There is a growing demand for strategies to address the impact of polymers and plastics in ecosystems. The principles of green chemistry offer a good source of such strategies. Ecofriendly Functional Polymers: An Approach from Application-Targeted Green Chemistry provides a holistic overview of polymer chemistry, development, and applications in the context of these sustainability-driven principles. It encourages researchers to consider the principles of green chemistry, environmental impacts, and end-user needs as integral aspects for consideration at the earliest stages of any design process, and draws together key aspects of polymer chemistry, organic synthesis, experimental design, and applications in a single volume. Beginning with an authoritative guide to fundamental polymer chemistry and its impact in the current environmental context, the book then discusses a range of key theoretical and experimental aspects of designing eco-friendly functional polymers. Applications of ecofriendly functional polymers across an entire range of fields are discussed, and a selection of case studies highlights the implementation of theoretical and experimental information to address a broad selection of issues.

Modeling, Operation, and Analysis of DC Grids presents a unified vision of direct current grids with their core analysis techniques, uniting power electronics, power systems, and multiple scales of applications. Part one presents high power applications such as HVDC transmission for wind energy, faults and protections in HVDC lines, stability analysis and inertia emulation. The second part addresses current applications in low voltage such as microgrids, power trains and aircraft applications. All chapters are self-contained with numerical and experimental analysis.

This book integrates multiple criteria concepts and methods for problems within the Risk, Reliability and Maintenance (RRM) context. The concepts and foundations related to RRM are considered for this integration with multicriteria approaches. In the book, a general framework for building decision models is presented and this is illustrated in various chapters by discussing many different decision models related to the RRM context. The scope of the book is related to ways of how to integrate Applied Probability and Decision Making. In Applied Probability, this mainly includes: decision analysis and reliability theory, amongst other topics closely related to risk analysis and maintenance. In Decision Making, it includes a broad range of topics in MCDM (Multi-Criteria Decision Making) and MCDA (Multi-Criteria Decision Aiding; also known as Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis). In addition to decision analysis, some of the topics related to Mathematical Programming area are briefly considered, such as multiobjective optimization, since methods related to these topics have been applied to the context of RRM. The book addresses an innovative treatment for the decision making in RRM, thereby improving the integration of fundamental concepts from the areas of both RRM and decision making. This is accomplished by presenting an overview of the literature on decision making in RRM. Some pitfalls of decision models when applying them to RRM in practice are discussed and guidance on overcoming these drawbacks is offered. The procedure enables multicriteria models to be built for the RRM context, including guidance on choosing an appropriate multicriteria method for a particular problem faced in the RRM context. The book also includes many research advances in these topics. Most of the multicriteria decision models that are described are specific applications that have been influenced by this research and the advances in this field. Multicriteria and Multiobjective Models for Risk, Reliability and Maintenance Decision Analysis is implicitly structured in three parts, with 12 chapters. The first part deals with MCDM/A concepts methods and decision processes. The second part presents the main concepts and foundations of RRM. Finally the third part deals with specific decision problems in the RRM context approached with MCDM/A models.

Humans are often extraordinary at performing practical reasoning. There are cases where the human computer, slow as it is, is faster than any artificial intelligence system. Are we faster because of the way we perceive knowledge as opposed to the way we represent it?

The authors address this question by presenting neural network models that integrate the two most fundamental phenomena of cognition: our ability to learn from experience, and our ability to reason from what has been learned. This book is the first to offer a self-contained presentation of neural network models for a number of computer science logics, including modal, temporal, and epistemic logics. By using a graphical presentation, it explains neural networks through a sound neural-symbolic integration methodology, and it focuses on the benefits of integrating effective robust learning with expressive reasoning capabilities.

The book will be invaluable reading for academic researchers, graduate students, and senior undergraduates in computer science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, cognitive science and engineering. It will also be of interest to computational logicians, and professional specialists on applications of cognitive, hybrid and artificial intelligence systems.

