Yan quitte le domicile familial pour partir à l’aventure en quête de nouveaux défis et trésors. Ses pérégrinations le conduisent profondément dans les montagnes où il rencontre une jeune fille à la fois charmante et mystérieuse et s’attire des ennuis avec des mercenaires et autres créatures... Bref tout un programme ! « Je veux devenir plus fort, le plus fort pour me hisser tout en haut, et réécrire les lois de ce monde où seul le fort a le droit d’exister. »
This authored monograph presents a study on fundamental limits and robustness of stability and stabilization of time-delay systems, with an emphasis on time-varying delay, robust stabilization, and newly emerged areas such as networked control and multi-agent systems. The authors systematically develop an operator-theoretic approach that departs from both the traditional algebraic approach and the currently pervasive LMI solution methods. This approach is built on the classical small-gain theorem, which enables the author to draw upon powerful tools and techniques from robust control theory. The book contains motivating examples and presents mathematical key facts that are required in the subsequent sections. The target audience primarily comprises researchers and professionals in the field of control theory, but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students alike.
Mechanical responses of solid materials are governed by their material properties. The solutions for estimating and predicting the mechanical responses are extremely difficult, in particular for non-homogeneous materials. Among these, there is a special type of materials whose properties are variable only along one direction, defined as graded materials or functionally graded materials (FGMs). Examples are plant stems and bones. Artificial graded materials are widely used in mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, biological engineering, and electronic engineering. This work covers and develops boundary element methods (BEM) to investigate the properties of realistic graded materials. It is a must have for practitioners and researchers in materials science, both academic and in industry. Covers analysis of properties of graded materials. Presents solutions based methods for analysis of fracture mechanics. Presents two types of boundary element methods for layered isotropic materials and transversely isotropic materials. Written by two authors with extensive international experience in academic and private research and engineering.
The village doctor arrived at a meeting from a long way away and accidentally entered the room where the female Red Beauty host was. The director was about to enter, so what should he do?
As medieval Chinese manuscripts were copied and recopied through the centuries, both mistakes and deliberate editorial changes were introduced. Xiaofei Tian shows how readers not only experience authors but "produce" them by shaping texts to their interpretation, focusing on the evolution over the centuries of the reclusive poet Tao Yuanming into a figure of epic stature.
The studies of Earth's history and of the physical and chemical properties of the substances that make up our planet, are of great significance to our understanding both of its past and its future. The geological and other environmental processes on Earth and the composition of the planet are of vital importance in locating and harnessing its resources. This book is primarily written for research scholars, geologists, civil engineers, mining engineers, and environmentalists. Hopefully the text will be used by students, and it will continue to be of value to them throughout their subsequent professional and research careers. This does not mean to infer that the book was written solely or mainly with the student in mind. Indeed from the point of view of the researcher in Earth and Environmental Science it could be argued that this text contains more detail than he will require in his initial studies or research.
Conservation Agriculture (CA) adoption can alleviate the environmental consequences of conventional agricultural production while maintaining yields. A better understanding of farmers' decision-making in CA adoption is needed to inform policy design that encourages adoption. In the absence of the CA adoption market, experimental methods provide an essential alternative to investigate decision-makers' preference. Therefore, this dissertation leverages a Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) to analyze farmers' decision-making to shed light on policy design as well as to inform methodological issues associated with DCE approach.The first chapter evaluates farmers' Willingness-to-Accept (WTA) CA practices and assesses the factors affecting the WTA. In addition to the payment to compensate the expenses or efforts of taking a CA practice, a substantial payment is needed to incentivize farmers leaving the status quo and committing to a CA program. Internal factors, such as farmers' characteristics and experience with CA practices, as well as external factors, i.e., policy design in terms of information framing and the decision time window, both have impacts on the WTA. These findings provide a practical guide for cost-efficient policy design.The traditional DCE approach for stated preference evaluation builds on an essential assumption that decision-making is reference independent, i.e., independent of irrelevant alternatives. The second chapter develops a new framework to relax and test this assumption by incorporating behavioral realism into modeling. I found that decision-makers use behavioral strategies, i.e., reference dependence, in decision making, and that different sources of information are evaluated differently as reference points. These findings, on the one hand, set caveats for modeling DCE data based on independence of irrelevance assumption, and on the other hand, indicate a more cost-efficient policy design tool that nudges desired behaviors through shaping the reference point.Three decision-making strategies could describe the decision making in a DCE: reference independence, reference dependence, and attributes non-attendance. This last chapter explicitly discusses which strategy is adopted and how such strategies evolve in repeated choice tasks. I found that decision-makers use behavioral strategies to make decisions. As decision-makers collect information over the repeated choice scenarios, they are shifting from the current choice set to the path as the reference point. Failing to account for the reference dependence behavior in choice modeling could misidentify the attended attributes as non-attended. This finding suggests that the reference dependence model can be a guiding choice for DCE modeling. Again, this chapter implies that discrete choice modeling without accounting for behavioral realism will fail to reveal the true preference.
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