Search results for ""World Scientific Publishing""

This book reinforces an understanding of Economics by showing how basic mathematics is used to construct models of the economy. By taking wide-ranging examples drawn for virtually all areas of economics, it shows how model-building is an indispensable aid to understanding economics.The mathematical techniques used in the book are fairly rudimentary — optimisation methods and equation-solving are the primary tools used. A brief explanation of constrained optimisation using Lagrange multipliers is provided. Throughout, the emphasis is on how these techniques are fruitfully deployed in constructing economic models and solving economic problems. It bridges the gap between mathematical analysis and economic logic. For readers, it builds confidence in constructing their own models for purposes of analysis. The book is well-suited for self-study.

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This volume contains more than 900 problems in differential calculus, covering limits, continuity, derivatives, and their applications. The applications are comprised of a variety of approximations, growth and decay, optimization, curve sketching techniques, and analytical tools to investigate properties of parametrically given planar curves. The problems are sorted by topic, each opening with with a summary of the relevant mathematical notions and their properties. Through a careful selection of appropriate problems in each chapter, the book clearly communicates some of the big ideas and applications in calculus: the notion of a function, the notion of an infinitesimal, the notion of a differentiable function, and the notion of an approximation, among others. The book provides the answers to each problem, often with a detailed sketch of the solution process.With about 260 true-false and multiple-choice questions, the book provides its users with an accessible way to assess and practice their understanding of calculus related facts and nuances. More than 180 figures are included to help readers to visualize properties of functions, illustrate word problems, depict solutions, and provide an extensive bank of polar curves.The purpose of this problem collection is to serve as a supplementary learning resource for students who are studying university-level differential calculus. The book also acts as a teaching resource for calculus instructors.

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From independence in 1965, Singapore has experienced a meteoric rise to a modern developed city-state. What is less known is the part played by its foreign policy or by the men and women who contributed to its implementation and success. Here, several of Singapore's senior diplomats and Ambassadors tell in their own words, how they did their work, their experiences, their achievements and the challenges that they faced in promoting and safeguarding Singapore's strategic security and economic interests.

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With the development of the scanning tunneling microscope, nanoscience became an important discipline. Single atoms could be manipulated in a controlled manner, and it became possible to change matter at its 'ultimate' level; it is the level on which the properties of matter emerge. This possibility enables to construct and to produce devices, materials, etc. with very small sizes and completely new properties. That opens up new perspectives for technology and is in particular relevant in connection with nano-engineering.Nanosystems are unimaginably small and very fast. No doubt, this is an important characteristic. But there is another feature, possibly more relevant, in connection with nanoscience and nanotechnology. The essential point here is that we work at the 'ultimate level'. This is the smallest level at which the properties of our world emerge, at which functional matter can exist. In particular, at this level biological individuality comes into existence. This situation can be expressed in absolute terms: This is not only the strongest material ever made, this is the strongest material it will ever be possible to make (D Ratner and M Ratner, Nanotechnology and Homeland Security). This is a very general statement. All aspects of matter are concerned here. Through the variation of the composition various forms of matter emerge with different items.Nanosystems are usually small, but they offer nevertheless the possibility to vary the structure of atomic (molecular) ensembles, creating a diversity of new material-specific properties. A large variety of experimental possibilities come into play and flexible theoretical tools are needed at the basic level. This is reflected in the different disciplines: In nanoscience and nanotechnology we have various directions: Materials science, functional nanomaterials, nanoparticles, food chemistry, medicine with brain research, quantum and molecular computing, bioinformatics, magnetic nanostructures, nano-optics, nano-electronics, etc.The properties of matter, which are involved within these nanodisciplines, are ultimate in character, i.e., their characteristic properties come into existence at this level. The book is organized in this respect.

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Many applied mathematical disciplines, such as dynamical systems and optimization theory as well as classical mathematical disciplines like differential geometry and the theory of Lie groups, have a common foundation in general topology and multivariate calculus in normed vector spaces. In this book, students from both pure and applied subjects are offered an opportunity to work seriously with fundamental notions from mathematical analysis that are important not only from a mathematical point of view but also occur frequently in the theoretical parts of, for example, the engineering sciences. The book provides complete proofs of the basic results from topology and differentiability of mappings in normed vector spaces. It is a useful resource for students and researchers in mathematics and the many sciences that depend on fundamental techniques from mathematical analysis.In this second edition, the notions of compactness and sequentially compactness are developed with independent proofs for the main results. Thereby the material on compactness is apt for direct applications also in functional analysis, where the notion of sequentially compactness prevails. This edition also covers a new section on partial derivatives, and new material has been incorporated to make a more complete account of higher order derivatives in Banach spaces, including full proofs for symmetry of higher order derivatives and Taylor's formula. The exercise material has been reorganized from a collection of problem sets at the end of the book to a section at the end of each chapter with further results. Readers will find numerous new exercises at different levels of difficulty for practice.

