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Experimental Unsaturated Soil Mechanics
These proceedings are a continuation of the series of International Conferences in Germany entitled "Mechanics of Unsaturated Soils." The primary objective is to discuss and understand unsaturated soil behaviour such that engineered activities are made better with times in terms of judgement and quality. We all realise by now that in addition to the knowledge on the classical concepts, it becomes an enormous challenging task to adapt convincing new concepts and present them in such a way that it could be used in engineering practices. The experimental studies reported primarily focus on the role of microstructure and fabric for the complex coupled hydro-mechanical behaviour of cohesive frictional materials. Several papers consider the relevance of temperature affecting the constitutive behaviour of clays. Common features of state of the art theoretical and numerical approaches, including theory of porous media and mixture theory, intend to describe the complex multi-field problems of fully coupled thermo-hydraulic-mechanical-chemical initial - boundary value problems.
Error-Correcting Linear Codes : Classification by Isometry and Applications
This text offers a thorough introduction to the mathematical concepts behind the theory of error-correcting linear codes. Care is taken to introduce the necessary algebraic concepts, for instance the theory of finite fields, the polynomial rings over such fields and the ubiquitous concept of group actions that allows the classification of codes by isometry. The book provides in-depth coverage of important topics like cyclic codes and the coding theory used in compact disc players. The final four chapters cover advanced and algorithmic topics like the classification of linear codes by isometry, the enumeration of isometry classes, random generation of codes, the use of lattice basis reduction to compute minimum distances, the explicit construction of codes with given parameters, as well as the systematic evaluation of representatives of all isometry classes of codes.
Encyclopedia of Microfluidics and Nanofluidics
Covering all aspects of transport phenomena on the nano- and micro-scale, Springer’s Encyclopedia of Microfluidics and Nanofluidics includes over 750 entries in three alphabetically-arranged volumes including the most up-to-date research, insights, and applied techniques across all areas. Specifically, subjects covered in this comprehensive Springer Reference include electrical double-layers, optofluidics, DNC lab-on-a-chip, nanosensors, and more.
Emerging States at Crossroads
This volume analyzes the economic, social, and political challenges that emerging states confront today. Notwithstanding the growing importance of the ‘emerging states’ in global affairs and governance, many problems requiring immediate solutions have emerged at home largely as a consequence of the rapid economic development and associated sociopolitical changes. The middle-income trap is a major economic challenge faced by emerging states. This volume regards interest coordination for technological upgrading as crucial to avoid the trap and examines how various emerging states are grappling with this challenge by fostering public-private cooperation, voluntary associations of market players, and/or social networks. Social disparity is another serious problem. This volume argues that the economic, social, and political problems are interwoven in the sense that the emerging states need to build political consensus in order to tackle the economic and social difficulties. Democratic institutions have not always been successful in this respect.
Embedded finance : When payments become an experience
In Embedded Finance: When Payments Become An Experience, veteran growth strategists, entrepreneurs, and fintech disruptors Scarlett Sieber and Sophie Guibaud deliver a thought-provoking and page-turning discussion on the most impactful and exciting trend of fintech yet: embedded finance. In the book, you’ll explore the past, present, and future of fintech, from how embedded finance is being leveraged today by industry heavyweights like Google and Amazon to supercharge their customers’ experience to the offerings of smaller, niche players who stand poised to dominate their own corners of the market as their answer unmet customers’ 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.
Drawing with a tablet : Easy techniques for mastering digital drawing on location
learn step by step how to create amazing drawings while on the go. Shows sketchers how to take their digital drawing to the next level. Whether you are new to sketching or wish to try the latest technology, this useful guide shares expert tips and techniques for drawing on a tablet. With a focus on using the ProCreate tool, but with information that is relevant to other digital platforms, you will start with the basics, such as opening your file, choosing your resolution, determining your palette, and how to simplify your tools by creating a preferred set of brushes.Covers using layers and groups of layers, and shows you how to create a sketch from start to finish.
