How do we understand culture and shape its future? How do we cross the bridge between culture as ideas and feelings and physical, cultural objects, all this within the endless variety and complexity of modern and traditional societies? This book proposes a Physical Culture Theory, taking culture as a self-organizing impulse pattern of electric forces. Bridging the gap to consciousness, the Physical Culture Theory proposes that consciousness content, what we think, hear, feel, or see is also just this: spatio-temporal electric fields. Music is a perfect candidate to elaborate on such a Physical Culture Theory. Music is all three, musical instrument acoustics, music psychology, and music ethnology. They emerge into living musical systems like all life is self-organization. Therefore the Physical Culture Theory knows no split between nature and nurture, hard and soft sciences, brains and musical instruments. It formulates mathematically complex systems as Physical Models rather than Artificial Intelligence. It includes ethical rules for maintaining life and finds culture and arts to be Human Rights. Enlarging these ideas and mathematical methods into all fields of culture, ecology, economy, or the like will be the task for the next decades to come.

This book consists of selected and peer-reviewed papers presented at the 13th International Conference on Vibration Problems (ICOVP 2017). The topics covered in this book include different structural vibration problems such as dynamics and stability under normal and seismic loading, and wave propagation. The book also discusses different materials such as composite, piezoelectric, and functionally graded materials for improving the stiffness and damping properties of structures. The contents of this book can be useful for beginners, researchers and professionals interested in structural vibration and other allied fields.

This open access book offers a timely guide to challenges and current practices to permanently plug and abandon hydrocarbon wells. With a focus on offshore North Sea, it analyzes the process of plug and abandonment of hydrocarbon wells through the establishment of permanent well barriers. It provides the reader with extensive knowledge on the type of barriers, their functioning and verification. It then discusses plug and abandonment methodologies, analyzing different types of permanent plugging materials. Last, it describes some tests for verifying the integrity and functionality of installed permanent barriers. The book offers a comprehensive reference guide to well plugging and abandonment (P&A) and well integrity testing. The book also presents new technologies that have been proposed to be used in plugging and abandoning of wells, which might be game-changing technologies, but they are still in laboratory or testing level. Given its scope, it addresses students and researchers in both academia and industry. It also provides information for engineers who work in petroleum industry and should be familiarized with P&A of hydrocarbon wells to reduce the time of P&A by considering it during well planning and construction.

Africa faces numerous challenges relating to good governance due to its vast and diverse landscape, as well as its history. This book explores the role of space-based applications in supporting African good governance by strengthening civil society, bolstering democratic processes and advancing socio-economic development. The increased use of such applications can accelerate Africa's progress towards the United Nations Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, as well as the African Union's Agenda 2063 aspirations This book examines key challenges facing governance within African to provide an accurate account of the current African context. It discusses specific examples of e-governance and digital solutions that leverage space-based technologies and have been successfully implemented in both the developed and developing world. In the context of the numerous satellite constellations being deployed to provide affordable Internet connectivity globally, it examines the major actors in this sector and presents additional governance solutions based on remote sensing and Earth observation data. Given its scope, the book will be of interest to professionals and students in the fields of development, governance and space studies.

In this newly updated directory, the latest in cutting-edge audio equipment is provided, including how to choose the best audio equipment on a budget, how to get the best sound for the money, and how to set up a system for maximum performance. Revised and expanded to include all the latest audio technologies, this book is packed with expert advice how to make speakers sound up to 50 percent better at no cost, avoid the most common system set-up mistakes, and how to choose the one speaker in 50 worth owning. Among the new topics covered are streaming audio, computer-based music servers, music-management apps, wireless streaming, high-resolution digital audio. A short course on listening-room acoustics is presented and additional information on audio for home theater, multichannel audio, system set-up secrets, and what each component's specifications and measurements mean is also provided.

This book proposes a framework for assessing countries' levels of compliance with international space law and norms. It begins by exploring the development of two movements - the evidence-based policymaking and programming movement, and the rise of ratings and rankings research - and their growth across various disciplines. The analysis suggests that such efforts are useful in gauging the behavior of countries in space according to how well they adhere to existing space law and norms. To date, there is no comprehensive, periodic, and systematic measure of countries' efforts to comply with space law and norms; this work endeavors to fill that gap by offering a framework in which to assess compliance. Applying the framework results in five possible ratings that a country may be assigned, ranging from highly compliant to non-compliant. Ideally, the proposed framework can be used to promote compliance, and with it, space security and sustainability.

