Disaster management is a process or strategy that is implemented when any type of catastrophic event takes place. The process may be initiated when anything threatens to disrupt normal operations or puts the lives of human beings at risk. Governments on all levels as well as many businesses create some sort of disaster plan that make it possible to overcome the catastrophe and return to normal function as quickly as possible. Response to natural disasters (e.g., floods, earthquakes) or technological disaster (e.g., nuclear, chemical) is an extreme complex process that involves severe time pressure, various uncertainties, high non-linearity and many stakeholders. Disaster management often requires several autonomous agencies to collaboratively mitigate, prepare, respond, and recover from heterogeneous and dynamic sets of hazards to society. Almost all disasters involve high degrees of novelty to deal with most unexpected various uncertainties and dynamic time pressures. Existing studies and approaches within disaster management have mainly been focused on some specific type of disasters with certain agency oriented. There is a lack of a general framework to deal with similarities and synergies among different disasters by taking their specific features into account. This book provides with various decisions analysis theories and support tools in complex systems in general and in disaster management in particular. The book is also generated during a long-term preparation of a European project proposal among most leading experts in the areas related to the book title. Chapters are evaluated based on quality and originality in theory and methodology, application oriented, relevance to the title of the book.

Systems for Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) are currently separate. The potential of the latest technologies and changes in operational and analytical applications over the last decade have given rise to the unification of these systems, which can be of benefit for both workloads. Research and industry have reacted and prototypes of hybrid database systems are now appearing.

Benchmarks are the standard method for evaluating, comparing and supporting the development of new database systems. Because of the separation of OLTP and OLAP systems, existing benchmarks are only focused on one or the other. With the rise of hybrid database systems, benchmarks to assess these systems will be needed as well.

Based on the examination of existing benchmarks, a new benchmark for hybrid database systems is introduced in this book. It is furthermore used to determine the effect of adding OLAP to an OLTP workload and is applied to analyze the impact of typically used optimizations in the historically separate OLTP and OLAP domains in mixed-workload scenarios.

Over the last decades Discrete Event Simulation has conquered many different application areas. This trend is, on the one hand, driven by an ever wider use of this technology in different fields of science and on the other hand by an incredibly creative use of available software programs through dedicated experts. This book contains articles from scientists and experts from 10 countries. They illuminate the width of application of this technology and the quality of problems solved using Discrete Event Simulation. Practical applications of simulation dominate in the present book. The book is aimed to researchers and students who deal in their work with Discrete Event Simulation and which want to inform them about current applications. By focusing on discrete event simulation, this book can also serve as an inspiration source for practitioners for solving specific problems during their work. Decision makers who deal with the question of the introduction of discrete event simulation for planning support and optimization this book provides a contribution to the orientation, what specific problems could be solved with the help of Discrete Event Simulation within the organization.

Volume 54 presents six chapters on the changing face of software engineering-the process by which we build reliable software systems. We are constantly building faster and less expensive processors, which allow us to use different processes to try and conquer the "bug" problem facing all developments-how to build reliable systems with few errors at low or at least manageable cost. The first three chapters of this volume emphasize components and the impact that object-oriented design is having on the program development process (a current "hot topic"). The final three chapters present additional aspects of the software development process, including maintenance, purchasing strategies, and secure outsourcing of scientific computations.

A fast-paced, useful, and easy introduction to Microsoft 365 For those who need the show as well as the tell, Teach Yourself VISUALLY Microsoft 365 is the visual walkthrough to Microsoft's latest suite of office products that will get you up-to-speed faster than any other resource on the market. This book offers image- and screenshot-rich tutorials alongside step-by-step instructions so you can see what you need to do to make the most of Microsoft 365. From getting a grip on the most basic Microsoft 365 functions to the advanced, new features known only by power users, the book provides you with the tools you need to make your work more streamlined and efficient. You'll also get: Up to date--and visually supported--guidance on the major Office apps that are part of Microsoft 365: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Access Full-color, two-page tutorials that get you up and running fast Easy-to-read instructions and stepwise advice to accompany the informative and crystal-clear images Ideal for people using Microsoft 365 for the very first time, Teach Yourself VISUALLY Microsoft 365 is also a can't-miss resource for long-time users of the software suite who need an introduction to the latest version and Office veterans seeking a refresher on what Microsoft 365 is capable of.

