The Rise of Smart Cities: Advanced Structural Sensing and Monitoring Systems provides engineers and researchers with a guide to the latest breakthroughs in the deployment of smart sensing and monitoring technologies. The book introduces readers to the latest innovations in the area of smart infrastructure-enabling technologies and how they can be integrated into the planning and design of smart cities. With this book in hand, readers will find a valuable reference in terms of civil infrastructure health monitoring, advanced sensor network architectures, smart sensing materials, multifunctional material and structures, crowdsourced/social sensing, remote sensing and aerial sensing, and advanced computation in sensor networks.

The acclaimed and award-winning book about what a rare mushroom can teach us about sustaining life on a fragile planet.

Matsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world—and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the northern hemisphere. Through its ability to nurture trees, matsutake helps forests to grow in daunting places. It is also an edible delicacy in Japan, where it sometimes commands astronomical prices. In all its contradictions, matsutake offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial question: what manages to live in the ruins we have made?

A tale of diversity within our damaged landscapes, The Mushroom at the End of the World follows one of the strangest commodity chains of our times to explore the unexpected corners of capitalism. Here, we witness the varied and peculiar worlds of matsutake commerce: the worlds of Japanese gourmets, capitalist traders, Hmong jungle fighters, industrial forests, Yi Chinese goat herders, Finnish nature guides, and more. These companions also lead us into fungal ecologies and forest histories to better understand the promise of cohabitation in a time of massive human destruction.

By investigating one of the world's most sought-after fungi, The Mushroom at the End of the World presents an original examination into the relation between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes, the prerequisite for continuing life on earth.

This book aims to consolidate, structure and articulate collective knowledge on construction project delivery, procurement and contracting, so that it can serve as a gateway to the contiguous topics of construction project delivery. In addition to supporting the education of student researchers, as well as broadening and deepening the knowledge of practitioners, the book is also intended to serve as a foundation for future education and as a reference book. Academicians can use it to benchmark and support their research and also as a textbook for an undergraduate or graduate course on the topics of project delivery, procurement and contracting.

The hidden costs of artificial intelligence—from natural resources and labor to privacy, equality, and freedom.

What happens when artificial intelligence saturates political life and depletes the planet? How is AI shaping our understanding of ourselves and our societies? Drawing on more than a decade of research, award‑winning scholar Kate Crawford reveals how AI is a technology of extraction: from the minerals drawn from the earth to the labor pulled from low-wage information workers to the data taken from every action and expression.

Crawford reveals how this planetary network is fueling a shift toward undemocratic governance and increased inequity. Rather than taking a narrow focus on code and algorithms, Crawford offers us a material and political perspective on what it takes to make AI and how it centralizes power. This is an urgent account of what is at stake as technology companies use artificial intelligence to reshape the world.

Nuclear Decommissioning Case Studies, Volume Three: The People Side presents a selection of global case studies on different aspects of Nuclear Decommissioning. This volume focuses on the people side of nuclear decommissioning, including stakeholder impacts, public relations and workforce factors. It presents a selection of case studies on stakeholders, socioeconomics and human factors, providing readers with a guide and information to deal with common, often contentious challenges. The events covered in this publication range from change management, stakeholder motivation, involvement and leadership adequacies. Decommissioning experts, including regulators, operators, waste managers, researchers and academics will find this book to be suitable supplementary material to Michele Laraia's reference works on the theory and applications of nuclear decommissioning. Alongside the case studies books in this series, readers will obtain an understanding of stakeholder, socioeconomic and people-related case studies, what happened, and what we can learn from them.

The hospitality industry is one of the most significant drivers of economic growth and socioeconomic advances in both developed and developing countries. This industry contributes directly to gross domestic product, job creation, income level, destination expansion, and economic development. Forecasts for 2020 indicated a promising year was ahead for this industry, but the COVID-19 pandemic had a catastrophic impact. Hospitality companies are experiencing one of the biggest, unprecedented crises to date, and experts must now rethink strategies to ensure these businesses' recovery. Sustainability and Competitiveness in the Hospitality Industry focuses on complex issues from a hotel industry perspective. It surveys existing research by reflecting on the pandemic's impacts and generates scenarios for how to strengthen business structures. Covering a wide range of topics such as digital hospitality and tourism products, this reference work is ideal for managers, business professionals, entrepreneurs, practitioners, researchers, academicians, instructors, and students.

To enter the sports, events, and hospitality industry, it is necessary to develop and hone certain skills to ensure competitiveness. These skills must be studied further to educate those interested in pursuing a career in these fields on what it takes to begin this long process and enhance their employability. Employability and Skills Development in the Sports, Events, and Hospitality Industry provides insight into current professionals working in the sports, events, tourism, and hospitality industry and considers the skills and qualifications necessary to work within or enter the industries. Covering key topics such as hard skills, volunteerism, virtual events, and educational institutions, this reference work is ideal for event managers, coaches, property owners, entrepreneurs, industry professionals, researchers, academicians, scholars, educators, and students.

