In this book, Optical Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) is approached from a strictly practical and application-oriented point of view. Based on the characteristics and constraints of modern fiber-optic components, transport systems and fibers, the text provides relevant rules of thumb and practical hints for technology selection, WDM system and link dimensioning, and also for network-related aspects such as wavelength assignment and resilience mechanisms. Actual 10/40 Gb/s WDM systems are considered, and a preview of the upcoming 100 Gb/s systems and technologies for even higher bit rates is given as well. Key features: Considers WDM from ULH backbone (big picture view) down to PON access (micro view). Includes all major telecom and datacom applications. Provides the relevant background for state-of-the-art and next-gen systems. Offers practical guidelines for system / link engineering.
The Service Hub Concept in Human Services Planning examines how the concept of a 'service hub' could assist in the delivery of human services. The monograph covers the problematic of human services planning, including difficulties associated with effective client assessment and assignment; overcoming the opposition sentiments that commonly block human services provision; and questions associated with socio-spatial justice. The book also tackles the service hub concept and service hubs in practice. The bases for community opposition to human service facilities; fair-share approach to service provision; and the impact of difference and social justice in human services planning are also described. Geographers and those involved in urban and regional planning will find the monograph invaluable.
Easy to use and filled with addictive--and highly useful--information about the people whose names will be carried into the future on the backs of the world's reptiles, The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles is a handy and fun book for professional and amateur herpetologists alike.
A multidisciplinary approach to problem-solving in community-based organizations using decision models and operations research applications A comprehensive treatment of public-sector operations research and management science, Decision Science for Housing and Community Development: Localized and Evidence-Based Responses to Distressed Housing and Blighted Communities addresses critical problems in urban housing and community development through a diverse set of decision models and applications. The book represents a bridge between theory and practice and is a source of collaboration between decision and data scientists and planners, advocates, and community practitioners. The book is motivated by the needs of community-based organizations to respond to neighborhood economic and social distress, represented by foreclosed, abandoned, and blighted housing, through community organizing, service provision, and local development. The book emphasizes analytic approaches that increase the ability of local practitioners to act quickly, thoughtfully, and effectively. By doing so, practitioners can design and implement responses that reflect stakeholder values associated with healthy and sustainable communities; that benefit from increased organizational capacity for evidence-based responses; and that result in solutions that represent improvements over the status quo according to multiple social outcome measures. Featuring quantitative and qualitative analytic methods as well as prescriptive and exploratory decision modeling, the book also includes: Discussions of the principles of decision theory and descriptive analysis to describe ways to identify and quantify values and objectives for community development Mathematical programming applications for real-world problem solving in foreclosed housing acquisition and redevelopment Applications of case studies and community-engaged research principles to analytics and decision modeling Decision Science for Housing and Community Development: Localized and Evidence-Based Responses to Distressed Housing and Blighted Communities is an ideal textbook for upper-undergraduate and graduate-level courses in decision models and applications; humanitarian logistics; nonprofit operations management; urban operations research; public economics; performance management; urban studies; public policy; urban and regional planning; and systems design and optimization. The book is also an excellent reference for academics, researchers, and practitioners in operations research, management science, operations management, systems engineering, policy analysis, city planning, and data analytics.
Computational linguistics can be used to uncover mysteries in text which are not always obvious to visual inspection. For example, the computer analysis of writing style can show who might be the true author of a text in cases of disputed authorship or suspected plagiarism. The theoretical background to authorship attribution is presented in a step by step manner, and comprehensive reviews of the field are given in two specialist areas, the writings of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and the various writing styles seen in religious texts. The final chapter looks at the progress computers have made in the decipherment of lost languages. This book is written for students and researchers of general linguistics, computational and corpus linguistics, and computer forensics. It will inspire future researchers to study these topics for themselves, and gives sufficient details of the methods and resources to get them started.
Maize is the world’s most productive food and industrial crop, grown in more than 160 countries and on every continent except Antarctica. If by some catastrophe maize were to disappear from our food supply chain, vast numbers of people would starve and global economies would rapidly collapse. How did we come to be so dependent on this one plant? Maize for the Gods brings together new research by archaeologists, archaeobotanists, plant geneticists, and a host of other specialists to explore the complex ways that this single plant and the peoples who domesticated it came to be inextricably entangled with one another over the past nine millennia. Tracing maize from its first appearance and domestication in ancient campsites and settlements in Mexico to its intercontinental journey through most of North and South America, this history also tells the story of the artistic creativity, technological prowess, and social, political, and economic resilience of America’s first peoples.
A paleontologist awakens us to the "extinction event" that human activity is bringing about today The natural world as humans have always known it evolved close to 100 million years ago, with the appearance of flowering plants and pollinating insects during the age of the dinosaurs. Its tremendous history is now in danger of profound, catastrophic disruption. In Terra, a brilliant synthesis of evolutionary biology, paleontology, and modern environmental science, Michael Novacek shows how all three can help us understand and prevent what he (and others) call today's "mass extinction event." Humanity's use of land, our consumption, the pollution we create, and our contributions to global warming are causing this crisis. True, the fossil record of hundreds of millions of years reveals that wild and bounteous nature has always evolved not quietly but thunderously, as species arise, flourish, die off, and are replaced by new species. We learn from paleontology and archaeology that for 50,000 years, human hunting, mining, and agriculture have changed many localities, sometimes irrevocably. But today, Novacek insists, our behavior endangers the entire global ecosystem. And if we disregard—through ignorance, antipathy, or apathy—the theory of evolution that developed with our modern understanding of the Earth's past, we not only impede enlightenment but threaten any practical strategy for our own survival. The evolutionary future of the entire living planet depends on our understanding this.
