Specialty Optical Fibers reviews theoretical and experimental photonic research relevant to the synthesis, processing, characterization, modeling, physical features, and applications of Specialty Optical Fibers (SOFs) with significant technological impact potential. All fiber-based advanced photonics device components rely on specialty optical fibers, which have either a unique waveguide structure or a novel material composition. High power optical amplifiers, high power fiber, and novel fabrication techniques for optical fiber design have enabled significant technological advances. The book provides discussion on these applications including current research directions, future opportunities and remaining challenges.Specialty Optical Fibers is suitable for researchers in academia and practitioners in R&D working in the subject areas of materials science, electrical engineering, and fiber optics.

Sugarcane: Agricultural Production, Bioenergy and Ethanol explores this vital source for "green" biofuel from the breeding and care of the plant all the way through to its effective and efficient transformation into bioenergy. The book explores sugarcane's 40 year history as a fuel for cars, along with its impressive leaps in production and productivity that have created a robust global market. In addition, new prospects for the future are discussed as promising applications in agroenergy, whether for biofuels or bioelectricity, or for bagasse pellets as an alternative to firewood for home heating purposes are explored. Experts from around the world address these topics in this timely book as global warming continues to represent a major concern for both crop and green energy production.

In the first half of the twentieth century, a charismatic Peruvian Amazonian indigenous chief, José Carlos Amaringo Chico, played a key role in leading his people, the Ashaninka, through the chaos generated by the collapse of the rubber economy in 1910 and the subsequent pressures of colonists, missionaries, and government officials to assimilate them into the national society. Slavery and Utopia reconstructs the life and political trajectory of this leader whom the people called Tasorentsi, the name the Ashaninka give to the world-transforming gods and divine emissaries that come to this earth to aid the Ashaninka in times of crisis. Fernando Santos-Granero follows Tasorentsi’s transformations as he evolved from being a debt-peon and quasi-slave to being a slave raider; inspirer of an Ashaninka movement against white-mestizo rubber extractors and slave traffickers; paramount chief of a multiethnic, anti-colonial, and anti-slavery uprising; and enthusiastic preacher of an indigenized version of Seventh-Day Adventist doctrine, whose world-transforming message and personal influence extended well beyond Peru’s frontiers. Drawing on an immense body of original materials ranging from archival documents and oral histories to musical recordings and visual works, Santos-Granero presents an in-depth analysis of chief Tasorentsi’s political discourse and actions. He demonstrates that, despite Tasorentsi’s constant self-reinventions, the chief never forsook his millenarian beliefs, anti-slavery discourse, or efforts to liberate his people from white-mestizo oppression. Slavery and Utopia thus convincingly refutes those who claim that the Ashaninka proclivity to messianism is an anthropological invention.

An exploration of the moral use of knowledge among the Amuesga of Central Peru.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th Latin American Robotics Symposium and Third Brazilian Symposium on Robotics, LARS 2015 / SBR 2015, held in Uberlandia, Brazil, in October/November 2015. The 17 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 80 submissions. The selected papers present a complete and solid reference of the state-of-the-art of intelligent robotics and automation research, covering the following areas: autonomous mobile robots, tele-operated and telepresence robots, human-robot interaction, trajectory control for mobile robots, autonomous vehicles, service-oriented robotic systems, semantic mapping, environment mapping, visual odometry, applications of RGB-D sensors, humanoid and biped robots, Robocup soccer robots, robot control, path planning, multiple vehicles and teams of robots.

Sugarcane Biorefinery, Technology and Perspectives provides the reader with a current view of the global scenario of sugarcane biorefinery, launching a new expectation on this important crop from a chemical, energy and sustainability point-of-view. The book explores the existing biorefinery platforms that can be used to convert sugarcane to new high value added products. It also addresses one of today's most controversial issues involving energy cane, in addition to the dilemma "sugar cane vs. food vs. the environment", adding even more value in a culture that is already a symbol of case study around the world. Focusing on the chemical composition of sugarcane, and the production and processes that optimize it for either agricultural or energy use, the book is designed to provide practical insights for current application and inspire the further exploration of options for balancing food and fuel demands.

An account of the philosophical conceptions of power held by the Amuesha, a priestly society of the Peruvian Amazon. It reveals the relationship the Amuesha see between cosmogony and political morality. Love is a crucial component of both legitimate knowledge and legitimate power. The distinction between divine and mortal love pervades this priestly cosmology and moral philosophy, making it central both to the playing out of hierarchical relationships in everyday life and to a millenaristic theology of salvation. This volume will be important to students of Amozonian and Andean peoples, to specialists in comparative religion, and to those more generally interested in the complex relationship between systems of morality and political power.

