Search results for ""scientific publishing""

Since the mid-1820s, a series of lectures has been delivered each year over the Christmas period in the world-famous Faraday Lecture Theatre at The Royal Institution of Great Britain by prominent scientists, addressed specifically to an audience of children. Initially made accessible in book form, the lectures have been nationally televised throughout the UK and distributed worldwide since the 1960s, making them accessible to an even larger audience. The importance of these lectures in promoting science to a broad audience is perhaps best gauged by the fact that an image of one of Faraday's lectures appeared on the Bank of England £20 note in the 1990s.This anthology brings together, for the first time, a carefully chosen selection of 11 lectures from the 1860s to the 1990s. The selection includes lectures by Michael Faraday, arguably the most important and influential 19th-century physicist, and Lawrence Bragg, the youngest ever winner of the Nobel Prize. Through this work, readers will come to grips with the changing nature of popular science lectures over the past 140 years.

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This volume carries the same title as that of an international conference held at the National University of Singapore, 9-11 January 2006 on the occasion of Roger E. Howe's 60th birthday. Authored by leading members of the Lie theory community, these contributions, expanded from invited lectures given at the conference, are a fitting tribute to the originality, depth and influence of Howe's mathematical work. The range and diversity of the topics will appeal to a broad audience of research mathematicians and graduate students interested in symmetry and its profound applications.

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This useful book is written from a medical perspective and is aimed at academics as well as medical and biomedical engineering students who want to become involved in the design, development, manufacturing or use of prostheses or medical devices. It covers basic information on the complexities of implant and medical device development. The design process, technology assessment, animal experiments, histocompatibility, tissue compatibility and infections are described. In addition, examples of biomaterial applications are presented, showing the diversity of biomaterials.This is the first book that guides the reader through the complicated process of medical product development. Different technical and medical aspects of medical implants are highlighted by a group of authors who are actively involved in biomaterial research at the University Medical Center of Groningen, one of the leading hospitals in The Netherlands.

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The book is a collection of papers written by a selection of eminent authors from around the world in honour of Gregory Chaitin's 60th birthday. This is a unique volume including technical contributions, philosophical papers and essays.

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This volume is devoted to the study of asymptotic properties of wide classes of stochastic systems arising in mathematical statistics, percolation theory, statistical physics and reliability theory. Attention is paid not only to positive and negative associations introduced in the pioneering papers by Harris, Lehmann, Esary, Proschan, Walkup, Fortuin, Kasteleyn and Ginibre, but also to new and more general dependence conditions. Naturally, this scope comprises families of independent real-valued random variables. A variety of important results and examples of Markov processes, random measures, stable distributions, Ising ferromagnets, interacting particle systems, stochastic differential equations, random graphs and other models are provided. For such random systems, it is worthwhile to establish principal limit theorems of the modern probability theory (central limit theorem for random fields, weak and strong invariance principles, functional law of the iterated logarithm etc.) and discuss their applications.There are 434 items in the bibliography.The book is self-contained, provides detailed proofs, for reader's convenience some auxiliary results are included in the Appendix (e.g. the classical Hoeffding lemma, basic electric current theory etc.).

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Orbital motion is a vital subject which has engaged the greatest minds in mathematics and physics from Kepler to Einstein. It has gained in importance in the space age and touches every scientist in any field of space science. Still, there is almost a total dearth of books in this important field at the elementary and intermediate levels — at best a chapter in an undergraduate or graduate mechanics course.This book addresses that need, beginning with Kepler's laws of planetary motion followed by Newton's law of gravitation. Average and extremum values of dynamical variables are treated and the central force problem is formally discussed. The planetary problem in Cartesian and complex coordinates is tackled and examples of Keplerian motion in the solar system are also considered. The final part of the book is devoted to the motion of artificial Earth satellites and the modifications of their orbits by perturbing forces of various kinds.

