Bücher veröffentlicht von Springer International Publishing

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Digital Economy, ICDEc 2017, held in Sidi Bou Said, Tunisia, in May 2017. The 18 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 46 submissions. The theme of ICDEc 2017 was "e;Digital Economy: Emerging Technologies and Business Innovation"e;. The conference offered a number of sessions discussing innovative research focusing on emerging technologies which support the digital transformation of business and the economy: digital marketing, digital economy and e-learning, data science and security, and uncertainty in Web data.

This book provides an interdisciplinary overview of the causes and impacts of COVID-19 on populations, economies, politics, institutions and environments from all world regions. The book maps the causes, effects and impacts of the virus and describes the impact of the virus on among others health care, teaching and learning, travel, tourism, daily life, local and regional economies, media impacts, elections, and indigenous populations and much more. Contributions to this book come from the humanities, social and policy science disciplines as well as from emerging transdisciplinary fields including climate change, sustainability, health care and epidemiology, security, art, visualization, economic and social well-being, law and borderland studies. As such, this book will be a rich source of information to all those geographers, social scientists and urban and regional planners working in this field.

This book introduces readers to advanced data science techniques for signal mining in connection with agriculture. It shows how to apply heuristic modeling to improve farm-level efficiency, and how to use sensors and data intelligence to provide closed-loop feedback, while also providing recommendation techniques that yield actionable insights.The book also proposes certain macroeconomic pricing models, which data-mine macroeconomic signals and the influence of global economic trends on small-farm sustainability to provide actionable insights to farmers, helping them avoid financial disasters due to recurrent economic crises.The book is intended to equip current and future software engineering teams and operations research experts with the skills and tools they need in order to fully utilize advanced data science, artificial intelligence, heuristics, and economic models to develop software capabilities that help to achieve sustained food security for future generations.

Dieses Buch bietet einzigartige und umfassende konzeptionelle Erklärungen der Quantenfeldtheorie und des Standardmodells der Teilchenphysik. Wie können fundamentale Teilchen als Wellen im Vakuum existieren? Wie können solche Wellen Teilcheneigenschaften wie z. B. Trägheit haben? Was verbirgt sich hinter dem Begriff der virtuellen Teilchen? Warum und wie üben die Teilchen Kräfte aufeinander aus? Und nicht zuletzt: Was sind überhaupt Kräfte? Dies sind einige der zentralen Fragen, auf die die Quantenfeldtheorie und das Standardmodell der Teilchenphysik faszinierende Antworten geben. Leider sind diese Theorien hochgradig mathematisch, so dass die meisten Menschen - sogar viele Wissenschaftler - nicht in der Lage sind, ihre Bedeutung vollständig zu erfassen. Dieses Buch entwirrt diese Theorien auf eine konzeptionelle, nicht-mathematische Weise, indem es mehr als 190 Abbildungen und ausführliche Erklärungen verwendet und dadurch großartige Einsichten vermittelt, die in der populärwissenschaftlichen Literatur nicht zu finden sind. Diese vollständig überarbeitete und erweiterte zweite Auflage bietet bemerkenswerte Einblicke in den Übergang von der Quanten- zur klassischen Welt unter Verwendung des Konzepts der Quantendekohärenz, wobei auch der "Kollaps der Wellenfunktion", der Tunneleffekt und das Quantencomputing erklärt werden.

