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.

Experimental Vibration Analysis for Civil Structures: Testing, Sensing, Monitoring, and Control covers a wide range of topics in the areas of vibration testing, instrumentation, and analysis of civil engineering and critical infrastructure. It explains how recent research, development, and applications in experimental vibration analysis of civil engineering structures have progressed significantly due to advancements in the fields of sensor and testing technologies, instrumentation, data acquisition systems, computer technology, computational modeling and simulation of large and complex civil infrastructure systems. The book also examines how cutting-edge artificial intelligence and data analytics can be applied to infrastructure systems. Features: Explains how recent technological developments have resulted in addressing the challenge of designing more resilient infrastructure Examines numerous research studies conducted by leading scholars in the field of infrastructure systems and civil engineering Presents the most emergent fields of civil engineering design, such as data analytics and Artificial Intelligence for the analysis and performance assessment of infrastructure systems and their resilience Emphasizes the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to develop the modeling, analysis, and experimental tools for designing more resilient and intelligent infrastructures Appropriate for practicing engineers and upper-level students, Experimental Vibration Analysis for Civil Structures: Testing, Sensing, Monitoring, and Control serves as a strategic roadmap for further research in the field of vibration testing and instrumentation of infrastructure systems.

This book explores the differential mode of people management in the Chinese context. Based on years of ethnographic research, this book illustrates how and why the guanxihu phenomena exist across different organisations and thus, the guanxi-hu could break the ‘organisational laws’ (e.g. structure and system; rules and regulations; policies and procedures). By focusing on personnel practices within organisations, the book provides an outlook for keeping indigenous management with Chinese characteristics. Most importantly, this book offers significant insights into how to ‘manage people’ in the private and public sectors within the Chinese cultural and institutional environment. The delta of Chinese management will appeal not only to academics and researchers who have an interest in management and Chinese studies, but also to expatriates and practitioners who are engaged in doing business and managing people with/in China.

A UN report recently found that the Asia Pacific is the world's most disaster-prone region. Indeed, considering that the region accounts for more than half of the total number of disasters in the world, building capacity and resilience to mitigate the devastating impact of disasters is a pressing task for local actors. This book takes a regional, multidisciplinary and multi-actor approach to improve understandings of how various actors respond to natural and human-induced disasters in the Asia-Pacific region. It examines the ideas and activities of four different categories of agents: civil society; military and state institutions; local cultural knowledge and the media; and economic initiatives, and these themes are approached from various academic disciplines, ranging from anthropology and cultural studies to economics, human geography and political science. The contributors draw their findings from a variety of countries in the region, including China, Fiji, India, Indonesia, Japan, Myanmar and Samoa, and importantly, focus on the interconnection between vulnerability and resilience. In turn, the book highlights how the nature and magnitude of disasters are influenced by social conditions, and aims to contribute to policies that prioritize development opportunities to enhance resilience. Further, it explores the complicated and multifaceted role of agency in building resilience, and presents a comparative framework for analysis and key findings from the Asia-Pacific region. The focus of this book on recent and ongoing disasters makes it a topical and timely contribution to the growing field of disaster management, and as such it will appeal to students and scholars of environmental studies, development studies and Asian politics.

This book introduces several observer-based methods, including: * the sliding-mode observer * the adaptive observer * the unknown-input observer and * the descriptor observer method for the problem of fault detection, isolation and estimation, allowing readers to compare and contrast the different approaches. The authors present basic material on Lyapunov stability theory, HY control theory, sliding-mode control theory and linear matrix inequality problems in a self-contained and step-by-step manner. Detailed and rigorous mathematical proofs are provided for all the results developed in the text so that readers can quickly gain a good understanding of the material. MATLAB (R) and Simulink (R) codes for all the examples, which can be downloaded from http://extras.springer.com, enable students to follow the methods and illustrative examples easily. The systems used in the examples make the book highly relevant to real-world problems in industrial control engineering and include a seventh-order aircraft model, a single-link flexible joint robot arm and a satellite controller. To help readers quickly find the information they need and to improve readability, the individual chapters are written so as to be semi-independent of each other. Robust Oberserver-Based Fault Diagnosis for Nonlinear Systems Using MATLAB (R) is of interest to process, aerospace, robotics and control engineers, engineering students and researchers with a control engineering background.

This book addresses computer scientists, IT specialists, mathematicians, knowledge engineers and programmers, who are engaged in research and practice of multicriteria decision making. Fuzzy measures, also known as capacities, allow one to combine degrees of preferences, support or fuzzy memberships into one representative value, taking into account interactions between the inputs. The notions of mutual reinforcement or redundancy are modeled explicitly through coefficients of fuzzy measures, and fuzzy integrals, such as the Choquet and Sugeno integrals combine the inputs. Building on previous monographs published by the authors and dealing with different aspects of aggregation, this book especially focuses on the Choquet and Sugeno integrals. It presents a number of new findings concerning computation of fuzzy measures, learning them from data and modeling interactions. The book does not require substantial mathematical background, as all the relevant notions are explained. It is intended as concise, timely and self-contained guide to the use of fuzzy measures in the field of multicriteria decision making.

