The past few decades have witnessed remarkable growth in the application of passive seismic monitoring to address a range of problems in geoscience and engineering, from large-scale tectonic studies to environmental investigations. Passive seismic methods are increasingly being used for surveillance of massive, multi-stage hydraulic fracturing and development of enhanced geothermal systems. The theoretical framework and techniques used in this emerging area draw on various established fields, such as earthquake seismology, exploration geophysics and rock mechanics. Based on university and industry courses developed by the author, this book reviews all the relevant research and technology to provide an introduction to the principles and applications of passive seismic monitoring. It integrates up-to-date case studies and interactive online exercises, making it a comprehensive and accessible resource for advanced students and researchers in geophysics and engineering, as well as industry practitioners.
After World War II, banks and other mortgage lenders began requiring insurance to protect them against flawed or defective real estate titles. Over the past sixty years, the title insurance industry has grown steadily in size, power, and secrecy: policies are available for both lenders and property owners and many title insurers offer an array of other real estate services, such as escrow and appraisal. Yet details about the industry’s operational procedures remain closely guarded from public exposure. In The American Title Insurance Industry, Joseph and David Eaton present evidence that improvements in recordkeeping over the last sixty years—particularly the advent of computers—have reduced the likelihood of a defective title going unnoticed in a property transaction. But the industry’s flaws run deeper than mere obsolescence: in most states, title insurers are allowed to engage in anticompetitive business practices, including price-fixing. Among the findings in this meticulously researched study are instances of insurers charging premiums well above the amount necessary to compensate them for assuming the risk of defect and identical policies with identical risk that vary in price by hundreds of percentage points for different geographic locations. The authors also examine the widely ignored role that the federal and most state governments play in perpetuating the title insurance industry’s unfair practices. Whereas most private industries prefer as little government intervention as possible, title insurers welcome it. Federal statue exempts title insurers from anti-trust liability, opening the door for price-fixing and destroying any semblance of free-market competition or market power for consumers. A landmark study for elected officials, and all those involved in the insurance, real estate, and brokerage industries, The American Title Insurance Industry brings to light a long-neglected problem—and offers suggestions for how it might be remedied.
A century and a half before the modern information technology revolution, machinists in the eastern United States created the nation's first high technology industries. In iron foundries and steam-engine works, locomotive works, machine and tool shops, textile-machinery firms, and firearms manufacturers, these resourceful workers pioneered the practice of dispersing technological expertise through communities of practice. In the first book to study this phenomenon since the 1916 classic, English and American Tool Builders, David R. Meyer examines the development of skilled-labor exchange systems, showing how individual metalworking sectors grew and moved outward. He argues that the networked behavior of machinists within and across industries helps explain the rapid transformation of metalworking industries during the antebellum period, building a foundation for the sophisticated, mass production/consumer industries that figured so prominently in the later U.S. economy.
The Second Shell Process Control Workshop covers the proceedings of a workshop of the same name, held in Houston, Texas on December 12-16, 1988. The said workshop seeks to improve the communication process between academic researchers, industrial researchers, and the engineering community in the field of process control, and in turn improve understanding of the nature of the control problems. The book covers topics such as automatic tuning and adaptive control; an operator control theory approach to the shell standard control problem; discrete time-adaptive predictive control; and the designing of a control system. Also included are topics such as optimal control and model identification; fundamental process control; statistical process control; and interfaces with process control. The text is recommended for researchers and practitioners in the field of engineering who would like to know more about process control and modeling.
These volumes make new contributions to the history of psychiatry and society in three ways: First, they propose a theory of values and ideology influencing the evolution of psychiatry and society in recurring cycles, and survey the history of psychiatry in recent centuries in light of this theory. Second, they review the waxing, prominence, and waning of Community Mental Health as an example of a segment of this cyclical history of psychiatry. Third, they provide the first biography of Erich Lindemann, one of the founders of social and community psychiatry, and explore the interaction of the prominent contributor with the historical environment and the influence this has on both. We return to the issue of values and ideologies as influences on psychiatry, whether or not it is accepted as professionally proper. This is intended to stimulate self-reflection and the acceptance of the values sources of ideology, their effect on professional practice, and the effect of values-based ideology on the community in which psychiatry practices. The books will be of interest to psychiatric teachers and practitioners, health planners, and socially responsible citizens.
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