Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) is a generic term for all methods that help people making decisions according to their preferences, in situations where there is more than one conflicting criterion. It is a branch of operational research dealing with finding optimal results in complex scenarios including various indicators, conflicting objectives and criteria. The approach of MCDM involves decision making concerning quantitative and qualitative factors. The importance and success of MCDM are due to the fact that they have successfully dealt with different types of problematics for supporting decision makers such as choice, ranking and sorting, description. Even though, each of the different problematics in MCDM is important, Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Sorting Methods will focus on sorting approaches across a wide range of interesting techniques and research disciplines. The applications which have been and can be solved by these techniques are more and more important in current real-world decision-making problems. Therefore, the book provides a clear overview of MCDM sorting methods and the different tools which can be used to solve real-world problems by revising such tools and characterizing them according to their performance and suitability for different types of problems. The book is aimed at a broad audience including computer scientists, engineers, geography and GIS experts, business and financial management experts, environment experts, and all those professional people interested in MCDM and its applications. The book may also be useful for teaching MCDM courses in fields such as industrial management, computer science, and applied mathematics, as new developments in multi-criteria decision making.

Covering from 1915 to the present, this book deals with the role that artists and intellectuals have played regarding projects of European integration. Consciously or not, they partake of a tradition of Euroskepticism. Because Euroskepticism is often associated with the discourse of political elites, its literary and artistic expressions have gone largely unnoticed. This book addresses that gap. Taking Spain as a case study, author Luis Martin-Estudillo analyzes its conflict over its own Europeanness or exceptionalism, as well as the European view of Spain. He ranges from canonical writers like Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, and Zambrano to new media artists like Valeriano Lopez, Carlos Spottorno, and Santiago Sierra. Martin-Estudillo provides a new context for the current refugee crisis, the North-South divide among EU countries, and the generalized disaffection toward the project of European integration. The eclipsed critical tradition he discusses contributes to a deeper understanding of the notion of Europe and its institutional embodiments. It gives resonance to the intellectual and cultural history of Europe's ""peripheries"" and re-evaluates Euroskeptic contributions as one of the few hopes left to imagine ways to renew the promise of a union of the European nations.

Essays focus on Baroque as a concept and category of analysis which has been central to an understanding of Hispanic cultures during the last several hundred years

Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746-1828) was fascinated by reading, and Goya's attention to the act and consequences of literacy-apparent in some of his most ambitious, groundbreaking creations-is related to the reading revolution in which he participated. It was an unprecedented growth both in the number of readers and in the quantity and diversity of texts available, accompanied by a profound shift in the way they were consumed and, for the artist, represented. Goya and the Mystery of Reading studies the way Goya's work heralds the emergence of a new kind of viewer, one who he assumes can and does read, and whose comportment as a skilled interpreter of signs alters the sense of his art, multiplying its potential for meaning. While the reading revolution resulted from and contributed to the momentous social transformations of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Goya and the Mystery of Reading explains how this transition can be tracked in the work of Goya, an artist who aimed not to copy the world around him, but to read it.

Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746-1828) was fascinated by reading, and Goya's attention to the act and consequences of literacy-apparent in some of his most ambitious, groundbreaking creations-is related to the reading revolution in which he participated. It was an unprecedented growth both in the number of readers and in the quantity and diversity of texts available, accompanied by a profound shift in the way they were consumed and, for the artist, represented. Goya and the Mystery of Reading studies the way Goya's work heralds the emergence of a new kind of viewer, one who he assumes can and does read, and whose comportment as a skilled interpreter of signs alters the sense of his art, multiplying its potential for meaning. While the reading revolution resulted from and contributed to the momentous social transformations of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Goya and the Mystery of Reading explains how this transition can be tracked in the work of Goya, an artist who aimed not to copy the world around him, but to read it.

This in-depth, comparative study focuses on the economy, society, and political culture of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Viewing developments as they relate to the countries' common heritage of insularity, colonialism, and slavery, Luis Martinez-Fernandez points out profound, underlying balance-of-power transformations during a time of ostensibly small change in the region's political status.

