requirements of aging populations.
Omega-3 fatty acids (n-3 FA) may have beneficial clinical and immune-modulating effects in surgical patients. In a randomized, double-blind, prospective, placebo-controlled trial, 148 patients referred for elective colorectal cancer surgery received an n-3 FA-enriched oral nutritional supplement (ONS) providing 2.0 g of eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and 1.0 g of docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) per day or a standard ONS for seven days before surgery. On the day of operation, there was a significant increase in the production of leukotriene B5 (LTB5) (p < 0.01) and 5-hydroxyeicosapentaenoic acid (5-HEPE) (p < 0.01), a significant decrease in the production of leukotriene B4 (LTB4) (p < 0.01) and a trend for a decrease in the production of 5-hydroxyeicosatetraenoic acid (5-HETE) (p < 0.1) from stimulated neutrophils in the active group compared with controls. There was no association between LTB4 values and postoperative complications. In conclusion, oral n-3 FA exerts anti-inflammatory effects in surgical patients, without reducing the risk of postoperative complications.
: The effect of germinated Superhongmi, a reddish brown pigmented rice cultivar, on the glucose profile and bone turnover in the postmenopausal-like model of ovariectomized rats was determined. The ovariectomized Sprague-Dawley rats were randomly divided into three dietary groups (n = 10): normal control diet (NC) and normal diet supplemented with non-germinated Superhongmi (SH) or germinated Superhongmi (GSH) rice powder. After eight weeks, the SH and GSH groups showed significantly lower body weight, glucose and insulin concentrations, levels of bone resorption markers and higher glycogen and 17-β-estradiol contents than the NC group. The glucose metabolism improved through modulation of adipokine production and glucose-regulating enzyme activities. The GSH rats exhibited a greater hypoglycemic effect and lower bone resorption than SH rats. These results demonstrate that germinated Superhongmi rice may potentially be useful in the prevention and management of postmenopausal hyperglycemia and bone turnover imbalance.
Habitats and Biota of the Gulf of Mexico: Before the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
The Gulf of Mexico is the ninth largest body of water in the world, and it is recognized as 1 of 64 Large Marine Ecosystems by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) (Kumpf et al. 1999). Economically and ecologically the Gulf is one of the most productive and important bodies of water (Tunnell 2009; Fautin et al. 2010; NOS/NOAA 2011; Yoskowitz et al. 2013), occupying a surface area of more than 1.5 million square kilometers (km2 ) (579,153 square miles [mi2 ]), a maximum east–west dimension of 1,573 km (977 mi), and 900 km (559 mi) from north to south between the Mississippi Delta and Yucata´n Peninsula. The shoreline, which extends counterclockwise from Cape Sable, Florida, to Cabo Catoche, Quintana Roo, Mexico, is approximately 5,696 km (3,539 mi) long, and it includes another 380 km (236 mi) of Gulf shoreline in Cuba from Cabo San Antonio in the west to Havana in the east (Tunnell 2009; Fautin et al. 2010).
Influence of elevated temperatures up to 100 °C on the mechanical properties of concrete
Experiments to characterize the effects of moisture content and temperature on the mechanical properties of concrete were conducted. Based on these experiments, a new overall material model capable of predicting the mechanical behaviour of concrete subject to elevated temperatures up to 100 °C was developed. The material model estimates the time, temperature and moisture dependency of the compressive and tensile strength, creep and shrinkage of concrete.
Ecological stoichiometry concerns the way that the elemental composition of organisms shapes their ecology. It deals with balance and imbalanced elemental ratios and how that affects organism growth, nutrient cycling, and the interactions with the biotic and abiotic worlds. It has been over a decade since the publication of Sterner and Elser's book, Ecological Stoichiometry. In the intervening years, hundreds of papers on stoichiometric topics ranging from evolution and regulation of nutrient content in organisms, the role of stoichiometry in populations, communities, ecosystems and global biogeochemical dynamics have been published.
In the nearly thirty years since Hans Buhlmann (Buhlmann (1987)) set out the notion of the Actuary of the Third Kind, the connection between Actuarial Science (AS) and Mathematical Finance (MF) has been continually reinforced. As siblings in the family of Risk Management techniques, practitioners in both fields have learned a great deal from each other. The collection of articles in this volume are contributed by scholars who are not only experts in areas of AS and MF, but also those who present diverse perspectives from both industry and academia. Topics from multiple areas, such as Stochastic Modeling, Credit Risk, Monte Carlo Simulation, and Pension Valuation, among others, that were maybe thought to be the domain of one type of risk manager are shown time and again to have deep value to other areas of risk management as well. The articles in this collection, in my opinion, contribute techniques, ideas, and overviews of tools that specialists in both AS and MF will find useful and interesting to implement in their work
What are the causes and consequences of species diversity in forested ecosystems, and how is this species diversity being affected by rapid environmental and climatic change, movement of invertebrate and vertebrate herbivores into new biogeographic regions, and expanding human populations and associated shifts in land-use patterns? In this Special Issue of Forests, we explore these questions for assemblages of forest trees, shrubs, and understory herbs at spatial scales ranging from small plots to large forest dynamics plots, at temporal scales ranging from seasons to centuries, in both temperate and tropical regions, and across rural-to-urban gradients in land use.
Catalytic soot oxidation by platinum on sintered metal filters. Influence of the platinum quantity, particle size and location, and investigation of the platinum-soot contact
The great challenge for next years concerning the emission of diesel engines is to develop diesel particle filters (DPF) with catalytic regeneration systems. This work is focused on the global understanding of the diesel soot oxidation on sintered metal filters (SMF). Platinum is studied as reference catalyst. The first objective is to determine which of platinum quantity, platinum particle size, or platinum location exhibits the preponderant influence on the catalytic.
Catalysis for Low Temperature Fuel Cells
Today, the development of active and stable catalysts still represents a challenge to be overcome in the research ﬁeld of low-temperature fuel cells. Operation at low temperatures offers great advantages, such as quick start-up and longer stability, but demands the utilization of highly active catalysts to reduce the activation energy of the electrochemical reactions involved in the electrodes, and thus obtain practical performances and high efﬁciencies. At present, the best-performing catalysts in low-temperature fuel cells are based on highly-dispersed Pt nanoparticles [1]. However, these present several drawbacks, such as high cost, limited earth resources, sensitivity to contaminants, low tolerance to the presence of alcohols, and instability due to carbon support electrochemical oxidation and Pt dissolution [2–4].
Vincenzo Baglio (Ed.) --- David Sebastián (Ed.)
Carotid Body: A New Target for Rescuing Neural Control of Cardiorespiratory Balance in Disease
The carotid body (CB) is the main arterial chemoreceptor in charge of adjusting ventilatory and cardiovascular function during changes in arterial blood gases. Regardless this essential function, the CB has been implicated in the sensing of other physiological signals such as changes in blood flow and glucose levels. More important, malfunction of the CB chemoreceptors has been associated with the progression and deterioration of several disease states such as hypertension, heart failure, renal failure, insulin resistance, diabetes and sleep apnea. Although the mechanisms involved in the alterations of the CB function in pathophysiology are currently under intense research, the development of therapeutic approaches to restore normal CB chemoreflex function remains unsolved.
Rodrigo Del Rio -, Rodrigo Iturriaga -, Harold D. Schultz
Physicochemical and biotic factors inﬂuence the binding and dispersivity of soil particles, and thus control soil macroaggregate formation and stability. Although soil pH inﬂuences dispersivity, it is usually relatively constant within a site, and thus not considered a driver of aggregation dynamics. However, land-use change that results in shifts in tree-species composition can result in alteration of soil pH, owing to species-speciﬁc traits, e.g., support of nitrogen ﬁxation and Al accumulation. In a long-term, randomized complete block experiment in which climate, soil type, and previous land-use history were similar, we evaluated effects of individual native tropical tree species on water-stable macroaggregate size distributions in an Oxisol. We conducted this study at La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica, in six vegetation types: 25-year-old plantations of four tree species grown in monodominant stands; an unplanted Control; and an adjacent mature forest.
To achieve good mechanical properties of carbon ﬁbre-reinforced polycarbonate composites, the ﬁbre-matrix adhesion must be dialled to an optimum level. The electrolytic surface treatment of carbon ﬁbres during their production is one of the possible means of adapting the surface characteristics of the ﬁbres. The production of a range of tailored ﬁbres with varying surface treatments (adjusting the current, potential, and conductivity) was followed by contact angle, inverse gas chromatography and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy measurements, which revealed a signiﬁcant increase in polarity and hydroxyl, carboxyl, and nitrile groups on the ﬁbre surface. Accordingly, an increase in the ﬁbre-matrix interaction indicated by a higher interfacial shear strength was observed with the single ﬁbre pull-out force-displacement curves
Cancer Metabolism: Molecular Targeting and Implications for Therapy
“Metabolic reprogramming” is one of the hallmarks of cancer, and is exemplified by distinctive biochemical alterations which include enhanced glucose uptake, aerobic glycolysis and glutamine-metabolism. Clinically, the prominent feature of altered metabolism, (i.e.) rapid glucose utilization, has already been exploited to diagnose majority of solid malignancies using PET/CT imaging. In the light of recent research it has become evident that cancer-specific metabolic shift complements pro-survival and anti-apoptotic events during unfavorable conditions such as nutrient-deprivation and therapeutic challenges.
Cancer care delivery refers to the multiple layers of the health care system that interact to affect outcomes for patients with cancer and the quality of that care. The factors included in the care delivery system that potentially alter outcomes include social dynamics, financing systems, organizational structures and processes, health technologies, provider and individual behaviors. Because women’s health care has its own unique challenges, the intersection between cancer care delivery and women’s health is to be examined in this Frontiers in Oncology issue.
Calibration/Validation of Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometers and Applications
The success of the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) brings us into a new era of global daily Earth observations, ranging from the faintest light of human settlements and air glows, to the dramatic events of hurricanes and forest fires, as well as the subtle changes in the planet Earth which we call home. At the heart of all satellite applications, calibration/validation of the instrument measurements and derived products is essential. Satellite product calibration and validation have become increasingly more important and challenging, in order to meet the stringent requirements for accurate and quantitative data for numerical weather prediction, climate change detection, and environmental intelligence. Validation is required not only for the satellite measurements, but also for all geophysical retrievals, including aerosols, cloud properties, radiation budget, sea surface temperature, ocean color, active fire, albedo, snow and ice, vegetation, as well as nightlights from human settlements
Calcium Signaling in Human Health and Diseases
Intracellular Ca2+ signals regulate a myriad of cellular functions, ranging from short-term responses, such as excitation-contraction coupling and stimulus-secretion coupling, to long-term processes, such as proliferation, gene expression, differentiation, motility, synaptic plasticity, programmed cell death (or apoptosis), and metabolism. It is, therefore, not surprising that any derangement of the multifaceted Ca2+ toolkit that shapes the elevation in intracellular Ca2+ concentration ([Ca2+]i) may lead to severe pathological disorders, including cancer, chronic heart failure, epileptic and neurodegenerative disorders, immunodeficiency, and developmental defects. An increase in [Ca2+]i is shaped by the concerted interaction among the components of an extremely versatile network of channels, transporters, pumps, and buffers that can be uniquely assembled by each cell type to generate intracellular Ca2+ signals with spatio-temporal properties precisely tailored to regulate specific functions.
Quantitative Problem Solving in Natural Resources
This text is intended to support courses that bridge the divide between mathematics typically encountered in U.S. high school curricula and the practical problems that natural resource students might engage with in their disciplinary coursework and professional internships.
Open Technical Writing: An Open-Access Text for Instruction in Technical and Professional Writing
This book presents technical writing as an approach to researching and carrying out writing that centers on technical subject matter. Each and every chapter is devoted to helping students understand that good technical writing is situationally-aware and context-driven. Technical writing doesn’t work off knowing the one true right way of doing things—there is no magic report template out there that will always work. Instead, the focus is on offering students a series of approaches they can use to map out their situations and do research accordingly.
English Composition: Connect, Collaborate, Communicate
This OER textbook has been designed for students to learn the foundational concepts for English 100 (first-year college composition). The content aligns to learning outcomes across all campuses in the University of Hawai'i system. It was designed, written, and edited during a three day book sprint in May, 2019
A Laboratory Guide to Clinical Hematology
This is eBook will be constantly updated, edited, and reviewed as new emerging information arises.
Extended Readings on Copyright is subject to a non-commercial Create Commons license that allows you to add, subtract, and amend as you see fit, provided you extend those terms to any derivative work based on these materials and provided your provide appropriate attribution. I encourage you to share your edits and additions with me, but it is not obligatory.Extended Readings on Copyright can be used as a stand alone textbook on United States copyright law. The individual chapters are available on this website, and these can be used to supplement other materials. Individual chapters are likely to be more up to date than the consolidated build of the book.
University Physics I: Classical Mechanics
This is a “minimalist” textbook for a first semester of university, calculus-based physics, covering classical mechanics (including one chapter on mechanical waves, but excluding fluids), plus a brief introduction to thermodynamics. The presentation owes much to Mazur’s The Principles and Practice of Physics: conservation laws, momentum and energy, are introduced before forces, and one-dimensional setups are thoroughly explored before two-dimensional systems are considered. It contains both problems and worked-out examples.
Astronomy for Educators provides new and accomplished K-12 instructors with concepts and projects for low-cost, high-impact STEM classroom instruction that is built around the National Academies National Research Council's K-12 Framework for Science Education.
Drugs quality control (Theoretical foundation and practical application): The Coursebook
The Course book presents the basics of drugs quality control in accordance with regulatory documents (pharmacopoeia of Europe, USA, Japan, Russia) and new data from current scientific periodicals, monographs The features of the physical, spectral and chemical quality control of medicines according to the indicators «identification», «tests» and «assay» are described in detail. Part II presents a workbook, which includes questions for the self-control of the material studied and tasks for a laboratory workshop. The Course book contains reference material and samples of pharmacopoeial articles. The Course book is designed for students of the specialty «Pharmacy».
Role of health economic data in policy making and reimbursement of new medical technologies
An accelerated growth of health spending began in the 1960s exceeding the historical 4% GDP threshold. This phenomenon was noticed early on in mature market economies led by the US and during the following decades spread to many global regions. Health policy makers became increasingly exposed to new harsh challenges in the uneasy task to provide universal health coverage and decent equity of access to the medical services. Among the most prominent demand-side issues are population aging, rise of non-communicable diseases and growing patient expectations.
Mihajlo (Michael) Jakovljevic -, Tetsuji Yamada
Diseases of the Abdomen and Pelvis 2018-2021: Diagnostic Imaging - IDKD Book
his open access book deals with imaging of the abdomen and pelvis, an area that has seen considerable advances over the past several years, driven by clinical as well as technological developments. The respective chapters, written by internationally respected experts in their fields, focus on imaging diagnosis and interventional therapies in abdominal and pelvic disease; they cover all relevant imaging modalities, including magnetic resonance imaging, computed tomography, and positron emission tomography. As such, the book offers a comprehensive review of the state of the art in imaging of the abdomen and pelvis. It will be of interest to general radiologists, radiology residents, interventional radiologists, and clinicians from other specialties who want to update their knowledge in this area.
Cloud-Based Benchmarking of Medical Image Analysis
This book presents the VISCERAL project benchmarks for analysis and retrieval of 3D medical images (CT and MRI) on a large scale, which used an innovative cloud-based evaluation approach where the image data were stored centrally on a cloud infrastructure and participants placed their programs in virtual machines on the cloud. The book presents the points of view of both the organizers of the VISCERAL benchmarks and the participants.The book is divided into five parts. Part I presents the cloud-based benchmarking and Evaluation-as-a-Service paradigm that the VISCERAL benchmarks used. Part II focuses on the datasets of medical images annotated with ground truth created in VISCERAL that continue to be available for research.
Allan Hanbury , - Henning Müller , - Georg Langs
Marine herbal medicine generally refers to the use of marine plants as original materials to develop crude drugs, or for other medical purposes. The term ‘marine plants’ usually denotes macroalgae grown between intertidal and subintertidal zones, including Chlorophyta, Phaeophyta, and Rhodophyta. Considerable progress has been made in the field of biomedical research into marine microalgae and microorganisms in the past decade. As the most important source of fundamental products in the world, marine plants have a very important role in biomedical research.
Handbook of Life Course Health Development
A critical mass of research linking early life events, experiences, and exposures with adult health conditions is delineating the developmental origins of many common chronic diseases. This emerging body of life course health development (LCHD) research specifies the complex adaptive processes by which both adversity and opportunity are integrated into developing biobehavioral systems. It is also challenging long-held views about origins and etiology of health and disease. There is a growing momentum among practitioners and policymakers to “connect the dots” between this rapidly expanding evidence base and the related practices and policies that are implemented within the fields of medicine, public health, nursing, mental health, education, urban planning, community development, social welfare, and others.
In the past one and a half decades, neutron and synchrotron radiation techniques have come to the forefront as an excellent set of tools for the wider investigation of material structures and properties [1,2], becoming available to a large user community. This holds especially true for metals, which are a fascinating class of materials with both structural and functional applications. With respect to these application classes, metals are used to engineer bridges and automotive engines as well as to exploit magnetic and electric properties in computer storage, optics, and electronics. Both neutron sources and synchrotrons are large user facilities of quantum-beam installations [3] with the implementation of a common accelerator or nuclear reactor-based source, often serving over 50 beamlines simultaneously and even more end stations. Up to a few thousand experiments are undertaken yearly, utilizing specialized beam conditions, sample environments, and detection systems. Their variations range across spectroscopy, diffraction, small-angle scattering, and inelastic scattering for sample sizes ranging from nanometers to meters. Examples of such installations can be found in the Topical Collection Facilities of Metals’ sister journal Quantum Beam Science [3].
Life on Earth was punctuated by several dramatic paleoenvironmental and paleoclimatic changes leading to mass extinction linked to continental flood basalts (CFBs) and large igneous provinces (LIPs), global oceanic anoxic events (OAE), rapid climate and sea level changes and meteorite impacts. On a global basis, linking the mass extinction to LIPs volcanism has remained problematic due to insufficient accuracy in radiometric dating. In the case of the Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) mass extinction, identifying the very short geological interval between Deccan Traps and the Meteorite impact has remained problematic and calls for new approaches. Likewise precise age control between LIPs and mass extinctions for the Jurassic/Triassic, Permo/Triassic, Mid-Permian, and end-Devonian are in need of further age refinement.
Medical Geology: Impacts of the Natural Environment on Public Health
B. anthracis infections in wildlife and livestock have been recognized as a critically important disease in the United States for over 200 years. Historical data on environmental, weather/climate and geographical factors that influence the occurrence of these infections are well known and include; (1) warm seasons during dry periods that follow moderate to heavy precipitation events (weather/climate); (2) regions containing post-flood organic detritus and/or short dry grazing grasses (environmental); and (3) topological lows, such as waterholes or riverbanks, calcareous and alluvial soils with elevated nutrient content and pH values greater than 6.0 (geology). Other geological factors that may influence B. anthracis outbreak occurrence, as noted through in vivo or in vitro observations, are elevated phosphate (which results in higher protective antigen production), magnesium, sodium, copper, zinc (needed for lethal factor production) and manganese (typically found in very low concentrations in calcareous soils and needed for gene regulation of exotoxins and antibiotics) [1–5].
Computers and Games for Mental Health and Well-Being
Recent years have seen important developments in the computer and game industry, including the emergence of the concept of serious games. It is hypothesized that tools such as games, virtual reality, or applications for smartphones may foster learning, enhance motivation, promote behavioral change, support psychotherapy, favor empowerment, and improve some cognitive functions. Computers and games may create supports for training or help people with cognitive, emotional, or behavioral change.
Interpreting Love Narratives in East Asian Literature and Film
This book explores the role of traditional East Asian worldviews, ethical values, and common practices in the shaping of East Asian narratives in literature and film. It offers a specific method for this analysis. The interpretive goal is to arrive at interpretations that more accurately engage cultural information so that narratives are understood more closely in terms of their native cultural rather than that of the reader/interpreter. Current neuroscience related to processes of perception and the attribution of meaning form the basis for the theory of interpretation offered in the first half of the volume.
Existing textbooks on international relations treat history in a cursory fashion and perpetuate a Euro-centric perspective. This textbook pioneers a new approach by historicizing the material traditionally taught in International Relations courses, and by explicitly focusing on non-European cases, debates and issues.
Trademark Law: An Open-Source Casebook Version 6.0
Trademark lawyers often tell the story in one form or another of the Coca-Cola lawyer who spoke in 1986 of the value of the company’s goodwill as symbolized by its brand: “The production plants and inventories of The Coca-Cola Company could go up in flames overnight. Yet, on the following morning there is not a bank in Atlanta, New York, or anywhere else, that would not lend this Company the funds necessary for rebuilding, accepting as security only the inherent good will in its trademarks ‘Coca-Cola’ and ‘Coke.”‘1 The story was and remains no exaggeration. In 2016, Interbrand estimated the value of the Coca-Cola brand to be $73.1 billion2—as against fixed assets in 2016 of approximately $10.6 billion.3
Drug Development for Parasite-Induced Diarrheal Diseases
One of the top four contributors to the global burden of disease is diarrheal infections. Intestinal parasites are major causes of morbidity and mortality associated with diarrheal diseases in both the developed and developing world. Amebiasis is responsible for 50 million cases of invasive disease and 70,000 deaths annually in the world. Giardiasis has an estimated worldwide prevalence of 280 million cases annually. In developed countries, Giardia lamblia infects about 2% of adults and 6-8% of children. The prevalence of G. lamblia infection is generally higher in developing countries, ranging from 3% to 90%. Furthermore, giardial infections contribute substantially to the 2.5 million annual deaths from diarrheal disease
Platelets as immune cells in physiology and immunopathology
Are platelets cells? (Not everyone agrees, since they are non-nucleate). And if platelets are cells—which all specialists consider at the time being—are they immune cells? The issue that platelets participate in immunity is no longer debated; however, the issue that they are key cells in immunity is challenged. It has even been proposed a couple of years ago that platelets can present antigen to T-lymphocytes by using their HLA class I molecules. No one has the same functional definition of platelets. The ‘Frontiers Research Topic’- coordinators’ own view is that platelets are primarily repairing cells, what they do in deploying tools of physiological inflammation.
So-called altered states of consciousness (ASC) are an intriguing, still under-researched topic, with profound neuropsychological and epistemological implications. In the last few decades there has been increasing multidisciplinary interest in consciousness and ASC, a term encompassing a wide range of pathological and non-pathological conditions, including dreaming, near-death experiences (NDEs), hypnagogic states, hallucinogenic experiences, epileptic seizures, psychotic symptoms, coma, and minimally conscious states
Danger Signals Triggering Immune Response and Inflammation
The immune system detects "danger", through a series of what we now call damage associated molecular pattern molecules (DAMPs), working in concert with both positive and negative signals derived from other tissues. DAMPS also known as alarmins, are molecules released by stressed cells undergoing necrosis that act as endogenous danger signals to promote and exacerbate the immune and inflammatory response. DAMPs vary greatly depending on the type of cell (epithelial or mesenchymal) and injured tissue. Some endogenous danger signals are heat-shock proteins, HMGB1 (high-mobility group box 1), reactive oxygen intermediates, extracellular-matrix breakdown products such as hyaluronan fragments, neuromediators and cytokines like the interferons (IFNs).
