At times in my life I have written poems of my passed escapades of the heart. Lost loves, regretful wasted years in seeking fulfillment of ones own desires in seeking happiness. Walking down paths of ill regret in seeking that perfect to us person in which we could mutually give it all and be bounded to for all eternity. I say eternity because I have always believed that (contrary to what others may and do think) true love never dies. The most difficult is to fine mutual true love. We all seek in the end the same things as to humanly be able to fulfill our destiny. Thank you for reading my words. I hope they touch your life in a good way, as my writings have been a therapy in mine.
At times in my life I have written poems of my passed escapades of the heart. Lost loves, regretful wasted years in seeking fulfillment of ones own desires in seeking happiness. Walking down paths of ill regret in seeking that perfect to us person in which we could mutually give it all and be bounded to for all eternity. I say eternity because I have always believed that (contrary to what others may and do think) true love never dies. The most difficult is to fine mutual true love. We all seek in the end the same things as to humanly be able to fulfill our destiny. Thank you for reading my words. I hope they touch your life in a good way, as my writings have been a therapy in mine.
The book provides a pentapartite theoretical analysis of socio-economic factors as the grand basis for the evolution of Boko Haram terrorism in Nigeria. It describes the terrorism as a by-product of unresolved conflict emanating from unequal hegemonic power exchange with respect to the non-fulfillment of socio-economic goals between the political state and the citizenry. Rather than follow the popular notion of religion as the root causes of Boko Haram crisis, the book widens its scope to cover terrorism as a whole with a view to laying a more viable foundation for its readers to understand the concept of terrorism, provoking causes and perspectives, as well as influential factors that may interplay to sustain extremist terrorism in contemporary global society. Using Boko Haram as a potentially useful model, the book contends that the discursive framework of terrorism cannot be isolated from its socio-economic perspectives. In view of the foregoing, the simplistic response to resolving terrorism crisis in Nigeria still lies at the heart of ameliorating the socio-economic conditions of the citizens via the political state. The book will be appropriate for individuals whose interests are vested on terrorism and homeland security, terrorism and counterterrorism studies, criminal justice and organized crime, terrorism and political violence, African politics, peace and conflict resolution as well as security and conflict management. Counter-terrorism experts, policy makers, academic scholars, intelligence and security operatives will also find this book resourceful. Ultimately, as interest in terrorism studies continues to grow exponentially among Sociologists, Anthropologists and Criminologists, it is my utmost quest to provide the most invaluable themes and updated theories in terrorism research for use by independent researchers, students and academics seeking to advance empirically and theoretically driven research in the fields of terrorism, homeland security and related crimes.
Este primer tomo de la Historia Monetaria Documental de Puerto Rico (La Moneda Macuquina) nos muestra el proceso de la introducción en nuestra isla de la moneda macuquina en 1813 por emigrados de América del Sur. Al finalizar en la Isla las remesas del Situado Mexicano, nuestro primer Intendente de Hacienda, Don Alejandro Ramírez, autorizó en 1813 el uso de la moneda macuquina para mitigar la falta de numerario en circulación. La macuquina circuló libremente en Puerto Rico hasta 1857 cuando fue canjeada por moneda de cuño nacional español. Este libro ilustra algo novedoso para los numismáticos y es que hemos encontrado evidencia de un papel moneda el cual se fabricó para facilitar el proceso del canje de la macuquina por la moneda de cuño nacional. El libro muestra los valores de las diferentes de monedas que además de la macuquina circularon en la Isla y ayuda a complementar el conocimiento acerca de dicha circulación monetaria en el siglo XIX.
The interest for :I:~ modulation-based NO converters has significantly increased in the last years. The reason for that is twofold. On the one hand, unlike other converters that need accurate building blocks to obtain high res olution, :I:~ converters show low sensitivity to the imperfections of their building blocks. This is achieved through extensive use of digital signal pro cessing - a desirable feature regarding the implementation of NO interfaces in mainstream CMOS technologies which are better suited for implementing fast, dense, digital circuits than accurate analog circuits. On the other hand, the number of applications with industrial interest has also grown. In fact, starting from the earliest in the audio band, today we can find :I:~ converters in a large variety of NO interfaces, ranging from instrumentation to commu nications. These advances have been supported by a number of research works that have lead to a considerably large amount of published papers and books cov ering different sub-topics: from purely theoretical aspects to architecture and circuit optimization. However, so much material is often difficultly digested by those unexperienced designers who have been committed to developing a :I:~ converter, mainly because there is a lack of methodology. In our view, a clear methodology is necessary in :I:~ modulator design because all related tasks are rather hard.
