Bücher veröffentlicht von Springer Nature Switzerland AG

This book starts with an introduction to the basic concepts of multistability, then illustrates how multistability arises in different systems and explains the main mechanisms of multistability emergence. A special attention is given to noise which can convert a multistable deterministic system to a monostable stochastic one. Furthermore, the most important applications of multistability in different areas of science, engineering and technology are given attention throughout the book, including electronic circuits, lasers, secure communication, and human perception. The book aims to provide a first approach to multistability for readers, who are interested in understanding its fundamental concepts and applications in several fields. This book will be useful not only to researchers and engineers focusing on interdisciplinary studies, but also to graduate students and technicians. Both theoreticians and experimentalists will rely on it, in fields ranging from mathematics and laser physics to neuroscience and astronomy. The book is intended to fill a gap in the literature, to stimulate new discussions and bring some fundamental issues to a deeper level of understanding of the mechanisms underlying self-organization of matter and world complexity.

Spending the final chapter of your life in a nursing home is considered, by many, a fate worse than death. Others, however, have found that through enlightened, imaginative care even the frailest of lives can flourish. The key to such a transformation is to replace the constricting custodial centres of the past with a more informed, research-based approach. This book is timely, responding to evidence of the urgent need for change described in the Australian Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety Final Report: Care, Dignity and Respect and its predecessor subtitled Neglect. In this book, the author proposes a model of care that places the whole person at its centre, sidestepping the constraints of a reductionist funding model that focusses on residents' deficits ¿ and the proprietor¿s financial gain. Aged care requires a comprehensive research-based guide to fulfil this aim. Narratives are included throughout the book to reinforce the fact that nursing home care is about individual residents and their unique lives. Topics explored in various chapters include:· Ageing in a Changing Community· Social, Gerontological Care· A Palliative Approach· Community Expectations Ageing in a Nursing Home: Foundations for Care takes a realistic approach that draws on contemporary research and narratives from the unique lives of older Australians who, despite their frailty, teach us how to care. Such knowledge informs and influences their future. The book is a resource intended for all who have a stake in the provision of best practice residential aged care, and all who benefit from such care. Its academic appeal will include those who design and teach courses in aged care: gerontology, general practice medicine, nursing, attendant care, allied health, and chaplaincy. Academics and teachers will find useful, well-referenced material for their courses, together with ample scope for researchers.

This book focuses on how businesses manage organizational innovation processes. It explores the innovative policies and practices that organizations need to develop to allow them to be successful in this digital age. These policies will be based on key resources such as research and development and human resources and need to enable companies to respond to challenges they may face due to the digital economy. It explains how organizational innovation can be used to improve business¿s development, performance, conduct and outcomes.Contributing to stimulate the growth and development of each individual in a dynamic, competitive and global economy, the present book can be used by a diverse range of readers, including academics, researchers, managers and engineers interested in matters related with Organizational Innovation in the Digital Age.

This book offers a new look at emergence in terms of a hierarchical emergent ontology. Emergence is recognised as a universal principle, as universal as the principle of evolution. This is achieved by setting out the ontological criteria of emergence and such criteriäs various roles. The traditional dichotomies are overcome, e.g., the synchronic and diachronic perspectives are unified, allowing a single, universal principle of emergence to be applied across various fields of science. As exemplars of its practical utility in both explanation and prediction, this new approach is applied to three different scientific areas: cellular automata, quantum Hall effects, and the neural network of the mind. It proves that the resulting metaphysics of hierarchical emergent ontology plays a fundamental role in unifying science, an impossible task under classical reductionism.

This book explores the changing economics, regulations, and operations of electricity distribution networks. It highlights the central challenges and opportunities caused by the rise of decentralisation paradigm in the power system within this segment of the electricity supply chain. As decarbonisation objectives continue to transform the power sector, the distribution system experiences an increased penetration of energy and flexibility resources that come from a variety of sizes, technologies, and capabilities. This makes traditional approaches to economic, regulation and operation of electricity distribution networks obsolete. This book aims to provide insights into the ways which decarbonisation, decentralisation and digitalisation trends in the electricity sector will eventually shape future of distribution grids. It will be relevant to students, researchers, and policymakers interested in energy economics, the political economy of energy, and the electricity sector.

