الصفحة 3
الصفحة 3
Essays on congruence theory in marketing : Special focus on digital products and webstores
Digital products are intangible goods, mainly presented visually and acoustically to consumers in the form of videos, images, texts, and music that can be bought, downloaded, or streamed via various web stores. Their consumption primarily fulfills hedonic needs. Before purchasing, a consumer's interaction with a digital product is always mediated by technology. Therefore, consumers cannot directly judge the quality through "touch and feel" experiences.
Environmentally-Friendly Product Development: Methods and Tools
Presents a survey of eco-friendly product design. This work is aimed at researchers and academics in design engineering and practitioners and managers in the industry
Energy Demand Challenges in Europe : Implications for policy, planning and practice
This book examines the role of citizens in sustainable energy transitions across Europe. It explores energy problem framing, policy approaches and practical responses to the challenge of securing clean, affordable and sustainable energy for all citizens, focusing on households as the main unit of analysis. The book revolves around ten contributions that each summarise national trends, socio-material characteristics, and policy responses to contemporary energy issues affecting householders in different countries, and provides good practice examples for designing and implementing sustainable energy initiatives. Prominent concerns include reducing carbon emissions, energy poverty, sustainable consumption, governance, practices, innovations and sustainable lifestyles.
Encounters and Practices of Petty Trade in Northern Europe, 1820–1960 : Forgotten Livelihoods
Uncovers one important, yet forgotten, form of itinerant livelihoods, namely petty trade, more specifically how it was practiced in Northern Europe during the period 1820–1960. It investigates how traders and customers interacted in different spaces and approaches ambulatory trade as an arena of encounters by looking at everyday social practices. Petty traders often belonged to subjugated social groups, like ethnic minorities and migrants, whereas their customers belonged to the resident population. How were these mobile traders perceived and described? What goods did they peddle? How did these commodities enable and shape trading encounters? What kind of narratives can be found, and whose? These questions pertaining to daily practices on a grass-root level have not been addressed in previous research.
Embedded systems design : The ARTIST roadmap for research and development
Embedded systems now include a very large proportion of the advanced products designed in the world, spanning transport (avionics, space, automotive, trains), electrical and electronic appliances (cameras, toys, televisions, home appliances, audio systems, and cellular phones), process control (energy production and distribution, factory automation and optimization), telecommunications (satellites, mobile phones and telecom networks), and security (e-commerce, smart cards), etc. The extensive and increasing use of embedded systems and their integration in everyday products marks a significant evolution in information science and technology. We expect that within a short timeframe embedded systems will be a part of nearly all equipment designed or manufactured in Europe, the USA, and Asia. There is now a strategic shift in emphasis for embedded systems designers: from simply achieving feasibility, to achieving optimality. Optimal design of embedded systems means targeting a given market segment at the lowest cost and delivery time possible. Optimality implies seamless integration with the physical and electronic environment while respecting real-world constraints such as hard deadlines, reliability, availability, robustness, power consumption, and cost. In our view, optimality can only be achieved through the emergence of embedded systems as a discipline in its own right.
Education and Postponement of Maternity : Economic Analyses for Industrialized Countries
This book examines various economic aspects of the role of women’s education in the postponement of maternity in these ten industrialized countries. The chapters in this book each empirically investigate one of these countries using individual or household survey data and are in particular interested in the increasing age at motherhood with the investment in education of the mother. In search of socio-economic explanations for this relationship each chapter investigates a specific related research question. This results in a book that covers a wide range of topics on the economics of fertility decisions, such as career planning motives of women, consumption smoothing motives of households and the role of institutions.
Economics of Accounting : Performance Evaluation
This book Performance Evaluation is divided into four parts. Volume I contains Parts A through D, and the concepts developed in Part A are fundamental to both volumes. In Volume II, Part E initially focuses on optimal contracts in a single-agent /single-task/single-period setting, and explores how performance measure characteristics affect the principal’s expected payoff. Multiple performance measures (including the stock price) and multiple tasks are introduced, thereby creating settings in which the principal is concerned with both the level of incentives and the congruency of the incentives with his own preferences. Part F considers the impact of start-of-period private management information (with communication to the principal) and limited commitment in single-period settings. These analyses serve as a bridge to the multi-period models explored in Part G. These multi-period models permit exploration of the impact of inter-period consumption preferences and limited inter-period commitments on preferences with respect to the inter-period correlation and timing of performance reports. Part H concludes the book with an analysis of multi-agent contracting in settings in which agents may coordinate their actions to their mutual benefit, and may even engage in overt collusion.
Drug utilization research : Methods and applications
Drug Utilization Research (DUR) is a discipline which combines aspects of pharmacotherapy, epidemiology, and health services research into an interdisciplinary set of methods for analyzing and assessing the prescribing, dispensing and consumption of medicines. It combines both qualitative and quantitative approaches to facilitate the safe and effective use of pharmaceuticals. Drug Utilization Research: Methods and Applications provides a comprehensive introduction to this discipline, prepared by an international team of authors with broad experience in numerous fields. Now reorganized and updated to reflect the latest research and global challenges, it is an indispensable resource for understanding the use of pharmaceuticals.
