Over a decade on from the action of the original movie 'American Pie' (1999), the characters descend on their home town East Great Falls, Michigan for their ten-year high school reunion.

Over the course of a wild weekend, sparks fly as Jim (Biggs), Stifler (Seann William Scott), Oz (Chris Klein) and Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) reconvene and reconnect.

Jim and Michelle (Alyson Hannigan) are still married, but things get wobbly when their next door neighbour develops a crush on Jim. Meanwhile, Stifler, stuck in a dead-end temping job, is having a hard time with the ladies, Oz has hit the big time after winning a TV talent show, and Finch is still hankering after Stifler's 'MILF' mother.

This special book asks children a simple question: How Can We Be Kind? The answer is: by learning from the animal kingdom! Animals demonstrate kindness and empathy towards each other, and care and compassion can be seen all throughout the natural world. This book shows children the ways they can be kind just like animalsare to each other, while at the same time teaching them about the magic and the beauty of the natural world. They can learn to be welcoming like capybaras, who let other animals sit on top of them while they wallow in mud. Or perhaps they might want to be like dolphins, who guide other species to their destinations. Or maybe they would like to work together like ants and bees, share what they have like jackdaws or stick up for their friends like zebras. With beautiful illustrations from Darla Okada, this beautiful picture book will enchant and entertain children time and time again. There are facts at the back about how each animal lives with and looks after its fellow creatures. This sweet and thoughtful book is both a celebration of the animal world and a manifesto for being kind in everyday life.

This book gathers the peer-reviewed proceedings of the 14th International Symposium, PRADS 2019, held in Yokohama, Japan, in September 2019. It brings together naval architects, engineers, academic researchers and professionals who are involved in ships and other floating structures to share the latest research advances in the field. The contents cover a broad range of topics, including design synthesis for ships and floating systems, production, hydrodynamics, and structures and materials. Reflecting the latest advances, the book will be of interest to researchers and practitioners alike.

This book gathers the peer-reviewed proceedings of the 14th International Symposium, PRADS 2019, held in Yokohama, Japan, in September 2019. It brings together naval architects, engineers, academic researchers and professionals who are involved in ships and other floating structures to share the latest research advances in the field. The contents cover a broad range of topics, including design synthesis for ships and floating systems, production, hydrodynamics, and structures and materials. Reflecting the latest advances, the book will be of interest to researchers and practitioners alike.

This book is a compilation of advanced research and applications on robotic item picking and warehouse automation for e-commerce applications. The works in this book are based on results that came out of the Amazon Robotics Challenge from 2015-2017, which focused on fully automated item picking in a warehouse setting, a topic that has been assumed too complicated to solve or has been reduced to a more tractable form of bin picking or single-item table top picking. The book's contributions reveal some of the top solutions presented from the 50 participant teams. Each solution works to address the time-constraint, accuracy, complexity, and other difficulties that come with warehouse item picking. The book covers topics such as grasping and gripper design, vision and other forms of sensing, actuation and robot design, motion planning, optimization, machine learning and artificial intelligence, software engineering, and system integration, among others. Through this book, the authors describe how robot systems are built from the ground up to do a specific task, in this case, item picking in a warehouse setting. The compiled works come from the best robotics research institutions and companies globally.

This special book asks children a simple question: How Can We Be Kind? The answer is: by learning from the animal kingdom! Animals demonstrate kindness and empathy towards each other, and care and compassion can be seen all throughout the natural world. This book shows children the ways they can be kind just like animalsare to each other, while at the same time teaching them about the magic and the beauty of the natural world. They can learn to be welcoming like capybaras, who let other animals sit on top of them while they wallow in mud. Or perhaps they might want to be like dolphins, who guide other species to their destinations. Or maybe they would like to work together like ants and bees, share what they have like jackdaws or stick up for their friends like zebras. With beautiful illustrations from Darla Okada, this beautiful picture book will enchant and entertain children time and time again. There are facts at the back about how each animal lives with and looks after its fellow creatures. This sweet and thoughtful book is both a celebration of the animal world and a manifesto for being kind in everyday life.

This book examines what mechanisms enable science-intensive organizations to broaden beneficiaries of science in urban settings. Focusing on organizations that constitute urban resilience systems and networks, it maps the contributions of academic institutions, established multinationals, and entrepreneur firms in environmental, material, and related life sciences. It then develops a model of strategy and governance for organizations to invest in and implement new environmental material science projects. This book provides researchers with a framework based on management theories of R&D and resource allocation for resolving urban issues.

