Rock Fragmentation by Blasting contains the papers presented at the 10th International Symposium on Rock Fragmentation by Blasting (New Delhi, India, 26-29 November 2012), and represents the most advanced forum on blasting science and technology. The contributions cover all major recent advancements in blasting and fragmentation, from realistic treatment of the target rock; modelling, measurement and prediction of blast results; control of blast-induced damage, to special blast designs applicable to civil construction and demolition projects. The latest developments on environmental issues associated with blasting operations such as vibrations, flyrock, and dust are also included. Rock Fragmentation by Blasting provides the state-of-the-art in explosives and blasting engineering, and will be a valuable source of information for researchers and practitioners involved in these areas.

Blasting practices in mines have undergone many changes in the recent past and continue to be honed and reconfigured to meet the demands of today's mining needs. This volume compiles papers of the workshop Blasting in Mines - New Trends, hosted by the Fragblast 10 Symposium . The 17 papers provide a mix which highlight the evolving trends in blasting in mines. These range from special techniques of cast blasting, applications of seed wave modelling for improved fragmentation, to design of mass blasts and controlled blasting for stability of pit-walls. Blasting in Mines - New Trends will be of particular interest to mining and blasting engineers.

This book treats the experimental methods used to determine the physical properties of explosives and explosions - physical principles, operating procedures and evaluations of results. Aimed at practicing engineers as well as experimental physicists who investigate the effects of explosions, this book will be of interest to research laboratories, manufacturers of explosives, military training establishments, technical laboratories and so forth.

Push: Software Design and the Cultural Politics of Music Production shows how changes in the design of music software in the first decades of the twenty-first century shaped the production techniques and performance practices of artists working across media, from hip-hop and electronic dance music to video games and mobile apps. Emerging alongside developments in digital music distribution such as peer-to-peer file sharing and the MP3 format, digital audio workstations like FL Studio and Ableton Live introduced design affordances that encouraged rapid music creation workflows through flashy, "user-friendly" interfaces. Meanwhile, software such as Avid's Pro Tools attempted to protect its status as the "industry standard," "professional" DAW of choice by incorporating design elements from pre-digital music technologies. Other software, like Cycling 74's Max, asserted its alterity to "commercial" DAWs by presenting users with nothing but a blank screen. These are more than just aesthetic design choices. Push examines the social, cultural, and political values designed into music software, and how those values become embodied by musical communities through production and performance. It reveals ties between the maximalist design of FL Studio, skeuomorphic design in Pro Tools, and gender inequity in the music products industry. It connects the computational thinking required by Max, as well as iZotope's innovations in artificial intelligence, with the cultural politics of Silicon Valley's "design thinking." Finally, it thinks through what happens when software becomes hardware, and users externalize their screens through the use of MIDI controllers, mobile media, and video game controllers. Amidst the perpetual upgrade culture of music technology, Push provides a model for understanding software as a microcosm for the increasing convergence of globalization, neoliberal capitalism, and techno-utopianism that has come to define our digital lives.

Moving Loads on Ice Plates is a unique study into the effect of vehicles and aircraft travelling across floating ice sheets. It synthesizes in a single volume, with a coherent theme and nomenclature, the diverse literature on the topic, hitherto available only as research journal articles. Chapters on the nature of fresh water ice and sea ice, and on applied continuum mechanics are included, as is a chapter on the subject's venerable history in related areas of engineering and science. The most recent theories and data are discussed in great depth, demonstrating the advanced state of the modelling and experimental field programmes that have taken place. Finally, results are interpreted in the context of engineering questions faced by agencies operating in the polar and subpolar regions. Although the book necessarily contains some graduate level applied mathematics, it is written to allow engineers, physicists and mathematicians to extract the information they need without becoming preoccupied with details. Structural, environmental, civil, and offshore engineers, and groups who support these industries, particularly within the Arctic and Antarctic, will find the book timely and relevant.

Release from prison is matter of increasing interest throughout Europe. On the one hand, arguments about the need to reduce prison numbers, as well the consistent findings that prisoners can be integrated into society more effectively if they are subject to a period of supervision in the community, have made early release policies attractive to governments and to academic commentators. On the other hand, there are concerns that early release may not be applied fairly to all prisoners. This book aims to meet the need for comparative information on release from prison across Europe and explores some of the key themes and issues. The body of the book focuses on country perspectives, providing an invaluable survey of the situation in a number of European countries. The introductory and concluding chapters place the comparative material in a broader perspective. They explain how release policy is related to wider questions about justice and fairness in prison-related decision-making and the changing place of imprisonment in European society.