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This is a book for medical students and first-year doctors who wish to learn how to approach a patient's symptoms, and sharpen their skills of clinical reasoning and diagnosis.Fifty-four presenting symptoms are discussed, covering approaches and conditions across various medical and surgical disciplines. Each chapter sets out the thought process behind history, examination, and investigations for a symptom, providing a systematic and practical algorithm to distinguish one differential from another. The reader will gain not only a functional approach to patients' presenting complaints, but also learn how to better organize and apply medical knowledge in diagnostic reasoning.

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The material for these volumes has been selected from the past twenty years' examination questions for graduate students at the University of California (Berkeley), Columbia University, the University of Chicago, MIT, State University of New York at Buffalo, Princeton University and the University of Wisconsin.

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Stein's startling technique for deriving probability approximations first appeared about 30 years ago. Since then, much has been done to refine and develop the method, but it is still a highly active field of research, with many outstanding problems, both theoretical and in applications. This volume, the proceedings of a workshop held in honour of Charles Stein in Singapore, August 2003, contains contributions from many of the mathematicians at the forefront of this effort. It provides a cross-section of the work currently being undertaken, with many pointers to future directions. The papers in the collection include applications to the study of random binary search trees, Brownian motion on manifolds, Monte-Carlo integration, Edgeworth expansions, regenerative phenomena, the geometry of random point sets, and random matrices.

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This book is a must-read for all who love nature and the environment. It contains 50 inspiring essays written by Singaporeans and friends who share their perspectives, expertise and experience — as scientists, lawyers, economists, engineers, bankers, government officers, and civil society — all linked by a love for nature, for the environment, and for Singapore. The essays focus on the protection and preservation of Singapore's rich biodiversity (primates, colugos, otters, butterflies, dragonflies, stick-insects, birds, coral reefs, mangroves and sea grasses); efforts to save special areas (the Lower Peirce Reservoir, Chek Jawa, Sungei Buloh, the Rail Corridor and the first marine nature reserve); the contributions of NGOs (Nature Society, Herpetological Society, Waterways Watch Society); and the efforts of scholars, the government and the private sector to ensure a clean and green City in Nature, amidst the challenges of limited space and climate change.

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There was once a vibrant river that flowed through the heart of Singapore. The river brought life and joy to everyone, but when people began to mistreat it, it lost its sparkle.Journey through the true story of the Singapore River, and discover how the river gained its sparkle back once again.This book is supported by a grant from the National Heritage Board.

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This volume is a collection of the Nobel lectures delivered by the Nobel laureates, together with their biographies and the presentation speeches by Nobel Committee members for the period 2011-2015. The criterion for the Physics award is to the discoverer of a physical phenomenon that changed our views, or to the inventor of a new physical process that gave enormous benefits to either science at large or to the public. The biographies are interesting to read and the Nobel lectures provide detailed explanations of the phenomena for which the laureates were awarded the Nobel Prize.List of Nobel laureates and their award citations:(2011) 'for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass'.

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This book aims to describe in simple terms the new area of statistical mechanics known as spin-glasses, encompassing systems in which quenched disorder is the dominant factor. The book begins with a non-mathematical explanation of the problem, and the modern understanding of the physics of the spin-glass state is formulated in general terms. Next, the 'magic' of the replica symmetry breaking scheme is demonstrated and the physics behind it discussed. Recent experiments on real spin-glass materials are briefly described to demonstrate how this somewhat abstract physics can be studied in the laboratory. The final chapters of the book are devoted to statistical models of neural networks.The material here is self-contained and should be accessible to students with a basic knowledge of theoretical physics and statistical mechanics. It has been used for a one-term graduate lecture course at the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics.

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This is an introductory book on elementary particles and their interactions. It starts out with many-body Schrödinger theory and second quantization and leads, via its generalization, to relativistic fields of various spins and to gravity. The text begins with the best known quantum field theory so far, the quantum electrodynamics of photon and electrons (QED). It continues by developing the theory of strong interactions between the elementary constituents of matter (quarks). This is possible due to the property called asymptotic freedom. On the way one has to tackle the problem of removing various infinities by renormalization. The divergent sums of infinitely many diagrams are performed with the renormalization group or by variational perturbation theory (VPT). The latter is an outcome of the Feynman-Kleinert variational approach to path integrals discussed in two earlier books of the author, one representing a comprehensive treatise on path integrals, the other dealing with critial phenomena. Unlike ordinary perturbation theory, VPT produces uniformly convergent series which are valid from weak to strong couplings, where they describe critical phenomena.The present book develops the theory of effective actions which allow to treat quantum phenomena with classical formalism. For example, it derives the observed anomalous power laws of strongly interacting theories from an extremum of the action. Their fluctuations are not based on Gaussian distributions, as in the perturbative treatment of quantum field theories, or in asymptotically-free theories, but on deviations from the average which are much larger and which obey power-like distributions.Exactly solvable models are discussed and their physical properties are compared with those derived from general methods. In the last chapter we discuss the problem of quantizing the classical theory of gravity.

