This book takes a hemispheric approach to contemporary urban intervention, examining urban ecologies, communication technologies, and cultural practices in the twenty-first century. It argues that governmental and social regimes of control and forms of political resistance converge in speculation on disaster and that this convergence has formed a vision of urban environments in the Americas in which forms of play and imaginations of catastrophe intersect in the vertical field. Schifani explores a diverse range of resistant urban interventions, imagining the city as on the verge of or enmeshed in catastrophe. She also presents a model of ecocriticism that addresses aesthetic practices and forms of play in the urban environment. Tracing the historical roots of such tactics as well as mapping their hopes for the future will help the reader to locate the impacts of climate change not only on the physical space of the city, but also on the epistemological and aesthetic strategies that cities can help to engender. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Urban Studies, Media Studies, American Studies, Global Studies, and the broad and interdisciplinary field of Environmental Humanities.

Environmental regulations provide protection to the public, workers and the environment. To protect themselves from long-term liabilities, however, companies have to do more than just comply with the basic responsibilities. This handbook is designed to introduce terminology, methodology, tools, procedures and practical guidance for incorporating efficient pollution prevention strategies into the overall business plan. It is a company s responsibility to protect and control its management of waste and pollution, and a company that fails to do so will ultimately inflict a negative impact on its bottom line, especially in financial performance. "Responsible Care" delivers critical guidelines and rules of thumb required for industrial managers to improve their companies profitability through waste reduction, cleaner production technologies and sound management practices."

As the Earth's oil supply runs out, and the effects of climate change threaten nations and their populations, the search for carbon-neutral sources of energy becomes more important and increasingly urgent. This book focuses on solutions to the energy problem, and not just the problem itself. It describes the major energy-generation technologies currently under development, and provides an authoritative summary of the current status of each one. It stresses the need for a balanced portfolio of alternative energy technologies. Certain solutions will be more appropriate than others in particular locations, due to the differences in availability of natural resources such as solar, wind, wave, tidal and geothermal. In addition, nuclear options (both fission and fusion), as well as technologies such as fuel cells, photovoltaics, artificial photosynthesis and hydrogen (as an energy carrier), all have a potential role to play. A state-of-the-art critique of energy efficiency in building design is also included. Each chapter is written by an acknowledged international expert and provides a non-technical overview of the competing and complementary approaches to energy generation.
Broad in scope and comprehensive in treatment, Energy..beyond Oil provides an authoritative synthesis of the scientific and technological issues which are essential to the survival of the human race in the near future. The book will be of interest and use to graduate students and researchers in all areas of energy studies, and will also be highly useful for policy-makers and professionals in the environmental sector as well as a more general readership who wish to learn more about this extremely topical subject.

Who Needs Nuclear Power challenges conventional thinking about the role of civil nuclear power in a rapidly changing energy context, where new energy carriers are penetrating markets around the world. Against the backdrop of a global energy transition and the defining issue of Climate Change, Chris Anastasi assesses new nuclear build in a fast-moving sector in which new technologies and practices are rapidly emerging. He considers various countries at different stages of nuclear industry development, and discusses their political, legal and technical institutions that provide the framework for both existing nuclear facilities and new build, as well as a country's technical capability. He also highlights the critical issue of nuclear safety culture, exploring how organisations go about instilling it and maintaining it in their operations and encouraging it in their supply chains; the critical role played by independent regulators and international institutions in ensuring the integrity of the industry is also highlighted. This book provides a balanced and holistic view of nuclear power for both an expert and non-expert audience, and a realistic assessment of the potential for this technology over the critical period to 2050 and beyond.

This book offers an intuitive approach to random processes and educates the reader on how to interpret and predict their behavior. Premised on the idea that new techniques are best introduced by specific, low-dimensional examples, the mathematical exposition is easier to comprehend and more enjoyable, and it motivates the subsequent generalizations. It distinguishes between the science of extracting statistical information from raw data--e.g., a time series about which nothing is known a priori--and that of analyzing specific statistical models, such as Bernoulli trials, Poisson queues, ARMA, and Markov processes. The former motivates the concepts of statistical spectral analysis (such as the Wiener-Khintchine theory), and the latter applies and interprets them in specific physical contexts. The formidable Kalman filter is introduced in a simple scalar context, where its basic strategy is transparent, and gradually extended to the full-blown iterative matrix form.

