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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.
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.
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.
La musica del Big Bang : Come la radiazione cosmica di fondo ci ha svelato i segreti dell’Universo = The music of the Big Bang : How the cosmic background radiation revealed the secrets of the Universe to us
Cosmic microwave background radiation is the residue of the great heat following the Big Bang. A tenuous sign, over 13 billion years old, in which the answers to many of the questions about the nature of our Universe are hidden. Discovered by chance in 1964, in the last forty years this fossil trace of the origins of the Cosmos has been explored with every available means. Two Nobel Prizes in physics have already been awarded for research involving it, the last in 2006 for the results of the COBE satellite. Much of the information encoded in the cosmic background radiation was impressed by the superimposition of acoustic waves present in the early Universe: a "music" of the Big Bang, which cosmologists have tried for years to reconstruct, using techniques similar to those that allow to distinguish the sound of different musical instruments. Only recently have the first notes of this extraordinary cosmic symphony finally been revealed, but the investigation is not over yet. This book illustrates, with a language suitable even for non-specialists, the theories, observations and discoveries that have brought cosmology into a new era.
La correspondance entre Henri Poincaré et les physiciens, chimistes et ingénieurs = The correspondence between Henri Poincaré and physicists, chemists and engineers
Cosmic microwave background radiation is the residue of the great heat following the Big Bang. A tenuous sign, over 13 billion years old, in which the answers to many of the questions about the nature of our Universe are hidden. Discovered by chance in 1964, in the last forty years this fossil trace of the origins of the Cosmos has been explored with every available means. Two Nobel Prizes in physics have already been awarded for research involving it, the last in 2006 for the results of the COBE satellite. Much of the information encoded in the cosmic background radiation was impressed by the superimposition of acoustic waves present in the early Universe: a "music" of the Big Bang, which cosmologists have tried for years to reconstruct, using techniques similar to those that allow to distinguish the sound of different musical instruments. Only recently have the first notes of this extraordinary cosmic symphony finally been revealed, but the investigation is not over yet. This book illustrates, with a language suitable even for non-specialists, the theories, observations and discoveries that have brought cosmology into a new era.
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.
Kramers-Kronig Relations in Optical Materials Research
This is the first one-volume work to provide a thorough and comprehensive description of the physical background, rigorous theory and applications of Kramers-Kronig relations in the fields of linear and nonlinear optical spectroscopy. Currently, Kramers-Kronig relations have become basic tools in the investigation of the optical properties of materials. A brief presentation of the related data-retrieval technique, the maximum entropy method, is also given. The contents and style potentially make this a standard text for physicists, chemists and engineers interested in optical-materials research and development.
Knowledge-Driven Computing : Knowledge Engineering and Intelligent Computations
Knowledge-Driven Computing constitutes an emerging area of intensive research located at the intersection of Computational Intelligence and Knowledge Engineering with strong mathematical foundations. It embraces methods and approaches coming from diverse computational paradigms, such as evolutionary computation and nature-inspired algorithms, logic programming and constraint programming, rule-based systems, fuzzy sets and many others. The use of various knowledge representation formalisms and knowledge processing and computing paradigms is oriented towards the efficient resolution of computationally complex and difficult problems.
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.
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 Networks
This book discusses a core question in many fields of the social sciences, namely how to create, share and adopt new knowledge. It creates an original space for conversation between two lines of research that have developed largely in parallel for a long time: social network theory and the geography of knowledge. This book considers that relational thinking has become increasingly important for scholars to capture societal outcomes by studying social relations and networks, whereas the role of place, space and spatial scales has been somewhat neglected outside an emergent geography of knowledge.
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.
Knowledge and Civil Society
Focuses on the role of civil society in the creation, dissemination, and interpretation of knowledge in geographical contexts. It offers original, interdisciplinary and counterintuitive perspectives on civil society. The book includes reflections on civil and uncivil society, the role of civil society as a change agent, and on civil society perspectives of undone science. Conceptual approaches go beyond the tripartite division of public, private and civic sectors to propose new frameworks of civic networks and philanthropic fields, which take an inclusive view of the connectivity of civic agency across sectors.
Knowledge and Action
Explores interdependencies between knowledge, action, and space from different interdisciplinary perspectives. Some of the contributors discuss knowledge as a social construct based on collective action, while others look at knowledge as an individual capacity for action. The chapters contain theoretical frameworks as well as experimental outcomes.
Knowing, Knowledge and Beliefs : Epistemological Studies across Diverse Cultures
Bringing together prominent educators and researchers, this book focuses on conceptual and methodical issues and state-of-the-art theoretical understanding on epistemological beliefs from educational and psychological perspectives. It is a critical and specialized source that describes recent advances in conceptualization and epistemological studies across diverse cultures.
Knot Theory and Its Applications
The book contains most of the fundamental classical facts about the theory, such as knot diagrams, braid representations, Seifert surfaces, tangles, and Alexander polynomials; also included are key newer developments and special topics such as chord diagrams and covering spaces. The work introduces the fascinating study of knots and provides insight into applications to such studies as DNA research and graph theory. In addition, each chapter includes a supplement that consists of interesting historical as well as mathematical comments.
Kinship and Demographic Behavior in the Past
This book examines the role of kinship and the family’s influence on the health outcomes of their children, their children’s selection of marriage partners, couples having higher order births or reduced fertility, individual migration and origins of populations. Mortality patterns are examined to determine the influence of fertility patterns on parents’ mortality, the contribution of parents’ longevity to their children’s lifespan, and the whether a family history of disease affects the risk of dying from that same disease.This volume emphasizes the importance of studies that include and compare other factors related to social organization with information on multi-generational families. The authors elucidate previous explanations and provide provocative new results. Such intergenerational research is crucial in understanding long term demographic trends and processes.
Kinetics of Catalytic Reactions--Solutions Manual
This textbook contains all the information needed for graduate students or industrial researchers to design kinetic experiments involving heterogeneous catalysts, to characterize these catalysts, to acquire valid rate data, to verify the absence of mass (and heat) transfer limitations, to propose reaction models, to derive rate expressions based on these models and, finally, to assess the consistency of these rate equations.The most recent technique to calculate heats of adsorption and activation barriers on metal surfaces, the BOC-MP approach, is discussed in detail. Methods to measure metal surface areas and crystallite sizes using x-ray diffraction, transmission electron microscopy and various chemisorption techniques are discussed. Different experimental techniques to determine the influence of mass transfer limitations, especially within the pores of a catalyst, are reviewed in detail, with a particular emphasis on liquid-phase reactions.
