الصفحة 7
الصفحة 7
Flexible Query Answering Systems ; 7th International Conference, FQAS 2006, Milan, Italy, June 7-10, 2006
This book constitutes the refereed proceeding of the 7th International Conference on Flexible Query Answering Systems, FQAS 2006, held in Milan, Italy in June 2006. The 60 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on flexibility in database management and quering, vagueness and uncertainty in XML quering and retrieval, information retrieval and filtering, multimedia information access, user modeling and personalization, knowledge and data extraction, intelligent information extraction from text, and knowledge representation and reasoning.
Female Genital Mutilation
Focuses on Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C) in children and adolescents. FGM/C comprises all procedures that involve partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or injury to the female genital organs for nonmedical reasons. It is mainly carried out during childhood, before the age of 15.
Fading Foundations : Probability and the Regress Problem
This book addresses the age-old problem of infinite regresses in epistemology. How can we ever come to know something if knowing requires having good reasons, and reasons can only be good if they are backed by good reasons in turn? The problem has puzzled philosophers ever since antiquity, giving rise to what is often called Agrippa's Trilemma. The current volume approaches the old problem in a provocative and thoroughly contemporary way. Taking seriously the idea that good reasons are typically probabilistic in character, it develops and defends a new solution that challenges venerable philosophical intuitions and explains why they were mistakenly held. Key to the new solution is the phenomenon of fading foundations, according to which distant reasons are less important than those that are nearby.
Expanding Horizons in Bioethics
What are the resources and needs, the strengths and the vulnerabilities of patients, of society, or of nature? How do we evaluate the societal potential of scientific discovery? It is fairly well assured that we are influencing the terms of existence of many inhabitants of this planet, from flora to fauna to humans. Moreover, history has shown that while technologies can be used neutrally, they can be (and have been) used to the great benefit – or the great detriment – of human life and the fate of the world as a whole. How various types of knowledge and technological ability will be deployed is up to us, individually and collectively. How such information and ability should be deployed, and for what reasons, are questions at the core of bioethical inquiry. These are the "expanding horizons in bioethics" to which this volume refers. This volume is comprised of fourteen essays. It is a rare gathering of scholarly opinion, featuring well-known experts from a diversity of disciplines. The topics addressed are of immediate concern to the public. The essays ask questions about human nature, genetic technologies, reproductive rights, human subjects research, and environmental issues – all in provocative and challenging new ways. Yet the themes that emerge throughout the volume are of enduring interest to anyone concerned about the interactions of scientific development, ethics, and society. This volume is of interest to students and teachers of bioethics and related topics, as well as to professionals working in these disciplines.
Essentials of Sports Nutrition and Supplements
Millions of consumers want to lose body fat, gain muscle mass, and/or improve exercise performance. In addition to an exercise program, they often look to sports supplements as ‘tools’ to help them reach their goals. This book, the culmination of years of work by the thought leaders in the sports nutrition field will help the consumer, student, scientist, and sports nutrition professional sift through the huge volume of information and come up with reasonable and scientifically-based ideas and conclusions about sports nutrition.
EQ-5D value sets
For various reasons, cost benefit analysis is usually rejected in favour of cost-effectiveness or cost-utility analyses, often involving the estimation of the incremental cost per Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY) gained (Drummond et al, 2005). The estimation of QALYs gained requires valuations for all relevant health states on a scale anchored at 1 = Full health and 0 = Dead. The EQ-5D is widely used in this context and a number of value sets are available for all the health states generated by the EQ-5D descriptive system. These can be readily applied to health outcomes measured as EQ-5D profiles. EQ-5D has become one of the valuation approaches recommended by several reimbursement authorities and academic bodies in European countries
Environmental Security and Public Safety ; Problems and Needs in Conversion Policy and Research after 15 Years of Conversion in Central and Eastern Europe
Although the end of the Cold War has paved the way to a substantial demilitarisation and conversion, the leftovers of this process – such as former military installations, military training areas, and huge quantities of unserviceable ammunition and equipment – still pose a severe threat to the environment of both NATO and Partner countries.The rehabilitation of these areas for civilian uses is extremely costly and is generally in the short and medium term not possible. For this reason, the development of new methods for the estimation avoidance of risks should receive special priority. In the context of this ARW, the reconnaissance and appraisal of conversion areas with respect to costs, returns, and legal considerations were discussed. The decades-long use of some areas led to the heavy loading of contaminates. Every task of conversion has as its goal the elimination of dangers to humans and nature, and the return of areas to civil use, such that these areas can be used realise economic interests of the society.