A UN report recently found that the Asia Pacific is the world's most disaster-prone region. Indeed, considering that the region accounts for more than half of the total number of disasters in the world, building capacity and resilience to mitigate the devastating impact of disasters is a pressing task for local actors. This book takes a regional, multidisciplinary and multi-actor approach to improve understandings of how various actors respond to natural and human-induced disasters in the Asia-Pacific region. It examines the ideas and activities of four different categories of agents: civil society; military and state institutions; local cultural knowledge and the media; and economic initiatives, and these themes are approached from various academic disciplines, ranging from anthropology and cultural studies to economics, human geography and political science. The contributors draw their findings from a variety of countries in the region, including China, Fiji, India, Indonesia, Japan, Myanmar and Samoa, and importantly, focus on the interconnection between vulnerability and resilience. In turn, the book highlights how the nature and magnitude of disasters are influenced by social conditions, and aims to contribute to policies that prioritize development opportunities to enhance resilience. Further, it explores the complicated and multifaceted role of agency in building resilience, and presents a comparative framework for analysis and key findings from the Asia-Pacific region. The focus of this book on recent and ongoing disasters makes it a topical and timely contribution to the growing field of disaster management, and as such it will appeal to students and scholars of environmental studies, development studies and Asian politics.

This book introduces several observer-based methods, including: * the sliding-mode observer * the adaptive observer * the unknown-input observer and * the descriptor observer method for the problem of fault detection, isolation and estimation, allowing readers to compare and contrast the different approaches. The authors present basic material on Lyapunov stability theory, HY control theory, sliding-mode control theory and linear matrix inequality problems in a self-contained and step-by-step manner. Detailed and rigorous mathematical proofs are provided for all the results developed in the text so that readers can quickly gain a good understanding of the material. MATLAB (R) and Simulink (R) codes for all the examples, which can be downloaded from http://extras.springer.com, enable students to follow the methods and illustrative examples easily. The systems used in the examples make the book highly relevant to real-world problems in industrial control engineering and include a seventh-order aircraft model, a single-link flexible joint robot arm and a satellite controller. To help readers quickly find the information they need and to improve readability, the individual chapters are written so as to be semi-independent of each other. Robust Oberserver-Based Fault Diagnosis for Nonlinear Systems Using MATLAB (R) is of interest to process, aerospace, robotics and control engineers, engineering students and researchers with a control engineering background.

This book reviews the state-of-the-art in combinatorial testing, with particular emphasis on the automatic generation of test data. It describes the most commonly used approaches in this area - including algebraic construction, greedy methods, evolutionary computation, constraint solving and optimization - and explains major algorithms with examples. In addition, the book lists a number of test generation tools, as well as benchmarks and applications. Addressing a multidisciplinary topic, it will be of particular interest to researchers and professionals in the areas of software testing, combinatorics, constraint solving and evolutionary computation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 39th Computer Graphics International Conference on Advances in Computer Graphics, CGI 2022, held Virtually, during September 12-16, 2022. The 45 full papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 139 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: image analysis & processing; graphs & networks; estimation & feature matching; 3d reconstruction; rendering & animation; detection & recognition; colors, paintings & layout; synthesis & generation; ar & user interfaces; medical imaging; segmentation; object detection; image attention & perception; and modeling & simulation.

This book examines the key role played by local governments in China's market-oriented economic reform process since 1978. In particular, it addresses the much debated questions of why Communist Party officials at the local level embraced market reform despite its potentially detrimental effects on their power, and how the choices they made have shaped institutional changes and the pattern of development in the economies under their jurisdiction. In contrast to most recent studies of local governments in China, which have tended to explain local state activism in terms of the economic interests of local government officials, this book highlights the role that political interests have played in shaping economic behaviour. The contention is that the active involvement of local governments in the economy has been motivated not only by a desire to seek economic benefits, but also, and more importantly, by political considerations. The political perspective emphasised in this book leads to a reassessment of the nature and effect of the role of local government in the economic growth and institutional changes in China's transitional economy. Tracing the behaviour of local government to its political origin, the book not only explains more fully the motivational sources of economic activism at the local level, but also demonstrates the contradictory ways in which local governments intervene in the economy, the internal weakness of the local state-led development, and how problems caused by politically-motivated economic intervention catalysed the privatisation of the local government-run economic sector during mid-1990s.

The World Wide Web has become one of the hottest topics in social science. Scholars and professionals from various fields have put tremendous efforts into studying the World Wide Web. However, the dynamic environment of the World Wide Web challenges traditional research methods, which have proven valuable in studying traditional media. One of the methods is content analysis. How did the dynamic features of Web sites affect the studies using content analysis? What is the status quo of content analysis after 2000? What are the challenges, either the "old" ones identified by former research or the "new" ones emerging in the WWW era? What are the potentially valid solutions to those challenges? This book examines those issues by conducting a thematic meta-analysis on how researchers apply the content analysis method to the World Wide Web between 2000 and 2004. Each step was examined in studies using content analysis to analyze the WWW during this period. Problems and solutions were identified. Suggestions of improving these solutions are proposed. The book is addressed to scholars and professional in Mass Communications, Journalism. It is also directed towards scholars in Information Science and Technology.

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.