As financial systems migrate to a pervasive, online environment, business leaders and layman investors alike must adapt to changes in the market brought about by this new age of business. Strategic E-Commerce Systems and Tools for Competing in the Digital Marketplace advances the body of knowledge on electronic business and commerce with an in-depth look at the opportunities and concerns surrounding online business and finance. This cutting-edge reference aids business leaders, financial managers, investors, and consumers looking to build their portfolios and thrive in modern digital business environments.

The series covers new developments in computer technology. Most chapters present an overview of a current subfield within computers, with many citations, and often include new developments in the field by the authors of the individual chapters. Topics include hardware, software, theoretical underpinnings of computing, and novel applications of computers. This current volume includes six chapters on nanotechnology emphasizing its use in biological applications.
The book series is a valuable addition to university courses that emphasize the topics under discussion in that particular volume as well as belonging on the bookshelf of industrial practitioners who need to implement many of the technologies that are described.
- Nanotechnology in biology
- Development of miniature computing devices
- Social and legal implications of nanotechnology

This book covers the major problems of turbulence and turbulent processes, including physical phenomena, their modeling and their simulation. After a general introduction in Chapter 1 illustrating many aspects dealing with turbulent flows, averaged equations and kinetic energy budgets are provided in Chapter 2. The concept of turbulent viscosity as a closure of the Reynolds stress is also introduced. Wall-bounded flows are presented in Chapter 3 and aspects specific to boundary layers and channel or pipe flows are also pointed out. Free shear flows, namely free jets and wakes, are considered in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 deals with vortex dynamics. Homogeneous turbulence, isotropy and dynamics of isotropic turbulence are presented in Chapters 6 and 7. Turbulence is then described both in the physical space and in the wave number space. Time dependent numerical simulations are presented in Chapter 8, where an introduction to large eddy simulation is offered. The last three chapters of the book summarize remarkable digital techniques current and experimental. Many results are presented in a practical way, based on both experiments and numerical simulations. The book is written for a advanced engineering students as well as postgraduate engineers and researchers. For students, it contains the essential results as well as details and demonstrations whose oral transmission is often tedious. At a more advanced level, the text provides numerous references which allow readers to find quickly further study regarding their work and to acquire a deeper knowledge on topics of interest.

Written by a AAA industry expert with over twenty years of experience, this book offers comprehensive coverage of the practical skills that all successful level designers need to know. It covers everything from practical production skills to the social and soft skills required to thrive in the games industry. The book begins with a theoretical and abstract approach that sets a common language for the later hard-skill applications and practical examples. These later chapters cover a wealth of practical skills for use during the concept phase, while creating layouts, scripting, and working with AI. The book includes essential chapters on topics such as social and soft skills, world building, level design direction, production, as well as how to gain a job in the industry. This book will be of great interest to all level designers, content leads and directors looking to enhance their skillset. It will also appeal to students of level and game design looking for tips on how to break into the industry.

The methodological system known as The NuneX Method, so named after its developer, Richard Nunez, took over 14 years of experience, documentation, and experimenting to develop and refine into a workable documentation system. This system can handle the influx of progress and change within information technology and be utilized as a form of technical knowledge management. The main objectives for this methodology are for any technical professional to properly document a project, system implementation, work request, or repair, and maintain a personal library of their own for reference and professional growth. It can even serve as a gauge to measure the success an IT professional achieves as one improves and becomes more aware and open to new ideas and techniques. Use of The NuneX Method can certainly contribute to an IT professional's own personal success story and be a tool to utilize anytime and anywhere. It was developed by an IT professional for IT professionals, namely those who work in the technical areas within Information Technology. techniques for IT professionals who work in technical and engineering level positions. 6. Refinement; 7. Maintenance & Updating documentation and allow for better quality service and professional advancement within a technical career. complete with practical, real-world exercises to enhance the learning process.

