springer springer aug 2012 (Oltre 2.100 risultati)

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -At the time of his sudden death in March 2011, well-known children¿s literature scholar Lawrence Sipe was North American Editor-in-Chief of Children's Literature in Education: An International Quarterly. A year later, this volume appeared in the form of a special commemorative issue to honour his contribution to the field. Reflecting the areas where Larry Sipe made his strongest contributions to our understanding of young people and their literature, the articles include a study of a single picturebook, a report on young people¿s responses to a different picturebook, and two projects to incorporate actual responses from children into more broadly theoretical perspectives. An unfinished article by Larry Sipe himself is included, as are a number of commentaries by students from his classes at the University of Pennsylvania.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 120 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -Data quality is one of the most important problems in data management. A database system typically aims to support the creation, maintenance, and use of large amount of data, focusing on the quantity of data. However, real-life data are often dirty: inconsistent, duplicated, inaccurate, incomplete, or stale. Dirty data in a database routinely generate misleading or biased analytical results and decisions, and lead to loss of revenues, credibility and customers. With this comes the need for data quality management. In contrast to traditional data management tasks, data quality management enables the detection and correction of errors in the data, syntactic or semantic, in order to improve the quality of the data and hence, add value to business processes. While data quality has been a longstanding problem for decades, the prevalent use of the Web has increased the risks, on an unprecedented scale, of creating and propagating dirty data. This monograph gives an overview of fundamental issues underlying central aspects of data quality, namely, data consistency, data deduplication, data accuracy, data currency, and information completeness. We promote a uniform logical framework for dealing with these issues, based on data quality rules. The text is organized into seven chapters, focusing on relational data. Chapter One introduces data quality issues. A conditional dependency theory is developed in Chapter Two, for capturing data inconsistencies. It is followed by practical techniques in Chapter 2b for discovering conditional dependencies, and for detecting inconsistencies and repairing data based on conditional dependencies. Matching dependencies are introduced in Chapter Three, as matching rules for data deduplication. A theory of relative information completeness is studied in Chapter Four, revising the classical Closed World Assumption and the Open World Assumption, to characterize incomplete information in the real world. A data currency model is presented in Chapter Five, to identify the current values of entities in a database and to answer queries with the current values, in the absence of reliable timestamps. Finally, interactions between these data quality issues are explored in Chapter Six. Important theoretical results and practical algorithms are covered, but formal proofs are omitted. The bibliographical notes contain pointers to papers in which the results were presented and proven, as well as references to materials for further reading. This text is intended for a seminar course at the graduate level. It is also to serve as a useful resource for researchers and practitioners who are interested in the study of data quality. The fundamental research on data quality draws on several areas, including mathematical logic, computational complexity and database theory. It has raised as many questions as it has answered, and is a rich source of questions and vitality. Table of Contents: Data Quality: An Overview / Conditional Dependencies / Cleaning Data with Conditional Dependencies / Data Deduplication / Information Completeness / Data Currency / Interactions between Data Quality IssuesSpringer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 220 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -In 1991, a group of researchers chose the term digital libraries to describe an emerging field of research, development, and practice. Since then, Virginia Tech has had funded research in this area, largely through its Digital Library Research Laboratory. This book is the first in a four book series that reports our key findings and current research investigations. Underlying this book series are six completed dissertations (Gonçalves, Kozievitch, Leidig, Murthy, Shen, Torres), eight dissertations underway, and many masters theses. These reflect our experience with a long string of prototype or production systems developed in the lab, such as CITIDEL, CODER, CTRnet, Ensemble, ETANA, ETD-db, MARIAN, and Open Digital Libraries. There are hundreds of related publications, presentations, tutorials, and reports. We have built upon that work so this book, and the others in the series, will address digital library related needs in many computer science, information science, and library science (e.g., LIS) courses, as well as the requirements of researchers, developers, and practitioners. Much of the early work in the digital library field struck a balance between addressing real-world needs, integrating methods from related areas, and advancing an ever-expanding research agenda. Our work has fit in with these trends, but simultaneously has been driven by a desire to provide a firm conceptual and formal basis for the field.Our aim has been to move from engineering to science. We claim that our 5S (Societies, Scenarios, Spaces, Structures, Streams) framework, discussed in publications dating back to at least 1998, provides a suitable basis. This book introduces 5S, and the key theoretical and formal aspects of the 5S framework. While the 5S framework may be used to describe many types of information systems, and is likely to have even broader utility and appeal, we focus here on digital libraries. Our view of digital libraries is broad, so further generalization should be straightforward. We have connected with related fields, including hypertext/hypermedia, information storage and retrieval, knowledge management, machine learning, multimedia, personal information management, and Web 2.0. Applications have included managing not only publications, but also archaeological information, educational resources, fish images, scientific datasets, and scientific