This textbook provides an introduction to energy analysis for those students who want to specialise in this challenging field. In comparison to other textbooks, this book provides a balanced treatment of complete energy systems, covering the demand side, the supply side, and the energy markets that connect these. The emphasis is very much on presenting a range of tools and methodologies that will help students find their way in analysing real world problems in energy systems. This new edition has been updated throughout and contains additional content on energy transitions and improvements in the treatment of several energy systems analysis approaches. Featuring learning objectives, further readings and practical exercises in each chapter, Introduction to Energy Analysis will be essential reading for upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students with a background in the natural sciences and engineering. This book may also be useful for professionals dealing with energy issues, as a first introduction into the field.

The book is concerned with contemporary methodologies used for automatic text summarization. It proposes interesting approaches to solve well-known problems on text-summarization using computational intelligence (CI) techniques including cognitive approaches. A better understanding of the cognitive basis of the summarization task is still an open research issue, an extent of its use in text summarization is highlighted for further exploration. With the ever-growing text and people on research has little time to spare for extensive reading, where, summarized information helps for a better understanding of the context at a shorter time. This book helps students and researchers to automatically summarize the text documents in an efficient and effective way. The computational approaches and the research techniques presented guides to achieve text summarization at ease. The summarized text generated supports readers to learn the context or the domain at a quicker pace. The book is presented with reasonable amount of illustrations and examples convenient for the readers to understand and implement for their use. The book is not to make readers understand what text summarization is, but for people to perform text summarization using various approaches. This also describes measures that can help to evaluate, determine and explore the best possibilities for text summarization to analyse and use for any specific purpose. The illustration is based on social media and healthcare domain, which shows the possibilities to work with any domain for summarization. The new approach for text summarization based on cognitive intelligence is presented for further exploration in the field.

The bioeconomy is steadily becoming more important in regional, national and European public policies. As it encompasses the transformation of agricultural, marine and organic resources into food, feed, fuels, energy and materials, the bioeconomy should become a major new industry, outlining the possibility of a post-fossil future. This book is the first attempt to depict the origins, formation and challenges of this new industry in terms of emerging institutions, innovation and economic strategies. The result of this work is that the substitution of raw materials alone is not enough to get out of the fossil economy. This book develops a political economy of the ecological transition which theorizes the transition as a new crisis of capitalism. This phase is characterized by stakeholders' attempts to develop renewed rationales and strategies to take control of the reorganization of flows of natural resources, their outcomes and their evaluation. The proposed framework considers recent results in four complementary research strands: transition studies, institutional economics, ecological economics and the evolutionary economics of innovation. The book will be of interest to researchers interested in the development of the bioeconomy, and both researchers and students seeking to understand the role of heterodox economics in the ecological transition.

Provides a comprehensive introduction to aircraft performance and flight dynamics. Covers both jet and propellor-driven aircraft. Includes new content on vertical takeoff and landing, UAV launch, UAV recovery, use of rocket engine as the main engine, range for electric aircraft, electric engine, endurance for electric aircraft, gliding flight, pull-up, and climb-turn. Includes end-of-chapter problems, MATLAB® code and examples, and case studies. Features a Solutions Manual and Figure Slides for instructor use.

Covers sustainable composites, their properties, fabrication techniques focus on their tribo-mechanical performance Highlights the renewable sources used in the preparation of composites Summarizes testing conditions affecting tribological properties of the composites Provides an extensive review on bio-composite properties and its tribological performance for biomedical applications Includes analytical overview of the different types of characterization techniques and tribological methods

Adopting a strategic approach to risk management can maximize competitiveness and profitability. Total Safety and Productivity approaches offer managers a set of methods and tools to apply a Total Safety Management (TSM) philosophy to achieve this. The capability to anticipate, assess and plan for risks associated with future operations is a critical success factor, for enterprises of all types and sizes. The ability to risk assess actual operations with an easy to apply, resilient methodology can offer significant benefits in terms of the capacity to improve safety and performance. This book describes approaches that can be used alone or jointly to improve safety management in any organization. The methods are based on academic best practice and have been developed by leading experts, but are presented here in a practical way for application in industry by non-experts. The book outlines a professional approach to risk and safety management, which requires goal setting, planning and the measurement of performance, and encourages a safety management system that is woven holistically into the fabric of an organization so that it becomes part of the culture, the way people do their jobs, and helps ensure that issues are correctly prioritized and managed as they emerge. This book is essential reading for professionals, at both expert and non-expert level, who are interested in applying the TSM philosophy within their organization.

