This is the first comprehensive review of the world literature on filovirus research and provides the most extensive bibliography of the subject yet published. There is special emphasis on foreign literature that has never been summarized. Every aspect of filovirus research, including their history, epidemiology, clinical picture, pathology, molecular biology, and political aspects are reviewed in detail.
Simian hemorrhagic fever is an acutely fatal disease of Asian macaques. It is caused by simian hemorrhagic fever virus (SHFV), which is currently classified as an arterivirus in the family Arteriviridae, order Nidovirales. In contrast to its closest relatives, the arterviruses equine arteritis virus, lactate dehydrogenase-elevating virus, and porcine respiratory and reproductive syndrome virus, SHFV is almost completely uncharacterized. Thus far, SHFV has never been isolated from wild animals, and all outbreaks have occurred within primate-holding facilities. Recently, scientific interest in simian hemorrhagic fever has increased in the biodefense community because the disease closely resembles viral hemorrhagic fevers (VHFs) caused by certain arena-, bunya-, flavi-, and filovirids. In contrast to these viruses, SHFV does not cause disease in humans, is not listed as a Select Agent or an NIAID Priority Pathogen, and can be handled in standard (A)BSL-2 laboratory environments. SHFV may therefore be a valuable tool for developing nonhuman primate models for VHF, which may not only allow for the better characterization of VHF pathogenesis and the testing of general anti-VHF pharmaceuticals, but may also be used as a training tool for new maximum-containment facilities in regards to safety testing of infrastructure and standard operation procedures. This review summarizes the scientific knowledge on SHFV and the disease it causes.”
Addiction is one of the most challenging health problems. It is associated with enormous individual distress and tremendous socioeconomic consequences. Unfortunately, its underlying mechanisms are not fully understood, and pharmacological, psychological, or social interventions often fail to achieve long-lasting remission. Next to genetic, social, and contextual factors, a substance-induced dysfunction of the brain’s reward system is considered a decisive factor for the establishment and maintenance of addiction. Due to its successful application and approval for several neurological disorders, deep brain stimulation (DBS) is known as a powerful tool for modulating dysregulated networks and has also been considered for substance addiction. Initial promising case reports of DBS in alcohol and heroin addiction in humans have recently been published. Likewise, results from animal studies mimicking different kinds of substance addiction point in a similar direction. The objective of this review is to provide an overview of the published results on DBS in addiction, and to discuss whether these preliminary results justify further research, given the novelty of this treatment approach.
Novel Perspectives on German-Language Comics Studies: History, Pedagogy, Theory gathers an international team of contributors from two continents whose innovative scholarship demonstrates a regard for comics and graphic novels as works of art in their own right. The contributions serve as models for further research that will continue to define the relationship between comics and other traditional “high art” forms, such as literature and the visual arts. Novel Perspectives on German-Language Comics Studies is the first English-language anthology that focuses exclusively on the graphic texts of German-speaking countries. In its breadth, this book functions as an important resource in a limited pool of critical works on German-language comics and graphic novels. The individual chapters differ significantly from one another in methodology, subject matter, and style. Taken together, however, they present a cross-section of comics and graphic novel scholarship being performed in North America and Europe today. Moreover, they help to secure a place for these works in a globalized culture of comics. This volume’s contributors have helped create a new critical language within which this rapidly expanding medium can be read and interpreted.
It's 1808 and Sweden is at war with Russia. The war is not going well. On land, the Swedish army is retreating continuously and all that stands between the Russians and the Swedish mainland are the gunboats of the inshore fleet. The sea war amongst the islands of the Finnish and Swedish archipelagos is a special kind of war, fought in open boats by badly equipped men without proper training. Fighting the weather as much as the Russians, Lieutenant Johan Kuhlin commands a small squadron of three gunboats on special duty. During the short and wet summer, he learns that an independent command isn't all glory and that spies can be more dangerous than Russian guns.