Abdulraouf Ramadan --- Walter G. Land --- Sophie Paczesny
Dynamics of decision making: from evidence to preference and belief
At the core of the many debates throughout cognitive science concerning how decisions are made are the processes governing the time course of preference formation and decision. From perceptual choices, such as whether the signal on a radar screen indicates an enemy missile or a spot on a CT scan indicates a tumor, to cognitive value-based decisions, such as selecting an agreeable flatmate or deciding the guilt of a defendant, significant and everyday decisions are dynamic over time. Phenomena such as decoy effects, preference reversals and order effects are still puzzling researchers
Marius Usher -, Konstantinos Tsetsos -, Erica Yu -, David A. Lagnado
On the Internet, everything we love and everything we hate has a name. It also has a number or a string of 0s and 1s making it technically viable. And, more often than not, it comes with a price tag, whether visible or disguised as data value. Since the 1980s, the infrastructure for our digital traces and digital legacies has continued to grow, scientifically and politically. In a few decades, it evolved from the purview of one government to the globalizing world to become the most influential means of communication, the biggest global market, but also the largest mass- surveillance tool ever devised. Digital flows are estimated to add about 15 to 20 per cent of the global GDP annually (WIPO 2015) and data- driven businesses have made Internet companies the most profitable in the world. Indisputably, the Internet is now a global domain of power.
Advances in Hydro-Meteorological Monitoring
This book presents a reprint of the Special Issue of the journal Water dedicated to “Advances in Hydro-Meteorological Monitoring”. As we planned, as editors, this Special Issue aimed to shed light on the more recent advances in ground observations and remote sensing products, as well as on the benefit that comes from the integration of technological innovation and the development of new ideas in hydrology science. This original objective was achieved, and in the eleven papers collected here the readers can appreciate theoretical and applied contributions dealing with the development and comparison of different monitoring procedures based on ground and satellite data. The papers are arranged with a process-oriented criterion that follows the hydrologic cycle. Starting from soil moisture monitoring from satellites and in-situ, we move to pan evaporimeter measurements. Runoff measurement using advanced methods from both satellites and in the field are then addressed. Three papers are dedicated to rainfall measurement and spatial representation and the two final papers address the problem of systematic errors in snow precipitation measurement and the design of snow measurement networks
Tommaso Moramarco (Ed.) -, Roberto Ranzi (Ed.)
The Transcriptional Regulation of Memory
The formation of human memories involves a series of complicated biochemical processes many of which are not fully understood. However, recent data implicate several families of transcription factors that appear critically important in the regulation of memory. For example, CREB, NF-kB, AP-1, Egr, and C/EBP ...The formation of human memories involves a series of complicated biochemical processes many of which are not fully understood. However, recent data implicate several families of transcription factors that appear critically important in the regulation of memory. For example, CREB, NF-kB, AP-1, Egr, and C/EBP families are emerging as key transcriptional regulators of synaptic plasticity and long term memory.
Benedict C. Albensi , Jelena Djordjevic
Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks
Intrusions are becoming more complicated with the recent development of adversarial techniques. To boost the detection accuracy of a separate intrusion detector, the collaborative intrusion detection network (CIDN) has thus been developed by allowing intrusion detection system (IDS) nodes to exchange data with each other. Insider attacks are a great threat for such types of collaborative networks, where an attacker has the authorized access within the network. In literature, a challenge-based trust mechanism is effective at identifying malicious nodes by sending challenges. However, such mechanisms are heavily dependent on two assumptions, which would cause CIDNs to be vulnerable to advanced insider attacks in practice. In this work, we investigate the influence of advanced on–off attacks on challenge-based CIDNs, which can respond truthfully to one IDS node but behave maliciously to another IDS node. To evaluate the attack performance, we have conducted two experiments under a simulated and a real CIDN environment. The obtained results demonstrate that our designed attack is able to compromise the robustness of challenge-based CIDNs in practice; that is, some malicious nodes can behave untruthfully without a timely detection.
Georgios Kambourakis (Ed.) -, Félix Gómez Mármol (Ed.) -, Guojun Wang (Ed.)
The Insecticidal Bacterial Toxins in Modern Agriculture
Agriculture has suffered enormous changes since the first human attempts to domesticate plants to obtain productive varieties which could become a constant source of food. Many developments have shaped current agricultural systems, especially those that led to extensive industrial monocultures. Concurrently with those, there are numerous other types of small scale agricultural systems with an important social and economic impact. The development of ecosystems with scarce plant varieties has favored the presence of specialized phytophagous that have evolved and adapted to plant species used in agriculture. Pest species share some biological traits, such as short generation cycles and large offsprings. Improvements in agriculture have led to a high production efficiency and the control of pests through different strategies. Modern agriculture seeks to evolve to more environmentally-friendly systems with little environmental impact and accessible to developing countries.
Juan Ferré (Ed.) , Baltasar Escriche (Ed.)
This research editorial is intended to establish the context and provide a broad overview for the Special Issue of Sustainability entitled “Enhancing Soil Health to Mitigate Soil Degradation” that was initiated in 2014 to document both the magnitude and global revalence of soil degradation. Our goals for the Special Issue were to: (1) help illustrate various factors contributing to the problem of soil degradation; (2) identify past and current impacts of soil degradation in countries around the world; and (3) suggest soil health strategies that could be used to protect our fragile soil resources. As our global population marches steadily toward projections of 9.5 billion in 2050, natural and human induced soil degradation, if not mitigated, will undoubtedly increase the potential for negative impacts such as disease and malnutrition.
Douglas L. Karlen (Ed.) ,- Charles W. Rice (Ed.)
The first human tumor virus was discovered in the middle of the last century by Anthony Epstein, Bert Achong and Yvonne Barr in African pediatric patients with Burkitt’s lymphoma. To date, seven viruses -EBV, KSHV, high-risk HPV, MCPV, HBV, HCV and HTLV1- have been consistently linked to different types of human cancer, and infections are estimated to account for up to 20% of all cancer cases worldwide. Viral oncogenic mechanisms generally include: generation of genomic instability, increase in the rate of cell proliferation, resistance to apoptosis, alterations in DNA repair mechanisms and cell polarity changes, which often coexist with evasion mechanisms of the antiviral immune response. Viral agents also indirectly contribute to the development of cancer mainly through immunosuppression or chronic inflammation, but also through chronic antigenic stimulation
Drug-induced hypersensitivity reactions play a prominent role among adverse drug effects, and constitute a major health problem. It has been suggested that up to 6% of all hospital admissions are related to these reactions. Biomarkers, especially those based on pharmacogenomics testing, have proved to be extremely useful for type A adverse drug reactions. Clinical practice guidelines based on biomarker testing are presently being developed and updated for type A adverse drug reactions. In contrast, little attention has been paid to the potential use of biomarkers in type B adverse reactions, characterized by the occurrence of reactions not directly related to the pharmacological properties of the drug. Drug-induced hypersensitivity belongs to those type B reactions.
Science, technology, engineering, and mathematical (STEM) tools and approaches are expected to become a critical component for the prevention, control, and eradication of animal diseases at a global scale in the near future. In the last decades the amount of information that is being generated in all scientific disciplines, including microbiological studies applied to infectious diseases, has increased exponentially, becoming a problem in itself due to the lack of tools and expertise to analyze data. The formulation and parameterization of such a body of empirical knowledge combined with theoretical knowledge into mathematical models
NK Cell Subsets in Health and Disease: New Developments
Under physiological conditions, the distribution /intensity of the surface markers CD56 and CD16 (FcγRIII) defines two subsets of NK lymphocytes: the CD56bright/CD16neg-dim (generally referred to as CD56bright) population that make up about 10% of blood NK cells in adults and the CD56dim/CD16bright (generally referred to as CD56dim) cells that comprise for about 90% of circulating NK cells. CD56bright NK cells exert only marginal cytotoxic capacity but are higly proficient in production of cytokines such as interferon IFN-γ, TNF-α and GM-CSF. Because of this property, CD56bright NK cells have been generally referred to as regulatory NK cells.
Emanuela Marcenaro, - Luigi D. Notarangelo ,- Jordan S. Orange --- Eric Vivier
Lyme Disease: Recent Advances and Perspectives
he interplay between host and pathogen is a complex co-evolutionary battle of surveillance and evasion. The pathogen continuously develops mechanisms to subvert the immune response in order to establish infection while the immune system responds with novel mechanisms of detection. Because the majority of Lyme disease pathology is due to an over-exuberant immune response, much research in Borrelia burgdorferi pathogenesis has been devoted to understanding the mammalian host response to the bacterium. Immunological studies continue to be an active area of research employing emerging techniques, such as intra-vital imaging.
Tanja Petnicki Ocwieja, - Catherine A Brissette
Nitrification in Fixed Bed Reactors Treating Saline Wastewater
Two fixed bed reactors for nitrification with either polyethylene/clay sinter lamellas (FBR A) or porous ceramic rings (FBR B) were continously run for treating synthetic saline wastewater. Seawater from Hafen Büsum was used as an inoculums. The performance of the system was evaluated under different operating conditions. A better overall nitrification without nitrite accumulation was observed in FBR B during continuous incubation
Citizenship and Democratization in Southeast Asia
Citizenship and Democratization in Southeast Asia redirects the largely western-oriented study of citizenship to postcolonial states. Providing various fascinating first-hand accounts of how citizens interpret and realize the recognition of their property, identity, security and welfare in the context of a weak rule of law and clientelistic politics, this study highlights the importance of studying citizenship for understanding democratization processes in Southeast Asia. With case studies from Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Cambodia, this book provides a unique bottom-up perspective on the character of public life in Southeast Asia.
Berenschot W, .; Schulte Nordholt H.; Bakker L.
The generalized Schur algorithm (GSA) allows computing well-known matrix decompositions, such as QR and LU factorizations [1]. In particular, if the involved matrix is structured, i.e., Toeplitz, block-Toeplitz or Sylvester, the GSA computes the R factor of the QR factorization with complexity of one order of magnitude less than that of the classical QR algorithm [2], since it relies only on the knowledge of the so-called generators [2] associated to the given matrix, rather than on the knowledge of the matrix itself. The stability properties of the GSA are described in [3–5], where it is proven that the algorithm is weakly stable provided the involved hyperbolic rotations are performed in a stable way. In this manuscript, we ﬁrst show that, besides the efﬁciency properties, the GSA provides new theoretical insights on the bounds of the entries of the R factor of the QR factorization of some structured matrices
Breaking the cycle: Attacking the malaria parasite in the liver
Plasmodium falciparum malaria remains one of the most serious health problems globally. Immunization with attenuated parasites elicits multiple cellular eﬀector mechanisms capable of eliminating Plasmodium from the liver. However, malaria liver stage immunity is complex. The anatomic site of priming of naive Plasmodium-speciﬁc CD8 T cells, be it in the lymph nodes draining the site of Plasmodium antigen deposition by the mosquito or in the liver, may in fact determine the speciﬁcity of the eﬀector CD8 T cells. The participation of particular antigenpresenting cells (Corradin and Levitskaya, 2014) and tissue signatures that inﬂuence the activation of intrahepatic CD8 T cells against malaria sporozoites (Morrot and Rodrigues, 2014) are still incompletely understood. Similarly, how eﬀector CD8 T cells detect the few infected hepatocytes in the large liver and the mechanisms they use to kill the intracellular parasites are unknown.
Ute Frevert, Urszula Krzych , Thomas L. Richie
It’s been ten years since open data first broke onto the global stage. Over the past decade, thousands of programmes and projects around the world have worked to open data and use it to address a myriad of social and economic challenges. Meanwhile, issues related to data rights and privacy have moved to the centre of public and political discourse. As the open data movement enters a new phase in its evolution, shifting to target real-world problems and embed open data thinking into other existing or emerging communities of practice, big questions still remain. How will open data initiatives respond to new concerns about privacy, inclusion, and artificial intelligence? And what can we learn from the last decade in order to deliver impact where it is most needed
Davies, Tim , Walker, Stephen B., Rubinstein, Mor ,Perini, Fernando
Sensory Hair Cell Death and Regeneration
Sensory hair cells are the specialized mechanosensory receptors found in vertebrate auditory, vestibular, and lateral line organs that transduce vibratory and acoustic stimuli into the sensations of hearing and balance. Hair cells can be damaged due to such factors as agin g, ototoxic chemicals, acoustic trauma, infection, or genetic factors. Loss of hese hair cells lead to deficits in hearing and balance, and in ammals, such deficits are permanent. In contrast, non-mammalian vertebrates exhibit the capability to regenerate missing hair cells.
Michael E. Smith , Andrew K. Groves, Allison B. Coffin
Agrobacterium biology and its application to transgenic plant production
The broad host range pathogenic bacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens has been widely studied as a model system to understand horizontal gene flow, secretion of effector proteins into host cells, and plant-pathogen interactions. Agrobacterium mediated plant transformation also is the major method for generating transgenic plants for research and biotechnology purposes. Agrobacterium species have the natural ability to conduct interkingdom genetic transfer from bacteria to eukaryotes, including most plant species, yeast, fungi, and even animal cells. In nature, A. tumefaciens causes crown gall disease resulting from expression in plants of auxin and cytokinin biosynthesis genes encoded by the transferred (T-) DNA
Jurg B. Logue , Stuart E. G. Findlay , Jerome Comte
Ontogeny and Phylogeny of Brain Barrier Mechanisms
Norman R. Saunders , Helen B. Stolp, Shane A. Liddelow
Natural Antibodies in Health and Disease
Natural antibodies (NAbs) are found in normal individuals in the absence of exogenous antigenic stimulation. Natural antibodies rapidly recognize and protect against pathogens that have not been previously encountered. NAbs also cross-react with several self-antigens, which, besides their role as a first line of defense against pathogens, affords them the ability to perform important housekeeping functions in healthy organisms. Such housekeeping functions include the clearance of oxidized damaged structures and/or apoptotic cells, which prevents the induction of pro-inflammatory effects. In addition,
Ana Maria Hernandez , Nichol E. Holodick
Antibody Repertoire and Graft Outcome Following Solid Organ Transplantation
In recent years, there has been vast improvement in the survival of solid organ grafts. Improved immunosuppression has resulted in efficient control of cell-mediated immune responses and has also mitigated the effects of HLA mismatching between the recipient and the grafted organ. ntibodymediated rejection (AMR) however still remains a clinical challenge and the identification of donorspecific HLA antibodies pretransplant are a mandatory requirement for successful grafting. Accurate and sensitive HLA antibody identification has been made possible by the introduction of solid phase assays such as the Luminex bead based platform for antibody testing. Despite this advancement in detecting and understanding the role of HLA antibodies in rejection, many questions still require answers in order to maximize the outcome in solid organ transplantation. Many of these aspects are dealt with efficiently in this excellent series of papers addressing the role of antibodies in solid organ rejection. This collection of reviews, some including new findings, by world leaders in their particular
Narinder K. Mehra --- Ajay Kumar Baranwal --- Brian D. Tait
Microwave and RF Design: Modules focuses on the design of systems based on microwave modules. The use of modules has become increasingly important in RF and microwave engineering for rapidly realizing high performance microwave systems. When integration is ultimately to be used, building a system up using modules provides a rapid means of prototyping and testing system concepts. A wide variety of RF modules including amplifiers, local oscillators, switches, circulators, isolators, phase detectors, frequency multipliers and dividers, phase-locked loops, and direct digital synthesizers are considered. Detailed design strategies for synthesizing filters based on parallel coupled lines are presented. The reader will gain an appreciation of design by synthesis.
North Carolina State University Libraries
Microwave and RF Design: Networks presents the tools and techniques required to analyze and design microwave and RF circuits. Because of the finite speed of light, microwave circuits must be considered to be spatially distributed and so there is not a single ground. As such metrics that can be used to describe power flow are of most use. The topics covered include scattering parameters, signal flow graphs, and Smith charts. Acquiring expertise in these is the biggest barriers to a successful career in microwave and RF engineering
Microwave and RF Design: Transmission Lines
Microwave and RF Design: Transmission Lines builds on the concepts of forward- and backward-traveling waves. Many examples are included of advanced techniques for analyzing and designing transmission line networks with microstrip lines primarily used in design examples. Coupled-lines are an important functional element in microwave circuits, and circuit equivalents of coupled lines are introduced as fundamental building blocks in design. The text and examples introduce the often hidden design requirements of mitigating parasitic effects and eliminating unwanted modes of operation.
Microwave and RF Design: Radio Systems is a circuits- and systems-oriented approach to modern microwave and RF systems. Sufficient details at the circuits and sub-system levels are provided to understand how modern radios are implemented. Design is emphasized throughout. The evolution of radio from what is now known as 0G, for early radio, through to 6G, for sixth generation cellular radio, is used to present modern microwave and RF engineering concepts. Two key themes unify the text: 1) how system-level decisions affect component, circuit and subsystem design; and 2) how the capabilities of technologies, components, and subsystems impact system design. This book is suitable as both an undergraduate and graduate textbook, as well as a career-long reference book.
Fundamentals of Microwave and RF Design enables mastery of the essential concepts required to cross the barriers to a successful career in microwave and RF design. Extensive treatment of scattering parameters, that naturally describe power flow, and of Smith-chart-based design procedures prepare the student for success. The emphasis is on design at the module level and on covering the whole range of microwave functions available. The orientation is towards using microstrip transmission line technologies and on gaining essential mathematical, graphical and design skills for module design proficiency. This book is derived from a multi volume comprehensive book series, Microwave and RF Design, Volumes 1-5, with the emphasis in this book being on presenting the fundamental materials required to gain entry to RF and microwave design.
Appropriate mathematical tools and methodologies are critical for ensuring robust and reliable computational model predictions based on medical and healthcare data in the era of the digital health revolution (Duggal et al., 2018). Patient-speciﬁc approaches are being increasingly pursued, with simulations benchmarked by clinical data (e.g., brain activity recordings; Breakspear, 2017) obtained in non-invasive manner on individual level (e.g., resting state; Spetsieris et al., 2015). Precision Medicine, although not a new concept, is gaining momentum (Hodson, 2016) powered by the ever increasing volume of patients data (Colijn et al.). Quantifying patient similarity is an important challenge that is critical in predicting patients’ disease trajectories (Sharafoddini et al., 2017). In an opinion article (Brown) patient similarity concept has been introduced as a paradigm shift in optimizing personalisation of patient care.
Krasimira Tsaneva-Atanasova, Vanessa Diaz-Zuccarini
Rabies Symptoms, Diagnosis, Prophylaxis and Treatment
Rabies is an acute, progressive, incurable viral encephalitis found throughout the world. Despite being one of the oldest recognized pathogens, its impact remains substantial in public health, veterinary medicine, and conservation biology. Thus, it is Essential to apply existing tools and to seek new methods to improve upon prevention, control, selective variant elimination, and treatment efforts. Advances in diagnosis, vaccinology, pathobiology, and related research techniques continue to afford enhanced insights on rabies. Although rabies is not a candidate for eradication, the results of these innovative communications provide further knowledge to deﬁne a more optimal approach to understanding and managing this complex infectious disease of nature on a global basis in a One Health context.
Charles Rupprecht (Ed.), Bernhard Dietzschold (Ed.)
Innovative Radiopharmaceuticals in Oncology and Neurology
Personalized medicine is presented as the future of patient care. Nuclear Medicine will play a major role in the selection of patients for targeted therapies and in early therapy assessment with the investigation of phenotypes and functions using sensitive and specific SPECT and PET imaging techniques and theranostic approaches. Nuclear Medicine is already a key in the development of new therapies and targeted radionuclide therapy provides efficacious treatment modalities against cancer. An incredible amount of innovation is related to the use of a variety of radionuclides, new or improved multimodality imaging devices, and numbers of recently marketed radiopharmaceuticals in all medical domains and particularly cardiology, neurology, and oncology.
Secondary Analysis of Electronic Health Records
While wonderful new medical discoveries and innovations are in the news every day, healthcare providers continue to struggle with using information. Uncertainties and unanswered clinical questions are a daily reality for the decision makers who provide care. Perhaps the biggest limitation in making the best possible decisions for patients is that the information available is usually not focused on the specific individual or situation at hand. For example, there are general clinical guidelines that outline the ideal target blood pressure for a patient with a severe infection. However, the truly best blood pressure levels likely differ from patient to patient, and perhaps even change for an individual patient over the course of treatment. The ongoing computerization of health records presents an opportunity to overcome this limitation.
Systems Biology Approaches to Understanding the Cause and Treatment of Heart, Lung, Blood, and Sleep Disorders
Development of powerful new highthroughput technologies for probing the transcriptome, proteome and metabolome is driving the rapid acquisition of information on the function of molecular systems. The importance of these achievements cannot be understated –they have transformed the nature of both biology and medicine. Despite this dramatic progress, one of the greatest challenges that continues to confront modern biology is to understand how behavior at the level of genome, proteome and metabolome determines physiological function at the level of cell, tissue and organ in both health and disease. Because of the inherent complexity of biological systems, the development, analysis, and validation of integrative computational models based directly on experimental data is necessary to achieve this understanding.
Animals and Medicine: The Contribution of Animal Experiments to the Control of Disease
The Research Defence Society (RDS) was founded in 1908 by Dr Stephen Paget, son of the eminent Victorian surgeon, Sir James Paget. Its role was to defend scientists conducting medical research using animals and to inform the public about the importance of animal experimentation. In its first year it attracted a membership of 2000 which included scientists in the pharmaceutical industry, in academia and in research institutes. Past presidents of the Society include such distinguished figures as Lord Perry of Walton and Sir William Paton.
Mind-Body Medicine in Children and Adolescents
The field of mind-body medicine holds significant promise for children and adolescents. Growing recognition of the intricate connections between thought, emotion, and physiology highlights the need for new therapies that leverage inner resources and offer non-invasive treatment options. Modern imaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have advanced our understanding and appreciation of how the mind-body therapies can benefit health, increasing confidence in their use and propelling them into the mainstream of medicine. Mind-body therapies have special value in addressing pain, fear, and stress that accompanies many pediatric medical encounters. Some of the mind-body therapies such as mindfulness, have their roots in ancient traditions and are now being used routinely in the practice of pediatric integrative medicine, an emerging field focused on preventive health that blends conventional and evidence-based complementary therapies
Homeostasis and Allostasis of Thyroid Function
Alterations of thyroid function, especially hypothyroidism, are exceptionally common conditions. Studies from several developed countries revealed the prevalence of subclinical and overt hypothyroidism to be between 5 and 15 % and between 1 and 10%, respectively. Diagnosis and treatment of (overt or subclinical) hypothyroidism are considered to be easy tasks, since thyrotropin (TSH) concentration mirrors the supply with thyroid hormones and is therefore accepted as a biomarker for both diagnosis and dose calibration for substitution therapy.
Johannes W. Dietrich, John E. M. Midgley, Rudolf Hoermann
The Impact of Systems Medicine on Human Health and Disease
Complex diseases including diabetes, neurological disorders and cancer are results from a combination of genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors, and development of new prognostic tools for the treatment of such diseases requires a deep understanding of the mechanisms underlying cell functions. With the advances in high throughput technologies, biological components of cells can be measured with a very high resolution and these data can be used for investigating whole systems properties using a network-based approach. Systems medicine provides an integrative platform for studying the interactions between the biological components of the cell using a holistic approach and generating mechanistic explanations for the emergent systems properties.