Paquimé (also known as Casas Grandes) and its antecedents are important and interesting parts of the prehispanic history in northwestern Mexico and the U.S. Southwest. Not only is there a long history of human occupation, but Paquimé is one of the better examples of centralized influence. Unfortunately, it is also an understudied region compared to the U.S. Southwest and other places in Mesoamerica. This volume is the first large-scale investigation of the prehispanic ethnobotany of this important ancient site and its neighbors. The authors examine ethnobotanical relationships during Medio Period, AD 1200–1450, when Paquimé was at its most influential. Based on two decades of archaeological research, this book examines uses of plants for food, farming strategies, wood use, and anthropogenic ecology. The authors show that the relationships between plants and people are complex, interdependent, and reciprocal. This volume documents ethnobotanical relationships and shows their importance to the development of the Paquimé polity. How ancient farmers made a living in an arid to semi-arid region and the effects their livelihood had on the local biota, their relations with plants, and their connection with other peoples is worthy of serious study. The story of the Casas Grandes tradition holds valuable lessons for humanity.
Hasidic Williamsburg is famous as one of the most separatist, intensely religious, and politically savvy communities in the entire United States. Less known is how the community survived in one of New York City's toughest neighborhoods during an era of steep decline, only to later oppose and also participate in the unprecedented gentrification of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper unravel the fascinating history of how a community of determined Holocaust survivors encountered, shaped, and sometimes fiercely resisted the urban processes that transformed their gritty neighborhood, from white flight and the construction of public housing to rising crime, divestment of city services, and, ultimately, extreme gentrification. By showing how Williamsburg's Hasidim avoided assimilation, Deutsch and Casper present both a provocative counter-history of American Jewry and a novel look at how race, real estate, and religion intersected in the creation of a quintessential, and yet deeply misunderstood, New York neighborhood.
This book offers a comprehensive global examination of the relationship between public transport and tourism as well as exploring other sustainable transport modes. It offers a unique view by analysing tourism through the public transport lens and vice versa. The volume provides an account of how the public transport experience can be improved for tourists so that its value can be maximised and a greater number of people can be encouraged to shift modes. It features a wide range of case studies and examples showing how the tourism industry, as well as regional economies, communities and the environment, benefit when public transport is widely used by tourists. The book will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of tourism and transport as well as destination marketing organisations and tourism, transport and urban planners.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Spatial Information Theory, COSIT 2003, held at Kartause Ittingen, Switzerland, in September 2003. The 26 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 61 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on ontologies of space and time, reasoning about distances and directions, spatial reasoning - shapes and diagrams, computational approaches, reasoning about regions, vagueness, visualization, and landmarks and wayfinding.
Marine eutrophication has been recognized as a global problem with adverse effects on ecosystem’s health and the economies of coastal states. Most conventions regarding marine environmental protection of Regional Seas have given priority to eutrophication and relevant management practices. This book presents a global perspective of eutrophication in most of the Regional Seas, including the legal framework, assessment and management practices. Information on ecosystem’s impact as well as an outline of the methods used for assessing eutrophication is also provided. This volume will be useful to research students, marine scientists and policy makers working in marine environmental management. Key Features: Contributes to the understanding of the eutrophication processes and problems Presents an extensive account of the data analysis methods used for the quantitative assessment of eutrophication Looks the eutrophication status of the main regional seas Provides information on eutrophication politics and measures to mitigate eutrophication
The semiconductor optical amplifier has emerged as an important component in many optical fibre communication, switching and signal processing systems. This invaluable information source provides a comprehensive and detailed treatment of the design and applications of SOAs.
New species of animal and plant are being discovered all the time. When this happens, the new species has to be given a scientific, Latin name in addition to any common, vernacular name. In either case the species may be named after a person, often the discoverer but sometimes an individual they wished to honour or perhaps were staying with at the time the discovery was made. Species names related to a person are ‘eponyms’. Many scientific names are allusive, esoteric and even humorous, so an eponym dictionary is a valuable resource for anyone, amateur or professional, who wants to decipher the meaning and glimpse the history of a species name. Sometimes a name refers not to a person but to a fictional character or mythological figure. The Forest Stubfoot Toad Atelopus farci is named after the FARC, a Colombian guerrilla army who found refuge in the toad’s habitat and thereby, it is claimed, protected it. Hoipollo's Bubble-nest Frog Pseudophilautus hoipolloi was named after the Greek for ‘the many’, but someone assumed the reference was to a Dr Hoipollo. Meanwhile, the man who has everything will never refuse an eponym: Sting's Treefrog Dendropsophus stingi is named after the rock musician, in honour of his ‘commitment and efforts to save the rainforest’. Following the success of their Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles, the authors have joined forces to give amphibians a similar treatment. They have tracked down 1,609 honoured individuals and composed for each a brief, pithy biography. In some cases these are a reminder of the courage of scientists whose dedicated research in remote locations exposed them to disease and even violent death. The eponym ensures that their memory will survive, aided by reference works such as this highly readable dictionary. Altogether 2,668 amphibians are listed.