This book offers a systematic and far-reaching account of party system institutionalization in Western Europe. Drawing upon a wide array of data and through a comparison of 20 countries from the end of WWII to 2019 across three arenas of party competition (electoral, parliamentary, and governmental ones), the empirical analysis shows that, over the past decade, the level of institutionalization in the Western European party systems has dramatically declined compared with previous decades. Electoral, parliamentary, and ¿ in some cases ¿ governmental instability and unpredictability have reached record-high levels. Although the impact of the 2008 Great Recession has certainly worked as a catalyst, this process of de-institutionalization has been mainly driven by long-term factors, such as cleavage decline and length of democratic experience. Moreover, its consequences are relevant not only for the relationship between parties and voters, but also for the very quality of democracy, as party system deinstitutionalization causes a decline in the citizens¿ satisfaction of the way democracy works and even an erosion of the ¿objective¿ democratic standards. In a nutshell, Western Europe, once seen as the land of stability and the cradle of democracy, may have become the land of party system deinstitutionalization and incipient democratic backsliding.

Through a transdisciplinary perspective, this book examines the complex urban dimension, in front of increasing density, soil consumption, abandoned places, and the recent pandemic which proved megacities particularly inadequate to provide healthy psychophysical conditions. Assuming bodily and emotional comfort as a reference horizon, it tends to inspire the design research overcoming a paradoxical binary logic that separates public and private, outside and inside, culture and nature, mind and places. The first part of the work explores built spaces and addresses sustainable strategies not only to overcome an ecologic and systemic crisis but also to improve places liveability in our contemporary city. The second part deals with our perception of aesthetic spaces, welcoming the stimuli coming from neuro-aesthetics studies on affordances and atmosphere and encouraging the intersection between interior architecture and design culture and arts. The third part examines relational spaces and how they influence human behaviour, starting from psychological, anthropological, and philosophical perspectives.The book benefits scholars and practitioners interested in interior architecture and design, as well as researchers involved in the relationship between people and places. The new challenge posed by the recent pandemic requires more than ever to rely on consciousness, culture and creativity to increase the intelligence of our surroundings, allowing our sense of belonging and improving our personal and mutual well-being.

This book explores the experiences of caregiving fathers in the UK. Conceptions of fatherhood, childcare, and work have altered over the last few decades, with many fathers taking a more active role in caregiving than before and seeking to alter their working patterns accordingly. However, such a wider involvement in caregiving for fathers can clash with traditional values about masculinity and work, which still hold sway over public opinion and workplace policies.Using quantitative and qualitative data, collected through the use of surveys, focus groups and semi-structured interviews with managers and working parents, the book explores perceptions and experiences of fathers who amend their working patterns due to caregiving responsibilities. It highlights the specific challenges faced by caregiving fathers when they attempt to take an active role in the parenting of their children which is identified as the ¿fatherhood forfeit¿.This impactful new book proposes actions to address such mistreatment and improve equality in the workplace, which includes changes to policy, increases in training and the importance of workplace role modelling. It will be of interest to academics studying human resource management, gender, masculinity, organisational studies, and the home-life balance, as well as policymakers.

The knowledge and innovation meant for knowledge-based economies (KBEs) are branded as green knowledge and innovation/ethical human capital, blended with the natural system as modeled by the Quintuple Helix Model of Innovation. However, due to bureaucratic challenges and myths, conventional universities produce knowledge and innovation in the sense of traditional disciplinary knowledge, which are not adequate to meet the goals of sustainable development.This book provides a model for greening a university which in turn can produce green knowledge and innovation in the mainstream knowledge production process. This model, which is based on research, can be adopted by the conventional universities in other regions. Such a process results in providing benefits to stakeholders of the university at the micro-level. At the macro-level, it blends with the other knowledge systems¿namely, the natural environment of society, economic system, media-based and culture-based public and civil society, and political system¿to create a sustainable knowledge economy.

Tolkien, Race, and Racism in Middle-earth is the first systematic examination of how Tolkien understood racial issues, how race manifests in his oeuvre, and how race in Middle-earth, his imaginary realm, has been understood, criticized, and appropriated by others. This book presents an analysis of Tolkien¿s works for conceptions of race, both racist and anti-racist. It begins by demonstrating that Tolkien was a racialist, in that his mythology is established on the basis of different races with different characteristics, and then poses the key question ¿Was Tolkien racist?¿ Robert Stuart engages the discourse and research associated with the ways in which racism and anti-racism relate Tolkien to his fascist and imperialist contemporaries and to twenty-first-century neo-Nazis and White Supremacists¿including White Supremacy, genocide, blood-and-soil philology, anti-Semitism, and aristocratic racism. Addressing a major gap in the field of Tolkien studies,Stuart focuses on race, racisms and the Tolkien legendarium.