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This is an introductory book on elementary particles and their interactions. It starts out with many-body Schrödinger theory and second quantization and leads, via its generalization, to relativistic fields of various spins and to gravity. The text begins with the best known quantum field theory so far, the quantum electrodynamics of photon and electrons (QED). It continues by developing the theory of strong interactions between the elementary constituents of matter (quarks). This is possible due to the property called asymptotic freedom. On the way one has to tackle the problem of removing various infinities by renormalization. The divergent sums of infinitely many diagrams are performed with the renormalization group or by variational perturbation theory (VPT). The latter is an outcome of the Feynman-Kleinert variational approach to path integrals discussed in two earlier books of the author, one representing a comprehensive treatise on path integrals, the other dealing with critial phenomena. Unlike ordinary perturbation theory, VPT produces uniformly convergent series which are valid from weak to strong couplings, where they describe critical phenomena.The present book develops the theory of effective actions which allow to treat quantum phenomena with classical formalism. For example, it derives the observed anomalous power laws of strongly interacting theories from an extremum of the action. Their fluctuations are not based on Gaussian distributions, as in the perturbative treatment of quantum field theories, or in asymptotically-free theories, but on deviations from the average which are much larger and which obey power-like distributions.Exactly solvable models are discussed and their physical properties are compared with those derived from general methods. In the last chapter we discuss the problem of quantizing the classical theory of gravity.

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This invaluable book features bibliographies, important papers, and speeches (for example at international congresses) of Wolf Prize winners, such as V I Arnold, P R Deligne, H Furstenberg, I M Gel'fand, P A Griffiths, M Gromov and G A Margulis. This is the first time that documents on Wolf Prize winners have been published together. Since the work of the Wolf laureates covers a wide spectrum, much of the mathematics of the twentieth century comes to life in this book.

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The Encyclopedia of Cosmology, in four volumes, is a major, long-lasting, seminal reference at the graduate student level, laid out by the most prominent, respected researchers in the general field of Cosmology. These volumes will be a comprehensive review of the most important concepts and current status in the field, covering both theory and observation.One of the attractive features of the encyclopedia is that it is accompanied by supplementary materials including videos and simulations of the numerical computation. This will help the readers to better understand and visualize the concepts discussed.This encyclopedia is edited by Dr. Giovanni Fazio from Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, with an advisory board comprised of renowned scientists: Lars Hernquist and Abraham Loeb (Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), and Christopher McKee (UC Berkeley). Each volume is authored/edited by a specialist in the area: Galaxy Formation and Evolution written by Rennan Barkana (Tel Aviv University), Numerical Simulations in Cosmology edited by Kentaro Nagamine (Osaka University / University of Nevada), Dark Energy written by Shinji Tsujikawa (Tokyo University of Science), and Dark Matter written by Jihn E Kim (Seoul National University).

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The Companion Media Pack is available in the .Introduction to Windows® and Graphics Programming with Visual C++® (2nd Edition) provides an accessible approach to the study of Windows programming. It is intended to be an introduction to Visual C++ for technical people including practicing engineers, engineering students, and others interested in Windows programming and its convenient graphics capabilities. While the book is aimed at a technical audience, its mathematical content is modest and should be readable by most people with an interest in C++ programming. Readers are introduced to Windows programming in a natural way; making use of the object-oriented environment, the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), and the document/view organization. Visual C++ is part of Microsoft's Visual Studio and provides full support of program development at all stages — from design to debugging.This second edition brings the original book up to date reflecting the evolution of Visual C++ and the Windows environment since the first edition. All example projects, figures and text in the book have been revised and coverage of touch screen developments has been added. Two new chapters on touch screen programming are based on programming strategies developed throughout the book. New examples demonstrate touch screen operations and consider programming for a tablet environment. More than seventy example projects are provided in the book's Companion Media Pack. The structure and coding for each example project are described thoroughly in a step-by-step fashion. Exercises at the end of each chapter provide opportunities to revisit and extend the tutorial examples. The media pack files include complete program code for all projects as well as files with classes and functions for handling geometric objects and graphs. The graphics examples require only standard Microsoft resources and may be easily adapted for a wide variety of application programs.The Companion Media Pack can be readily updated as Visual C++ continues to evolve. For example, the first update of the media pack was made after the release of a new version of Visual C++. It provides a full set of example projects developed with the new version as an addition to the book's original examples. Continuing updates of the media pack are planned as appropriate.