Nonlinear Labor Market Dynamics discusses adjustment processes in labor markets. Contrary to linear-stochastic approaches this book is based on a non-linear deterministic framework. It is shown that even textbook-like-models of the labor market can generate long lasting adjustment processes, local instabilities, and chaotic movements, once nonlinear relationships and widely accepted adjustment rules are introduced. Thus, labor market dynamics may have an endogenous component that is governed by a nonlinear deterministic core. Of course, all results are tied to the particular models discussed in this book. Nevertheless, these models imply that by incorporating nonlinear relationships, one may arrive at an explanation of labor market behavior where linear stochastic approaches fell. Time series studies for German labor market data support this point of view.
Supporting Shrinkage describes a new approach to citizen-engaged, community-focused planning methods and technologies for cities and regions facing decline, disinvestment, shrinkage, and social and physical distress. The volume evaluates the benefits and costs of a wide range of analytic approaches for designing policy and planning interventions for shrinking cities and distressed communities. These include collaborative planning, social media, civic technology, game design, analytics, decision modeling and decision support, and spatial analysis. The authors present case studies of three US cities addressing shrinkage and decline, with a focus on issues of social justice, democratization of knowledge, and local empowerment. Proposed as a solution is an approach that puts community engagement and empowerment at the center, combined with data and technology innovations. The authors argue that decisions informed by qualitative and quantitative data and analytic methods, implemented through accessible and affordable technologies, and based on notions of social impact and social justice, can enable residents to play a leading role in the positive transformation of shrinking cities and distressed communities.
One-on-One Tutoring by Humans and Computers articulates the CIRCSIM-Tutor project, an attempt to develop a computer tutor that generates a natural language dialogue with a student. Editors Martha Evens and Joel Michael present the educational context within which the project was launched, as well as research into tutoring, the process of implementation of CIRCSIM-Tutor, and the results of using CIRCSIM-Tutor in the classroom. The domain of this project is cardiovascular physiology, specifically targeting first-year medical students, though the idea is applicable to the development of intelligent tutoring systems across populations, disciplines, and domains. This 5 year-long project was motivated by the belief that students need assistance in building appropriate mental models of complex physiological phenomena, as well as practice in expressing these ideas in their own words to fully develop those models, and experience in problem-solving to use those models effectively. The book outlines directions for future research, and includes distinct features such as: *detailed studies of human one-on-one tutoring; *learning outcomes resulting from use of the tutor; *natural language input parsed and translated into logical form; and *natural language output generated using the LFG paradigm. This volume will appeal to educators who want to improve human tutoring or use computer tutors in the classroom, and it will interest computer scientists who want to build those computer tutors, as well as anyone who believes that language is central to teaching and learning.
Environmental Kuznets Curves - one of the most controversial issues of current environmental economics - suggest that economic growth may lead to environmental quality improvements. Why and under which circumstances this may be so, are the questions addressed in this book. The approach taken is formal, using techniques of static and dynamic optimisation. In addition, the main assumptions, arguments and conclusions are also presented in a non-formel way.
Taking a strategic perspective, this text covers developments in retailing, and reflects the changing job market with the centralization of the buying function and limited jobs for buyers. Topics covered include category management, international sourcing decisions, activity-based costing, quick response inventory systems and data-based retailing. There is a new chapter on electronic retailing and location, and examples include international, service retailers and small/independent retailers.
This sound, scholarly book continues to organize the diverse content of personality psychology in a meaningful way, taking care to present complex concepts in highly readable, accessible language. Using a single, overarching framework, the authors capture the flavor of each of four important conceptual strategies (psychoanalytic, dispositional, behavioral, and representational) and four fundamental issues (theory, assessment, research, and personality change) underlying contemporary personality psychology. The presentation of each strategy begins with an overview chapter that describes the strategy's basic assumptions and principles, as well as its respective intellectual school of thought. Then, after a more detailed presentation of the approaches that fall within the strategy, the authors conclude with a single chapter on the strategy's practical applications and limitations.
In this book, Optical Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) is approached from a strictly practical and application-oriented point of view. Based on the characteristics and constraints of modern fiber-optic components, transport systems and fibers, the text provides relevant rules of thumb and practical hints for technology selection, WDM system and link dimensioning, and also for network-related aspects such as wavelength assignment and resilience mechanisms. Actual 10/40 Gb/s WDM systems are considered, and a preview of the upcoming 100 Gb/s systems and technologies for even higher bit rates is given as well. Key features: Considers WDM from ULH backbone (big picture view) down to PON access (micro view). Includes all major telecom and datacom applications. Provides the relevant background for state-of-the-art and next-gen systems. Offers practical guidelines for system / link engineering.
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