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With the great progress in numerical methods and the speed of the modern personal computer, if you can formulate the correct physics equations, then you only need to program a few lines of code to get the answer. Where other books on computational physics dwell on the theory of problems, this book takes a detailed look at how to set up the equations and actually solve them on a PC.Focusing on popular software package Mathematica, the book offers undergraduate student a comprehensive treatment of the methodology used in programing solutions to equations in physics.

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This essential book is a compendium of papers written by an international team of world-renowned experts, who cover topics in their respective areas of expertise. Presenting the most up-to-date knowledge of hepatocellular carcinoma, it covers all topics — including those more controversial ones — in this rapidly advancing field, from epidemiology to prevention, from molecular biology to gross pathology, from screening to atypical presentation, from diagnosis to treatment, and from assessment to choice of appropriate treatment. This volume is therefore an important contribution to the field of hepatocellular carcinoma.

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Bioinformatics, a field devoted to the interpretation and analysis of biological data using computational techniques, has evolved tremendously in recent years due to the explosive growth of biological information generated by the scientific community. Soft computing is a consortium of methodologies that work synergistically and provides, in one form or another, flexible information processing capabilities for handling real-life ambiguous situations. Several research articles dealing with the application of soft computing tools to bioinformatics have been published in the recent past; however, they are scattered in different journals, conference proceedings and technical reports, thus causing inconvenience to readers, students and researchers.This book, unique in its nature, is aimed at providing a treatise in a unified framework, with both theoretical and experimental results, describing the basic principles of soft computing and demonstrating the various ways in which they can be used for analyzing biological data in an efficient manner. Interesting research articles from eminent scientists around the world are brought together in a systematic way such that the reader will be able to understand the issues and challenges in this domain, the existing ways of tackling them, recent trends, and future directions. This book is the first of its kind to bring together two important research areas, soft computing and bioinformatics, in order to demonstrate how the tools and techniques in the former can be used for efficiently solving several problems in the latter.

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This volume provides a comprehensive treatment of basic Lie theory, primarily directed toward graduate study. The text is ideal for a full graduate course in Lie groups and Lie algebras. However, the book is also very usable for a variety of other courses: a one-semester course in Lie algebras, or on Haar measure and its applications, for advanced undergraduates; or as the text for one-semester graduate courses in Lie groups and symmetric spaces of non-compact type, or on lattices in Lie groups. The material is complete and detailed enough to be used for self-study; it can also serve as a reference work for professional mathematicians working in other areas. The book's utility for such a varied readership is enhanced by a diagram showing the interdependence of the separate chapters so that individual chapters and the material they depend upon can be selected, while others can be skipped.The book incorporates many of the most significant discoveries and pioneering contributions of the masters of the subject: Borel, Cartan, Chevalley, Iwasawa, Mostow, Siegel, and Weyl, among others.

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The necessity of expertise for tackling the complicated and multidisciplinary issues of safety and risk has slowly permeated into all engineering applications so that risk analysis and management has gained a relevant role, both as a tool in support of plant design and as an indispensable means for emergency planning in accidental situations. This entails the acquisition of appropriate reliability modeling and risk analysis tools to complement the basic and specific engineering knowledge for the technological area of application.Aimed at providing an organic view of the subject, this book provides an introduction to the principal concepts and issues related to the safety of modern industrial activities. It also illustrates the classical techniques for reliability analysis and risk assessment used in current practice.

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This volume presents a timely and comprehensive overview of biological networks at all organization levels in the spirit of the complex systems approach. It discusses the transversal issues and fundamental principles as well as the overall structure, dynamics, and modeling of a wide array of biological networks at the molecular, cellular, and population levels. Anchored in both empirical data and a strong theoretical background, the book therefore lends valuable credence to the complex systems approach.

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In recent years, researchers have identified a pivotal, upstream role for macrophage migration inhibitory factor (MIF) in the innate immune response. This pioneering book describes this renaissance of knowledge in the biology of MIF. Topics covered include MIF's molecular mechanism of action, its counterregulatory action on the immunosuppressive properties of glucocorticoids, its role in the production of proinflammatory mediators as shown in cell-based and animal studies; and its central role in human inflammation. Human genetic studies have identified allelic forms of the MIF gene, and high-expression alleles have been associated with rheumatoid arthritis, asthma severity, sarcoidosis, atopy, inflammatory bowel disease, and other inflammatory and infectious maladies. The book also discusses the role of MIF as a therapeutic target. Unique structural features of the protein, such as an intrinsic catalytic activity and the recent discovery of its cell surface receptor, offer attractive opportunities for therapeutic intervention. Such approaches are presently in clinical development.