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This text continues the exploration of the use of MATLAB tools and features in visualizing physical processes. The symbolic math packages are important in solving those problems which are amenable to closed form solution, while the numerical packages are used for the remaining problems. The results for the solutions use the MATLAB graphics packages to help visualize the properties of the solutions. User dialogues are designed to allow users to change the input parameters in order to see how the dynamics of the solutions depends on the parameters of the specific problem. In particular movies are used to display the dynamical evolution of solutions in time.

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The first two volumes of The Little Red Dot series covered a wide range of views about Singapore's diplomacy by Singaporean diplomats. This new addition to the series offers a complementary perspective of Singapore and its bilateral relations, through the eyes of past heads of missions from foreign countries who have served as ambassadors to Singapore. The reader will be able to glean insights from the foreign diplomats who took an active role in getting to know Singapore, and at the same time, also worked hard to promote their respective countries' interests. As seen from their perspectives, the reader can learn more about what was unique about Singapore, what they learnt and what made their postings to Singapore memorable. These candid reflections will allow Singaporean readers to understand how different elements of our country are often seen as a whole, and how that in turn contributes to the impressions that our foreign friends have of Singapore. Often cited by the contributors are the success of Singapore's economic development, our cohesive multi-cultural and multi-religious society, our good governance, our education system and opportunities for the young. These aspects that are highlighted, among others, are what makes Singapore unique and they are also important to Singapore's future. There were, of course, some critical comments on some aspects of our culture and political arrangements. We should evaluate them with an open mind, always willing to learn from our friends.

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The book presents the following counterintuitive theoretical results breaking several paradigms of quantum mechanics and providing alternative interpretations of some important phenomena in atomic and molecular physics. 1) Singular solutions of the Schrödinger and Dirac equations should not have been always rejected: they can explain the experimental high-energy tail of the linear momentum distribution in the ground state of hydrogenic atoms. Application: a unique way to test intimate details of the nuclear structure by performing atomic (rather than nuclear) experiments and calculations. 2) Charge exchange is not really an inherently quantal phenomenon, but rather has classical roots. Application: continuum lowering in plasmas. 3) The most challenging problem of classical physics that led to the development of quantum mechanics — the failure to explain the stability of atoms — can be solved within a classical formalism that has its roots in Dirac's works. The underlying physics can be interpreted as a non-Einsteinian time dilation. 4) In two-electron atoms/ions, the spin-spin interaction (singular in its nature), usually considered unimportant, makes a significant contribution to the binding energy. 5) In magnetized plasmas the standard Inglis-Teller concept, concerning the number of observed lines in spectral series of hydrogen, breaks down. Application: new plasma diagnostic. 6) Extrema in transition energies of molecules/quasimiolecules can result in dips (rather than usually considered satellites) within spectral lines. Application: the experimental determination of rates of charge exchange between multicharged ions — important for magnetic fusion in Tokamaks, for population inversion in the soft x-ray and VUV ranges, for ion storage devices, and for astrophysics.

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As key nodes that connected ancient silk routes traversing China, Japan and India, trading hubs, towns and cities in Java and Sumatra and other places in Asia were key destination points for merchants, monks and other itinerants plying these routes.Recent archaeological excavations in countries bordering the South China Sea and around the Indian Ocean unveiled remarkable similarities in artifacts recovered both on land and from the sea. The similarities underlined the many facets of regional exchanges and cross-cultural influences among people and places in these networks. Some of the findings indicate a distinct Chinese presence in the commercial, social and religious activities of these early Asian trading posts.This book collects papers from the symposium on Ancient Silk Trade Routes — Cross Cultural Exchanges and Their Legacies in Asia. It explores several threads arising from this regional exchange of goods and ideas, in particular, the cross-cultural dimensions of the exchanges in the areas of textile trade, ceramic routes, trading hubs, arts and artifacts and Buddhism.

