You can't make it better until you make it work. In America, we don't create bad infrastructure-we just fail to maintain it. The crumbling infrastructure of US cities and towns is often overshadowed by budget concerns, national turmoil, and global crises. As a leader in your local government, you know this better than anyone. But progress is possible. In Mission Control, technologist and entrepreneur Benjamin Schmidt shares how you can join the data-driven revolution and lead the way in adopting new processes and technologies to save money, achieve better outcomes, and make a tangible difference in your civil infrastructure management. A pioneer in public infrastructure technology, Benjamin explains how to overcome the common obstacles and wrong turns that stop innovators in their tracks, demonstrating how obtaining the right data works as a foundation for informed decision-making. Sometimes a good idea just needs a push in the right direction. Learn how to avoid the pitfalls, gain momentum, and take actionable steps with a proven framework for inspiring progress and disrupting the status quo.
As early modern Europe launched its multiple projects of global empire, it simultaneously embarked on an ambitious program of describing and picturing the world. The shapes and meanings of the extraordinary global images that emerged from this process form the subject of this highly original and richly textured study of cultural geography. Inventing Exoticism draws on a vast range of sources from history, literature, science, and art to describe the energetic and sustained international engagements that gave birth to our modern conceptions of exoticism and globalism. Illustrated with more than two hundred images of engravings, paintings, ceramics, and more, Inventing Exoticism shows, in vivid example and persuasive detail, how Europeans came to see and understand the world at an especially critical juncture of imperial imagination. At the turn to the eighteenth century, European markets were flooded by books and artifacts that described or otherwise evoked non-European realms: histories and ethnographies of overseas kingdoms, travel narratives and decorative maps, lavishly produced tomes illustrating foreign flora and fauna, and numerous decorative objects in the styles of distant cultures. Inventing Exoticism meticulously analyzes these, while further identifying the particular role of the Dutch—"Carryers of the World," as Defoe famously called them—in the business of exotica. The form of early modern exoticism that sold so well, as this book shows, originated not with expansion-minded imperialists of London and Paris, but in the canny ateliers of Holland. By scrutinizing these materials from the perspectives of both producers and consumers—and paying close attention to processes of cultural mediation—Inventing Exoticism interrogates traditional postcolonial theories of knowledge and power. It proposes a wholly revisionist understanding of geography in a pivotal age of expansion and offers a crucial historical perspective on our own global culture as it engages in a media-saturated world.
Einzigartige archäologische Einblicke Der Band 9 präsentiert die Ergebnisse der Grabungsaktivitäten 2018 und 2019 des im Frühjahr 2018 wieder aufgenommenen Gadara Region Project. Die seit 2018 in Zirāʽa durchgeführten Grabungs- und Forschungssaisons sind der Siedlungsgeschichte der Eisenzeit II bis zur hellenistischen Zeit in Areal II gewidmet. Mit der Fortsetzung der Ausgrabungen sollte ein weiterer Einblick in die detaillierte chronologische Abfolge der Besiedlung von Zirāʽa zwischen der Eisenzeit II und der hellenistischen Periode gewonnen und insbesondere im nördlichen Bereich des Tall, in Areal II, das die größte Ansammlung von Bauschutt aufweist, weiterverfolgt werden. Der vorliegende Band "Die Ausgrabungssaison 2018 und 2019" stellt eine einzelne Monographie der Tall Zirāʽa Publication Series dar. Einzigartige Einblicke in die Lebenswelt einer lang vergangenen Zeit
Photovoltaic (PV) is attracting increasing interest as an important contribution to renewable energy supply. Organic photovoltaic (OPV) is a comparable young PV technology with a great potential towards low cost solar power. This is due to the intrinsic advantage of the incorporated organic semiconductors which are soluble. Solution processing allows high throughput coating and printing processes. Hence, energy intensive high temperature and vacuum steps can be avoided which reduces the fabrication costs and keeps energy payback times low. The performance of organic solar cells strongly depends on the structure of the solution cast photoactive layer which comprises a polymer-fullerene blend. The blend structure evolves during the film drying step which has been studied in this thesis. Starting point of this work was the hypothesis that drying process parameters are suitable for systematically tuning the structure formation during drying of solution cast polymer-fullerene films in order to generate optimized structures with improved photovoltaic performance. For the evaluation of this hypothesis the structure formation of