Russian officials claim today that the USSR never possessed an offensive biological weapons program. In fact, the Soviet government spent billions of rubles and hard currency to fund a hugely expensive weapons program that added nothing to the country’s security. This history is the first attempt to understand the broad scope of the USSR’s offensive biological weapons research—its inception in the 1920s, its growth between 1970 and 1990, and its possible remnants in present-day Russia. We learn that the U.S. and U.K. governments never obtained clear evidence of the program’s closure from 1990 to the present day, raising the critical question whether the means for waging biological warfare could be resurrected in Russia in the future. Based on interviews with important Soviet scientists and managers, papers from the Soviet Central Committee, and U.S. and U.K. declassified documents, this book peels back layers of lies, to reveal how and why Soviet leaders decided to develop biological weapons, the scientific resources they dedicated to this task, and the multitude of research institutes that applied themselves to its fulfillment. We learn that Biopreparat, an ostensibly civilian organization, was established to manage a top secret program, code-named Ferment, whose objective was to apply genetic engineering to develop strains of pathogenic agents that had never existed in nature. Leitenberg and Zilinskas consider the performance of the U.S. intelligence community in discovering and assessing these activities, and they examine in detail the crucial years 1985 to 1992, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempts to put an end to the program were thwarted as they were under Yeltsin.
Antonia Correlli has lived for 600 years. She's a vampire with special abilities which let her live amongst humans undetected. For the most part. In 1915 the First World War is raging through Europe and new, frightful weapons bring suffering and pain to the men who fight it. While using her cunning and her magic on a hospital ship in the Mediterranean Antonia discovers mysterious things aboard. And she develops dangerous feelings for her captain. Solving the mystery, she discovers once again that humans can't be trusted and that immortality has its price.
In the early months of 1809 a British frigate is trapped in the ice of the Baltic Sea. While Sweden’s war against Russia continues and Stockholm itself is threatened by invasion, several groups plot against the unsuccessful king. Female spy and adventuress Anna Wetterstrand had hoped for a quiet winter together with her beloved Eric. But now the unforeseen events force her to question her loyalties and make a tough decision. Will she be able to save the king – and herself?
This is the first comprehensive review of the world literature on filovirus research and provides the most extensive bibliography of the subject yet published. There is special emphasis on foreign literature that has never been summarized. Every aspect of filovirus research, including their history, epidemiology, clinical picture, pathology, molecular biology, and political aspects are reviewed in detail.
This book reports recent advances in the use of pattern recognition techniques for computer and robot vision. The sciences of pattern recognition and computational vision have been inextricably intertwined since their early days, some four decades ago with the emergence of fast digital computing. All computer vision techniques could be regarded as a form of pattern recognition, in the broadest sense of the term. Conversely, if one looks through the contents of a typical international pattern recognition conference proceedings, it appears that the large majority (perhaps 70-80%) of all pattern recognition papers are concerned with the analysis of images. In particular, these sciences overlap in areas of low level vision such as segmentation, edge detection and other kinds of feature extraction and region identification, which are the focus of this book.
This book offers support for interdisciplinary research on the interactions of nature and society. It is based on the hypothesis that a science of coevolution is needed to explore paths to a sustainable future. Jens Jetzkowitz initially discusses why social science knowledge only rarely finds its way into sustainability discourse. One significant issue is a view of science that separates knowing and acting, and the book illustrates current problems in conceptualising interdisciplinary knowledge production. It then goes one step further and introduces a workable alternative concept, taking philosophical pragmatism as a point of departure. Sustainable development goals and transdisciplinarity are currently subject to widespread discussions and Jetzkowitz takes a stance on the debates from the perspective of coevolutionary science. This book will appeal to scholars and students interested in environmental and sustainability discourses and to anyone willing to think outside the box.
This book contains more than 70 articles and presents international trends in structural glazing and facade construction. Renowned authors from all over the world report on current research results and innovative construction projects.
This well-written textbook on combinatorial optimization puts special emphasis on theoretical results and algorithms with provably good performance, in contrast to heuristics. The book contains complete (but concise) proofs, as well as many deep results, some of which have not appeared in any previous books.