The book emphasizes the predictive models of Big Data, Genetic Algorithm, and IoT with a case study. The book illustrates the predictive models with integrated fuel consumption models for smart and safe traveling. The text is a coordinated amalgamation of research contributions and industrial applications in the field of Intelligent Transportation Systems. The advanced predictive models and research results were achieved with the case studies, deployed in real transportation environments. Features: Provides a smart traffic congestion avoidance system with an integrated fuel consumption model. Predicts traffic in short-term and regular. This is illustrated with a case study. Efficient Traffic light controller and deviation system in accordance with the traffic scenario. IoT based Intelligent Transport Systems in a Global perspective. Intelligent Traffic Light Control System and Ambulance Control System. Provides a predictive framework that can handle the traffic on abnormal days, such as weekends, festival holidays. Bunch of solutions and ideas for smart traffic development in smart cities. This book focuses on advanced predictive models along with offering an efficient solution for smart traffic management system. This book will give a brief idea of the available algorithms/techniques of big data, IoT, and genetic algorithm and guides in developing a solution for smart city applications. This book will be a complete framework for ITS domain with the advanced concepts of Big Data Analytics, Genetic Algorithm and IoT. This book is primarily aimed at IT professionals. Undergraduates, graduates and researchers in the area of computer science and information technology will also find this book useful.

Thorough coverage, from the ground up, of tree-based methods (e.g., CART, conditional inference trees, bagging, boosting, and random forests). A companion website containing additional supplementary material and the code to reproduce every example and figure in the book. A companion R package, called treemisc, which contains several data sets and functions used throughout the book (e.g., there's an implementation of gradient tree boosting with LAD loss that shows how to perform the line search step by updating the terminal node estimates of a fitted rpart tree). Interesting examples that are of practical use; for example, how to construct partial dependence plots from a fitted model in Spark MLlib (using only Spark operations), or post-processing tree ensembles via the LASSO to reduce the number of trees while maintaining, or even improving performance.

COVID-19 in Brooklyn: Everyday Life During a Pandemic looks closely at the ways that the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the lives of ordinary people living in the super-gentrified Brooklyn neighborhoods of Park Slope and Greenpoint/Williamsburg, where the authors hunkered down during the 2020 lockdown. Putting their private lives into broader scientific and public contexts, Krase and DeSena discuss a wide range of research methods and theories, as well as print and internet media sources about the pandemic. With words and images, the scholar-activist authors place their own personal experiences and those of their family and neighbors inside the broader context of global and national medical emergencies, as well as related economic, social, and political unrest, such as widespread unemployment, the Black Lives Matter Movement, and the contentious 2020 presidential election. Using a distributive social justice perspective and examining their own privileges, they discover and discuss the racial and economic inequities that affected the lives of other Brooklynites. These disparities included public health measures and lack of access to basic necessities of urban living. The book also addresses the cultural and economic shifts that took place at the start of the pandemic and contemplate how those forces will impact on future urban life, asking what the "new normal" of business, entertainment, education, housing, and work will look like locally and globally. This richly illustrated book offers an invaluable local study of the impact of the pandemic on ordinary people in Brooklyn. As such, it will be of great interest to students and researchers in the humanities and social sciences.

1. Uses practical industry examples to illustrate key concepts of mechanics and stress analysis 2. Includes worked examples and MATHCAD programs 3. Presents the theory behind stress analysis with reference to multiple disciplines, making this a comprehensive book 4. Covers composite material stress analysis, plate analysis and Finite Element Method

The aim of this book is to present and analyse theoretical advances and also emerging practical applications of swarm and evolutionary intelligence. It comprises nine chapters. Chapter 1 provides a theoretical introduction of the computational optimization techniques regarding the gradient-based methods such as steepest descent, conjugate gradient, newton and quasi-Newton methods and also the non-gradient methods such as genetic algorithm and swarm intelligence algorithms. Chapter 2, discusses evolutionary computation techniques and genetic algorithm. Swarm intelligence theory and particle swarm optimization algorithm are reviewed in Chapter 3. Also, several variations of particle swarm optimization algorithm are analysed and explained such as Geometric PSO, PSO with mutation, Chaotic PSO with mutation, multi-objective PSO and Quantum mechanics - based PSO algorithm. Chapter 4 deals with two essential colony bio-inspired algorithms: Ant colony optimization (ACO) and Artificial bee colony (ABC). Chapter 5, presents and analyses Cuckoo search and Bat swarm algorithms and their latest variations. In chapter 6, several other metaheuristic algorithms are discussed such as: Firefly algorithm (FA), Harmony search (HS), Cat swarm optimization (CSO) and their improved algorithm modifications. The latest Bio-Inspired Swarm Algorithms are discussed in chapter 7, such as: Grey Wolf Optimization (GWO) Algorithm, Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA), Grasshopper Optimization Algorithm (GOA) and other algorithm variations such as binary and chaotic versions. Chapter 8 presents machine learning applications of swarm and evolutionary algorithms. Illustrative real-world examples are presented with real datasets regarding neural network optimization and feature selection, using: genetic algorithm, Geometric PSO, Chaotic Harmony Search, Chaotic Cuckoo Search, and Evolutionary Algorithm and also crime forecasting using swarm optimized SVM. In chapter 9, applications of swarm intelligence on deep long short-term memory (LSTM) networks and Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are discussed, including LSTM hyperparameter tuning and Covid19 diagnosis from chest X-Ray images. The aim of the book is to present and discuss several state-of-theart swarm intelligence and evolutionary algorithms together with their variances and also several illustrative applications on machine learning and deep learning.