Cost-effectiveness analysis is becoming an increasingly important tool for decision making in the health systems. Cost-Effectiveness of Medical Treatments formulates the cost-effectiveness analysis as a statistical decision problem, identifies the sources of uncertainty of the problem, and gives an overview of the frequentist and Bayesian statistical approaches for decision making. Basic notions on decision theory such as space of decisions, space of nature, utility function of a decision and optimal decisions, are explained in detail using easy to read mathematics. Features Focuses on cost-effectiveness analysis as a statistical decision problem and applies the well-established optimal statistical decision methodology. Discusses utility functions for cost-effectiveness analysis. Enlarges the class of models typically used in cost-effectiveness analysis with the incorporation of linear models to account for covariates of the patients. This permits the formulation of the group (or subgroup) theory. Provides Bayesian procedures to account for model uncertainty in variable selection for linear models and in clustering for models for heterogeneous data. Model uncertainty in cost-effectiveness analysis has not been considered in the literature. Illustrates examples with real data. In order to facilitate the practical implementation of real datasets, provides the codes in Mathematica for the proposed methodology. The motivation for the book is to make the achievements in cost-effectiveness analysis accessible to health providers, who need to make optimal decisions, to the practitioners and to the students of health sciences. Elías Moreno is Professor of Statistics and Operational Research at the University of Granada, Spain, Corresponding Member of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Spain, and elect member of ISI. Francisco José Vázquez-Polo is Professor of Mathematics and Bayesian Methods at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, and Head of the Department of Quantitative Methods. Miguel Ángel Negrín is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Quantitative Methods at the ULPGC. His main research topics are Bayesian methods applied to Health Economics, economic evaluation and cost-effectiveness analysis, meta-analysis and equity in the provision of healthcare services.
This book presents a systematic approach to the implementation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices achieving visual inference through deep neural networks. Practical aspects are covered, with a focus on providing guidelines to optimally select hardware and software components as well as network architectures according to prescribed application requirements. The monograph includes a remarkable set of experimental results and functional procedures supporting the theoretical concepts and methodologies introduced. A case study on animal recognition based on smart camera traps is also presented and thoroughly analyzed. In this case study, different system alternatives are explored and a particular realization is completely developed. Illustrations, numerous plots from simulations and experiments, and supporting information in the form of charts and tables make Visual Inference and IoT Systems: A Practical Approach a clear and detailed guide to the topic. It will be of interest to researchers, industrial practitioners, and graduate students in the fields of computer vision and IoT.
Writing about Troilo over a century after his birth and nearly fifty years after his death implies a certainty: the artist, who performed with him, in all but a few cases, no longer exist. That vast absence compels us to seek Troilo where he never left: the music. “Troilo: Biography of Argentina” is a music book, but also a precise and rigorous painting of a mobilized, vigorous and encompassing country where culture –and tango– were in the spotlight. It might well be read as a text that uncovers the keys of growth and decline of Argentina
The second edition of the Historical Dictionary of Spain is an unrivalled reference guide to Spanish history and politics from the Middle Ages to the present. With its chronology, introductory essay, and over seven hundred dictionary entries on major Spanish organizations, including political parties, trade unions, and state bodies; the various regions and languages which comprise Spain, including Catalonia and the Basque Country; and major figures in Spanish culture and the arts, the Historical Dictionary of Spain allows readers to easily follow the major changes Spain has undergone.
What role does war play in political development? Our understanding of the rise of the nation-state is based heavily on the Western European experience of war. Challenging the dominance of this model, Blood and Debt looks at Latin America's much different experience as more relevant to politics today in regions as varied as the Balkans and sub-Saharan Africa. The book's illuminating review of the relatively peaceful history of Latin America from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries reveals the lack of two critical prerequisites needed for war: a political and military culture oriented toward international violence, and the state institutional capacity to carry it out. Using innovative new data such as tax receipts, naming of streets and public monuments, and conscription records, the author carefully examines how war affected the fiscal development of the state, the creation of national identity, and claims to citizenship. Rather than building nation-states and fostering democratic citizenship, he shows, war in Latin America destroyed institutions, confirmed internal divisions, and killed many without purpose or glory.