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The area of low-dimensional quantum systems on discrete spaces is a rapidly growing research field lying at the interface between quantum theoretical developments, like discrete and q-difference equations, and tight binding superlattice models in solid-state physics. Systems on discrete spaces are promising candidates for applications in several areas. Indeed, the dynamic localization of electrons on the 1D lattice under the influence of an external electric field serves to describe time-dependent transport in quantum wires, linear optical absorption spectra, and the generation of higher harmonics. Odd-even parity effects and the flux dependent oscillations of total persistent currents in discretized rings can also be invoked. Technological developments are then provided by conductance calculations characterizing 1D conductors, junctions between rings and leads or rings and dots, and by quantum LC-circuits. Accordingly, the issues presented in this book are important starting points for the design of novel nanodevices.

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This is the first existing volume that collects lectures on this important and fast developing subject in mathematics. The lectures are given by leading experts in the field and the range of topics is kept as broad as possible by including both the algebraic and the differential aspects of noncommutative geometry as well as recent applications to theoretical physics and number theory.

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This is the first book that analyzes tobacco control policies in China from the perspectives of economics and health. For readers interested in the economic aspects of tobacco control policy issues not only in China but also in other developing countries, this book provides a comprehensive analytical and empirical framework addressing key debated issues.This book covers a range of interesting topics from the prevalence of smoking in China, health and economic burden of smoking in China, demand for cigarettes and taxation in China, the role of tobacco on farming, the tobacco industry and the World Trade Organization, poverty and smoking in China, to future challenges of tobacco control for the Chinese government.

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This volume presents a collection of review papers on recent work in the connected areas of strongly correlated systems, the effects of coherence on macroscopic systems, and entanglement in quantum systems. These areas have attracted considerable interest due to their complexity and associated unexpected nontrivial phenomena, and also due to their potential applications in various fields, from materials science to information technology. The coverage includes strongly correlated electronic systems such as low-dimensional complex materials, ordered and disordered spin systems, and aspects of the physics of manganites and graphene, both in equilibrium and far from equilibrium.

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This is a fascinating and popular account of the very large and the very small, from the universe as a whole to subatomic physics. It includes qualitative explanations of quantum mechanics and relativity, the big bang with inflation, the synthesis of elements, atoms, nuclei, subnuclear physics, quarks, leptons, and other elementary particles. It also gives an account of dark matter and dark energy. In summary, it provides and overview of what we know about the universe and what it is made of, and also what we don't know.

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Ownership-based economics has led to the rapid development and apparent universal success of the market economy. It is a system built on the deception of resource availability, ill-defined profit, and misled by the idea that an invisible hand can be an equitable system of distribution. It has resulted in a high living standard for a few select individuals, but at the expense of mankind and nature, ultimately culminating in the development of human conflict.This is a book with a blueprint for the twenty-first century, proposing a two-fold approach to easing the pressure on both the human race and the world we live in. It calls for a change of mindset from ownership to stewardship and a shift of responsibility to the corporate entities as a sub-system of the market economy.

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The field of nanotubes and nanowires is evolving at a rapid pace, with many potential applications in electronics, optics, and sensors, to name a few. In this book, various prominent researchers summarize our current understanding of these new materials systems, as well as some of these potential applications. A snapshot of the state-of-the-art in the field of nanowires and nanotubes, the contributions give an instructive mix of experimental, theoretical, and visionary material to give the reader an indication of where the field is now, and where it is going.With several points of view represented, including academic theoreticians, academic experimental device engineers, and industry researchers from well-known semiconductor companies, Nanotubes and Nanowires is an essential source of reference for physicists, chemists, materials scientists, and graduate students interested in keeping abreast of the latest developments in nanotechnology.