This collection of essays brings together a selection of some of the most important studies of Professor Ivo Assad Ibri about the work of Charles Sanders Peirce. In the last decades, Prof. Ibri made important contributions to Peirce studies by showing that the various individual aspects of Peirce's work actually form a coherent philosophical system, a metaphysical architecture, as he describes it in his previous book Kosmos Noetos (Springer, 2017). Now this new book brings together a selection of 24 articles and book chapters originally published in both Portuguese and English on different topics and aspects of Peirce's work, such as philosophy of art, heuristic logic, theories of beliefs and habits, objective idealism, pragmatism and pragmaticism. By bringing together this collection of essays in a single publication, Semiotics and Pragmatism: Theoretical Interfaces will be a valuable source for scholars interested in Prof. Ibri's unique contributions to the study of the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce. "e;In recognizing Ivo Assad Ibri as one the leading exponents of qualitative interpretations of Peirce in the world today, I refer especially to Ibri's concentration on Peirce's later-phase metaphysical writings. Ibri's expertise will be seen to consist in his precise reformulations of Peirce's full-fledged philosophy, not just pursuing specialized minor topics."e; David A. Dilworth Professor of Philosophy, Stonybrook University"e;Ivo Ibri's collected essays brims with clarifying insights from beginning to end. He manages to reveal plenty of aspects of Peirce's thought from angles the traditional scholarship has not been equipped to notice. How not to miss such kairotic theoretical opportunities and how to exploit them to heuristic advantage is a lesson well taught in this outstanding book."e; Andr De TienneProfessor of Philosophy and Director of the Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University

This book presents the most up-to-date research contributions focusing on progress in the field of physics education. It provides researches and results that are based on the most relevant matters in physics teacher education and how these matters can be improved for the satisfaction of both teachers and learners. The work is the by-product of the collaboration between GIREP (the International Research Group on Physics Teaching) and the University of Malta. The contributing authors present close examinations of the following topics: ICT and multimedia in teacher education; experiments and laboratory work in teacher education; the role of quantum mechanics in teaching and learning physics; formal, non-formal and informal aspects of physics education at the primary level; strategies for pre-service physics teacher education at all levels; and in-service teacher professional learning strategies. The editors hope that many different stakeholders within scientific academia will find something of value in this compilation of the current most advanced ideas in physics education.

This book considers theoretical issues of the ethnocultural landscape concepts at large as well as examples of its practical application in ethnic communities of Siberia. It reveals the patterns of the processes of penetration, settlement, development and adaptation of Siberian populations from Paleolithic time to Russian colonization in the era of the Russian Empire, during Soviet modernization and in the face of modern challenges. The authors consider the principal interactions (character, stages, conditions), system-related evidence and phenomena that determine the diverse specifics and multidirectional vectors of a change in the ethnic (social, cultural, economic, legal) presence in large subregions of Siberia in the mirror of various theoretical paradigms.This transdisciplinary volume appeals to researchers, lecturers and students in the fields of geography, history, philosophy, anthropology, ecology, archaeology and interfaces to many other disciplines.

Modern AI techniques -- especially deep learning -- provide, in many cases, very good recommendations: where a self-driving car should go, whether to give a company a loan, etc. The problem is that not all these recommendations are good -- and since deep learning provides no explanations, we cannot tell which recommendations are good. It is therefore desirable to provide natural-language explanation of the numerical AI recommendations. The need to connect natural language rules and numerical decisions is known since 1960s, when the need emerged to incorporate expert knowledge -- described by imprecise words like "e;small"e; -- into control and decision making. For this incorporation, a special "e;fuzzy"e; technique was invented, that led to many successful applications. This book described how this technique can help to make AI more explainable.The book can be recommended for students, researchers, and practitioners interested in explainable AI.

This book explores the post-war Greco-German relationship and asks how this relationship fits into, and changes, the narrative of European integration. The book highlights West Germany¿s role in shaping Greece¿s development model and argues that Greece's accession to the Community in 1981 had a long back story in the modernization strategies adopted by the two countries as early as the 1950s. The success, not the failure, of those strategies lies at the root of Greece's lingering balance of payments problems: the ever-widening trade deficit with Germany, the country¿s main trading partner, was the price of Greek economic growth in the decades following the war. By addressing this three-decade story of uneasy continuity, the book offers new insights into core-periphery relations in Europe, questions the conventional wisdom about Greece¿s path to Europe, and challenges the way the so-called North-South divide has been adduced to explain the recent euro crisis. In doing so, the authorcalls attention to past cooperation between leading political and business circles in Greece and Germany, making this a useful and insightful read for historians and political scientists alike.