Drinking in Victorian and Edwardian Britain : Beyond the Spectre of the Drunkard
Investigates the reasons why Victorians and Edwardians consumed alcohol in the ways that they did and explores the ideas about alcohol that circulated in the period. This book shows that they had many reasons for purchasing and consuming alcoholic substances and these were driven by broader social, cultural, medical and commercial factors. Although drunkenness may have been the most visible consequence of alcohol consumption, it was not the only type of drinking behaviour. Alcohol played an important social role in the everyday lives of Victorians and Edwardians where its consumption held many different meanings.
Distributed Consensus in Multi-vehicle Cooperative Control : Theory and Applications
Distributed Consensus in Multi-vehicle Cooperative Control develops distributed consensus strategies designed to ensure that the information states of all vehicles in a network converge to a common value. This approach strengthens the team, minimizing power consumption and the deleterious effects of range and other restrictions.
Design of Very High-Frequency Multirate Switched-Capacitor Circuits : Extending the Boundaries of CMOS Analog Front-End Filtering
Presents the theory and the corresponding CMOS implementation of the novel multirate sampled-data analog interpolation technique. In order to tackle physical IC imperfections at very high frequency, this work discusses the circuit design and layout techniques for high-speed Switched-Capacitor (SC) circuits.
Design for Environmental Sustainability
Design for Environmental Sustainability is a technical and operative contribution to the United Nations "Decade on Education for Sustainable Development" (2005-2014), aiding the development of a new generation of designers, responsible and able in the task of designing environmentally sustainable products.
Death in a consumer culture
Organised into five sections covering: The death industry; death rituals; death and consumption; death and the body; and alternate endings, The book explores topics from celebrity death tourism, pet and online memorialization; family history research, to alternatives to traditional corpse disposal methods and patient-assisted suicide. Work from scholars in history, religious studies, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and cultural studies sits alongside research in marketing and consumer culture.
Data collection in fragile states : Innovations from Africa and beyond
This book addresses an urgent issue on which little organized information exists. It reflects experience in Africa but is highly relevant to other fragile states as well. —Constantine Michalopoulos, John Hopkins University, USA and former Director of Economic Policy and Co-ordination at the World Bank
Cost-effective energy efficient building retrofitting : Materials, technologies, optimization and case studies
The building sector is responsible for high energy consumption and its global demand is expected to grow as each day there are approximately 200,000 new inhabitants on planet Earth. The majority of electric energy will continue to be generated from the combustion of fossil fuels releasing not only carbon dioxide, but also methane and nitrous oxide. Energy efficiency measures are therefore crucial to reduce greenhouse gas emissions of the building sector. Energy efficient building retrofitting needs to not only be technically feasible, but also economically viable. New building materials and advanced technologies already exist, but the knowledge to integrate all active components is still scarce and far from being widespread among building industry stakeholders.
Cost Accounting for Shared IT Infrastructures
Distributed client/server architectures are the technological backbone of today’s data centres. A usage-based allocation of infrastructure costs to business processes or users is often not possible as the necessary resource consumption measurements incur too much overhead. Reinhard Brandl proposes a method to derive estimates for the expected resource consumption of customer-oriented services during standard load tests. This facilitates the determination of usage-based cost allocation keys significantly. He implements the concept in a software tool kit and evaluates it successfully in a set of experiments with multi-tier database applications. In particular, he uses the determined consumption estimates as input parameters for Queuing Network Models which lead to highly accurate performance predictions. Finally, he analyzes how the method can be integrated into existing IT processes at the BMW Group.
Continuous-Time Sigma-Delta A/D Conversion : Fundamentals, Performance Limits and Robust Implementations
This comprehensive book deals with all relevant aspects arising during the analysis, design and simulation of the now widespread continuous-time implementations of sigma-delta modulators. The results of several years of research by the authors in the field of CT sigma-delta modulators are covered, including the analysis and modeling of different CT modulator architectures, CT/DT loop filter synthesis, a detailed error analysis of all components, and possible compensation/correction schemes for the non-ideal behavior in CT sigma-delta modulators. Guidance for obtaining low-power consumption and several practical implementations are also presented. It is shown that all the proposed new theories, architectures and possible correction techniques have been confirmed by measurements on discrete or integrated circuits. Quantitative results are also provided, thus enabling prediction of the resulting accuracy.
Consumption structure and macroeconomics : Structural change and the relationship between inequality and growth
This book offers a novel perspective that allows to incorporate changing consumption and production structure into models of economic growth. Starting from the empirical observation that income and consumption structure are closely related, it develops a tractable theoretical framework which enables to analyze macroeconomic models consistent with these empirical facts. As a result, central macroeconomic phenomena are better understood: the reasons behind long-run growth, structural change, and the influence of inequality on innovations and growth.
Consuming Music Together : Social and Collaborative Aspects of Music Consumption Technologies
This book collects together the most recent studies of music consumption, and new developments in music technology. It combines the perspectives of both social scientists and technology designers, uncovering how new music technologies are actually being used, along with discussions of new music technologies still in development. With a specific focus on the social nature of music.
Consumers, Policy and the Environment : A tribute to Folke Ölander
The role of the consumer has changed from seeking the most satisfaction from goods and services to reconciling consumption with active citizenship, which links consumption to modern social issues such as environmental protection, sound business ethics, and fair working conditions. Understanding consumers - the way they buy products, the way they relate to questions of environmental importance, and the way they participate in public policy formulation processes –is of vital importance to modern society. In this book, eminent researchers examine contemporary issues related to the field of consumers, policy, and the environment.