In the first half of the twentieth century, a charismatic Peruvian Amazonian indigenous chief, Jose Carlos Amaringo Chico, played a key role in leading his people, the Ashaninka, through the chaos generated by the collapse of the rubber economy in 1910 and the subsequent pressures of colonists, missionaries, and government officials to assimilate them into the national society. Slavery and Utopia reconstructs the life and political trajectory of this leader whom the people called Tasorentsi, the name the Ashaninka give to the world-transforming gods and divine emissaries that come to this earth to aid the Ashaninka in times of crisis. Fernando Santos-Granero follows Tasorentsi's transformations as he evolved from being a debt-peon and quasi-slave to being a slave raider; inspirer of an Ashaninka movement against white-mestizo rubber extractors and slave traffickers; paramount chief of a multiethnic, anti-colonial, and anti-slavery uprising; and enthusiastic preacher of an indigenized version of Seventh-Day Adventist doctrine, whose world-transforming message and personal influence extended well beyond Peru's frontiers. Drawing on an immense body of original materials ranging from archival documents and oral histories to musical recordings and visual works, Santos-Granero presents an in-depth analysis of chief Tasorentsi's political discourse and actions. He demonstrates that, despite Tasorentsi's constant self-reinventions, the chief never forsook his millenarian beliefs, anti-slavery discourse, or efforts to liberate his people from white-mestizo oppression. Slavery and Utopia thus convincingly refutes those who claim that the Ashaninka proclivity to messianism is an anthropological invention.

Native peoples of the Amazon view objects, especially human artifacts, as the first cosmic creations and the building blocks from which the natural world has been shaped. In these constructional cosmologies, spears became the stings of wasps, hammocks became spiderwebs, stools became the buttocks of human beings.
A view so antithetical to Western thought offers a refreshing perspective on the place and role of objects in human social life--one that has remained under-studied in Amazonian anthropology. In this book, ten scholars re-introduce objects to contemporary studies of animism in order to explore how various peoples envision the lives of material objects: the occult, or extraordinary, lives of "things," whose personas are normally not visible to lay people.
Combining linguistic, ethnological, and historical perspectives, the contributors draw on a wealth of information gathered from ten Amerindian peoples belonging to seven different linguistic families to identify the basic tenets of what might be called a native Amazonian theory of materiality and personhood. They consider which objects have subjective dimensions and how they are manifested, focusing on three domains regarding Amazonian conceptions of things: the subjective life of objects, considering which things have a subjective dimension; the social life of things, seeing the diverse ways in which human beings and things relate as subjectivities; and the historical life of things, recognizing the fact that some things have value as ritual objects or heirlooms.
These chapters demonstrate how native Amazonian peoples view animals, plants, and things as "subjectivities" possessing agency, intentionality, and consciousness, as well as a composite anatomy. They also show how materiality is intimately linked to notions of personhood, with artifacts classified as natural or divine creations and living beings viewed as cultural or constructed. "The Occult Life of Things" offers original insights into these elaborate native ontologies as it breaks new ground in Amazonian studies.

Analyzing slavery and other forms of servitude in six non-state indigenous societies of tropical America at the time of European contact, Vital Enemies offers a fascinating new approach to the study of slavery based on the notion of "political economy of life." Fernando Santos-Granero draws on the earliest available historical sources to provide novel information on Amerindian regimes of servitude, sociologies of submission, and ideologies of capture.

Estimating that captive slaves represented up to 20 percent of the total population and up to 40 percent when combined with other forms of servitude, Santos-Granero argues that native forms of servitude fulfill the modern understandings of slavery, though Amerindian contexts provide crucial distinctions with slavery as it developed in the American South. The Amerindian understanding of life forces as being finite, scarce, unequally distributed, and in constant circulation yields a concept of all living beings as competing for vital energy. The capture of human beings is an extreme manifestation of this understanding, but it marks an important element in the ways Amerindian "captive slavery" was misconstrued by European conquistadors.

Illuminating a cultural facet that has been widely overlooked or miscast for centuries, Vital Enemies makes possible new dialogues regarding hierarchies in the field of native studies, as well as a provocative re-framing of pre- and post-contact America.

Before they were largely decimated and dispersed by the effects of European colonization, Arawak-speaking peoples were the most widespread language family in Latin America and the Caribbean, and they were the first people Columbus encountered in the Americas. Comparative Arawakan Histories, in paperback for the first time, examines social structures, political hierarchies, rituals, religious movements, gender relations, and linguistic variations through historical perspectives to document sociocultural diversity across the diffused Arawakan diaspora.