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This volume is a collection of the Nobel lectures delivered by the prizewinners, together with their biographies and the presentation speeches by Nobel Committee members for the period 2006-2010. The criterion for the Physics award is to the discoverer of a physical phenomenon that changed our views, or to the inventor of a new physical process that gave enormous benefits to either science at large or to the public. The biographies are remarkably interesting to read and the Nobel lectures provide detailed explanations of the phenomena for which the Laureates were awarded the Nobel Prize.Aspiring young scientists as well as more experienced ones, but also the interested public will learn a lot from and appreciate the geniuses of these narrations.List of prizewinners and their discoveries:(2006) to John C Mather and George F Smoot “for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation”The very detailed observations that the Laureates have carried out from the COBE satellite have played a major role in the development of modern cosmology into a precise science.(2007) to Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg “for the discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance”Applications of this phenomenon have revolutionized techniques for retrieving data from hard disks. The discovery also plays a major role in various magnetic sensors as well as for the development of a new generation of electronics. The use of Giant Magnetoresistance can be regarded as one of the first major applications of nanotechnology.(2008) to Yoichiro Nambu “for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics“, and to Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa “for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature”Why is there something instead of nothing? Why are there so many different elementary particles? The Laureates presented theoretical insights that give us a deeper understanding of what happens far inside the tiniest building blocks of matter.(2009) to Charles Kuen Kao “for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication“, and to Willard S Boyle and George E Smith “for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit — the CCD sensor”Kao's discoveries have paved the way for optical fiber technology, which today is used for almost all telephony and data communication. Boyle and Smith have invented a digital image sensor — CCD, or charge-coupled device — which today has become an electronic eye in almost all areas of photography.(2010) to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov “for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene”The Laureates have shown that a thin flake of ordinary carbon, just one atom thick, has exceptional properties that originate from the remarkable world of quantum physics.

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The Marcel Grossmann Meetings seek to further the development of the foundations and applications of Einstein's general relativity by promoting theoretical understanding in the relevant fields of physics, mathematics, astronomy and astrophysics and to direct future technological, observational, and experimental efforts. The meetings discuss recent developments in classical and quantum aspects of gravity, and in cosmology and relativistic astrophysics, with major emphasis on mathematical foundations and physical predictions, having the main objective of gathering scientists from diverse backgrounds for deepening our understanding of spacetime structure and reviewing the current state of the art in the theory, observations and experiments pertinent to relativistic gravitation. The range of topics is broad, going from the more abstract classical theory, quantum gravity, branes and strings, to more concrete relativistic astrophysics observations and modeling.The three volumes of the proceedings of MG13 give a broad view of all aspects of gravitational physics and astrophysics, from mathematical issues to recent observations and experiments. The scientific program of the meeting included 33 morning plenary talks during 6 days, and 75 parallel sessions over 4 afternoons. Volume A contains plenary and review talks ranging from the mathematical foundations of classical and quantum gravitational theories including recent developments in string/brane theories, to precision tests of general relativity including progress towards the detection of gravitational waves, and from supernova cosmology to relativistic astrophysics including such topics as gamma ray bursts, black hole physics both in our galaxy and in active galactic nuclei in other galaxies, and neutron star and pulsar astrophysics. Volumes B and C include parallel sessions which touch on dark matter, neutrinos, X-ray sources, astrophysical black holes, neutron stars, binary systems, radiative transfer, accretion disks, quasors, gamma ray bursts, supernovas, alternative gravitational theories, perturbations of collapsed objects, analog models, black hole thermodynamics, numerical relativity, gravitational lensing, large scale structure, observational cosmology, early universe models and cosmic microwave background anisotropies, inhomogeneous cosmology, inflation, global structure, singularities, chaos, Einstein-Maxwell systems, wormholes, exact solutions of Einstein's equations, gravitational waves, gravitational wave detectors and data analysis, precision gravitational measurements, quantum gravity and loop quantum gravity, quantum cosmology, strings and branes, self-gravitating systems, gamma ray astronomy, and cosmic rays and the history of general relativity.

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This needs-based book summarizes important correlations about interpretation of structures — i.r. frequencies (both theoretical and experimental) from a vast amount of data available in a number of excellent encyclopedic books. It contains a short elementary introduction on the calculation methodology for Normal Co-ordinate Analysis that will aid students in assigning a particular band to a functional group or normal mode. Statistical correlations of the i.r.-frequency data are dealt with in a number of examples not found in most other books. This book also details various spectroscopies with different optics and strategies for analyzing the spectron. Students will also get ample practice with a comprehensive section containing more than 350 problems and worked-out solutions.

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The book “Leptons and Quarks” was first published in the early 1980s, when the program of the experimental search for the intermediate bosons W and Z and Higgs boson H was formulated. The aim and scope of the present extended edition of the book, written after the experimental discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, is to reflect the various stages of this 30+ years search. Along with the text of the first edition of “Leptons and Quarks” it contains extracts from a number of books published by World Scientific and an article from “On the concepts of vacuum and mass and the search for higgs” available from www.worldscientific.com/worldscinet/mpla or from arxiv.org/abs/1212.1031.The book is unique in communicating the Electroweak Theory at a basic level and in connecting the concept of Lorenz invariant mass with the concept of the Extended Standard Model, which includes gravitons as the carriers of gravitational interaction.

