This book on the Tripurārahasya, a South Indian Sanskrit work which occupies a unique place in the Śākta literature, is a study of the Śrīvidyā and Śākta traditions in the context of South Indian intellectual history in the late middle ages. Associated with the religious tradition known as Śrīvidyā and devoted to the cult of the Goddess Tripurā, the text was probably composed between the 13th and the 16th century CE. The analysis of its narrative parts addresses questions about the relationships between Tantric and Purāṇic goddesses. The discussion of its philosophical and theological teachings tackles problems related to the relationships between Sākta and Śaiva traditions. The stylistic devices adopted by the author(s) of the work deal uniquely with doctrinal and ritual elements of the Śrīvidyā through the medium of a literary and poetic language. This stylistic peculiarity distinguishes the Tripurārahasya from many other Tantric texts, characterized by a more technical language. The book is intended for researchers in the field of Asian Studies, Indology, Philosophical, Theological or Religious Studies, Hindu Studies, Tantric Studies and South Asian Religion and Philosophy, in particular those interested in Śākta and Śaiva philosophic-religious traditions.
This updated and revised textbook presents a broad overview on topics concerning cellular electrophysiology – ranging from bioelectric phenomena recognized as far back as ancient Egypt to popular topics on the dangers of electrosmog. Without sacrificing scientific precision, this clear and concise work presents on the one hand the different methods and modern applications, on the other hand the biophysical fundamentals of ion-channel and carrier proteins. Numerous and carefully selected illustrations and diagrams supplement the text. Each chapter is extended by a detailed table of Take-Home Messages. Questions at the end of each chapter allow readers to test their understanding. Each section also includes references to relevant original literature for further reading. The book offers a valuable resource for students of biology, chemistry and physics with a special interest in biophysics.
This textbook presents a broad overview of topics concerning cellular electrophysiology – covering topics ranging from bioelectric phenomena recognized as far back as ancient Egypt to popular topics on the dangers of electrosmog. Without sacrificing scientific precision, this clear and concise work presents on the one hand the different methods and applications, on the other hand the biophysical fundamentals of ion-channel and carrier proteins. Numerous and carefully selected illustrations and diagrams supplement the text, while questions at the end of each chapter allow readers to test their understanding. Each section also includes references to relevant original literature for further reading. The book offers a valuable resource for students of biology, chemistry and physics with a special interest in biophysics.
This book is a collection of lecture notes for the CIME course on "Multiscale and Adaptivity: Modeling, Numerics and Applications," held in Cetraro (Italy), in July 2009. Complex systems arise in several physical, chemical, and biological processes, in which length and time scales may span several orders of magnitude. Traditionally, scientists have focused on methods that are particularly applicable in only one regime, and knowledge of the system on one scale has been transferred to another scale only indirectly. Even with modern computer power, the complexity of such systems precludes their being treated directly with traditional tools, and new mathematical and computational instruments have had to be developed to tackle such problems. The outstanding and internationally renowned lecturers, coming from different areas of Applied Mathematics, have themselves contributed in an essential way to the development of the theory and techniques that constituted the subjects of the courses.
Self-awareness - the ability to recognize one's existence - is one of the most important variables in psychology. Without self-awareness, people would be unable to self-reflect, recognize differences between the self and others, or compare themselves with internalized standards. Social, clinical, and personality psychologists have recognized the significance of self-awareness in human functioning, and have conducted much research on how it participates in everyday life and in psychological dysfunctions. Self-Awareness & Causal Attribution: A Dual-Systems Theory presents a new theory of how self-awareness affects thought, feeling, and action. Based on experimental social-psychological research, the authors describe how several interacting cognitive systems determine the links between self-awareness and organized activity. This theory addresses when people become self-focused, how people internalize and change personal standards, when people approach or avoid troubling situations, and the nature of self-evaluation. Special emphasis is given to causal attribution, the process of perceiving causality. Self-Awareness & Causal Attribution will be useful to social, clinical, and personality psychologists, as well as to anyone interested in how the self relates to motivation and emotion.
