الصفحة 10
الصفحة 10
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Lasers, Clocks and Drag-Free Control : Exploration of Relativistic Gravity in Space

Over the next decade the gravitational physics community will benefit from dramatic improvements in many technologies critical to testing gravity. Highly accurate deep space navigation, interplanetary laser communication, interferometry and metrology, high precision frequency standards, precise pointing and attitude control, together with drag-free technologies, will revolutionize the field of experimental gravitational physics. The centennial of the general theory of relativity in 2015 will motivate a significant number of experiments designed to test this theory with unprecedented accuracy.

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Language, Expressivity and Cognition

The book presents how language shapes communicative and cognitive processes but at the same time is also shaped by those processes. The chapters put forward a number of disciplinary and methodological perspectives encompassing insights from cognitive and social psychology, (critical) discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics. Both intralingual as well as contrastive, each chapter also engages with qualitative and quantitative methods.

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Land-Change Science in the Tropics : Changing Agricultural Landscapes

Land use and land-cover change research over the past decade has focused mainly on contemporary primary land-cover conversions in the tropics and sub-tropics, with considerable resources dedicated to the explanation and prediction of tropical deforestation and often ignoring the dynamism in the world’s agro-pastoral landscapes. This collection integrates cutting-edge research in the social, biogeophysical, and geographical information sciences to understand the human and environmental dynamics that change the type, magnitude and location of land uses and land covers in the changing countryside.This book describes the monitoring of land-cover changes, explains the processes through which land is altered, and describes the development of spatially-explicit models to predict land change. This book illustrates how practitioners have integrated knowledge from the three scientific realms - social, biophysical, and GIScience - that underpin land-change science.

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Land Use and Soil Resources

Land-use change is one of the main drivers of many environmental change processes. It influences the basic resources of land use, including the soil. Its impact on soil often occurs so creepingly that land managers hardly contemplate initiating ameliorative or counterbalance measures. Poor land management has degraded vast amounts of land, reduced our ability to produce enough food, and is a major threat to rural livelihoods in many developing countries. To date, there has been no single unifying volume that addresses the multifaceted impacts of land use on soils. This book has responded to this challenge by bringing together renowned academics and policy experts to analyze the patterns, driving factors and proximate causes, and the socioeconomic impacts of soil degradation. Policy measures to prevent irreversible degradation and rehabilitate degraded soils are also identified.

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Kristian Birkeland : The First Space Scientist

PREFACEThisscientific biography of Kristian Birkeland (1867–1917) was written to bring the story ofa Norwegian national hero to the attention ofthe English-speaking world. Birkeland’sheroic stature was established not on a field of military battle,but in the bitter cold of the Artic wilderness ashe sought to answer basic questions abouthow the Sun controlled northern lights andmag-netic storms. He was also afather of Norsk Hydro one ofNorway’s largest industries. Birkel and died before reaching the age of 50.Because Birkel and never kept adiary, documented information about his family and private life is sparse. Before he died, Olaf Devik, the last of Birke-ffland’s close friends, gave along interview and graciously transferred his personal archive to A.E. Birkeland’s 82 scientific papers and three book-length publications map the progress of his investigations. addressed this book questions that had vexed European scientists for centuries. Why do the northern lights appear overhead when the Earth’s magnetic field is disturbed? How are magnetic storms connected to disturbances on the Sun? To answer these questions Birkeland interpreted his advance laboratory simulations and daring campaigns in the Arctic wilderness in the light of Maxwell’s newly discovered laws of electricity and magnetism. Birkeland’s ideas were dismissed for decades, only to be vindicated when satellites could fly above the Earth’s atmosphere.

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Knowledge-Based Virtual Education : User-Centred Paradigms

The book covers a multitude of important issues on the subject of "Innovations in Knowledge-Based Virtual Education ", aiming at researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government. The carefully selected contributions report on research, development and real-world experiences of virtual education.

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Knowledge Discovery from Legal Databases

Describes data mining , techniques as they apply to law. Law students, legal academics and applied information technology specialists are guided thorough all phases of the knowledge discovery from databases process with clear explanations of numerous data mining algorithms including rule induction, neural networks and association rules. Throughout the text, assumptions that make data mining in law quite different to mining other data are made explicit.  Issues such as the selection of commonplace cases, the use of discretion as a form of open texture, transformation using argumentation concepts and evaluation and deployment approaches are discussed at length.

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Knowledge and Critical Pedagogy : An Introduction

Knowledge and Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction takes scholars through a critical review of the issues facing researchers and educators in the last years of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Refusing to assume the reader’s familiarity with such issues but concurrently rebuffing the tendency to dumb down such complex issues, the book serves as an excellent introduction to one of the most important and complicated issues of our time.

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Japan’s Arduous Rejuvenation as a Global Power : Democratic Resilience and the US-China Challenge

This book assesses the profound impact of Japan’s aspirations to become a great power on Japanese security, democracy and foreign relations. Rather than viewing the process of normalization and rejuvenation as two decades of remilitarization in face of rapidly changing strategic environment and domestic political circumstances, this volume contextualizes Japan’s contemporary international relations against the longer grain of Japanese historical interactions.It also submits that an improvement in Japan-China relations would enhance rather than detract Japan-US relations and that Tokyo will find that her new found automony in the US-Japan alliance would not only accord her more political respect and strategic latitude, but also allow her to ameliorate the excesses of American foreign policy adventurism, paving for her to become a truly normal great power.

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IUTAM Symposium on Multiscale Problems in Multibody System Contacts ; Proceedings of the IUTAM Symposium held in Stuttgart, Germany, February 20–23, 2006

The investigation of multiscale problems in multibody system contacts is an interesting and timely topic which has been the subject of intensive research. This proceedings volume summarizes contributions of many authors active in the field and gives insight in very different areas of this fascinating research.

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Italian Mathematics Between the Two World Wars

This book describes Italian mathematics in the period between the two World Wars. We analyze its development by focusing on both the interior and the external influences. Italian mathematics in that period was shaped by a colorful array of strong personalities who concentrated their efforts on a select number of fields and won international recognition and respect in an incredibly short time. Italy was also dominated by a fascist regime. This political situation and the social and academic structure of Italian society are included in the analysis as influences external to mathematics itself. The authors have provided a fascinating study of a most difficult time in the history of the world and of mathematics.

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Complexity Management in Fuzzy Systems : A Rule Base Compression Approach

This book presents a systematic study on the inherent complexity in fuzzy systems, resulting from the large number and the poor transparency of the fuzzy rules. The study uses a novel approach for complexity management, aimed at compressing the fuzzy rule base by removing the redundancy while preserving the solution. The compression is based on formal methods for presentation, manipulation, transformation and simplification of fuzzy rule bases, which are illustrated by algorithms as well as results from numerous examples and two case studies. The results are directly applicable or easily extendable to a wide class of fuzzy systems and detailed benchmarks for expanding these systems to new areas such as fuzzy networks and fuzzy multi-agent systems are introduced. The intended readers are people from both academia and industry, who would be interested in building and implementing advanced fuzzy systems.

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Complex Medical Engineering

In the twenty-first century, applications in medicine and engineering must acquire greater safety and flexibility if they are to yield better products at higher efficiency. To this end, complex science and technology must be integrated in medicine and engineering. Complex medical engineering (CME) is a new field that merges medical science and technology, and includes biomedical robotics and biomechatronics, complex virtual technology in medicine, information and communication technology in medicine, complex technology in rehabilitation, cognitive neuroscience and technology, and complex bioinformatics. Experts from academia, industry, and government research laboratories who have pioneered CME ideas and technologies describe its concept and research approach and discuss related hardware and software, science and technology, and medicine and engineering. This book will be invaluable to scientists, researchers, and graduates in the emerging field of CME.

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Compendium for Early Career Researchers in Mathematics Education

The book provides a state-of-the-art overview of important theories from mathematics education and the broad variety of empirical approaches currently widely used in mathematics education research.

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Comparative risk assessment and environmental decision making

Decision making in environmental projects is typically a complex and confusing process characterized by trade-offs between socio-political, environmental, and economic impacts. Comparative Risk Assessment (CRA) is a methodology applied to facilitate decision making when various activities compete for limited resources. CRA has become an increasingly accepted research tool and has helped to characterize environmental profiles and priorities on the regional and national level. CRA may be considered as part of the more general but as yet quite academic field of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA). Considerable research in the area of MCDA has made available methods for applying scientific decision theoretical approaches to multi-criteria problems, but its applications, especially in environmental areas, are still limited. The papers show that the use of comparative risk assessment can provide the scientific basis for environmentally sound and cost-efficient policies, strategies, and solutions to our environmental challenges.

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Community Schools in Africa : Reaching the Unreached

Over the past decade, community schools similar to those supported by Save the Children have been established in many developing countries, and especially in sub-Saharan Africa. As large numbers of children attend schools started and managed by their own communities and/or by nongovernmental organizations, questions have come up about the impact of such schools at large scale: "Can village-based or community schools have a national impact on access to education, spur improved long-term development strategies and education policy, or achieve or influence Education for All? This book explores these and related questions, drawing on Save the Children’s experience with community-based schooling in four countries: Ethiopia, Malawi, Mali, and Uganda.

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Community Quality-of-Life Indicators : Best Cases VIII

Offers critical insights into the thriving international field of community indicators, incorporating the experiences of government leaders, philanthropic professionals, community planners and a wide range of academic disciplines. It illuminates the important role of community indicators in diverse settings and the rationale for the development and implementation of these innovative projects.  details many of the practical “how to” aspects of the field as well as lessons learned from implementing indicators in practice. The case studies included here also demonstrate how, using a variety of data applications, leaders of today are monitoring and measuring progress and communities are empowered to make sustainable improvements in their wellbeing.

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Communicating science and technology in society

Addresses the engagement between science and society from multiple viewpoints. At a time when trust in experts is being questioned, misinformation is rife and scientific and technological development show growing social impact, the volume examines the challenges in involving the public in scientific debates and decisions. It takes into account societal needs and concerns in research, and analyses the interface between the roles of institutions and individuals. From environmental challenges to science communication, participatory technological design to animal experimentation, and transdisciplinarity to norms and values in science, the volume brings together research on areas in which scientists and citizens interact, across diverse, often understudied, socio-cultural contexts in Europe.

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Common interests, uncommon goals : Histories of the world council of comparative education societies and its members

This book presents histories of the WCCES and its member societies. It shows ways in which the field has changed over the decades, and the forces which have shaped it in different parts of the world. The book demonstrates that while comparative education can be seen as a single global field, it has different characteristics in different countries and cultures. In this sense, the book presents a comparison of comparisons.

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Climate Change and Community Resilience : Insights from South Asia

Documents myriads of ways community-based climate change adaptation and resilience programs are being implemented in South Asian countries. The narrative style of writing in this volume makes it accessible to a diverse audience from academics and researchers to practitioners in various governmental, non-governmental and international agencies. At a time when climate change presents humanity with a gloomy future, the stories of innovation, creativity, grassroots engagement and locally applicable solutions highlighted in this book provides insights into hopeful ways of approaching climate solutions.

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