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The fourth edition of this book has been widely revised. It includes additional chapters and some sections are complemented with either new ones or an extension of their content.In this latest edition a complete treatment of the physics and properties of semiconductors is presented, covering transport phenomena in semiconductors, scattering mechanisms, radiation effects and displacement damages. Furthermore, this edition presents a comprehensive treatment of the Coulomb scattering on screened nuclear potentials resulting from electrons, protons, light- and heavy-ions — ranging from (very) low up to ultra-relativistic kinetic energies — and allowing one to derive the corresponding NIEL (non-ionizing energy-loss) doses deposited in any material.The contents are organized into two parts: Chapters 1 to 7 cover Particle Interactions and Displacement Damage while the remaining chapters focus on Radiation Environments and Particle Detection.This book can serve as reference for graduate students and final-year undergraduates and also as supplement for courses in particle, astroparticle, space physics and instrumentation. A section of the book is directed toward courses in medical physics. Researchers in experimental particle physics at low, medium, and high energy who are dealing with instrumentation will also find the book useful.

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The fifth and sixth volumes of the Handbook of Carbon Nano Materials focus on fundamental properties and key applications of graphene. Graphene, the thinnest known material made of a single atom thick sheet of carbon atoms arranged hexagonally, offers great opportunities for application development in nanotechnology. This handbook covers fundamental properties, characterization, chemical manipulation, and applications of graphene. Specific applications cover latest developments in chemical manipulation, thermodynamic characterization, energy conversion and storage, and biosensor development.

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With a Foreword by Steven WeinbergIn this richly illustrated book, Nobel Laureate Gerard 't Hooft and Theoretical Physicist Stefan Vandoren describe the enormous diversity of natural phenomena that take place at different time scales.In the tradition of the bestseller Powers of Ten, the authors zoom in and out in time, each step with a factor of ten. Starting from one second, time scales are enlarged until processes are reached that take much longer than the age of the universe. After the largest possible eternities, the reader is treated to the shortest and fastest phenomena known. Then the authors increase with powers of ten, until again the second is reached at the end of the book.At each time scale, interesting natural phenomena occur, spread over all scientific disciplines: orbital and rotation periods of planets and stars, decay times of elementary particles and atoms, biological rhythms and evolution processes, but also the different geological time scales. remove

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The major progress in computer vision allows us to make extensive use of medical imaging data to provide us better diagnosis, treatment and predication of diseases. Computer vision can exploit texture, shape, contour and prior knowledge along with contextual information from image sequence and provide 3D and 4D information that helps with better human understanding. Many powerful tools have been available through image segmentation, machine learning, pattern classification, tracking, reconstruction to bring much needed quantitative information not easily available by trained human specialists. The aim of the book is for both medical imaging professionals to acquire and interpret the data, and computer vision professionals to provide enhanced medical information by using computer vision techniques. The final objective is to benefit the patients without adding to the already high medical costs.

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The concept of improving the use of electromagnetic energy to achieve a variety of qualitative and quantitative spectroscopic measurements on solid and liquid materials has been proliferating at a rapid rate. The use of such technologies to measure chemical composition, appearance, for classification, and to achieve detailed understanding of material interactions has prompted a dramatic expansion in the use and development of spectroscopic techniques over a variety of academic and commercial fields.The Concise Handbook of Analytical Spectroscopy is integrated into 5 volumes, each covering the theory, instrumentation, sampling methods, experimental design, and data analysis techniques, as well as essential reference tables, figures, and spectra for each spectroscopic region. The detailed practical aspects of applying spectroscopic tools for many of the most exciting and current applications are covered. Featured applications include: medical, biomedical, optical, physics, common commercial analysis methods, spectroscopic quantitative and qualitative techniques, and advanced methods.This multi-volume handbook is designed specifically as a reference tool for students, commercial development and quality scientists, and researchers or technologists in a variety of measurement endeavours.Number of Illustrations and Tables: 393 b/w illus., 304 colour illus, 413 tables.Related Link(s)

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The Handbook of Environment and Waste Management, Volume 2, Land and Groundwater Pollution Control, is a comprehensive compilation of topics that are at the forefront of many of the technical advances and practices in solid waste management and groundwater pollution control. These include biosolids management, landfill for solid waste disposal, landfill liners, beneficial reuse of waste products, municipal solid waste recovery and recycling and groundwater remediation.Internationally recognized authorities in the field of environment and waste management contribute chapters in their areas of expertise. This handbook is an essential source of reference for professionals and researchers in the areas of solid waste management and groundwater pollution control, and as a text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in these fields.