Machine Learning with Radiation Oncology Big Data
Half of all cancer patients may receive radiotherapy as part of their treatment. With the wealth of diverse data generated every day in the clinic, the radiation oncology community possesses a unique advantage in harnessing these massive data with the predictive power of machine learning methods for the beneﬁt of millions of cancer patients undergoing radiotherapy worldwide. In this Research Topic “Machine Learning with Radiation Oncology Big Data,” a wide range of clinical applications involving various machine learning algorithms have been described and demonstrated, with the hope of ushering in more widespread applications of artiﬁcial intelligence in medicine, particularly in cancer radiotherapy in order to achieve a truly individualized radiation oncology and an evidence-based learning healthcare system.
Drug-Diagnostics Co-Development in Oncology
The idea of combining drugs and diagnostics in oncology is not new. When the selective estrogen-receptor modulator tamoxifen was developed in the 1970s for the treatment of breast cancer, data on estrogen-receptor status were correlated with the treatment outcome. Based on a phase II study performed in patients with advanced breast cancer, published in 1976, the investigators concluded:“a high degree of correlation between response and positive estrogen-receptor assay suggests the value of the diagnostic test as a means to select patients for tamoxifen treatment” (1). Despite the fact that this conclusion was drawn nearly 40 years ago, the adaptation of the drug-diagnostic co-development model has been relatively slowand it is only within the last decade that it has gained widespread acceptance.
Our species has always used plants as medicines, during our 200,000 year existence. This is made obvious by the plant medicines found in mummy burials, around the world, dating back thousands of years. Human beings evolved using plant medicines to stay alive. This has resulted in a genetic selection in which those who were healed by plant medicines and survived were able to pass on their genes. Modern humans must continue to use plant medicines. When a Traditional Healer is asked how her people learned how to use a specific plant medicine, the answer is usually that God taught them. Each of us has a spiritual sense that can be used to seek answers [1]. Finding a new plant medicine involves fasting, praying, and spending as much as four days with the plant that will become a new medicine [2]. Traditional Healers are still the major or only source of healthcare for many regions of the world. The loss of Traditional Healers in some areas has resulted in major changes in healthcare, sometimes to the detriment of the people [3,4]. Since Traditional Healers may be religious leaders also, they provide moral direction for the community. The displacement of traditional religious beliefs has been detrimental in some regions
Contemporary Bioethics Islamic Perspective
The present study undertakes to examine biomedical issues as they have emerged in the last three decades. In the Muslim world, as in any part of the globe, advancements in biomedical technology has meant a number of new issues in the medical treatment and procedures that impinge upon Islamic values as taught by the Qur’an and the Sunna (the Tradition of Prophet Muhammad). Our investigations in bioethical issues require Muslim ethicists to examine a number of judicial decisions made by Muslim scholars in response to the growing number of cases in the clinical settings as well as national health policies adopted by various Muslim governments in the last two decades.
Dr. Mohammed Ali Al-Bar, Dr. Hassan Chamsi-Pasha
Innovative Medicine : Basic Research and Development
Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are an intricate part of normal cellular physiology. In excess, however, ROS can damage all three major classes of acromolecules and compromise cell via bility. We briefl y discuss the physiology of ROS but focus on the mechanisms cells use to preserve redox homeostasis upon oxidative stress, with particular emphasis on glycolysis. ROS inhibits multiple glycolytic enzymes, including glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase, pyruvate kinase M2, and phosphofructokinase-1. Consistently, glycolytic inhibition promotes fl ux into the oxidative arm of the pentose phosphate pathway to generate NADPH. NADPH is critically important, as it provides the reducing power that fuels the protein-based antioxidant systems and recycles oxidized glutathione. The unique ability of pyruvate kinase M2 inhibition to promote serine synthesis in the context of oxidative stress is also discussed.
Kazuwa Nakao, Nagahiro Minato, Shinji Uemoto
The core of the present study is an investigation on eighteenth-century medical writing, particularly concerning the elaboration and the communication of medicine in reference works such as universal dictionaries of arts and sciences, medical dictionaries, and handbooks. Most of the vernacular texts under scrutiny here were issued in the second half of the century, a period in which the advancements in medical research, medical education and medical practice1 , as well as a growing awareness of health issues (Pirohakul-Wallis 2014: 3-4), favoured the circulation of an expanding medical vocabulary and stimulated medical writing as a whole.
Perspectives on Nuclear Medicine for Molecular Diagnosis and Integrated Therapy
t Quantitative four-dimensional (4D) image reconstruction methods with respiratory and cardiac motion compensation are an active area of research in ECT imaging, including SPECT and PET. They are the extensions of three-dimensional (3D) statistical image reconstruction methods with iterative algorithms that incorporate accurate models of the imaging process and provide significant improvement in the quality and quantitative accuracy of the reconstructed images as compared to that obtained from conventional analytical image reconstruction methods. The new 4D image reconstruction methods incorporate additional models of the respiratory and cardiac motion of the patient to reduce image blurring due to respiratory motion and image noise of the cardiac-gated frames of the 4D cardiac-gated images.
The Precision Medicine Initiative, which was instituted by President Barack Obama on January 20, 2015, highlighted the importance that advances in genomics and related “-omic” approaches have made to science and medicine, and it set the stage for their federally funded and mandated integration into the delivery of health care. Whether these advances comprise large-scale approaches, such as The Cancer Genome Atlas, which provides a modern classification of cancers based on molecular profiles, or genealogy initiatives, which seek to trace the movement of our early ancestors out of Africa, genomic technology has taken us closer to developing targeted therapies and a refined understanding of our evolutionary journey.
A History of Radionuclide Studies in the UK
The British Nuclear Medicine Society (BNMS) is a registered charity that was originally established in 1966 as the Nuclear Medicine Society. It is the only independent forum devoted to all aspects of nuclear medicine, clinical practice, education, research and development of nuclear medicine within the UK. Nuclear medicine covers the whole spectrum of medical diagnostic, investigational and investigational use of ‘unsealed’ radionuclides. The Society is committed to safe practice and high quality standards throughout the UK. As well as co-operating with other professional societies and interested bodies, the BNMS holds two scientifi c and educational meetings each year around the UK and through its committees, promotes education, good practice, organisational audit and quality assurance activities. The Society provides advice for purchasers on clinical and technical requirements and standards for nuclear medicine as well as responding to NICE when appropriate.
Ralph McCready, Gopinath Gnanasegaran, Jamshed B. Bomanji
Demystifying Climate Models: A Users Guide to Earth System Models
The book series Earth Systems Data and Models publishes state-of-the-art research and technologies aimed at understanding processes and interactions in the earth system. A special emphasis is given to theory, methods, and tools used in earth, planetary and environmental sciences for: modeling, observation and analysis; data generation, assimilation and visualization; forecasting and simulation; and optimization. Topics in the series include but are not limited to: numerical, datadriven and agent-based modeling of the earth system; uncertainty analysis of models; geodynamic simulations, climate change, weather forecasting, hydroinformatics, and complex ecological models; model evaluation for decision-making processes and other earth science applications; and remote sensing and GIS technology.
Bacterial Exotoxins: how bacteria fight the immune system
Bacterial pathogenicity factors are functionally diverse. They may facilitate the adhesion and colonization of bacteria, influence the host immune response, assist spreading of the bacterium by e.g. evading recognition by immune cells, or allow bacteria to dwell within protected niches inside the eukaryotic cell.
Inka Sastalla , Denise M. Monack, Katharina F. Kubatzky
Bacterial pathogens in the non-clinical environment
Bacterial pathogens , clinical environment
When thinking about bacterial pathogens, most will consider their interaction with humans. Nevertheless, many pathogens aﬀecting humans will not be transmitted directly from one individual to another but will rather come from or transit through the environment to infect the human host. Outside their hosts, bacterial pathogens must be able to resist environmental stresses and perhaps grow in order to get to another hosts. The environment outside the host is referred therein as the non-clinical environment (NCE). In this research topic, a collection of articles is presented that covers some of the strategies and factors that inﬂuence the survival and growth of bacterial pathogens in the NCE, and therefore aﬀects transmission to humans, and outbreaks. Such knowledge could be important to limit the transmission during an outbreak. For example, a Legionnaires’ disease outbreak in Quebec City (Canada) in 2012 prompted Trudel et al. (2014) to review the eﬀort to ﬁnd the source
Folate, vitamin B12, vitamin B6 and riboflavin play a key role as coenzymes in one-carbon metabolism which, in turn, is essential for a broad range of fundamental physiological processes, including RNA and DNA synthesis, cell division, tissue growth and methylation. Deficiencies or imbalance of B-vitamins, as well as genetic polymorphisms and environmental factors, are shown to disturb the normal function of one-carbon metabolism with adverse effects on human health. Although a vast volume of research has already been conducted in this area, there are still significant gaps in our knowledge that require further investigation. This prompted the journal Nutrients to publish a Special Issue focused on the novel findings in the area of B-vitamins and one-carbon metabolism. The Special Issue published 26 research papers and reviews on various topics pertinent to one-carbon metabolism. Several of the published papers examined the relationship between folate and the metabolically related B-vitamins and degenerative diseases in ageing. Porter et al. provided an extensive review on the causes and consequences of low B-vitamin status and the risk for development of cardiovascular disease, cognitive dysfunction and osteoporosis. In a large cohort of French older adults, followed for approximately 10 years, Lefevre-Arbogast et al. demonstrated that higher intake of folate was associated with a decreased risk of dementi
Even before history began, people must already have noticed certain facts about the sky. The sun and moon both rise in the east and set in the west. Another fact that can be settled to a fair degree of accuracy using the naked eye is that the apparent sizes of the sun and moon don’t change noticeably. (There is an optical illusion that makes the moon appear bigger when it’s near the horizon, but you can easily verify that it’s nothing more than an illusion by checking its angular size against some standard, such as your pinkie held at arm’s length.) If the sun and moon were varying their distances from us, they would appear to get bigger and smaller, and since they don’t appear to change in size, it appears, at least approximately, that they always stay at the same distance from us.
The Adventure of Physics Volume VI . The Strand Model – A Speculation on Unification
Look at what happens around us. A child that smiles, a nightingale that sings, aily that opens: all move. Every shadow, even an immobile one, is due to moving ight. Every mountain is kept in place by moving electrons. Every star owes its formation and its shine to motion of matter and radiation. Also the darkness of the night sky** is due to motion: it results from the expansion of space. Finally, human creativity is due to the motion of molecules, ions and electrons in the brain. Is there a common language for these and all other observations of nature? Is there a unified and precise way to describe all motion? How? Is everything that moves, from people to planets,from light to empty space, made of the same constituents? What is the origin of motion? Answering these questions is the topic of the present text
Well seismic surveying and acoustic logging
In the geophysics of oil exploration and reservoir studies, the seismic method is the most commonly used method to obtain a subsurface model. This method plays an increasingly important role in soil investigations for geotechnical, hydrogeological and site characterization studies regarding seismic hazard issues (Mari et al, 1999).
In the geophysics of oil exploration and reservoir studies, the surface seismic method is the most commonly used method to obtain a subsurface model in 2 or 3 dimensions. This method plays an increasingly important role in soil investigations for geotechnical, hydrogeological and site characterization studies regarding seismic hazard issues. This book is neither a basic introduction nor a theoretical study of seismic imaging. Its goal is to provide a practical guide, through the use of examples from the field, to the application of seismic methods to surface imaging
Introduction to Louis Michel’s lattice geometry through group action
This chapter describes the outline of the book and explains the interrelations between different chapters and appendices. The specificity of this book is an intensive use of group action ideas and terminology when discussing physical and mathematical models of lattices. Another important aspect is the discussion and comparison of various approaches to the characterization of lattices. Along with symmetry and topology ideas, the combinatorial description based on Voronoï and Delone cells is discussed along with classical characterization of lattices via quadratic forms.
The importance of cultural heritage for mankind was once well expressed by the Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928-2000) when he said: “If we do not honour our past we lose our future. If we destroy our roots we cannot grow.” This statement refers almost directly to the two pillars of this review: Investigation and preservation of our cultural treasures. The various contributions summarised in the current review demonstrate that the methods inherent to nuclear physics are capable of following Hundertwasser’s vision. The basic concept is to use nuclear radiations of various kinds (X-rays, γ-rays, electrons, neutrons and ion beams) to analyse the elemental and/or isotopic composition of an object, or to preserve it by irradiation processes.
Νear-Earth space is the region that extends from the middle atmosphere up to the outer radiation belts. This region is of significant interest because of its potentially undesired effects on human life and on technological systems, whose understanding, modeling and prediction require continuous scientific exploration and advances. Consequently, a number of observing systems have been set up to acquire observations from the near-Earth space, producing a wealth of diverse types of data which still need to be homogenized and organized in order to become widely accessible. The exploitation of multi-instrument data from a large number of distributed observing sites is the requirement for accurate predictions of the near-Earth space environment. As the near-Earth space is part of the complex Sun-Earth system, supporting data from the Sun, the interplanetary medium but also from the upper and lower layers of the atmosphere, are needed to drive near-Earth prediction models.
Earth's climate response to a changing Sun
The Earth’s atmosphere, the thin envelope of air that surrounds our planet, consists of a mixture of gases, extending from the surface of the Earth to the edge of space and tied to the Earth mainly by its gravitational force, and partly by the magnetic field at high altitude. It comprises mainly molecular nitrogen (78% in mass) and molecular oxygen (21%), with the other 1% composed of trace gases, named so because their concentrations are very small. Despite their small amount, carbon dioxide, ozone and water vapor are very important to the Earth’s climate and can have a large impact on atmospheric processes. Above about 200 km, atomic oxygen, although tenuous, becomes the major species while atomic hydrogen is the most abundant species above typically 1000 km. Depending on the approach taken, there are various ways one can consider a distinction between atmospheric layers: composition, temperature, electromagnetic properties.
https://www.edp- open.org/images/stories/books/fulldl/Earths_climate_response_to_a_changing_Sun.pdf
3D City Models and urban information: Current issues and perspectives
Many urban or environmental models are defined with the objective of helping practitioners and stakeholders in their decision-making processes. Models which represent in three dimensions the geometric elements of a city are called 3D city models. These models are increasingly used in different cities and countries for an intended wide range of applications beyond mere visualisation. Indeed, unlike maps and drawings, 3D visualisation reflects a view of the environment that a lot of people are familiar with and acts as a communication tool. Non geometrical data (such as social, historic or acoustic data or statistics, for example) can be associated to urban geometrical objects (such as buildings or streets) that can be represented and visualized in 3D, leading to a localization as well as a better understanding of these data. By associating a domain (energy consumption, air quality, etc.) to these 3D models, we obtain richer 3D representations that can be used for simulations and reasoning (visual reasoning).
An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers
This book, which presupposes familiarity only with the most elementary concepts of arithmetic (divisibility properties, greatest common divisor, etc.), is an expanded version of a series of lectures for graduate students on elementary number theory. Topics include: Compositions and Partitions; Arithmetic Functions; Distribution of Primes; Irrational Numbers; Congruences; Diophantine Equations; Combinatorial Number Theory; and Geometry of Numbers. Three sections of problems (which include exercises as well as unsolved problems) complete the text.
Quantitative Ecology: A New Unified Approach
Quantitative Ecology introduces and discusses the principles of ecology from populations to ecosystems including human populations, disease, exotic organisms, habitat fragmentation, biodiversity and global dynamics. The book also reformulates and unifies ecological equations making them more accessible to the reader and easier to teach.
Clarence Lehman, Shelby Loberg, Adam Clark
University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing
This text is a presentation of how and why children grow, develop, and learn. We will look at how we change physically over time from conception through adolescence. We examine cognitive change, or how our ability to think and remember changes over the first 20 years or so of life. And we will look at how our emotions, psychological state, and social relationships change throughout childhood and adolescence. Think about what periods of development that you think a course on Child Development would address. How many stages are on your list? Perhaps you have three: infancy, childhood, and teenagers.
The goal of this book is to improve your logical-reasoning skills. These skills are also called "critical thinking skills." They are a complex weave of abilities that help you get someone's point, generate reasons for your own point, evaluate the reasons given by others, decide what or what not to do, decide what information to accept or reject, explain a complicated idea, apply conscious quality control as you think, and resist propaganda. Your most important critical thinking skill is your skill at making judgments─not snap judgments that occur in the blink of an eye, but those that require careful reasoning.
Statistical Thinking for the 21st Century
Statistical thinking is a way of understanding a complex world by describing it in relatively simple terms that nonetheless capture essential aspects of its structure, and that also provide us some idea of how uncertain we are about our knowledge. The foundations of statistical thinking come primarily from mathematics and statistics, but also from computer science, psychology, and other fields of study. We can distinguish statistical thinking from other forms of thinking that are less likely to describe the world accurately. In particular, human intuition often tries to answer the same questions that we can answer using statistical thinking, but often gets the answer wrong. For example, in recent years most Americans have reported that they think that violent crime was worse compared to the previous year (Pew Research Center). However, a statistical analysis of the actual crime data shows that in fact violent crime has steadily decreased since the 1990’s. Intuition fails us because we rely upon best guesses (which psychologists refer to as heuristics) that can often get it wrong. For example, humans often judge the prevalence of some event (like violent crime) using an availability heuristic – that is, how easily can we think of an example of violent crime. For this reason, our judgments of increasing crime rates may be more reflective of increasing news coverage, in spite of an actual decrease in the rate of crime. Statistical thinking provides us with the tools to more accurately understand the world and overcome the fallibility of human intuition.
In dredging, production estimating is carried out mainly with analytical physical models of the different dredging processes. Slurry transport of settling slurries and cutting processes in sand, clay and rock are already covered in two other books by the author. Other processes like hopper sedimentation and erosion, water jet fluidization, cutter head spillage, pump/pipeline dynamics and clamshell dredging are covered in this Special Topics Edition. New topics may be added in the near future
Introduction to Financial Mathematics Concepts and Computational Methods
Financial Mathematics Concepts, Computational Methods
Introduction to Financial Mathematics: Concepts and Computational Methods serves as a primer in financial mathematics with a focus on conceptual understanding of models and problem solving. It includes the mathematical background needed for risk management, such as probability theory, optimization, and the like. The goal of the book is to expose the reader to a wide range of basic problems, some of which emphasize analytic ability, some requiring programming techniques and others focusing on statistical data analysis. In addition, it covers some areas which are outside the scope of mainstream financial mathematics textbooks. For example, it presents marginal account setting by the CCP and systemic risk, and a brief overview of the model risk. Inline exercises and examples are included to help students prepare for exams on this book.
Undergraduate Diagnostic Imaging Fundamentals
Diagnostic Imaging principles and concepts are augmented by the presentation of images for common clinical conditions. Guiding principles related to minimizing radiation exposure and requesting the most appropriate imaging examination are addressed.Static images are enhanced by the ability to access images stored and displayed on an Html-5 compatible, Dicom image viewer that simulates a simple Picture Archive and Communication system (PACS). Users can also access other imaging from the Dicom viewer (ODIN), beyond the basic curriculum provided, to further advance their experience with viewing diagnostic imaging pathologies.
Numerical methods are designed to approximate one thing or another. Sometimes roots, sometimes derivatives or definite integrals, or curves, or solutions of differential equations. As numerical methods produce only approximations to these things, it is important to have some idea how accurate they are. Sometimes accuracy comes down to careful algebraic analysis—sometimes careful analysis of the calculus, and often careful analysis of Taylor polynomials. But before we can tackle those details, we should discuss just how error and, therefore, accuracy are measured. There are two basic measurements of accuracy: absolute error and relative error. Suppose that p is the value we are approximating, and p˜ is an approximation of p. Then p˜ misses the mark by exactly the quantity p˜− p, the so-called error. Of course, p˜ − p will be negative when p˜ misses low. That is, when the approximation p˜ is less than the exact value p. On the other hand, p˜ − p will be positive when p˜ misses high. But generally, we are not concerned with whether our approximation is too high or too low. We just want to know how far off it is. Thus, we most often talk about the absolute error, |p˜ − p|. You might recognize the expression |p˜ − p| as the distance between p˜ and p, and that’s not a bad way to think about absolute error.
Geometry with an Introduction to Cosmic Topology
Motivated by questions in cosmology, the open-content text Geometry with an Introduction to Cosmic Topology uses Mobius transformations to develop hyperbolic, elliptic, and Euclidean geometry - three possibilities for the global geometry of the universe. The text, written for students who have taken vector calculus, also explores the interplay between the shape of a space and the type of geometry it admits. Geometry is suitable for a semester course in non-Euclidean geometry or as a guide to independent study, with over 200 exercises and several essays on topics including the history of geometry, parallax and curvature, and research aimed at determining the shape of the universe.
Educational contexts (e.g., schools, special education units and early childhood centres) are places of social hope capital, a place and space where people can inspire positive thinking, engage in educational growth and the sustainment of wellbeing. Considerable research suggests that the promotion of wellbeing, 8 CARTER, SUSAN AND CECILY ANDERSEN is a core role of schools and teachers are in a prime position to recognise changes indicative of wellbeing concerns. The quality of life or wellbeing of an individual or community is a function of the actual conditions of that life and what an individual or community makes of those conditions. What a person or community makes of those conditions is in turn a function of how the conditions are perceived, what is thought and felt about those conditions, what is done and, finally, what consequences follow from all these inputs. People’s perceptions, thoughts, feelings and actions, then, have an impact on their own and others’ living conditions (Michalos, 2007, p.4). Prior to embarking on this journey of exploring wellbeing within educational contexts, this Chapter will connect with your prior knowledge on wellbeing and explore your own sense of wellbeing.
Most people think of psychologists in very traditional ways. For example, if you were to close your eyes and imagine a psychologist, there is a good chance you would think of a clinician or therapist. Clinical psychologists in their office settings often treat people with psychological problems one at a time by trying to change thought patterns, perceptions, or behavior. This is often called the “medical model” which involves a therapist delivering one-on-one psychotherapy to patients. There is a similar medical model in the field of medicine, and examples of this model would involve a physician fixing a patient’s broken arm or providing antibiotics for an infection. Although there is a clear need for this traditional model for those with medical or psychological problems, many do not have access to these services, and a very different approach will be required to successfully solve many of the individual and community problems that confront us.
Unfolding the Mystery of Life, Biology Lab Manual for Non-Science Majors
This laboratory manual is intended for use in a biology laboratory course taken by non-science majors, pre-biology, and pre-allied health majors. Laboratory exercises provide students with experience in basic laboratory skills, gathering and organizing data, measuring and calculating, hypothesis testing, analysis of data, writing, and laboratory safety. The skill sets are designed to promote the development of critical thought and analysis. Students work with living and preserved specimens, and laboratory reagents and equipment.
Introduction to Programming using Fortran 95/2003/2008
Computers are everywhere in our daily lives. Between the desktop, laptop, phone, bank, and vehicle, it is difficult to completely get away from computers. It only makes sense to learn a little about how a computer really works.This text provides an introduction to programming and problem solving using the Fortran 95/2003/2008 programming language. This introduction is geared for non-computer science majors. The primary focus is on an introduction to problem solving and algorithm development. As such, many details of the Fortran 95/2003/2008 language are omitted.