This book provides a holistic evidence-based perspective on conceptual, clinical, assessment, and treatment aspects of key non-substance-based addictive disorders related to: gambling, gaming, social media, smartphone, internet, love, sex, exercise, work, and shopping. Each chapter focuses on a different addictive disorder and is structured in a user-friendly way to enable the reader fast navigation, yet the main aspects of the respective disorders are covered in the necessary depth. All in all, this book offers a timely, self-contained introduction to both key concepts and the latest scientific developments in behavioral addictions. It addresses mental health practitioners, researchers in psychology, neuroscience and communication, and undergraduate and postgraduate students alike.

This book evaluates the characteristics and developments in Africäs financial systems, including monetary policy, structured finance, sustainable finance and banking, FinTech, RegTech, SupTech, inclusive finance, the role of regulation in dealing with banking crises, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Africäs financial systems and how to reform the post-COVID-19 financial systems. It is made up of contributions from scholars in finance and economics as well as financial market practitioners.Banking and the financial markets play a significant role in the growth of various economies. Although a number of handbooks on banking and finance exist, they mainly focus on Europe, America and Asia. Banks and financial markets in Africa are confronted with different challenges and therefore present a unique case to understand Africäs financial systems. A number of African countries have experienced banking crises and it is important to examine these issues as well as the regulatory regimes required to address them. This edited book contributes to the limited texts in the area by providing a comprehensive resource on banking and finance for students, scholars, researchers, policymakers, and financial market practitioners. It contains various theoretical and empirical chapters on banking and finance in Africa.

This book presents the concept of a fuzzy-based recommender system for user account privacy settings that can be used for citizen participation on online political platforms. The elaborated components are exemplarily based on the needs of a political platform implemented during the presidential election in Ecuador. The book readdresses the issue of privacy paradox demonstrating that, indeed, users' actual decisions of being private in most cases diverge with their initial privacy intentions. The two concepts presented in the book - the citizen privacy profile framework and the prototype fuzzy-based privacy settings recommender system - can be adapted by different organizations such as government institutions, NGOs, or private online service providers to meet their specific needs.   The book will be of interest to researchers and practitioners in the areas of usage modeling, privacy, system design, and for service providers in eDemocracy.

Over the last decade, ultrasound mid-air haptic technology has emerged and rapidly advanced to engage multidisciplinary scientific communities within and adjacent to the haptics and HCI fields. Additionally, this haptic technology has been adopted by a number of industry sectors (e.g., automotive, virtual reality, digital signage, neuroscience research) who appear keen to exploit its unique value proposition: the ability to deliver rich haptic sensations from a distance, without the need to touch, wear or hold anything in order to enhance touchless interfaces, novel applications, and experiences.This book is the first, and currently the only one, that provides a comprehensive description of the technology, encapsulating almost all aspects relating to electronic prototyping, acoustics, haptics, psychology and perception, user experience and end-user HCI applications. Through its 18 chapters written by 30 expert co-authors, this book is therefore an excellent introduction to the technology for anyone coming from any of those fields. Specifically, the reader will benefit by getting a unique and multi-dimensional perspective on the state-of-the-art of this enabling haptic technology while also understanding its history, relevant best research practices, and an overview of the various open challenges and opportunities.

This book aims to introduce recent advances in IoT and its applications for smart environments. The state of the art is reviewed with a focus on the technologies, applications, challenges, and opportunities. At this stage, a comprehensive understanding of the formal and practical applications of IoT in the different scenarios of smart environments is necessary to support future research. Therefore, the main contribution of this book is a comprehensive study of the most recent proposals for smart environments. In addition, this book synthesizes existing information and highlights common threads and gaps that lead to new and complex areas of future research. The book covers a range of major research subjects which will foster future implementations. The topics include smart learning environments, crowdsensing applications, participatory citizen sensing, multimodal perception systems and security challenges. This book seeks to provide a valuable framework for future research projects by expounding the topic to academics, engineers, and industry professionals, which is necessary for the design of future IoT architectures for smart environments.