This book gathers the very best academic research to date on prison regimes in Latin America and the Caribbean. Grounded in solid ethnographic work, each chapter explores the informal dynamics of prisons in diverse territories and countries of the region - Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, Honduras, Nicaragua, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic - while theorizing how day-to-day life for the incarcerated has been forged in tandem between prison facilities and the outside world. The editors and contributors to this volume ask: how have fastest-rising incarceration rates in the world affected civilians' lives in different national contexts? How do groups of prisoners form broader and more integrated 'carceral communities' across day-to-day relations of exchange and reciprocity with guards, lawyers, family, associates, and assorted neighbors? What differences exist between carceral communities from one national context to another? Last but not least, how do carceral communities, contrary to popular opinion, necessarily become a productive force for the good and welfare of incarcerated subjects, in addition to being a potential source of troubling violence and insecurity? This edited collection represents the most rigorous scholarship to date on the prison regimes of Latin America and the Caribbean, exploring the methodological value of ethnographic reflexivity inside prisons and theorizing how daily life for the incarcerated challenges preconceptions of prisoner subjectivity, so-called prison gangs, and bio-political order. Sacha Darke is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at University of Westminster, UK, Visiting Lecturer in Law at University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Affiliate of King's Brazil Institute, King's College London, UK. Chris Garces is Research Professor of Anthropology at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador, and Visiting Lecturer in Law at Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar, Ecuador. Luis Duno-Gottberg is Professor at Rice University, USA. He specializes in Caribbean culture, with emphasis on race and ethnicity, politics, violence, and visual culture. Andres Antillano is Professor in Criminology at Universidad Central de Venezuela, Venezuala.

This book explores the different ways women have been liberating themselves from the shackles of patriarchy and cultural laws that inhibit their independence and freedom to show that women are also contributing meaningfully to society. Women have worked to attain freedom through speaking out, writing memoirs, fiction, plays, poetry, and essays. The creative experiences of women are captured in this book, thus fulfilling the book's aim to give women voices to air their views and show that they are effectual members of society. The book examines the roles played by patriarchy, religion, and socioeconomic and political systems that keep women to the background. It also examines the issue of education, otherhood, marginalization, cultural imposition, and the diverse positions of women in local and international affairs. The book testifies that women's literature, and the stories of women all over the world, can be appreciated and viewed from different perspectives because of the diverse cultural environment in which women find themselves. This confirms that the issue of marginalization, suppression, and oppression of women are on-going problems in different societies around the world.

With contributions from leading religious studies scholars this is a comprehensive overview of the relationship between religion and death. This is the first and only book to be written at an accessible undergraduate level and has the potential to be adopted widely. This new edition has been thoroughly updated to cover new debates and developments for example end of life ethics and the hospice movement. This new edition also considers emerging phenomena such as public shrines, the COVID-19 pandemic, funeral celebrants, death with dignity, spiritual bereavement groups, and online funeral practices.

This innovative edited collection presents new insights into emerging debates around digital communication practices. It brings together research by leading international experts to examine methods and approaches, multimodality, face and identity, across five thematically organised sections. Its contributors revise current paradigms in view of past, present, and future research and analyse how users deploy the wealth of multimodal resources afforded by digital technologies to undertake tasks and to enact identity. In its concluding section it identifies the ideologies that underpin the construction of digital texts in the social world. This important contribution to digital discourse studies will have interdisciplinary appeal across the fields of linguistics, socio-linguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, gender studies, multimodality, media and communication studies.

With contributions from leading religious studies scholars this is a comprehensive overview of the relationship between religion and death. This is the first and only book to be written at an accessible undergraduate level and has the potential to be adopted widely. This new edition has been thoroughly updated to cover new debates and developments for example end of life ethics and the hospice movement. This new edition also considers emerging phenomena such as public shrines, the COVID-19 pandemic, funeral celebrants, death with dignity, spiritual bereavement groups, and online funeral practices.

Real Talk: Reality Television and Discourse Analysis in Action is the first book to examine the discourse of reality television. It provides state-of-the-art contextualization chapters on relevant concepts and methods, followed by rigorous case studies of the discourse practices that characterise a wide range of generic and linguistic / cultural contexts, including dating shows in China and Spain, docudramas in Argentina and New Zealand, and talent shows in the UK and the USA. These are structured in relation to two key themes: identity and aggression. This book will be essential reading for upper-level undergraduates and graduates in linguistics, discourse analysis and media studies, as well as for practitioners in these fields.