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This book provides a fascinating account of the accumulated knowledge of the mechanisms by which plants regulate their patterning. This is an exciting subject based on a novel endeavor, not least due to the rapid progress made in recent years in the diverse fields of genetics, molecular biology, microscopy, inter- and intracellular signaling, as well as our intimate knowledge of model plants (such as Arabidopsis).This book is unique in that it provides, in one volume, comprehensive information on all the main organs of flowering plants. There is no other book similar to this, written by a single author, that has been published in the last 10 years.The book contains updated information on the differentiation of the plant organs with respect to structure and molecular genetics, and the methodologies employed to investigate plant patterning are described in detail. Extensively illustrated with numerous figures, many of which are in color, the book will appeal to three main groups of readers: novices interested in plant patterning; plant biologists requiring a comprehensive understanding of differentiation in flowering plants; and graduate students in advanced courses.

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Ambition, genius, thought, imagination, love, hate, greed and, above all, consciousness ourselves as alive and as part of our world — all this is somehow enabled by the brain. The brain is the person, and if it goes wrong, a person is ruined. This book is about part of what the brain does — a role of which many of us are hardly aware, but one that has ensured, the survival of mankind. Despite famine, drought, wars, cold, infections and hostile environments, we survive as a species — though not always as individuals. All this time, our brains have been coping with what fate throws at us — a process that some call adaptation. How does the brain do it? How does it know what's needed? How does it enable us to provide that need? How much do we depend on our own brains, or on those of others?This book is different from other books on the brain. It deals with the brain's role in survival, rather than “higher” cognitive functions (such as language or thought). It describes the special part of the brain that keeps you alive: that makes you feel hungry when you need energy, makes you feel thirsty when you need water, drives you to reproduce so that your species survives, makes you fearful of things or individuals that might harm you, and defends you against adversity.

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Laser Cleaning II is the second of a series of books reporting research on the use of lasers for cleaning material surfaces and related micro-scale and nano-scale laser processing. It follows Laser Cleaning, edited by Boris Luk'yanchuk, published in 2002. The primary focus is on contaminant particle removal, nano-scale sized particles in particular, which represents a major cleaning challenge in industrial contexts and poses a broad range of research questions. The contributions provide stimulating answers to these questions, spanning the essential areas: the fundamental theoretical and experimental physics of light/particle/interface interactions, invention and development of laser cleaning techniques and diagnostics, simulations for important material and process systems, and laser cleaning and processing applications. Laser cleaning for art and cultural heritage conservation is a related, mature field of research which is also treated.

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The rapid progress in genomics and related technologies has increased interest in genetically modified organisms (GMOs). This concise and highly readable book equips the reader with essential information about what genes are, how they work, and how they can be modified and used in biotechnology. The book starts with a summary of the beginnings of life, the structure and components of living organisms, and an outline of genetic engineering.The coverage of human genetics spans race, human evolution and migration, the sex chromosomes, gene therapy, and forensic science. A separate chapter is devoted to the genetics and evolution of some of the major disease-causing organisms. On environmental genetics, the book considers the risks of releasing agricultural GM plants, as well as bioremediation and metal extraction by GM plants. Applications of genetic modification in agriculture — pest-resistant plants, herbicide resistance, and improved foods — are presented as part of a discussion on sustainable agriculture to emphasize the role played by GM plants in relation to chemicals, analytic techniques, and organic farming.

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The breadth, scope and volume of research in atomic, molecular and optical (AMO) physics have increased enormously in the last few years. Following the widespread use of pulsed lasers, certain newly emerging areas as well as selected mature subfields are ushering in a second renaissance.This volume focuses on current research in these crucial areas: cold atoms and Bose-Einstein condensates, quantum information and quantum computation, and new techniques for investigating collisions and structure. The topics covered include: the multireference coupled cluster method in quantum chemistry and the role of electronic correlation in nanosystems; laser cooling of atoms and theories of the Bose-Einstein condensate; and quantum computing and quantum information transfer using cold atoms and shaped ultrafast pulses. Other articles deal with recent findings in heavy ion collisions with clusters, time-of-flight spectroscopy techniques, and a specific example of a chaotic quantum system.The contributions will greatly assist in the sharing of specialized knowledge among experts and will also be useful for postgraduate students striving to obtain an overall picture of the current research status in the areas covered.