This book contains the collection of papers presented at the conference of the International Federation for Information Processing Working Group 8.2 "Information and Organizations." The conference took place during June 21-24, 2009 at the Universidade do Minho in Guimaraes, Portugal. The conference entitled "CreativeSME - The Role of IS in Leveraging the Intelligence and Creativity of SME's" attracted high-quality submissions from across the world. Each paper was reviewed by at least two reviewers in a double-blind review process. In addition to the 19 papers presented at the conference, there were five panels and four workshops, which covered a range of issues relevant to SMEs, creativity and information systems. We would like to show our appreciation of the efforts of our two invited keynote speakers, Michael Dowling of the University of Regensburg, Germany and Carlos Zorrinho, Portuguese coordinator of the Lisbon Strategy and the Technological Plan. The following organizations supported the conference through financial or other contributions and we would like to thank them for their engagement: "

This book presents computer programming as a key method for solving mathematical problems. There are two versions of the book, one for MATLAB and one for Python. The book was inspired by the Springer book TCSE 6: A Primer on Scientific Programming with Python (by Langtangen), but the style is more accessible and concise, in keeping with the needs of engineering students. The book outlines the shortest possible path from no previous experience with programming to a set of skills that allows the students to write simple programs for solving common mathematical problems with numerical methods in engineering and science courses. The emphasis is on generic algorithms, clean design of programs, use of functions, and automatic tests for verification.

The recent popularity of Social Network Sites (SNS) shows that there is a growing interest in articulating, making visible, and managing personal or professional relationships through technology-enabled environments. Networked Sociability and Individualism: Technology for Personal and Professional Relationships provides a multidisciplinary framework for analyzing the new forms of sociability enabled by digital media and networks. This book focuses on a variety of social media and computer-mediated communication environments with the aim of identifying and understanding different types of social behavior and identity expression.

later versions. In addition, the CD-ROM contains a complete solutions manual that includes detailed solutions to all the problems in the book. If the reader does not wish to consult these solutions, then a brief list of answers is provided in printed form at the end of the book. Iwouldliketothankmyfamilymembersfortheirhelpandcontinuedsupportwi- out which this book would not have been possible. I would also like to acknowledge the help of the editior at Springer-Verlag (Dr. Thomas Ditzinger) for his assistance in bringing this book out in its present form. Finally, I would like to thank my brother, Nicola, for preparing most of the line drawings in both editions. In this edition, I am providing two email addresses for my readers to contact me (pkattan@tedata. net. jo and pkattan@lsu. edu). The old email address that appeared in the ?rst edition was cancelled in 2004. December 2006 Peter I. Kattan PrefacetotheFirstEdition 3 This is a book for people who love ?nite elements and MATLAB . We will use the popular computer package MATLAB as a matrix calculator for doing ?nite element analysis. Problems will be solved mainly using MATLAB to carry out the tedious and lengthy matrix calculations in addition to some manual manipulations especially when applying the boundary conditions. In particular the steps of the ?nite element method are emphasized in this book. The reader will not ?nd ready-made MATLAB programsforuseasblackboxes. Insteadstep-by-stepsolutionsof?niteelementpr- lems are examined in detail using MATLAB.

This book provides comprehensive coverage of fundamentals of database management system. It contains a detailed description on Relational Database Management System Concepts. There are a variety of solved examples and review questions with solutions. This book is for those who require a better understanding of relational data modeling, its purpose, its nature, and the standards used in creating relational data model.