This book provides a general overview of the life and literary career of the prolific writer Eva Figes, placing her extensive production within the various literary movements that have shaped the last century, and drawing on the main features of her works and the different stages in her production. Having recourse to the tools provided by narratology and using the theoretical background of the disciplines of ethics, Holocaust and trauma studies, together with other related fields such as theories of artistic representation, identity questions concerning Jewishness, contemporary history and philosophy, it carries out a comprehensive analysis of Figes’s main works. The main starting hypothesis explored throughout the book is that an evolution may be traced in the aesthetics employed by Figes throughout her career – from her initial Modernist phase to her more realist position – to depict individual and collective traumas. This development is a result of her need to find a mode of representing various traumatic events that have given shape to her personal and family history and to our recent collective history, from the two World Wars and the Holocaust to the social exclusion suffered by minority groups like women or the Jewish immigrant communities. This evolution will be also approached thematically, as there is a development from her early interest in depicting isolated male traumatised characters to the traumas suffered by women under patriarchal structures, and, then, to the encounter with her own suffering as a Holocaust survivor. The author’s evolution in the topics and narrative techniques employed mirrors the different stages in the individual and collective processes of recovery from traumatic experiences, from the process of acting out to the eventual healing phase. Thus, the conclusions detailed here will be useful not only to make Figes’ work known to a wider audience, but also to gain an insight into the evolution of the literary tendencies of the last few decades in trying to represent some of the most horrible events of the modern age.
This volume deals with two complementary topics. On one hand the book deals with the problem of determining the the probability distribution of a positive compound random variable, a problem which appears in the banking and insurance industries, in many areas of operational research and in reliability problems in the engineering sciences. On the other hand, the methodology proposed to solve such problems, which is based on an application of the maximum entropy method to invert the Laplace transform of the distributions, can be applied to many other problems. The book contains applications to a large variety of problems, including the problem of dependence of the sample data used to estimate empirically the Laplace transform of the random variable. Contents Introduction Frequency models Individual severity models Some detailed examples Some traditional approaches to the aggregation problem Laplace transforms and fractional moment problems The standard maximum entropy method Extensions of the method of maximum entropy Superresolution in maxentropic Laplace transform inversion Sample data dependence Disentangling frequencies and decompounding losses Computations using the maxentropic density Review of statistical procedures
Large-scale survey datasets, in particular complex survey designs such as panel data, provide a rich source of information for health economists. They offer the scope to control for individual heterogeneity and to model the dynamics of individual behaviour. However the measures of outcome used in health economics are often qualitative or categorical. These create special problems for estimating econometric models. The dramatic growth in computing power over recent years has been accompanied by the development of methods that help to solve these problems. This book provides a practical guide to the skills required to put these techniques into practice. This book illustrates practical applications of these methods using data on health from, among others, the British Health and Lifestyle Survey (HALS), the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) and the WHO Multi-Country Survey (WHO-MCS). Assuming a familiarity with the basic syntax and structure of Stata, this book presents and explains the statistical output using empirical case studies rather than general theory. Never before has a health economics text brought theory and practice together and this book will be of great benefit to applied economists, as well as advanced undergraduate and post graduate students in health economics and applied econometrics.
Stay on top of the latest advances in the ambulatory care of women with Glass' Office Gynecology, 7e, today’s most up-to-date and practical guide to the common issues seen every day by women’s health providers in an office setting. Chapters mirror the common issues seen by practitioners and include epidemiology of gynecologic disease, examination tips, laboratory testing, diagnostic procedures, treatment and appropriate follow up, as well as referral for specialty treatment and counseling. Clinical notes make this book a handy resource for the busy practitioner.
A vivid look at China’s shifting place in the global political economy of technology production How did China’s mass manufacturing and “copycat” production become transformed, in the global tech imagination, from something holding the nation back to one of its key assets? Prototype Nation offers a rich transnational analysis of how the promise of democratized innovation and entrepreneurial life has shaped China’s governance and global image. With historical precision and ethnographic detail, Silvia Lindtner reveals how a growing distrust in Western models of progress and development, including Silicon Valley and the tech industry after the financial crisis of 2007–8, shaped the rise of the global maker movement and the vision of China as a “new frontier” of innovation. Lindtner’s investigations draw on more than a decade of research in experimental work spaces—makerspaces, coworking spaces, innovation hubs, hackathons, and startup weekends—in China, the United States, Africa, Europe, Taiwan, and Singapore, as well as in key sites of technology investment and industrial production—tech incubators, corporate offices, and factories. She examines how the ideals of the maker movement, to intervene in social and economic structures, served the technopolitical project of prototyping a “new” optimistic, assertive, and global China. In doing so, Lindtner demonstrates that entrepreneurial living influences governance, education, policy, investment, and urban redesign in ways that normalize the persistence of sexism, racism, colonialism, and labor exploitation. Prototype Nation shows that by attending to the bodies and sites that nurture entrepreneurial life, technology can be extricated from the seemingly endless cycle of promise and violence. Cover image: Courtesy of Cao Fei, Vitamin Creative Space and Sprüth Magers
This book represents a unique contribution to the debate on enhancement technologies as it spans from the bench of molecular biology where the technologies are being developed, to the bedside of a clinical trial where they are used for selective reproduction or for first-in-human gene therapy studies, to the track & field where they are being applied to enhance human athletic performance. These investigations address current debates regarding the resurgence of eugenics in relation to genetic technologies, and provide a clear and much needed ethical autopsy of contemporary genetic practices.
