الصفحة 3
الصفحة 3
Facing the Complexities of Womens Sexual Desire
Whether they involve excess, a decrease, or complete absence, problems of sexual desire drive women to consult sex therapists, couples counselors, and other practitioners (to say nothing of self-help books and talk-show hosts). Facing the Complexities of Women’s Sexual Desire, by veteran sex therapist Vera Sonja Maass, is one of the few books to address these intimate phenomena in practical clinical detail.
Extreme Conflict and Tropical Forests
At a time when the international community is devoting significant attention to the issue of governance as a key factor in global environmental decline, this book provides a timely insight into the relationships between extreme conflict, the international trade in forest products, and the social, economic and environmental condition of tropical forests and their human communities. Drawing on the expertise of both natural and social scientists, Extreme Conflict and Tropical Forests explores the underlying causes and the social and environmental consequences of conflict in tropical forest areas. Case studies from Africa, Asia and Latin America present a range of issues – from illicit crops and ‘conflict timber’ production, to the potential of peace parks for improving human security, social quality and biodiversity conservation.
Evolutionary Multi-Criterion Optimization ; 4th International Conference, EMO 2007, Matsushima, Japan, March 5-8, 2007, Proceedings
Multicriterion optimization refers to problems with two or more objectives (normally in conflict with each other) which must be simultaneously satisfied. Evolutionary algorithms have been used for solving multicriterion optimization problems for over two decades, gaining an increasing attention from industry. This book included four keynote speakers: Hirotaka Nakayama on aspiration level methods, Kay Chen Tan on large and computationally intensive real-world MO optimization problems, Carlos Fonseca on decision making, and Gary B. Lamont on design of large-scale network centric systems.
European water law and hydropolitics : An inquiry into the resilience of transboundary water governance in the European Union
provides the first comprehensive assessment of the various issues faced by countries in the European Union, where progressing climate change and urbanization pose significant cooperative challenges in a large number of river basins. Conducting a thorough analysis of the intricate web of EU water governance, it reveals that the hydropolitical stability of the European Union is already at risk. Further, given the structural nature of the shortcomings in EU water policy—e.g. the rigidity of the EU’s founding treaties or the institutional complacency of the European Commission— argues that these risks are likely to turn into sources of prolonged conflict, unless EU decision-making bodies take steps to address the new hydrological realities early on.
Environmental security and environmental management : The role of risk assessment ; Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Research Workhop on The Role of Risk Assessment in Environmental Security and Emergency Preparedness in the Mediterranean Region, held in Eilat, Israel, April 15-18, 2004
The concept of “environmental security” has emerged as one basis for understanding international conflicts. This phrase can mean a variety of things. It can signify security issues stemming from environmental concerns or conflicting needs, or it can mean that the environment is treated as a resource for the long term, and the question is what should be done today to preserve the quality of the environment in the future. In the same way that energy security is about ensuring access to energy for the long run, it can also mean that pressing environmental concerns create a situation where different countries and communities are forced to collaboratively design a unified response, even if cooperation is not generally in the logic of their relations. Over the last several years, the authors of this book and their colleagues have tried to demonstrate the power of risk assessment and decision analysis as valuable tools that decision makers should use for a broad range of environmental problems, including environmental security. Risk analysis is almost more a state of mind or a way of looking at problems than it is a kind of algorithm or a set of recipes. It projects a kind of rationality on problems and forces a certain degree of quantitative rigor, as opposed to the all too common tendency of making environmental recommendations based on anecdotal evidence.
Environmental Governance in Latin America
The multiple purposes of nature – livelihood for communities, revenues for states, commodities for companies, and biodiversity for conservationists – have turned environmental governance in Latin America into a highly contested arena. In such a resource-rich region, unequal power relations, conflicting priorities, and trade-offs among multiple goals have led to a myriad of contrasting initiatives that are reshaping social relations and rural territories. This edited collection addresses these tensions by unpacking environmental governance as a complex process of formulating and contesting values, procedures and practices shaping the access, control and use of natural resources. Contributors from various fields address the challenges, limitations, and possibilities for a more sustainable, equal, and fair development. In this book, environmental governance is seen as an overarching concept defining the dynamic and multi-layered repertoire of society-nature interactions, where images of nature and discourses on the use of natural resources are mediated by contextual processes at multiple scales.