Environmental Risk Assessment : Quantitative Measures, Anthropogenic Influences, Human Impact
The world is a dirty place and getting dirtier all the time. The reasons for this ever-increasing lack of cleanliness are not hard to find, being basically caused by the actions of the six billion people who inhabit the planet. The needs of the people for air, water, food, housing, clothing, heating, materials, oil, gas, minerals, metals, chemicals, and so forth have, over the centuries, given rise to a variety of environmental problems that have been exacerbated or been newly created by the industrialization of the world, the increase in population, and the increase in longevity of the population. The costs of cleaning even fractions of the known environmental problems are truly enormous, as detailed in the volume Environmental Risk Analysis (I. Lerche and E. Paleologos, 2001, McGraw-Hill). The chances of causing new environmental problems, and their associated costs of clean up, are equally challenging in terms of anthropogenic influences and also of the natural environmental problems that can be triggered by humanity.
Entomology
The author’s long-held belief that an introductory entomology course should present a balanced treatment of the subject is reflected in the continued arrangement of the book in four sections: Evolution and Diversity, Anatomy and Physiology, Reproduction and Development, and Ecology. For the third edition, all chapters have been updated. This includes not only the addition of new information and concepts but also the reduction or exclusion of material no longer considered "mainstream", so as to keep the book at a reasonable size.
Entity-Oriented Search
This open access book covers all facets of entity-oriented search—where “search” can be interpreted in the broadest sense of information access—from a unified point of view, and provides a coherent and comprehensive overview of the state of the art. It represents the first synthesis of research in this broad and rapidly developing area. Selected topics are discussed in-depth, the goal being to establish fundamental techniques and methods as a basis for future research and development. Additional topics are treated at a survey level only, containing numerous pointers to the relevant literature. A roadmap for future research, based on open issues and challenges identified along the way, rounds out the book.
Engineering Interactive Systems ; 2nd Conference on Human-Centered Software Engineering, HCSE 2008, and 7th International Workshop on Task Models and Diagrams, TAMODIA 2008, Pisa, Italy, September 25-26, 2008. Proceedings
This book constitutes the combined proceedings of the second working conference on Human-Centred Software Engineering (HCSE 2008) and the 6th International Workshop on TAsk MOdels and DIAgrams (TAMODIA 2008); jointly held as EIS 2008, the international event on Engineering Interactive Systems, in Pisa, Italy, in September 2008.
Encyclopedia of diasporas : Immigrant and refugee cultures around the world ; Vol. I : Overviews and Topics ; Vol. II : Diaspora communities
The encyclopedia consists of two volumes covering three main sections: Diaspora Overviews covers over 20 ethnic groups that have experienced voluntary or forced immigration. These essays discuss the history behind the social, economic, and political reasons for leaving the original countries, and the cultures in the new places; Topics discusses the impact and assimilation that the immigrant cultures experience in their adopted cultures, including the arts they bring, the struggles they face, and some of the cities that are in the forefront of receiving immigrant cultures; Diaspora Communities include over 60 portraits of specific diaspora communities. Each portrait follows a standard outline to facilitate comparisons. The Encyclopedia of Diasporas can be used both to gain a general understanding of immigration and immigrants, and to find out about particular cultures, topics and communities. It will prove of great value to researchers and students, curriculum developers, teachers, and government officials. It brings together the disciplines of anthropology, social studies, political studies, international studies, and immigrant and immigration studies
Emerging Talents : Training Architects
This issue showcases the students and teachers who are pushing the envelope of architecture in extraordinary ways, offering their insights into its future materiality and spatial dexterity. It premieres a new young generation of architects who are likely to become names in the architectural profession and possibly important teachers themselves. Their work has been selected by their own influential teachers of architecture who describe the studio methodologies – and reasons for them – that prompted the work.