experiments/ simulations. Table of Contents: Introduction / Exploration / Mathematical Preliminaries / Minimal Digital Library / Archaeological Digital Libraries / 5S Results: Lemmas, Proofs, and 5SSuite / Glossary / Bibliography / Authors' Biographies / IndexSpringer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 184 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -The key idea behind active learning is that a machine learning algorithm can perform better with less training if it is allowed to choose the data from which it learns. An active learner may pose 'queries,' usually in the form of unlabeled data instances to be labeled by an 'oracle' (e.g., a human annotator) that already understands the nature of the problem. This sort of approach is well-motivated in many modern machine learning and data mining applications, where unlabeled data may be abundant or easy to come by, but training labels are difficult, time-consuming, or expensive to obtain. This book is a general introduction to active learning. It outlines several scenarios in which queries might be formulated, and details many query selection algorithms which have been organized into four broad categories, or 'query selection frameworks.' We also touch on some of the theoretical foundations of active learning, and conclude with an overview of the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches in practice, including a summary of ongoing work to address these open challenges and opportunities. Table of Contents: Automating Inquiry / Uncertainty Sampling / Searching Through the Hypothesis Space / Minimizing Expected Error and Variance / Exploiting Structure in Data / Theory / Practical ConsiderationsSpringer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 116 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -Climate change is acknowledged as being one of the most important areas of research today. Increasing global temperatures will impact all of us to a greater or lesser extent. From the point of view of research it is an enormously important and complex subject. However, little attention is paid to its relationship to astronomy, the sun in particular but not exclusively.Though directed at an astronomically inclined readership, and providing some less well-known astronomically related information, studies and concepts, this book will also appeal to a broader public, who need to understand the subject of climate change and learn of all the various theories and possible solutions.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 300 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -The study of what can be computed by a team of autonomous mobile robots, originally started in robotics and AI, has become increasingly popular in theoretical computer science (especially in distributed computing), where it is now an integral part of the investigations on computability by mobile entities. The robots are identical computational entities located and able to move in a spatial universe; they operate without explicit communication and are usually unable to remember the past; they are extremely simple, with limited resources, and individually quite weak. However, collectively the robots are capable of performing complex tasks, and form a system with desirable fault-tolerant and self-stabilizing properties. The research has been concerned with the computational aspects of such systems. In particular, the focus has been on the minimal capabilities that the robots should have in order to solve a problem. This book focuses on the recent algorithmic results in the field of distributed computing by oblivious mobile robots (unable to remember the past). After introducing the computational model with its nuances, we focus on basic coordination problems: pattern formation, gathering, scattering, leader election, as well as on dynamic tasks such as flocking. For each of these problems, we provide a snapshot of the state of the art, reviewing the existing algorithmic results. In doing so, we outline solution techniques, and we analyze the impact of the different assumptions on the robots' computability power. Table of Contents: Introduction / Computational Models / Gathering and Convergence / Pattern Formation / Scatterings and Coverings / Flocking / Other DirectionsSpringer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 188 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -The chase has long been used as a central tool to analyze dependencies and their effect on queries. It has been applied to different relevant problems in database theory such as query optimization, query containment and equivalence, dependency implication, and database schema design. Recent years have seen a renewed interest in the chase as an important tool in several database applications, such as data exchange and integration, query answering in incomplete data, and many others. It is well known that the chase algorithm might be non-terminating and thus, in order for it to find practical applicability, it is crucial to identify cases where its termination is guaranteed. Another important aspect to consider when dealing with the chase is that it can introduce null values into the database, thereby leading to incomplete data. Thus, in several scenarios where the chase is used the problem of dealing with data dependencies and incomplete data arises. This book discusses fundamental issues concerning data dependencies and incomplete data with a particular focus on the chase and its applications in different database areas. We report recent results about the crucial issue of identifying conditions that guarantee the chase termination. Different database applications where the chase is a central tool are discussed with particular attention devoted to query answering in the presence of data dependencies and database schema design. Table of Contents: Introduction / Relational Databases / Incomplete Databases / The Chase Algorithm / Chase Termination / Data Dependencies and Normal Forms / Universal Repairs / Chase and Database ApplicationsSpringer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 124 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This document was commissioned by the Facility Guidelines Institute as the sole reference for acoustics in health care facilities. It was written by the Health Care Acoustics Working Group, a permanent committee of the Acoustics Research Council (ARC), comprised of members of leading professional societies in acoustics, noise control engineering, acoustical consulting and related professions. ARC organized the health care Working Group in 2004-5 drawing its members from ten constituencies