Japanese semiconductor firms are well known for obtaining dynamics in a short period of time and achieving even global leadership. A significant portion of their success are attributable to cooperative interfirm relations and the development of intermediate organizational structure based on long-term relationship between firms. The purpose of this book is to explain how interfirm relations contributed to their dynamics during the golden age of the semiconductor industry. Meanwhile this book clarifies the real source of dynamics in interfirm relations and how the firms have interacted. The author concludes that the competitive-cum-cooperative (CCC) interfirm interaction are observed. Quantitative and qualitative findings show that firms enjoy not only flexible cooperation based synergy effects, but also dynamics market-like effects by creating competition among partners through CCC interaction.

Focuses on the process by which manually crafting interactive, hypertextual maps clarifies one's own understanding, communicates it to others, and enables collective intelligence. The authors see mapping software as visual tools for reading and writing in a networked age. In an information ocean, the challenge is to find meaningful patterns around which we can weave plausible narratives. Maps of concepts, discussions and arguments make the connections between ideas tangible - and critically, disputable. With 22 chapters from leading researchers and practitioners (5 of them new for this edition), the reader will find the current state-of-the-art in the field. Part 1 focuses on knowledge maps for learning and teaching in schools and universities, before Part 2 turns to knowledge maps for information analysis and knowledge management in professional communities, but with many cross-cutting themes: * reflective practitioners documenting the most effective ways to map * conceptual frameworks for evaluating representations * real world case studies showing added value for professionals * more experimental case studies from research and education * visual languages, many of which work on both paper and with software * knowledge cartography software, much of it freely available and open source * visit the companion website for extra resources: books.kmi.open.ac.uk/knowledge-cartography Knowledge Cartography will be of interest to learners, educators, and researchers in all disciplines, as well as policy analysts, scenario planners, knowledge managers and team facilitators. Practitioners will find new perspectives and tools to expand their repertoire, while researchers will find rich enough conceptual grounding for further scholarship.

Compiling the expertise of nine pioneers of the field, Magnetic Bearings - Theory, Design, and Application to Rotating Machinery offers an encyclopedic study of this rapidly emerging field with a balanced blend of commercial and academic perspectives. Every element of the technology is examined in detail, beginning at the component level and proceeding through a thorough exposition of the design and performance of these systems.

The book is organized in a logical fashion, starting with an overview of the technology and a survey of the range of applications. A background chapter then explains the central concepts of active magnetic bearings while avoiding a morass of technical details. From here, the reader continues to a meticulous, state-of-the-art exposition of the component technologies and the manner in which they are assembled to form the AMB/rotor system. These system models and performance objectives are then tied together through extensive discussions of control methods for both rigid and flexible rotors, including consideration of the problem of system dynamics identification. Supporting this, the issues of system reliability and fault management are discussed from several useful and complementary perspectives. At the end of the book, numerous special concepts and systems, including micro-scale bearings, self-bearing motors, and self-sensing bearings, are put forth as promising directions for new research and development.

Newcomers to the field will find the material highly accessible while veteran practitioners will be impressed by the level of technical detail that emerges from a combination of sophisticated analysis and insights gleaned from many collective years of practical experience. An exhaustive, self-contained text on active magnetic bearing technology, this book should be a core reference for anyone seeking to understand or develop systems using magnetic bearings.

This book deals with one of the most novel advances in mathematical modeling for applied scientific technology, including computer graphics, public-key encryption, data visualization, statistical data analysis, symbolic calculation, encryption, error correcting codes, and risk management. It also shows that mathematics can be used to solve problems from nature, e.g., slime mold algorithms.

One of the unique features of this book is that it shows readers how to use pure and applied mathematics, especially those mathematical theory/techniques developed in the twentieth century, and developing now, to solve applied problems in several fields of industry. Each chapter includes clues on how to use "mathematics" to solve concrete problems faced in industry as well as practical applications.

The target audience is not limited to researchers working in applied mathematics and includes those in engineering, material sciences, economics, and life sciences.

ZnO has been the central theme of research in the past decade due to its various applications in band gap engineering, and textile and biomedical industries. In nanostructured form, it offers ample opportunities to realize tunable optical and optoelectronic properties and it was also termed as a potential material to realize room temperature ferromagnetism. This book presents 17 high-quality contributory chapters on ZnO related systems written by experts in this field. These chapters will help researchers to understand and explore the varied physical properties to envisage device applications of ZnO in thin film, heterostructure and nanostructure forms.

This book gathers the peer-reviewed proceedings of the 14th International Symposium, PRADS 2019, held in Yokohama, Japan, in September 2019. It brings together naval architects, engineers, academic researchers and professionals who are involved in ships and other floating structures to share the latest research advances in the field. The contents cover a broad range of topics, including design synthesis for ships and floating systems, production, hydrodynamics, and structures and materials. Reflecting the latest advances, the book will be of interest to researchers and practitioners alike.

