Have you ever asked: Why do we exist? What is the purpose of life? Is there a God? Why do bad things happen to good people? Is there life after death? Was this world just created by chance or does it follow a plan? If you have pondered some or all of these mysteries, pick up this book. The Answer: Proof of God in Heaven explores these questions and more. You will find some surprising simple and logical conclusions. The authors explore universal truths, natural laws, and their implication in our lives, and find absolute responses to all the questions of faith, purpose, and our paths in life. Read it and decide for yourself if you agree with the evidence, logic and deductions of the authors. The Answer asks questions that resonate with all of us.
Mozart’s Piano Concertos, especially those composed during the years 1784-’91, are still held in high esteem, two centuries later, by both amateur music-lovers and professional musicians. Strangely enough, only very few comprehensive studies exist on this remarkable section of Mozart’s output. The present study, first published in German in a slightly abridged form, deals with Mozart’s evolution as a composer of piano concertos; sheds light on the connections between the concertos and other fields of creative activity, as well as on those with other composers of his time. Finally, attention is paid to problems of performance practice. The author, born in 1914, emeritus professor of Utrecht University and former chairman of the Zentralinstitut für Mozart-Forschung, Salzburg, has been involved with the subject of Mozart’s concertos for about 60 years.
Offers an integrated presentation for path planning and motion control of cooperative mobile robots using discrete-event system principles Generating feasible paths or routes between a given starting position and a goal or target position—while avoiding obstacles—is a common issue for all mobile robots. This book formulates the problem of path planning of cooperative mobile robots by using the paradigm of discrete-event systems. It presents everything readers need to know about discrete event system models—mainly Finite State Automata (FSA) and Petri Nets (PN)—and methods for centralized path planning and control of teams of identical mobile robots. Path Planning of Cooperative Mobile Robots Using Discrete Event Models begins with a brief definition of the Path Planning and Motion Control problems and their state of the art. It then presents different types of discrete models such as FSA and PNs. The RMTool MATLAB toolbox is described thereafter, for readers who will need it to provide numerical experiments in the last section. The book also discusses cell decomposition approaches and shows how the divided environment can be translated into an FSA by assigning to each cell a discrete state, while the adjacent relation together with the robot's dynamics implies the discrete transitions. Highlighting the benefits of Boolean Logic, Linear Temporal Logic, cell decomposition, Finite State Automata modeling, and Petri Nets, this book also: Synthesizes automatic strategies based on Discrete Event Systems (DES) for path planning and motion control and offers software implementations for the involved algorithms Provides a tutorial for motion planning introductory courses or related simulation-based projects using a MATLAB package called RMTool (Robot Motion Toolbox) Includes simulations for problems solved by methodologies presented in the book Path Planning of Cooperative Mobile Robots Using Discrete Event Models is an ideal book for undergraduate and graduate students and college and university professors in the areas of robotics, artificial intelligence, systems modeling, and autonomous control.
A travelogue revealing the hidden stories of Naples. In recent years Naples has become, for better or worse, the new destination in Italy. While many of its more unusual features are on display for all to see, the stories behind them remain largely hidden. In Marius Kociejowski’s portrait of this baffling city, the serpent can be many things: Vesuvius, the mafia-like Camorra, the outlying Phlegrean Fields (which, geologically speaking, constitute the second most dangerous area on the planet). It is all these things that have, at one time or another, put paid to the higher aspirations of Neapolitans themselves. Naples is simultaneously the city of light, sometimes blindingly so, and the city of darkness, although often the stuff of cliché. The boundary that separates death from life is porous in the extreme: the dead inhabit the world of the living and vice versa. The Serpent Coiled in Naples is a travelogue, a meditation on mortality, and much else besides.
Few figures in history have defined their time as dramatically as Martin Luther. And few books have captured the spirit of such a figure as truly as this robust and eloquent life of Luther. A highly regarded historian and biographer and a gifted novelist and playwright, Richard Marius gives us a dazzling portrait of the German reformer--his inner compulsions, his struggle with himself and his God, the gestation of his theology, his relations with contemporaries, and his responses to opponents. Focusing in particular on the productive years 1516-1525, Marius' detailed account of Luther's writings yields a rich picture of the development of Luther's thought on the great questions that came to define the Reformation. Marius follows Luther from his birth in Saxony in 1483, during the reign of Frederick III, through his schooling in Erfurt, his flight to an Augustinian monastery and ordination to the outbreak of his revolt against Rome in 1517, the Wittenberg years, his progress to Worms, his exile in the Wartburg, and his triumphant return to Wittenberg. Throughout, Marius pauses to acquaint us with pertinent issues: the question of authority in the church, the theology of penance, the timing of Luther's Reformation breakthrough, the German peasantry in 1525, Muntzer's revolutionaries, the whys and hows of Luther's attack on Erasmus. In this personal, occasionally irreverent, always humane reconstruction, Luther emerges as a skeptic who hated skepticism and whose titanic wrestling with the dilemma of the desire for faith and the omnipresence of doubt and fear became an augury for the development of the modern religious consciousness of the West. In all of this, he also represents tragedy, with the goodness of his works overmatched by their calamitous effects on religion and society.
