Imagining Motherhood in Contemporary Irish and Caribbean Literature undertakes a comparative transnational reading to develop more expansive literary models of good mothering. Abigail L. Palko argues that Irish and Caribbean literary representations of non-normative mothering practices do not reflect transgressive or dangerous mothering but are rather cultural negotiations of the definition of a good mother. This original book demonstrates the sustained commitment to countering the dominant ideologies of maternal self-sacrifice foundational to both Irish and Caribbean nationalist rhetoric, offering instead the possibility of integrating maternal agency into an effective model of female citizenship.

Regional Intelligence is an emerging field that leverages the lessons learned through decades of regional science. By merging spatial analysis with quantitative analytical techniques in the Anthropocene, this book contributes to the multidisciplinary understanding of regional issues. The locational aspects of regional paradigms are explored through various empirical studies that promote a rich and diversified understanding of regional issues concerning policy, governance, land use, and territorial decisions. Given its scope, the book will appeal to scholars and students of regional and spatial sciences and geography, as well as practitioners and decision makers engaged in regional planning and policymaking, looking for new methodological approaches that offer insights into sustainable development, regional prosperity, and livability. As a unique contribution, this book challenges the status quo on how complex spatial problems at an international level and at multiple scales can be comprehended.

This book summarizes the research being pursued as part of the Erasmus+ CBHE KA2 project entitled "Development of master curricula for natural disasters risk management in Western Balkan countries" (NatRisk), which aims to educate experts on the prevention and management of natural disasters in the Western Balkan region in line with national and EU policies. The project has successfully developed and implemented master curricula and educational training in the field of natural disasters risk management, and a methodology for the identification and prevention of natural disasters. Consisting of 11 chapters, the book analyzes and discusses topics such as risk assessment tools and quality methods, the different approaches for civil-military collaboration, natural disasters risk management in Bosnia and Herzegovina, leadership models for managing crises resulting from natural disasters, natural disasters in industrial areas, natural risk management in geotechnics, flood risk modeling, adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference models for flood prediction, collapse prediction of masonry arches, an algorithm for fire truck dispatch in emergency situations, and processing drought data in a GIS environment.

This book introduces readers to the latest advances in and approaches to intuitionistic fuzzy decision-making methods. To do so, it explores a range of applications to practical decision-making problems, together with representative case studies. Examining a host of decision-making methods, most of which are based on intuitionistic fuzzy aggregation operators, its goal is to offer readers a new way to study decision-making methods in the intuitionistic fuzzy environment. Chiefly intended for practitioners and researchers working in the areas of risk management, decision-making under uncertainty, and operational research, the book can also be used as supplementary material for graduate and senior undergraduate courses in these areas.

This thesis represents one of the most comprehensive and in-depth studies of the use of Lorentz-boosted hadronic final state systems in the search for signals of Supersymmetry conducted to date at the Large Hadron Collider. A thorough assessment is performed of the observables that provide enhanced sensitivity to new physics signals otherwise hidden under an enormous background of top quark pairs produced by Standard Model processes. This is complemented by an ingenious analysis optimization procedure that allowed for extending the reach of this analysis by hundreds of GeV in mass of these hypothetical new particles. Lastly, the combination of both deep, thoughtful physics analysis with the development of high-speed electronics for identifying and selecting these same objects is not only unique, but also revolutionary. The Global Feature Extraction system that the author played a critical role in bringing to fruition represents the first dedicated hardware device for selecting these Lorentz-boosted hadronic systems in real-time using state-of-the-art processing chips and embedded systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on From Data Models and Back, DataMod 2020, held virtually, in October 2020. The 11 full papers and 3 short papers presented in this book were selected from 19 submissions. The papers are grouped in these topical sections: machine learning; simulation-based approaches, and data mining and processing related approaches.