Fully updated throughout, with new content on topics including the latest developments in fission and fusion energy, the global financial crisis of 2008/2009, and the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear accident. Accessible to readers without a formal education in the area Authored by an authority in the field

First written in 1977, Economics of Natural and Environmental Resources presents a collection of articles written in exploration of the economic, social, and ecological problems peculiar to natural and environmental resources. Whilst focusing on the economic theory of natural resources, the contributions also consider geological, technological, and institutional features of particular resources. Policy implications and considerations are central to the text and although the book was published over thirty years ago, the issues discussed remain relevant to today's society.

Urban parks and gardens are where people go to reconnect with nature and destress. But do they all provide the same benefits or are some better than others? What specific attributes set some green spaces apart? Can we objectively measure their impact on mental health and well-being? If so, how do we use this evidence to guide the design of mentally healthy cities? The Contemplative Landscape Model unveils the path to answer these questions. Rooted in landscape architecture and neuroscience, this innovative concept is described for the first time in an extended format, offering a deep dive into contemplative design and the science behind it. In the face of the global mental health crisis, and increasing disconnection from nature, design strategies for creating healthier urban environments are what our cities so sorely need. The book delves into the neuroscience behind contemplative landscapes, their key spatial characteristics, and practical application of the Contemplative Landscape Model through case studies from around the world. Landscape architects, urban planners, students, land managers, and anyone interested in unlocking the healing power of landscapes will find inspiration here.

This 21st Century Nanoscience Handbook will be the most comprehensive, up-to-date large reference work for the field of nanoscience. Handbook of Nanophysics by the same editor published in the fall of 2010 and was embraced as the first comprehensive reference to consider both fundamental and applied aspects of nanophysics. This follow-up project has been conceived as a necessary expansion and full update that considers the significant advances made in the field since 2010. It goes well beyond the physics as warranted by recent developments in the field. This ninth volume in a ten-volume set covers industiral applications. Key Features: Provides the most comprehensive, up-to-date large reference work for the field. Chapters written by international experts in the field. Emphasises presentation and real results and applications. This handbook distinguishes itself from other works by its breadth of coverage, readability and timely topics. The intended readership is very broad, from students and instructors to engineers, physicists, chemists, biologists, biomedical researchers, industry professionals, governmental scientists, and others whose work is impacted by nanotechnology. It will be an indispensable resource in academic, government, and industry libraries worldwide. The fields impacted by nanophysics extend from materials science and engineering to biotechnology, biomedical engineering, medicine, electrical engineering, pharmaceutical science, computer technology, aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, food science, and beyond.

This book introduces a powerful system that explains how to run a company with a focus on continuous improvement. The results are a satisfied customer base, evolving products and an increase in revenue and profits. These factors determine the success for any company because business transformation involves making fundamental changes in how business is conducted to cope with shifts in the market environment. This a comprehensive book for valuable guidance on framing strategy and overcoming challenges for successful and sustainable implementation of a lean production system, daily management system and lean accounting system in companies to empower the managers to serve their customers with timely delivery of quality products while maximizing profits and easing workloads. The main challenge is ensuring operations colleagues in different functions understand the link between their daily work and the profit and loss statement. In addition, it illustrates how finance personnel can assist the operations team and be a part of the transformation journey. This book is not meant to impart theoretical knowledge of the lean production system, daily management and lean accounting, as there are many books already available that focus on the methodology instead of the implementation. This book empowers people in each function of a company, irrespective of which level they work in the company, and shows them the way to operate on a daily basis to achieve the company's strategy while simultaneously fulfilling their career goals. The book lays out a brief history of the evolution of lean concepts with a focus on lean accounting. This book guides the successful implementation and sustenance of lean and kaizen tools and provides answers to the questions: Who should lead the lean and kaizen implementation in the company? Where should the lean and kaizen journey begin? Which lean and kaizen tools should be implemented first? How important is capacity for the company? How much current capacity is wasted and how much free capacity is available? Where exactly are the resources being wasted in the company? How can the company reduce waste to release capacity for more production? Why should the daily management system and lean accounting system be implemented simultaneously with the lean production system? Why must managers understand the monetary value of their daily activities? Is there an easy way of making a profit and loss statement that is understood at each level in the company? Why is one-day closing of accounts important and how can it be done?