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Our Place in the Universe tells the story of our world, formation of the first galaxies and stars formed from great clouds containing the primordial elements made in the first few minutes; birth of stars, their lives and deaths in fiery supernova explosions; formation of the solar system, its planets and many moons; life on Earth, its needs and vicissitudes on land and in the seas; finally exoplanets, planets that surround distant stars. Interspersed in the text are short pieces on some of those who revealed these wonders to us.It is written in a very authoritative and readable form and contains more than 100 color prints of the marvelous galaxies, and nebula that have been taken from space-based and land-based telescopes carried by NASA missions, the European Space Agency, the European Southern Laboratory in Chile and many other sources.

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This book provides valuable insight and critical appraisal of key areas of intelligent transport systems (ITS) for land transport in Europe. ITS is becoming increasingly important as the means to improving the efficiency, safety and comfort of the transport of people and goods while at the same time helping to minimize environmental damage and the contribution of transport to global warming.The material draws on over four years of study by the ROSETTA project — part of the European Commission 5th Framework Program. For each of the 12 areas addressed, the book provides a vision for their application, identifies key issues yet to be addressed and the future opportunities that the timely application and advancement of ITS can bring.

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This is the third and fully updated edition of the classic textbook on physics at the subatomic level. An up-to-date and lucid introduction to both particle and nuclear physics, the book is suitable for both experimental and theoretical physics students at the senior undergraduate and beginning graduate levels.Topics are introduced with key experiments and their background, encouraging students to think and empowering them with the capability of doing back-of-the-envelope calculations in a diversity of situations. Earlier important experiments and concepts as well as topics of current interest are covered, with extensive use of photographs and figures to convey principal concepts and show experimental data.The coverage includes new material on:Detectors and acceleratorsNucleon elastic form factor dataNeutrinos, their masses and oscillationsChiral theories and effective field theories, and lattice QCDRelativistic heavy ions (RHIC)Nuclear structure far from the region of stabilityParticle astrophysics and cosmology

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This is a brief introduction to some geometrical topics including topological spaces, the metric tensor, Euclidean space, manifolds, tensors, r-forms, the orientation of a manifold and the Hodge star operator. It provides the reader who is approaching the subject for the first time with a deeper understanding of the geometrical properties of vectors and covectors. The material prepares the reader for discussions on basic concepts such as the differential of a function as a covector, metric dual, inner product, wedge product and cross product.J M Domingos received his D Phil from the University of Oxford and has now retired from the post of Professor of Physics at the University of Coimbra, Portugal.

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This volume describes the elaborate surveillance systems and various DNA repair mechanisms that ensure accurate passage of genetic information onto daughter cells. In particular, it narrates how the cell cycle checkpoint and DNA repair machineries detect and restore DNA damages that are embedded in millions to billions of normal base pairs. The scope of the book ranges from biochemical analyses and structural details of DNA repair proteins, to integrative genomics and population-based studies. It provides a snapshot of current understanding about some of the major DNA repair pathways, including base-excision repair, nucleotide excision repair, mismatch repair, homologous recombination, and non-homologous end-joining as well as cell cycle checkpoints and translesion DNA synthesis. One of the particular emphases of the book is the link between inherited DNA repair deficiencies and susceptibility to cancer in the general population. For the first time, the book brings together a collection of review articles written by a group of active and laboratory-based investigators who have a clear understanding of the recent advances in the fields of DNA damage repair and genomic stability and their implications in carcinogenesis, new approaches in cancer therapy, and cancer prevention.