Entertainment-Education Behind the Scenes : Case Studies for Theory and Practice
This book tracks the latest trends in the theory, research, and practice of entertainment-education, the field of communication that incorporates social change messaging into entertaining media. Sometimes called edutainment, social impact television, narrative persuasion, or cultural strategy, this approach to social and behavior change communication offers new opportunities including transmedia and digital formats
Emotion Regulation : Conceptual and Clinical Issues
Emotions: basic products of human functioning, intimately involved in physical health, they have been alternately embraced and ignored by generations of researchers and practitioners. Emotion Regulation offers a much-needed corrective to the conventional clinical wisdom, updating the knowledge base on emotions—specifically their expression and inhibition—as they affect stress, health, and well-being. An international team of researchers from a variety of fields sort out conflicting affect/health theories, and provide the latest findings on inter- and intrapersonal functions of emotions while acknowledging the role of individual variables. The book covers conceptual, developmental, and clinical issues and balances core topics with emerging areas of interest
Education for sustaining peace through historical memory
This is a necessary exercise in deconstruction and reconstruction that challenges conventional and critical approaches to peace education. Schultze-Kraft’s new book is an impressive piece of synthesis, a personal manifesto married to a rigorous interrogation of the theoretical literature. It pushes boundaries enhancing the sustaining peace agenda. As such it deserves the critical attention of policy makers at the highest level, as well as scholar-practitioners.
Dynamics of Japan’s Trade and Industrial Policy in the Post Rapid Growth Era (1980–2000)
This book provides an in-depth examination of Japan's policy responses to the economic challenges of the 1980s and '90s. While MITI's earlier role in promoting rapid growth has been addressed in other studies, this volume, based on official records and exhaustive interviews, is the first to examine the aftermath of rapid growth and the evolution of MITI's interpretation of the economy's changing needs.
Dynamic Games : Theory and Applications
Dynamic games continue to attract strong interest from researchers interested in modelling competitive as well as conflict situations exhibiting an intertemporel aspect. Applications of dynamic games have proven to be a suitable methodology to study the behaviour of players (decision-makers) and to predict the outcome of such situations in many areas including engineering, economics, management science, military, biology and political science. Dynamic Games: Theory and Applications collects thirteen articles written by established researchers.
Dissonant Heritages and Memories in Contemporary Europe
This book discusses political, economic, social, and humanitarian challenges that influence both how people deal with their past and how they build their identities in contemporary Europe. Ongoing debates on migration, on local, national, inter- and transnational levels, prove that it is a divisive issue with regards to understanding European integration and identity. At the same time, the European Union increasingly invests in projects related to European heritage, museums, and cultural memory networks, while having to take dissonant heritages into account. These processes in their combination offer an interesting dynamic and form the complex puzzle that poses challenging questions for anyone involved in academic research, heritage practices, and policy debates. With this puzzle at its core, this book explicitly focuses on slippery and transforming notions of Europe and critically discusses ongoing and transforming power structures of heritage and memory in today’s Europe.
Diplomacy Games : Formal Models and International Negotiations
In this book, leading experts in international negotiations present formal models of conflict resolution and international negotiations. Besides the description of different models and approaches, the book answers three questions: How can the abstract concepts and results of rational choice theorists be made more understandable and plausible to political and social scientists not trained to work with formal models? What can be done to encourage practitioners to use not only simple but also mathematically advanced approaches in their analysis of real world negotiation problems? How can practitioners (e.g., politicians and diplomats) become interested in, take into account, and apply formal models of their more important problems?
Digital Phase Lock Loops : Architectures and Applications
This exciting new book covers various types of digital phase lock loops. It presents a comprehensive coverage of a new class of digital phase lock loops called the time delay tanlock loop (TDTL). It also details a number of architectures that improve the performance of the TDTL through adaptive techniques that overcome the conflicting requirements of the locking rage and speed of acquisition. These requirements are of paramount importance in many applications including wireless communications, consumer electronics and others. Digital Phase Lock Loops then illustrates the process of converting the TDTL class of digital phase lock loops for implementation on an FPGA-based reconfigurable system. These devices are being utilized in software-defined radio, DSP-based designs and many other communication and electronic systems to implement complex high-speed algorithms.