Honorable Mention, 2014 Distinguished Contribution to Research Award presented by the Latina/o Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association Getting Ahead tells the compelling stories of Latin-American immigrant women living in public housing in two Boston-area neighborhoods. Silvia Domínguez argues that these immigrant women parlay social ties that provide support and leverage to develop networks and achieve social positioning to get ahead. Through a rich ethnographic account and in-depth interviews, the strong voices of these women demonstratehow they successfully negotiate the world and achieve social mobility through their own individual agency, skillfullynavigating both constraints and opportunities. Domínguez makes it clear that many immigrant women are able to develop the social support needed for a rich social life, and leverage ties that open options for them to develop their social and human capital. However, she also shows that factors such as neighborhood and domestic violence and the unavailability of social services leave many women without the ability to strategize towards social mobility. Ultimately, Domínguez makes important local and international policy recommendations on issue ranging from public housing to world labor visas, demonstrating how policy can help to improve the lives of these and other low-income people.
Discover the secrets to applying simple econometric techniques to improve forecasting Equipping analysts, practitioners, and graduate students with a statistical framework to make effective decisions based on the application of simple economic and statistical methods, Economic and Business Forecasting offers a comprehensive and practical approach to quantifying and accurate forecasting of key variables. Using simple econometric techniques, author John E. Silvia focuses on a select set of major economic and financial variables, revealing how to optimally use statistical software as a template to apply to your own variables of interest. Presents the economic and financial variables that offer unique insights into economic performance Highlights the econometric techniques that can be used to characterize variables Explores the application of SAS software, complete with simple explanations of SAS-code and output Identifies key econometric issues with practical solutions to those problems Presenting the "ten commandments" for economic and business forecasting, this book provides you with a practical forecasting framework you can use for important everyday business applications.
The latest tools and techniques for pricing and risk management This book introduces readers to the use of copula functions to represent the dynamics of financial assets and risk factors, integrated temporal and cross-section applications. The first part of the book will briefly introduce the standard the theory of copula functions, before examining the link between copulas and Markov processes. It will then introduce new techniques to design Markov processes that are suited to represent the dynamics of market risk factors and their co-movement, providing techniques to both estimate and simulate such dynamics. The second part of the book will show readers how to apply these methods to the evaluation of pricing of multivariate derivative contracts in the equity and credit markets. It will then move on to explore the applications of joint temporal and cross-section aggregation to the problem of risk integration.