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Professor Chen Ning Yang, an eminent contemporary physicist, was Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, from 1955 to 1966, and Albert Einstein Professor of Physics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook until his retirement in 1999. He has been Distinguished Professor-at-Large at the Chinese University of Hong Kong since 1986 and Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, since 1998.Since receiving his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1948, Prof Yang has made great impacts in both abstract theory and phenomenological analysis in modern physics. In 1983, he published “Selected Papers (1945-1980), With Commentary”. It has been considered by Freeman Dyson as one of his favorite books. The present book is a sequel to that earlier volume. It is a collection of his personally selected papers (1971-2012) supplemented by his insightful commentaries. Its contents reflect Professor Yang's changing interests after he reached age sixty. It also includes commentaries written by him in 2011 when he is 89 years old.The papers and commentaries in this unique collection comprise a remarkable personal and professional chronicle, shedding light on both the intellectual development of a great physicist and on the nature of scientific inquiry.

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Health Assessment of Engineered Structures has become one of the most active research areas and has attracted multi-disciplinary interest. Since available financial recourses are very limited, extending the lifespan of existing bridges, buildings and other infrastructures has become a major challenge to the engineering profession world-wide. Some of its related areas are only in their development phase. As the study of structural health assessment matures, more new areas are being identified to complement the concept.This book covers some of the most recent developments (theoretical and experimental) and application potentials in structural health assessment. It is designed to present currently available information in an organised form to interested parties who are not experts in the subject.Each chapter is authored by the most active scholar(s) in the area. After discussing the general concept, various currently available methods of structural health assessment (such as the use of smart sensors) are presented. Health Assessment discusses the following: sensor types, platforms and data conditioning for practical applications; wireless collection of sensor data, sensor power needs and on-site energy harvesting; and long term monitoring of structures. Uncertainty in collected data is also extensively addressed. A chapter discussing future directions in structural health assessment is also included.

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In recent years, China has taken a number of effective measures to strengthen the supervision of food quality and safety, but food safety incidents still occur sometimes. The recurrence and intractability of such incidents suggest that, in addition to the imperfect supervision system, the greatest obstacle to China's food quality safety management is that China's “farm to fork” food supply chain has too many stages, the members on the supply chain have not form a stable strategic and cooperative relation, and on the other hand, during the transitional period, some practitioners lack social responsibility. Therefore, China's food quality safety management and the establishment of food quality and safety traceability system should follow the development trend of international food quality and safety supervision, and should combine with the establishment of China's agricultural industrialization and standardization, integrate China's existing but isolated effective measures, such as the establishment of bases for the implementation of the system of claiming certificates or invoices, for the performance of Management Regulations for Pig Slaughtering and Quarantine Inspection in Designated Places, and for the conduct of World Expo, as well as the establishment of market access system, take into consideration the demand, the dynamic mechanism, and the performance of important measures of food supply chain members for food quality and safety control, as well as the difficulties and the deep-seated reasons in the implementation process of such measures.To this end, this book chooses important agricultural products of vegetables, pork and aquatic products as the subjects investigated. From an “integrated” vertical perspective of the supply chain and according to the degree of industrialization of different products, focusing on the key links of quality and safety control of vegetables, pork and aquatic products, this book carries out empirical analysis of the construction of food quality and safety control system, such as HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point) quality control system and food quality and safety traceability system, deeply analyzes and straightens out the dynamic mechanism and the performance of different business entities implementing the food quality and safety management system, as well as the bottleneck and deep-seated causes of promoting advanced experience of pilot areas and enterprises in China, and put forward ideas and suggestions of establishing long-term effective food quality and safety management system with regard to vegetables, pork, and aquatic products, which can provide scientific basis for the government to design food quality and safety management policies.

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Computational finance is an interdisciplinary field which joins financial mathematics, stochastics, numerics and scientific computing. Its task is to estimate as accurately and efficiently as possible the risks that financial instruments generate. This volume consists of a series of cutting-edge surveys of recent developments in the field written by leading international experts. These make the subject accessible to a wide readership in academia and financial businesses.The book consists of 13 chapters divided into 3 parts: foundations, algorithms and applications. Besides surveys of existing results, the book contains many new previously unpublished results.

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This is a highly interdisciplinary book straddling physics and complex systems such as living organisms. The presentation is from the perspective of physics, in a manner accessible to those interested in scientific knowledge integrated within its socio-cultural and philosophical backgrounds. Two key areas of human understanding, namely physics and conscious complex systems, are presented in simple language. An optional technical presentation is also given in parallel where it is needed.