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This easy-to-read book presents an elementary yet comprehensive introduction to modern energy economics. Mathematical content is kept to a minimum, and advanced numerical concepts are placed in appendices. The two survey chapters are suitable for readers with little or no formal training in economics. Differing greatly from other energy textbooks, the book aims to provide the reader with an informed advantage. Principally intended as a textbook for undergraduate economics students, it can also be used for self-study or as a reference material.

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Given the rapid emergence of regional economic arrangements in Asia, especially in Southeast Asia, it is useful to understand clearly what regionalism implies for the region, as well as to take stock as to the far-reaching and complicated effects of formal economic cooperation and integration. This book allows the reader to better understand the relevant international policies of the Southeast Asian economies, and to appreciate the potential lessons for other developing regions. It also focuses on the regionalism trend with an explicit application to ASEAN, as well as the implications of regionalism in the developed countries.The goal of this book is to survey the economics and political economy of regionalism in the ASEAN context from a variety of perspectives and using various techniques, from standard economic analysis of preferential trading arrangements to the political economy analysis of institutions. Its approach is comprehensive in that it includes ASEAN economic integration in the areas of trade, foreign direct investment, and finance. Presentation of the material is designed to be accessible to non-technical audiences without sacrificing the rigor expected by economists and other experts.

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Ever since 1911, the Solvay Conferences have shaped modern physics. The 23rd edition, chaired by 2004 Nobel Laureate David Gross, did not break with that tradition. It gathered most of the leading figures working on the central problem of reconciling Einstein's theory of gravity with quantum mechanics.These proceedings give a broad overview with unique insight into the most fundamental issues raised by this challenge for 21st century physics, by distinguished renowned scientists. The contributions cover: the status of quantum mechanics, spacetime singularities and breakdown of classical space and time, mathematical structures underlying the most promising attempts under current development, spacetime as an emergent concept, as well as cosmology and the cosmological constant puzzle. A historical overview of the Solvay conferences by historian of sciences Peter Galison opens the volume.In the Solvay tradition, the volume also includes the discussions among the participants — many of which were quite lively and illustrate dramatically divergent points of view — carefully edited and reproduced in full.

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This book is written for managers in organizations that practice western style of management. The central theme of the book is the importance of generating core values, vision and mission within an organization, extending core values of work into practical and concrete ways of infusing them into day-to-day activities at work.Many of the central ideas and theories of western style of management are questioned, and readers are introduced to theories of contemporary writers in the field.Based on a critical interpretation of theory, this practical book is distilled from the authors' experience in developing core values within a variety of organizations over the last decade.

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"Bridges over Water" places the study of transboundary water conflicts, negotiation, and cooperation in the context of various disciplines (such as international relations, international law, international negotiations, and economics), analyzing them using various quantitative approaches, such as river basin modeling and game theory. Case studies of particular transboundary river basins, lakes and aquifers are also considered. This is the first textbook for a relatively recent yet rapidly expanding field of study.

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Does the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) exploit student athletes? Should athletes be paid? Does Title IX unfairly discriminate against men's sports? Are the salaries of head coaches excessive? Why is there so much cheating in college sports? Should the sports department be subsidized by the university? Why do universities place so much emphasis on athletics?The above are just some of the questions raised in this sports economics textbook specially designed to teach undergraduate students about the college sports industry. The book focuses on the unique cartel structure of the NCAA and its member institutions to shed light on the labor market for college athletes and coaches; the tension between athletics and academics; the finance of athletic departments; the role of the media and commercialization of college sports; race, gender, and legal issues; and the desirability and plausibility of reform.The book reinforces the economic analysis with a variety of examples of recent events and can be used as either a primary or secondary text.

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This book begins by introducing the effective field approach, the simplest approach to phase transitions. It provides an intuitive approximation to the physics of such diverse phenomena as liquid-vapor transitions, ferromagnetism, superconductivity, order-disorder in alloys, ferroelectricity, superfluidity and ferroelasticity. The connection between the effective field approach and Landau's theory is stressed.The main coverage is devoted to specific applications of the effective field concept to ferroelectric systems, both hydrogen bonded ferroelectrics, like those in the TGS family, and oxide ferroelectrics, like pure and mixed perovskites.