This book, written by authors with more than a decade of experience in the design and development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in medical imaging, will guide readers in the understanding of one of the most exciting fields today. After an introductory description of classical machine learning techniques, the fundamentals of deep learning are explained in a simple yet comprehensive manner. The book then proceeds with a historical perspective of how medical AI developed in time, detailing which applications triumphed and which failed, from the era of computer aided detection systems on to the current cutting-edge applications in deep learning today, which are starting to exhibit on-par performance with clinical experts. In the last section, the book offers a view on the complexity of the validation of artificial intelligence applications for commercial use, describing the recently introduced concept of software as a medical device, as well as good practices and relevant considerations for training and testing machine learning systems for medical use. Open problematics on the validation for public use of systems which by nature continuously evolve through new data is also explored. The book will be of interest to graduate students in medical physics, biomedical engineering and computer science, in addition to researchers and medical professionals operating in the medical imaging domain, who wish to better understand these technologies and the future of the field. Features: An accessible yet detailed overview of the field Explores a hot and growing topic Provides an interdisciplinary perspective
BEST PRACTICES TO CREATE AND IMPLEMENTHIGHLY EFFECTIVE WEB SURVEYS Exclusively combining design and sampling issues, Handbook of Web Surveys presents a theoretical yet practical approach to creating and conducting web surveys. From the history of web surveys to various modes of data collection to tips for detecting error, this book thoroughly introduces readers to the this cutting-edge technique and offers tips for creating successful web surveys. The authors provide a history of web surveys and go on to explore the advantages and disadvantages of this mode of data collection. Common challenges involving under-coverage, self-selection, and measurement errors are discussed as well as topics including: Sampling designs and estimation procedures Comparing web surveys to face-to-face, telephone, and mail surveys Errors in web surveys Mixed-mode surveys Weighting techniques including post-stratification, generalized regression estimation, and raking ratio estimation Use of propensity scores to correct bias Web panels Real-world examples illustrate the discussed concepts, methods, and techniques, with related data freely available on the book's Website. Handbook of Web Surveys is an essential reference for researchers in the fields of government, business, economics, and the social sciences who utilize technology to gather, analyze, and draw results from data. It is also a suitable supplement for survey methods courses at the upper-undergraduate and graduate levels.
HANDBOOK OF WEB SURVEYS The updated, must-have guide for creating and implementing web surveys Revised and thoroughly updated, the second edition of Handbook of Web Surveys offers a practical and comprehensive guide for creating and conducting effective web surveys. The authors noted experts on the topic, include a review the Blaise system (which has been around for 30 years) and provide information on the most recent developments and techniques in the field. The book illustrates the steps needed to develop effective web surveys and explains how the survey process should be carried out. It also examines the aspects of sampling and presents a number of sampling designs. The book includes ideas for overcoming possible errors in measurement and nonresponse. The authors also compare the various methods of data collection (face-to-face, telephone, mail, and mobile surveys) and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. Critical information for designing questionnaires for mobile devices is also provided. Filled with real-world examples, Handbook of Web Surveys discuss the key concepts, methods, and techniques of effective web surveys. This important book: Contains the most recent sampling designs and estimation procedures Offers ideas for overcoming errors in web surveys Includes information on mixed mode surveys Explores the concept of response probabilities Reviews all aspects of web panels Written for researchers in government, business, economics, and social scientists, the second edition of Handbook of Web Surveys provides an introduction to web surveys and the various methods and techniques.
Customer survey studies deals with customers, consumers and user satisfaction from a product or service. In practice, many of the customer surveys conducted by business and industry are analyzed in a very simple way, without using models or statistical methods. Typical reports include descriptive statistics and basic graphical displays. As demonstrated in this book, integrating such basic analysis with more advanced tools, provides insights on non-obvious patterns and important relationships between the survey variables. This knowledge can significantly affect the conclusions derived from a survey. Key features: Provides an integrated, case-studies based approach to analysing customer survey data. Presents a general introduction to customer surveys, within an organization’s business cycle. Contains classical techniques with modern and non standard tools. Focuses on probabilistic techniques from the area of statistics/data analysis and covers all major recent developments. Accompanied by a supporting website containing datasets and R scripts. Customer survey specialists, quality managers and market researchers will benefit from this book as well as specialists in marketing, data mining and business intelligence fields.
Reality-based modeling for today's unique economic recovery Economic Modeling in the Post Great Recession Era presents a more realistic approach to modeling, using direct statistical applications to address the characteristics and trends central to current market behaviors. This book's unique focus on the reality of today's markets makes it an invaluable resource for students and practitioners seeking a comprehensive guide to more accurate forecasting. While most books treat the economy as if it were in a vacuum, building models around idealized or perception-biased behaviors, this book deals with the economy as it currently stands—in a state of recovery, limited by financial constraints, imperfect information, and lags and disparities in price movements. The authors identify how these characteristics impact various markets' behaviors, and quantify those behaviors using SAS as the primary statistical tool. Today's economy bears a number of unique attributes that usual modeling methods fail to consider. This book describes how to approach modeling based on real-world, observable data in order to make better-informed decisions in today's markets. Discover the three economic characteristics with the greatest impact on various markets Create economic models that mirror the current post-recession reality Adopt statistical methods that identify and adapt to structural breaks and lags Factor real-world imperfections into modeling for more accurate forecasting The past few years have shown a clear demarcation between policymakers' forecasts and actual outcomes. As the dust settles on the Great Recession, after-effects linger—and impact our current recovery in ways that diverge from past experience and theoretical expectations. Economic Modeling in the Post Great Recession Era provides comprehensive guidance grounded in reality for today's economic decision-makers.