Nano-Enabled Agrochemicals in Agriculture presents a targeted overview of the safe implementation of nanotechnologies within agricultural and horticultural settings, with the purpose of achieving enhanced production while maintaining ecological integrity. The growing global request for agricultural crops and products requires high standards of quality and safety, which has stimulated the search for new technologies that preserve their quality and delay their decomposition. Nanotechnology may boost plant production by improving nutrient uptake/use efficiency with nanoformulations of fertilizers and agrochemicals for plant enhancement, detection and treatment of diseases, and host-parasite interactions at the molecular level using nanosensors. It also may improve plant disease diagnostics, removal of contaminants from soil and water, postharvest management of vegetables and flowers, and reclamation of salt-affected soils. Although the markets for nanoproducts and nanoformulations continue to increase, there are also growing concerns regarding the fate and behavior of nanomaterials in environmental systems. Exploring important topics related to nanotechnology and nanomaterials, the book includes the use of nanochemicals in insect pest management, as nanofungicides, nanoherbicides, micronutrient supply, and nanosensors to monitor crop and soil health conditions, from detection of agrochemicals to their slow release of agrochemicals, and their impact on related environs. This book will serve as an excellent resource for a wide range of plant scientists who have concerns about nanomaterial interactions with terrestrial and aquatic plants.

Sport has the power to change the world.'' Sports Economics Uncut expresses this insight from Nelson Mandela, exploring sports as a fascinating mirror of the world and a powerful agent of change. In this book, Brian Goff covers subjects ranging from the ebb and flow of racial discrimination, to inequality, law enforcement, managers and risky decisions, club membership, and politics. Much more than merely a review or synthesis, this work extends existing perspectives and explores provocative questions such as: how systematic is racial bias in pro sports today? Is all racial segregation in sports due to racial bias? How much are college athletes really worth, and is league parity really optimal? This book highlights the fascinating paradox of the modest revenues spent on sports but the enormous intangible value of it. The author explains how recent evidence of racial bias in sports actually illustrates how much ground has been gained in society on racial matters; how the scandals of college sports are a built-in feature of a world in which football and basketball athletes are worth millions; how athletic skill can vary widely across and within regions and races, and how this can influence positioning decisions; and how managers reflect both traditional economic views of decision making and more recent behavioral views. While drawing from widespread academic studies, this is a lively presentation accessible to a wide audience, with extensive but easy to digest data. Students and scholars of sports economics, as well as those studying sports analysis or related areas, will find it an engaging and eye-opening read.

The Future and FinTech examines the fundamental financial technologies and its growing impact on the Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) sectors. With global investment amounting to more than $100 billion in 2020, the proliferation of FinTech has underpinned the direction payments, loans, wealth management, insurance, and cryptocurrencies are heading.This book presents FinTech from an industrial perspective in the context of architecture and its basic building blocks, e.g., Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blockchain, Cloud, Big Data, Internet of Things (IoT), and its connections to real-life applications at work. It provides a detailed guidance on how FinTech digitalizes business operations, improves productivity and efficiency, and optimizes resource management with the help of some new concepts, such as AIOps, MLOps and DevSecOps. Readers will also discover how FinTech Innovations connect BFSI to the rest of the world with growing interests in Open Banking, Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) and FinTech-as-a-Service (FaaS).To help readers understand how FinTech has unlocked numerous opportunities for tapping into the massive substantial group of customers, this book illustrates the massive changes already underway and provides insights into changes yet to come through practical examples and applications with illustrative figures and summary tables, making this book a handy quick reference for all things of FinTech.Related Link(s)

Elgar Research Agendas outline the future of research in a given area. Leading scholars are given the space to explore their subject in provocative ways, and map out the potential directions of travel. They are relevant but also visionary. Original and thought-provoking, this book investigates how creative experiences, interactions, and place-specific dynamics and contexts are shaping the expanding field of creative tourism across the globe. Exploring the evolution of research in this field, the authors investigate pathways for future research that advance conceptual questions and pragmatic issues. Bringing together an array of international perspectives and research approaches, this book investigates the growing synergies between creativity and tourism. Contributors from a variety of disciplines utilize key case studies to examine the development of creative tourism in both the global North and South, including: World Heritage Sites in Malaysia; small communities in Thailand; small town 'creative outposts' in Canada; community-engaged projects in rural Russia; Gangneung, Korea's 'coffee city'; the pioneering creative tourism city of Santa Fe; and a participatory museum in Croatia. Both the growing diversity and scope of creative tourism and the expanding body of literature on this topic makes this timely Research Agenda a vital read for scholars of tourism studies, especially as it offers much-needed suggestions of areas for future research, at doctoral and post-doctoral levels. Tourism policy makers and creative tourism practitioners will also find this a useful read. Contributors: M. Blapp, P. Brouder, M.-A. Delisle, N. Duxbury, M.L. Emmendoerfer, J. Erkkila-Hill, I. Freitas, R. Goja, B. Hanifl, M. Hiltunen, D.A. Jelincic, T. Jokela, S.-M. Koistinen, H.d.S. Lopes, M. Matetskaya, O. Matos, S. Miettinen, O. Mitas, M. Pereira, P. Remoaldo, V. Ribeiro, G. Richards, M. Senkic, U.-S. Seo, A. Svyatunenko, S.-H. Tan, S.-K. Tan, T. Vongvisitsin, J. Wisansing