Bücher veröffentlicht von Springer

This book provides modeling, analysis, and control methods for wideband oscillations caused by control interactions in converter-dominated power systems. The modern power system comprises power electronic devices in various forms, including wind turbines, photovoltaics, flexible AC/DC transmission systems, battery energy storage systems, and distributed generations, among others. Unstable oscillation modes can cause equipment damage, sudden power reduction, noise in power transformers, and degradation of power quality. Wideband oscillation seriously threatens the stable and reliable operation of wind power systems. The interaction mechanism becomes more complex due to system-wide factors such as network topology, grid strength, input resource intermittency, converter control parameters, and the output levels of renewable generators. This complexity presents a significant challenge in studying the intricate control interaction phenomena and deriving appropriate countermeasures. The book is beneficial for industry professionals, engineers, and academic researchers working on power systems in general, and specifically on power electronic converters.

Soil is a complex system of inorganic and organic materials, living organisms, water, and air. It is home to more than one trillion species of microorganisms. Soil also plays an important role in the global carbon cycle. Because plants absorb carbon from the atmosphere, convert it to plant tissue, and return it to the soil as plant residue, soils globally act as the world's largest sink of active carbon. Soil has role to play in food production and safety. Soil contamination undermined by modern agricultural practices that deplete soil carbon stocks. Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have been raising recorded temperatures since the Industrial Revolution. Greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, forestry, and fisheries have almost doubled in the last 50 years and will increase by 30% by 2050 given the current trend. The primacy of arresting climate change is nowhere more evident than the adoption of 195 countries of the first legally binding global climate deal at the Paris Climate Conference in 2015. With atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) reaching 400 parts per million in 2016, soils can be an ally in bringing the CO2 level down to a sustainable level if protected for regeneration. Soil protection and regeneration is a technique that involves the conservative rehabilitation of soil ecosystem and farmland. This technique focuses on top soil regeneration, improving the water cycle, supporting biosequestration, enhancing ecosystem services, increasing biodiversity, strengthening the vitality and health of farm soil, and increasing resilience to climate change and landscape. Environmental protection not only improves soil health, productivity, and resilience to weather extremes, raising farm yields and income while strengthening regional food security in the face of a changing climate, but can also form part of a region's broader climate strategy. This book is timely as more studies and reviews need to be reported about regenerating global polluted soil and the impacts on the environment, the benefit of both biotic and abiotic structure, thereby creating more awareness of environmental protection and sustainability. Thus, this book presents a vista to research on regeneration of lost resources in the soil and its impacts on the environment.

Bioremediation is the use of biological interventions for mitigation of the noxious effects caused by pollutants in the environment including wastewater. It is very useful approach for a variety of applications in the area of environmental protection. It has become an attractive alternative to the conventional clean-up technologies that employ plants and their associated microorganisms to remove, contain, or render harmless environmental contaminants.Hydroponic systems, which utilize plants which are grown in a nutrient solution without soil, are expanding and raising great interest in the commercial and scientific community. They are engineered systems designed and constructed to utilize the natural processes involving macrophytes, media, and the associated microbial assemblages to assist in treating wastewaters. This is a relatively new approach in wastewater treatment by which a variety of emergent macrophytes are grown hydroponically on top of floating platforms with their roots developing freely into the flowing wastewater. The roots provide a support medium for attached microbial growth which participates in the treatment process.

This open access volume compiles student reports from the 2023 Simula Summer School in Computational Physiology. The reports provide an overview of some tools available to model physiology in excitable tissues across scales and scientific questions. In 2023, Simula held the nineth annual Summer School in Computational Physiology in collaboration with the University of Oslo (UiO) and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Each year, the course focuses on modeling excitable tissues, with a special interest in cardiac physiology and neuroscience. Group research projects conducted by graduate students from around the world result in reports addressing problems of physiological importance. Reports may not necessarily represent new scientific results; rather, they can reproduce or supplement earlier studies.Reports from seven of the summer projects are included as separate chapters. The topics represented include multiscale mechanics, electrophysiology, pharmacology, and machine learning. This is an open access book.