This book presents recent advances in computational optimization. Our everyday life is unthinkable without optimization. We try to minimize our effort and to maximize the achieved profit. Many real-world and industrial problems arising in engineering, economics, medicine and other domains can be formulated as optimization tasks.The book is a comprehensive collection of extended contributions from the Workshops on Computational Optimization 2020. The book includes important real problems like modeling of physical processes, workforce planning, parameter settings for controlling different processes, transportation problems, wireless sensor networks, machine scheduling, air pollution modeling, solving multiple integrals and systems of differential equations which describe real processes, solving engineering problems. It shows how to develop algorithms for them based on new intelligent methods like evolutionary computations, ant colony optimization, constrain programming and others. This research demonstrates how some real-world problems arising in engineering, economics and other domains can be formulated as optimization problems.

This book provides an interdisciplinary exploration of the challenges faced by pastoral ministry in South African Pentecostalism as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as some interventions being made to manage these challenges. Contributors present descriptive approaches to churches¿ reactions to lockdown measures, and especially the adaptations generated within Pentecostalism in South Africa. Through a variety of approaches¿including pastoral care, virtual ecclesiology, social media, and missiology¿contributors offer intervention techniques which can help readers to understand the unique role of Christian ministry during the pandemic, in South Africa and beyond.

This timely volume examines the conflict between human individual life and larger forces that are not controllable. Drawing on recent literature in phenomenological and existential psychology it calls for a more nuanced understanding of the human predicament.  Focusing on the co-occurring crises of climate change and the COVID-19 epidemic, it explores the nature of widespread anxiety and the long-term human consequences.  It calls for an expansion of current research that would include the arts and humanities for critical insights into how this essential conflict between humanity and nature may be reconciled.

This textbook presents the fundamental concepts and theories in solid-state engineering physics in a very simple, systematic, and comprehensive way. The book is written in a lucid manner so that students are able to understand the realization behind the mathematical concepts which are the backbone of this subject. All the subject fundamentals and related derivations are discussed in an easy and comprehensive way to make the students strong about the basics of the solid-state engineering physics. The philosophy of presentation and material content in the book are based on concept-based approach toward the subject. The key features also lie in the solutions of several interesting numerical problems so that the students should have the idea of the practical usages of the subject. The book will benefit students who are taking introductory courses in solid-state physics for engineering.

This book addresses the operationalization of community resilience in the United Kingdom (UK) in connection with severe floods. Written for early academic professionals, students, and community practitioners, it investigates the educational and practical meaning and application of community resilience using a UK-centric local-level case study. Exploring the perceptions of both those who have been affected by a natural hazard and those who have not, the book reveals how trust, community resources, and neighborhood security can offer effective ways of bringing communities together after a natural hazard.The author introduces the topic of community resilience as it applies to disasters in Chapter 1 and its implications for securing and improving the wellbeing of disaster-affected communities in Chapters 2 and 3. In Chapter 4, the lessons learned contributing to the available information and research on community resilience are reviewed. Finally, the author offers recommendations and outlines future directions in coping with the uncertainty and insecurity caused by natural hazards in Chapter 5.

In this two-volume compilation of articles, leading researchers reevaluate the success of Hilbert's axiomatic method, which not only laid the foundations for our understanding of modern mathematics, but also found applications in physics, computer science and elsewhere.The title takes its name from David Hilbert's seminal talk Axiomatisches Denken, given at a meeting of the Swiss Mathematical Society in Zurich in 1917. This marked the beginning of Hilbert's return to his foundational studies, which ultimately resulted in the establishment of proof theory as a new branch in the emerging field of mathematical logic. Hilbert also used the opportunity to bring Paul Bernays back to Gottingen as his main collaborator in foundational studies in the years to come.The contributions are addressed to mathematical and philosophical logicians, but also to philosophers of science as well as physicists and computer scientists with an interest in foundations.