This edited collection brings together new research on public service interpreting and translation (PSIT) with a focus on ideology, ethics and policy development. The contributions provide fresh theoretical and empirical perspectives on the inconsistencies in translation and interpreting provision observed in different geonational contexts and the often-reported tensions between prescribed approaches to ethics and practitioner experience. The discussions are set against the backdrop of developments in rights-based discourses on language support services and the professionalisation of the field, drawing attention to how stakeholders and interpreting practitioners navigate the realities of service in the context of shifting ideological landscapes. Particular innovations in the collection include theorisations about policy and practice that draw on political science, applied ethics and paradigms of trauma-informed care. The volume also presents research on settings that have received limited attention to date such as prison and charitable services for survivors of violence and trauma.

The last few decades have witnessed tremendous developments in nonlinear control theory. One of the most important of these is the model-based method of feedback linearisation in which a nonlinear system is transformed into a linear system by means of state feedback and nonlinear transformations. After feedback linearisation, a system can be dealt with by linear controller design. The extension of these techniques to include MIMO systems allows for the further simplification of controller design by decoupling the system. Strategies for Feedback Linearisation demonstrates this powerful technique in the light of research on neural networks which allow the identification of nonlinear models without the complicated and costly development of models based on physical laws. Dynamic or recurrent neural networks have inherent properties that allow them to approximate nonlinear dynamic systems. Strategies for the identification of nonlinear systems using such neural networks are presented in this monograph together with the use of such models for the design and application of input-output linearisation and decoupling methods. Strategies for Feedback Linearisation is written to serve academic and industrial researchers in non-linear control and system identification and practising control engineers interested in their application to real-world industrial systems. The reader will gain a balanced view of theoretical and practical issues: relevant mathematical proofs are provided as are case studies illustrating design and application issues.

The highly anticipated U.S. Supreme Court decision in Fisher v. University of Texas placed a greater onus on higher education institutions to provide evidence supporting the need for affirmative action policies on their respective campuses. It is now more critical than ever that institutional leaders and scholars understand the evidence in support of race consideration in admissions as well as the challenges of the post-Fisher landscape. This important volume shares information documented for the Fisher case and provides empirical evidence to help inform scholarly conversation and institutions' decisions regarding race-conscious practices in higher education. With contributions from scholars and experts involved in the Fisher case, this edited volume documents and shares lessons learned from the collaborative efforts of the social science, educational, and legal communities. Affirmative Action and Racial Equity is a critical resource for higher education scholars and administrators to understand the nuances of the affirmative action legal debate and to identify the challenges and potential strategies toward racial equity and inclusion moving forward.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Toward a Cultural Archive of la Movida revisits the cultural and social milieu in which la Movida, an explosion of artistic production in the late 1970s and early 1980s, was articulated discursively, aesthetically, socially, and politically. We connect this experience with a broader national and international context that takes it beyond the city of Madrid and outside the borders of Spain. This collection of essays links the political and social undertakings of this cultural period with youth movements in Spain and other international counter-cultural or underground movements. Moving away from biographical experiences or the identification of further participants and works that belong to la Movida, the articles collected in this volume situate this movement within the political and social development of post-Franco Spain. Finally, it also offers a reading of recent politically motivated recoveries of this cultural phenomenon through exhibitions, state sponsored documentaries, musicals, or tourist itineraries. The perception of Spain as representative of a successful dual transition from dictatorship to democracy and free market capitalism created a "Spanish model" that has been emulated in countries like Portugal, Argentina, Chile and Hungary, all formerly ruled by totalitarian regimes. While social scientists study the promises, contradictions and failures of the Spanish Transicion-especially on issues of memory, repression, and (the lack of) reconciliation -our approach from the humanities offers another vantage point to a wider discussion of an unfinished chapter in recent Spanish history by focusing on la Movida as the "cultural archive" whose cultural transitions parallel the political and economic ones. The transgressive, urban nature of this movement demonstrated an overt desire, especially among Spanish youth, to reach onto a global arena emulating the punk and new wave aesthetic of such cities as London, New York, Paris, and Berlin. Art, design, film, music, fashion during this period helped to forge a sense of a modern urban identity in Spain that also reflected the tensions between modernity and tradition, global forces and local values, international mass media technology and regional customs.