The authors propose a novel measure of proximity between two sets of nominal elements. This measure describes the changes in the first set after adding the second set or changes in the second set after adding the first set.It is crucial to note that this measure is not symmetric, it means that the perturbation of the first set on the second set can be different than the perturbation of the opposition direction. The introduced set impact measure allows for the direct treatment of objects described by nominal-valued attributes. The ordinary sets, multisets, fuzzy sets, and the intuitionistic fuzzy sets are considered. The book is intended for data science professionals, philosophers as well as cognitive psychologists, who struggle with practical problems in which asymmetry of proximity of objects cannot be neglected. The use of the proposed measures of perturbation between compared objects can be very important in data mining or in exploration of Internetresources.

Based on a deliberative democracy, this book uses a hermeneutic-critical methodology to study bibliographical sources and practical issues in order to analyse the possibilities, limits and consequences of the digital transformation of democracy. Drawing on a two-way democracy, the aim of this book is intended as an aid for thinking through viable alternatives to the current state of democracy with regard to its ethical foundations and the moral knowledge implicit in or assumed by the way we perceive and understand democracy. It is intended to stimulate reflection and discussion on the basis that, by addressing what we understand as democracy, we can inevitably influence the reality known as democracy. Democracy's evident regression in today's world makes this all too apparent: it has become a hostage to all kinds of autocracies and technopopulisms, which are supported to a greater or lesser extent by the current algorithmic revolution.

This book explores smart/intelligent business and management, addressing the challenges and issues encountered by contemporary organizations. It provides a detailed and up-to-date perspective on theoretical and practical aspects related to the management of dynamic, competitive, and socially responsible organizations. The topics covered span the strategic integration of smart technologies to enhance competitiveness, the intersection of artificial intelligence, hyper-personalization, and customer-centricity, the transformative impact of Industry 4.0 technologies in manufacturing, agile human resource management, eco-innovation practices, and the effective management of a multigenerational workforce. The book also examines the strategic interplay between talent management and smart organizations, making it an essential guide for navigating the intersection of technology, strategy, and human capital in the contemporary business landscape.

This book deals with the ethics of technology and addresses specific ethical problems related to some emerging technologies, mainly in the field of computer science (from machine learning models to extracting value from data to human-robot interaction). The contributions are authored mainly by scholars in ICT and other engineering fields who reflect on ethical and societal issues emerging from their own research activity. Thus, rather uniquely, the work overcomes the traditional divide between pure ethical theory that disregards what practitioners do and mere R&D practice that ignores what theorists conceptualize. Conversely, the reader is enabled to understand what ethics means when it is actually put into work by engineering researchers. The book arises from a joint program between MIT and Politecnico di Milano aimed at training early career researchers in addressing the ethical issues of technology and critically reflecting on the social impacts of the emerging, and even disruptive, technologies they are currently developing through their novel research. Overall, it aims at spreading the task of developing technologies that, from the beginning, are designed to be responsible for human life, society, and nature.

This scientific monograph presents the results obtained during research in the field of chipless logging and consists of two parts. At the beginning of the book, the current state of the researched task in chipless logging using chipless logging heads is presented. The experimental measurement methodology will be determined after reviewing the theoretical analysis of the cutting heads. The measurement methodology describes the principle of research carried out on an experimental hydraulic stand based on defined parameters. Data obtained during experimental measurement can be analyzed in many areas, e.g. statistical influence of individual factors as well as their combinations. The energy demand of chipless knives is also determined during experimental measurement.

