Seventeen marvelous essays introducing the habitats, ecology, plants, and animals of the Central and South American rainforest. A lively, lucid portrait of the tropics as seen by two uncommonly observant and thoughtful field biologists. Its seventeen marvelous essays introduce the habitats, ecology, plants, and animals of the Central and South American rainforest. Includes a lengthy appendix of practical advice for the tropical traveler.
The foremost text in this complex and fast-changing field, Medical Microbiology, 9th Edition, provides concise, up-to-date, and understandable explanations of key concepts in medical microbiology, immunology, and the microbes that cause human disease. Clear, engaging coverage of basic principles, immunology, laboratory diagnosis, bacteriology, virology, mycology, and parasitology help you master the essentials of microbiology―effectively preparing you for your coursework, exams, and beyond. - Features significant new information on the human microbiome and its influence on the immune and other body systems, and new developments in microbial diagnosis, treatment, diseases, and pathogens. - Updates every chapter with state-of-the-art information and current literature citations. - Summarizes detailed information in tabular format rather than in lengthy text. - Provides review questions at the end of each chapter that correlate basic science with clinical practice. - Features clinical cases that illustrate the epidemiology, diagnosis, and treatment of infectious diseases. - Introduces microbe chapters with summaries and trigger words for easy review. - Highlights the text with clear, colorful figures, clinical photographs, and images that help you visualize the clinical presentation of infections. - Offers additional study features online, including 200 self-assessment questions, microscopic images of the microbes, videos, and a new integrating chapter that provides hyperlinks between the microbes, the organ systems that they affect, and their diseases. - Evolve Instructor site with an image and video collection is available to instructors through their Elsevier sales rep or via request at: https://evolve.elsevier.com.
Northern Japan is home to an ancient, esoteric tradition of self-mummifying Buddhist monks, little known to the outside world. Long after death, these ascetics continue to be revered as Living Buddhas. This first English-language work on the subject recounts the process by which these monks starve themselves for a decade, bury themselves alive with only a small breathing tube, and meditate until death. After three years, the mummified body is exhumed and displayed. The biographies of various monks are presented within, as is an examination of the religious beliefs involved, an amalgamation of three distinct religious traditions. Also explored is the role of asceticism in religion, and beliefs about life and death shared by the Buddhist sects involved in self-mummification.
Turn to Medical Microbiology, 8th Edition for a thorough, clinically relevant understanding of microbes and their diseases. This succinct, easy-to-use text presents the fundamentals of microbiology and immunology in a clearly written, engaging manner-effectively preparing you for your courses, exams, and beyond. Coverage of basic principles, immunology, laboratory diagnosis, bacteriology, virology, mycology, and parasitology help you master the essentials. Review questions at the end of each chapter correlate basic science with clinical practice to help you understand the clinical relevance of the organisms examined. Clinical cases illustrate the epidemiology, diagnosis, and treatment of infectious diseases, reinforcing a clinical approach to learning. Full-color clinical photographs, images, and illustrations help you visualize the clinical presentations of infections. Summary tables and text boxes emphasizing essential concepts and learning issues optimize exam review. Additional images, 200 self-assessment questions, NEW animations, and more. Student Consult eBook version included with purchase. This enhanced eBook experience includes access -- on a variety of devices -- to the complete text, videos, images, and references from the book. Thoroughly updated chapters include the latest information on the human microbiome and probiotics/prebiotics; including a new chapter on Human Microbiome In Health and Disease. NEW chapter summaries introduce each microbe chapter, including trigger words and links to the relevant chapter text (on e-book version on Student Consult), providing a concise introduction or convenient review for each topic. Online access to the complete text, additional images, 200 self-assessment questions, NEW animations, and more is available through Student Consult.
Many who critique democracy as practiced in East Asia suggest that the Confucian political culture of these nations prevents democracy from being the robust participatory type, and limits it to a spectacle designed to create obedience from the public. Certainly some East Asian nations have had elections for decades, but for democracy to be meaningful, a country needs an active public sphere, political tolerance, egalitarian beliefs, and vigorous political participation. The Asian-values debate focuses on whether the creation of this optimal version of democracy in East Asian nations will be hindered by their shared Confucian cultural heritage and at the centre of this debate is whether there is an active political culture in East Asia that allows citizens to freely discuss, debate, and disagree about politics. With Japan as its focus, this book examines the role of social networks and political discussion in Japanese political culture and asks whether discursive participatory democracy is indeed possible in East Asia. In order to answer this question the authors undertook the largest academic political survey ever conducted in Japan to give the book exceptional empirical credence. This data reveals how the Japanese people interact politically, concluding that through the powerful influence of social networks on Japanese political behaviour, Japan has a more globalized and less hierarchical society where Confucian culture is not dominant and where creation of a vibrant civil society is possible. This book will be invaluable for students and scholars of Japanese politics, democracy, civil society, and globalization.
This work presents results from five years of research on microbial species in exotic and pristine locations in Asian countries, by contributors in food science, microbiology, and agricultural and environmental sciences in the UK, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, China, Korea, and Philippines. Some microorganisms are described here for the first time. Specific topics include lactic acid bacteria in fermented foods in Southeast Asia, culture collection networks in Asia, high actinomycete diversity in the topical rainforests of Singapore, and engineering biphenyl dioxygenases to acquire wide degradation capabilities of polychlorinated biphenyls and aromatic hydrocarbons. The editor is affiliated with the Department of Microbiology at the National University of Singapore. c. Book News Inc.
Covers the fundamentals and techniques of multiple biological sequence alignment and analysis, and shows readers how to choose the appropriate sequence analysis tools for their tasks This book describes the traditional and modern approaches in biological sequence alignment and homology search. This book contains 11 chapters, with Chapter 1 providing basic information on biological sequences. Next, Chapter 2 contains fundamentals in pair-wise sequence alignment, while Chapters 3 and 4 examine popular existing quantitative models and practical clustering techniques that have been used in multiple sequence alignment. Chapter 5 describes, characterizes and relates many multiple sequence alignment models. Chapter 6 describes how traditionally phylogenetic trees have been constructed, and available sequence knowledge bases can be used to improve the accuracy of reconstructing phylogeny trees. Chapter 7 covers the latest methods developed to improve the run-time efficiency of multiple sequence alignment. Next, Chapter 8 covers several popular existing multiple sequence alignment server and services, and Chapter 9 examines several multiple sequence alignment techniques that have been developed to handle short sequences (reads) produced by the Next Generation Sequencing technique (NSG). Chapter 10 describes a Bioinformatics application using multiple sequence alignment of short reads or whole genomes as input. Lastly, Chapter 11 provides a review of RNA and protein secondary structure prediction using the evolution information inferred from multiple sequence alignments. • Covers the full spectrum of the field, from alignment algorithms to scoring methods, practical techniques, and alignment tools and their evaluations • Describes theories and developments of scoring functions and scoring matrices •Examines phylogeny estimation and large-scale homology search Multiple Biological Sequence Alignment: Scoring Functions, Algorithms and Applications is a reference for researchers, engineers, graduate and post-graduate students in bioinformatics, and system biology and molecular biologists. Ken Nguyen, PhD, is an associate professor at Clayton State University, GA, USA. He received his PhD, MSc and BSc degrees in computer science all from Georgia State University. His research interests are in databases, parallel and distribute computing and bioinformatics. He was a Molecular Basis of Disease fellow at Georgia State and is the recipient of the highest graduate honor at Georgia State, the William M. Suttles Graduate Fellowship. Xuan Guo, PhD, is a postdoctoral associate at Oak Ridge National Lab, USA. He received his PhD degree in computer science from Georgia State University in 2015. His research interests are in bioinformatics, machine leaning, and cloud computing. He is an editorial assistant of International Journal of Bioinformatics Research and Applications. Yi Pan, PhD, is a Regents' Professor of Computer Science and an Interim Associate Dean and Chair of Biology at Georgia State University. He received his BE and ME in computer engineering from Tsinghua University in China and his PhD in computer science from the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Pan's research interests include parallel and distributed computing, optical networks, wireless networks and bioinformatics. He has published more than 180 journal papers with about 60 papers published in various IEEE/ACM journals. He is co-editor along with Albert Y. Zomaya of the Wiley Series in Bioinformatics.
The third edition of this classic tutorial and reference on procedural texturing and modeling is thoroughly updated to meet the needs of today's 3D graphics professionals and students. New for this edition are chapters devoted to real-time issues, cellular texturing, geometric instancing, hardware acceleration, futuristic environments, and virtual universes. In addition, the familiar authoritative chapters on which readers have come to rely contain all-new material covering L-systems, particle systems, scene graphs, spot geometry, bump mapping, cloud modeling, and noise improvements. There are many new spectacular color images to enjoy, especially in this edition's full-color format. As in the previous editions, the authors, who are the creators of the methods they discuss, provide extensive, practical explanations of widely accepted techniques as well as insights into designing new ones. New to the third edition are chapters by two well-known contributors: Bill Mark of NVIDIA and John Hart of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on state-of-the-art topics not covered in former editions. An accompanying Web site (www.texturingandmodeling.com) contains all of the book's sample code in C code segments (all updated to the ANSI C Standard) or in RenderMan shading language, plus files of many magnificent full-color illustrations. No other book on the market contains the breadth of theoretical and practical information necessary for applying procedural methods. More than ever, Texturing & Modeling remains the chosen resource for professionals and advanced students in computer graphics and animation. *New chapters on: procedural real-time shading by Bill Mark, procedural geometric instancing and real-time solid texturing by John Hart, hardware acceleration strategies by David Ebert, cellular texturing by Steven Worley, and procedural planets and virtual universes by Ken Musgrave. *New material on Perlin Noise by Ken Perlin. *Printed in full color throughout. *Companion Web site contains revised sample code and dozens of images.
The son of a prominent Japanese mathematician who came to the United States after World War II, Ken Ono was raised on a diet of high expectations and little praise. Rebelling against his pressure-cooker of a life, Ken determined to drop out of high school to follow his own path. To obtain his father’s approval, he invoked the biography of the famous Indian mathematical prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan, whom his father revered, who had twice flunked out of college because of his single-minded devotion to mathematics. Ono describes his rocky path through college and graduate school, interweaving Ramanujan’s story with his own and telling how at key moments, he was inspired by Ramanujan and guided by mentors who encouraged him to pursue his interest in exploring Ramanujan’s mathematical legacy. Picking up where others left off, beginning with the great English mathematician G.H. Hardy, who brought Ramanujan to Cambridge in 1914, Ono has devoted his mathematical career to understanding how in his short life, Ramanujan was able to discover so many deep mathematical truths, which Ramanujan believed had been sent to him as visions from a Hindu goddess. And it was Ramanujan who was ultimately the source of reconciliation between Ono and his parents. Ono’s search for Ramanujan ranges over three continents and crosses paths with mathematicians whose lives span the globe and the entire twentieth century and beyond. Along the way, Ken made many fascinating discoveries. The most important and surprising one of all was his own humanity.
Maximize efficiency and minimize pollution: the breakthrough technology of high temperature air combustion (HiTAC) holds the potential to overcome the limitations of conventional combustion and allow engineers to finally meet this long-standing imperative. Research has shown that HiTAC technology can provide simultaneous reduction of CO2 and nitric
This book employs a comparative approach to explore the decision-making processes behind the Japanese and Italian foreign policies concerned with East Asia, Africa, Europe and the Mediterranean. It explores these policies in relation to the Axis powers and Britain in the 1930s. Both Japan and Italy shared significant similarities in their decision-making processes, which help to illustrate the workings of ultra-nationalist and fascist foreign policy. The work examines the mechanism of decision-making in the foreign ministries, rather than the personalities of leaders, in order to understand why and how both countries finally chose unexpected partners. The Tripartite Alliance has often been perceived through the diplomatic motives and arbitrary manners of dictatorial leadership in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and ultra-nationalist Japan individually. This book compares the foreign policies of Italy and Japan and looks outwards to their diplomatic relations with Britain, a key imperial factor in their expansions into East Asia and Africa, contrasting these Axis powers with Germany, usually thought to typify fascist diplomacy.
This volume offers the proceedings from the workshop held at the University of Milan (Italy) on groups of homotopy self-equivalences and related topics. The book comprises the articles relating current research on the group of homotopy self-equivalences, homotopy of function spaces, rational homotopy theory, classification of homotopy types, and equivariant homotopy theory. Mathematicians from many areas of the globe attended the workshops to discuss their research and to share ideas. Included are two specially-written articles, by J.W. Rutter, reviewing the work done in the area of homotopy self-equivalences since 1988. Included also is a bibliography of some 122 articles published since 1988 and a list of problems. This book is suitable for both advanced graduate students and researchers.
Serving as a user's manual for synthetic organic and catalytic chemists, this book guides chemists in the design and choice of ligands to catalyze organic reactions and apply the results for more efficient, green, and practical synthesis. • Focuses on the role of ligands in metal complexes that catalyze green organic transformations: a hot topic in the area of organic synthesis and green chemistry • Offers a comprehensive resource to help readers design and choose ligands and understand selectivity/reactivity characteristics • Addresses a gap by taking novel ligand approaches and including up-to-date discussion on hydrogen transfers and reactions • Presents important industrial perspective and provides rational explanations of ligand effects, impacts, and novelty
State-of-the-science methods, synthetic routes, and strategies to construct aromatic rings The development of new reactions for the synthesis of aromatic compounds is a highly active research area in organic synthesis, providing new functional organic materials, functional reagents, and biologically active compounds. Recently, significant advances in transition-metal-mediated reactions have enabled the efficient and practical construction of new aromatic rings with useful properties and applications. This book draws together and reviews all the latest discoveries and methods in transition-metal-mediated reactions, offering readers promising new routes to design and construct complex aromatic compounds. Integrating metal catalysis with aromatic compound synthesis, Transition-Metal-Mediated Aromatic Ring Construction offers a practical guide to the methods, synthetic routes, and strategies for constructing aromatic compounds. The book's five parts examine: [2+2+2], [2+2+1], and related cycloaddition reactions [4+2], [3+2], and related cycloaddition reactions Electrocyclization reactions Coupling and addition reactions Other important transformations, including methathesis reactions and skeletal rearrangement reactions Edited by Ken Tanaka, an internationally recognized expert in the field of transition-metal catalysis, the book features authors who are leading pioneers and researchers in synthetic reactions. Their contributions reflect a thorough review and analysis of the literature as well as their own firsthand laboratory experience developing new aromatic compounds. All chapters end with a summary and outlook, setting forth new avenues of research and forecasting new discoveries. There are also references at the end of each chapter, guiding readers to important original research reports and reviews. In summary, Transition-Metal-Mediated Aromatic Ring Construction offers synthetic chemists a promising new avenue for the development of important new aromatic compounds with a broad range of applications.
Eternal Remains: World Mummification and the Beliefs that make it Necessary provides an overview of mummification, but it concentrates on the reasons behind the act. It investigates the justification for preserving dead bodies, and in so doing, probes the true nature of both life and death. Many think of these as two distinct concepts, like day and night, but they are not distinct. Day fades into night, and night then returns to day. There are realms in which night and day merge, such as dusk and dawn. Perhaps the relationship between life and death is similar. After explaining the natural processes of decay and how they are halted, various mummies in different parts of the world are introduced. In the Americas, these include snow- and ice-preserved bodies in Montana and Alaska, and some controversial finds in other states. The Guanajuato mummies in Mexico and the strangely-preserved bodies in San Bernardo, Columbia are also introduced, alongside new translations of modern reactions to such bodies. The mummification techniques of cultures in Central and South America are also delineated, including Incan sacrificial ceremonies and the preservation of Incan kings. Unusual preservations in South America include the Chancay practice of turning the deceased into drums, which were played during special ceremonies, and the Jívaro method of shrinking heads. In addition, Eternal Remains introduces to the English-speaking world the recently discovered world's smallest mummy, Ichiknuna. Chapters about European mummies cover the so-called Frankenstein mummies of Cladh Hallan and fantastically preserved bog bodies, which provide evidence of ancient murders and superstitious customs. The mummies in Ferentillo, a small town north of Rome in the region of Umbria, were strangely preserved by the soil's chemical composition. Eternal Remains contains many pictures of these mummies, which have not been previously published. It also provides new information about what happened to King Tutankhamen's body after it had been embalmed and placed into a sarcophagus, and it explains the amazing discovery of cocaine, nicotine, and hashish in nine different 7,000-year-old Egyptian mummies. Since mainstream historical understanding holds that these substances only existed in the Americas at the time, the discovery is forcing some scholars to consider the possibility of cross-oceanic trade, which would force a historical rewrite. Other controversial finds are likewise presented in this text, including the discovery of advanced, ancient Caucasian bodies in China. This book is one of few in English to cover Buddhist mummification in Tibet and China, and the amazingly self-mummified monks in Japan. Newly translated information about some of these monks, never before published in English, is included in this book, alongside pictures of the monks who engaged in this suicidal practice. Eternal Remains also explains modern methods of conservation. The reasons behind the worldwide desire to mummify are similar, and by investigating the techniques and the underlying beliefs that necessitated the practice, one can more clearly see just what makes us human. This study forces readers to reflect upon the true nature of life and death, and connections are made between the spiritual portion of each individual and other natural phenomena. They are led to ponder the ultimate significance of it all. The final conclusions formed are sure to inspire all, providing a new way to consider death and its relationship to life. Eternal Remains combines a study of mummification with comparative religions, and an analysis of worldwide beliefs about the nature of death. It will open one's eyes to new possibilities concerning human advancement, anomalous archaeological discoveries, and the greatest mysteries of both life and death.
Japan's national identity associates the 'Japanese people' with the Japanese land, making the farmer the backbone of the nation. Others in Japanese Agriculture challenges this mythology, revealing the changing faces of Japanese farmers during the colonial and post-war eras. First, it traces the tangled trail of Koreans brought into farming villages as a result of war mobilization and capitalist development. Second, it discusses the plight of those who evacuated from cities as they attempted to eke out a living on marginal land. Third, it points out that settlers repatriated from the colonies were met with hostility from villagers and indifference from authorities. Finally, it explores how those who were encouraged to emigrate for 'the good of the nation' in post-war Japan, found themselves victims of agrarian reforms, which severed their ties. In sum, despite being lauded as the 'backbone of the nation' Japanese farmers have been repeatedly marginalized and othered. (Series: Japanese Society Series) [Subject: Asian Studies, Agricultural Studies, History, Japanese Studies, Korean Studies, Migration Studies, Sociology]
Seventeen marvelous essays introducing the habitats, ecology, plants, and animals of the Central and South American rainforest. A lively, lucid portrait of the tropics as seen by two uncommonly observant and thoughtful field biologists. Its seventeen marvelous essays introduce the habitats, ecology, plants, and animals of the Central and South American rainforest. Includes a lengthy appendix of practical advice for the tropical traveler.
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