that range from medicine to law, public policy, architecture, design and engineering in order to provide constructive, guidance on sound and vibration based on research and best practices. Sound and Vibration 2.0 has been adopted as the sole reference standard for acoustics in health care facilities by: the 2010 FGI/ASHE 'Guidelines for the Design and Construction of Healthcare Facilities' (used in 60 countries); the US Green Building Council¿s 'LEED for Healthcare' (used in 87 countries); The Green Guide for Health Care V2.2; and the International Code Council's IGCC (2011).Sound and vibration are topics of increasing prominence in the design, construction, and operation of healthcare facilities. A satisfactory acoustical environment in a healthcare facility is now viewed as an essential component of effective healthcare.Sensible acoustical and privacy planning in the early design stages of a healthcare facility project can be solved effectively and affordably with a few strokes of the designer's pencil. The recommended minimum design requirements presented in this work are therefore intended to aid designers in achieving satisfactory acoustical and privacy environments in healthcare facilities. This handbook includes comprehensive, practical, and measureable guidelines for all aspects of acoustics in the design, construction, and evaluation of all types of healthcare facilities, including large general hospitals, specialized patient carefacilities, and ambulatory patient care facilities.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 88 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -The Italian Study Group on Cardiomyopathies organized in Florence in April 1997, eight years after the first successful meeting, the second international symposium devoted to 'Advances in Cardiomyopathies'. In these years exceptional progress has been made in the field of heart muscle diseases, in clinical research as well as in molecular biology, molec ular genetics., pathophysiology and treatment. Many of these advances were presented and discussed in Florence by a distinguished team of international experts. Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy was addressed in ten papers; in the first one Seidman reported the results obtained by the use of molecular genetic tech niques which showed that hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is a heterogeneous disorder caused by different mutations of different genes and discussed the clinical role and significance of genetic testing. Original data regarding the natural history and prognosis of symptomatic patients were obtained in the Italian multicentric study (Cecchi, Lazzeroni), while Baroldi discussed the clinico-pathologic spectrum of the disease in severely symptomatic patients treated with heart transplantation. Sudden death in the young (Basso), the identification and management of high risk patients (Elliott), the clinical importance and the problems of detec tion of ischemia (Camici) were deeply discussed as well as the indications and results of different types of treatment: medical, surgical, DDD pacing (Spirito, Betocchi, Schoendube).

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -Classic telescopes are of interest to amateur astronomers for a variety of reasons. There are the dedicated collectors, but there are also many amateurs who love the nostalgia they inspire. These telescopes 'feel' different from any contemporary telescope and perhaps have a unique ability to reconnect the owner to a bygone age of craftmanship. This book takes a look at traditional telescopes built by the great instrument makers of the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly the dynastic telescope makers, including Dollond, Alvan Clark, Thomas Cooke & Sons, and Carl Zeiss. Also included are lesser luminaries such as John Brashear, John Calver, William Wray, Henry Fitz, and William Henry Mogey.'Classic Telescopes' covers the key features of the telescopes designed by these manufacturers, and shows how a heady combination of market trends, instrument condition, and pedigree will dictate their prices at auction. 'Classic Telescopes' also shows the reader how to find real bargains! Interviews with top classic telescope collectors (and users) provide the best tips of prospecting for a genuine acquisition.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 256 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Software Engineering for Resilient Systems, SERENE 2012, held in Pisa, Italy, in September 2012.The 12 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers address all aspects of fault tolerance and exception handling, safety modeling, supporting evolution, resilience in service-oriented computing, and applying formal methods in case studies.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 192 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Colloquium on Theoretical Aspects of Computing, ICTAC 2012 held in Bangalore, India, in September 2012.The 16 revised full papers presented together with the abstracts of three keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 73 submissions. The papers cover various topics related to both theoretical aspects of computing and the exploitation of theory through methods and tools for system development.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 272 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First European Conference on Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing, ESOCC, held in Bertinoro, Italy, in September 2012. The 12 full papers, 3 short papers and 3 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 57 submissions. The volume also contains 7 papers from the industrial track. The papers cover the following topics: cloud computing; service quality and analysis; service composition and evolution; composition; security; modeling; adaption.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 296 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed conference proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Business Intelligence for the Real-Time Enterprise, BIRTE 2011, held in Seattle, WA, USA, in September 2011, in conjunction with VLDB 2011, the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases. The series of BIRTE workshops aims to provide a forum for researchers to discuss and advance the foundational science and engineering required to enable real-time business intelligence as well as novel applications and solutions based on these foundational techniques.The volume contains 6 research papers, which have been carefully reviewed and selected from 12 submissions, plus the 3 keynotes presented at the workshop. The topics cover all stages of the business intelligence cycle, including capturing of real-time data, handling of temporal or uncertain data, performance issues, event management, and the optimization of complex ETL workflows.The volume contains 6 research papers, which have been carefully reviewed and selected from 12 submissions, plus the 3 keynotes presented at the workshop. The topics cover all stages of the business intelligence cycle, including capturing of real-time data, handling of temporal or uncertain data, performance issues, event management, and the optimization of complex ETL workflows.