This open access book provides a historical treatment of scientific control in experimentation in the longue durée. The introduction distinguishes four related strands in the history of experimental control: the development of practices to stabilize experimental conditions; the career of the comparative design; the unfolding of methodological discussions about control practices and designs; and the history of the term "control". Each chapter brings these distinctions to bear on specific historical episodes. The focus is on experiments with complex, elusive phenomena such as perception and learning, irregular movements, and unobservable elements. Such experiments bring control issues to the fore because they are difficult to design and stabilize and often controversial. Together, the chapters show that the local context shapes what exactly is controlled, how control can be accomplished, and how controls are justified. They also show that control strategies and methodological ideas often remain stable for a long time and change only gradually. This book, as well as the volume on analysis and synthesis in experimentation by the same editors, contains contributions by an array of experts from multiple disciplines, making it suitable for historians and philosophers of science and students alike.

It is wrong when someone cannot exercise their rights in a court of law because they have no money to pay for a good lawyer, because they are too scared of the possible consequences, or because they simply don¿t know that the law protects them. But does that mean governments have an obligation to intervene? And if so, how?This book provides the first systematic philosophical theory of equal access to justice. It begins by identifying the content of claims to equal access to justice. Then, it reviews traditional political and legal arguments on the right of access to justice, which it argues are both illuminating and insufficient. The best comparative way to approach equal access to justice, the book argues, is to think through the requirements of a moral, pre-political, duty to ¿ at times and provisionally ¿ pause, cool down and listen: in other words, we ought to demand that governments step in and protect access rights, because we have a moral and pre-political interest in cultivating our ability to comply with this duty. It is the recognition of this duty which best explains both law¿s potential for promoting, as well as its potential for endangering, equal justice. In closing, the book tests this novel theory of equal access to justice against contemporary trends and reforms in procedural law.

This manual provides a quick reference guide to assist educators in providing authentic feedback, how to address feedback in pre-clinical and clinical situations, and the benefits of two-way feedback in improving instruction. This manual is a collective effort between medical educators designed to ensure authentic feedback is structured for both the learner and the learning environment.This manual enables medical educators to move from theory to practical application in both the preclinical and clinical settings. Through theory, the practical application of authentic feedback becomes a concrete application rather than a profound concept. Educators gain knowledge regarding how theoretical concepts become a reality leading to student success and self-directed learning. The manual guides the educator through the various modalities in which feedback is required to drive student success, such as formative practice, learning environments, small group learning, multiple-choice assessments, and clinical settings. Finally, the manual ends with two-way communication and describes the steps medical educators can take to become reflective professionals. Supported by experienced and evidence-based recommendations, medical educators, administrators, and institutions are presented with checklists, strategies, and best practices for providing authentic feedback.

This Open Access book reviews recent theoretical and numerical developments in nonlinear model order reduction in continuum mechanics, being addressed to Master and PhD students, as well as to researchers, lecturers and instructors. The aim of the authors is to provide tools for a better understanding and implement reduced order models by using: physics-based models, synthetic data forecast by these models, experimental data and deep learning algorithms. The book involves a survey of key methods of model order reduction applied to model-based engineering and digital twining, by learning linear or nonlinear latent spaces.Projection-based reduced order models are the projection of mechanical equations on a latent space that have been learnt from both synthetic data and experimental data. Various descriptions and representations of structured data for model reduction are presented in the applications and survey chapters. Image-based digital twins are developed in a reduced setting. Reduced order models of as-manufactured components predict the mechanical effects of shape variations. A similar workflow is extended to multiphysics or coupled problems, with high dimensional input fields. Practical techniques are proposed for data augmentation and also for hyper-reduction, which is a key point to speed up projection-based model order reduction of finite element models. The book gives access to python libraries available on gitlab.com, which have been developed as part of the research program [FUI-25] MORDICUS funded by the French government. Similarly to deep learning for computer vision, deep learning for model order reduction circumvents the need to design parametric problems prior reducing models. Such an approach is highly relevant for image-base modelling or multiphysics modelling.