Elementary logic : For software development
This book teaches readers how to better reason about software development, to communicate reasoning, to distinguish between good and bad reasoning, and to read professional literature that presumes knowledge of elementary logic. It explains fundamental concepts and provides reader-friendly instructions for applying logic to software development.
Elasticity of Transversely Isotropic Materials
This book aims to provide a comprehensive introduction to the theory and applications of the mechanics of transversely isotropic elastic materials. There are many reasons why it should be written. First, the theory of transversely isotropic elastic materials is an important branch of applied mathematics and engineering science; but because of the difficulties caused by anisotropy, the mathematical treatments and descriptions of individual problems have been scattered throughout the technical literature. This often hinders further development and applications. Hence, a text that can present the theory and solution methodology uniformly is necessary.
Einsteins Spacetime : An Introduction to Special and General Relativity
Einstein's Space-Time: An Introduction to Special and General Relativity is a textbook addressed to students in physics and other people interested in Relativity and a history of physics. The book contains a complete account of Special Relativity that begins with the historical analysis of the reasons that led to a change in our manner of regarding the space and time.
Education In Human Creative Existential Planning
Education is the transmission of knowledge and skill from one generation to another, and is vitally significant for the growth and unfolding of the living individual. The present collection of papers focuses on the underpinnings of the creative workings of the human strategies of reason.
Economics of the Environment : Theory and Policy
Interprets nature and the environment as a scarce resource. It offers a theoretical study of the allocation problem and describes different policy approaches to the environmental problem. The entire spectrum of the allocation issue is studied: the use of the environment in a static context, international and trade aspects of environmental allocation, regional dimensions, global environmental media, environmental use over time and under uncertainty. The book incorporates a variety of economic approaches, including neoclassical analysis, the public-goods approach, benefit-cost analysis, property-rights ideas, economic policy and public-finance reasoning, international trade theory, regional science, optimization theory, and risk analysis. The different aspectsof environmental allocation are studied in the context of a single model that is used through the book.
Ecological Informatics : Scope, Techniques and Applications
Ecological Informatics promotes interdisciplinary research between ecology and computer science on elucidation of principles of information processing in ecosystems, ecological sustainability by informed decision making, and bio-inspired computation. The 2nd edition of the book consolidates the scope, concepts, and techniques of this newly emerging discipline by a new preface and additional chapters on cellular automata, qualitative reasoning, hybrid evolutionary algorithms and artificial neural networks. It illustrates numerous applications of Ecological Informatics for aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, image recognition at micro- and macro-scale as well as computer hardware design.
Early Nutrition and its Later Consequences : New Opportunities; Perinatal Programming of Adult Health - EC Supported Research
Health problems such as hypertension, tendency to diabetes, obesity, blood lipids, vascular disease, bone health, behaviour and learning and longevity may be ‘imprinted’ during early life. This process is defined as ‘programming’ whereby a nutritional stimulus operating at a critical, sensitive period of pre and postnatal life imprints permanent effects on the structure, physiology and metabolism. For this reason, academics and industry set-up the EC supported Scientific Workshop -Early Nutrition and its Later Consequences: New Opportunities. The prime objective of the Workshop was to generate a sound exchange of the latest scientific developments within the field of early nutrition to look for opportunities for new preventive health concepts. Further, a closer look was taken at the development of food applications which could provide (future) mothers and infants with improved nutrition that will ultimately lead to better future health. The Workshop was organised by the Dept. of Pediatrics, University of Munich, Germany in collaboration with the Danone Institutes and the Infant Nutrition Cluster, a collaboration of three large research projects funded by the EU.