MIPS Assembly Language Programming using QtSpim
MIPS Assembly, Language Programming, QtSpim
There are a number of excellent, comprehensive, and in-depth texts on MIPS assembly language programming. This is not one of them.The purpose of this text is to provide a simple and free reference for university level programming and architecture units that include a brief section covering MIPS assembly language programming. The text assumes usage of the QtSpim simulator. An appendix is included that covers the download, installation, and basic use of the QtSpim simulator.The scope of this text addresses basic MIPS assembly language programming including instruction set usage, stacks, procedure/function calls, QtSpim simulator system services, multiple dimension arrays, and basic recursion.
This textbook is unique among economics textbooks. It contains many of the same topics as mainstream textbooks, but it includes and takes very seriously heterodox critiques and alternatives to the mainstream approach to economics. It includes a whole range of alternative theories, including Post-Keynesian, Austrian, Marxian, radical, feminist, institutionalist, and other approaches. The purpose is to teach students about alternative schools of economic thought but also to deepen their understanding of the dominant, neoclassical approach to economics. In this sense, it draws a great deal of inspiration from Richard Wolff and Stephen Resnick’s Contending Economic Theories. Following Wolff and Resnick, an even broader objective is to teach students that economics is a discourse and that no single voice can rightfully claim to have a monopoly on the truth about economics.
rctic Geopolitics, Media and Power provides a fresh way of looking at the potential and limitations of regional international governance in the Arctic region.Far-reaching impacts of climate change, its wealth of resources and poten-tial for new commercial activities have placed the Arctic region into the political limelight. In an era of rapid environmental change, the Arctic provides a complex and challenging case of geopolitical interplay. Based on analyses of how actors from within and outside the Arctic region assert their interests and how such dis-courses travel in the media, this book scrutinizes the social and material contexts within which new imaginaries, spatial constructs and scalar preferences emerge. It places ground-breaking attention to shifting media landscapes as a critical com-ponent of the social, environmental and technological change. It also reflects on the fundamental dilemmas inherent in democratic decision making at a time when an urgent need for addressing climate change is challenged by conflicting interests and growing geopolitical tensions.
Governing Extractive Industries : Politics, Histories, Ideas
The large-scale extraction of minerals, hydrocarbons, and other natural resources1has long been central to national economies and the global economy. This has been the case in colonial and post-colonial economies alike, and the harnessing of such resources continues to feature prominently in the economic development strategies of many countries. The economic significance of resource extraction can be quantified through data on percentage contribution of oil, gas, and mining to GDP, exports, foreign direct investment, and the public budget (Mosley, 2017). In contrast, the contributions of extractive industries to ‘development’ and ‘inclusive development’ are more uncertain, not least because definitions of these terms differ based on the degree to which analysts emphasize goals of poverty and income inequality, environmental justice, gender equity, or human and citizenship rights. Even those advocating for the role of extractives in economic development and poverty reduction recognize that results have often been ambiguous (Davis, 2009).
The Environmental Impact of Sieben Linden Ecovillage
Environmental impact assessment is widely taught and researched, but rarely covers both lifestyle and building construction in a town or neigh-bourhood. This book provides a broad assessment of the environmental impact of the ecovillage Sieben Linden in Germany. The ecovillage was founded in 1997 and has a population of over one hundred people. This book shows how raising the awareness of individuals and adopting a consistent way of community living can be environmentally friendly. This applies both to everyday practices and the way the houses in the ecovillage are built. The tools used to measure the impact are Ecological Footprint and Carbon Footprint methodologies, making use of indicators such as Primary Energy Intensity and Global Warming Potential. Despite the diffi culties encountered by using standardised methodologies, these research tools provide an overall assessment and have allowed comparisons with selected, similar cases and general values from statistic sources.
Bocco, Andrea; Gerace , Martina; Pollini, Susanna
American Government 2e is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of the single-semester American Government course. This title includes innovative features designed to enhance student learning, including Insider Perspective features and a Get Connected module that shows students how they can get engaged in the political process. The book provides an important opportunity for students to learn the core concepts of American Government and understand how those concepts apply to their lives and the world around them. Changes made in American Government 2e are described in the preface to help instructors transition to the second edition.
The word culture is among the most frequently used words in English. We use it frequently in daily speech and encounter it often in both popular and academic texts. Directly or indirectly, it is the subject matter of many university courses. Even when it is not the exclusive focus, it plays a role in many discussions across the humanities and social sciences. But most of the time, we use it without defining it or even thinking much about exactly what we mean by it. Despite the ease with which we use the term, culture is speaking of culture | 1 not a simple concept. The primary purpose of this book is to promote a better understanding of the scope of the idea. Indeed, the word has a very wide range of meanings, and they are not all consistent with one another. For one thing, it has a relatively long history, and its primary uses have changed markedly over several centuries. Even in my lifetime (I was born in 1953) the ways in which scholars have defined culture have only become more diverse.
Meta ethics from a First Person Standpoint : An Introduction to Moral Philosophy
Metaethics from a First Person Standpoint addresses in a novel format the major topics and themes of contemporary metaethics, the study of the analysis of moral thought and judgement. Metathetics is less concerned with what practices are right or wrong than with what we mean by ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ Looking at a wide spectrum of topics including moral language, realism and anti-realism, reasons and motives, relativism, and moral progress, this book engages students and general readers in order to enhance their understanding of morality and moral discourse as cultural practices. Catherine Wilson innovatively employs a first-person narrator to report step-by-step an individual’s reflections, beginning from a position of radical scepticism, on the possibility of objective moral knowledge. The reader is invited to follow along with this reasoning, and to challenge or agree with each major point
Writing for Electronic Media, an OER textbook. OER stands for Open Educational Resource, which means it’s free for all who access. Since it is electronic, I will do what I can to keep it updated with the changing media. People’s viewing habits are changing as they migrate to mobile sources, social media, and kitten videos.Television News is still a dominant #1 source, and radio is still the safest way to stay informed in your car. Hopefully, you already have some journalism background. This book does not teach the who, what, when, where, why, and how of reporting; its goal is to teach how to present the journalism you already know via electronic media, primarily television.
x86-64 Assembly Language Programming with Ubuntu
The purpose of this text is to provide a reference for University level assembly language and systems programming courses. Specifically, this text addresses the x86-64 instruction set for the popular x86-64 class of processors using the Ubuntu 64-bit Operating System (OS). While the provided code and various examples should work under any Linux-based 64-bit OS, they have only been tested under Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (64-bit). The x86-64 is a Complex Instruction Set Computing (CISC) CPU design. This refers to the internal processor design philosophy. CISC processors typically include a wide variety of instructions (sometimes overlapping), varying instructions sizes, and a wide range of addressing modes. The term was retroactively coined in contrast to Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC3).
Teaching Mathematics is nothing less than a mathematical manifesto. Arising in response to a limited National Curriculum, and engaged with secondary schooling for those aged 11 ̶ 14 (Key Stage 3) in particular, this handbook for teachers will help them broaden and enrich their students’ mathematical education. It avoids specifying how to teach, and focuses instead on the central principles and concepts that need to be borne in mind by all teachers and textbook authors—but which are little appreciated in the UK at present. This study is aimed at anyone who would like to think more deeply about the discipline of ‘elementary mathematics’, in England and Wales and anywhere else. By analysing and supplementing the current curriculum, Teaching Mathematics provides food for thought for all those involved in school mathematics, whether as aspiring teachers or as experienced professionals.
There are many reasons why people study oceanography. An understanding of ocean processes is obviously vital to oceanographers, marine biologists, or environmental scientists. However, there are numerous other scientific fields where the oceans play an important role. The oceans are a major contributor to global climate patterns, and can give us clues to past climate conditions. Knowledge of oceanography is important for resource or energy extraction, such as commercial fishing or aquaculture, oil and gas exploration, and clean energy resources such as wind, wave, or tidal energy. The oceans are the major route for international trade through commercial shipping, and are still a significant factor in the transportation of people across the seas. But even the recreational user benefits from an understanding of the ocean, from winds and currents for the casual sailor, tides and habitat conditions for a fisherman, to wave patterns for surfers. And finally, for anyone who has ever stood on the shore and gazed out at the ocean with a sense of wonder at what lies beneath the surface, the study of oceanography can begin to reveal some of the ocean’s mysteries.
The Essence of Mathematics Through Elementary Problems
The Essence of Mathematics consists of a sequence of 270 problems – with commentary and full solutions. The reader is assumed to have a reasonable grasp of school mathematics. More importantly, s/he should want to understand something of mathematics beyond the classroom, and be willing to engage with (and to reflect upon) challenging problems that highlight the essence of the discipline. The book consists of six chapters of increasing sophistication (Mental Skills; Arithmetic; Word Problems; Algebra; Geometry; Infinity), with interleaved commentary. The content will appeal to students considering further study of mathematics at university, teachers of mathematics at age 14-18, and anyone who wants to see what this kind of elementary content has to tell us about how mathematics really works.
This introduction is designed to exemplify how writers think about and produce text. The guiding features are the following: Every good piece of writing is an argument. Everything worth writing and reading begins with a specific question. Improving skills takes practice, feedback, and re-thinking, redoing, revising. The layout of our book implies there is a beginning, middle, and end to a writing course, but because writing is both an art and a skill, people will find their own processes for learning, improving, and using these skills. Writing processes differ because we are each looking for a workable schemata that fits our way of thinking. Try out a variety of writing processes and strategies, and find what works for you. If you are not uncomfortable on this journey, you simply are not stretching yet. Learning is prickly, awkward, and risky, so if it does not feel a bit unnerving, push harder and farther.
Migrating into Financial Markets : How Remittances Became a Development Tool
We understand very little about the billions of dollars that flow throughout the world from migrants back to their home countries. In this rigorous and illuminating work, Matt Bakker, an economic sociologist, examines how these migrant remittances—the resources of some of the world’s least affluent people—have come to be seen in recent years as a fundamental contributor to development in the migrant?sending states of the global south. This book analyzes how the connection between remittances and development was forged through the concrete political and intellectual practices of policy entrepreneurs within a variety of institutional settings, from national government agencies and international development organizations to nongovernmental policy foundations and think tanks.
Equity, Growth, and Community : What the Nation Can Learn from America's Metro Areas Manuel Pastor, Chris Benner
In the last several years, much has been written about growing economic challenges, increasing income inequality, and political polarization in the United States. Addressing these new realities in America’s metropolitan regions, this book argues that a few lessons are emerging: first, inequity is bad for economic growth; second, bringing together the concerns of equity and growth requires concerted local action; and third, the fundamental building block for doing this is the creation of diverse and dynamic epistemic (or knowledge) communities, which help to overcome political polarization and to address the challenges of economic restructuring and social divides.
Discrimination at Work : Comparing European, French, and American Law
How do the United States and France differ in laws and attitudes concerning discrimination at work? Franco-American scholar Marie Mercat-Bruns interviews prominent legal scholars to demonstrate how these two post-industrial democracies have adopted divergent strategies. Whereas employers in the United States and France rarely discriminate openly, deep systemic discrimination exists in both countries, each with a unique history of dealing with difference. Powerful and incisive, the book examines hot-button issues such as racial and religious bias, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and equality for LGBT individuals, highlighting comparisons that will further discussions on social equality and fundamental human rights across borders. “Mercat-Bruns makes original use of comparative law to shed new light on the issue of discrimination at work. In addition to reviewing the literature, she enters into a rich dialogue with American experts about their core findings. This book makes a fascinating and useful contribution to one of today’s most pressing issues
Voices of Labor : Creativity, Craft, and Conflict in Global Hollywood
Motion pictures are made, not mass produced, requiring a remarkable collection of skills, self-discipline, and sociality—all of which are sources of enormous pride among Hollywood’s craft and creative workers. The interviews collected here showcase the pleasures that attract people to careers in film and television. They also reflect critically on changes in the workplace brought about by corporate conglomeration and globalization. Rather than offer publicity-friendly anecdotes by marquee celebrities, Voices of Labor presents off-screen observations about the everyday realities of Global Hollywood. Ranging across job categories—from showrunner to make-up artist to location manager—this collection features voices of labor from Los Angeles, Atlanta, Prague, and Vancouver. Together they show how abstract concepts like conglomeration, financialization, and globalization are crucial tools for understanding contemporary Hollywood and for reflecting more generally on changes and challenges in the screen media workplace and our culture at large.
Finding Jerusalem : Archaeology between Science and Ideology
Jerusalem, Archaeology, Science, Ideology
Archaeological discoveries in Jerusalem capture worldwide attention in various media outlets. The continuing quest to discover the city’s physical remains is not simply an attempt to define Israel’s past or determine its historical legacy. In the context of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is also an attempt to legitimate—or undercut—national claims to sovereignty. Bridging the ever-widening gap between popular coverage and specialized literature, Finding Jerusalem provides a comprehensive tour of the politics of archaeology in the city. Through a wide-ranging discussion of the material evidence, Katharina Galor illuminates the complex legal contexts and ethical precepts that underlie archaeological activity and the discourse of “cultural heritage” in Jerusalem. This book addresses the pressing need to disentangle historical documentation from the religious aspirations, social ambitions, and political commitments that shape its interpretation.
Virtuous Waters : Mineral Springs, Bathing, and Infrastructure in Mexico
Virtuous Waters is a pathbreaking and innovative study of bathing, drinking and other everyday engagements with a wide range of waters across five centuries in Mexico. Casey Walsh uses political ecology to bring together an analysis of shifting scientific, religious and political understandings of waters and a material history of social formations, environments, and infrastructures. The book shows that while modern concepts and infrastructures have come to dominate both the hydrosphere and the scholarly literature on water, longstanding popular understandings and engagements with these heterogeneous liquids have been reproduced as part of the same process. Attention to these dynamics can help us comprehend and confront the water crisis that is coming to a head in the twenty-first century.
Unjust Conditions : Women’s Work and the Hidden Cost of Cash Transfer Programs
Unjust Conditions follows the lives and labors of poor mothers in rural Peru, richly documenting the ordeals they face to participate in mainstream poverty alleviation programs. Championed by behavioral economists and the World Bank, conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs are praised as efficient mechanisms for changing poor people’s behavior. While rooted in good intentions and dripping with the rhetoric of social inclusion, CCT programs’ successes ring hollow, based solely on metrics for children’s attendance at school and health appointments. Looking beyond these statistics reveals a host of hidden costs for the mothers who meet the conditions. With a poignant voice and keen focus on ethnographic research, Tara Patricia Cookson turns the reader’s gaze to women’s care work in landscapes of grossly inadequate state investment, cleverly drawing out the tensions between social inclusion and conditionality.
Instruments for New Music : Sound, Technology, and Modernism
Player pianos, radio-electric circuits, gramophone records, and optical sound film—these were the cutting-edge acoustic technologies of the early twentieth century, and for many musicians and artists of the time, these devices were also the implements of a musical revolution. Instruments for New Music traces a diffuse network of cultural agents who shared the belief that a truly modern music could be attained only through a radical challenge to the technological foundations of the art. Centered in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, the movement to create new instruments encompassed a broad spectrum of experiments, from the exploration of microtonal tunings and exotic tone colors to the ability to compose directly for automatic musical machines. This movement comprised composers, inventors, and visual artists, including Paul Hindemith, Ernst Toch, Jörg Mager, Friedrich Trautwein, László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Ruttmann, and Oskar Fischinger.
Afghanistan’s Islam : From Conversion to the Taliban
This book provides the first overview of the history and development of Islam in Afghanistan. Written by leading international experts, chapters cover every era from the conversion of Afghanistan through the medieval period to the present day. Based on primary sources in Arabic, Persian, Pashto, Uzbek, and Urdu, its depth of coverage is unrivalled in providing a developmental picture of Afghanistan’s Islam, including such issues as the rise of Sufism, women’s religiosity, state religious policies, and transnational Islamism. Looking beyond the unifying rhetoric of theology, the book reveals the disparate and contested forms of Afghanistan’s Islam. “Islam in Afghanistan has long been viewed as static and uniform, but this fine collection demonstrates that it has been far more contested and dynamic over the centuries than either Afghans or outside observers have realized.
Mirage of Police Reform : Procedural Justice and Police Legitimacy
n the United States, the exercise of police authority—and the public’s trust that police authority is used properly—is a recurring concern. Contemporary prescriptions for police reform hold that the public would trust the police more and feel a greater obligation to comply and cooperate if police-citizen interactions were marked by higher levels of procedural justice by police. In this book, Robert E. Worden and Sarah J. McLean argue that the procedural justice model of reform is a mirage. From a distance, procedural justice seems to offer relief from strained police-community relations. But a closer look at police organizations and police-citizen interactions shows that the relief offered by such reform is, in fact, illusory. A procedural justice model of policing is likely to be only loosely coupled with police practice, despite the best intentions, and improvements in procedural justice on the part of police are unlikely to result in corresponding improvements in citizens’ perceptions of procedural justice.
Protect, Serve, and Deport : The Rise of Policing as Immigration Enforcement
Protect, Serve, and Deport exposes the on-the-ground workings of local immigration enforcement in Nashville, Tennessee. Between 2007 and 2012, Nashville's local jail participated in an immigration enforcement program called 287(g), which turned jail employees into immigration officers who identified over ten thousand removable immigrants for deportation. The vast majority of those identified for removal were not serious criminals but Latino residents arrested by local police for minor violations. Protect, Serve, and Deport explains how local politics, state laws, institutional policies, and police practices work together to deliver immigrants into an expanding federal deportation system, conveying powerful messages about race, citizenship, and belonging.
Child’s Play : Multi-Sensory Histories of Children and Childhood in Japan
Few things make Japanese adults feel quite as anxious today as the phenomenon called the “child crisis.” Various media teem with intense debates about bullying in schools, child poverty, child suicides, violent crimes committed by children, the rise of socially withdrawn youngsters, and forceful moves by the government to introduce a more conservative educational curriculum. These issues have propelled Japan into the center of a set of global conversations about the nature of children and how to raise them. Engaging both the history of children and childhood and the history of emotions, contributors to this volume track Japanese childhood through a number of historical scenarios. Such explorations—some from Japan’s early modern past—are revealed through letters, diaries, memoirs, family and household records, and religious polemics about promising, rambunctious, sickly, happy, and dutiful youngsters.
Morals Not Knowledge : Recasting the Contemporary U.S. Conflict Between Religion and Science
In a time when conservative politicians challenge the irrefutability of scientific findings such as climate change, it is more important than ever to understand the conflict at the heart of the “religion vs. science” debates unfolding in the public sphere. In this groundbreaking work, John H. Evans reveals that, with a few limited exceptions, even the most conservative religious Americans accept science’s ability to make factual claims about the world. However, many religious people take issue with the morality implicitly promoted by some forms of science. Using clear and engaging scholarship, Evans upends the prevailing notion that there is a fundamental conflict over the way that scientists and religious people make claims about nature and argues that only by properly understanding moral conflict between contemporary religion and science will we be able to contribute to a more productive interaction between these two great institutions
Building Green . Environmental Architects and the Struggle for Sustainability in Mumbai
Building Green explores the experience of environmental architects in Mumbai, one of the world’s most populous and population-dense urban areas and a city iconic for its massive informal settlements, extreme wealth asymmetries, and ecological stresses. Under these conditions, what does it mean to learn, and try to practice, so-called green design? By tracing the training and professional experiences of environmental architects in India’s first graduate degree program in Environmental Architecture, Rademacher shows how environmental architects forged sustainability concepts and practices and sought to make them meaningful through engaged architectural practice. The book’s focus on practitioners offers insights into the many roles that converge to produce this emergent, critically important form of urban expertise. At once activists, scientists, and designers, the environmental architects profiled in Building Green act as key agents of urban change whose efforts in practice are shaped by a complex urban development economy, layered political power relations, and a calculus of when, and how, their expert skills might be operationalized in service of a global urban future.
Sounding Islam Voice, Media, and Sonic Atmospheres in an Indian Ocean World
Sounding Islam provides a provocative account of the sonic dimensions of religion, combining perspectives from the anthropology of media and sound studies, as well as drawing on neo-phenomenological approaches to atmospheres. Using long-term ethnographic research on devotional Islam in Mauritius, Patrick Eisenlohr explores how the voice, as a site of divine manifestation, becomes refracted in media practices that have become integral parts of religious traditions. At the core of Eisenlohr’s concern is the interplay of voice, media, affect, and listeners’ religious experiences. Sounding Islam sheds new light on a key dimension of religion, the sonic incitement of sensations that are often difficult to translate into language. “Sounding Islam is both a pathbreaking contribution to the anthropological study of sound and media and a convincing engagement with core issues of religious transformation and experience. A sensitively written, insightful, and thought-provoking ethnographic account.” DON BRENNEIS, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz “Eisenlohr’s marvelous Sounding Islam overcomes the dualism between discursive and materialist conceptualizations of voice through exploration of the ‘sonic atmosphere’ of Muslim devotional practice.” DOMINIC BOYER, Professor of Anthropology, Rice University
Islamic Shangri-La. Inter-Asian Relations and Lhasa’s Muslim Communities, 1600 to 1960
David Atwill transports readers to the heart of the Himalayas as he traces the rise of the Tibetan Muslim community from the seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Radically altering popular interpretations that have portrayed Tibet as isolated and monolithically Buddhist, Atwill’s vibrant account demonstrates how truly cosmopolitan Tibetan society was by highlighting the hybrid infl uences and internal diversity of Tibet. In its exploration of the Tibetan Muslim experience, Islamic Shangri-La presents an unparalleled perspective of Tibet’s standing during the rise of post–World War II Asia. “Atwill’s groundbreaking book traces a forgotten Muslim thread through the knot of identity, subjecthood, and citizenship in twentieth-century Tibet, offering a fresh perspective on the region’s tumultuous modern history. It is a highly readable narrative of a Muslim community that has often been rendered invisible, and an important statement on the transition from empires to nation-states at the Inner Asian nexus of Tibet, China, India, and the Islamic world.” RIAN THUM, author of The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History
Intimate Communities . Wartime Healthcare and the Birth of Modern China, 1937–1945
When China’s War of Resistance against Japan began in July 1937, it sparked an immediate health crisis throughout China. In the end, China not only survived the war but emerged from the trauma with a more cohesive population. Intimate Communities argues that women who worked as military and civilian nurses, doctors, and midwives during this turbulent period built the national community, one relationship at a time. In a country with a majority illiterate, agricultural population that could not relate to urban elites’ conceptualization of nationalism, these women used their work of healing to create emotional bonds with soldiers and civilians from across the country. These bonds transcended the divides of social class, region, gender, and language. “Nicole Elizabeth Barnes demonstrates remarkable insights into some of the most well-known figures in healthcare in wartime China—and introduces many previously unknown—providing pointed character analyses while also connecting individual experiences to larger sociopolitical trends across the tumultuous wartime landscape.” SONYA GRYPMA, PhD, RN, author of China Interrupted: Japanese Internment and the Reshaping of a Canadian Missionary Community “Not only a major contribution to the histories of medicine, gender, emotion, and nationalism, but even more importantly, it opens up exciting horizons by making visible and exploring the surprising entanglements between them all.” SEAN HSIANG-LIN LEI, author of Neither Donkey nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over China’s Modernity
Mountain, Water, Rock, God . Understanding Kedarnath in the Twenty-First Century
In Mountain, Water, Rock, God, Luke Whitmore situates the disastrous flooding that fell on the Hindu Himalayan shrine of Kedarnath in 2013 within a broader religious and ecological context. Whitmore explores the longer story of this powerful realm of the Hindu god Shiva through a holistic theoretical perspective that integrates phenomenological and systems-based approaches to the study of religion, pilgrimage, place, and ecology. He argues that close attention to places of religious significance offers a model for thinking through connections between ritual, narrative, climate destabilization, tourism, development, and disaster, and he shows how these critical components of human life in the twenty-first century intersect in the human experience of place. “Mountain, Water, Rock, God is the first book-length scholarly treatment of Kedarnath, a pilgrimage destination of pan-Indian importance. Accessible and poetically evocative, the work is timely, at times wrenching, and the scholarship is superior, covering important ground across disciplines.
