Advancing the Science of Cancer in Latinos
This book gives an overview of the sessions, panel discussions, and outcomes of the Advancing the Science of Cancer in Latinos conference, held in February 2018 in San Antonio, Texas, USA, and hosted by the Mays Cancer Center and the Institute for Health Promotion Research at UT Health San Antonio.
Advancing Culture of Living with Landslides ; Vol. 1 : ISDR-ICL Sendai Partnerships 2015-2025
Contains peer-reviewed papers from the Fourth World Landslide Forum organized by the International Consortium on Landslides (ICL), the Global Promotion Committee of the International Programme on Landslides (IPL), University of Ljubljana (UL) and Geological Survey of Slovenia in Ljubljana, Slovenia from May 29 to June 2, 2017. The complete collection of papers from the Forum is published in five full-color volumes
Advances in the toxicity of construction and building materials
Presents the potential and toxic effects of building materials on human health, along with tactics on how to minimize exposure. Chapters are divided into four sections covering the toxicity of indoor environments, fire toxicity, radioactive materials, and toxicity from plastics, metals, asbestos, nanoparticles and construction wastes. Key chapters focus on the reduction of chemical emissions in houses with eco-labelled building materials and potential risks posed by indoor pollutants that may include volatile organic compounds (VOC), formaldehyde, semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOC), radon, NOx, asbestos and nanoparticles.
Advances in Mathematical Finance
This volume brings together a collection of chapters by some of the most distinguished researchers and practitioners in the fields of mathematical finance and financial engineering. Presenting state-of-the-art developments in theory and practice.
Advances in Integrated Soil Fertility Research in sub-Saharan Africa : Challenges and Opportunities
Food insecurity is a central concern and a fundamental challenge for human welfare and economic growth in Africa. Low agricultural production, results in low incomes, poor nutrition, vulnerability to risks and lack of empowerment. Land degradation and soil fertility depletion are considered the major threats to food security and natural resource conservation in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Investments in technology, policy and institutional reforms are needed to increase agricultural productivity to ensure food security and sustained national economies. Past research has generated numerous soil fertility management technologies which if adopted could propel the African continent out of the poverty trap. However, these technologies have had little, if any, impact due to low adoption by the smallholder farmers.
Advances in Earthquake Engineering for Urban Risk Reduction
It is the vulnerable buildings - liable to cause damage and loss of life - that need immediate attention and urgent appraisal in order to decide if structural rehabilitation and upgrading are feasible. Current economic, efficient and occupant-friendly rehabilitation techniques vary widely and include the application either of precast concrete panels or layers, strips and patches of fiber reinforced polymers (FRP) in strategic locations. The papers in this book, many by renowned authorities in earthquake engineering, chart new and vital directions of research and application in the assessment and rehabilitation of buildings in seismic regions. While several papers discuss the probabilistic prediction and quantification of structural damage, others present approaches related with the in-situ and occupant friendly upgrading of buildings and propose both economical and practical techniques to address the problem.
Advances in decision making under risk and uncertainty
Whether we like it or not we all feel that the world is uncertain. From choosing a new technology to selecting a job, we rarely know in advance what outcome will result from our decisions. Unfortunately, the standard theory of choice under uncertainty developed in the early forties and fifties turns out to be too rigid to take many tricky issues of choice under uncertainty into account. The good news is that we have now moved away from the early descriptively inadequate modeling of behavior. This book brings the reader into contact with the accomplished progress in individual decision making through the most recent contributions to uncertainty modeling and behavioral decision making. It also introduces the reader into the many subtle issues to be resolved for rational choice under uncertainty.
Advances in Data Mining : Applications in E-Commerce, Medicine, and Knowledge Management
Presents papers describing selected projects on the topic of data mining in fields like e commerce, medicine, and knowledge management. The objective is to report on current results and at the same time to give a review on the present activities in this field in Germany. An effort has been made to include the latest scientific results, as well as lead the reader to the various fields of activity and the problems related to them. Knowledge discovery on the basis of web data is a wide and fast growing area. E commerce is the principal theme of motivation in this field, as companies invest large sums in the electronic market, in order to maximize their profits and minimize their risks. Other applications are telelearning, teleteaching, service support, and citizen information systems. Concerning these applications, there is a great need to understand and support the user by means of recommendation systems, adaptive information systems, as well as by personalization.
Advances in Assessment and Modeling of Earthquake Loss
Originates from an international workshop organized by Turkish Natural Catastrophe Insurance Pool (TCIP) in November 2019 that gathered renown researchers from academia, representatives of leading international reinsurance and modeling companies as well as government agencies responsible of insurance pricing in Turkey. The book includes chapters related to post-earthquake damage assessment, the state-of-art and novel earthquake loss modeling, their implementation and implication in insurance pricing at national, regional and global levels, and the role of earthquake insurance in building resilient societies and fire following earthquakes. The rich context encompassed in the book makes it a valuable tool not only for professionals and researchers dealing with earthquake loss modeling but also for practitioners in the insurance and reinsurance industry.
Advanced Techniques in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
This explosion is a result of the growing use of electronic media. But what is data mining (DM)? A Web search using the Google search engine retrieves many (really many) definitions of data mining. We include here a few interesting ones. One of the simpler definitions is: “As the term suggests, data mining is the analysis of data to establish relationships and identify patterns” [1]. It focuses on identifying relations in data. Our next example is more elaborate: An information extraction activity whose goal is to discover hidden facts contained in databases. Using a combination of machine learning, statistical analysis, modeling techniques and database technology, data mining finds patterns and subtle relationships in data and infers rules that allow the prediction of future results. Typical applications include market segmentation, customer profiling, fraud detection, evaluation of retail promotions, and credit risk analysis .