This book presents an overview of the field of multimodal location estimation. The authors' aim is to describe the research results in this field in a unified way. The book describes fundamental methods of acoustic, visual, textual, social graph, and metadata processing as well as multimodal integration methods used for location estimation. In addition, the book covers benchmark metrics and explores the limits of the technology based on a human baseline. The book also outlines privacy implications and discusses directions for future research in the area.

Senior level/graduate level text/reference presenting state-of-the- art numerical techniques to solve the wave equation in heterogeneous fluid-solid media. Numerical models have become standard research tools in acoustic laboratories, and thus computational acoustics is becoming an increasingly important branch of ocean acoustic science. The first edition of this successful book, written by the recognized leaders of the field, was the first to present a comprehensive and modern introduction to computational ocean acoustics accessible to students. This revision, with 100 additional pages, completely updates the material in the first edition and includes new models based on current research. It includes problems and solutions in every chapter, making the book more useful in teaching (the first edition had a separate solutions manual). The book is intended for graduate and advanced undergraduate students of acoustics, geology and geophysics, applied mathematics, ocean engineering or as a reference in computational methods courses, as well as professionals in these fields, particularly those working in government (especially Navy) and industry labs engaged in the development or use of propagating models.

The increased computational power and software tools available to engineers have increased the use and dependence on modeling and computer simulation throughout the design process. These tools have given engineers the capability of designing highly complex systems and computer architectures that were previously unthinkable. Every complex design project, from integrated circuits, to aerospace vehicles, to industrial manufacturing processes requires these new methods. This book fulfills the essential need of system and control engineers at all levels in understanding modeling and simulation. This book, written as a true text/reference has become a standard sr./graduate level course in all EE departments worldwide and all professionals in this area are required to update their skills.
The book provides a rigorous mathematical foundation for modeling and computer simulation. It provides a comprehensive framework for modeling and simulation integrating the various simulation approaches. It covers model formulation, simulation model execution, and the model building process with its key activities model abstraction and model simplification, as well as the organization of model libraries. Emphasis of the book is in particular in integrating discrete event and continuous modeling approaches as well as a new approach for discrete event simulation of continuous processes. The book also discusses simulation execution on parallel and distributed machines and concepts for simulation model realization based on the High Level Architecture (HLA) standard of the Department of Defense.

* Presents a working foundation necessary for compliance with High Level Architecture (HLA) standards
* Provides a comprehensive framework for continuous and discrete event modeling and simulation
* Explores the mathematical foundation of simulation modeling
* Discusses system morphisms for model abstraction and simplification
* Presents a new approach to discrete event simulation of continuous processes
* Includes parallel and distributed simulation of discrete event models
* Presentation of a concept to achieve simulator interoperability in the form of the DEVS-Bus

Based on more than 10 years of teaching experience, Blanken and his coeditors have assembled all the topics that should be covered in advanced undergraduate or graduate courses on multimedia retrieval and multimedia databases. The single chapters of this textbook explain the general architecture of multimedia information retrieval systems and cover various metadata languages such as Dublin Core, RDF, or MPEG. The authors emphasize high-level features and show how these are used in mathematical models to support the retrieval process. For each chapter, there 's detail on further reading, and additional exercises and teaching material is available online.

Particle models play an important role in many applications in physics, chemistry and biology. They can be studied on the computer with the help of molecular dynamics simulations. This book presents in detail both the necessary numerical methods and techniques (linked-cell method, SPME-method, tree codes, multipole technique) and the theoretical background and foundations. It illustrates the aspects modelling, discretization, algorithms and their parallel implementation with MPI on computer systems with distributed memory. Furthermore, detailed explanations are given to the different steps of numerical simulation, and code examples are provided. With the description of the algorithms and the presentation of the results of various simulations from the areas material science, nanotechnology, biochemistry and astrophysics, the reader of this book will be able to write his own programs for molecular dynamics step by step and to run successful experiments.