This book investigates how actors organize in order to solve a water quality problem. Research on the use of environmental resources has mainly focused on the circumstances needed for users to self-organize or to maintain an already sustainable way of resource use. Few studies have investigated the reasons why actors start to cooperate when they are faced with an environmental problem. Actor networks in three regions of the Rhine catchment area are scrutinized regarding a) actors' cooperation pattern when managing an environmental problem; and b) the factors that trigger actors in a common-pool resource situation to initiate cooperation. Water quality policy is analysed in two European countries - Germany and Luxembourg - and one non-European country - Switzerland -, providing an overview of the distinctive measures applied in these regions aiming to tackle the water quality problem of micro-pollutants in river surface water. Applying the social-ecological system framework (SESF) devised by E. Ostrom and her colleagues and Social Network Analysis (SNA), the current book combines qualitative and quantitative methods to answer the question of why actors cooperate in the management process of an environmental problem like water pollution.

This book provides an overview of the ecological indicators of landscape dynamics in the context of geographical landscape integration. Landscape dynamics depicts every change that occurs in the physical, biological, and cognitive assets of a landscape. To understand and interpret the complex physical, biological, and cognitive phenomena of landscapes, it is necessary to operate conceptually and practically on a broad range of spatial and temporal scales. Rapid land use changes have become a concern to environmentalists and planners because of their impacts on the natural ecosystem, which further determines socioeconomic dynamics. In this regard, the book discusses case studies that share new insights into how landscape patterns and processes impact small creatures, and how small creatures in turn influence landscape structure and composition. In turn, the relevant aspects of land use and land cover dynamics are covered, and the multi-faceted relationship between the substrata and ecological community is highlighted. The book is unique in its focus on the application of spatial informatics such as automatic building extraction from high-resolution imagery; a soil resource inventory for meeting the challenges of land degradation; hydrological modeling; the temporal variation analysis of glacier area and the identification and mapping of glacial lakes; morphometric analysis of river basins; and the monitoring and modeling of urban sprawl, among other features.

This unique book introduces a variety of techniques designed to represent, enhance and empower multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional machine learning research in healthcare informatics. Providing a unique compendium of current and emerging machine learning paradigms for healthcare informatics, it reflects the diversity, complexity, and the depth and breadth of this multi-disciplinary area. Further, it describes techniques for applying machine learning within organizations and explains how to evaluate the efficacy, suitability, and efficiency of such applications. Featuring illustrative case studies, including how chronic disease is being redefined through patient-led data learning, the book offers a guided tour of machine learning algorithms, architecture design, and applications of learning in healthcare challenges.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Modelling and Simulation for Autonomous Systems, MESAS 2020, held in Prague, Czech Republic, in October 2020.*The 19 full papers included in the volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 26 submissions. They are organized in the following topical sections: future challenges of advanced M&S technology; M&S of intelligent systems - R&D and application; and AxS/AI in context of future warfare and security environment. *The conference was held virtually.

This book discusses enterprise hierarchies, which view a target system with varying degrees of abstraction. These requirement refinement hierarchies can be represented by goal models. It is important to verify that such hierarchies capture the same set of rationales and intentions and are in mutual agreement with the requirements of the system being designed. The book also explores how hierarchies manifest themselves in the real world by undertaking a data mining exercise and observing the interactions within an enterprise. The inherent sequence-agnostic property of goal models prevents requirement analysts from performing compliance checks in this phase as compliance rules are generally embedded with temporal information. The studies discussed here seek to extract finite state models corresponding to goal models with the help of model transformation. The i*ToNuSMV tool implements one such algorithm to perform model checking on i* models. In turn, the AFSR framework provides a new goal model nomenclature that associates semantics with individual goals. It also provides a reconciliation machinery that detects entailment or consistency conflicts within goal models and suggests corrective measures to resolve such conflicts. The authors also discuss how the goal maintenance problem can be mapped to the state-space search problem, and how A* search can be used to identify an optimal goal model configuration that is free from all conflicts. In conclusion, the authors discuss how the proposed research frameworks can be extended and applied in new research directions. The GRL2APK framework presents an initiative to develop mobile applications from goal models using reusable code component repositories.