Dialogue as a Collective Means of Design Conversation
Dialogue as a Collective Means of Design Conversation is the second volume edited by Patrick M. Jenlink and Bela H. Banathy to offer a cross-disciplinary approach to examining dialogue as a communicative medium. In this Compendium, the contributing authors set forth their ideas, experiences, and perspectives as the path of a learning journey—a journey of new meaning, of new understanding, and of becoming self-aware of design conversation as future creating and consciousness evolving. In particular, this volume comes at a time when we as a global society are faced with the question of how we shape our actions and in turn shape our future, through conversation that is focused on resolving global conflict and fostering world peace. The volume evokes in the reader a realization that our greatest potential rests, in no small measure, with our collective capacity for cultural creativity and in our capacity to achieve new levels of consciousness through dialogue and design conversation.
Designing virtual reality systems : The structured approach
Virtual Reality (VR) is a field of study that aims to create a system that provides a synthetic experience for its users. Developing and maintaining a VR system is a very difficult task, requiring in-depth knowledge in many different disciplines, such as sensing and tracking technologies, stereoscopic displays, multimodal interaction and processing, computer graphics and geometric modeling, dynamics and physical simulation, performance tuning, etc. The difficulty lies in the complexity of having to simultaneously consider many system goals, some of which are conflicting.
Designing and evaluating e-management decision tools : The integration of decision and negotiation models into internet-multimedia technologies
Presents the most relevant concepts for designing intelligent decision tools in an Internet-based multimedia environment and assessing the tools using concepts of statistical design of experiments. The book covers : Decision modeling paradigms , Visual interactive decision modeling , Online preference elicitation , collaborative decision making , negotiation and conflict resolution , marketing decision optimization , and guidelines for designing and evaluating decision support tools. This book is designed for the following uses: 1) for researchers and engineers, who are seeking recent advances and who are developing e-management systems; 2) for practitioners and managers, who seek insights about ICT potential and using ICT for business intelligence management; and 3) for students, who seek theoretical and practical concepts of building and evaluating prototype decision tools.
Decision Making in the Manufacturing Environment : Using Graph Theory and Fuzzy Multiple Attribute Decision Making Methods
Manufacturing is the backbone of any industrialized nation. Recent worldwide advances in manufacturing technologies have brought about a metamorphosis in industry. Fast-changing technologies on the product front have created a need for an equally fast response from manufacturing industries. To meet these challenges, manufacturing industries have to select appropriate manufacturing strategies, product designs, manufacturing processes, work piece and tool materials, and machinery and equipment. The selection decisions are complex, as decision making is more challenging today. Decision makers in the manufacturing sector frequently face the problem of assessing a wide range of options and selecting one based on a set of conflicting criteria.
Database Schema Evolution and Meta-Modeling ; 9th International Workshop on Foundations of Models and Languages for Data and Objects FoMLaDO/DEMM 2000 Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, September 18-21, 2000 Selected Papers
The Ninth International Workshop on Foundations of Models and Languages for Data and Objects (FoMLaDO) took place in Dagstuhl Germany, Sept- ber 18{21, 2000. The topic of this workshop was Database schema Evolution and Meta-Modeling; this FoMLaDO Workshop was hence assigned the acronym DEMM 2000.
Data Monitoring in Clinical Trials : A Case Studies Approach
Randomized clinical trials are the gold standard for establishing many clinical practice guidelines and are central to evidence based medicine. Obtaining the best evidence through clinical trials must be done within the boundaries of rigorous science and ethical principles. One fundamental principle is that trials should not continue longer than necessary to reach their objectives. Therefore, trials must be monitored for recruitment progress, quality of data, adherence to patient care or prevention standards, and early evidence of benefit or harm. Frequently, a group of external experts, independent from the investigators and trial sponsor, is charged with this monitoring responsibility, especially for safety and early benefit. This group is referred to by various names, such as a data monitoring committee or a data and safety monitoring board. This book, through a series of case studies presented by many distinguished clinical trial experts, illustrates the complexity of this monitoring process.No other text has as extensive a collection of cases which provide insight into the many issues, often conflicting, that must be examined before recommendations to continue or discontinue a trial can be made. While depth in statistical methods is not required, some familiarity with statistical design and analysis issues in clinical trials is helpful. The cases cover trials which were terminated early for convincing evidence of benefit, or for harmful effects. Cases with complex issues are also included. This series of cases should provide broad background information for potential monitoring committee members and better prepare them for the challenges that may exist in the trials for which they are responsible.