This book deals with a number of contentious issues in Chinese management as China emerges as a global economic player, with a greater role in international business during a global economic crisis. This step is in tandem with an economically driven foreign policy. Since the 1980s, Chinese management while still in transition, has benefited from an infusion of capital, technology and managerial expertise through inward direct investment via joint and wholly-owned foreign ventures. As the so-called 'workshop of the world', China and its exports, especially labour-intensive goods, face protectionism in the United States and the European Union. To circumvent these barriers, the Chinese leaders are emphasising domestic consumption, itself dependent on rising personal income levels and an improved national social insurance system, and a move to high-tech products, themselves requiring indigenous innovation. The creation of a knowledge economy, in addition to outward investment in manufacturing, could lead to a distinctive independent style of Chinese management. Simultaneously, China's participation in intra-regional trade underlines the nation's role in Asian regional business networks. Such developments in turn present a challenge to Western and global business. This book was published as a special issue of Asia Pacific Business Review.

Nominated as an outstanding thesis by the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of New Mexico, this thesis seeks to identify the gamma-ray burst (GRB) progenitor. GRBs are extragalactic explosions that briefly outshine entire galaxies, but the mechanism that can release that much energy over a < 100 second burst is still a mystery. The leading candidate for the GRB progenitor is currently a massive star which collapses to form a black hole-accretion disk system that powers the GRB. GRB afterglows, however, do not always show the expected behavior of a relativistic blast wave interacting with the stellar wind that such a progenitor should have produced before its collapse. In this book, the author uses the Zeus-MP astrophysical hydrodynamics code to model the environment around a stellar progenitor prior to the burst. He then develops a new semi-analytic MHD and emission model to produce light curves for GRBs encountering these realistic density profiles. The work ultimately shows that the circumburst medium surrounding a GRB at the time of the explosion is much more complex than a pure wind, and that observed afterglows are entirely consistent with a large subset of proposed stellar progenitors.

Describes the instruments and initial results of the Fast Imaging Solar Spectrograph (FISS) at the Big Bear Solar Observatory. This collection of papers describes the instrument and initial results obtained from the Fast Imaging Solar Spectrograph (FISS), one of the post-focus instruments of the 1.6 meter New Solar Telescope at the Big Bear Solar Observatory. The FISS primarily aims at investigating structures and dynamics of chromospheric features. This instrument is a dual-band Echelle spectrograph optimized for the simultaneous recording of the H I 656.3 nm band and the Ca II 854.2 nm band. The imaging is done with the fast raster scan realized by the linear motion of a two-mirror scanner, and its quality is determined by the performance of the adaptive optics of the telescope. These papers illustrate the capability of the early FISS observations in the study of chromospheric features. Since the imaging quality has been improved a lot with the advance of the adaptive optics, one can obtain much better data with the current FISS observations. This volume is aimed at graduate students and researchers working in the field of solar physics and space sciences. Originally published in Solar Physics, Vol. 288, Issue 1, 2013, and Vol. 289, Issue 11, 2014.

Falling oil prices and smaller offshore fields, especially in the UK sector of the North Sea, have produced a resurgence of interest in subsea developments. These developments always include the installation of a subsea structure and laying and tying-in of pipeline and control lines. In the Southern North Sea small unmanned jackets may become widely used and these require subsea control and power lines installation. This change in the offshore scene has produced a potentially larger market for underwater construction activities. Companies engaged in underwater design and construction have been developing new equipment and techniques to enable further economies to be realised. It is not only in hydrocarbon development where underwater construction plays a major role. One of the largest offshore construction projects on the UK Continental Shelf in recent years is the cross-channel link where power cables have been laid between the UK and France. This volume looks at the economic outlook and the breadth of underwater construction operations; important developments in techniques and equip ment are presented together with a discussion of various projects in which they have been successfully used. PART I 1 An overview of subsea construction R. Goodfellow, Goodfellow Associates Ltd INTRODUCTION Working underwater is a lot more difficult than working above water or on land, therefore the incentives to do so must be found in some aspects of project realization, such as: * reduced cost; * advantageous schedule; * improved technology.

New trends in mineral deposits mining largely consist of intensifying and concentrating mining operations. Innovative technologies helping to increase technical-economic indices, extraction volume, working efficiency and safety rules are presented in this book.