This book presents the latest achievements in the field of theory and practice of information processing in the CNS SEMS. Recently, the task of integrating computer technologies, transmitting and storing information, monitoring and controlling objects of the physical world has become urgent. This capability is provided by Smart Electromechanical Systems (SEMS) used in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPhS). The main tasks in the field of theory and practice of SEMS are to ensure the efficiency, reliability and safety of functioning in real time. The task of obtaining reliable information about the selection environment, as well as object recognition and identification, is especially important when several SEMS interact in a group. Since in this case, it is necessary to ensure the safety and speed of the planned behavior of all members of the group.The purpose of the publication is to familiarize with the latest achievements of scientists of the Russian Academy of Sciences and leading universities of Russia in the field of theory and practice of information processing in the CNS of EMS, as well as to familiarize with the development of methods and algorithms for recognition, identification and modeling based on the principles of bionics, adaptivity, intelligence and parallelism in information processing and computing.Topics of primary interest include, but are not limited to the following: Methods and systems of recognition and identification;Mathematical and computer modeling; Measurement systems to identify the simulation of the selection environment;Sensors and auxiliary SEMS systems.This book is intended for students, scientists and engineers specializing in smart electromechanical systems and robotics.

Written by a leading expert in turnpike phenomenon, this book is devoted to the study of symmetric optimization, variational and optimal control problems in infinite dimensional spaces and turnpike properties of their approximate solutions. The book presents a systematic and comprehensive study of general classes of problems in optimization, calculus of variations, and optimal control with symmetric structures from the viewpoint of the turnpike phenomenon. The author establishes generic existence and well-posedness results for optimization problems and individual (not generic) turnpike results for variational and optimal control problems. Rich in impressive theoretical results, the author presents applications to crystallography and discrete dispersive dynamical systems which have prototypes in economic growth theory.This book will be useful for researchers interested in optimal control, calculus of variations turnpike theory and their applications, such as mathematicians, mathematical economists, and researchers in crystallography, to name just a few.

Northern Ireland presents a fundamental challenge for the sociology of religion ¿ how do religious beliefs, attitudes and identities relate to practices, violence and conflict? In other words, what does religion do?These interrogations are at the core of this book. It is the first critical and comprehensive review of the ways in which the social sciences have interpreted religion¿s significance in Northern Ireland. In particular, it examines the shortcomings of existing interpretations and, in turn, suggests alternative lines of thinking for more robust and compelling analyses of the role(s) religion might play in Northern Irish culture and politics.Through, and beyond, the case of Northern Ireland, the second objective of this book is to outline a critical agenda for the social study of religion, which has theoretical and methodological underpinnings. Finally, this work engages with epistemological issues which never have been addressed as such in the Northern Irish context: how do conflict settings affect the research undertaken on religion, when religion is an object of political and violent contentions? By analysing the scope for objective and critical thinking in such research context, this critical essay intends to contribute to a sociology of the sociology of religion.

This book seeks to understand white conservative Christians¿ support for Donald Trump, using their own words. Drawing on the triangular relationship between the 45th president, and his voters, and religious organizations, this work investigates the creation of the tale of Trump as the protector and enhancer of Christian values. The first part of the book discusses in detail the white conservative Christian constituency in the United States, and the development of feelings of displacement and resentment fostered by intergroup threat and nationalism. The central part focuses on the actor known as the ¿Religious Right,¿ through the rhetoric of one of their most representative organizations in the twenty-first century. The final part focuses on the character of Donald Trump and his peculiar relationship with religious discourse. The book demonstrates that while such discourse is expected of Trump as a Republican candidate, his approach to it is characterized by detachment and sloganized exploitation of Christian symbols. Ultimately, the book highlights the cultural tools that are crucial in the reproduction of structures of inequality and the ways they have been used by conservative politicians and groups to accumulate power.

This proceedings volume gathers selected, peer-reviewed papers presented at the 2nd International Conference on Mathematics and its Applications in Science and Engineering ¿ ICMASE 2021, which was virtually held on July 1-2, 2021 by the University of Salamanca, Spain. Works included in this book cover applications of mathematics both in engineering research and in real-world problems, touching topics such as difference equations, number theory, optimization, and more. The list of applications includes the modeling of mechanical structures, the shape of machines, and the growth of a population, expanding to fields like information security and cryptography. Advances in teaching and learning mathematics in the context of engineering courses are also covered.This volume can be of special interest to researchers in applied mathematics and engineering fields, as well as practitioners seeking studies that address real-life problems in engineering.