From her personal diary as an eleven-year-old in a Catholic girl's school, in which she chastises herself for the sin of wearing a bathing suit, through erudite analysis of the patriarchal structures on which most world communities stand, Elena GarcZs examines culture, history, economics, law, and religion as they apply to her native Colombia. In so doing, she promotes ideas which demolish the 'forced enclosure' of women in that society. Eighteen Colombian women, selected at random from many regions and ethnicities, and from up and down the socioeconomic ladder, tell life stories almost universally tragic, regardless of the wealth, education, age, or status derived from positions held by their husbands. Their experiences, in particular the ways in which family and institutions are used against them, illustrate the feminist theories around which GarcZs shapes her arguments. This book will be ideal for undergraduate students of Women's Studies, Latin American Studies, Religion, and Sociology. It will also appeal to scholars interested in the welfare and development of women.

In this open access book, experts on integration processes, integration policies, transnationalism, and the migration and development framework provide an academic assessment of the 2011 European Agenda for the Integration of Third-Country Nationals, which calls for integration policies in the EU to involve not only immigrants and their society of settlement, but also actors in their country of origin. Moreover, a heuristic model is developed for the non-normative, analytical study of integration processes and policies based on conceptual, demographic, and historical accounts. The volume addresses three interconnected issues: What does research have to say on (the study of) integration processes in general and on the relevance of actors in origin countries in particular? What is the state of the art of the study of integration policies in Europe and the use of the concept of integration in policy formulation and practice? Does the proposal to include actors in origin countries as important players in integration policies find legitimation in empirical research? A few general conclusions are drawn. First, integration policies have developed at many levels of government: nationally, locally, regionally, and at the supra-national level of the EU. Second, a multitude of stakeholders has become involved in integration as policy designers and implementers. Finally, a logic of policymaking-and not an evidence-based scientific argument-can be said to underlie the European Commission's redefinition of integration as a three-way process. This book will appeal to academics and policymakers at international, European, national, regional, and local levels. It will also be of interest to graduate and master-level students of political science, sociology, social anthropology, international relations, criminology, geography, and history.

Alma, una escritora acomplejada y fatalista, acaba de perder a su padre y decide refugiarse en el peque o pueblo de sus abuelos. Una vez all , har una regresi n hacia s misma, intentar romper con el pasado para llegar a un futuro incierto de la mano de un amigo de la infancia. Lo que cabe en una ola. Se escurre r pido entre los dedos, es una historia inacabada que va m s all de la inmediatez del d a a d a, es una historia de consumo lento, de reflexi n, es un asalto directo al coraz n que trata de invadir al lector mediante las sensaciones y los recuerdos.

This book integrates multiple criteria concepts and methods for problems within the Risk, Reliability and Maintenance (RRM) context. The concepts and foundations related to RRM are considered for this integration with multicriteria approaches. In the book, a general framework for building decision models is presented and this is illustrated in various chapters by discussing many different decision models related to the RRM context. The scope of the book is related to ways of how to integrate Applied Probability and Decision Making. In Applied Probability, this mainly includes: decision analysis and reliability theory, amongst other topics closely related to risk analysis and maintenance. In Decision Making, it includes a broad range of topics in MCDM (Multi-Criteria Decision Making) and MCDA (Multi-Criteria Decision Aiding; also known as Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis). In addition to decision analysis, some of the topics related to Mathematical Programming area are briefly considered, such as multiobjective optimization, since methods related to these topics have been applied to the context of RRM. The book addresses an innovative treatment for the decision making in RRM, thereby improving the integration of fundamental concepts from the areas of both RRM and decision making. This is accomplished by presenting an overview of the literature on decision making in RRM. Some pitfalls of decision models when applying them to RRM in practice are discussed and guidance on overcoming these drawbacks is offered. The procedure enables multicriteria models to be built for the RRM context, including guidance on choosing an appropriate multicriteria method for a particular problem faced in the RRM context. The book also includes many research advances in these topics. Most of the multicriteria decision models that are described are specific applications that have been influenced by this research and the advances in this field. Multicriteria and Multiobjective Models for Risk, Reliability and Maintenance Decision Analysis is implicitly structured in three parts, with 12 chapters. The first part deals with MCDM/A concepts methods and decision processes. The second part presents the main concepts and foundations of RRM. Finally the third part deals with specific decision problems in the RRM context approached with MCDM/A models.

This is the first book to examine the discourse of reality television. Chapters provide rigorous case studies of the discourse practices that characterise a wide range of generic and linguistic/cultural contexts, including dating shows in China and Spain, docudramas in Argentina and New Zealand, and talent shows in the UK and USA.