Search results for ""author jean""

This book places IT in perspective by tracing its development through time, covering its origins in business, the massive expansion of the role of IT at the end of the 20th century, the growth of the internet, and the successes and failures of companies involved in this development. Despite its ubiquity in the modern world, the author highlights that efficient use of IT by businesses can only be gained by a good understanding of its potentials and pitfalls, highlighting how its informed use in practice is essential for companies to succeed. Finally, questions are raised concerning the future of IT: who will reap the benefits and why? Will IT continue to provide solutions and will it always deliver on its promise? Will it cease to advance and thus cease to be studied or will it continue to develop and thus provide new opportunities and challenges to users?

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Revel probes the origins of the notion that America is the source of all evil: imperialistic, greedy, ruthlessly competitive - a hyperpower whose riches are acquired at the expense of the Third World.

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This practical book takes you step-by-step from planning to leading your meeting successfully. Includes techniques that maximise group dynamics; how to avoid sabotaging your presentation before you begin to speak; ground rules to help keep your meeting on track; what to do when someone wants to use the meeting for his or her own agenda; and how planning and preparation almost guarantee a successful meeting.

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Equilibrium and Transfer in Porous Media 3 A porous medium is composed of a solid matrix and its geometrical complement: the pore space. This pore space can be occupied by one or more fluids. The understanding of transport phenomena in porous media is a challenging intellectual task. This book provides a detailed analysis of the aspects required for the understanding of many experimental techniques in the field of porous media transport phenomena. It is aimed at students or engineers who may not be looking specifically to become theoreticians in porous media, but wish to integrate knowledge of porous media with their previous scientific culture, or who may have encountered them when dealing with a technological problem. While avoiding the details of the more mathematical and abstract developments of the theories of macroscopization, the author gives as accurate and rigorous an idea as possible of the methods used to establish the major laws of macroscopic behavior in porous media. He also illustrates the constitutive laws and equations by demonstrating some of their classical applications. The priority is to put the constitutive laws in concrete circumstances without going into technical detail. This third volume in the three-volume series focuses on the applications of isothermal transport and coupled transfers in porous media.

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Synchronous motors are indubitably the most effective device to drive industrial production systems and robots with precision and rapidity. Their control law is thus critical for combining at the same time high productivity to reduced energy consummation. As far as possible, the control algorithms must exploit the properties of these actuators. Therefore, this work draws on well adapted models resulting from the Park’s transformation, for both the most traditional machines with sinusoidal field distribution and for machines with non-sinusoidal field distribution which are more and more used in industry. Both, conventional control strategies like vector control (either in the synchronous reference frame or in the rotor frame) and advanced control theories like direct control and predictive control are thoroughly presented. In this context, a significant place is reserved to sensorless control which is an important and critical issue in tomorrow’s motors.

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Monitoring and diagnosis of electrical machine faults is a scientific and economic issue which is motivated by objectives for reliability and serviceability in electrical drives. This book provides a survey of the techniques used to detect the faults occurring in electrical drives: electrical, thermal and mechanical faults of the electrical machine, faults of the static converter and faults of the energy storage unit. Diagnosis of faults occurring in electrical drives is an essential part of a global monitoring system used to improve reliability and serviceability. This diagnosis is performed with a large variety of techniques: parameter estimation, state observation, Kalman filtering, spectral analysis, neural networks, fuzzy logic, artificial intelligence, etc. Particular emphasis in this book is put on the modeling of the electrical machine in faulty situations. Electrical Machines Diagnosis presents original results obtained mainly by French researchers in different domains. It will be useful as a guideline for the conception of more robust electrical machines and indeed for engineers who have to monitor and maintain electrical drives. As the monitoring and diagnosis of electrical machines is still an open domain, this book will also be very useful to researchers.

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The role of optical instruments is very important and affects all areas of human activity, from scientific analysis (such as spectrometry) to recreation and leisure pursuits like photography and television. Optical components are often an essential part of the instrument, but are not always visible. It is therefore useful and important to understand how they work. In this book the reader will find both a review of the most important components currently used, the theoretical foundation for their application, and an example of evolution. To do this, we first supply the basic knowledge in optics necessary for the understanding of the instruments: geometrical optics, photometry, colorimetry, image analysis and processing, as well as a short description of the sources used: lamps, lasers and semiconductor sources. Optical systems such as zoom lens under different illuminations are discussed. As a first example of application, the evolution of microscopy, up to the most recent technological progress, are given.

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Although complexity makes up the very fabric of our daily lives and has been more or less addressed in a wide variety of knowledge fields, the approaches developed in the Natural Sciences and the results obtained over the past century have not yet permeated Management Sciences very much. The main features of the phenomena that the Natural Sciences deal with are: non-linear behavior, self-organization and chaos. They are analyzed with the framing of what is called “systems thinking”, popularized by the mindset pertaining to cybernetics. All pioneers in systems thinking either had direct or indirect connections with Biology, which is the discipline considered complex par excellence by the public. When applying these concepts to Operations Management Systems and modeling organizations by BDI (Beliefs, Desires, Intentions) agents, the lack of predictability in the conduct of change management that is prone to bifurcations (tipping points) in terms of organizational structures and in forecasting future activities, reveals them to be ingrained in the interplay of complexity and chaos.

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Both a sense of urgency and a goodly amount of patience are required for any writer to produce a novel. Moving between these two poles, Jean-Philippe Toussaint here collects a series of short essays on the art of writing, both his own and that of writers he's admired, for example Kafka, Beckett, Dostoyevsky, and Proust. As Toussaint himself has said, "It's only natural for writers... to say a word about how they write and what they owe to great authors."

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