Departing from earlier studies which regarded incest as a literary topos or dramatic metaphor foregrounding political, social, or legal issues, Words and Deeds: The Spectacle of Incest in English Renaissance Tragedy argues that the presence of incest on the Renaissance stage is a strategy for the enactment of the spectator's tragic experience. Incest is explored neither as a sin nor as a crime, but as an "unspeakable" experience filtered through dramatic words and deeds. The incitement of desire, visual pleasure, and unconscious fantasy, as well as traumatic rejection, pain, and horror, are all aspects of this paradoxical and uncanny experience. Aristotelian theory of tragedy, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Michel Foucault's notions of the deployment of sexuality and alliance, concur in the analysis of plays where incest is a central or a secondary motif - Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, Beaumont and Fletcher's Cupid's Revenge, Webster's The Duchess of Malfi - and others where incest is an effect of language and mise-en-scene - Sackville and Norton's Gorboduc, Shakespeare's King Lear. The variety of topics and the combination of critical perspectives makes In Words and Deeds an attractive book for students and teachers of Renaissance drama, as well as for those with a special interest in psychoanalytic and other new theoretical approaches to the literary text.

This book presents the latest results of quantum properties of light in the nanostructured environment supporting surface plasmons, including waveguide quantum electrodynamics, quantum emitters, strong-coupling phenomena and lasing in plasmonic structures. Different approaches are described for controlling the emission and propagation of light with extreme light confinement and field enhancement provided by surface plasmons. Recent progress is reviewed in both experimental and theoretical investigations within quantum plasmonics, elucidating the fundamental physical phenomena involved and discussing the realization of quantum-controlled devices, including single-photon sources, transistors and ultra-compact circuitry at the nanoscale.

This book recognizes Mexico's effects and challenges in a natural disaster and offers empirical risk-reduction methods in critical cases. The proposals considered here include real and detailed analysis, a set of models, frameworks, strategies, and findings in the three stages of the disaster (before-during-after). This book: describes the methodology to find secure locations for the Regional Humanitarian Response Depot; offers recommendations for the sites and creation of an Export Logistics Cluster; shows how to use available technology and information to locate volunteers in the right spots describes mathematical models to help to allocate procedure of resources for restoring the affected community and proposes actions to create resilience in the country's main economic sectors, including agriculture and industry. The processes applied at recent disasters such as the 19S earthquake and their results are used as case studies, identifying possibilities for further improvement. The book also describes new trends for Mexico due to climate change and makes suggestions for mitigating future disasters. The proposals are also replicable to other highly populated societies with similar socio-economic structures. Finally, this book is the basis for generating more innovative recommendations by researchers, graduate students, academics, professionals, and practitioners to obtain better planning and better collaboration between all the humanitarian chain actors. This book intends to be of interest as a fundamental tool for decision-makers, governments, non-governmental organizations, and enterprises.

This book presents methods for optimising the spatial and network configuration of solar radiation measuring stations. Various physical and mathematical models are demonstrated, which together with high quality measurements, provide the essential tools to generate and validate solar resource estimates to improve the mapping of solar resources. Each chapter deals with a specific topic, showing its methodology, and providing examples of how to apply these techniques with reference to current projects around the world. These topics include: * Radiometric measurement campaigns;* Equipment calibration, installation, operation, and maintenance;* Data quality assurance and assessment;* Solar radiation modelling from satellite images and numerical models;* Downscaling and kriging interpolation of solar radiation;* Simulation of electric solar power plant generation;* Solar radiation forecasting;* Applications of solar energy; and* Socio-economic benefits of solar energy. The contributors present the statistical and physical models needed to derive solar radiation from satellite images and numerical models, emphasising the importance of measuring solar radiation accurately. They also show the classical models used to generate synthetic data, clear sky models and ancillary air quality and meteorological data from different input sources. Solar Resources Mapping provides industry professionals with methodologies and tools to build solar irradiance maps for different applications. The book will also benefit students and researchers as it serves as a main technical reference, presenting the basic terminology and fundamentals for solar resource mapping that include methods for assessing measurement uncertainty.

Crossing Racial Borders: The Epistemic Empowerment of the Subaltern explores critically the racial, socioeconomic, historical, and political contemporary conditions of the lived experiences of the subaltern, the oppressed. Through the lens of the decolonial school of thought developed by Latin American thinkers and scholars, this text focuses on the identification and analysis of the subalterns' praxis of living, thinking, knowing, and doing. The contributors delve into the subalterns' agency at work and how their [inter]subjective/reflective actions, gestures, and thoughts are deep-seated in subverting and resisting the material and symbolic coloniality of power's exploitation, categorization, and oppression. Drawing from sociological, anthropological, literary, and historical approaches, a new set of ideas and rationalities uncovers and challenges the complicities of modernity/coloniality (power-pattern-matrix) through new narratives and discursive epistemic-frames of empowerment and agency.