This title, first published in 1987, provides an authoritative account of both the science and the politics of acid rain. Chris Park places the debates surrounding acid rain in context, and examines the full implications of scientific studies and the effects of acid rain on surface waters, soils and buildings. Evidence is drawn from around the world, including an examination of the damage in Scandinavia and Germany and the effects of acid rain in the U.K. and U.S.A. A comprehensive and relevant work, this is an important guide for students of geography, environment and sustainability and energy policy.

* Presents the first quantitative index to measure construction project management performance

Since the invention of computers or machines, scientists and researchers are trying very hard to enhance their capabilities to perform various tasks. As a consequence, the capabilities of computers are growing exponentially day by day in terms of diverse working domains, versatile jobs, processing speed, and reduced size. Now, we are in the race to make the computers or machines as intelligent as human beings. Artificial Intelligence (AI) came up as a way of making a computer or computer software think in the similar manner the intelligent humans think. AI is inspired by the study of human brain like how humans think, learn, decide and act while trying to solve a problem. The outcomes of this study are the basis of developing intelligent software and systems or Intelligent Computing (IC). An IC system has the capability of reasoning, learning, problem solving, perception, and linguistic intelligence. The IC systems consist of AI techniques as well as other emerging techniques that make a system intelligent. The use of intelligent computing has been seen in almost every sub-domain of computer science such as networking, software engineering, gaming, natural language processing, computer vision, image processing, data science, robotics, expert systems, and security. Now a days, the use of IC can also be seen for solving various complex problems in diverse domains such as for predicting disease in medical science, predicting land fertility or crop productivity in agriculture science, predicting market growth in economics, weather forecasting and so on. For all these reasons, this book presents the advances in AI techniques, under the umbrella of IC. In this context, the book includes the recent research works have been done in the areas of machine learning, neural networks, deep learning, evolutionary algorithms, genetic algorithms, swarm intelligence, fuzzy systems and so on. This book provides theoretical, algorithmic, simulation, and implementation-based recent research advancements related to the Intelligent Computing.

Reconstructing Medical Practice examines how doctors see health care and their place in it, why they remain in medicine and why they are limited in their ability to lead change in the current system. Doctors are beset by doubts and feel rejected by systems where they should be leaders - some see their role as 'flog[ging] a derelict system to get the last breath of workability out ... for their patients'. Others simply turn away. Rigorous studies carried out at large public teaching hospitals in Australia found that doctors were reluctant to increase safety in the wider health system, despite making every effort for their 'own' patients. Doctors' self-esteem was found to be delicate due to the uncertain nature of their work; colleagues provide the support doctors need to deliver good care. However, these essential relationships and their cherished connections with patients have disadvantages: reducing doctors' ability to admit to error. On top of this, senior doctors predict a future bereft of professional values - one where medicine is 'just a job'. While the loss of professional identity introduces new risks for patients and doctors, the repercussions of the more self-serving attitudes of younger doctors are unknown. Reconstructing Medical Practice concludes that regulation, despite its recent proliferation, is a clumsy and limited approach to ensuring good care. It presents original and much-needed ideas for ways to rebuild the critical relationship between doctors and the system. By better valuing communicative interactions and workplace relationships, safe and satisfying medical practice can be reconstructed.

This book interrogates the contributions that religious traditions have made to climate change discussions within Africa, whether positive or negative. Drawing on a range of African contexts and religious traditions, the book provides concrete suggestions on how individuals and communities of faith must act in order to address the challenge of climate change. Despite the fact that Africa has contributed relatively little to historic carbon emissions, the continent will be affected disproportionally by the increasing impact of anthropogenic climate change. Contributors to this book provide a range of rich case studies to investigate how religious traditions such as Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and indigenous faiths influence the worldviews and actions of their adherents. The chapters also interrogate how the moral authority and leadership provided by religion can be used to respond and adapt to the challenges posed by climate change. Topics covered include risk reduction and resilience, youth movements, indigenous knowledge systems, environmental degradation, gender perspectives, ecological theories, and climate change financing. This book will be of interest to scholars in diverse fields, including religious studies, sociology, political science, climate change and environmental humanities. It may also benefit practitioners involved in solving community challenges related to climate change. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