There was no academic book presenting the biographies of the pioneers of South American Adventism. There were just short devotional works about the experiences of one or more Adventist missionaries. This book showcases the life and work of those who established the Seventh-day Adventist Church in South America. It is a text prepared with historical rigour, true to available sources, spreads the work of Adventist missionaries in these lands and promotes the fulfillment of evangelical mission in present day. However, its contents are presented in an enjoyable and inspiring way. This work contains the biographies of twelve of the foundational missionaries of South American Adventism. The areas in which they contributed to mission are diverse: evangelization, administration, medical work, publishing ministry, educational work and social service. All of them, men and women, adult and young, owning big ideals and a spirit of sacrifice that invite emulation.
Explaining the theoretical underpinning of generalized linear models, this text enables researchers to decide how to select the best way to adapt their data for this type of analysis, with examples to illustrate the application of GLM.
Astrology: don't believe - experience!" convinces skeptics, but also brings new insights to those interested in astrology. Away from common platitudes and clichés about star signs and their characteristics, the reader receives a lot of new information on a journey through the annual cycle. Numerous physical and perceptual exercises help the reader to gain a new awareness and to be more mindful of themselves and others. A series of questions about the individual signs of the zodiac supports the reader on their journey to themselves. After reading the individual chapters, some questions about why we act the way we do may not be solved, but they will be easier to understand.
Mediated messages flood our daily lives, through virtually endless choices of media channels, genres, and content. However, selectivity determines what media messages we attend to and focus on. The present book examines the factors that influence this selectivity. Seminal books on selective media exposure were published in 1960 by Klapper and in 1985 by Zillmann and Bryant. But an integrated update on this research field is much needed, as rigorous selective exposure research has flourished in the new millennium. In the contexts of political communication, health communication, Internet use, entertainment consumption, and electronic games, the crucial question of how individuals choose what content they consume has garnered much attention. The present book integrates theories and empirical evidence from these domains and discusses the related research methodologies. In light of the ever-increasing abundance of media channels and messages, selective exposure has become more important than ever for media impacts. This monograph provides a comprehensive review of the research on selective exposure to media messages, which is at the heart of communication science and media effects. It is required reading for media scholars and researchers, and promises to influence and inspire future research.
The year 2011 will go down in history as a turning point for the Arab world. The popular unrest that swept across the region and led to the toppling of the Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Qaddhafi regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya has fundamentally altered the social, economic, and political outlooks of these countries and the region as a whole. This book assesses the transition processes unleashed by the uprisings that took place in Egypt and Tunisia in 2011. The wave of unrest and popular mobilisation that swept through these countries is treated as the point of departure of long and complex processes of change, manipulation, restructuring, and entrenchment of the institutional structures and logics that defined politics. The book explores the constitutive elements of institutional development, namely processes of constitution making, electoral politics, the changing status and power of the judiciary, and the interplay between the civilian and the military apparatuses in Egypt and Tunisia. It also considers the extent to which these two countries have become more democratic, as a result of their institutions being more legitimate, accountable, and responsive, at the beginning of 2014 and from a comparative perspective. The impact of temporal factors in shaping transition paths is highlighted throughout the book. The book provides a comprehensive assessment of political and institutional transition processes in two key countries in North Africa and its conclusions shed light on similar processes that have taken place throughout the region since 2011. It will be a valuable resource for anyone studying Middle Eastern and North African politics, area studies, comparative institutional development and democratisation.
Aminata Camara, Maya K., Lafia T., Oxana Chi and Layla Zami are middle-class, highly educated women in Germany and come from families of mixed African European heritages. This ethnographic study traces the coming of age as person of African descent in Germany born in the 1980s with a focus on the city of Frankfurt. Silvia Wojczewski follows the paths of five women and shows how the practice of travelling is used as a way to connect to transnational families and to an Afrodiasporic heritage. Zooming in on five lives, she reveals the ways in which class, diaspora and kinship relations influence how the women understand themselves and their position in the world.