When the World Turned Upside Down is a collection of 65 essays and opinion columns written between 2019 and 2022, a period of momentous-some unimaginable-developments in the United States and across the world. This book stands at the intersection between opinion journalism and history, its individual components offering a dialogue between past and present (or present and past). They are, to use the often-quoted phrase, first drafts of history. Over the past five years, the world has witnessed several "unimaginables" about which the author felt compelled to write. Some of the book's essays identify, analyze and connect parallels between the U.S. Antebellum and Civil War and the contemporary increasingly polarized context that reached an explosive peak during the 2020 elections and the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Shrouded in a cloud of unprecedented global pestilence, the world has witnessed dramatic political and geopolitical change, mostly for the worse: China, Russia, Hungary, Belarus, Myanmar, Cuba, even Puerto Rico. Essays in this book discuss these transformations from a historical perspective as well as mass popular resistance, in places like Cuba, where they seemed unimaginable. The book's final section, entitled "Not Boring at all: Globalization and World Politics," explores the global ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic, geopolitical rearrangements related to China's meteoric ascendance as world power, Russia's militaristic expansionism and related topics.

Food Microbiology and Biotechnology: Safe and Sustainable Food Production explores the most important advances in food microbiology and biotechnology, with special emphasis on the challenges that the industry faces in the era of sustainable development and food security problems. Chapters cover broad research areas that offer original and novel highlights in microbiology and biotechnology and other related sciences. The authors discuss food bioprocesses, fermentation, food microbiology, functional foods, nutraceuticals, extraction of natural products, nano- and micro-technology, innovative processes/bioprocesses for utilization of by-products, alternative processes requiring less energy or water, among other topics. The volume relates some of the current developments in food microbiology that address the relationship between the production, processing, service and consumption of foods and beverages with the bacteriology, mycology, virology, parasitology, and immunology. Demonstrating the potential and actual developments across the innovative advances in food microbiology and biotechnology, this volume will be of great interest to students, teachers, and researchers in the areas of biotechnology and food microbiology.

This book is the latest volume in the popular ""Hispanic Issues"" series. The volume explores the role played by culture in the transition to democracy in Latin America's Southern Cone (Argentina, Uruguay, Chile) and Spain, with a focus on opposing stances of acceptance and defiance by artists and intellectuals in post-authoritarian regimes.

Corporate success has been changed by the importance of new developments in Business Analytics (BA) and furthermore by the support of computational intelligence- based techniques. This book opens a new avenues in these subjects, identifies key developments and opportunities. The book will be of interest for students, researchers and professionals to identify innovative ways delivered by Business Analytics based on computational intelligence solutions. They help elicit information, handle knowledge and support decision-making for more informed and reliable decisions even under high uncertainty environments.Computational Intelligence for Business Analytics has collected the latest technological innovations in the field of BA to improve business models related to Group Decision-Making, Forecasting, Risk Management, Knowledge Discovery, Data Breach Detection, Social Well-Being, among other key topics related to this field.

Climate change is expected to modify the hydrological cycle and affect freshwater resources. Groundwater is a critical source of fresh drinking water for almost half of the world's population and it also supplies irrigated agriculture. Groundwater is also important in sustaining streams, lakes, wetlands, and associated ecosystems. But despite this, knowledge about the impact of climate change on groundwater quantity and quality is limited. Direct impacts of climate change on natural processes (groundwater recharge, discharge, storage, saltwater intrusion, biogeochemical reactions, chemical fate and transport) may be exacerbated by human activities (indirect impacts). Increased groundwater abstraction, for example, may be needed in areas with unsustainable or contaminated surface water resources caused by droughts and floods. Climate change effects on groundwater resources are, therefore, closely linked to other global change drivers, including population growth, urbanization and land-use change, coupled with other socio-economic and political trends. Groundwater response to global changes is a complex function that depends on climate change and variability, topography, aquifer characteristics, vegetation dynamics, and human activities. This volume contains case studies from diverse aquifer systems, scientific methods, and climatic settings that have been conducted globally under the framework of the UNESCO-IHP project Groundwater Resources Assessment under the Pressures of Humanity and Climate Change (GRAPHIC). This book presents a current and global synthesis of scientific findings and policy recommendations for scientists, water managers and policy makers towards adaptive management of groundwater sustainability under future climate change and variability.