Degrowth is a planned economic contraction in wealthy countries that reduces production and consumption-and, by extension, greenhouse gas emissions and stresses on global ecosystems-to sustainable levels within ecological limits. This book explores the idea of degrowth as an economic alternative to offer a more sustainable and just future. A growing number of scientists and scholars now recognize that a system that continues to prioritize economic growth will prevent us from effectively addressing the dual environmental crises of climate change and biodiversity loss. To establish the case for degrowth, the text opens by posing critical questions about our current system and identifying its limitations, as well as discussing the ineffectiveness of "false solutions" that seem to offer something new but would actually preserve the status quo. The concept of degrowth is then fully introduced along with a discussion of core principles and goals as well as major critiques and questions. The book explores what living in a degrowth society would entail and the policies needed to support degrowth. Finally, the work concludes by examining the opportunities and challenges for degrowth and a successful transition to a sustainable steady-state economy. This book provides an advanced introduction to the environmental issues around degrowth for students, scholars and activists interested in economic alternatives, sustainability and the environment.

Managers in organisations must make rational decisions. Rational decision making is the opposite of intuitive decision making. It is a strict procedure utilising objective knowledge and logic. It involves identifying the problem to solve, gathering facts, identifying options and outcomes, analysing them, considering all the relationships and selecting the decision. Rational decision making requires support: methods and software tools. The identification of the problem to solve needs methods that would measure and evaluate the current situation. Identification and evaluation of options and analysis of the available possibilities involves analysis and optimisation methods. Incorporating intuition into rational decision making needs adequate methods that would translate ideas or observed behaviours into hard data. Communication, observation and opinions recording is hardly possible today without adequate software. Information and data that form the input, intermediate variables and the output must be stored, managed and made accessible in a user-friendly manner. Rational Decisions in Organisations: Theoretical and Practical Aspects presents selected recent developments in the support of the widely understood rational decision making in organisations, illustrated through case studies. The book shows not only the variety of perspectives involved in decision making, but also the variety of domains where rational decision support systems are needed. The case studies present decision making by medical doctors, students and managers of various universities, IT project teams, construction companies, banks and small and large manufacturing companies. Covering the richness of relationships in which the decisions should and must be taken, the book illustrates how modern organisations operate in chains and networks; they have multiple responsibilities, including social, legal, business and ethical duties. Nowadays, managers in organisations can make transparent decisions and consider a multitude of stakeholders and their diverse features, incorporating diverse criteria, using multiple types and drivers of information and decision-making patterns, and referring to numerous lessons learned. As the book makes clear, the marriage of theoretical ideas with the possibilities offered by technology can make the decisions in organisations more rational and, at the same time, more human.

Artificial Intelligence in Information and Communication Technologies, Healthcare and Education: A Roadmap Ahead is designed as a reference text and discusses inter-dependability, communication and effective control for the betterment of services through artificial intelligence (AI), as well as the challenges and path ahead for AI in computing and control across different domains of business and human life. The book accommodates technologies and application domains including backbone hardware, systems and methods for deployment, which help incorporating intelligence through different supervised and probabilistic learning approaches. Features The book attempts to establish a connection between hardware, software technologies and algorithmic intelligence for data analysis and decision support in domains such as healthcare, education and other aspects of business and mobility. It presents various recent applications of artificial intelligence in information and communication technologies such as search and optimization methods, machine learning, data representation and ontologies, and multi-agent systems. The book provides a collection of different case studies with experimentation results than mere theoretical and generalized approaches. Covers most of the applications using the trending technologies like machine learning (ML), data science (DS), Internet of Things (IoT), and underlying information and communication technologies. The book is aimed primarily at advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students studying computer science, computer applications, and information technology. Researchers and professionals will also find this book useful.

Polyester-Based Biocomposites highlights the performance of polyester-based biocomposites reinforced with various natural fibres extracted from leaf, stem, fruit bunch, grass, wood material. It also addresses the characteristics of polyester-based biocomposites reinforced with rice husk fillers and various nanoparticles. The book explores the widespread applications of fibre-reinforced polymer composites ranging from the aerospace sector, automotive parts, construction and building materials, sports equipment, and household appliances. Investigating the advantages of natural fibres, such as superior damping characteristics, low density, biodegradability, abundant availability at low cost and non-abrasive to tooling, the book discusses what makes them a cost-effective alternative reinforcement material for composites in certain applications. The book serves as a useful reference for researchers, graduate students, and engineers in the field of polymer composites.