The authors explain the rewarding results from the interdisciplinary collaboration between an environmental study group working on coastal ecosystems and effects of oil spills and applied mathematicians modelling wave motion on sandy beaches. By using the unified Navier-Stokes equations with a Bingham fluid model for spilled oil, multi-phase flow analysis were made. Decomposition of spilled oil by bacteria was simulated as a chemical reaction, and the theoretical and numerical analysis suggested a countermeasure to help reduce stress on coastal ecosystems. The new understanding of how ecosystems both depend upon, and help to determine, the nature of the shoreline demonstrates promising ways to better assist and exploit the regenerative powers inherent in nature.

How did Japanese companies, technology-supporting organizations, and governments reformulate organizational strategies, industrial structures, and institutions to revive Japanese high-tech industries (semiconductor, telecommunications, and biotechnology) in the 1990s? This book takes a comprehensive look at the question by integrating the fields of institutional economics and corporate strategy, an approach that will be of significant interest theoretically and empirically to scholars, professionals, and graduate students. Complex interactions among diverse technology-related actors are presented, focusing on co-evolution among market changes induced by technology innovation, macro-level institutional arrangements for innovation, and corporate strategies for survival. Insights are provided on diverse types of institutional arrangements, technology innovation policies, and management practices for companies and technology organizations.

New research reveals that plants actively acquire nutrients; the acquisition process is not a passive one in which plants simply wait for dissolved nutrients to come closer to their roots. In fact plants play a far more active role than once was understood to be possible in nutrient acquisition and in adaptation to problem soils. This book presents an excellent overview and summary of new concepts of plant nutrient acquisition mechanisms, and sets forth their practical implications in crop production. The scope is wide ranging, from biochemical, molecular, and genetic analysis of nutrient acquisition to global nutritional problems. Especially noteworthy are the sections on the cell apoplast, phosphorus-solubilizing organisms, and direct uptake of macro-organic molecules. With contributions by leading scientists worldwide, the book provides an invaluable resource for researchers in plant and environmental sciences and in agronomy and other branches of agriculture.

This book relates the experiences of a range of Western writers who went to Japan as teachers and lecturers, covering a period of over 100 years. It discusses East-West cultural differences; Western 'individualism' encountering Japanese 'formal' society; and draws on the author's interviews with many of the writers featured. It includes some hitherto unpublished correspondence, as well as comments on their published works. The author hopes her book will encourage a deeper understanding between East and West.

Over the past decade the topic of energy and environment has been ackno- edged among many people as a critical issue to be solved in 21st century since the Kyoto Protocol came into e?ect in 1997. Its political recognition was put forward especially at Heiligendamm in 2007, when the e?ect of carbon dioxide emission and its hazard in global climate were discussed and shared univ- sallyascommonknowledge.Controllingtheglobalwarmingintheeconomical framework of massive development worldwide through this new century is a very challenging problem not only among political, economical, or social c- cles but also among technological or scienti?c communities. As long as the humans depend on the combustion of fossil for energy resources, the waste heat exhaustion and CO emission are inevitable. 2 In order to establish a new era of energy saving and environment benign society, which is supported by technologies and with social consensus, it is important to seek for a framework where new clean energy system is inc- porated as infrastructure for industry and human activities. Such a society strongly needs innovative technologies of least CO emission and e?cient en- 2 ergy conversion and utilization from remaining fossil energies on the Earth. Energy recycling system utilizing natural renewable energies and their c- version to hydrogen may be the most desirable option of future clean energy society. Thus the society should strive to change its energy basis, from foss- consuming energy to clean and recycling energy.

This volume explores the integration of recent research on everyday, classroom, and professional scientific thinking. It brings together an international group of researchers to present core findings from each context; discuss connections between contexts, and explore structures; technologies, and environments to facilitate the development and practice of scientific thinking. The chapters focus on:
* situations from young children visiting museums,
* middle-school students collaborating in classrooms,
* undergraduates learning about research methods, and
* professional scientists engaged in cutting-edge research.
A diverse set of approaches are represented, including sociocultural description of situated cognition, cognitive enthnography, educational design experiments, laboratory studies, and artificial intelligence. This unique mix of work from the three contexts deepens our understanding of each subfield while at the same time broadening our understanding of how each subfield articulates with broader issues of scientific thinking. To provide a common focus for exploring connections between everyday, instructional, and professional scientific thinking, the book uses a "practical implications" subtheme. In particular, each chapter has direct implications for the design of learning environments to facilitate scientific thinking.