Terminology on Accessible Communication has primarily evolved and been published within the borders of a given country with no or only little exchange across these borders. Since English can be regarded as the lingua franca of science, this first German–English dictionary of Accessible Communication will help to promote international exchange and an international discourse on this topic by attempting to define concepts that go beyond the scope of a single-country centered approach. The terminological work for this dictionary is based on the German Handbook of Accessible Communication. Most of the handbook’s contents are language-independent and applicable to other recipient communities. On the basis of the German terminology, the English equivalents, definitions and explanations were researched. The dictionary contributes to the development of a standardised terminology across languages and cultures.
This book offers a new edition, with English translation and commentary, of the Kitāb al-Madḫal, which opens Avicenna’s (d. 1037) most comprehensive summa of Peripatetic philosophy, namely the Kitāb al-Šifāʾ. For the first time, the text is established together with a stemma codicum showing the genealogical relations among 34 manuscripts, the twelfth-century Latin translation, and the literal quotations by Avicenna’s first and second-generation students. In this book, Avicenna’s reappraisal of Porphyry’s Isagoge is examined from both a historical and a philosophical point of view. The key-features of Avicenna’s theory of predicables are analyzed in the General Introduction and in the Commentary both in their own right and against the background of the Greek and Arabic exegetical tradition. Readers shall find in this book the first systematic study of the Madḫal which, in addition to being the only logical work of the Šifāʾ ever transmitted in its entirety both in Arabic and in Latin, is crucial for understanding Avicenna’s conception of universal predicables at the crossroads between logic and metaphysics.
Statistical Analysis of Questionnaires: A Unified Approach Based on R and Stata presents special statistical methods for analyzing data collected by questionnaires. The book takes an applied approach to testing and measurement tasks, mirroring the growing use of statistical methods and software in education, psychology, sociology, and other fields.
Obwohl die deutsche Wiedervereinigung mehr als 25 Jahre zurückliegt, bestehen bis heute Unterschiede zwischen Ost- und Westdeutschland. Aufgrund der unterschiedlichen Lebensstandards und Chancen ziehen viele Menschen von Ost nach West. Silvia Maja Melzer analysiert theoretisch wie empirisch Determinanten und Konsequenzen der innerdeutschen Migration und beantwortet folgende Fragen: Welche Faktoren sind ausschlaggebend für die Wanderungen von Männern und Frauen? Wie beeinflusst Bildung das geschlechtsspezifische Migrationsverhalten? Wer wandert oder pendelt häufiger, Frauen oder Männer? Um ein möglichst differenziertes Bild von der geschlechtsspezifischen Migration zu erhalten, werden Vergleiche zwischen alleinstehenden Männern und Frauen und solchen in Partnerschaften gezogen. Unterscheidet sich das Migrationsverhalten von ost- und westdeutschen Paaren und Alleinstehenden? Und: Welche finanziellen Konsequenzen zieht die Migration nach sich? Sind Ost-West Migranten glücklicher?
The increasing availability of data in our current, information overloaded society has led to the need for valid tools for its modelling and analysis. Data mining and applied statistical methods are the appropriate tools to extract knowledge from such data. This book provides an accessible introduction to data mining methods in a consistent and application oriented statistical framework, using case studies drawn from real industry projects and highlighting the use of data mining methods in a variety of business applications. Introduces data mining methods and applications. Covers classical and Bayesian multivariate statistical methodology as well as machine learning and computational data mining methods. Includes many recent developments such as association and sequence rules, graphical Markov models, lifetime value modelling, credit risk, operational risk and web mining. Features detailed case studies based on applied projects within industry. Incorporates discussion of data mining software, with case studies analysed using R. Is accessible to anyone with a basic knowledge of statistics or data analysis. Includes an extensive bibliography and pointers to further reading within the text. Applied Data Mining for Business and Industry, 2nd edition is aimed at advanced undergraduate and graduate students of data mining, applied statistics, database management, computer science and economics. The case studies will provide guidance to professionals working in industry on projects involving large volumes of data, such as customer relationship management, web design, risk management, marketing, economics and finance.
This volume widens the scope of Legal Linguistics from the traditional focus on performative texts like statutes to the popularization of legal knowledge for different purposes. The chapters, written in English, German or French, discuss the theoretical basis and methods and investigate popularization efforts by national institutions, law firms and community websites. The objects of study cover a variety of modes and media from different national contexts reaching from print folders over online written texts to YouTube videos and movies.
