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Citation Classics from Social Indicators Research : The Most Cited Articles Edited and Introduced by Alex C. Michalos
Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement was founded by Alex C. Michalos and published its first issue in March 1974. It has been the leading journal for scholarly research in its field for over thirty years. This volume is published in celebration of that record of accomplishment. The 19 articles assembled here are a selection drawn from the 34 (2.4%) most frequently cited articles in the journal’s history. An introductory essay written by Michalos explains the historical and scientific importance of each article in the development of social indicators or quality-of-life research. It provides a rare overview of the perceived scientific problems that researchers around the world addressed in the first three decades of exploration, as well as a view of some of the problems to be addressed in the future. A short essay describing the origins of the journal by its founder is also included.
Chernobyl: Catastrophe and Consequences
The long-term effects of the Chernobyl incident on the environment are still becoming apparent, twenty years after the event. This book, written by two researchers with frontline experience in this field, provides a detailed review of these over a wide range of ecosystems. It also discusses the responses and countermeasures utilised to combat the effects of the accident, as well as considering the health, social, psychological and economic impacts on the human population. Chernobyl - Catastrophe and Consequences provides a comprehensive assessment of the Chernobyl accident and its long-term consequences draws on the most recent measurements of contamination in the terrestrial and aquatic food chains discusses the sociological consequences of such disasters in detail This book adds valuable weight to the debate about the environmental cost of nuclear power and the issue of nuclear safety.
Chernobyl - What Have We Learned? : The Successes and Failures to Mitigate Water Contamination Over 20 Years
Twenty million people have been exposed to Chernobyl radionuclides through the Dnieper River aquatic pathways. This book presents a 20-year historical overview and comprehensive study results of the aquatic environment affected by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. During this time, many water quality management practices and countermeasures were enacted. The book presents in-depth analyses of these water remediation actions, using current science and mathematical modeling, and discusses why some were successful, but many others failed. The chapter entitled Where Do We Go From Here? incorporates a comprehensive discussion of the planned New Safe Confinement (NSC) structure to cover the Chernobyl plant. The book closes with a summary and conclusions drawn from these analyses, making it a valuable reference tool for the future. This book will be of interest to engineers, scientists, decision-makers, and those involved in radiation protection and radioecology, environmental protection and risk assessment, water remediation and mitigation measures, and radioactive waste disposal. In addition, the detailed, almost day-to-day, emergency responses to the Chernobyl accident described in this book will also be useful to people developing emergency and long-term responses to accidental or intentional (by terrorists) releases of radionuclides, toxic chemicals and biological agents.
Chasing the Chinese dream : Four decades of following China’s war on poverty
This book explores the historical, cultural and philosophical contexts that have made anti-poverty the core of Chinese society since Liberation in 1949, and why poverty alleviation measures evolved from the simplistic aid of the 1950s to Xi Jinping’s precision poverty alleviation and its goal of eliminating absolute poverty by 2020. The book also addresses the implications of China’s experience for other developing nations tackling not only poverty but such issues as pandemics, rampant urbanization and desertification exacerbated by global warming. The first of three parts draws upon interviews of rural and urban Chinese from diverse backgrounds and local and national leaders. These interviews, conducted in even the remotest areas of the country, offer candid insights into the challenges that have forced China to continually evolve its programs to resolve even the most intractable cases of poverty.
Chaos, Nonlinearity, Complexity : The Dynamical Paradigm of Nature
This carefully edited book presents a focused debate on the mathematics and physics of chaos, nonlinearity and complexity in nature. It explores the role of non-extensive statistical mechanics in non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and presents an overview of the strong nonlinearity of chaos and complexity in natural systems that draws on the relevant mathematics from topology, measure-theory, inverse and ill-posed problems, set-valued analysis, and nonlinear functional analysis. It presents a self-contained scientific theory of complexity and complex systems as the steady state of non-equilibrium systems, denoting a homeostatic dynamic equilibrium between stabilizing order and destabilizing disorder.