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 132 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Serious Games Development and Applications, SGDA 2012, held in Bremen, Germany in September 2012.The 22 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers cover various topics on serious games including engineering, education, health care, military applications, game design, game study, game theories, virtual reality, 3D visualisation and medical applications of games technology.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 284 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 35th Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence, KI 2012, held in Saarbrücken, Germany, in September 2012.The 19 revised full papers presented together with 9 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 57 submissions. The papers contain research results on theory and applicaiton of all aspects of AI.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 284 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Model and Data Engineering, MEDI 2012, held in Poitiers, France, in October 2012.The 12 revised full papers presented together with 5 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 35 submissions. The papers are cover the topics of model driven engineering, ontology engineering, formal modeling, security, and data mining.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 200 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Computational Logistics, held in Shanghai, China, in September 2012. The 15 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on maritime shipping; logistics and supply chain management; planning and operations; and case studies.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 228 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference, TPNC 2012, held in Tarragona, Spain, in October 2012. The 12 revised full papers presented together with 6 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 34 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on nature-inspired models of computation; synthesizing nature by means of computation; nature-inspired materials; and information processing in nature.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 240 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th Brazilian Symposium on Formal Methods, SBMF 2012, held in Natal, Brazil, in September 2012; co-located with CBSoft 2012, the Third Brazilian Conference on Software: Theory and Practice. The 14 revised full papers presented together with 2 keynotes were carefully reviewed and selected from 29 submissions. The papers presented cover a broad range of foundational and methodological issues in formal methods for the design and analysis of software and hardware systems as well as applications in various domains.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 240 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Formal Modeling and Analysis of Timed Systems, FORMATS 2012, held in London, UK in September 2012.The 16 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 34 submissions. The book covers topics of foundations and semantics, methods and tools, techniques, algorithms, hybrid automata, appilcations, real-time software and hardware circuits.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 280 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the proceedings of the 18th Collaboration Researchers' International Working Group Conference on Collaboration and Technology, held in Raesfeld, Germany, in September 2012.The 9 revised papers presented together with 12 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. They are grouped into five themes that represent collaborative learning, social media analytics, conceptual and design models, formal modeling and technical approaches and collaboration support in emergency scenarios.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 252 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the proceedings of the 16th Brazililan Symposium on Programming Languages, SBLP 2012, held in Natal, Brazil, in September 2012.The 10 full and 2 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 27 submissions. The papers cover various aspects of programming languages and software engineering.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 176 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Spatio-temporal Image Analysis for Longitudinal and Time-Series Image Data, STIA 2012, held in conjunction with MICCAI 2012 in Nice, France, in October 2012.The 13 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 22 submissions. They are organized in topical sections named: longitudinal registration and transport; spatio-temporal analysis for shapes; spatio-temporal analysis under appearance changes; and spatio-temporal analysis for biology.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 176 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the proceedings of the Third International Conference of the CLEF Initiative, CLEF 2012, held in Rome, Italy, in September 2012.The 14 papers and 3 poster abstracts presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this volume. Furthermore, the books contains 2 keynote papers. The papers are organized in topical sections named: benchmarking and evaluation initiatives; information access; and evaluation methodologies and infrastructure.