The subject of Discrete Signals and Systems is broad and deserves a single book devoted to it. The objective of this textbook is to present all the required material that an undergraduate student will need to master this subject matter and the use of MATLAB. This book is primarily intended for electrical and computer engineering students, and especially for use by juniors or seniors in these undergraduate engineering disciplines. It can also be very useful to practicing engineers. It is detailed, broad, based on mathematical basic principles, focused, and it also contains many solved problems using analytical tools as well as MATLAB. The book is ideal for a one-semester course in the area of discrete linear systems or digital signal processing, where the instructor can cover all chapters with ease. Numerous examples are presented within each chapter to illustrate each concept when and where it is presented. Most of the worked-out examples are first solved analytically and then solved using MATLAB in a clear and understandable fashion.

This book seeks to establish the meaning of design research, its role in the field, and the characteristics that differentiate research in design from research in other fields. The author introduces a model to explain the relationship between the components of the ontological reality of design: the designed object, the designer, and the user. Addressing design research across disciplines, the author establishes a foundational understanding of research, and research paradigms, for the design disciplines. This will be crucial for the emerging field of design research to find its own identity and move forward, building its own knowledge base as it finds its positioning between science and art. The book will be of interest to scholars working in design history, design studies, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, architecture, fashion design, and service design.

Congruences are ubiquitous in computer science, engineering, mathematics, and related areas. Developing techniques for finding (the number of) solutions of congruences is an important problem. But there are many scenarios in which we are interested in only a subset of the solutions; in other words, there are some restrictions. What do we know about these restricted congruences, their solutions, and applications? This book introduces the tools that are needed when working on restricted congruences and then systematically studies a variety of restricted congruences. Restricted Congruences in Computing defines several types of restricted congruence, obtains explicit formulae for the number of their solutions using a wide range of tools and techniques, and discusses their applications in cryptography, information security, information theory, coding theory, string theory, quantum field theory, parallel computing, artificial intelligence, computational biology, discrete mathematics, number theory, and more. This is the first book devoted to restricted congruences and their applications. It will be of interest to graduate students and researchers across computer science, electrical engineering, and mathematics.

Humans rank with the powerful forces of nature transforming Earth. Since the mid-20th century, population growth, industrialization, and globalization have had such deep and wide-ranging impacts that our planet no longer functions as it did during the previous eleven millennia. So distinctive is this collective human intervention that a new geological interval has been proposed; it is called the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is intriguing scientifically, fascinating intellectually, and deeply disturbing politically, socially, economically, and ethically. We must learn how to co-exist sustainably with the rest of nature in what is emerging as a new planetary state. To do so, we must first understand what "Anthropocene" means in all its dimensions. This book adopts a multidisciplinary approach, starting with an exploration of the Anthropocene as a geological concept: ranging across the physical changes to the landscape, to the rapidly heating climate, to a biosphere undergoing transformation. And what of the "anthropos" in the Anthropocene? While geoscience does not normally address political and ethical issues of justice and equity, or economics and culture, Anthropocene studies in the humanities and social sciences investigate the complexities of the human activity driving global change. Here the book looks at human history, both in the deep past and more recently, the politics and economics of growth spurring the Anthropocene, and potential ways of mitigating its cruel effects. Our fragile, still beautiful, planet is finite. The new realities of the Anthropocene will need our best efforts, across disciplinary divides, at effective hope and action.

This book provides an in-depth analysis of nine weapons and explosive remnants of war, their uses in armed conflict and their deadly impact on the environment. Besides three weapons of mass destruction (Biological, Chemical and Nuclear), it also covers controversial weapons like Depleted Uranium, White Phosphorus, Cluster Munitions, and Anti-personnel Landmines, their military applications, and the health and environmental hazard posed by them. The book offers an impartial analysis of legal regimes, and their efficacy in minimising the damage these weapons wreak on humans and the environment. It then examines the principles and rules of international humanitarian law, which could be used by the international community to ban these weapons. The book concludes by making a few recommendations addressed to international organisations, the States and military commanders with a view to reducing the damage caused by these weapons to the earth's pristine environment.