We know a lot about the directors and stars of Italian cinema's heyday, from Roberto Rossellini to Sophia Loren. But what do we know about the Italian audiences that went to see their films? Based on the AHRC-funded project 'Italian Cinema Audiences 1945-60', Italian Cinema Audiences: Histories and Memories of Cinema-going in Post-war Italy draws upon the rich data collected by the project team (160 video interviews and 1000+ written questionnaires gathered from Italians aged 65 and over; archival material related to cinema distribution, exhibition and programming, box-office figures, and critical discussions of cinema from film journals and popular magazines of the period). For the first time, cinema's role in everyday Italian life, and its affective meaning when remembered by older people, are enriched with industrial analyses of the booming Italian film sector of the period, as well as contextual data from popular and specialized magazines.
Introduction to Statistical Decision Theory: Utility Theory and Causal Analysis provides the theoretical background to approach decision theory from a statistical perspective. It covers both traditional approaches, in terms of value theory and expected utility theory, and recent developments, in terms of causal inference. The book is specifically designed to appeal to students and researchers that intend to acquire a knowledge of statistical science based on decision theory. Features Covers approaches for making decisions under certainty, risk, and uncertainty Illustrates expected utility theory and its extensions Describes approaches to elicit the utility function Reviews classical and Bayesian approaches to statistical inference based on decision theory Discusses the role of causal analysis in statistical decision theory
With the proliferation of huge amounts of (heterogeneous) data on the Web, the importance of information retrieval (IR) has grown considerably over the last few years. Big players in the computer industry, such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, are the primary contributors of technology for fast access to Web-based information; and searching capabilities are now integrated into most information systems, ranging from business management software and customer relationship systems to social networks and mobile phone applications. Ceri and his co-authors aim at taking their readers from the foundations of modern information retrieval to the most advanced challenges of Web IR. To this end, their book is divided into three parts. The first part addresses the principles of IR and provides a systematic and compact description of basic information retrieval techniques (including binary, vector space and probabilistic models as well as natural language search processing) before focusing on its application to the Web. Part two addresses the foundational aspects of Web IR by discussing the general architecture of search engines (with a focus on the crawling and indexing processes), describing link analysis methods (specifically Page Rank and HITS), addressing recommendation and diversification, and finally presenting advertising in search (the main source of revenues for search engines). The third and final part describes advanced aspects of Web search, each chapter providing a self-contained, up-to-date survey on current Web research directions. Topics in this part include meta-search and multi-domain search, semantic search, search in the context of multimedia data, and crowd search. The book is ideally suited to courses on information retrieval, as it covers all Web-independent foundational aspects. Its presentation is self-contained and does not require prior background knowledge. It can also be used in the context of classic courses on data management, allowing the instructor to cover both structured and unstructured data in various formats. Its classroom use is facilitated by a set of slides, which can be downloaded from www.search-computing.org.
This book provides a modern introduction to the growth, characterization, and physics of iron-based superconducting thin films. Iron pnictide and iron chalcogenide compounds have become intensively studied key materials in condensed matter physics due to their potential for high temperature superconductivity. With maximum critical temperatures of around 60 K, the new superconductors rank first after the celebrated cuprates, and the latest announcements on ultrathin films promise even more. Thin film synthesis of these superconductors began in 2008 immediately after their discovery, and this growing research area has seen remarkable progress up to the present day, especially with regard to the iron chalcogenides FeSe and FeSe1-xTex, the iron pnictide BaFe2-xCoxAs2 and iron-oxyarsenides. This essential volume provides comprehensive, state-of-the-art coverage of iron-based superconducting thin films in topical chapters with detailed information on thin film synthesis and growth, analytical film characterization, interfaces, and various aspects on physics and materials properties. Current efforts towards technological applications and functional films are outlined and discussed. The development and latest results for monolayer FeSe films are also presented. This book serves as a key reference for students, lecturers, industry engineers, and academic researchers who would like to gain an overview of this complex and growing research area.
Long QT syndrome is a heart rhythm disorder that can cause fast, chaotic heartbeats. In some cases, long QT syndrome can cause sudden death. Long QT syndrome may result from a genetic mutation or be caused by certain medications and medical conditions. The condition is treatable with medication, surgery, or an implantable device. Because it may have serious consequences, it's important for electrophysiologists to know about long QT syndrome.
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