This book is mainly intended for residents and young physicians in Nuclear Medicine, Oncology and Gynaecology, as well as other professionals interested in this area. It covers the application of several relevant nuclear medicine procedures for malignancies affecting the female reproductive system and the breast. To date, there has never been a nuclear medicine textbook specifically focused on this topic, which this work seeks to remedy. In recent years, certain nuclear medicine procedures have proven to be extremely valuable for the diagnosis and staging of gynaecological malignancies and breast cancer. The book provides a comprehensive and structured review of these procedures, accompanied by a summary of the respective issues, making it a valuable asset for students, instructors and practitioners alike.

The book discusses smart governments and innovation in the public sector. In hopes of arriving at a clear definition of innovation in the field of public administration, the volume provides a wide survey of global policies and practices, especially those aimed at reducing bureaucracy and using information-communication technologies in public service delivery. Chapters look at current applications across countries and multiple levels of government, from public innovation labs in the UK to AI in South Korea. Providing concrete examples of innovation culture at work in public institutions, this volume will be of use to researchers and students studying new public management, public service delivery, and innovation as well as practitioners and professionals working in various public agencies.

How is a changing climate affecting hurricanes, and how are these changes intersecting with our changing exposure and vulnerability in ways that affect tropical cyclone risk? Crucially, how should this understanding be incorporated into risk management practice? This book takes a cross-sectoral look at how damaging tropical cyclone characteristics are changing and presents novel approaches to integrate science with risk assessment. In this new era of tropical cyclone impacts, understanding effective risk management practice in a changing climate is more important than ever.This book details the outcomes of new research focusing on climate risk related to hurricanes in a changing climate. Topics include characteristics of tropical cyclone risk, perspectives on hurricane risk management strategies in the built environment, and implications for commercial risk. Inspired by the Symposium on Hurricane Risk in a Changing Climate, this book brings together leading international academics and researchers, and provides a source reference for both risk managers and climate scientists for research on the interface between tropical cyclones, climate, and risk.8 chapters are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This volume gathers the latest advances, innovations and applications in the field of condition monitoring, plant maintenance and reliability, as presented by leading international researchers and engineers at the 6th International Conference on Maintenance Engineering and the 2021 conference of the Efficiency and Performance Engineering Network (IncoME-VI  TEPEN 2021), held in Tianjin, China on October 20-23, 2021. Topics include vibro-acoustics monitoring, condition-based maintenance, sensing and instrumentation, machine health monitoring, maintenance auditing and organization, non-destructive testing, reliability, asset management, condition monitoring, life-cycle cost optimisation, prognostics and health management, maintenance performance measurement, manufacturing process monitoring, and robot-based monitoring and diagnostics. The contributions, which were selected through a rigorous international peer-review process, share exciting ideas that will spur novel research directions and foster new multidisciplinary collaborations.

In diesem Buch werden mehrere neue Ansätze vorgestellt, die den Weg für die nächste Generation integrierter Schaltungen ebnen, die auch in sicherheitskritischen Anwendungen erfolgreich und zuverlässig integriert werden können. Die Autoren beschreiben neue Maßnahmen zur Bewältigung der steigenden Herausforderungen im Bereich des Designs für Testbarkeit, Fehlersuche und Zuverlässigkeit, die für moderne Schaltungsentwürfe unbedingt erforderlich sind. Insbesondere werden in diesem Buch formale Techniken wie das Satisfiability (SAT)-Problem und das Bounded Model Checking (BMC) kombiniert, um die entstehenden Herausforderungen in Bezug auf die Zunahme des Testdatenvolumens, die Testanwendungszeit und die erforderliche Zuverlässigkeit zu bewältigen. Alle Methoden werden detailliert diskutiert und unter Berücksichtigung von industrie-relevanten Benchmark-Kandidaten ausführlich evaluiert. Alle Maßnahmen wurden in ein gemeinsames Framework integriert, das standardisierte Software/Hardware-Schnittstellen implementiert.