This book addresses the hazard of gas explosions in sealed underground coal mines, and how the risk of explosion can be assessed, modeled, and mitigated. With this text, coal mine operators and managers will be able to identify the risks that lead to underground mine gas explosions, and implement practical strategies to optimize mining safety for workers. In six chapters, the book offers a framework for understanding the sealed coal mine atmosphere, the safety characteristics that are currently in place, and the guidelines to be followed by engineers to improve upon these characteristics. The first part of the book describes the importance and characteristics of underground gas mine explosions in a historical context with data showing the high number of fatalities from explosion incidents, and how risk has been mitigated in the past. Chapters also detail mathematical models and explosibility diagrams for determining and understanding the risk factors involved in mine explosions. Readers will also learn about safety operations, and assessments for the sealed mine atmosphere. With descriptions of chapter case studies, mining engineers and researchers will learn how to apply safety measures in underground coal mines to improve mining atmospheres and save lives.

This textbook provides materials for an introductory course in Engineering Acoustics for students with a basic knowledge of mathematics. The contents are based on extensive teaching experience at the graduate level. Each of the 14 main chapters deals with a well-defined topic and represents the material for a two-hour lecture. The chapters alternate between more theoretical and more application-oriented concepts. The presentation is organized to be suitable for self-study as well. For this third edition, the complete text and many figures have been revised. Several current amendments take account of advancements in the field. Further, a completely new chapter has been added which presents approaches and solutions to all assigned exercise problems. The new chapter offers the opportunity to explore the underlying theoretical background in more detail. However, the study of the problems and their proposed solutions is no prerequisite for comprehending the material presented in the book's lecture part.

This is an introduction to basic music technology, including acoustics for sound production and analysis, Fourier, frequency modulation, wavelets, and physical modeling and a classification of musical instruments and sound spaces for tuning and counterpoint. The acoustical theory is applied to its implementation in analogue and digital technology, including a detailed discussion of Fast Fourier Transform and MP3 compression. Beyond acoustics, the book discusses important symbolic sound event representation and software as typically realized by MIDI and denotator formalisms. The concluding chapters deal with globalization of music on the Internet, referring to iTunes, Spotify and similar environments. The book will be valuable for students of music, music informatics, and sound engineering.

This book addresses and reviews many of the still little understood questions related to the processes underlying planetary magnetic fields and their interaction with the solar wind. With focus on research carried out within the German Priority Program "PlanetMag", it also provides an overview of the most recent research in the field. Magnetic fields play an important role in making a planet habitable by protecting the environment from the solar wind. Without the geomagnetic field, for example, life on Earth as we know it would not be possible. And results from recent space missions to Mars and Venus strongly indicate that planetary magnetic fields play a vital role in preventing atmospheric erosion by the solar wind. However, very little is known about the underlying interaction between the solar wind and a planet's magnetic field. The book takes a synergistic interdisciplinary approach that combines newly developed tools for data acquisition and analysis, computer simulations of planetary interiors and dynamos, models of solar wind interaction, measurement of ancient terrestrial rocks and meteorites, and laboratory investigations.

The book presents selected papers at the 8th Conference on Sound and Music Technology (CSMT) held in November 2020, at Taiyuan, Shanxi, China. CSMT is a multidisciplinary conference focusing on audio processing and understanding with bias on music and acoustic signals. The primary aim of the conference is to promote the collaboration between art society and technical society in China. In this proceeding, the paper included covers a wide range topic from speech, signal processing, music understanding, machine learning and signal processing for advanced medical diagnosis and treatment applications; which demonstrates the target of CSMT merging arts and science research together.its content caters to scholars, researchers, engineers, artists, and education practitioners not only from academia but also industry, who are interested in audio/acoustics analysis signal processing, music, sound, and artificial intelligence (AI).

Gateway to the Moon presents the definitive history of the origins, design, and construction of the lunar launch facilities at Kennedy Space Center, the terrestrial site of one of the greatest national adventures of the 20th century, humanity's first trip to the moon. It includes archival illustrations and diagrams of locations, personnel, and equipment, from aerial views of sandy, undeveloped Cape Canaveral to some of the first photos of the mobile launchers and crawler-transporters.

Filled with the sense of wonder and pride that the earliest U.S. space achievements inspired, the book focuses on launch complexes 39A and 39B, the gigantic assemblies from which the Apollo-Saturn vehicles departed for trips into space, and on the massive eight-acre Vertical Assembly Building (renamed the Vehicle Assembly Building) and the attached Launch Control Center -- some of the most awesome buildings ever constructed. It also analyzes the technological and governmental interactions necessary to ensure success of the launches.

Originally part of Moonport, a 1978 volume in the NASA History Series, the book is based on extensive interviews with wit participants in the space program and wide access to official documents, letters, and memoranda; in addition, the authors air criticisms directed at the Kennedy Space Center team and treat in detail mistakes in launch operations and conflicts within the program. Written for a general-interest audience, with jargon and acronyms translated into everyday language, the book offers a faithful account of technology in service to humanity.