Public Goods Provision in the Early Modern Economy
Scholarly discussions on economic development in history, specifically those linked to industrialization or modern economic growth, have paid great attention to the formation and development of the market economy as a set of institutions able to augment people’s welfare. The role of nonmarket practices for promoting economic development and success has been an area of interest, typically involving discussion of the state’s economic policies. How have societies tackled problems that the market did not handle well? To what extent did their solutions reflect the structure of their economy.
Built in the 1890s at the center of the nation, Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary was designed specifically to be a replica of the US Capitol Building. But why? The Prison of Democracy explains the political significance of a prison built to mimic one of America’s monuments to democracy. Locating Leavenworth in memory, history, and law, the prison geographically sits at the borders of Indian Territory (1825–1854) and Bleeding Kansas (1854–1864), both sites of contestation over slavery and freedom. Author Sara M. Benson argues that Leavenworth reshaped the design of punishment in America by gradually normalizing state-inflicted violence against citizens. Leavenworth’s peculiar architecture illustrates the real roots of mass incarceration—as an explicitly race- and nation-building system that has been ingrained in the very fabric of US history rather than as part of a recent post-war racial history. The book sheds light on the truth of the painful relationship between the carceral state and democracy in the United States—a relationship that thrives to this day.
This book provides an updated look at issues that comprise the online learning experience creation process. As online learning evolves, the lines and distinctions between various classifications of courses has blurred and often vanished. Classic elements of instructional design remain relevant at the same time that newer concepts of learning experience are growing in importance. However, problematic issues new and old still have to be addressed. This handbook explores many of these topics for new and experienced designers alike, whether creating traditional online courses, open learning experiences, or anything in between.
Organizational Behavior. The text presents the theory, concepts, and applications with particular emphasis on the impact that individuals and groups can have on organizational performance and culture. An array of recurring features engages students in entrepreneurial thinking, managing change, using tools/technology, and responsible management; furthermore, the unique chapter on Social Media and Communication contextualizes the importance and implications of various platforms and communications methods.
Becoming America: An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution
The University of North Georgia Press and Affordable Learning Georgia bring you Becoming America: An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution. Featuring sixty-nine authors and full texts of their works, the selections in this open anthology represent the diverse voices in early American literature. This completely-open anthology will connect students to the conversation of literature that is embedded in American history and has helped shaped its culture.
Brehe’s Grammar Anatomy makes grammar accessible to general and specialist readers alike. This book provides an in-depth look at beginner grammar terms and concepts, providing clear examples with limited technical jargon. Whether for academic or personal use, Brehe’s Grammar Anatomy is the perfect addition to any resource library.
Thermodynamics and Chemistry is designed primarily as a textbook for a one-semester course in classical chemical thermodynamics at the graduate or undergraduate level. It can also serve as a supplementary text and thermodynamics reference source.
Business Mathematics was written to meet the needs of a twenty-first century student. It takes a systematic approach to helping students learn how to think and centers on a structured process termed the PUPP Model (Plan, Understand, Perform, and Present). This process is found throughout the text and in every guided example to help students develop a step-by-step problem-solving approach. This textbook simplifies and integrates annuity types and variable calculations, utilizes relevant algebraic symbols, and is integrated with the Texas Instruments BAII+ calculator. It also contains structured exercises, annotated and detailed formulas, and relevant personal and professional applications in discussion, guided examples, case studies, and even homework questions.
American Government is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of the single-semester American government course. This title includes innovative features designed to enhance student learning, including Insider Perspective features and a Get Connected Module that shows students how they can get engaged in the political process. The book provides an important opportunity for students to learn the core concepts of American government and understand how those concepts apply to their lives and the world around them. American Government includes updated information on the 2016 presidential election.
Naming the Unnameable: An Approach to Poetry for New Generations
Informed by a writing philosophy that values both spontaneity and discipline, Michelle Bonczek Evory’s Naming the Unnameable: An Approach to Poetry for New Generations offers practical advice and strategies for developing a writing process that is centered on play and supported by an understanding of America’s rich literary traditions. With consideration to the psychology of invention, Bonczek Evory provides students with exercises aimed to make writing in its early stages a form of play that gives way to more enriching insights through revision, embracing the writing of poetry as both a love of language and a tool that enables us to explore ourselves and better understand the world. The volume includes resources for students seeking to publish and build a writing-centered lifestyle or career. Poets featured range in age, subject, and style, and many are connected to colleges in the State University of New York system. Naming the Unnameable promotes an understanding of poetry as a living art of which students are a part, and provides ways for students to involve themselves in the growing contemporary poetry community that thrives in America today.
Essentials of Nutrition: A Functional Approach! This book is written for students who are not majoring in nutrition, but want to learn about the fundamental aspects of nutrition and how it applies to their own lives. We have written this book with the assumption that you have little or no prior knowledge of college level chemistry, biology, or physiology. But that does not mean it’s not scientific! Nutrition is a science-based discipline, so all the material included is backed up by rigorous scientific research, but it is presented in a clear, easy-to-understand fashion without requiring a background in science.
First Semester in Numerical Analysis with Julia
First Semester in Numerical Analysis with Julia presents the theory and methods, together with the implementation of the algorithms using the Julia programming language (version 1.1.0). The book covers computer arithmetic, root-finding, numerical quadrature and differentiation, and approximation theory. The reader is expected to have studied calculus and linear algebra. Some familiarity with a programming language is beneficial, but not required. The programming language Julia will be introduced in the book. The simplicity of Julia allows bypassing the pseudocode and writing a computer code directly after the description of a method while minimizing the distraction the presentation of a computer code might cause to the flow of the main narrative.
An Introduction to Psychological Statistics
We are constantly bombarded by information, and finding a way to filter that information in an objective way is crucial to surviving this onslaught with your sanity intact. This is what statistics, and logic we use in it, enables us to do. Through the lens of statistics, we learn to find the signal hidden in the noise when it is there and to know when an apparent trend or pattern is really just randomness. The study of statistics involves math and relies upon calculations of numbers. But it also relies heavily on how the numbers are chosen and how the statistics are interpreted.
University Success has a student-friendly format arranged to help you develop the essential skills and provide the information you need to succeed in university. This is not a textbook full of theory and extensive detail that merely discusses student success; rather, this is a how-to manual for your first year of study. The book provides realistic, practical guidance ranging from study skills to personal health, from test taking to managing time and money. Furthermore, University Success is accessible—information is presented concisely and as simply as possible. University Success has the following features to help you achieve your goals: Each chapter asks you to evaluate yourself because success starts with recognizing your strengths and weaknesses, your hopes and desires, and your own personal, individual realities. You’ll develop your own goals based on these self-assessments, determining what success in college really means for you as an individual. Throughout the book, you will find numerous interactive activities created to help you improve your skills. To assist you with this, the material is presented in easily digestible “chunks” of information so you can begin applying it immediately in your own life—and get the most out of your university education.
Adult Literacy Fundamentals Mathematics: Book 1
This is book one in a six-book series on fundamental mathematics for adult learners. These books include glossaries, self tests, practice requests, grades records, and unit tests. Ancillary Resources include the Instructor's Manual.
Province of British Columbia Ministry of Advanced Education and Labour Market Development
Strategies for Academic Success accompanies the first-year University of Saskatchewan College of Arts and Science online course by the same name. The textbook has a reader-friendly format arranged to help you develop the essential skills and provide the information you need to succeed in university.
PowerPoint 2010 is a complete presentation graphics program that allows you to produce professional looking presentations. Slides can be created and displayed as a slide show on your computer, video projector, or on the Internet. Information from a PowerPoint presentation can be printed in a handout form or as transparencies. PowerPoint allows for data to be entered and edited quickly and efficiently. To make changes to the presentation you can edit a slide rather than recreate the presentation. You can also import information from spreadsheets, databases, and word-processing files. Open PowerPoint by clicking the Start button on the Windows Taskbar, point to Programs, go to Microsoft Office and then click Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2010.
Human Resources in the Food Service and Hospitality Industry
Human Resources in the Food Services and Hospitality Industry is one of a series of Culinary Arts open textbooks developed to support the training of students and apprentices in British Columbia’s foodservice and hospitality industry. Although created with the Professional Cook, Baker and Meatcutter programs in mind, these have been designed as a modular series, and therefore can be used to support a wide variety of programs that offer training in foodservice skills.
The BC Cook Articulation Committee, go2HR
Clinical Procedures for Safer Patient Care
This peer reviewed e-book is a must-read for nurses and other health professionals who strive to teach with creativity and excellence in clinical settings. Each chapter presents current evidence informed educational practice knowledge. Each topic is also presented with text boxes describing ‘Creative Strategies’ that clinical teachers from across Canada have successfully implemented. For those who are interested in background knowledge, the authors provided a comprehensive literature base. And, for those interested mainly in 'what to do,' the text box summaries offer step-by-step directions for creative, challenging activities that both new and experienced instructors can begin using immediately.
British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT)
This is a calculus-based book meant for the first semester of a first year survey course taken by engineering and physical science majors. It has a traditional order of topics whereby force is discussed before energy. It is divided into 17 chapters that cover a review of high school physics, scaling and estimation, vectors, velocity, acceleration, forces, circular motion, gravity, conservation of energy, work, conservation of momentum and angular momentum, vibrations, and resonance. A treatment of relativity is interspersed with the Newtonian mechanics, in optional sections.
Western Civilization: A Concise History - Volume 1
Western Civilization: A Concise History​ is an Open Educational Resource textbook covering the history of Western Civilization from approximately 8,000 BCE to 2017 CE. It is available in three volumes covering the following time periods and topics: Volume 1: from the origins of civilization in Mesopotamia c. 8,000 BCE through the early Middle Ages in Europe c. 1,000 CE. Volume 1 covers topics including Mesopotamia,Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome, the Islamic caliphates, and the early European Middle Ages.
Western Civilization: A Concise History - Volume 2
Western Civilization: A Concise History​ is an Open Educational Resource textbook covering the history of Western Civilization from approximately 8,000 BCE to 2017 CE. It is available in three volumes covering the following time periods and topics: Volume 2: from the early Middle Ages to the French Revolution in 1789 CE. Volume 2covers topics including the High Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the European conquest of the Americas, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment.
Western Civilization: A Concise History - Volume 3
What is “Western Civilization”? Furthermore, who or what is part of it? Like all ideas, the concept of Western Civilization itself has a history, one that coalesced in college textbooks and curriculums for the first time in the United States in the 1920s. In many ways, the very idea of Western Civilization is a “loaded” one, opposing one form or branch of civilization from others as if they were distinct, even unrelated. Thus, before examining the events of Western Civilization’s history, it is important to unpack the history of the concept itself.
Sociology: Understanding and Changing the Social World
Most Americans probably agree that we enjoy a great amount of freedom. And yet perhaps we have less freedom than we think, because many of our choices are influenced by our society in ways we do not even realize. Perhaps we are not as distinctively individualistic as we believe we are. For example, consider the right to vote. The secret ballot is one of the most cherished principles of American democracy. We vote in secret so that our choice of a candidate is made freely and without fear of punishment. That is all true, but it is also possible to guess the candidate for whom any one individual will vote if enough is known about the individual. This is because our choice of a candidate is affected by many aspects of our social backgrounds and, in this sense, is not made as freely as we might think.
Metastatic Extramammary Paget's Disease: Pathogenesis and Novel Therapeutic Approach
Metastatic Extramammary Paget's Disease, Pathogenesis and Novel Therapeutic Approach
Extramammary Paget's disease (EMPD) is a rare, slow-growing, cutaneous adenocarcinoma that usually originates in the anogenital area and axillae outside the mammary glands. EMPD mostly progresses slowly and is often diagnosed as carcinoma in situ; however, upon becoming invasive, it promptly and frequently metastasizes to regional lymph nodes, leading to subsequent distant metastasis. To date, several chemotherapy regimens have been used to treat metastatic EMPD; however, they present limited effect and patients with distant metastasis exhibit a poor prognosis. Recently, basic and translational investigative research has elucidated factors and molecular mechanisms underlying the promotion of metastasis, which can lead to targeted therapy-based emerging treatment strategies. Here, we aim to discuss current therapies and their limitations; advancements in illustrating mechanisms promoting invasion, migration, and proliferation of EMPD tumor cells; and future therapeutic approaches for metastatic EMPD that may enhance clinical outcomes.
1. A variety of different malignancies fall into the category of “Head and. Neck Cancers”. This chapter focuses on upper aerodigestive tract cancer. 2. Tobacco and alcohol use and human papillomavirus infection are common causes of head and neck cancers. 3. Most head and neck cancers are squamous cell carcinomas. 4. Treatment of head and neck cancers commonly requires some combination of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. Close cooperation between otolaryngologists, radiation oncologists, and medical oncologists is mandatory for successful treatment of these cancers. 5. Preservation of organ function in addition to cure of cancer, is an important goal of treatment. 6. Any patient with persistent symptoms of sore throat, hoarseness, difficulty swallowing or an enlarged cervical lymph node should be evaluated for possible head and neck cancer.
James Liebmann, MD, Ali Akalin MD, PhD., Liana Puscas, MD, MHS., Andrew Chen MD., Richard S. Pieters, MD
Introduction To MIPS Assembly Language Programming
This book was written to introduce students to assembly language programming in MIPS. As with all assembly language programming texts, it covers basic operators and instructions, subprogram calling, loading and storing memory, program control, and the conversion of the assembly language program into machine code. However this book was not written simply as a book on assembly language programming. The larger purpose of this text is to show how concepts in Higher Level Languages (HLL), such as Java or C/C++, are represented in assembly. By showing how program constructs from these HLL map into assembly, the concepts will be easier to understand and use when the programmer implements programs in languages like Java or C/C++. Concepts such as references and variables, registers, binary and Boolean operations, subprogram execution, memory types (heap, stack, and static), and array processing are covered to clarify the decisions made when implementing HLL. Program control is presented using a mapping from structured programs in pseudo code to help students understand structured programming, and why it exists. Memory access in assembly is presented to high light the difference between references (pointers) and values, and how these impact HLL.
This textbook and its accompanying spreadsheet templates were designed with and for students wanting a practical and easy-to-follow guide for developing a business plan. It follows a unique format that both explains what to do and demonstrates how to do it.
Digital Circuit Projects: An Overview of Digital Circuits Through Implementing Integrated Circuits - Second Edition
Digital circuits, often called Integrated Circuits or ICs, are the central building blocks of a Central Processing Unit (CPU). To understand how a computer works, it is essential to understand the digital circuits which make up the CPU. This text introduces the most important of these digital circuits; adders, decoders, multiplexers, D flip-flops, and simple state machines. What makes this textbook unique is that it puts the ability to understand these circuits into the hands of anyone, from hobbyists to students studying Computer Science. This text is designed to teach digital circuits using simple projects the reader can implement. But unlike most lab manuals used in classes in Digital Circuits or Computer Organization classes, this textbook is designed to remove the barrier of a laboratory infrastructure needed in a face-to-face environment at a college or university. This textbook is designed to be used by the reader to create the circuits in their own homes. The textbook is free. The cost of the kits needed to do the labs is reasonable.
Arts Integration in Elementary Curriculum: 2nd Edition
Many teachers, schools, and arts programs benefit from knowing the different ways the arts can be present in schools. Without making a distinction, opportunities can be missed, programs can lack clarity, or the arts can seem like something too unwieldy to incorporate. Making a distinction among the approaches can help narrow or focus objectives as well as help educators select the most appropriate approach based on their objectives. Ultimately, students are best served when all three variations-Arts as Curriculum, ArtsEnhanced Curriculum, and Arts-Integrated Curriculum-are part of their education (Figure 1.1).
Educational Learning Theories: 2nd Edition
Behaviorism is primarily concerned with observable and measurable aspects of human behavior. In defining behavior, behaviorist learning theories emphasize changes in behavior that result from stimulus-response associations made by the learner. John B. Watson (1878-1958) and B. F. Skinner (1904-1990) are the two principal originators of behaviorist approaches to learning. Watson believed that human behavior resulted from specific stimuli that elicited certain responses. Watson's basic premise was that conclusions about human development should be based on observation of overt behavior rather than speculation about subconscious motives or latent cognitive processes (Shaffer, 2000). Watson's view of learning was based in part on the studies of Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936). Pavlov was well known for his research on a learning process called classical conditioning.
Building information - representationand management
Building information,, representationand management
This book is about the foundations and principles of building information, its representation and management. It does not tell you which software or policies to choose for representing buildings and managing the resulting information. In fact, the book argues that one should not start with practical steps before fully understanding the reasoning behind any such choice. The basis of this reasoning comprises the structure of information and of the representations that contain it, the purposes of managing information in the context of these representations and the processes in which the representations are used; in a nutshell, how information relates to a specific domain. Without adequate reasoning that takes into account all syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects, adopting one software or another, implementing one practical measure or another simply subjugates information processing to some prescriptive or proscriptive framework that may be unproductive, incompatible or inappropriate for the domain.
Principles of Microeconomics for AP® Courses 2e
Economics is concerned with the well-being of all people, including those with jobs and those without jobs, as well as those with high incomes and those with low incomes. Economics acknowledges that production of useful goods and services can create problems of environmental pollution. It explores the question of how investing in education helps to develop workers’ skills. It probes questions like how to tell when big businesses or big labor unions are operating in a way that benefits society as a whole and when they are operating in a way that benefits their owners or members at the expense of others. It looks at how government spending, taxes, and regulations affect decisions about production and consumption. It should be clear by now that economics covers a lot of ground. That ground can be divided into two parts: Microeconomics focuses on the actions of individual agents within the economy, like households, workers, and businesses; Macroeconomics looks at the economy as a whole. It focuses on broad issues such as growth of production, the number of unemployed people, the inflationary increase in prices, government deficits, and levels of exports and imports. Microeconomics and macroeconomics are not separate subjects, but rather complementary perspectives on the overall subject of the economy.
Principles of Accounting Volume 1 Financial Accounting
Principles of Accounting is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of a two-semester accounting course that covers the fundamentals of financial and managerial accounting. Due to the comprehensive nature of the material, we are offering the book in two volumes. This book is specifically designed to appeal to both accounting and non-accounting majors, exposing students to the core concepts of accounting in familiar ways to build a strong foundation that can be applied across business fields. Each chapter opens with a relatable real-life scenario for today’s college student. Thoughtfully designed examples are presented throughout each chapter, allowing students to build on emerging accounting knowledge. Concepts are further reinforced through applicable connections to more detailed business processes. Students are immersed in the “why” as well as the “how” aspects of accounting in order to reinforce concepts and promote comprehension over rote memorization.
Mitchell Franklin, Patty Graybeal, Dixon Cooper,
This book is designed as a foundational entry point to International Relations theory – structured to condense the most important information into the smallest space and present that information in an accessible manner. The first half of the book covers the theories that are most commonly taught in undergraduate programmes. The book then expands to present emerging approaches and offer wider perspectives. Each chapter sets out the basics of a theory whilst also applying it to a real-world event or issue, creating a lively, readable and relevant guide that will help students to see not only what theories are – but why they matter.
tephen McGlinchey, Rosie Walters, Christian Scheinpflug
The purpose of this book is to teach new programmers and scientists about the basics of High Performance Computing. Too many parallel and high performance computing books focus on the architecture, theory and computer science surrounding HPC. This book speaks to the practicing chemistry student, physicist, or biologist who need to write and run their programs as part of their research.
This book will help you to understand elementary mathematics more deeply, gain facility with creating and using mathematical notation, develop a habit of looking for reasons and creating mathematical explanations, and become more comfortable exploring unfamiliar mathematical situations. The primary goal of this book is to help you learn to think like a mathematician in some very specific ways. You will: • Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them. You will develop and demonstrate this skill by working on difficult problems, making incremental progress, and revising solutions to problems as you learn more. . Reason abstractly and quantitatively. You will demonstrate this skill by learning to represent situations using mathematical notation (abstraction) as well as creating and testing examples (making situations more concrete).
HYDRAULICS AND ELECTRICAL CONTROL OF HYDRAULIC SYSTEMS
Differentiate between fluid power systems and mechanical or electrical systems Differentiate between hydraulic and pneumatic systems with respect to the fluid medium employed, characteristics, capacity, performance, and cleanliness Describe a basic fluid power system in terms of power conversion. Describe the role of a prime mover like a motor or internal combustion engine in a fluid power system.Draw the schematic symbol for a motor and internal combustion engine. Describe the role of a pump in a fluid power system. Draw the schematic symbol for a pump and reservoir.Describe what properties pressure, flow rate, and valve position influence in a fluid power system. Describe Pascal’s Law and the formula used to relate force, pressure, and area.Describe the role of an actuator in a fluid power system. Draw the schematic symbol for a cylinder and hydraulic motor.
A DIFFERENT ROAD TO COLLEGE: A GUIDE FOR TRANSITIONING TO COLLEGE FOR NON-TRADITIONAL STUDENTS
A Different Road To College: A Guide For Transitioning Non-Traditional Students is designed to introduce students to the contextual issues of college. Non-traditional students have an ever-growing presence on college campuses, especially community colleges. This open educational resource is designed to engage students in seeing themselves as college students and understanding the complexity of what that means to their lives. Non-traditional students face critical issues surrounding participation and success in college. These critical issues include, but are not limited to, the following
Principles of Macroeconomics for AP® Courses 2e
Principles of Macroeconomics for AP® Courses 2e covers the scope and sequence requirements for an Advanced Placement® macroeconomics course and is listed on the College Board’s AP® example textbook list. The second edition includes many current examples and recent data from FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data), which are presented in a politically equitable way. The outcome is a balanced approach to the theory and application of economics concepts. The second edition was developed with significant feedback from current users. In nearly all chapters, it follows the same basic structure of the first edition. General descriptions of the edits are provided in the preface, and a chapter-by-chapter transition guide is available for instructors.
GENERAL BIOLOGY II: SURVEY OF MOLECULAR LIFE AND GENETICS
BI102A is a survey course that introduces the discipline of molecular biology and genetics, exploring topics including cell division, protein production, inheritance and gene regulation. This book focuses on putting those topics into an appropriate context for students who are not biology majors.
BI101 Course Description: Adaptations of BI101 vary in theme. BI101A is a survey course that introduces the discipline of cellular biology, exploring topics including the cellular basis of life, cell structure and function and the metabolic processes that affect cells. BI101 introduces students to biology as a scientific discipline and engages students in the process of scientific discovery. All BI101 courses are equivalent; only one can be used to fulfill degree requirements. BI101, BI102 and BI103 are non-sequential and can be taken in any order. Students considering majors in science or preprofessional health occupations are advised to eventually take BI211, B1212 and BI213.