Advanced Reliability Models and Maintenance Policies
Advanced Reliability Models and Maintenance Policies introduces partition and redundant problems within reliability models, and provides optimization techniques. The book also indicates how to perform maintenance in a finite time span and at failure detection, and to apply recovery techniques for computer systems.
Advanced REIT Portfolio Optimization : Innovative Tools for Risk Management
This book provides an investor-friendly presentation of the premises and applications of the quantitative finance models governing investment in one asset class of publicly traded stocks, specifically real estate investment trusts (REITs). The models provide highly advanced analytics for REIT investment, including: portfolio optimization using both historic and predictive return estimation; model backtesting; a complete spectrum of risk assessment and management tools with an emphasis on early warning systems, risk budgeting, estimating tail risk, and factor analysis; derivative valuation; and incorporating ESG ratings into REIT investment.
Adolescents and risk : Behaviors, functions and protective factors
The book describes the different risk behaviors, shows the linkages among them, explains the functions served by the various risk behaviors or the meanings they may have for the adolescent, examines how they vary with age, sex, and other demographic characteristics, demonstrates the influential role that the theoretical risk factors and protective factors play in adolescent risk behavior involvement. The research findings not only strengthen the theory, but they serve as an important guide to the design of intervention efforts to prevent or reduce adolescent involvement in risk behavior.
Acoustic Emission Testing : Basics for Research - Applications in Civil Engineering
Covers all levels from the description of AE basics for AE beginners (level of a student) to sophisticated AE algorithms and applications to real large-scale structures as well as the observation of the cracking process in laboratory specimen to study fracture processes.
Academic Study of Common Diets
The foods you choose to eat can have a direct impact on your ability to enjoy life to its fullest. Perhaps the most obvious positive effect of food is the pleasurable feeling you get from eating a good-tasting meal. Over the past decade there has been an increasing concern about the impact of chronic diseases on the health of developing world populations. Traditionally, major causes of illness and death in developing countries have been linked to infectious diseases and undernutrition, and these are still major public health problems in several regions of the world. Obesity is recognized as an underlying risk factor for many of these chronic conditions. As in developed societies, the risk of obesity in developing countries is also strongly influenced by diet and lifestyle, which are changing dramatically as a result of the economic and nutrition transition.
Abstraction, refinement and proof for probabilistic systems
Probabilistic techniques are increasingly being employed in computer programs and systems because they can increase efficiency in sequential algorithms, enable otherwise nonfunctional distribution applications, and allow quantification of risk and safety in general. This makes operational models of how they work, and logics for reasoning about them, extremely important. Abstraction, Refinement and Proof for Probabilistic Systems presents a rigorous approach to modeling and reasoning about computer systems that incorporate probability. Its foundations lie in traditional Boolean sequential-program logic—but its extension to numeric rather than merely true-or-false judgments takes it much further, into areas such as randomized algorithms, fault tolerance, and, in distributed systems, almost-certain symmetry breaking. The presentation begins with the familiar "assertional" style of program development and continues with increasing specialization: Part I treats probabilistic program logic, including many examples and case studies; Part II sets out the detailed semantics; and Part III applies the approach to advanced material on temporal calculi and two-player games.
A Structural Framework for the Pricing of Corporate Securities : Economic and Empirical Issues
This book is the first comprehensive treatment, of structural credit risk models for the simultaneous and consistent pricing of corporate securities. Through the development of a flexible economic framework based on the firm's EBIT, the reader is taken from the economic principles of firm value models to the empirical implementation. Analytical solutions are provided, if EBIT follows an arithmetic or geometric Brownian motion.
A Stakeholder Rationale for Risk Management : Implications for Corporate Finance Decisions
Ordinarily, only the interests of shareholders, debtholders, and corporate management are taken into account when analyzing corporate financial decisions while the interests of non-financial stakeholders are often neglected. Gregor Gossy develops a so-called stakeholder rationale for risk management arguing that firms which are more dependent on implicit claims from their non-financial stakeholders, such as customers, suppliers, and employees, prefer conservative financial policies. In order to perform panel data analyses of the determinants of corporate financial decisions, the author uses data from Austrian and German industrial companies. He shows that variables for a firm’s most important non-financial stakeholders explain the firm’s capital structure and cash holding decisions. His findings suggest that a firm’s choice of accounting standards have a moderating effect on the determinants of corporate finance decisions.
A Risk-Benefit Perspective on Early Customer Integration
Customer integration in the early innovation phase has been considered the method of choice in theory and practice. Growing experience with the concept has shown unexpected side effects that may even outweigh its recognized advantages. Therefore, management needs to be able to assess in advance whether the involvement of customers will add overall value to each particular innovation project. To support but not to replace the final managerial decision, a mathematical formula is developed. It can be applied to all kinds of process structures, takes into account the risks and benefits contingent on a company's situation as well as risk-reducing and benefit-increasing measures and translates them into numerical values. The resulting figure indicates the prospective value of customer integration in a specific project.
A practical guide to corporate finance : Breaking the financial lce
Offers an approachable guide to all key concepts within corporate finance. Emphasizing the use of common sense rather than number-crunching models, A practical guide to corporate finance begins with the basics of how to read financial statements and how to estimate future cash flows. It also includes a guide to subjects such as capital budgeting decisions, the cost of financing for businesses, cash and working capital management, The process of business valuation, and how stock markets work. This textbook breaks the financial ice by offering real, practical advice, helping the reader to avoid common pitfalls, and translate the 'financialese', or business jargon that can cause confusion for those without a financial or banking background.



