Economic growth and development critically depends on the quality of infrastructure. Each aspect of the economy and its infrastructure are linked systemically. Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) are increasingly being promoted as the solution to the shortfall in financing needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Public-private partnerships enable the public entity to utilize the expertise and efficiencies of the private sector to deliver services and facilities that traditionally have been delivered by the public sector, either through public sector employees or by traditional procurement methods. To be beneficial to all stakeholders, a PPP project requires careful planning, implementation, and strong governance. This book breaks down the steps involved and the traps to circumvent.Despite its globally growing importance, project finance has been somewhat underrepresented in research. This book analyzes project finance from an interdisciplinary perspective¿finance, management, and international business¿and includes international laws of arbitrage and perspectives of international financial institutions as never endeavored by any previous research projects. The book also includes case studies assessing the relevance of private-public partnerships by comparing the country expectations and the real outcomes. The gap between expectations and results does not necessarily mean that significant progress has not been made. To the contrary, the book suggests that some of the original targets set may have been unrealistic, and that the requisite financial resources¿or the financial sector policies that could have generated those resources¿may have been lacking.

This book is a collection of research results in a wide range of topics related to human¿robot interaction, both physical and cognitive, including theories, methodologies, technologies, and empirical and experimental studies. The works contained in the book have been presented at the 14th International Workshop on Human-Friendly Robotics (HFR 2021), organized by the University of Bologna (Bologna, Italy, October 28¿29, 2021), and they describe the most original achievements in the field of human¿robot interaction coming from the ideas of young researchers. The intended readership of the book is any researcher in the field of robotics interested to research problems related to human¿robot coexistence, like robot interaction control, robot learning, and human¿robot co-working.

This book covers the results of a study concerning systems for healthcare-oriented monitoring of elderly persons. It is focused on the methods for processing data from impulse-radar sensors and depth sensors, aimed at localisation of monitored persons and estimation of selected quantities informative from the healthcare point of view. It includes mathematical descriptions of the considered methods, as well as the corresponding algorithms and the results of their testing in a real-world context. Moreover, it explains the motivations for developing healthcare-oriented monitoring systems and specifies the real-world needs which may be addressed by such systems.The healthcare systems, all over the world, are confronted with challenges implied by the ageing of population and the lack of adequate recruitment of healthcare professionals. Those challenges can be met by developing new technologies aimed at improving the quality of life of elderly people and at increasing the efficiency of public health management. Monitoring systems may contribute to this strategy by providing information on the evolving health status of independently-living elderly persons, enabling healthcare personnel to quickly react to dangerous events. Although these facts are generally acknowledged, such systems are not yet being commonly used in healthcare facilities and households. This may be explained by the difficulties related to the development of technological solutions which can be both acceptable for monitored persons and capable of providing healthcare personnel with useful information. The impulse-radar sensors and depth sensors, considered in this book, have a potential for overcoming those difficulties since they are not cumbersome for the monitored persons ¿ if compared to wearable sensors ¿ and do not violate the monitored person's privacy ¿ if compared to video cameras. Since for safety reasons the level of power, emitted by the radar sensors, must be ultra-low, the task of detection and processing of signals is a research challenge which requires more sophisticated methods than those developed for other radar applications. This book contains descriptions of new Bayesian methods, applicable for the localisation of persons by means of impulse-radar sensors, and an exhaustive review of previously published ones. Furthermore, the methods for denoising, regularised numerical differentiation and fusion of data from impulse-radar sensors and depth sensors are systematically reviewed in this book. On top of that, the results of experiments aimed at comparing the performance of various data-processing methods, which may serve as guidelines for related future projects, are presented.

This book is about design. Everybody does design, from artists to engineers, from interior designers to industrial designers. We design our days and we design our lives. This book presents the three universal activities that everyone uses, no matter who they are or what they do. These three activities are 1.) clarify an ambiguous project, 2.) generate ideas, and 3.) select one idea for implementation. This book also presents how the psychology of design impacts our effectiveness with each of these three activities, from creativity through decision making, intuition through analysis, and cognitive enhancement through design biases. Although the examples provided in this book primarily target the diverse disciplines of art (painting) and engineering, they can be easily understood and adapted by designers in any discipline.This book helps advanced design students and working professionals in any discipline to understand why and when the basic design principles they were taught workor do not work and, as a result, improve their design effectiveness.