A drug is typically manufactured through chemical synthesis, which means that it is made by combining specific chemical ingredients in an ordered process. Biologics are medicines made from living cells through highly complex manufacturing processes and must be handled and administered under carefully monitored conditions. Biologics are used to prevent, treat, diagnose, or cure a variety of diseases including cancer, chronic kidney disease, autoimmune disorders, and infectious diseases. A biosimilar is a biologic that is similar to another biologic drug already that has already been approved. This book is a complete guide to the use of biologics and biosimilars in the treatment of dermatologic disorders. Beginning with an overview of the history and classification of biologics and the concept of biosimilars, the following chapters explain their therapeutic use for different skin conditions. The final sections cover related topics such as cost effectiveness and quality of life with biologic therapy, and the book concludes with discussion on future developments and the use of small molecule treatment. Key points Complete guide to use of biologics and biosimilars in treatment of dermatologic disorders Covers many different skin diseases and conditions Discusses related topics such as cost effectiveness and quality of life Covers future development of small molecule therapy

Manas Roy Chowdhuri was an unknown writer who was never exposed as one. Even so, he had a dream to publish a collection of stories dealing with subject matters very commonly visible in our society. The reader may experience all these stories in their daily lives, occurring all around them.

As always, society is dynamic and constantly changing. These twelve stories reflect our society from many different angles. This author was hopeful that acculturation and modernization might ultimately have a positive influence on our society.

Although recommendation systems have become a vital research area in the fields of cognitive science, approximation theory, information retrieval and management sciences, they still require improvements to make recommendation methods more effective and intelligent. Intelligent Techniques in Recommendation Systems: Contextual Advancements and New Methods is a comprehensive collection of research on the latest advancements of intelligence techniques and their application to recommendation systems and how this could improve this field of study.

"We live in the age of data. In the last few years, the methodology of extracting insights from data or "data science" has emerged as a discipline in its own right. The R programming language has become one-stop solution for all types of data analysis. The growing popularity of R is due its statistical roots and a vast open source package library. The goal of "Beginning Data Science with R" is to introduce the readers to some of the useful data science techniques and their implementation with the R programming language. The book attempts to strike a balance between the how: specific processes and methodologies, and understanding the why: going over the intuition behind how a particular technique works, so that the reader can apply it to the problem at hand. This book will be useful for readers who are not familiar with statistics and the R programming language.

"Eurasia: A New Peace Agenda" includes chapters from a distinguished group of Eurasian scholars, journalists, and diplomats. The volume is focused on a new peace agenda grounded in a dialogue among the Eurasia civilizations. Part I deals with the problems and prospects of such a dialogue and its consequences for world peace. Part II focuses on the old dilemmas and new challenges in Eurasian security. The nuclear arms race, religious resurgence, super-terrorism, militarism, imperialism, and confidence building are among the topics. Part III concentrates on globalization and regionalization as the two dominant Eurasian trends. The volume compares and contrasts regionalist trends in Europe, Asia, and North America. The competition and cooperation among different global forces led by the United States, Europe, and Asia for resources and identities are the main foci.

Today, Europe is facing a political crisis because it has not solved a double dilemma. The first one is institutional and concerns the frontiers of the Union and thus the number of potential regions. The second one is economic, and makes it necessary to choose between, on the one hand, the need to strengthen the European growth poles (especially the metropolitan regions) in order to compete successfully with the Triad and the Asiatic countries and, on the other, the obligation to ensure ???harmonious development??? and to distribute the structural funds more evenly or even to concentrate them in the Eastern countries and the less favoured regions characterized by atonic growth. In other words, the choice facing the European Commission reflects the crucial dilemma between size and integration and between equity and growth. In terms of territorial prospective and management, four main scenarios must be compared and their impacts must be estimated: the strengthening of concentration, the diffused metropolization, the increase of regional inequalities and the polycentrism.
This is the main reason why the question of European regional convergence is now attracting considerable attention, since polarization phenomena and specific regional trajectories are challenging the hypothesis of automatic catch-up within the European Union over nearly two decades. This interest is further compounded by the huge challenge of integrating the ten new Eastern countries, two other candidates in 2007 (Bulgaria and Romania) and probably several other ones in the near future (especially Croatia, but also Moldavia and Ukraine and, perhaps, Turkey). For regional policy-makers, the main concern is to makemonetary integration successful, to moderate the divergent forces and to stimulate the lagging territories.
This study of spatial convergence is very interesting, because it combines theoretical openness, access to recent statistical databases (REGIO) and the use of mathematical applications (Markov chains, Generalized Moments method), together with the possibility of conducting empirical tests leading to a new analysis of decentralization policies and to the characterization of new growth factors and new locational strategies.
All these methods are used to analyze the empirical reality of the European convergence process, for Western European countries and Eastern ones successively. A final chapter on the regional dynamics in Ukraine and Russia is also added. The results show a strong diversity of regional evolutions at an aggregate level and specific spatial dynamics at a sectoral level. The role of agglomeration economies (density, regional capitals) and spatial externalities (diffusive growth), especially through autocorrelation tests and fixed effects analysis, as well as the importance of regional specialization and of metropolarization are confirmed. To sum up, the main finding of this book is the coexistence of national convergence and regional divergence for the Western countries and the converse for the Eastern ones. All these empirical results shed light on the relevance of new economic geography, the need to distinguish spatial and institutional hierarchies and give some appropriate strategies to policymakers.
The questions of the quality of the integration and the prospect of further enlargement of the European Union to the East (up to the Urals frontier?)highlighted by these empirical findings demand ingenious political management in order to reconcile regional diversity (and especially the fact that a moderate level of inequalities could stimulate global growth) and the European project itself (not only the economic aspects but also the political and cultural aspects).
To conclude, the main question is whether the European Union has the means to play on different fields (geographic size, cultural mix and above all distribution of structural funds) without threatening its long-term growth and diluting its economic culture (and its ???social cohesion???) in the face of globalization.