This proceedings volume presents new methods and applications in applied economics with special interest in advanced cross-section data estimation methodology. Featuring select contributions from the 2019 International Conference on Applied Economics (ICOAE 2019) held in Milan, Italy, this book explores areas such as applied macroeconomics, applied microeconomics, applied financial economics, applied international economics, applied agricultural economics, applied marketing and applied managerial economics. International Conference on Applied Economics (ICOAE) is an annual conference that started in 2008, designed to bring together economists from different fields of applied economic research, in order to share methods and ideas. Applied economics is a rapidly growing field of economics that combines economic theory with econometrics, to analyze economic problems of the real world, usually with economic policy interest. In addition, there is growing interest in the field of applied economics for cross-section data estimation methods, tests and techniques. This volume makes a contribution in the field of applied economic research by presenting the most current research. Featuring country specific studies, this book is of interest to academics, students, researchers, practitioners, and policy makers in applied economics, econometrics and economic policy.

This book addresses student passivity in teacher education. Using a developed metaphor, the author critically examines the use of authentic learning to design and implement learning experiences for preservice teachers, and reveals the opportunities and limitations of a focus on authenticity. This book prepares teachers for outdoor education using practice-based exemplars of applied teaching theories. Focusing on authentic pedagogies, it applies to all teacher educators who seek to engage in high-impact learning for their students, and is relevant for in-service educators, preservice teachers and researchers in the field of self-study.

This book addresses the enormous global challenge of providing balanced and sustainable solutions to urgent water problems. The author explores our dependence on access to safe water and other water-related services and how driving forces of the human and natural worlds are degrading this access. The greatest challenges involve conflicts between people and interest groups across all countries, as well as the economic and political difficulties in finding solutions through infrastructure development. The book takes an interdisciplinary approach to Integrated Water Resources Management or IWRM, which provides a set of tools for policy development, planning and organization, assessment, systems analysis, finance, and regulation. The author suggests that IWRM is challenging because of the human element, but that no other process can reconcile the conflicting agendas involved with water management. The broad range of topics covered here, as well as 25 case summaries, will be of interest to scientists, engineers, practitioners, and advanced level students interested in the integrated management of water as a resource.

This handbook gathers state-of-the-art research on optimization problems in power distribution systems, covering classical problems as well as the challenges introduced by distributed power generation and smart grid resources. It also presents recent models, solution techniques and computational tools to solve planning problems for power distribution systems and explains how to apply them in distributed and variable energy generation resources. As such, the book therefore is a valuable tool to leverage the expansion and operation planning of electricity distribution networks.

This book provides a systematic introduction to the fundamental concepts, major challenges, and effective solutions for Quality of Service in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Unlike other books on the topic, it focuses on the networking aspects of WSNs, discussing the most important networking issues, including network architecture design, medium access control, routing and data dissemination, node clustering, node localization, query processing, data aggregation, transport and quality of service, time synchronization, and network security. Featuring contributions from researchers, this book strikes a balance between fundamental concepts and new technologies, providing readers with unprecedented insights into WSNs from a networking perspective. It is essential reading for a broad audience, including academics, research engineers, and practitioners, particularly postgraduate/postdoctoral researchers and engineers in industry. It is also suitable as a textbook or supplementary reading for graduate computer engineering and computer science courses.

This collected volume is the first to study the interface between contemporary social movements, cultural memory and digital media. Establishing the digital memory work practices of social movements as an important area of research, it reveals how activists use digital media to lay claim to, circulate and curate cultural memories. Interdisciplinary in scope, its contributors address mobilizations of mediated remembrance in the USA, Germany, Sweden, Italy, India, Argentina, the UK and Russia.