Food Microbiology and Biotechnology: Safe and Sustainable Food Production explores the most important advances in food microbiology and biotechnology, with special emphasis on the challenges that the industry faces in the era of sustainable development and food security problems. Chapters cover broad research areas that offer original and novel highlights in microbiology and biotechnology and other related sciences. The authors discuss food bioprocesses, fermentation, food microbiology, functional foods, nutraceuticals, extraction of natural products, nano- and micro-technology, innovative processes/bioprocesses for utilization of by-products, alternative processes requiring less energy or water, among other topics. The volume relates some of the current developments in food microbiology that address the relationship between the production, processing, service and consumption of foods and beverages with the bacteriology, mycology, virology, parasitology, and immunology. Demonstrating the potential and actual developments across the innovative advances in food microbiology and biotechnology, this volume will be of great interest to students, teachers, and researchers in the areas of biotechnology and food microbiology.

VI Special thanks also go to the employees of the case study companies for their open and friendly support. These are Bernhard Panther and Armin ZeiB from Bosch, Thomas Adler and Jiirgen Herb from Goodyear, Stefan Arnold and Wolfgang Gopfert from Porsche, Bernhard Oymann and Thomas Peilert from Schenker, as well as Ute Leppert and Jorg Mieger from SupplyOn. From SAP, Martin Edelmann, Claus Grunewald, Christian Lienert, Frank Klingl, Klaus Kreplin, Dr. Andreas Otto, Karsten Schierholt, and Dr. Stefan Theis gave us extraordinary support by sharing their know-how. Special thanks also go to Uwe Neuner from IBM for providing his know-how in the area SAP Business Connector. Finally, we would like to thank Matthias Kamberg, Daniel Horstkotte, and Zoe Tsesmelidakis from the FrankfurtlMain University as well as Isabel Kuttner, Tina Werthmann, and Patrick Johnscher of the Freiberg University of Technology (TV Freiberg) for their continuous friendly support while this book was being written. Moreover, we would like to thank Jennifer Brundage from SAP for translating the manuscript. The authors Preface for the First Edition The formation of inter-organizational cooperation is increasingly used to improve the partners' competitive position in a global world economy. This tendency can also be observed in logistics. Several "layers" are involved in a supply chain: vendors, manufacturers, retail companies, logistics service providers, and finally the end customers. Supply chain management attempts to optimize the flows of goods and information between companies.

This publication is a compilation of studies on religious instruction in state schools. As Europe goes through a "social revolution" with the influence of the church and religious instruction in state schools being opened to discussion, this book describes the diversity between states and analyzes the legislative basis of religious instruction in various countries. The comparative analyses will be of value to researchers in educational research and to educational policymakers.

Scholarly and popular attention tends to focus heavily on Cuba's recent history: its notoriety as the world's largest exporter of sugar and the Western hemisphere's first socialist nation. Key to the New World fills the gap in our knowledge of the island before 1700, examining Cuba's formative centuries in depth. Luis Martinez-Fernandez presents a holistic portrait of the island nation, interrelating its geography, economy, society, politics, and culture. He weaves these threads into a narrative that begins with the first arrival of indigenous people 7,000 years ago. He explores the conquest and establishment of colonial rule and how the island's geographic uniqueness made it an ideal launching pad for Spanish conquests into Central America, Mexico, and Florida. While considering the role of Cuba and the Caribbean as a theater for European power struggles, Martinez-Fernandez also focuses intimately on the people who both influenced and were influenced by these larger, impersonal forces. In these often-overlooked centuries, Martinez-Fernandez finds the roots of many of Cuba's enduring economic, political, social, and cultural complexities. The result is a sweeping history, a seminal text that makes clear that to fully grasp revolutionary or contemporary Cuba we must first understand what came before.

Always considered a classic renewable resource, after a hundred thousand years of farming and industry, rivers in many parts of the world are running dry and the groundwater is over pumped. In addition, the rate at which water sources are becoming contaminated with waste from humans, industry, and agriculture is truly alarming. Do these factors add up to a water crisis that merits drastic, large-scale action? Not necessarily say the editors of Water Crisis: Myth or Reality. They challenge this pessimism, concluding that while there are serious global water issues to be considered, the concept of a global water crisis is largely overstated. The book examines the issues and explores which conditions are permanent and unchangeable and which are remediable and changeable. The chapters explore when and where severe regional and local water problems occur and make suggestions about how they may be solved in a deliberate, non-crisis manner. The book covers recent breakthroughs in desalination technologies, the eco-sanitation revolution, international trade in agricultural products, methods of governance and negotiation in water allocation, and pricing and devolution of property rights and the roles they play in solving water issues. The editors, along with a panel of world-renowned experts, suggest that water issues can be solved over the next few decades using new technologies and processes.