This important volume provides a holistic understanding of the cultural, psychological, neurological and biological elements involved in human facial expressions and of computational models in the analyses of expressions. It includes methodological and technical discussions by leading scholars across the world on the subject. Automated and manual analysis of facial expressions, involving cultural, gender, age and other variables, is a growing and important area of research with important implications for cross-cultural interaction and communication of emotion, including security and clinical studies. This volume also provides a broad framework for the understanding of facial expressions of emotion with inputs drawn from the behavioural sciences, computational sciences and neurosciences.

This thesis discusses the privacy issues in speech-based applications such as biometric authentication, surveillance, and external speech processing services. Author Manas A. Pathak presents solutions for privacy-preserving speech processing applications such as speaker verification, speaker identification and speech recognition. The author also introduces some of the tools from cryptography and machine learning and current techniques for improving the efficiency and scalability of the presented solutions. Experiments with prototype implementations of the solutions for execution time and accuracy on standardized speech datasets are also included in the text. Using the framework proposed may now make it possible for a surveillance agency to listen for a known terrorist without being able to hear conversation from non-targeted, innocent civilians."

This important volume tackles the potential problems of international military disarmament. Distinguished scholars across several disciplines discuss possible negative economic and social consequences, including unemployment, conversion costs, and the related hampered growth of research and development, associated with the conversion from a military industrial economy to a civilian complex. The authors present techniques for managing sectoral and regional economic imbalances and conclude that disarmament would ultimately release resources for foreign aid to close the gap between the world's haves and have-nots.

Divided into three parts (Models of Disarmament and Conflict Analysis, Economic Conversion, and Management of Peace), this volume addresses specific topics such as techniques of management conflict, factors affecting military expenditures, new prospects for an East-West relationship, American strategic policy and NATO, defense expenditure and economic conversion, Third World arms production, and regional conflict in the wake of superpower convergence. These analyses and discussions will be of particular interest to scholars of Peace Studies, Political Science, Economics, Sociology, and Military Studies.

Although all religions and cultures preach the gospel and virtues of peace, the history of mankind is the history of war and peace; millions have perished in international and domestic conflicts, and many wars have been fought on behalf of those same religions and people who call for peace around the world. During the 20th century, at the height of human civilization, we have seen two world wars and many devastating region conflicts. Although the last two decades have seen a prevalence of domestic, rather than international conflict, these have been as vicious and as destructive as any other war. Further, we are still facing the threat of nuclear confrontation, and a new kind of war - the war on terror - is also taking place.Although there is widespread desire for peace, there is no sustained advocacy of it by our political and cultural leaders. Citizens the world over have become more insecure because of international and domestic conflicts, genocide, terrorism, drug and criminal activities, weapons of mass destruction, pandemic threats of infectious diseases like Aids and HIV, natural disasters, poverty, resource constraints, climate change, threats to the international financial system, and much else. All these are interrelated at some level. In the name of international and domestic security, billions of dollars are wasted on unproductive military spending in both developed and developing countries, when millions are starving and living without basic human needs.This book contains a number of original articles relating to military spending, military industrial establishments, peace keeping, terrorism, environmental security and democratic peace, prepared by leading scholars in the field. Since we are living in a globalized world, global security rather than national security is the relevant issue. Global security must be consistent with and complimentary to a basic human security, which preserves freedom from threats to people's rights and safety. Because peace is not just the absence of violence. It is related to all the above issues - the socio-economic, political and physical environment of the world. Making this clear is the focus of the book.

The objective of this book is to present the problems and possibilities of transferring technology from the developed countries to the developing countries to raise their standard of living. It develops the conceptual issues, legal ramifications, empirical testing of mathematical models and case studies of different industries in many countries. It contains articles by distinguished scholars in the field, practitioners and government officials. It is an important supplement to the hands-on approach used by many private industries and national and international organizations. The unique feature of this book is that it is multidisciplinary and that it has a balanced combination of abstract theoretical approaches and practical considerations.

Provides understanding of basics of IT technologies applied in Oil and Gas sector Includes deep comparison between different artificial intelligence techniques Analyses different simulators in Oil and Gas sector as well as discussion of AI applications Focusses on in-depth experimental and applied topics Details different case studies for upstream and downstream

Derived from the fourth edition of the well-known "Plastics Technology Handbook," Industrial Polymers, Specialty Polymers, and Their Applications covers a wide range of general and special types of polymers, along with a wealth of information about their applications.

The book first focuses on commonly used industrial polymers, including polypropylenes, low- and high-density polyethylenes, and poly(vinyl chloride), as well as less widely used polymer types, such as acrylics, ether polymers, cellulosics, sulfide polymers, silicones, polysulfones, polyether ether ketones, and polybenzimidazoles. It then explores polymer derivatives and polymeric combinations that play special and often critical roles in diverse fields of human activities. The polymers covered include liquid crystal, electroactive, ionic, and shape memory polymers; hydrogels; and nanocomposites. The volume concludes with a comprehensive overview of new developments in the use of polymers in a variety of areas.