the polymer-fullerene system Poly(3-hexylthiophene-2,5-diyl):[6,6]-Phenyl C61-butyric acid methyl ester (P3HT:PCBM) was investigated incorporating i) thin film drying kinetics, ii) phase behavior of polymer-fullerene solutions, iii) structure formation and iv) the drying process-structure-property relationship of solar cells. The generality of the obtained results has been studied in comparison with the behavior of Poly{[4,40-bis(2-ethylhexyl)dithieno(3,2-b;20,30-d)silole]-2,6-diyl-alt-(2,1,3-benzothidiazole)-4,7-diyl} (PSBTBT). i) Within this thesis a dedicated coating and drying setup was developed which afforded precisely defined coating and drying process conditions as prerequisite for all obtained results. For the first time, the drying behavior of finally a few hundred nanometer thin films could be investigated at five measurement positions with laser reflectometry simultaneously. This allowed the elaboration of a spatially resolved numerical thin film drying model. ii) In conjunction with the measurement and simulation of the evolution of film composition it was required to determine important instants of phase transitions such as solubility limits. Therefore the binodal region of P3HT solutions has been determined in the temperature range of 0°C-60°C. Within the unstable region P3HT solutions phase separate into a sol and a gel phase. The fullerene PCBM exhibits only a single solubility limit. iii) In order to correlate the expected phase transitions according to the phase diagrams with the real structure formation, the above mentioned coating and drying setup was combined with synchrotron based in situ grazing incidence X-ray diffraction (GIXD) measurements. This gave unique insights into the mechanisms and dynamics of polymer-fullerene blend crystallization. After reaching P3HT solubility the crystallization proceeded with well-oriented interface-induced P3HT nucleation followed by P3HT crystal growth with increasing orientation distribution of the crystallites and PCBM aggregation in the final drying period. Furthermore strong polymer-fullerene interaction forces could be derived. By increasing the PCBM fraction it could be shown for the 1:2 P3HT:PCBM ratio that PCBM molecules brake the (020) π-π-stacking of P3HT lamellae which signifies a dramatic loss of hole mobility and consequently reduced device performance. It is further notable that increasing drying temperatures reduce the amount of (020) π-π-stacked P3HT molecules but lead to an increased amount of P3HT (100) crystallinity. Hence, drying temperature determines the preferred direction of crystal growth. iv) Besides a finer degree of phase separation, reduced drying temperatures also cause a higher amount of π-π-stacked polymers, longer effective polymer conjugation length, increased amount of vertical charge transport pathways and an increasingly rough topography due to larger polymer aggregates. Jointly this leads to improved power conversion efficiency at lower drying temperatures. Based on the elaborated knowledge a strategy for a 40% reduction of drying time with only small drawbacks in solar cell performance could be developed. Finally it was important to investigate the transferability of the obtained knowledge to other material systems. PSBTBT:PC71BM blends show similarities to that of P3HT:PCBM with partly interface induced polymer nucleation and subsequent fullerene aggregation in the final drying stage. The kinetics of molecular ordering however proceed fast enough such that the drying process under the investigated conditions cannot limit the structure formation. Hence, P3HT:PCBM is a suitable model system due to its sensitivity to many process parameters. According to the process influence on novel materials the results of this thesis can serve as a source for appropriate process strategies.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Since its popularization in the mid 1990s, the Internet has impacted nearly every aspect of our cultural and personal lives. Over the course of two decades, the Internet remained an unregulated medium whose characteristic openness allowed numerous applications, services, and websites to flourish. By 2005, Internet Service Providers began to explore alternative methods of network management that would permit them to discriminate the quality and speed of access to online content as they saw fit. In response, the Federal Communications Commission sought to enshrine “net neutrality” in regulatory policy as a means of preserving the Internet’s open, nondiscriminatory characteristics. Although the FCC established a net neutrality policy in 2010, debate continues as to who ultimately should have authority to shape and maintain the Internet’s structure. Regulating the Web brings together a diverse collection of scholars who examine the net neutrality policy and surrounding debates from a variety of perspectives. In doing so, the book contributes to the ongoing discourse about net neutrality in the hopes that we may continue to work toward preserving a truly open Internet structure in the United States.
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