Digitalization and the Future of Financial Services : Innovation and Impact of Digital Finance
The aim of this book is to extend our understandings on how digitalization and the future of financial services can be helpful in different business circumstances in many cross-functional financial areas, such as financial markets, financial risk management, financial technologies, investment finance, etc. Thus, the book aims at addressing the relevance of digital finance for different players, highlighting differences in tools and processes as well as identifying innovative practices in financial digitalization.
Digital Satellite Communications
Digital Satellite Communications focuses on the study and design of efficient and flexible physical layers for broadband mobile and fixed satellite links. The chapters address long-term developments for advanced physical layer techniques in broadband communications, fixed and mobile terminals, and 4G evolutions with a potential convergence between different technologies. A general description of satellite systems and services is provided which organizes the material into a generalized and readable framework. The approach is both analytical and descriptive.
Defending Life : The Nature of Host-Parasite Relations
Defending Life discusses the relationship between hosts and parasites. A major contention of the book is that the immune system depends ontologically on the ecosystem in which it is embedded; it would not have the features it has if it was not related in one way or other to parasitic agents and to the host’s own cells and tissues. To sustain the argument, life is investigated at all layers – from molecules up through cells, organisms and ecosystems. Together with the inverse course, which goes from ecological contingencies down to gene-expression profiles, the approach facilitates an advanced understanding of immunocompetence as well as its converse, immunoincompetence. The emphasis on analytical abstractions, coherent patterns and generative mechanisms makes possible the distinction between genuine causality and coincidental associations, and thus increases the understanding of why we observe what we observe. The book contains detailed descriptions of the immune system and the microbial world as well as methodological and conceptual clarifications.
Corporate Control and Enterprise Reform in China : An Econometric Analysis of Block Share Trades
This study sheds light on the efficiency of corporate control allocation in Chinese listed firms. Using a panel data set for the period 1996 to 2006, it examines the frequency, causes and consequences of changes in corporate control. The results indicate that poorly performing firms are the predominant targets of control changes; shareholder and creditor control generally act as a complement for changes in control. Following the change in ownership there is a substantial amount of corporate restructuring and an improvement in operating performance. Significant differences in these dimensions emerge, however, between State and private transfers of control. The findings not only provide insights into the motives and constraints of the key players involved in governance practices in China; but they also contain useful implications for other emerging markets around the world that have weak legal systems and weak property rights protection.
Controlled Synthesis of Nanoparticles in Microheterogeneous Systems
contains descriptions of one of the most powerful bottom-up methods of synthesizing size controlled and stable nanoparticles. This method is based on the use of surfactant-containing microheterogeneous systems: liquid crystals, monolayers and multilayers, solutions of direct and reversed micelles, direct and reversed vesicles, and water-in-oil and oil-in-water microemulsions. The author is prominent in the field of physico-chemical characterization of microheterogeneous systems and their use as ideal solvent and reaction media for the production and long-term storage of nanomaterials. This is the first book that attempts to unify the knowledge necessary for judicious manipulation of surfactant-based systems and a fine tuning of geometric and physico-chemical properties of nanoparticles of a wide variety of substances
Contributions to Ubiquitous Computing
This book puts the larger vision of ubiquitous computing in the context of today’s mobile and distributed computing systems and presents innovative solutions at all system layers ranging from hardware over vertical and horizontal infrastructure services and novel middleware techniques to various types of application software. Some chapters address core properties of ubiquitous applications including mobility, self-healing and self-organisation of both technical and social-technical systems. Other contributions deal with common facilities like secure e-payment or semantic web techniques and business solutions like wireless asset management or e- maintenance. Distributed systems management with self-monitoring capabilities, Internet congestion control, and novel security solutions coping with denial of service attacks against mobile agent systems and software- and hardware-based data encryption methods are further topics addressed.