This book brings together a wide range of current research to create a holistic understanding of fouling. It draws upon practical and laboratory experiences spanning many years. While offering an overview of various fouling types, the book's emphasis is on crystallization fouling, a facet seldom addressed in the existing literature. Furthermore, this book goes beyond theory by providing practical examples for heat exchanger design, incorporating the pivotal consideration of fouling's impact. It focuses especially on calcium salts such as calcium carbonate and calcium sulfate.Fouling formation represents a ubiquitous challenge across diverse industrial sectors, spanning oil, gas, petrochemicals, food, pharmaceuticals, and power generation. This encroaching fouling, prevalent within heating equipment, not only jeopardizes the integrity of machinery but also significantly saps energy resources. Consequently, extensive research efforts have been undertaken to comprehensively explorefouling formation through both experimental and theoretical avenues across various heating apparatuses. The book's mission is to facilitate a broader comprehension of crystallization fouling research, revealing the various factors influencing this form of fouling. Additionally, it critiques prior research endeavors, identifying their strengths and weaknesses while pinpointing potential avenues for future investigation

The Brief explores the relationship between industrial dynamics, business strategies, and environmental regulations in the agrochemical industry. Focusing on contested technologies that continue to be used despite evidence of their hazardous impacts, the book calls for investigating the potential hazards during the inventive phase of companies to anticipate future risks. Combining patent analysis with computational chemistry and toxicology, the author examines the toxicity of chemical inventions and the effectiveness of environmental regulations in curbing harmful products. The result is a comprehensive dataset that combines patent data with chemical structures, which provides valuable insights into firms' innovation strategies as well as their potential hazards. Underscoring the importance of effective regulation in addressing social and environmental challenges, this Brief will be of interest to researchers and practitioners at the intersection of numerous fields, including economic policy, industrial economics, agribusiness, management, life sciences, and sustainability.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Dynamic Data Driven Applications Systems, DDDAS 2022, which took place in Cambridge, MA, USA, during October 6-10, 2022.The 31 regular papers in the main track and 5 regular papers from the Wildfires panel, as well as one workshop paper, were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. They were organized in following topical sections: DDAS2022 Main-Track Plenary Presentations; Keynotes; DDDAS2022 Main-Track: Wildfires Panel; Workshop on Climate, Life, Earth, Planets.

In the dynamic realm of digital agriculture, the integration of big data acquisition platforms has sparked both curiosity and enthusiasm among researchers and agricultural practitioners. This book embarks on a journey to explore the intersection of artificial intelligence and agriculture, focusing on small-unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), edge-AI sensors and the profound impact they have on digital agriculture, particularly in the context of heterogeneous crops, such as walnuts, pomegranates, cotton, etc. For example, lightweight sensors mounted on UAVs, including multispectral and thermal infrared cameras, serve as invaluable tools for capturing high-resolution images. Their enhanced temporal and spatial resolutions, coupled with cost effectiveness and near-real-time data acquisition, position UAVs as an optimal platform for mapping and monitoring crop variability in vast expanses. This combination of data acquisition platforms and advanced analytics generates substantial datasets, necessitating a deep understanding of fractional-order thinking, which is imperative due to the inherent ¿complexity¿ and consequent variability within the agricultural process. Much optimism is vested in the field of artificial intelligence, such as machine learning (ML) and computer vision (CV), where the efficient utilization of big data to make it ¿smart¿ is of paramount importance in agricultural research. Central to this learning process lies the intricate relationship between plant physiology and optimization methods. The key to the learning process is the plant physiology and optimization method. Crafting an efficient optimization method raises three pivotal questions: 1.) What represents the best approach to optimization? 2.) How can we achieve a more optimal optimization? 3.) Is it possible to demand ¿more optimal machine learning,¿ exemplified by deep learning, while minimizing the need for extensive labeled data for digital agriculture? This book details the foundations of the plant physiology-informed machine learning (PPIML) and the principle of tail matching (POTM) framework. It is the 9th title of the "Agriculture Automation and Control" book series published by Springer.