Under this somewhat threatening title, the renowned civil rights leader Jos? Angel Guti?rrez provides a guidebook to minority empowerment through the use of analysis, practical experience and anecdote. His primary goal is the conversion of Latino demographic power into educational, economic and political power. In an incisive introduction, Guti?rrez analyzes the types of power and evaluates Chicano and Latino access to power at various levels in U.S. society. In very plain, down-to-earth language and examples, Guti?rrez takes pains to make his broad knowledge and experience available to everyone, but especially to those who want to be activists for themselves and their communities. For him the empowerment of a minority or working-class person can transfer into greater empowerment of the whole community. This manual penned by the founder of the only successful Hispanic political party, La Raza Unida, brings together an impressive breadth of models to either follow or avoid. Quite often, Guti?rrezÍs voice is not only the seasoned voice of reason, but also that of humor, wry wit and satire. If nothing else, The Chicano Manual on How to Handle Gringos is a wonderful survey of the Chicano and Latino community on the move in all spheres of life in the United States on the very eve of its demographic and cultural ascendancy.
Traditional Pattern Recognition (PR) and Computer Vision (CV) technologies have mainly focused on full automation, even though full automation often proves elusive or unnatural in many applications, where the technology is expected to assist rather than replace the human agents. However, not all the problems can be automatically solved being the human interaction the only way to tackle those applications. Recently, multimodal human interaction has become an important field of increasing interest in the research community. Advanced man-machine interfaces with high cognitive capabilities are a hot research topic that aims at solving challenging problems in image and video applications. Actually, the idea of computer interactive systems was already proposed on the early stages of computer science. Nowadays, the ubiquity of image sensors together with the ever-increasing computing performance has open new and challenging opportunities for research in multimodal human interaction. This book aims to show how existing PR and CV technologies can naturally evolve using this new paradigm. The chapters of this book show different successful case studies of multimodal interactive technologies for both image and video applications. They cover a wide spectrum of applications, ranging from interactive handwriting transcriptions to human-robot interactions in real environments.
Cutaneous lymphoid infiltrates which are suspicious for lymphoma, are always important challenges for the general pathologist who faces them occasionally. Many times they are also difficult even for the dermatopathologist, and the most modern diagnostic weapons sometimes play a crucial role in the differential diagnosis with other non-malignant entities, as well as between the different types of lymphomas. Clinically, they sometimes simulate many other conditions, and are not always easy to be recognise by the dermatologist. In 2005, a new classification of cutaneous lymphomas was published, in an attempt to achieve a better comprehension of the nature and behaviour of these tumours. Nevertheless, many new aspects of pathogenesis, diagnosis and differential diagnosis, are constantly appearing in medical literature. This current book is an attempt to present to the reader, the field of cutaneous lymphomas in a way that can be useful in daily practice, either as a general surgical pathologist, a dermatologist, or a dermatopathologist. At the same time, the reader will find updated information which will probably be very helpful in order to face confidently most of the difficult clinical and histopathologic cases. The book goes through most of the cutaneous lymphomas in systematic order, either B-cell, T-cell, or Hodgkin type, presenting the clinical, and morphological aspects, which include many of the most recent molecular contributions. Many of the chapters also provide a therapeutic approach.
Human visual perception is limited to the visual-optical spectrum. Machine vision is not. Cameras sensitive to the different infrared spectra can enhance the abilities of autonomous systems and visually perceive the environment in a holistic way. Relevant scene content can be made visible especially in situations, where sensors of other modalities face issues like a visual-optical camera that needs a source of illumination. As a consequence, not only human mistakes can be avoided by increasing the level of automation, but also machine-induced errors can be reduced that, for example, could make a self-driving car crash into a pedestrian under difficult illumination conditions. Furthermore, multi-spectral sensor systems with infrared imagery as one modality are a rich source of information and can provably increase the robustness of many autonomous systems. Applications that can benefit from utilizing infrared imagery range from robotics to automotive and from biometrics to surveillance. In this book, we provide a brief yet concise introduction to the current state-of-the-art of computer vision and machine learning in the infrared spectrum. Based on various popular computer vision tasks such as image enhancement, object detection, or object tracking, we first motivate each task starting from established literature in the visual-optical spectrum. Then, we discuss the differences between processing images and videos in the visual-optical spectrum and the various infrared spectra. An overview of the current literature is provided together with an outlook for each task. Furthermore, available and annotated public datasets and common evaluation methods and metrics are presented. In a separate chapter, popular applications that can greatly benefit from the use of infrared imagery as a data source are presented and discussed. Among them are automatic target recognition, video surveillance, or biometrics including face recognition. Finally, we conclude with recommendations for well-fitting sensor setups and data processing algorithms for certain computer vision tasks. We address this book to prospective researchers and engineers new to the field but also to anyone who wants to get introduced to the challenges and the approaches of computer vision using infrared images or videos. Readers will be able to start their work directly after reading the book supported by a highly comprehensive backlog of recent and relevant literature as well as related infrared datasets including existing evaluation frameworks. Together with consistently decreasing costs for infrared cameras, new fields of application appear and make computer vision in the infrared spectrum a great opportunity to face nowadays scientific and engineering challenges.