Protected areas have often been defined as the backbones of biodiversity conservation. Protected areas have often been defined as the backbones of biodiversity conservation. However, legitimate demands formulated by countries for their economic development, growing human populations, forest fragmentations, and needs of local communities for sustainable livelihoods are also pressing demands on protected areas, stringently pressuring conservation community to identify means to reconcile long term biodiversity conservation and communities' livelihoods. Hence, integrating conservation activities within the global framework of economic development of countries with high biodiversity had become part of conservation paradigms. Integrated development as a route to conservation, strict protected areas, community managed areas, etc. have been tried but resulted in debatable outcomes in many ways. The lukewarm nature of these results brought 'landscape approach' at the front of biodiversity conservation in Central Africa. Since the late 1990s the landscape approach uses large areas with different functional attributes and shifts foundational biodiversity conservation paradigms. Changes are brought to the role traditionally attributed to local communities, aligning sustainable development with conservation and stretching conservation beyond the confines of traditional protected areas. These three shifts need a holistic approach to respond to different conservation questions. There are only a few instances where the landscape experience has been scientifically documented and lessons learnt drawn into a corpus of knowledge to guide future conservation initiatives across Central Africa. To subjugate one biodiversity conservation landscape as one case study emerged as a matter of urgency to present the potential knowledge acquired throughout the landscape experiment, including leadership and management, processes tried, results (at least partially) achieved, and why such and such other process or management arrangement were been chosen among many other alternatives, etc. The challenges of the implementation of the conservation landscape approach needed also to be documented. This book responds to the majority of these questions; drawing its content from the firsthand field knowledge, it discusses these shifts and documents what has been tried, how successful (unsuccessful) it was, and what lessons learnt from these trials. Theoretical questions such as threat index, and ecological services, etc. are also discussed and gaps in knowledge are identified.

The book is basically written with a view to project Computer Numerical Control Programming (CNC) Programming for machines. This book shows how to write, read and understand such programs for modernizating manufacturing machines. It includes topics such as different programming codes as well as different CNC machines such as drilling and milling.

This book highlights the shortcomings of the present Digital Rights Management (DRM) regulations in China. Using literature reviews and comparative analysis from theoretical and empirical perspectives, it appraises different DRM restriction regulations and practices as well as current advice on balance of interests to analyze the dilemma faced by the DRM system. This research intends to help China establish a comprehensive DRM regulatory model through comparative theoretical and empirical critiques of systems in America and Europe. A newly designed DRM regulatory model should be suitable for specific Chinese features, and should consist of government regulated, self-regulated, and even unregulated sections. The new regulation model might be an addition to existing legal structures, while self-regulations/social enforcement also would be as important as legislation based on case studies.

The book studies the "Manchurian immigrants" from many important aspects suchas agricultural operation, education, religion, and women's issues. It contains thefollowing features: first, readers can get deeper understanding on the "Manchurianimmigrants" policies by investigating the agriculture-based social life of the"Manchurian immigrants" in Northeast China; second, studying the life conditions ofthe "Manchurian immigrants" can make up for the lack of researches in related fieldto some extent; third, readers are given chances by this book to learn Japanese societyand Japanese people from another facet.

This book discusses several new, near-net-shape techniques for fabricating highly reliable, high-performance, complex ceramic parts. In the context of materials design, the creation of high-performance ceramic products of desired shapes has led to the need for new ceramic forming processes. The near-net-shape techniques combine both injection-molding and colloidal-forming processes. Reviewing and summarizing the research and latest advances, the book is divided into 6 parts: (1) the basic theory, development, and application of the colloidal injection molding of ceramics; (2) the tape casting technology; (3) the reliability of the product; (4) the colloidal injection molding of Si3N4 and SiC; (5) low-toxicity systems; and (6) the novel in-situ coagulation casting of ceramic suspensions via controlled release of high-valence counter ions and dispersant removal. It is intended for researchers and graduates in materials science and engineering.

This book provides an in-depth review on various aspects of canine and feline hypertension. Physiology, pathophysiology, epidemiology and pathological consequences of high blood pressure in cats and dogs are discussed. A comparative approach is taken, the underpinning research is critically evaluated and knowledge gaps identified. In addition, the reader is presented with evidence-based treatment strategies. The book targets researchers, graduate students and clinical specialists in small animal internal medicine as well as veterinary clinicians with interest in nephrology, cardiology, neurology and ophthalmology.