Both the beauty and interest of fractures and fracture networks are easy to grasp, since they are abundant in nature. An example is the road from Digne to Nice in the south of France, with an impressive number and variety of such structures: the road for the most part, goes through narrow valleys with fast running streams penetrating the rock faces; erosion is favored by the Mediterranean climate, so that rocks are barely covered by meager vegetation. In this inhospitable and sterile landscape, the visitor can im mediately discover innumerable fractures in great masses which have been distorted by slow, yet powerful movements. This phenomenon can be seen for about 100 kilometers; all kinds of shapes and combinations are repre sented and can be observed either in the mountain itself or in the man-made cliffs and excavations, resulting from improvements made to the road. In the same region, close to the Turini Pass, a real large scale hydrody namic experiment is taking place -a source which is situated on the flank on the mountain, has been equiped with a tap; if the tap is open, water flows through the tap only, but when it is closed, then the side of the mountain releases water in a matter of seconds. Other outlets are also influenced by this tap, such as a water basin situated a few hundred meters away."

This collection of papers will address the question "What is the Magnetospheric Cusp?" and what is its role in the coupling of the solar wind to the magnetosphere as well as its role in the processes of particle transport and energization within the magnetosphere. The cusps have traditionally been described as narrow funnel-shaped regions that provide a focus of the Chapman-Ferraro currents that flow on the magnetopause, a boundary between the cavity dominated by the geomagnetic field (i.e., the magnetosphere) and the external region of the interplanetary medium. Measurements from a number of recent satellite programs have shown that the cusp is not confined to a narrow region near local noon but appears to encompass a large portion of the dayside high-latitude magnetosphere. It appears that the cusp is a major source region for the production of energetic charged particles for the magnetosphere. This book will be of great interest to scientists in Space Physics as well as to those working in research organizations in governments and industries, university departments of physics, astronomy, space physics, and geophysics. Part of this book has already been published in a journal.

The control of marine engines and propulsion plants is a field of increasing interest to the maritime industry. The author's participation in a number of closely related research projects together with practical shipboard experience allows Robust Control of Diesel Ship Propulsion to present a broad view of the needs and problems of the shipping industry in this area. The book covers a number of models and control types: An integrated nonlinear state-space model of the marine propulsion system is developed. This is based upon physical principles that incorporate uncertainties due to engine thermodynamics and disturbances due to propeller hydrodynamics. The model employs artificial neural nets for depicting the nonlinearities of the thermochemical processes of engine power/torque generation and the engine-turbocharger dynamical interaction; neural nets combine the required mathematical flexibility and formalism with numerical training and calibration options using either thermodynamic engine models or measured data series. The neural state-space model is decomposed appropriately to provide a linearised perturbation model suitable for controller synthesis. The proportional integral (derivative) control law is examined under the perspective of shaft speed regulation for enhanced disturbance rejection of the propeller load. The typical marine shafting system dynamics and configuration allow for a smart implementation of the D-term based on shaft torque feedback. Full-state feedback control is, examined for increased robustness of the compensated plant against parametric uncertainty and neglected dynamics. The H* requirements on the closed-loop transfer matrix are appropriately decomposed to similar ones on scalar transfer functions, which give specifications which are easier to manipulate. In effect, the methods are comparatively assessed and suggestions for extensions and practical applications are given. This synthetic approach to the propulsion plant control and operational problems should prove useful for both theoreticians and practitioners, and can be easily adopted for the control of other processes or systems outside the marine field, as well.

A guide for students and professionals, this introductory course book covers the basic principles of remote sensing and its applications in mine environment monitoring. Building from a reader's basic knowledge of mine monitoring, it teaches how to implement remote sensing techniques and how to interpret the acquired data for different purposes. Following a general introduction to remote sensing principles and image analysis, mine subsidence monitoring, slope stability monitoring, reclamation planning and implementation, and post-closure mine and land use analysis are explained and illustrated. With the help of case studies, the techniques and tools presented are demonstrated. With an increasing importance of sustainable mining, this accurate text is intended for the education of university students in mining, civil, geological and environmental engineering. Researchers and professionals in these disciplines may find it beneficial as well to guide their professional monitoring investigations.

The book provides readers with a snapshot of recent research and industrial trends in field of industrial acoustics and vibration. Each chapter, accepted after a rigorous peer-review process, reports on a selected, original piece of work presented and discussed at the Second International Conference on Acoustics and Vibration (ICAV2018), which was organized by the Tunisian Association of Industrial Acoustics and Vibration (ATAVI) and held March 19-21, in Hammamet, Tunisia. The contributions cover advances in both theory and practice in a variety of subfields, such as: smart materials and structures; fluid-structure interaction; structural acoustics as well as computational vibro-acoustics and numerical methods. Further topics include: engines control, noise identification, robust design, flow-induced vibration and many others. This book provides a valuable resource for both academics and professionals dealing with diverse issues in applied mechanics. By combining advanced theories with industrial issues, it is expected to facilitate communication and collaboration between different groups of researchers and technology users.