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.

This book is a complete guide to dermatologic surgery for clinicians. Divided into 52 sections, the text begins with an overview of surgical instruments, local anaesthesia, sutures, dressings and skin biopsy. The following chapters cover numerous techniques for different dermatologic conditions, from mole surgery, vitiligo, and nail surgery, to Mohs surgery, laser scar revision, fillers, and much more. Each procedure is described with a step by step approach and includes tips and tricks, modifications, potential complications and recent advances. Both common and more complex disorders and techniques are explained in detail. The comprehensive text is further enhanced by more than 1800 clinical and surgical photographs, diagrams and tables. Key points Comprehensive guide to dermatologic surgery Covers numerous common and more complex disorders and techniques Tips and tricks, modifications, complications and recent advances highlighted for each topic Highly illustrated with more than 1800 photographs, diagrams and tables

The role of emotions is important in explaining conflicts and their resolution. Witness the emotions surrounding the outbreak of wars past and current and their endings. In order to introduce the perspective of emotions as an explanatory scheme of conflict escalation and crises, a comparison to classical conceptions such as the pursuit of power or commercial and financial interests is warranted. On first glance these two explanatory schemes seem to be at opposite extremes. However, new approaches to decision-making and rationality and challenges to the traditional expected utility model make these two conceptions much more compatible. The new perspective of rank dependent expected utility and the closely related notion of utility functions, which can both represent risk averse and risk preferring attitudes in decision-making go a long way in incorporating emotions within otherwise rational choices. One can thus build models that account more easily for conflict escalations but also for conflict resolution. These theoretical considerations are investigated within empirical cases of civil wars and shown to be effective in explaining the origins but also the breakdown of conflicts.

"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.

IADVL Color Atlas of Dermatology is a comprehensive, highly illustrated guide to dermatological disorders, from the most common to rare variants. The book is divided into 47 chapters grouped into nineteen sections, according to the classification of disorders. Sections include keratinisation disorders, bullous disorders, connective tissue disorders, infections and infestations, STDs and HIV, pigmentary disorders, disorders of vascular architecture, and skin tumours. Other sections include paediatric dermatology, drug reactions, and metabolic and nutritional disorders. The final chapter covers skin and systemic medicine. Enhanced by nearly 1900 full colour images, IADVL Color Atlas of Dermatology is a valuable resource for both dermatologists and dermatology trainees. Key Points Highly illustrated guide to a wide range of dermatological disorders 19 sections covering various disorder types 1892 full colour images

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.

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

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.