Learning to Learn Online helps you prepare for online learning success by introducing you to the online learning environment and your role as a learner within it. As you come to understand yourself as an self-directed learner, you will also be introduced to effective learning strategies: time management for online learners, information management, professional communication, and reading strategies. Welcome to your online learning journey!
Descriptive writing is often found in fiction, though it can make an appearance in nonfiction as well (for example, memoirs, firsthand accounts of events, or travel guides). When an author writes in a descriptive style, they are painting a picture in words of a person, place, or thing for their audience. The author might employ metaphor or other literary devices in order to describe the author’s impressions via their five senses (what they hear, see, smell, taste, or touch). But the author is not trying to convince the audience of anything or explain the scene – merely describe things as they are.
The Delft Sand, Clay & Rock Cutting Model
This book gives an overview of cutting theories for the cutting of sand, clay and rock as applied in dredging engineering. In dredging engineering in general sand, clay and rock are excavated with buckets of bucket ladder dredges, cutter heads of cutter suction dredges, dredging wheels of wheel dredges, drag heads of trailing suction hopper dredges, clamshells, backhoes and other devices. Usually the blades have a width much larger than the layer thickness of the cut (2D process) and the blade angles of these devices are not too large in the range of 30°-60°. Although clamshells and backhoes may have blade angles around 90°when they start cutting. Other devices like drill bits of oil drilling devices,blades of tunnel boring machines,ice berg scour and the bull dozer effect in front of a drag head may have cutting angles larger than 90°. In such a case a different cutting mechanismis encountered, the so called wedge mechanism
Principles of Management is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of the introductory course on management. This is a traditional approach to management using the leading, planning, organizing, and controlling approach. Management is a broad business discipline, and the Principles of Management course covers many management areas such as human resource management and strategic management, as well behavioral areas such as motivation. No one individual can be an expert in all areas of management, so an additional benefit of this text is that specialists in a variety of areas have authored individual chapters.
Slurry Transport: Fundamentals, A Historical Overview & The Delft Head Loss & Limit Deposit Velocity Framework 2nd Edition
In dredging, the hydraulic transport of solids is one of the most important processes. Since the 50’s many researchers have tried to create a physical mathematical model in order to predict the head losses in slurry transport. One can think of the models of Durand&Condolios(1952)& Durand (1953), Worster& Denny(1955), Newitt et al.(1955), Gibert (1960), Fuhrboter (1961), Jufin & Lopatin (1966), Zandi & Govatos(1967)&Zandi(1971), Turian & Yuan (1977), Doronet al. (1987)& Doron & Barnea (1993), Wilsonet al. (1992)andMatousek(1997). Some models are based on phenomenological relations and thus result in semi empirical relations, other tried to create models based on physics, like the two and three layer models. It is however the question whether slurry transport can be modeledthis way at all. Observations in our laboratory show a process which is often non-stationary with respect to time and space. Different physics occur depending on the line speed, particle diameter, concentration and pipe diameter.
Evolution is happening all around us. In many cases – lately, due to technological advances in molecular biology – scientists can now describe the evolutionary process in exquisite detail. For example, we know exactly which genes change in frequency from one generation to the next as mice and lizards evolve a white color to match the pale sands of their novel habitats (Rosenblum et al. 2010). We understand the genetics, development, and biomechanical processes that link changes in a Galapagos finches’ diet to the shape of their bill (Abzhanov et al. 2004). And, in some cases, we can watch as one species splits to become two (for example, Rolshausen et al. 2009). Detailed studies of evolution over short time-scales have been incredibly fruitful and important for our understanding of biology. But evolutionary biologists have always wanted more than this. Evolution strikes a chord in society because it aims to tell us how we, along with all the other living things that we know about, came to be.
Introduction to the American Criminal Justice System
here is a dearth of OER textbooks in Criminology and Criminal Justice, which made creating this textbook all the more exciting. At times we faced challenges about what or how much to cover, but our primary goal was to make sure this book was as in-depth as the two textbooks we were currently using for our CCJ 230 introduction course. The only way we were willing to undertake this project as if it was as good, or better than the current books students read. We have had very positive feedback about the required textbooks in the course but consistently heard how expensive the books were to buy. We also needed to ensure we met the learning outcomes outlined by SOU for a general education course, as well as the state of Oregon, to make sure this textbook helps students meet those outcomes.
Alison S. Burke, David Carter, Brian Fedorek, Tiffany Morey, Lore Rutz-Burri, and Shanell Sanchez
World Regional Geography: People, Places and Globalization
World Regional Geography: People, Places and Globalization is designed for students to experience and study as much of the world as possible within a limited amount of time. It gives students the fundamental concepts and the latest data regarding world places in a concise, easy-to-read format.
Environmental Biology is a free and open textbook that enables students to develop a nuanced understanding of today’s most pressing environmental issues. This text helps students grasp the scientific foundation of environmental topics so they can better understand the world around them and their impact upon it. This book is a collaboration between various authors and organizations that are committed to providing students with high quality and affordable textbooks. Particularly, this text draws from the following open sources, in addition to new content from the editor
Principles of Microeconomics: Scarcity and Social Provisioning
Principles of Economics covers scope and sequence requirements for a two-semester introductory economics course. The authors take a balanced approach to micro- and macroeconomics, to both Keynesian and classical views, and to the theory and application of economics concepts. The text also includes many current examples, which are handled in a politically equitable way.
Erik Dean, Justin Elardo, Mitch Green, Benjamin Wilson, Sebastian Berger
Digital Foundations: Introduction to Media Design with the Adobe Creative Cloud, Revised Edition
Digital Foundations uses formal exercises of the Bauhaus to teach the Adobe Creative Suite. All students of digital design and production—whether learning in a classroom or on their own—need to understand the basic principles of design in order to implement them using current software. Far too often design is left out of books that teach software for the trade and academic markets. Consequently, the design software training exercise is often a lost opportunity for visual learning. This revised edition updates the original text for use with Adobe Creative Cloud 2017 software.
Innovative Learning and Teaching: Experiments Across the Disciplines
The authors of these chapters are faculty and instructors from the University of Minnesota System whose proposals to pursue innovative undergraduate teaching and learning at the course or curricular level were awarded grants through the Provost’s “Experiments in Learning Innovations” or “Digital Technology” initiatives. Working within teams that included teaching and technology consultants, each project engaged in formative design and research across 12 to 18 months, with several teams opting to contribute a scholarship of learning and teaching chapter for this monograph.
Information Systems: A Manager's Guide to Harnessing Technology
Information Systems, Harnessing Technology
This book is written for a world that has changed radically in the past decade. At the start of the prior decade, Google barely existed and well-known strategists dismissed Internet advertising models (Porter, 2001). By decade’s end, Google brought in more advertising revenue than any firm, online or off, and had risen to become the most profitable media company on the planet. Today billions in advertising dollars flee old media and are pouring into digital efforts, and this shift is reshaping industries and redefining skills needed to reach today’s consumers.
Teaching the strategic management course can be a challenge for many professors. In most business schools, strategic management is a “capstone” course that requires students to draw on insights from various functional courses they have completed (such as marketing, finance, and accounting) in order to understand how top executives make the strategic decisions that drive whether organizations succeed or fail. Although students have taken these functional courses, many students have very little experience with major organizational choices.
Linear Regression Using R: An Introduction to Data Modeling
Linear Regression Using R: An Introduction to Data Modeling presents one of the fundamental data modeling techniques in an informal tutorial style. Learn how to predict system outputs from measured data using a detailed step-by-step process to develop, train, and test reliable regression models. Key modeling and programming concepts are intuitively described using the R programming language. All of the necessary resources are freely available online.
https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/189222/LinearRegression_fulltext.pdf? sequence=5&isAllowed=y
San Francisco, Portland, Austin, Madison, and Minneapolis are considered some of the country’s best-designed and most politically liberal cities. Mention of each brings to mind public parks, ample bike lanes, eclectic music scenes, colleges, creatives, and craft beer. Each has focused public funds on livability investments like transit, public spaces, arts, and entertainment. Each has said that equity—fair and just access to opportunities and resources for all of its citizens—is a central concern of its place and policy-making. But as David Dahmer asks in his article titled “The Harsh Truth about Progressive Cities,” (Dahmer, 2015) why are these cities some of the most unjust in the U.S.?
Write Here, Right Now: An Interactive Introduction to Academic Writing and Research
An interactive Introduction to Academic Writing and Research utilizes PressBooks to create and host a writing e-textbook for first year university students that would effectively integrate into the flipped classroom model. The textbook could also be used for non-flipped classroom designs, as the embedded videos, diagrams and linked modules would act as an all-in-one multimedia textbook geared towards multiple learning styles and disciplines. The components of the textbook, including the embedded videos, could be swapped in and out in order to accommodate a professor’s best idea of his/her own course design.
Professional Web Accessibility Auditing Made Easy
Digital accessibility skills are in high demand, as the world becomes more aware of barriers in digital content that prevent some people from participating in a digital society. These are essential skills for web developers, and essential knowledge for organizations that want to ensure their web content is reaching the broadest audience possible.
Prealgebra is designed to meet scope and sequence requirements for a one-semester prealgebra course. The book’s organization makes it easy to adapt to a variety of course syllabi. The text introduces the fundamental concepts of algebra while addressing the needs of students with diverse backgrounds and learning styles. Each topic builds upon previously developed material to demonstrate the cohesiveness and structure of mathematics.
Digital Accessibility as a Business Practice
Most business leaders would agree that reaching the broadest audience is good for a business’s bottom line. A good portion of that audience will be people with disabilities. How, though, would an organization go about ensuring it is as accessible as it can be to all its potential clients or customers, including people with disabilities? This book has been created to answer this question, and to demystify “digital accessibility” as a business practice. It brings together all the pieces of the digital accessibility picture, and provides strategies and resources that will help make digital accessibility a part of an organization’s business culture.
GREG GAY, FRANK MILLER, AND CHRISTOPHER WEST
Web Accessibility for Developers : Essential Skills for Web Developers
Web Accessibility for Developers is a technical book aimed primarily at programmers. Learn how to develop accessible interactivity on the Web and gain expertise using WAI-ARIA, a W3C specification that enables optimal use of assistive technologies, like screen readers, when navigating the Web.
PROJECT MANAGEMENT FOR INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGNERS
PROJECT MANAGEMENT, INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGNERS
The concepts and basic topics in elementary Linear Algebra and Calculus are reviewed and generalized to Linear Analysis in this first unit. In particular, the dot product, the vector space of R 2(that is, the x − y plane in Plane Geometry), and measurement of lengths of vectors in R2 , are extended to the “inner product,” the “inner-product space,” and “norm” measurement, respectively; the notion of eigenvalues and eigenvectors from Linear Algebra is extended to the “eigenvalue problem” of bounded linear operators; and eigenvalues are replaced by singular values for self-adjoint positive definite linear operators.
https://resources.saylor.org/wwwresources/archived/site/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/MA304- TopicsInAppliedMathematics-FINAL.pdf
An Introductory Course in Elementary Number Theory
Integers are the building blocks of the theory of numbers. This chapter contains somewhat very simple and obvious observations starting with properties of integers and yet the proofs behind those observations are not as simple. In this chapter we introduce basic operations on integers and some algebraic definitions that will be necessary to understand basic concepts in this book. We then introduce the Well ordering principle which states basically that every set of positive integers has a smallest element. Proof by induction is also presented as an efficient method for proving several theorems throughout the book.
Introduction to Financial Accounting Adapted for U.S. GAAP
AccounƟng involves a process of collecƟng, recording, and reporƟng a business’s economic acƟviƟes to users. It is oŌen called the language of business because it uses a unique vocabulary to communicate informaƟon to decision makers. To understand accounƟng, we first look at the basic forms of business organizaƟons. The concepts and principles that provide the foundaƟon for financial accounƟng are then discussed. With an emphasis on the corporate form of business organizaƟon, we will examine how we communicate to users of financial informaƟon using financial statements. Finally, we will review how financial transacƟons are analyzed and then reported on financial statements.
Henry Dauderis, David Annand, Donna L. Marchand
Principles of Microeconomics an Open Text
Principles of Microeconomics provides a concise, yet complete, coverage of introductory microeconomic theory, application and policy in a Canadian and global environment. Our beginning is orthodox: We explain and develop the standard tools of analysis in the discipline. Economic policy is about the well-being of the economy’s participants, and economic theory should inform economic policy. So we investigate the meaning of ‘well-being’ in the context of an efficient use of the economy’s resources early in the text. We next develop an understanding of individual optimizing behaviour. This behaviour in turn is used to link household decisions on savings with firms’ decisions on production, expansion and investment. A natural progression is to explain production and cost structures
Principles of MACROECONOMICS an Open Text
Principles of Macroeconomics provides complete, concise coverage of introductory macroeconomic theory and policy. It examines the Canadian economy as an economic system, and embeds current Canadian institutions and approaches to monetary policy and fiscal policy within that system. Particular attention is given to the recent structure, performance, and evolution of the Canadian economy, and to the current targets and instruments of Canadian monetary and fiscal policy. These are exciting and challenging times in which to study macroeconomics. We focus on shortrun macroeconomic performance, analysis, and policy motivated by the recessions of the early 1980s and 1990s, the financial crisis and recession of 2008-2009, and the prolonged recovery that is still incomplete in several industrial countries in 2017.
Linear Algebra with Applications. Open Edition
This textbook is an introduction to the ideas and techniques of linear algebra for first- or second-year students with a working knowledge of high school algebra. The contents have enough flexibility to present a traditional introduction to the subject, or to allow for a more applied course. Chapters 1–4 contain a onesemester course for beginners whereas Chapters 5–9 contain a second semester course (see the Suggested Course Outlines below). The text is primarily about real linear algebra with complex numbers being mentioned when appropriate (reviewed in Appendix A). Overall, the aim of the text is to achieve a balance among computational skills, theory, and applications of linear algebra. Calculus is not a prerequisite; places where it is mentioned may be omitted.
This is a book on linear algebra and matrix theory. While it is self contained, it will work best for those who have already had some exposure to linear algebra. It is also assumed that the reader has had calculus. Some optional topics require more analysis than this, however. I think that the subject of linear algebra is likely the most significant topic discussed in undergraduate mathematics courses. Part of the reason for this is its usefulness in unifying so many different topics. Linear algebra is essential in analysis, applied math, and even in theoretical mathematics. This is the point of view of this book, more than a presentation of linear algebra for its own sake. This is why there are numerous applications, some fairly unusual.
Information Systems for Business and Beyond
Welcome to Information Systems for Business and Beyond. In this book, you will be introduced to the concept of information systems, their use in business, and the larger impact they are having on our world. This book is written as an introductory text, meant for those with little or no experience with computers or information systems. While sometimes the descriptions can get a little bit technical, every effort has been made to convey the information essential to understanding a topic while not getting bogged down in detailed terminology or esoteric discussions.
This text is an outgrowth of lectures given at the University of Windsor, Canada. One of our main objectives is updating the undergraduate analysis as a rigorous postcalculus course. While such excellent books as Dieudonn´e’s Foundations of Modern Analysis are addressed mainly to graduate students, we try to simplify the modern Bourbaki approach to make it accessible to sufficiently advanced undergraduates.
Computer Networking : Principles, Protocols and Practice Release 0.25
When the first computers were built during the second world war, they were expensive and isolated. However, after about twenty years, as their prices gradually decreased, the first experiments began to connect computers together. In the early 1960s, researchers including Paul Baran, Donald Davies or Joseph Licklider independently published the first papers describing the idea of building computer networks [Baran] [Licklider1963] . Given the cost of computers, sharing them over a long distance was an interesting idea. In the US, the ARPANET started in 1969 and continued until the mid 1980s [LCCD09]. In France, Louis Pouzin developed the Cyclades network [Pouzin1975]. Many other research networks were built during the 1970s [Moore]. At the same time, the telecommunication and computer industries became interested in computer networks.
This is an introduction to linear algebra. The main part of the book features row operations and everything is done in terms of the row reduced echelon form and specific algorithms. At the end, the more abstract notions of vector spaces and linear transformations on vector spaces are presented. However, this is intended to be a first course in linear algebra for students who are sophomores or juniors who have had a course in one variable calculus and a reasonable background in college algebra. I have given complete proofs of all the fundamental ideas, but some topics such as Markov matrices are not complete in this book but receive a plausible introduction. The book contains a complete treatment of determinants and a simple proof of the Cayley Hamilton theorem although these are optional topics.
Conducting Psychology Research in the Real World
The laboratory experiment is traditionally considered the “gold standard” in psychology research. This is because only laboratory experiments can clearly separate cause from effect and therefore establish causality. Despite this unique strength, it is also clear that a scientific field that is mainly based on controlled laboratory studies ends up lopsided. Specifically, it accumulates a lot of knowledge on what can happen—under carefully isolated and controlled circumstances—but it has little to say about what actually does happen under the circumstances that people actually encounter in their daily lives.
This text was written as a prequel to the APEXCalculus series, a three–volume series on Calculus. This text is not intended to fully prepare students with all of the mathematical knowledge they need to tackle Calculus, rather it is de-signed to review mathematical concepts that are o[en stumbling blocks in the Calculus sequence. It starts basic and builds to more complex topics. This text is written so that each secࢢon and topic largely stands on its own, making it a good resource for students in Calculus who are struggling with the supporting mathemathics found in Calculus courses. The topics were chosen based on experience; several instructors in the Applied Mathemathics Department at the Virginia Military Insࢢtute (VMI) compiled a list of topics that Calculus students commonly struggle with, giving the focus of this text.
Amy Chapman, Meagan Herald, Jessica Libertini
This textbook, or really a “coursebook” for a college freshman-level class, has been updated for Spring 2014 and provides an introduction to programming and problem solving using both Matlab and Mathcad. We provide a balanced selection of introductory exercises and real-world problems (i.e. no “contrived” problems). We include many examples and screenshots to guide the reader. We assume no prior knowledge of Matlab or Mathcad.
A college (or advanced high school) level text dealing with the basic principles of matrix and linear algebra. It covers solving systems of linear equations, matrix arithmetic, the determinant, eigenvalues, and linear transformations. Numerous examples are given within the easy to read text. This third edition corrects several errors in the text and updates the font faces.
In this lecture, the professor discussed fluctuations and noise, and the single photon.
MIT OpenCourseWare published via YouTube.com
In this lecture, the professor discussed single mode light, thermal states, coherent states
This lecture provides a general overview of atomic, molecular, and optical (AMO) physics.
English Speaking Course in Hindi for Beginners English Speaking Tutorial
If you just started learning English, you first need to know some basic rules of the language. Developing a solid foundation in English grammar will not only help you create your own sentences correctly but will also make it easier to improve your communication skills in both spoken and written English.
Creative Commons published via YouTube.com
Creative Commons License
The AP Physics Collection is a free, turnkey solution for your AP® Physics course, brought to you through a collaboration between OpenStax and Rice Online Learning. The integrated collection features the OpenStax College Physics for AP® Courses text, Concept Trailer videos, instructional videos, problem solution videos, and a correlation guide to help you align all of your free content. The College Physics for AP® Courses text is designed to engage students in their exploration of physics and help them apply these concepts to the Advanced Placement® test.
Jason Hafner, Gigi Nevils-Noe, Matt Wilson
This textbook has been on my mind since 1994, when I sat in my own undergraduate sociology research methods class, enjoying the material but also wondering about its relevance to my everyday life and future plans (the idea that one day I would be teaching such a class hadn’t yet occurred to me). While the importance of understanding research methods is usually clear to students who intend to pursue an advanced degree, I’ve long thought that we research methods teachers could do a better job of demonstrating to all of our students the relevance of what it is that we’re teaching. Today, as an active researcher who uses both qualitative and quantitative methods, I appreciate the need not only for students to understand the relevance of research methods for themselves but also for them to understand the relevance of both qualitative and quantitative techniques for sociological inquiry.
Sociology is a relatively new discipline in comparison to chemistry, math, biology, philosophy andother disciplines that trace back thousands of years. Sociology began as an intellectual/philosophical effortby a French man named Auguste Comte who coined the term “Sociology.” Sociology is the science of society and of human behavior when influenced by society. Why did thinkers of the day find a need for the new science of sociology? Societies had changedin unprecedented ways and had formed a new collective of social complexities that the world hadnever witnessed before. Western Europe was transformed by the Industrial Revolution, atechnological development of knowledge and manufacturing that began in the late 1600s and continued untilthe early 1900s.
Sociology 200: Introduction to Women’s Studies
Sociology’s roots are in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, from where founding fathers Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel hail. Sociology waxed and waned in popularity outside of the U.S. over its short history. Today, sociology has become a United States-centered scientific discipline with most sociologists living in the U.S.. There is significant sociological work being done in various countries of the world, but most of the 14,000 members of the American Sociological Association (the world’s largest professional sociology organization) live in the U.S Sociology is a relatively new discipline in comparison to chemistry, math, biology, philosophy and other disciplines that trace back thousands of years
Intimate Relationships and Families . Sociology 103 v.2
Sociological theories are the core and underlying strength of the discipline. They guide researchers in their studies; they also guide practitioners in their intervention strategies. And they will provide you with a basic understanding of how to see the larger social picture in your own personal life. A theory is a set of interrelated concepts used to describe, explain, and predict how society and its parts are related to each other. Let’s use binoculars as a metaphor to illustrate the usefulness of a theory. Binoculars serve to magnify, enlarge, clarify, and expand our view of the thing we are looking at. Unlike binoculars, you can’t see or touch a theory, but it is a framework to help you “see” the world sociologically. Some things you want to look at need 20x80 strength binoculars while you might see other things better with 8x40 or 10x30 lenses. It’s the same with society. Some things need the lens of Conflict Theory, while others need a Structural Functional or Symbolic Interactionist lens.
Information Gathering: Computer Security Lectures 2014/15 S2
This video is part of the computer/information/cyber security and ethical hacking lecture series; by Z. Cliffe Schreuders at Leeds Beckett University. Laboratory work sheets, slides, and other open educational resources are available at http://z.cliffe.schreuders.org. The slides themselves are creative commons licensed CC-BY-SA, and images used are licensed as individually attributed.
Z. Cliffe Schreuders published via YouTube.com
Introduction to Cloud Computing and Virtual Machines
This is the first module in the 2016 Bioinformatics for Big Data: Cloud Computing on the Human Genome workshop hosted by the Canadian Bioinformatics Workshops.
Bioinformatics DotCa published via YouTube.com
Introduction to Tools, Computing Infrastructure, and Data
This is the second lecture in the Bioinformatics of Genomic Medicine 2017 workshop hosted by the Canadian Bioinformatics Workshops. This lecture is by Mathieu Bourgey from the Canadian Centre for Computational Genomics. For tutorials and lecture slides for this workshop, please visit bioinformaticsdotca.github.io.
This is the first lecture in the Bioinformatics of Genomic Medicine 2017 workshop hosted by the Canadian Bioinformatics Workshops. This lecture is by Michael Brudno from the Hospital for Sick Children. For tutorials and lecture slides for this workshop, please visit bioinformaticsdotca.github.io.
Bioinformatics Dot Ca published via YouTube.com
Food as Medicine: Preventing and Treating the Most Common Diseases with Diet
This is Dr. Greger's 2015 live presentation. Dr. Greger has scoured the world's scholarly literature on clinical nutrition and developed this new presentation based on the latest in cutting-edge research exploring the role diet may play in preventing, arresting, and even reversing some of our leading causes of death and disability. Subscribe to Dr. Greger’s free nutrition newsletter and get the Evidence-Based Eating Guide: A Healthy Living Resource from Dr. Greger and NutritionFacts.org.