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The study of isoperimetric inequalities involves a fascinating interplay of analysis, geometry and the theory of partial differential equations. Several conjectures have been made and while many have been resolved, a large number still remain open.One of the principal tools in the study of isoperimetric problems, especially when spherical symmetry is involved, is Schwarz symmetrization, which is also known as the spherically symmetric and decreasing rearrangement of functions. The aim of this book is to give an introduction to the theory of Schwarz symmetrization and study some of its applications.The book gives an modern and up-to-date treatment of the subject and includes several new results proved recently. Effort has been made to keep the exposition as simple and self-contained as possible. A knowledge of the existence theory of weak solutions of elliptic partial differential equations in Sobolev spaces is, however, assumed. Apart from this and a general mathematical maturity at the graduate level, there are no other prerequisites.

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This book is meant for postgraduate modules that cover lifetime data in reliability and survival analysis as taught in statistics, engineering statistics and medical statistics courses. It is helpful for researchers who wish to choose appropriate models and methods for analyzing lifetime data. There is an extensive discussion on the concept and role of ageing in choosing appropriate models for lifetime data, with a special emphasis on tests of exponentiality. There are interesting contributions related to the topics of ageing, tests for exponentiality, competing risks and repairable systems. A special feature of this book is that it introduces the public domain R-software and explains how it can be used in computations of methods discussed in the book.

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This important book reviews applications of optimization and optimal control theory to modern problems in physics, nano-science and finance. The theory presented here can be efficiently applied to various problems, such as the determination of the optimal shape of a laser pulse to induce certain excitations in quantum systems, the optimal design of nanostructured materials and devices, or the control of chaotic systems and minimization of the forecast error for a given forecasting model (for example, artificial neural networks). Starting from a brief review of the history of variational calculus, the book discusses optimal control theory and global optimization using modern numerical techniques. Key elements of chaos theory and basics of fractional derivatives, which are useful in control and forecast of complex dynamical systems, are presented. The coverage includes several interdisciplinary problems to demonstrate the efficiency of the presented algorithms, and different methods of forecasting complex dynamics are discussed.

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This book explores the unique advantages and large inherent transmission capacity of optical fiber communication systems. The long-term and high-risk research challenges of optical transceivers are analyzed with a view to sustaining the seemingly insatiable demand for bandwidth. A broad coverage of topics relating to the design of high-speed optical devices and integrated circuits, oriented to low power, low cost, and small area, is discussed.Written by specialists with many years of research and engineering experience in the field of optical fiber communication, this book is essential for an audience dedicated to the development of integrated electronic systems for optical communication applications. It can also be used as a supplementary text for graduate courses on optical transceiver IC design.

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This is the first book that takes a detailed look at the importance of phase in the design of speech processing systems. Phase, in comparison with amplitude, is often ignored for speech recognition applications. Thus, this book highlights some of the important ways in which the phase of speech signals can be utilized for sound localization, enhancement, and recognition.This book also discusses the state-of-the-art research in phase-based speech processing, starting from the basics of signal processing and recording, to single microphone speech recognition, the recognition of speech and the processing of speech by humans, as well as the importance of phase in human speech recognition and multi-microphone phase-based speech processing.

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This book offers a refreshing view of leadership as a psycho-social phenomenon. Attention is drawn to the conceptual muddle which underlies much of managerial practices, particularly in the selection and development of future leaders. Also demonstrated is the conceptual muddle through semantic analysis of the vocabulary used in defining leadership in different languages. The concept of leadership from four different perspectives is examined in detail: leadership as a universal and natural phenomenon; membership and social roles; leadership as a collective process; conceptual models.In addition to the theoretical models, the author discusses patterns of influence and use and abuse of power. Consistent with his emphasis on the reciprocal nature of leadership, he complements his analysis of leading behavior by insightful analysis of the phenomenon of obedience: the psychological and cultural foundations of obedience; patterns of obedience; the collusion of leaders and followers in the abuse of power.The author's conceptualization of leadership challenges much of our conventional wisdom and traditional notions. He questions, for example, the universality of intelligence, dominance, aggressiveness and extraversion as predictors of leadership potential. Instead of imposing an ideal model of leadership, he lays the philosophical foundations that allow institutions to make their own choice of the model (or models) best suited for their values and unique historical circumstances. As such, the book can best be described as an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural guide for policy makers, particularly those concerned with the selection and training of leaders.