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 164 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -Il testo confronta con la usuale geometria del piano (euclidea) vari tipi di geometrie che si hanno su superfici note e meno note: geometria sulla sfera, sul cilindro, sul cono e sulla pseudosfera. L'idea di fondo è di giungere alla descrizione 'intrinseca' di queste geometrie analizzando che cosa significa l'andare diritto su queste superficie (cioè l'idea di geodetica). Si giunge così a vari tipi di geometrie che si discostano da quella euclidea usuale: geometrie localmente euclidee (su cilindro e cono deprivato del vertice), geometria ellittica (sulla sfera), geometria iperbolica (sulla pseudosfera). Si scopre che la chiave di volta concettuale che distingue queste diverse geometrie è la nozione di curvatura gaussiana, rispettivamente nulla su piani, cilindri, coni; (costante) positiva sulla sfera e (costante) negativa sulla pseudosfera. In relazione a queste idee matematiche si sviluppano anche vari temi interdisciplinari: si studiano ad esempio le caratteristiche delle carte geografiche che rappresentano la Terra a partire dal problema di determinare la rotta migliore tra due località (porti, aereoporti); si indaga sulla curvatura del nostro universo; si descrivono le leggi geometriche su cui si basa la tecnologia dei GPS. Non si trascurano gli aspetti fondazionali, analizzando quali assiomi della Geometria Euclidea valgano o meno e perché nelle nuove geometrie.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 212 pp. Italienisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -Recent increases in uncertainty and speed of market change are driving the adoption of new intelligent mobile office systems. Organizational information systems paradigm suggests that a right match between organizational characteristics and the use of technology is critical in producing desired results. Following such perspective this study focused on the relationship between task characteristics and the use of mobile office systems with an intention to find out factors that affect the adoption of modern mobile office systems. The research results show that in performing tasks with high mobility users tend to use extensive mobile office functions. When the task has a high level of interdependency with external business partners, users relied on specialized mobile functions such as FFA, SFA and ERP. Highly volatile environment with many unexpected task changes caused an extensive use of task specific functions that help to solve problems at hand. Further, analyses of the differences of mobile office use by department showed that sales department used more communication functions than others, while administrative departments rely more on such task specific functions as mobile CRM and KM than others. Additional case study shows how the application of new technology the effectiveness of organizational coordination. Based on the research the concept of convergent coordination is suggested as well as the direction for future research.¿Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 52 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -¿¿¿¿¿¿Major societal challenges of a global nature include climate change, efficient energy supply, environmental sustainability, and health care. Science & Technology Policy (S&T) policy is an essential contributor to dealing with these challenges; moreover, international cooperation and collaboration in S&T is vital to tackling these issues, since no single nation or even region is able to respond adequately by itself. Within this context, this book addresses recent developments in transatlantic S&T cooperation between the European Union and the United States. The EU-U.S. relationship dates back to the 1950s, with regular EU-U.S. Summits to assess and develop transatlantic cooperation. In the area of S&T, the EU and U.S. concluded an S&T Cooperation Agreement in 1998, renewed it in 2004, and extended it for another five years in July 2009.The research underlying this study is based on interviews with key stakeholders in the field, with an emphasis on:¿ potential new opportunities and new mechanisms for increased transatlantic EU ¿ U.S. S&T cooperation under current conditions¿ examples of coordinated ¿science diplomacy¿ efforts¿ options for the development of effective joint efforts.While the project is focused on European-U.S. relationships, it also addresses issues of international S&T cooperation involving other regions, including Africa and Asia. The author highlights the urgency of S&T cooperation to address global issues, and the evolving roles of government, universities and research centers, and industry, in promoting successful strategies and programs.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 108 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -The study of combinatorial block designs is a vibrant area of combinatorial mathematics with connections to finite geometries, graph theory, coding theory and statistics.The practice of ordering combinatorial objects can trace its roots to bell ringing which originated in 17th century England, but only emerged as a significant modern research area with the work of F. Gray and N. de Bruijn.These two fascinating areas of mathematics are brought together for the first time in this book. It presents new terminology and concepts which unify existing and recent results from a wide variety of sources. In order to provide a complete introduction and survey, the book begins with background material on combinatorial block designs and combinatorial orderings, including Gray codes -- the most common and well-studied combinatorial ordering concept -- and universal cycles.The central chapter discusses how ordering concepts can be applied to block designs, with definitions from existing (configuration orderings) and new (Gray codes and universal cycles for designs) research. Two chapters are devoted to a survey of results in the field, including illustrative proofs and examples. The book concludes with a discussion of connections to a broad range of applications in computer science, engineering and statistics.This book will appeal to both graduate students and researchers.Each chapter contains worked examples and proofs, complete reference lists, exercises and a list of conjectures and open problems.Practitioners will also find the book appealing for its accessible, self-contained introduction to the mathematics behind the applications.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 220 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -Natural Convective Heat Transfer from Narrow Plates deals with a heat transfer situation that is of significant practical importance but which is not adequately dealt with in any existing textbooks or in any widely available review papers. The aim of the book is to introduce the reader to recent studies of natural convection from narrow plates including the effects of plate edge conditions, plate inclination, thermal conditions at the plate surface and interaction of the flows over adjacent plates. Both numerical and experimental studies are discussed and correlation equations based on the results of these studies are reviewed.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 128 pp. Englisch.