Japan, like the rest of the world, has undergone enormous changes in the last few years. The impact of the end of the Cold War has combined with a worldwide recession to create a fluid situation in which long-held assumptions about politics and policies no longer hold. A classic, short history of Japan, this book has been brought up-to-date by Marius Jansen, now our most distinguished interpreter of Japanese history. Jansen gives a lucid account and analysis of the events that have rocked Japan since 1990, taking the story through the election of Murayama as prime minister. About the previous edition: With the two-thousand-year history of the Japanese experience as his foundation, Edwin O. Reischauer brings us an incomparable description of Japan today in all its complexity and uniqueness, both material and spiritual. His description and analysis present us with the paradox that is present-day Japan: thoroughly international, depending for its livelihood almost entirely on foreign trade, its products coveted everywhere--yet not entirely liked or trusted, still feared for its past military adventurism and for its current economic aggressiveness. Reischauer begins with the rich heritage of the island nation, identifying incidents and trends that have significantly affected Japan's modern development. Much of the geographic and historical material on Japan's earlier years is drawn from his renowned study The Japanese, but the present book deepens and broadens that earlier interpretation: our knowledge of Japan has increased enormously in the intervening decade and our attitudes have become more ambivalent, while Japan too has changed, often not so subtly. Moving to contemporary Japanese society, Reischauer explores both the constants in Japanese life and the aspects that are rapidly changing. In the section on government and politics he gives pithy descriptions of the formal workings of the various organs of government and the decision-making process, as well as the most contentious issues in Japanese life--pollution, nuclear power, organized labor--and the elusive matter of political style. In what will become classic statements on business management and organization, Reischauer sketches the early background of trade and commerce in Japan, contrasts the struggling prewar economy with today's assertive manufacturing, and brilliantly characterizes the remarkable postwar economic miracle of Japanese heavy industry, consumer product development, and money management. In a final section, "Japan and the World," he attempts to explain to skeptical Westerners that country's growing and painful dilemma between neutrality and alignment, between trade imbalance and "fair" practices, and the ever-vexing issue of that embodiment of Japanese specialness, a unique and difficult language that affects personal and national behavior.
Magisterial in vision, sweeping in scope, this monumental work presents a seamless account of Japanese society during the modern era, from 1600 to the present. A distillation of more than fifty years’ engagement with Japan and its history, it is the crowning work of our leading interpreter of the modern Japanese experience. Since 1600 Japan has undergone three periods of wrenching social and institutional change, following the imposition of hegemonic order on feudal society by the Tokugawa shogun; the opening of Japan’s ports by Commodore Perry; and defeat in World War II. The Making of Modern Japan charts these changes: the social engineering begun with the founding of the shogunate in 1600, the emergence of village and castle towns with consumer populations, and the diffusion of samurai values in the culture. Marius Jansen covers the making of the modern state, the adaptation of Western models, growing international trade, the broadening opportunity in Japanese society with industrialization, and the postwar occupation reforms imposed by General MacArthur. Throughout, the book gives voice to the individuals and views that have shaped the actions and beliefs of the Japanese, with writers, artists, and thinkers, as well as political leaders given their due. The story this book tells, though marked by profound changes, is also one of remarkable consistency, in which continuities outweigh upheavals in the development of society, and successive waves of outside influence have only served to strengthen a sense of what is unique and native to Japanese experience. The Making of Modern Japan takes us to the core of this experience as it illuminates one of the contemporary world’s most compelling transformations.
Due to the dramatic shifts in the knowledge economy, this book provides a significant departure from traditional strategic management concepts and practice. Designed for both advanced students and business managers, it presents a unique combination of new strategic management theory, carefully selected strategic management articles by prominent scholars such as Gary Hamel, Michael Porter, Peter Senge, and real-world case studies. On top of this, the authors link powerful new benchmarks in strategic management thinking, including the concepts of Socio-Cultural Network Dynamics, Systemic Scorecards, and Customer Knowledge Management with practical business challenges and solutions of blue-chip companies with a superior performance (Lafite-Rothschild, Who's Who, Holcim, BRL Hardy, Kuoni BTI, Deutsche Bank, Unisys, Novartis).
In recent years, tropical forests have received more attention and have been the subject of greater environmental concern than any other kind of vegetation. There is an increasing public awareness of the importance of these forests, not only as a diminishing source of countless products used by mankind, nor for their effects on soil stabilization and climate, but as unrivalled sources of what today we call biodiversity. Threats to the continued existence of the forests represent threats to tens of thousands of species of organisms, both plants and animals. It is all the more surprising, therefore, that there have been no major scientific accounts published in recent years since the classic handbook by Paul W. Richards, The Tropical Rain Forest in 1952. Some excellent popular accounts of tropical rain forests have been published including Paul Richard's The Life of the Jungle, and Catherine Caulfield's In the Rainforest and Jungles, edited by Edward Ayensu. There have been numerous, often conflicting, assessments of the rate of conversion of tropical forests to other uses and explanations of the underlying causes, and in 1978 UNESCO/UNEPI FAO published a massive report, The Tropical Rain Forest, which, although full of useful information, is highly selective and does not fully survey the enormous diversity of the forests.
Spanning three generations and three continents, The Original Sin delivers a rich tale of two wonderful love stories, gripping war scenes, a kidnapping, sex, rape, drugs, and riveting plot twists. From pre-Civil War Spain to a race against time across five countries, the threads of this novel come together in the cellar of an isolated house in the Arizona desert.
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