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This review volume is devoted to a discussion of analogies and differences of complex production systems — natural, as in biological cells, or man-made, as in economic systems or industrial production. Taking this unified look at production is based on two observations: Cells and many biological networks are complex production units that have evolved to solve production problems in a reliable and optimal way in a highly stochastic environment. On the other hand, industrial production is becoming increasingly complex and often hard to predict. As a result, modeling and control of such production networks involve many different spatial and temporal scales and decision policies for many different structures. The common themes of industrial and biological production include evolution and optimization, synchronization and self-organization, robust operation despite high stochasticity, and hierarchical dynamics. The mathematical techniques used come from dynamical systems theory, transport equations, control theory, pattern formation, graph theory, discrete event simulations, stochastic processes, and others. The application areas range from semiconductor production to supply chains, protein networks, slime molds, social networks, and whole economies.

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Noncommutative differential geometry is a novel approach to geometry that is paving the way for exciting new directions in the development of mathematics and physics. The contributions in this volume are based on papers presented at a workshop dedicated to enhancing international cooperation between mathematicians and physicists in various aspects of frontier research on noncommutative differential geometry. The active contributors present both the latest results and comprehensive reviews of topics in the area. The book is accessible to researchers and graduate students interested in a variety of mathematical areas related to noncommutative geometry and its interface with modern theoretical physics.

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The contributors of this volume are working at the forefront of various realizations of quantum computers. They survey the recent developments in each realization, in the context of the DiVincenzo criteria, including nuclear magnetic resonance, Josephson junctions, quantum dots, and trapped ions. There are also some theoretical contributions which have relevance in the physical realizations of a quantum computer. This book fills the gap between elementary introductions to the subject and highly specialized research papers to allow beginning graduate students to understand the cutting-edge of research in the shortest possible time.

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This textbook describes the fundamental “physical” aspects of fluid flows for beginners of fluid mechanics in physics, mathematics and engineering, from the point of view of modern physics.It also emphasizes the dynamical aspects of fluid motions rather than the static aspects, illustrating vortex motions, waves, geophysical flows, chaos and turbulence. Beginning with the fundamental concepts of the nature of flows and the properties of fluids, the book presents fundamental conservation equations of mass, momentum and energy, and the equations of motion for both inviscid and viscous fluids.In addition to the fundamentals, this book also covers water waves and sound waves, vortex motions, geophysical flows, nonlinear instability, chaos, and turbulence. Furthermore, it includes the chapters on superfluids and the gauge theory of fluid flows.The material in the book emerged from the lecture notes for an intensive course on Elementary Fluid Mechanics for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of theoretical physics given in 2003 and 2004 at the Nankai Institute of Mathematics (Tianjin) in China. Hence, each chapter may be presented separately as a single lecture.

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With the poems written by winner of the Posner Poetry Award from the Council of Wisconsin Writers in 2005, this coffee-table book will delight and inform general readers curious about ideas of chaos, fractals, and nonlinear complex systems. Developed out of ten years of interdisciplinary seminars in chaos and complex systems at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, it features multiple ways of knowing: Robin Chapman's poems of everyday experience of change in a complex world, associated metaphorically with Julien Clinton Sprott's full-color computer art generated from billions of versions of only three simple equations for strange attractors, Julia sets, and iterated function systems; his definitions of 39 key terms; a mathematical appendix; and even a multiple-choice quiz to test understanding. Accompanied by a CD-ROM of the poet reading 13 poems and 1,000 images of chaos art from which slide shows can be generated and 100 high-resolution posters created, the book has a foreword by Cliff Pickover, author of A Passion for Mathematics.

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