During the 1980s the Mexican regime faced a series of economic, social, and political disasters that led many to question its survival. Yet by 1992 the economy was again growing, with inflation under control and the confidence of international investors restored. Mexico was now touted as an example for regimes in Eastern Europe to emulate. How did Carlos Salinas and his team of technocrats manage to gain political power sufficient to impose their economic model? How did they sustain their revolution from above despite the hardships these changes brought for many Mexicans? How did they stage their remarkable political comeback and create their “democracy within reason”? Why did Salinas succeed in keeping control of his revolution while Mikhail Gorbachev failed to do so in his similar effort at radical reform? Miguel Centeno addresses these questions by analyzing three critical developments in the Mexican state: the centralization of power within the bureaucracy; the rise of a new generation of technocrats and their use of a complex system of political networks; and the dominance of a neoliberal ideology and technocratic vision that guided policy decisions and limited democratic participation. In his conclusion the author proposes some alternative scenarios for Mexico’s future, including the role of NAFTA, and suggests lessons for the study of regimes undertaking similar transitions. Of obvious interest to students of contemporary Mexico and Latin America, the book will also be very useful for those analyzing the transition to the market in other countries, the role of knowledge in public policy, and the nature of the modern state in general.
This book aims to overcome the traditional ray paradigm and provide an analytical paradigm for Nonimaging Optics based on Field Theory. As a second objective, the authors address the connections between this Field Theory of Nonimaging Optics and other radiative transfer theories. The book introduces the Field Theory of Nonimaging Optics as a new analytical paradigm, not statistical, to analyze problems in the frame of nonimaging geometrical optics, with a formulation based on field theory of irradiance vector D. This new paradigm provides new principles and tools in the optical system design methods, complementary to flowline method, overcoming the classical ray paradigm. This new Field paradigm can be considered as a generalization of the ray paradigm and new accurate and faster computation algorithms will be developed. In a parallel way, the advance in the knowledge of the principles of Field Theory of Nonimaging Optics has produced clear advances in the connection between nonimaging optics and other apparently disconnected theories of radiation transfer. The irradiance vector D can be considered as the macroscopic average of Poynting vector, with a clear connection with radiation pressure. Lorentz geometry techniques can also be applied to study irradiance vector D. There are clear thermodynamic connections between the nonimaging concentrator and Stefan-Boltzmann law of radiation. From this thermodynamic connection, nonimaging optics and irradiance vector D can also be studied from a phase space point of view. This book is intended for researchers, graduate students, academics and professionals looking to analyze, design and optimize optical systems.
Fuzzy logic has virtually exploded over the landscape of emerging technologies, becoming an integral part of myriad applications and a standard tool for engineers. Until recently, most of the attention and applications have centered on fuzzy systems implemented in software. But these systems are limited. Problems that require real-time operation, low area, or low power consumption demand hardware designed to the fuzzy paradigm - and engineers with the background and skills to design it. Microelectronic Design of Fuzzy Logic-Based Systems offers low-cost answers to issues that software cannot resolve. From the theoretical, architectural, and technological foundation to design tools and applications, it serves as your guide to effective hardware realizations of fuzzy logic. Review fuzzy logic theory and the basic issues of fuzzy sets, operators, and inference mechanisms Explore the trade-offs between efficient theoretical behavior and practical hardware realizations Discover the properties of the possible microelectronic realizations of fuzzy systems - conventional processors, fuzzy coprocessors, and fuzzy chips Investigate the design of fuzzy chips that implement the whole fuzzy inference method into silicon Analyze analog, digital, and mixed-signal techniques Reduce your design effort for fuzzy systems with CAD tools - learn the requirements they should meet and survey current environments. Put it all together - see examples and case studies illustrating how all of this is used to solve particular problems related to control and neuro-fuzzy applications
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