Nutrition Facts.org published via YouTube.com
GRADE 12 PHYSICAL SCIENCES. VERSION 1 CAPS
This book deals with the physical sciences - physics and chemistry. All the sciences are based in the use of experiment and testing to understand the world around us better. The scientific method requires us to constantly re-examine our understanding, by testing new evidence with our current theories and making changes to those theories if the evidence does not meet the test. The scientific method therefore is the powerful tool you will use throughout the physical sciences.
GRADE 11 PHYSICAL SCIENCES. VERSION 1 CAPS
In grade 10 you learnt about vectors in one dimension. Now we will take these concepts further and learn about vectors in two dimensions as well as components of vectors. As a very short recap, a vector has both a magnitude and a direction. There are many physical quantities, like forces, that are well described by vectors (called or known as vector quantities). We often use arrows to represent vectors visually because the length of the arrow can be related to the magnitude and the arrowhead can indicate ad, tail and magnitude of a vector when using arrows to represent them. Below is a diagram showing a vector (the arrow). The magnitude is indicated by the length and the labels show the the tail and the head of the vector. The direction of the vector is indicated by the direction in which the arrow is pointing.
Everything Science : Grade 10 Physical Science. Version 1 – CAPS
In the physical sciences there are many skills that you need to learn. These include working with units, basic mathematics skills and laboratory skills. In this chapter we will revise some of these skills that you should know before starting to study physical science. This chapter is intended as a reference guide to assist you in your journey of studying physical science.
Microbiology covers the scope and sequence requirements for a single-semester microbiology course for non-majors. The book presents the core concepts of microbiology with a focus on applications for careers in allied health. The pedagogical features of the text make the material interesting and accessible while maintaining the career-application focus and scientific rigor inherent in the subject matter. Microbiology’s art program enhances students’ understanding of concepts through clear and effective illustrations, diagrams, and photographs
Pharmacokinetics/ADME Of Drugs | Pharmacology Online Lecture-1 | For Upcoming D.Pharm & B.Pharm Exam
In this video , we have discussed about PHARMACOKINETICS OF DRUGS - ABSORPTION, DISTRIBUTION, METABOLISM, EXCRETION (ADME) IN BRIEF. Watch the video till the end to get complete information regarding pharmacokinetics of drugs. Topic discussed in the video :- Pharmacokinetics - the branch of pharmacology concerned with the movement of drugs within the body, the time course of its absorption, bioavailability, distribution, metabolism, and excretion or sometimes described as what the body does to a drug. It include four steps:- Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, Excretion.
LEARNINGPHARMACY.IN published via YouTube.com
Communication is the heart of business. Short emails, complex reports, private chats, impassioned pitches, formal presentations, and team meetings move information and ideas around an organization, define strategy, and drive decisions. Business communication is concise, direct, clear, and compelling.
Algebra and Mathematics. Explained with easy to understand 3D animations.
Explains variables, systems of equations, Cartesian coordinates, and many other concepts. Fun and educational for all ages.
Quantum Numbers, Atomic Orbitals, and Electron Configurations
Professor Dave Explains published via YouTube.com
Properties and Chemistry of Benzene | Chemistry for All | The Fuse School
This video is part of 'Chemistry for All' - a Chemistry Education project by our Charity Fuse Foundation - the organisation behind The Fuse School. These videos can be used in a flipped classroom model or as a revision aid. Find our other Chemistry videos here:
FuseSchool - Global Education published via YouTube.com
Creative Commons License This video represents licensed content on YouTube, meaning that the content has been claimed by a YouTube content partner.
As we get started on our journey into the world of health and nutrition, our first focus will be to demonstrate that nutritional science is an evolving field of study, continually being updated and supported by research, studies, and trials.
This book introduces criminal procedure law in the United States, with a focus on the “investigation” stage of the criminal justice system. Specifically, the book focuses on legal constraints placed upon police and prosecutors, constraints largely derived from Supreme Court interpretations of the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments to the Constitution. Major topics include searches and seizures, warrants and when they are required, interrogations, witness identifications of suspects, and the right to counsel during various stages of investigation and prosecution. At the end of the semester, students should have a solid foundation in the “black-letter law” of criminal procedure. This material is tested on the bar examination, and it is the sort of information that friends and family will expect lawyers to know, even lawyers who never practice criminal law.
This chapter in Cancer Concepts: A Guidebook for the Non-Oncologist presents an overview of esophageal cancer, including etiology, epidemiology, screening, pathology, staging, and treatment.
University of Massachusetts Medical School
This trigonometry textbook is different than other trigonometry books in that it is free to download, and the reader is expected to do more than read the book and is expected to study the material in the book by working out examples rather than just reading about them. So this book is not just about mathematical content but is also about the process of learning and doing mathematics. That is, this book is designed not to be just casually read but rather to be engaged. Since this can be a difficult task, there are several features of the book designed to assist students in this endeavor. In particular, most sections of the book start with a beginning activity that review prior mathematical work that is necessary for the new section or introduce new concepts and definitions that will be used later in that section.
From the preface, "These are notes for a course in precalculus, as it is taught at New York City College of Technology - CUNY (where it is offered under the course number MAT 1375). Our approach is calculator based. For this, we will use the currently standard TI-84 calculator, and in particular, many of the examples will be explained and solved with it. However, we want to point out that there are also many other calculators that are suitable for the purpose of this course and many of these alternatives have similar functionalities as the calculator that we have chosen to use. An introduction to the TI-84 calculator together with the most common applications needed for this course is provided in appendix A. In the future we may expand on this by providing introductions to other calculators or computer algebra systems."
Elementary Differential Equations with Boundary Value Problems is written for students in science, engineering, and mathematics who have completed calculus through partial differentiation. If your syllabus includes Chapter 10 (Linear Systems of Differential Equations), your students should have some preparation in linear algebra. In writing this book I have been guided by the these principles: An elementary text should be written so the student can read it with comprehension without too much pain. I have tried to put myself in the student’s place, and have chosen to err on the side of too much detail rather than not enough.
This book is about how to read, use, and create maps. Our exploration of maps will be informed by a contextual understanding of how maps reflect the relationship between society and technology, and how mapping is an essential form of scientific and artistic inquiry. We will also explore how mapping is used to address a variety of societal issues, such as land use planning and political gerrymandering. You will gain insight into the technical underpinnings of mapping as a science approach, complement on-going interest and activities, or provide an applied focus for research or policy
Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking. Version 1.3
This is an introductory textbook in logic and critical thinking. The goal of the textbook is to provide the reader with a set of tools and skills that will enable them to identify and evaluate arguments. The book is intended for an introductory course that covers both formal and informal logic. As such, it is not a formal logic textbook, but is closer to what one would find marketed as a “critical thinking textbook.” The formal logic in chapter 2 is intended to give an elementary introduction to formal logic. Specifically, chapter 2 introduces several different formal methods for determining whether an argument is valid or invalid (truth tables, proofs, Venn diagrams).
writing spaces : readings on writing spaces volume 1
Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing offer multiple perspectives on a wide-range of topics about writing, much like the model made famous by Wendy Bishop’s “The Subject Is . . .” series. In each chapter, authors present their unique views, insights, and strategies for writing by addressing the undergraduate reader directly. Drawing on their own experiences, these teachers-as-writers invite students to join in the larger conversation about developing nearly every aspect of the craft of writing. Consequently, each essay functions as a standalone text that can easily complement other selected readings in writing or writing-intensive courses across the disciplines at any level.
Calculus was first developed more than three hundred years ago by Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz to help them describe and understand the rules overning the motion of planets and moons. Since then, thousands of other men and women have refined the basic ideas of calculus, developed new techniques to make the calculations easier, and found ways to apply calculus to problems besides planetary motion. Perhaps most importantly, they have used calculus to help understand a wide variety of physical, biological, economic and social phenomena and to describe and solve problems in those areas. Part of the beauty of calculus is that it is based on a few very simple ideas
Shana Calaway, Dale Hoffman, David Lippman
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. The word “psychology” comes from the Greek words “psyche,” meaning life, and “logos,” meaning explanation. Psychology is a popular major for students, a popular topic in the public media, and a part of our everyday lives. Television shows such as Dr. Phil feature psychologists who provide personal advice to those with personal or family difficulties. Crime dramas such as CSI, Lie to Me, and others feature the work of forensic psychologists who use psychological principles to help solve crimes. And many people have direct knowledge about psychology because they have visited psychologists, for instance, school counselors, family therapists, and religious, marriage, or bereavement counselors.
This workbook was created through the efforts of three instructors at Scottsdale Community College in Scottsdale, Arizona, has been used by thousands of students, and is continually improved. This workbook contains have lessons that were carefully and thoughtfully crafted to lead students on a path to understanding numbers and arithmetic.
Contemporary Calculus I . For the students
This is a textbook for differential calculus with explanations, examples, worked solutions, problem sets and answers. It has been reviewed by calculus instructors and class-tested by them and the author. Topics are typically introduced by way of applications, and the text contains the usual theorems and techniques of a first course in calculus. Besides technique practice and applications of the techniques, the examples and problem sets are also designed to help students develop a visual and conceptual understanding of the main ideas of differential calculus.
Statistics as a subject focuses on making stages 2-4 objective, rigorous, and efficient. That is, statistics has three primary components: How best can we collect data? How should it be analyzed? And what can we infer from the analysis? The topics scientists investigate are as diverse as the questions they ask. However, many of these investigations can be addressed with a small number of data collection techniques, analytic tools, and fundamental concepts in statistical inference. This chapter provides a glimpse into these and other themes we will encounter throughout the rest of the book. We introduce the basic principles of each branch and learn some tools along the way. We will encounter applications from other fields, some of which are not typically associated with science but nonetheless can benefit from statistical study.
Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs: A Harm Reduction Approach to Medication Withdrawal | Will Hall
Psychiatric medications can sometimes be very useful, but there is often little information or guidance when the risks and harm start to outweigh the benefits. Will Hall provides an introductory overview of how to come off psychiatric medication. Will Hall is a survivor of a schizophrenia diagnosis who today works as a therapist and teaches internationally on mental diversity, including psychiatric medication. This video provides some basic guidance for anyone considering reducing or coming off psychiatric medications and their supporters, and is discussed in greater detail in the Harm Reduction Guideto Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs.
Will Hall published via YouTube.com
This is the first module in the 2016 Informatics for RNA-Seq Analysis workshop hosted by the Canadian Bioinformatics Workshops. This lecture is by Obi Griffith from Washington University School of Medicine.
This is a tutorial/lecture on Drug Formulations. We cover some topics important for classes such as Biochemistry and Pharmacology.
TheSalmonellaPlace published via YouTube.com
Creative Commons
Breast Cancer Eliminated Using Keshe Technologies - Demo by Dr.Rodrigo Vildosola
Dr. Rodrigo Vildosola explains his method for treating breast cancer using Keshe Plasma Technologies. He gives an example of how he used this with one of his patients with stunning results. Warning: The video contains graphic images of a medical nature.
This is the first lecture in the Bioinformatics for Cancer Genomics 2017 workshop hosted by the Canadian Bioinformatics Workshops. This lecture is by Trevor Pugh from the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. For tutorials and lecture slides for this workshop, please visit bioinformaticsdotca.github.io.
http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-...
MCQs in Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery - Local and General Anesthetics
Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery MCQs - Local and General Anesthetics Practice these MCQs for MDS entrance preparation in AIIMS, COMEDK, AIPG, PGI, BHU, etc. Also useful for ADA, NBDE, NDEB and other dental board exams. Please Share and Subscribe to Support us.
Dentosphere : World of Dentistry published via YouTube.com
Creative Commons License .
This video shows the final stage of the production of a cast gold crown for a damaged tooth. The gold casting is cooled and removed from the mould. Sand blasting, an acid bath and then a series of abrasive burs are used to trim and finish the casting before a final polish is applied.
Dr Christopher Stokes and Dr Duncan Wood
School of Clinical Dentistry, The University of Sheffield.
This video shows the second stage of the production of a cast gold crown for a damaged tooth. The wax template of the tooth is sprued using wax wire, then invested in a refractory investment material. The video shows the mould being heated to both expand it and prevent against thermal shock. A centrifugal casting process is shown, using an electrical furnace for melting the gold.
This video shows the first stage of the production of a cast gold crown for a damaged tooth. The crown is made on the model (See Videos 2 and 3) using wax, which will be replaced by molten gold in the lost wax casting process. The technique of making the wax template and adjusting it to fit the model accurately is shown. Courtesy of Dr Christopher Stokes and Dr Duncan Wood
In this video, I demonstrate the surgeon's knot and the square knot and give some general beginner tips on how to suture.
Lifelong Nursing published via YouTube.com
Standard YouTube License This video represents licensed content on YouTube, meaning that the content has been claimed by a YouTube content partner.
Hypothalamus and Limbic System - UBC Neuroanatomy - Season 1 - Ep 4
Dr. Claudia Krebs, Tamara Bodnar, Parker Holman, Dr. Joanne Weinberg
UBC Medicine - Educational Media published via YouTube.com
Middle Mediastinum and Heart - Anatomy and Dissection Guide
The anatomy shown in this video is based off of the UBC MEDD 411 gross anatomy checklist.
U.S. Federal Income Taxation of Individuals 2017
This textbook is not intended to be an exhaustive treatise; rather, it is intended to be far more useful than that for beginning tax law students by equipping the novice not merely with unmoored detail but rather with a rich blueprint that illuminates the deeper structural framework on which that detail hangs (sometimes crookedly). Chapter 1 outlines the conceptual meaning of the term “income” for uniquely tax purposes (as opposed to financial accounting or trust law purposes, for example) and examines the Internal Revenue Code provisions that translate this larger conceptual construct into positive law. Chapter 2 explores various forms of consumption taxation because the modern Internal
Laboratory Manual for Introductory Geology
The average introductory geology student’s perception of geology normally involves the memorization of rocks and discussions of natural disasters, but Geology contains so much more. Geology is the study of our planet, which is vital to our everyday lives from the energy we use, to the growing of the food we eat, to the foundations of the buildings we live in, to the materials that are used to make everyday objects (metals and plastics). The ideal place to start this course is discussing the methods that are used to better understand our planet, the processes that shape it, and its history. Science is not a set of facts to remember. Instead it is a method to discover the world around us. You are likely already familiar with the Scientific Method, but it is worthwhile to review the process
Bradley Deline, Randa Harris, Karen Tefend,
Solving Linear Equations - Basic Algebra Shortcut Tricks!
This algebra video tutorial shows you how to solve linear equations that contain fractions and variables on both sides of the equation. This video contains plenty of examples and practice problems for you to work on.
The Organic Chemistry Tutor published via YouTube.com
Home health services are those which are provided within the comforts of the home setting to help people avoid hospitalization or skilled nursing facility placement while they recover from illness, injury, or disability. Home health care may also be provided to people who suffer from chronic illnesses, those who have cognitive or physical disabilities or those who have been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Home Health Aide and Personal Care Aide are two of the fastest growing occupations. This text will provide you with the background necessary to begin working toward a career in the home care field.
Chemistry: Atoms First 2e is a peer-reviewed, openly licensed introductory textbook produced through a collaborative publishing partnership between OpenStax and the University of Connecticut and UConn Undergraduate Student Government Association. This text is an atoms-first adaptation of OpenStax Chemistry 2e. The intention of “atoms-first” involves a few basic principles: first, it introduces atomic and molecular structure much earlier than the traditional approach, and it threads these themes through subsequent chapters. This approach may be chosen as a way to delay the introduction of material such as stoichiometry that students traditionally find abstract and difficult, thereby allowing students time to acclimate their study skills to chemistry. Additionally, it gives students a basis for understanding the application of quantitative principles to the chemistry that underlies the entire course. It also aims to center the study of chemistry on the atomic foundation that many will expand upon in a later course covering organic chemistry, easing that transition when the time arrives.
Chemistry 2e is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of the two-semester general chemistry course. The textbook provides an important opportunity for students to learn the core concepts of chemistry and understand how those concepts apply to their lives and the world around them. The book also includes a number of innovative features, including interactive exercises and real-world applications, designed to enhance student learning. The second edition has been revised to incorporate clearer, more current, and more dynamic explanations, while maintaining the same organization as the first edition. Substantial improvements have been made in the figures, illustrations, and example exercises that support the text narrative.
Efficacious Technology Management: A Guide for School Leaders
Efficacious educational technology supports, enables, and facilitates students as they are become full participants in the computer and network-rich communication landscape of society. Differences between how IT is provided and managed in other organizations compared to educational organizations can pose challenges for school leaders and the IT professional they hire from other industries. It is through the collaborative efforts of educators, information technology professionals, and school leaders that educational technology becomes efficacious
This trigonometry textbook is different than other trigonometry books in that it is free to download, and the reader is expected to do more than read the book and is expected to study the material in the book by working out examples rather than just reading about them. So this book is not just about mathematical content but is also about the process of learning and doing mathematics. That is, this book is designed not to be just casually read but rather to be engaged. Since this can be a difficult task, there are several features of the book designed to assist students in this endeavor. In particular, most sections of the book start with a beginning activity that review prior athematical work that is necessary for the new section or introduce new concepts and definitions that will be used later in that section
This book consists of ten weeks of material given as a course on ordinary differential equations (ODEs) for second year mathematics majors at the University of Bristol. It is the first course devoted solely to differential equations that these students will take. This book consists of 10 chapters, and the course is 12 weeks long. Each chapter is covered in a week, and in the remaining two weeks I summarize the entire course, answer lots of questions, and prepare the students for the exam. I do not cover the material in the appendices in the lectures. Some of it is basic material that the students have already seen that I include for completeness and other topics are "tasters" for more advanced material that students will encounter in later courses or in their project work.
We believe the entire book can be taught in twenty five 50-minute lectures to a sophomore audience that has been exposed to a one year calculus course. Vector calculus is useful, but not necessary preparation for this book, which attempts to be self-contained. Key concepts are presented multiple times, throughout the book, often first in a more intuitive setting, and then again in a definition, theorem, proof style later on. We do not aim for students to become agile mathematical proof writers, but we do expect them to be able to show and explain why key results hold. We also often use the review exercises to let students discover key results for themselves; before they are presented again in detail later in the book.
David Cherney, Tom Denton, Andrew Waldon
Lies, Damned Lies, or Statistics: How to Tell the Truth with Statistics
Mathematical definitions should be perfectly precise because they do not describe something which is observed out there in the world, since such descriptive definitions might have fuzzy edges. In biology, for example, whether a virus is considered “alive” could be subject to some debate: viruses have some of the characteristics of life, but not others. This makes a mathematician nervous.
The field of Urogynaecology has expanded dramatically over the past decade with the advent of a number of new medical and surgical treatment modalities. The evidence base on pelvic floor dysfunction has also grown extensively. This multi-contributor text will prove invaluable to gynecology, urology and surgery registrars and specialists. Physiotherapists and nurses working in the field of Urogynaecology will also find it extremely useful.
Design and Testing of Laboratory Instruction Management System (LIMS)
Laboratory Instruction Management System (LIMS)
Laboratory Integration Management Solution (LIMS) is a software/hardware system which is used in industrial laboratories for the integration of all laboratory software and instruments, training laboratory users, QA and QC. LIMS may also support data mining, data analysis, and decision making. In this project, we propose to introduce Laboratory Instruction Management System thus redefining the acronym LIMS
Precalculus is adaptable and designed to fit the needs of a variety of precalculus courses. It is a comprehensive text that covers more ground than a typical one- or two-semester college-level precalculus course. The content is organized by clearly-defined learning objectives and includes worked examples that demonstrate problem-solving approaches in an accessible way.
You are exposed to statistics regularly. If you are a sports fan, then you have the statistics for your favorite player. If you are interested in politics, then you look at the polls to see how people feel about certain issues or candidates. If you are an environmentalist, then you research arsenic levels in the water of a town or analyze the global temperatures. If you are in the business profession, then you may track the monthly sales of a store or use quality control processes to monitor the number of defective parts manufactured. If you are in the health profession, then you may look at how successful a procedure is or the percentage of people infected with a disease. There are many other examples from other areas. To understand how to collect data and analyze it, you need to understand what the field of statistics is and the basic definitions.
The Mayans used arithmetic to make astronomical computations, and developed the concept of zero over 2,000 years ago. The word “arithmetic” is derived from the Greek word arithmos (translated as “number”). It is the oldest and most elementary branch of mathematics and is used for a variety of tasks ranging from simple counting to advanced science and business calculations.
College of the Redwoods, Department of Mathematics
This book helps students to master the material of a standard US undergraduate first course in Linear Algebra. The material is standard in that the subjects covered are Gaussian reduction, vector spaces, linear maps, determinants, and eigenvalues and eigenvectors. Another standard is book’s audience: sophomores or juniors, usually with a background of at least one semester of calculus. The help that it gives to students comes from taking a developmental approach — this book’s presentation emphasizes motivation and naturalness, using many examples. The developmental approach is what most recommends this book so I will elaborate. Courses at the beginning of a mathematics program focus less on theory and more on calculating.
Mathematics, Saint Michael’s College Colchester
In order to apply mathematical methods to a physical or “real life” problem, we must formulate the problem in mathematical terms; that is, we must construct a mathematical model for the problem. Many physical problems concern relationships between changing quantities. Since rates of change are represented mathematically by derivatives, mathematical models often involve equations relating an unknown function and one or more of its derivatives. Such equations are differential equations. They are the subject of this book
Why would one need an attorney? Perhaps you are buying or selling a house. Or, you are getting married and want a will. You may be starting a new business or have had difficulty with a contractor and need assistance in pursing your grievance. You may be a landlord and need to evict a tenant, or you may be a tenant and your landlord is violating your lease. You may have gotten a speeding ticket or been charged with a DWI or some other crime. In these, and many other circumstances, you may need the assistance and counsel of an attorney. So, who are attorneys, how does one become an attorney, what is his/her role, and how would you choose and work with one?
Laboratory Exercises in Microbiology: Discovering the Unseen World Through Hands-On Investigation
The exercises in this laboratory manual are designed to engage students in hand-on activities that reinforce their understanding of the microbial world. Topics covered include: staining and microscopy, metabolic testing, physical and chemical control of microorganisms, and immunology. The target audience is primarily students preparing for a career in the health sciences, however many of the topics would be appropriate for a general microbiology course as well.
This textbook has been created with several goals in mind: accessibility, customization, and student engagement—all while encouraging students toward high levels of academic scholarship. Students will find that this textbook offers a strong introduction to human biology in an accessible format.
BASIC CELL AND MOLECULAR BIOLOGY 3e: WHAT WE KNOW AND HOW WE FOUND OUT
A grasp of the logic and practice of science is essential to understand the rest of the world around us. To that end, the CMB3e iText (like earlier editions) remains focused on experimental support for what we know about cell and molecular biology, and on showing students the relationship of cell structure and function. Rather than trying to be a comprehensive reference book, CMB3e selectively details investigative questions, methods and experiments that lead to our understanding of cell biology. This focus is nowhere more obvious than in the chapter learning objectives and in external links to supplementary material.