This edited book is the first one written in English that deals comprehensively with behavior metrics. The term “behaviormetrics� comprehends the research including all sorts of quantitative approaches to disclose human behavior. Researchers in behavior metrics have developed, extended, and improved methods such as multivariate statistical analysis, survey methods, cluster analysis, machine learning, multidimensional scaling, corresponding analysis or quantification theory, network analysis, clustering, factor analysis, test theory, and related factors. In the spirit of behavior metrics, researchers applied these methods to data obtained by surveys, experiments, or websites from a diverse range of fields.  The purpose of this book is twofold. One is to represent studies that display how the basic elements of behavior metrics have developed into present-day behavior metrics. The other is to represent studies performed mainly by those who would like to pioneer new fields of behavior metrics and studies that display elements of future behavior metrics. These studies consist of various characteristics such as those dealing with theoretical or conceptual subjects, the algorithm, the model, the method, and the application to a wide variety of fields. This book helps readers to understand the present and future of behavior metrics. 

Japan's school curriculum, revised for the 2020s, introduces new subjects and, perhaps more importantly, a new vision for teaching referred to as 'active learning'. This book examines the social and political realities that provided space for this unprecedented curriculum reform; the policymaking process through which it was refined; its envisaged pedagogy, and the intended and unintended outcomes of the new requirements, both on the ground in each school subject and across the education system. Finally, the book steps back to consider the possible future of 'active learning' and direction of the course of study in this decade and the next. This book will be of interest to those researching contemporary Japanese education, education policy, curriculum studies and equality of educational opportunity.

The four volumes of Game Equilibrium Models present applications of non-cooperative game theory. Problems of strategic interaction arising in biology, economics, political science and the social sciences in general are treated in 42 papers on a wide variety of subjects. Internationally known authors with backgrounds in various disciplines have contributed original research. The reader finds innovative modelling combined with advanced methods of analysis. The four volumes are the outcome of a research year at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of the University of Bielefeld. The close interaction of an international interdisciplinary group of researchers has produced an unusual collection of remarkable results of great interest for everybody who wants to be informed on the scope, potential, and future direction of work in applied game theory. Volume IV Social and Political Interaction contains game equilibrium models focussing on social and political interaction within communities or states or between states, i.e. national and international social and political interaction. Specific aspects of those interactions are modelled as non-cooperative games and their equilibria are analysed.

This book describes the state-of-the-art in RF, analog, and mixed-signal circuit design for Software Defined Radio (SDR). It synthesizes for analog/RF circuit designers the most important general design approaches to take advantage of the most recent CMOS technology, which can integrate millions of transistors, as well as several real examples from the most recent research results.

The four volumes of Game Equilibrium Models present applications of non-cooperative game theory. Problems of strategic interaction arising in biology, economics, political science and the social sciences in general are treated in 42 papers on a wide variety of subjects. Internationally known authors with backgrounds in various disciplines have contributed original research. The reader finds innovative modelling combined with advanced methods of analysis. The four volumes are the outcome of a research year at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of the University of Bielefeld. The close interaction of an international interdisciplinary group of researchers has produced an unusual collection of remarkable results of great interest for everybody who wants to be informed on the scope, potential, and future direction of work in applied game theory. Volume III Strategic Bargaining contains ten papers on game equilibrium models of bargaining. All these contributions look at bargaining situations as non-cooperative games. General models of two-person and n-person bargaining are explored.

This paper represents the collaborative work of a game theorist and a policy analyst in an attempt to examine severa! questions that go to the hearl of the way individuala achieve social order. The capacity of any individual to undertake long-term, productive activities that affect and are affected by the actiona of other individuala dependa upon gaining a minimallevel of predictability among those involved. No one could successfully drive to work if the behavior of other drivera were noi relatively predictable. No one could operate a stare, if potential consumers did not purcha. se, rather than stea!, the commodities offered to the public. No one would ma. ke a. ny investments other than those tha. t would be made by a solitary individual in an isolated setting (the cla. ssic Robinson Crusoe situation). One of the ways that individuals achieve predictability in social arrangements is to a. gree to follow a set of normative prescriptions a. bout what they must, must not, or may do. Agreeing to a set of prescriptions is relatively easy. Actually following those prescriptions over time when temptations arise offering potentially high payoffs, is not at all easy. In natural settings, individUala follow agreed upon prescriptions to a greater or lesser extent depending on enforcement levels. A frequent assumption made by policy ana. lysts a. nd game theorists is tha. t enforcement is externa! to the situa. tion under analysis. That a.