Now back in print by the AMS, this is a significantly revised edition of a book originally published in 1987 by Academic Press. This book gives the reader an introduction to the theory of algebraic representations of reductive algebraic groups. To develop appropriate techniques, the first part of the book is an introduction to the general theory of representations of algebraic group schemes. Here, the author describes important basic notions: induction functors, cohomology,quotients, Frobenius kernels, and reduction mod $p$, among others. The second part of the book is devoted to the representation theory of reductive algebraic groups. It includes topics such as the description of simple modules, vanishing theorems, the Borel-Bott-Weil theorem and Weyl's character formula, andSchubert schemes and line bundles on them. For this revised edition the author added nearly 150 pages of new material describing some later developments, among them Schur algebras, Lusztig's conjecture and Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials, tilting modules, and representations of quantum groups. He also made major revisions to parts of the old text. Jantzen's book continues to be the ultimate source of information on representations of algebraic groups in finite characteristics. It is suitable forgraduate students and research mathematicians interested in algebraic groups and their representations.
This book presents the state of the art in reinforcement learning applied to robotics both in terms of novel algorithms and applications. It discusses recent approaches that allow robots to learn motor. skills and presents tasks that need to take into account the dynamic behavior of the robot and its environment, where a kinematic movement plan is not sufficient. The book illustrates a method that learns to generalize parameterized motor plans which is obtained by imitation or reinforcement learning, by adapting a small set of global parameters and appropriate kernel-based reinforcement learning algorithms. The presented applications explore highly dynamic tasks and exhibit a very efficient learning process. All proposed approaches have been extensively validated with benchmarks tasks, in simulation and on real robots. These tasks correspond to sports and games but the presented techniques are also applicable to more mundane household tasks. The book is based on the first author’s doctoral thesis, which won the 2013 EURON Georges Giralt PhD Award.
Thorough and continuous architecting is the key to overall success in software engineering, and architecture evaluation is a crucial part of it. This book presents a pragmatic architecture evaluation approach and insights gained from its application in more than 75 projects with industrial customers in the past decade. It presents context factors, empirical data, and example cases, as well as lessons learned on mitigating the risk of change through architecture evaluation. By providing comprehensive answers to more than 100 typical questions and discussing more than 60 frequent mistakes and lessons learned, the book allows readers to not only learn how to conduct architecture evaluations and interpret its results, but also to become aware of risks such as false conclusions, manipulating data, and unsound lines of argument. It equips readers to become confident in assessing quantitative measurement results and recognize when it is better to rely on qualitative expertise. The target readership includes both practitioners and researchers. By demonstrating its impact and providing clear guidelines, data, and examples, it encourages practitioners to conduct architecture evaluations. At the same time, it offers researchers insights into industrial architecture evaluations, which serve as the basis for guiding research in this area and will inspire future research directions.
Published just months after the Versailles Treaty was signed, The Economic Consequences of the Peace is a devastating critique of allied leaders and the reparations imposed on Germany and Austria in the aftermath of WWI. These essays assess the importance of Keynes’s book, both historically and in its relevance for the challenges we face today.
Authoritative resource describing the artificial intelligence and advanced technologies in smart power systems with simulation examples and case studies Artificial Intelligence-based Smart Power Systems presents advanced technologies used in various aspects of smart power systems, especially grid-connected and industrial evolution, covering many new topics such as distribution Phasor management, blockchain technologies for smart power systems, the application of deep learning and reinforced learning, and artificial intelligence techniques. The text also explores the potential consequences of artificial intelligence and advanced technologies in smart power systems in the forthcoming years. To enhance and reinforce learning, the highly qualified editors include many learning resources throughout the text, including MATLAB and HIL codes, end-of-chapter problems, end-of-book solutions, practical examples, and case studies. Artificial Intelligence-based Smart Power Systems includes specific information on topics such as: Modeling and analysis of smart power systems, covering steady state analysis, dynamic analysis, voltage stability, and more Recent advancement in power electronics for smart power systems, covering power electronic converters for renewable energy sources, electric vehicles, and HDVC/FACTs Distribution Phasor Measurement Units (PMU) in smart power systems, covering the need for PMU in distribution and automation of system reconfigurations Power and energy management systems for microgrids Engineering colleges and universities, along with industry research centers, can use the in-depth subject coverage and the extensive supplementary learning resources found in Artificial Intelligence-based Smart Power Systems to gain a holistic understanding of the subject and be able to harness that knowledge within a myriad of practical applications.
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