Challenges for Computational Intelligence
Computational Intelligence (CI) is used as a name to cover many existing branches of science, with artificial neural networks, fuzzy systems and evolutionary computation forming its core. In recent years CI has been extended by adding many other subdisciplines and it became quite obvious that this new field also requires a series of challenging problems that will give it a sense of direction. Without setting up clear goals and yardsticks to measure progress on the way many research efforts are wasted.The book written by top experts in CI provides such clear directions and the much-needed focus on the most important and challenging research issues, showing a roadmap how to achieve ambitious goals.
Catalogue of risks : Natural, technical, social and health risks
The book clearly shows the interdependence of risk measures. Safety and risks cannot be discussed only by looking at specific problems, since increasing safety in individual fields might lead to a decrease of safety over the entire society.
Calibrating the Cosmos : How Cosmology Explains Our Big Bang Universe
Calibrating the Cosmos describes hard science, but is gently written. It explains in clear, non-mathematical language the measurements and the interpretation of the resulting data that have led to the current understanding of the origin, evolution and properties of our expanding Big Bang universe. Many people have a sketchy idea of the work of cosmologists, but Professor Levin’s experience in teaching both scientific and liberal arts students has enabled him to impart much of our current thinking without resorting to difficult mathematics. Theoretical concepts are emphasized, in particular the symmetries of homogeneity and isotropy enjoyed by our universe on the largest scales, how these symmetries lead to only one quantity being needed to describe the growth of the universe from its infancy to the present time, and how the so-called parameters of the universe are the ingredients used to construct the model universes to which ours – the real thing – is compared.
Bringing the sun down to earth : Designing inexpensive instruments for monitoring the atmosphere
The book describes in detail how to design, build, calibrate, and use inexpensive instruments for measuring solar radiation, ranging from total radiation from the entire sky to narrow spectral bands of radiation travelling along a path directly from the sun. Students and their teachers will learn a great deal about weather, the seasons, and the atmosphere, and they will develop a much better understanding of how to measure the physical world around them.
Breaking ocean waves : Geometry, structure and remote sensing
This book represents the most comprehensive description of the physical findings of an investigation into the spatio-temporal characteristics of the gravity of breaking waves and the foam activity in open sea by methods and instruments of optical and microwave remote sensing. Much emphasis is placed on the physical aspects of breaking processes necessary to measure the possibilities and limitations of remote sensing methods in specific observation cases of an oceanic surface. Numerous practical applications and illustrations are provided from air-borne, ship-borne and laboratory up-to-date experiments.
Beauty’s Appeal : Measure and Excess
Beauty fulfils human existence. As it registers in our aesthetic experience, beauty enhances nature’s enchantment around us and our inward experience lifting our soul toward moral elevation. Carried by creative imagination (Imaginatio Creatrix), beauty participates in the moulding of the forms of the intellective constitution of the mind in tandem with praxis and seeks deeper enigmas of the real in the labyrinth of the cosmos. Yet with the evolution of human development and in technological inventions, beauty, while suffusing all modalities of experience, seems to undergo transformations and expansion. Are there perduring norms and modalities of beauty or are we carried along blindly by human development? Is there a measure intrinsic to our human ontopoietic unfolding and the growth of human life that we may follow instead of the whim of fancy and excess? The present collection of art-explorations seeks the elemental ties of Human Condition. Together, the authors aim to answer the questions posed above.
Beam Instrumentation and Diagnostics
This treatise covers all aspects of the design and the daily operations of a beam diagnostic system for a large particle accelerator. A very interdisciplinary field, it involves contributions from physicists, electrical and mechanical engineers and computer experts alike so as to satisfy the ever-increasing demands for beam parameter variability for a vast range of operation modi and particles. The author draws upon 40 years of research and work, most of them spent as the head of the beam diagnostics group at GSI. He has illustrated the more theoretical aspects with many real-life examples that will provide beam instrumentation designers with ideas and tools for their work.