Biology is a science, but what exactly is science? What does the study of biology share with other scientific disciplines? We can define science (from the Latin scientia, meaning “knowledge”) as knowledge that covers general truths or the operation of general laws, especially when acquired and tested by the scientific method. It becomes clear from this definition that applying scientific method plays a major role in science. The scientific method is a method of research with defined steps that include experiments and careful observation. We will examine scientific method steps in detail later, but one of the most important aspects of this method is the testing of hypotheses by means of repeatable experiments. A hypothesis is a suggested explanation for an event, which one can test. Although using the scientific method is inherent to science, it is inadequate in determining what science is. This is because it is relatively easy to apply the scientific method to disciplines 10 Chapter 1 | The Study of Life This OpenStax book is available for free at
Biology for AP® Courses covers the scope and sequence requirements of a typical two-semester Advanced Placement® biology course. The text provides comprehensive coverage of foundational research and core biology concepts through an evolutionary lens. Biology for AP® Courses was designed to meet and exceed the requirements of the College Board’s AP® Biology framework while allowing significant flexibility for instructors. Each section of the book includes an introduction based on the AP® curriculum and includes rich features that engage students in scientific practice and AP® test preparation; it also highlights careers and research opportunities in biological sciences
Introductory Statistics follows scope and sequence requirements of a one-semester introduction to statistics course and is geared toward students majoring in fields other than math or engineering. The text assumes some knowledge of intermediate algebra and focuses on statistics application over theory. Introductory Statistics includes innovative practical applications that make the text relevant and accessible, as well as collaborative exercises, technology integration problems, and statistics labs.
Human anatomy is the scientific study of the body’s structures. Some of these structures are very small and can only be observed and analyzed with the assistance of a microscope. Other larger structures can readily be seen, manipulated, measured, and weighed. The word “anatomy” comes from a Greek root that means “to cut apart.” Human anatomy was first studied by observing the exterior of the body and observing the wounds of soldiers and other injuries. Later, physicians were allowed to dissect bodies of the dead to augment their knowledge. When a body is dissected, its structures are cut apart in order to observe their physical attributes and their relationships to one another. Dissection is still used in medical schools, anatomy courses, and in pathology labs. In order to observe structures in living people, however, a number of imaging techniques have been developed. These techniques allow clinicians to visualize structures inside the living body such as a cancerous tumor or a fractured bone.
Concepts of Biology is designed for the typical introductory biology course for nonmajors, covering standard scope and sequence requirements. The text includes interesting applications and conveys the major themes of biology, with content that is meaningful and easy to understand. The book is designed to demonstrate biology concepts and to promote scientific literacy.
Beyond Dichotomy: Synergizing Writing Center and Classroom Pedagogies
How closely can or should writing centers and writing classrooms collaborate? Beyond Dichotomy explores how research on peer tutoring one-to-one and in small groups can inform our work with students in writing centers and other tutoring programs, as well as in writing courses and classrooms. These multi-method (including rhetorical and discourse analyses and ethnographic and case-study) investigations center on several course-based tutoring (CBT) partnerships at two universities. Rather than practice separately in the center or in the classroom, rather than seeing teacher here and tutor there and student over there, CBT asks all participants in the dynamic drama of teaching and learning to consider the many possible means of connecting synergistically.
Research Methods in Psychology (New Zealand edition)
This textbook is an adaptation of the Research Methods in Psychology that is available on this site in US and Canadian editions. This New Zealand edition is an adaptation to the New Zealand context. The main changes are in Chapters 1 and 3 and the spelling, grammar, and terminology are changed throughout. This textbook is adopted at the University of Waikato in our 200-level research methods in psychology class.
Water Systems and Technology is a program designed to provide the student with enough information to build a successful and lasting career in the water and wastewater industry. It is a by professionals within the industry and within academia. Upon successful completion of the program and after completing any required general education course work, the student can earn an Associate of Science degree in Water Systems Technology. In addition, each course provides supplemental course work hours required for renewal of existing certifications in the water and wastewater industries and many provide specialized training coursework to qualify students to take state certification exams. The program has several general topic course options, includes coursework related to waterworks mathematics, and has specialized courses covering water distribution, water treatment, and wastewater.
https://www.canyons.edu/Offices/DistanceLearning/OER/Documents/Water%20020%20Text%20- 203rd%20Edition%20(2).pdf
Pipeline projects can be small jobs requiring only a few sticks of pipe. Or, they can be extensive jobs covering several miles or more. Regardless of the size of the job, it is important to properly plan. Preparing the pipe at the job site is an important aspect of job preparation. The pipe should be placed as close to the trench as possible. This makes it easier for the pipe to be accessed and placed into the trench. String the pipe on the opposite side of the trench as the dirt (spoils) that is being excavated and should be located away from traffic and heavy equipment. The bells should be located in the direction of installation and only enough pipe should be laid out for a days work. It is also important that the pipe is protected from rolling into the trench or away from the job site.
Principles and Procedures of the Justice System
Ernesto Miranda (D) was convicted for kidnapping, rape, and robbery by the Arizona criminal courts. D appealed to the Arizona Supreme Court but the conviction was sustained. The U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari to determine the role police have in protecting the rights of the accused from issues arising in four different cases (Miranda v. Arizona; Vignera v. New York; Westover v. United Stated; and California v. Stewart).
A First Course in LINEAR ALGEBRA an Open Text
A First Course in Linear Algebra presents an introduction to the fascinating subject of linear algebra for students who have a reasonable understanding of basic algebra. Major topics of linear algebra are presented in detail, with proofs of important theorems provided. Separate sections may be included in which proofs are examined in further depth and in general these can be excluded without loss of contrinuity. Where possible, applications of key concepts are explored. In an effort to assist those students who are interested in continuing on in linear algebra connections to additional topics covered in advanced courses are introduced. Each chapter begins with a list of desired outcomes which a student should be able to achieve upon completing the chapter. Throughout the text, examples and diagrams are given to reinforce ideas and provide guidance on how to approach various problems. Students are encouraged to work through the suggested exercises provided at the end of each section. Selected solutions to these exercises are given at the end of the text.
Business Information Systems: Design an App for That
nformation systems are the combination of people, information technology, and business processes to accomplish a business objective. Every information system (IS) has people, processes, and information technology. In fact, many IS professionals add most of their value working with people and processes. They manage the programmers but typically avoid programming themselves. We can represent an information system as a triangle with people, processes, and information technology (computers) on the three vertices. The three parts of an information system are often referred to as theinformation systems triangle. Consider the popular trend of letting the TV audience vote on some talent shows such as Dancing with the Stars. The voting is managed by a sophisticated information system. The voters are the people involved with the system. Voters can cast the votes by phone, by text, or by online poll—three different information technologies. A central server at ABC records and tallies the votes. The business processes include the phone, texting, and online procedures—how and when to cast votes, and rules limiting the number of votes from each household.
Raymond Frost, Jacqueline Pike, Lauren Kenyo, Sarah Pels,
forallX: an Introduction to Formal Logic
Logic is the business of evaluating arguments, sorting good ones from bad ones. In everyday language, we sometimes use the word ‘argument’ to refer to belligerent shouting matches. If you and a friend have an argument in this sense, things are not going well between the two of you. In logic, we are not interested in the teeth-gnashing, hair-pulling kind of argument. A logical argument is structured to give someone a reason to believe some conclusion.
University at Albany, State University of New York
A Concise Introduction to Logic is an introduction to formal logic suitable for undergraduates taking a general education course in logic or critical thinking, and is accessible and useful to any interested in gaining a basic understanding of logic. This text takes the unique approach of teaching logic through intellectual history; the author uses examples from important and celebrated arguments in philosophy to illustrate logical principles. The text also includes a basic introduction to findings of advanced logic. As indicators of where the student could go next with logic, the book closes with an overview of advanced topics, such as the axiomatic method, set theory, Peano arithmetic, and modal logic. Throughout, the text uses brief, concise chapters that readers will find easy to read and to review.
Steps to Success : Crossing the Bridge Between Literacy Research and Practice
Crossing the Bridge Between Literacy Research and Practice
Steps to Success: Crossing the Bridge Between Literacy Research and Practice introduces instructional strategies linked to the most current research-supported practices in the field of literacy. The book includes chapters related to scientifically-based literacy research, early literacy development, literacy assessment, digital age influences on children’s literature, literacy development in underserved student groups, secondary literacy instructional strategies, literacy and modern language, and critical discourse analysis. Chapters are written by authors with expertise in both college teaching and the delivery of research-supported literacy practices in schools. The book features detailed explanations of a wide variety of literacy strategies that can be implemented by both beginning and expert practitioners. Readers will gain knowledge about topics frequently covered in college literacy courses, along with guided practice for applying this knowledge in their future or current classrooms.
Chemistry is the study of matter, including its composition, its structure, its physical properties, and its reactivity. Although there are many ways to study chemistry, traditionally we divide it into ve areas: organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry, biochemistry, physical chemistry, and analytical chemistry. is division is historical and, perhaps, arbitrary, as suggested by current interest in interdisciplinary areas, such as bioanalytical chemistry and organometallic chemistry. Nevertheless, these ve areas remain the simplest division that spans the discipline of chemistry. Each of these traditional areas of chemistry brings a unique perspective to how a chemist makes sense of the diverse array of elements, ions, and molecules (both small and large) that make up our physical environment. An undergraduate chemistry course, therefore, is much more than a collection of facts; it is
The Bankruptcy Rules and Forms govern procedure in cases under title 11 of the United States Code. The rules shall be cited as the Federal Rules of Bankruptcy Procedure and the forms as the Official Bankruptcy Forms. These rules shall be construed to secure the just, speedy, and inexpensive determination of every case and proceeding. (As amended Mar. 30, 1987, eff. Aug. 1, 1987; Apr. 30, 1991, eff. Aug. 1, 1991.) Notes of Advisory Committee on Rules—1983 Section 247 of Public Law 95–598, 92 Stat. 2549 amended 28 U.S.C. §2075 by omitting the last sentence. The effect of the amendment is to require that procedural rules promulgated pursuant to 28 U.S.C. §2075 be consistent with the bankruptcy statute, both titles 11 and 28 U.S.C.
These are the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) as amended to December 01, 2016. The FRCP govern civil proceedings in the United States district courts and are often the foundation for the standard 1L law school course, Civil Procedure.
Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School
This publication contains the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure as amended to December 1, 2014. These materials have been complied by the Legal Information Institute at the Cornell Law School (LII) and published by the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Information (CALI). This material does not contain, nor is it intended to be, legal advice. Users seeking legal advice should consult with a licensed attorney in their jurisdiction. The editors have endeavored to provide complete and accurate information in this book. However, neither LII nor CALI warrant that the information provided is complete and accurate. Both disclaim all liability to any person for any loss caused by errors or omissions in this collection of information. Neither LII nor CALI assert copyright in U.S. Government works, but we do claim copyright in markup, navigation apparatus, and other value-added features of electronic editions of government publications.
Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law Schoo
These are the Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE) as effective December 01, 2016. The FRE govern the introduction of evidence in civil and criminal trials in United States federal courts. These Rules are often the foundation for the standard upper level law school course in Evidence.
Socrates: And now, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightenedor unenlightened: — Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so thatthey cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them,
Anthropology is the study of what makes us human. Anthropologists take a broad approach to understanding the many different aspects of the human experience, which we call holism. They consider the past, through archaeology, to see how human groups lived hundreds or thousands of years ago and what was important to them. They consider what makes up our biological bodies and genetics, as well as our bones, diet, and health. Anthropologists also compare humans with other animals (most often, other primates like monkeys and chimpanzees) to see what we have in common with them and what makes us unique. Even though nearly all humans need the same things to survive, like food, water, and companionship, the ways people meet these needs can be very different. For example, everyone needs to eat, but people eat different foods and get food in different ways. So anthropologists look at how different groups of people get food, prepare it, and share it. World hunger is not a problem of production but social barriers to distribution, and that Amartya Sen won a Nobel Prize for showing this was the case for all of the 20th century’s famines. Anthropologists also try to understand how people interact in social relationships (for example with families and friends).
Introduction to Art: Design, Context, and Meaning
We live in a rapidly changing world in which images play an important, even central, role. With widespread use of personal electronics, we instantaneously deliver and receive sound, video, and text messages. Corporations and governments worldwide recognize the power of advertising. Art museums worldwide are putting large parts of their collections online. Today we are seeing theater-quality movies made with inexpensive equipment that was unavailable ten years ago. Selfies, personal video, and memes are everywhere. In 1968, artist Andy Warhol (1928-1967, USA) said, “In the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.” (Self Portrait, Andy Warhol: http://art.newcity.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/05/Warhol_SelfPortrait.jpg) We are seeing that prediction come true with the advent of personal electronics that rival the sophistication of the most advanced professional studios of only twenty years ago. We are surrounded by images, but, for all of our clever technical abilities, the fundamental dynamics of visual art remain the same.
This first general textbook An introduction to ontology engineering has as main aim to provide the reader with a comprehensive introductory overview of ontology engineering. A secondary aim is to provide hands-on experience in ontology development that illustrate the theory. The book is divided into three blocks: Block I: logic foundations for ontologies both regarding the languages (mainly First Order predicate Logic, Description Logics, and OWL) and automated reasoning. Block II: developing good ontologies with methods and methodologies, the top-down approach with foundational ontologies, and the bottom-up approach to extract as much useful content as possible from legacy material.
An Introduction to Cooperation and Mutualism
This textbook introduces readers to the idea of cooperation and mutualism. Cooperatives and mutuals are participatory organizations in which members participate in control and governance, receive economic benefits through patronage refunds or net income, and become owners through equity. These mutual-benefit organizations exist alongside non-profit organizations and investor-benefit organizations through the global economy.
Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Employment Discrimination
Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, Employment Discrimination
This Chapter will address the current protections that are available to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (“LGBT”) individuals who allege they have been victims of employment discrimination. The Chapter’s primary focus will be on federal statutory law, particularly Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (“Title VII”). Although the focus here is on federal law, Appendix I to this Chapter lists the states that protect individuals from public and/or private discrimination under state laws. LGBT employees have argued with mixed results in the courts that discrimination against an individual because of sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression is also “discrimination because of sex” prohibited by Title VII. As a result, it is necessary to understand what it means under Title VII to discriminate “because of sex,” and how that meaning has evolved
LIFESPAN DEVELOPMENT: A Psychological Perspective
LIFESPAN DEVELOPMENT, Psychological Perspective
Developmental Psychology, also known as Human Development or Lifespan Development, is the scientific study of ways in which people change, as well as stay the same, from conception to death. You will no doubt discover in the course of studying that the field examines change across a broad range of topics. These include physical and other psychophysiological processes, cognition, language, and psychosocial development, including the impact of family and peers. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to include adolescence and more recently, aging and the entire life span. Previously, the message was once you are 25, your development is essentially completed. Our academic knowledge of the lifespan has changed and although there is still less research on adulthood than on childhood, adulthood is gaining increasing attention. This is particularly true now that the large cohort known as the baby boomers are beginning to enter late adulthood.
Learning Statistics with R: A tutorial for psychology students and other beginners
Learning Statistics with R covers the contents of an introductory statistics class, as typically taught to undergraduate psychology students, focusing on the use of the R statistical software. The book discusses how to get started in R as well as giving an introduction to data manipulation and writing scripts. From a statistical perspective, the book discusses descriptive statistics and graphing first, followed by chapters on probability theory, sampling and estimation, and null hypothesis testing. After introducing the theory, the book covers the analysis of contingency tables, t-tests, ANOVAs and regression. Bayesian statistics are covered at the end of the book.
You are probably asking yourself the question, "When and where will I use statistics?" If you read any newspaper, watch television, or use the Internet, you will see statistical information. There are statistics about crime, sports, education, politics, and real estate. Typically, when you read a newspaper article or watch a television news program, you are given sample information. With this information, you may make a decision about the correctness of a statement, claim, or "fact." Statistical methods can help you make the "best educated guess." Since you will undoubtedly be given statistical information at some point in your life, you need to know some techniques for analyzing the information thoughtfully. Think about buying a house or managing a budget. Think about your chosen profession. The fields of economics, business, psychology, education, biology, law, computer science, police science, and early childhood development require at least one course in statistics
ALEXANDER HOLMES, BARBARA ILLOWSKY, SUSAN DEAN,
Elementary Algebra is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY) license, which means that you can distribute, remix, and build upon the content, as long as you provide attribution to OpenStax and its content contributors. Because our books are openly licensed, you are free to use the entire book or pick and choose the sections that are most relevant to the needs of your course. Feel free to remix the content by assigning your students certain chapters and sections in your syllabus, in the order that you prefer. You can even provide a direct link in your syllabus to the sections in the web view of your book.Instructors also have the option of creating a customized version of their OpenStax book. The custom version can be made available to students in low-cost print or digital form through their campus bookstore. Visit your book page on openstax.org for more information.
It’s a cold day in Antarctica. In fact, it’s always a cold day in Antarctica. Earth’s southernmost continent, Antarctica experiences the coldest, driest, and windiest conditions known. The coldest temperature ever recorded, over one hundred degrees below zero on the Celsius scale, was recorded by remote satellite. It is no surprise then, that no native human population can survive the harsh conditions. Only explorers and scientists brave the environment for any length of time. Measuring and recording the characteristics of weather conditions in Antarctica requires a use of different kinds of numbers. Calculating with them and using them to make predictions requires an understanding of relationships among numbers. In this chapter, we will review sets of numbers and properties of operations used to manipulate numbers. This understanding will serve as prerequisite knowledge throughout our study of algebra and trigonometry
Principles of Accounting, Volume 2: Managerial Accounting
Principles of Accounting is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of a two-semester accounting course that covers the fundamentals of financial and managerial accounting. This book is specifically designed to appeal to both accounting and non-accounting majors, exposing students to the core concepts of accounting in familiar ways to build a strong foundation that can be applied across business fields. Each chapter opens with a relatable real-life scenario for today’s college student. Thoughtfully designed examples are presented throughout each chapter, allowing students to build on emerging accounting knowledge. Concepts are further reinforced through applicable connections to more detailed business processes. Students are immersed in the “why” as well as the “how” aspects of accounting in order to reinforce concepts and promote comprehension over rote memorization.
U.S. History is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of most introductory courses. The text provides a balanced approach to U.S. history, considering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped the United States from both the top down (politics, economics, diplomacy) and bottom up (eyewitness accounts, lived experience). U.S. History covers key forces that form the American experience, with particular attention to issues of race, class, and gender.
P. Scott Corbett, Volker Janssen, John M. Lund,
You’re about to understand water demand and water supply more deeply. This understanding is going to change how you look at your water bill, grass in your yard and around town, and all those canals you see while driving around in California. Understanding the connection between demand and supply is critical to anyone working in the water industry today. Water demand is our need and use of water. Water supply refers to our sources of water. This textbook has three primary parts. In Part One, you will learn foundational concepts in water supply, including the water cycle, water management concepts, water rights and stakeholder concepts.
The converting (or cancelling) of units is the most important concept in waterworks mathematics. You may be working with million gallons, cubic feet, acre feet, feet per second, gallons per minute, milligrams per liter, pounds per gallon, yard, ounce, parts per billion, etc., etc., etc. Units are the “driver” for problem solving in many waterworks math questions. The reason for this has to do with how processes are measured. For example, many water meters measure usage in hundred cubic feet. However, when Utility Managers report total usage by a class of customers it is typically expressed as acre feet or million gallons. Another example can be when dosage calculations are performed. Many times flow rates are measured as gallons per minute, but dosage computations require million gallons per day. These are just a couple of examples demonstrating the common conversion between units. In an introductory water mathematics course unit conversion is typically explained in a “unit by unit” break down. Here we are converting from cfs (cubic feet per sec) to gpm (gallon per minute).
Exploring Movie Construction & Production: What’s so exciting about movies
This book is designed in this manner because, as a college film instructor at a community college for 18 years, I have found that the biggest difficulty students have with a film course is the textbook. Other textbooks give examples from numerous movies to demonstrate a particular term. Most of the movies used in other textbooks, the students have not seen, resulting in the students not comprehending the technical film terms and rendering the textbook useless. A book on film should be about film terminology and the understanding of it. Movies then become more appreciated when watched, resulting in better understanding of the movie and the terminology.
Kansas State University Human Nutrition Flexbook
The CK-12 foundation defines a flexbook as a “free and open source textbook platform where one can build and edit collaborative textbooks1 .” The FNDH 400 (formerly HN 400, department changed its name from Human Nutrition to Food, Nutrition, Dietetics and Health) Flexbook fits this definition, but I felt the name was particularly accurate due to the flexibility of Google Docs that it was built on. The flexbook is divided into 13 chapters with sections and subsections. These are numbered in such a way that the first number represents the chapter. A period separates the chapter from the section number, and another period is followed by the subsection number. The figures are non-copyrighted figures or I have made them myself in PowerPoint. The flexbook also contains links to articles, videos, and animations in Web Link boxes. These can be clicked to open the link, and urls for these resources are also provided at the end of the section or subsection.
The Art of Being Human: A Textbook for Cultural Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of all humans in all times in all places. But it is so much more than that. “Anthropology requires strength, valor, and courage,” Nancy Scheper-Hughes noted. “Pierre Bourdieu called anthropology a combat sport, an extreme sport as well as a tough and rigorous discipline. … It teaches students not to be afraid of getting one’s hands dirty, to get down in the dirt, and to commit yourself, body and mind. Susan Sontag called anthropology a “heroic” profession.” What is the payoff for this heroic journey? You will find ideas that can carry you across rivers of doubt and over mountains of fear to find the the light and life of places forgotten. Real anthropology cannot be contained in a book. You have to go out and feel the world’s jagged edges, wipe its dust from your brow, and at times, leave your blood in its soil.
DESAFÍOS DE LA FORMACIÓN CIUDADANA EN LA ERA DIGITAL: ESTADODELARTE
Esta publicación es posible gracias al proyecto “Fortaleciendo la Democracia a través del Ciudadanía Digital en Chile y México”, desarollado por La Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional de Chile y el Instituto Belisario Domínguez del Senado de México, y financiado por el Fondo Conjunto de Cooperación México–Chile (convocatoria 2015). Dicho fondo es administrado por la Agencia de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo de Chile (AGCID) y la Agencia Mexicana de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo (AMEXCID).
David Guzmán, Escuela de Pedagogía , David Silva
This course material has been created for the course “Evaluation of comprehension and oral and written production in English” (LCL 462) from the English Language Teaching (ELT) program at the Institute of Literature and Language Sciences, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (PUCV). This course is located in the 8th semester of the curriculum of the bachelor degree of “Pedagogy in English” (English Language Initial Teacher Training) at PUCV. This course corresponds to the area of specific disciplinary training, complements the professional training course “Evaluation of Learning” of the School of Pedagogy and precedes the professional practice, academic-professional activity culminating in the curriculum of this career.
Jannett Fonseca, Francisca Henríquez, Henríquez
Going green, green business, and sustainable business are topics on everyone’s mind. But what does all this mean exactly? A Primer on Sustainable Business answers that question and provides an introduction to the basics you need to know. We begin with an understanding of the background of the concept of sustainability and how it applies to the business world. In 1987, the Brundtland Commission put forth a “global agenda for change” with the purpose of “furthering the common understanding and common spirit of responsibility so clearly needed in a divided world.”Brundtland (1987). The report outlined the following description of sustainable development: