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Large Coulomb Systems: Lecture Notes on Mathematical Aspects of QED
A mathematically consistent formulation of relativistic quantum electrodynamics (QED) has still to be found. Nevertheless, there are several simplified effective models that successfully describe many body quantum systems and the interaction of radiation with matter. Large Coulomb Systems explores a selection of mathematical topics inspired by QED. It comprises selected, expanded and edited lectures given by international experts at a topical summer school and is intended as a high-level introduction for graduate students, postdocs and nonspecialists from related fields.
Language Policy and Modernity in Southeast Asia : Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand
This volume considers the ways in which modernity challenges and informs the language policies of various Southeast Asians nations. Using case studies from Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, the authors examine language policies that are explicitly articulated either in the form of State constitutions or in the public proclamations of political leaders. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which English, often seen as the language of globalization, impacts the status of indigenous Southeast Asian language.
Language Choice in a Nation Under Transition : English Language Spread in Cambodia
This book examines language choice in contemporary Cambodia, and uses the case study to explore and evaluate competing explanations for the spread of English globally. the multiple contexts in which Cambodians make individual and institutional language policy choices are considered. Chapters 2 and 3 examine the economic and political contexts for language choice, as Cambodia has transitioned from a planned economy and communism to a market economy and democracy. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 examine the assistance context for language choice; the bilateral, multilateral, and nongovernmental development agencies that have recently begun to work in Cambodia demand certain language skills of Cambodian employees and government counterparts, and support the learning of these languages in both nonformal and formal education.
Land-Use and Land-Cover Change : Local Processes and Global Impacts
The book presents recent estimates of the rates in changes of major land classes such as forest, cropland and pasture. Among the causative mechanisms behind land change, synergetic factor combinations are found to be more common than single key factor explanations. Aggregated globally, multiple impacts of local land changes are shown to significantly affect central aspects of Earth System functioning. Innovative developments and applications in the fields of modeling and scenario construction are presented. Finally, conclusions are drawn about the most pressing implications for the design of appropriate intervention policies, and on new directions and frontiers of research.
Landslides from Massive Rock Slope Failure
Amongst the thematic topics discussed are global frequency, impacts on society, analysis of initial rock slope failure, monitoring of rock slope movement, analysis and modeling of post-failure behaviour, volcanic landslides, and influences of massive rock slope failure on the geomorphological evolution of mountain regions. Regional contributions include reports on rockslides and rock avalanches in Norway, western Canada, the Andes of Argentina, the Karakoram Himalaya, the European Alps, the Appennines, and the mountains of Central Asia.
Landscapes Under Pressure : Theory and Practice of Cultural Heritage Research and Preservation
This book investigates the newly emerging scope of interests and project agendas to investigate and preserve cultural landscapes. It presents the historic, archaeological, ethnographic, and environmental traditions of cultural landscape study and the attempts to reconstruct and analyze the complex processes of cultural changes through prehistoric and historic times.The "guiding light" of the book is that the fullest understanding of a cultural landscape will materialize through interdisciplinary cooperation, which should involve an ecological approach with historical ecology as the guiding tool, applied archaeology, and environmental planning.
Lake Victoria : Ecology, Resources, Environment
Recently, there has been, and continues to be, a tremendous interest on Lake Victoria and its environs, both locally and internationally. A casual browsing on the Internet indicates that the entries on the Lake have been rising phenomenally. At the same time, the issues discussed are as diverse as they are varied in their treatment of the subject, both in terms of depth and comprehensiveness. The information on Lake Victoria and its environ is scattered, isolated, and sometimes confusing even though documentation on the subject are available. Despite this situation, the fact remains that various people (e. g. , secondary and universitystudents,researchers,practitioners,etc. ,)wouldliketoaccess and know more about the Lake and its environs. Aware of the existing information gap about this world’s second largest fresh water Lake, this book is intended to provide readers with up-to-date information pertaining the Lake. The book gives an in-depth coverage of environmental issues, - source endowment, poverty amidst plenty, development opportunities, challenges and other related issues facing the Lake and its environs. It aims at providing information on the above variables, which hopefully will address the needs of various users.
Lagrangian Transport in Geophysical Jets and Waves : The Dynamical Systems Approach
This book provides an accessible introduction to a new set of methods for the analysis of Lagrangian motion in geophysical flows. These methods were originally developed in the abstract mathematical setting of dynamical systems theory, through a geometric approach to differential equations. Despite the recent developments in this field and the existence of a substantial body of work on geophysical fluid problems in the dynamical systems and geophysical literature, this is the first introductory text that presents these methods in the context of geophysical fluid flow. The book is organized into seven chapters; the first introduces the geophysical context and the mathematical models of geophysical fluid flow that are explored in subsequent chapters. The second and third cover the simplest case of steady flow, develop basic mathematical concepts and definitions, and touch on some important topics from the classical theory of Hamiltonian systems. The fundamental elements and methods of Lagrangian transport analysis in time-dependent flows that are the main subject of the book are described in the fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters. The seventh chapter gives a brief survey of some of the rapidly evolving research in geophysical fluid dynamics that makes use of this new approach. Related supplementary material, including a glossary and an introduction to numerical methods, is given in the appendices.
Lagrangian Probability Distributions
Lagrangian expansions can be used to obtain numerous useful probability models, which have been applied to real life situations including, but not limited to: branching processes, queuing processes, stochastic processes, environmental toxicology, diffusion of information, ecology, strikes in industries, sales of new products, and production targets for optimum profits. This book presents a comprehensive, systematic treatment of the class of Lagrangian probability distributions, along with some of its families, their properties, and important applications.
Knowledge Representation Techniques : A Rough Set Approach
The basis for the material in this book centers around a long term research project with autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle systems. One of the main research topics in the project is knowledge representation and reasoning. The focus of the research has been on the development of tractable combinations of approximate and nonmonotonic reasoning systems. The techniques developed are based on intuitions from rough set theory. Efforts have been made to take theory into practice by instantiating research results in the context of traditional relational database or deductive database systems.
Knowledge and Reality : Essays in Honor of Alvin Plantinga
Comprises essays presented to Alvin Plantinga on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Plantinga is one of the leading figures in Anglo-American metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of religion; his work in these areas has been the focus of wide scholarly attention. This collection of essays, all of which were written specifically for this volume in honor of Plantinga’s 70th birthday, ranges broadly over topics in metaphysics and epistemology and includes contributions by some of the best philosophers writing today. The volume will be of particular interest to metaphysicians, epistemologists, philosophers of religion and theologians as it includes important recent work by some of the leading thinkers in these fields.
Knowing Art : Essays in Aesthetics and Epistemology
Knowing Art collects ten original essays written by leading philosophers who distill and build upon recent work at the intersection of aesthetics and epistemology. Specific topics addressed include the objectivity of critical knowledge, the quality of critical testimony, the roles of principles and perception in critical reasoning, phenomenal knowledge of what a work of art is like, the acquisition of factual information and psychological understanding from fictions, and the limits of images as sources of historical evidence. In addressing these topics, the volume also explores the challenges that art poses for theories of knowledge as well as the challenges that artistic knowledge poses to traditional views about art.
Kernel Based Algorithms for Mining Huge Data Sets : Supervised, Semi-supervised, and Unsupervised Learning
"Kernel Based Algorithms for Mining Huge Data Sets" is the first book treating the fields of supervised, semi-supervised and unsupervised machine learning collectively. The book presents both the theory and the algorithms for mining huge data sets by using support vector machines (SVMs) in an iterative way. It demonstrates how kernel based SVMs can be used for dimensionality reduction (feature elimination) and shows the similarities and differences between the two most popular unsupervised techniques, the principal component analysis (PCA) and the independent component analysis (ICA).
Jurisdiction of the Coastal State over Foreign Merchant Ships in Internal Waters and the Territorial Sea
Dr Yang's book deals with the port and coastal State's jurisdiction over foreign merchant ships as well as with the rights and duties of these ships in the internal waters and in the territorial sea. The international law is rather different in both situations. Despite the fact that it faces a number of issues such as, for example, a contested right of access to ports or conditions for port access requirements, the law of foreign merchant ships in internal waters has never been codified. On the other hand, already the League of Nations considered the law of the territorial sea as appropriate for codification in the 1930s. And the Geneva Convention on the Territorial Sea and the Contiguous Zone of 1958 was indeed a codification of most rules of international law on the territorial sea known at that time.
John Dee : Interdisciplinary Studies in English Renaissance Thought
This volume records the diversity of scholarly approaches to John Dee which have emerged since the synthetic accounts of I. R. F. Calder, Frances Yates and Peter French. If these approaches have not succeeded in resolving the problematic multiplicity of Dee’s activities, they will at least deepen our understanding of specific and local areas of his intellectual life, and render them more historiographically legible.
Jamming, Yielding, and Irreversible Deformation in Condensed Matter
This collection ot ten tutorial reviews by leading researchers in the field introduces and renews recent advances on irreversible deformation phenomena in solid state and soft condensed matter physics. The focus in applications is on amorphous materials, crystalline solids under stress and more generally, elastic manifolds driven by external processes. This book addresses in particular nonspecialists and graduate students wishing to enter the field.
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.
Issues in Theoretical Diversity : Persistence, Composition, and Time
Our world is full of composite objects that persist through time: dogs, persons, chairs and rocks. But in virtue of what do a bunch of little objects get to compose some bigger object, and how does that bigger object persist through time? This book aims to answer these questions, but it does so by looking at accounts of composition and persistence through a new methodological lens. It asks the question: what does it take for two theories to be genuinely different, and how can we know whether what seems like metaphysical disagreement is really just semantic disagreement
Isotopes in Palaeoenvironmental Research
This thorough reference shows how stable isotopes can be applied to understanding the palaeoenvironment, with chapters on the interpretation of isotopes in water, tree rings, bones and teeth, lake sediments, speleothems and marine sediments.
Composite Systems Decisions
Composite decisions consist of interconnected parts or subdecisions and correspond to a composite (composable, modular, decomposable) system. Composite Systems Decisions describes an educational approach that is based on systems engineering and considered modular design of composite decisions. Divided into four parts, this book contains descriptions of basic systems approaches and examines basic ‘technological’ problems for composite systems, including: modular hierarchical design; multistage design; multistage planning; redesign/improvement/adaptation; evaluation; and, combinatorial evolution/development.