Collective Actions in Europe : A Comparative, Economic and Transsystemic Analysis
This book offers an analytical presentation of how Europe has created its own version of collective actions. In the last three decades, Europe has seen a remarkable proliferation of collective action legislation, making class actions the most successful export product of the American legal scholarship. While its spread has been surrounded by distrust and suspiciousness, today more than half of the EU Member States have introduced collective actions for damages and from those who did, more than half chose, to some extent, the opt-out system. This book demonstrates why collective actions have been felt needed from the perspective of access to justice and effectiveness of law, the European debate and the deep layers of the European reaction and resistance, revealing how the Copernican turn of class actions questions the fundamentals of the European thinking about market and public interest. Using a transsystemic presentation of the European national models, it analyzes the way collective actions were accommodated with the European regulatory environment, the novel and peculiar regulatory questions they had to address and how and why they work differently on this side of the Atlantic.
Magnetic Heterostructures : Advances and Perspectives in Spinstructures and Spintransport
Magnetic heterostructures constitute an important field in magnetism and nanotechnology, which has developed over the past fifteen years due to important advances in epitaxial- growth techniques and lithographic processes. Magnetic heterostructures combine different physical properties which do not exist in nature. Examples are semiconductors/ferromagnets, superconductors/ferromagnets, and ferromagnets/antiferromagnets. These combinations display rich and novel physical properties different from those that exit in any single one of them. Interlayer exchange coupling, exchange bias, proximity effects, giant magneto-resistance, tunneling magneto-resistance, spininjection and spintransport are examples of new physical phenomena that rely on the combination of different materials layers
Macroscopic Transport Equations for Rarefied Gas Flows : Approximation Methods in Kinetic Theory
This book discusses classical and modern methods to derive macroscopic transport equations for rarefied gases from the Boltzmann equation, for small and moderate Knudsen numbers, i.e.as well as the new order of magnitude method, which avoids the short-comings of the classical methods, but retains their benefits.
Lymphocyte Trafficking in Health and Disease
Since the discovery of chemokines and of chemokine receptors it has become evident that expression of chemokines at the site of inflammation may regulate the composition of cellular infiltrate, thereby directing the type of immune response. Recently, the molecular characterization of inherited disorders of immune system, (e.g., Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome, WHIM syndrome, leukocyte adhesion deficiency), which are characterized by cytoskeleton/adhesion defects or by altered response of chemokine receptors has contributed to clarifying the key players of immune response in normal physiology and in disease. This book, which deals with the description of the role of chemokines in immune response and underlines potential targets of therapeutical intervention, offers a series of contributions of the most challenging aspects of lymphocyte migration in homeostasis and in disease.
Layered Double Hydroxides
Both experimental and theoretical studies of nearly every aspect of the LDH structure are discussed, including the range of metal cations and interlayer anions, M 3+ /M 2+ ratios, LDH polytypes, arrangement of the "interlayer" anions and water molecules, molecular modeling and molecular dynamics simulations, and the long- and short-range order in both the layers and interlayer galleries. Of especial value is the treatment of the more detailed aspects of the LDH structure that are still unresolved.
Lasers in the Conservation of Artworks ; LACONA V Proceedings, Osnabrück, Germany, Sept. 15-18, 2003
Since 1995, when Costas Fotakis first brought together restorers and scientists to discuss the potential of lasers in art conservation, the field has grown enormously in importance, and today restorers and laser scientists work together to develop new applications. This book presents the more than six dozen research papers prepared for LACONA V (Lasers in Art Conservation), held in Osnabrueck/Germany in September 2003. The fifth congress once again gathers restorers, art historians, museum staff, laser scientists and laser manufacturers. The topics include, among others: laser cleaning of artworks (case studies and side effects), removal of former conservation layers, fundamentals of laser-artwork interaction, online monitoring and process control, laser diagnostics, spectroscopy for monitoring and identification, networks and co-operation projects.
KRAS : Methods and protocols
Details protocols ranging from high yield production metabolically labeled KRAS for NMR studies to approaches that quantify engagement of novel molecules that bind KRAS in live cells. Chapters focus on protein production and characterization, biochemical assays, cell-based assays, KRAS-membrane interactions, targeting KRAS, and cell models.