Battery management systems : Accurate state-of-charge indication for battery-powered applications
Builds further on the contents of the first volume in the Philips Research Book Series, Battery Management Systems - Design by Modelling. Since the subject of battery SoC indication requires a number of disciplines, this book covers all important disciplines starting from (electro)chemistry to understand battery behaviour, via mathematics to enable modelling of the observed battery behaviour and measurement science to enable accurate measurement of battery variables and assessment of the overall accuracy, to electrical engineering to enable an efficient implementation of the developed SoC indication system. It will therefore serve as an important source of information for any person working in engineering and involved in battery management.
Basic Real Analysis
Basic Real Analysis and Advanced Real Analysis (available separately or together as a Set) systematically develop those concepts and tools in real analysis that are vital to every mathematician, whether pure or applied, aspiring or established. These works present a comprehensive treatment with a global view of the subject, emphasizing the connections between real analysis and other branches of mathematics.
Axiom of Choice
AC, the axiom of choice, because of its non-constructive character, is the most controversial mathematical axiom, shunned by some, used indiscriminately by others. This treatise shows paradigmatically that:Disasters happen without AC: Many fundamental mathematical results fail (being equivalent in ZF to AC or to some weak form of AC).Disasters happen with AC: Many undesirable mathematical monsters are being created (e.g., non measurable sets and undeterminate games).Illuminating examples are drawn from diverse areas of mathematics, particularly from general topology, but also from algebra, order theory, elementary analysis, measure theory, game theory, and graph theory.
Average-Cost Control of Stochastic Manufacturing Systems
This book is concerned with hierarchical control of manufacturing systems under uncertainty. It focuses on system performance measured in long-run average cost criteria, exploring the relationship between control problems with a discounted cost and that with a long-run average cost in connection with hierarchical control. A new theory is articulated that shows that hierarchical decision making in the context of a goal-seeking manufacturing system can lead to a near optimization of its objective. The approach in the book considers manufacturing systems in which events occur at different time scales.
Automotive Control Systems : For Engine, Driveline, and Vehicle
Reflecting the trend to optimization through integrative approaches for engine, driveline and vehicle control, this book enables control engineers to understand engine and vehicle models necessary for controller design and also introduces mechanical engineers to vehicle-specific signal processing and automatic control. The emphasis on measurement, comparisons between performance and modelling, and realistic examples derive from the authors’ industrial experience at Bosch and interactions within IFAC and SAE. The second edition offers new or expanded topics such as diesel-engine modelling, diagnosis and anti-jerking control, and vehicle modelling and parameter estimation. The book addresses professional engineers as well as students.
Assessing Climate Change : Temperatures, Solar Radiation, and Heat Balance
The chapters of the book attempt to answer a number of essential questions in relation to global warming and climate change. He begins by showing how the earth’s climate has varied in the past, discussing ice ages, the Holocene period since the end of the last ice age, particularly during the past 1000 years. He investigates the reliability of "proxies" for historical temperatures and assesses the hockey stick version of global temperatures for the past millennium. To do this effectively he looks carefully at how well near surface temperatures of land and ocean on earth have been monitored during the past 100 years or more, and looks at the utility and significance of a single global average temperature
Aspects of Mathematical Finance
Considering the stupendous gain in importance, in the banking and insurance industries since the early 1990’s, of mathematical methodology, especially probabilistic methodology, it was a very natural idea for the French "Académie des Sciences" to propose a series of public lectures, accessible to an educated audience, to promote a wider understanding for some of the fundamental ideas, techniques and new tools of the financial industries. These lectures were given at the "Académie des Sciences" in Paris by internationally renowned experts in mathematical finance, and later written up for this volume which develops, in simple yet rigorous terms, some challenging topics such as risk measures, the notion of arbitrage, dynamic models involving fundamental stochastic processes like Brownian motion and Lévy processes.
Aspects of Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing in the Southern Ocean
Overfishing threatens the viability of high seas living resources. Furthermore, controls to prevent overfishing are inadequate. Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing is a product of overfishing and affects all marine fisheries. Southern Ocean fisheries have been particularly targeted by IUU fishing. The efforts of the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources Commission and the Australian government to adopt complementary measures to deter IUU fishing in the Southern Ocean form the basis of this study, although the examination is conducted following a comprehensive review of the legal and other factors contributing to the development of IUU fishing as well as the applicable international law.