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The modern history of Iraq is punctuated by a series of successive and radical ruptures (coups d'etat, changes of regime, military adventures and foreign invasions) whose chronological markers are relatively easy to identify. Although researchers cannot ignore these ruptures, they should also be encouraged to establish links between the moments when the breaks occur and the longue durée, in order to gain a better understanding of the period.Combining a variety of different disciplinary and methodological perspectives, this collection of essays seeks to establish some new markers which will open fresh perspectives on the history of Iraq in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and suggest a narrative that fits into new paradigms. The book covers the various different periods of the modern state (the British occupation and mandate, the monarchy, the first revolutions and the decades of Ba'thist rule) through the lens of significant groups in Iraq society, including artists, film-makers, political and opposition groups, members of ethnic and religious groups, and tribes.

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The International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) is a competition for high school students. China has taken part in the IMO 21 times since 1985 and has won the top ranking for countries 14 times, with a multitude of golds for individual students. The six students China has sent every year were selected from 20 to 30 students among approximately 130 students who took part in the annual China Mathematical Competition during the winter months. This volume of comprises a collection of original problems with solutions that China used to train their Olympiad team in the years from 2009 to 2010. Mathematical Olympiad problems with solutions for the years 2002-2008 appear in an earlier volume, Mathematical Olympiad in China.

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The standard (Markovian) transport model based on the Boltzmann equation cannot describe some non-equilibrium processes called anomalous that take place in many disordered solids. Causes of anomality lie in non-uniformly scaled (fractal) spatial heterogeneities, in which particle trajectories take cluster form. Furthermore, particles can be located in some domains of small sizes (traps) for a long time. Estimations show that path length and waiting time distributions are often characterized by heavy tails of the power law type. This behavior allows the introduction of time and space derivatives of fractional orders. Distinction of path length distribution from exponential is interpreted as a consequence of media fractality, and analogous property of waiting time distribution as a presence of memory.In this book, a novel approach using equations with derivatives of fractional orders is applied to describe anomalous transport and relaxation in disordered semiconductors, dielectrics and quantum dot systems. A relationship between the self-similarity of transport, the Levy stable limiting distributions and the kinetic equations with fractional derivatives is established. It is shown that unlike the well-known Scher-Montroll and Arkhipov-Rudenko models, which are in a sense alternatives to the normal transport model, fractional differential equations provide a unified mathematical framework for describing normal and dispersive transport. The fractional differential formalism allows the equations of bipolar transport to be written down and transport in distributed dispersion systems to be described. The relationship between fractional transport equations and the generalized limit theorem reveals the probabilistic aspects of the phenomenon in which a dispersive to Gaussian transport transition occurs in a time-of-flight experiment as the applied voltage is decreased and/or the sample thickness increased. Recent experiments devoted to studies of transport in quantum dot arrays are discussed in the framework of dispersive transport models. The memory phenomena in systems under consideration are discussed in the analysis of fractional equations.It is shown that the approach based on the anomalous transport models and the fractional kinetic equations may be very useful in some problems that involve nano-sized systems. These are photon counting statistics of blinking single quantum dot fluorescence, relaxation of current in colloidal quantum dot arrays, and some others.

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This highly illustrated book describes the properties of liquid water and the relevance of these properties to life, in a way that makes the content accessible to anyone. It will raise the awareness of the reader on the vital importance of water to all life on earth. It is a book of science interwoven into the fabric of a story.There are very few books on water aimed at the general public. This volume will appeal to both adults and students with its superb delivery of scientific knowledge in highly accessible prose.

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The Erice International Seminars are multidisciplinary seminars attended by over 100 eminent participants from all fields of Science. Each year, a few scientific issues are selected and experts are invited to present contrasting views during the plenary multidisciplinary sessions of the Seminar, followed by general debates. These sessions offer a unique opportunity for specialists to enlarge their fields of vision by being confronted to the ideas and suggestions from high level scientists in complementary domains of science. Associated workshops allow the experts to further refine and process the ideas evoked during the seminar. This year's topics are focused on the World Energy Crisis and more specifically on the Essential Technologies for Moderating Climate Change and Improving Energy Security and for Energy & Limits of Development. We also concentrated on Managing the Challenges of Climate Change, Energy Security and Pollution in Asian Countries. On Global Monitoring of the Planet we have focused on the Climate Change issues and specifically on the Sensitivity of Climate to Additional CO2 as indicated by Water Cycle Feedback Issues, Climate Uncertainties Addressed by Satellites, and the Basic Mathematics Needed for All Models. In Information Security we focused on Cyber Conflict and Cyber Stability. For Pollution and Medicine we focused on the Revolution in the Environmental Health Sciences and the Emergence of Green Chemistry.

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