This book offers a comprehensive exploration of children's understanding and experiences of thermal comfort. The book provides a methodology for evaluating comfort that takes into account the unique perspectives of children. The first part of the book provides an overview of the history of thermal comfort, the human body and environmental parameters, and common thermal comfort indexes. It also offers guidelines for creating questionnaires that accurately assess children's perceptions of indoor thermal comfort. The book then delves into children's understanding of the concepts of comfort and energy, as well as the factors that influence their perception of these concepts. It addresses the psychological and pedagogical aspects of thermal comfort judgment, as well as the architectural and environmental characteristics that contribute to children's perceptions of comfort. First published as Indoor Thermal Comfort Perception, this updated edition also includes new sections on architecture and sensitivity, exploring the impact of classroom spaces on learning, and outdoor education and thermal comfort outdoors, based on qualitative research. These additions provide valuable insights for future studies on these topics. While physical parameter measurements and comfort indexes are useful in thermal comfort, the book emphasizes the importance of ergonomic assessments in the form of questionnaires, which offer unique insights into children's experiences. The book fills a critical gap in understanding children's perceptions of thermal comfort and is essential reading for HVAC engineers, architects, environmental psychologists, and researchers in the medical and cognitive fields.

Efficient navigation in terms of travel time and energy dissipation is of crucial importance for biological micro-swimmers. The design of optimally navigating artificial swimmers also has potentially valuable applications such as targeted drug delivery, which has become an increasingly realistic perspective due to the recent progress in the experimental realization of controllable microswimmers able to perform nontrivial tasks. Despite recent theoretical progress, the field still faces open challenges, notably in describing navigation problems that take into account the complexities of the world of microswimmers.This book presents a selection of works on the problem of optimal microswimmer navigation that represent a significant advance in this direction. The material in this book provides important insights into how efficient navigation may be achieved in the presence of curved space geometry, confining forces and flows, as well as thermal fluctuations. Finally, the energetic cost of navigation is addressed via a new formulation of the problem that accounts for the swimmer body geometry.

This book presents the intersection of two dynamic fields: Reinforcement Learning (RL) and RIS- Assisted Wireless Communications. With an emphasis on both discrete and continuous problems, it introduces a comprehensive overview of RL techniques and their applications in the evolving world of RIS-assisted wireless communications. Chapter 1 introduces the fundamentals of RL and deep RL (DRL), providing a solid foundation for understanding subsequent chapters. It also presents the Q-learning, deep Q-learning, and deep deterministic policy gradient algorithms. Chapter 2 provides a holistic overview of RIS-assisted systems and details several use cases in wireless communications. Then, Chapters 3 and 4 present various applications of the discrete and continuous DRL to RIS-assisted wireless communications. From maximizing the sum-rate to minimizing, the system resources and maximizing the energy efficiency. These chapters showcase the versatility of the DRL algorithms in tackling arange of challenges. This book concludes with Chapter 5, which introduces the challenges and future directions in this field. It explores the particulars of hyperparameter tuning, problem design, and complexity analysis, while also highlighting the potential of hybrid DRL, multi-agent DRL, and transfer learning techniques for advancing wireless communication systems. Optimizing RIS-Assisted Wireless Systems requires powerful algorithms to cope with the dynamic propagation environment. DRL is envisioned as one of the key enabling techniques to exploit the full potential of RIS-Assisted Wireless Communication Systems. It empowers these systems to intelligently adapt to dynamic wireless environments, maximize performance metrics, and adjusts their configurations to accommodate diverse use cases efficiently. This book serves as a valuable resource, shedding light on the potential of DRL to optimize RIS-Assisted Wireless Communication, enabling researchers, engineers, advanced level students in computer science and electrical engineering and enthusiasts to grasp the intricacies of this topic. It offers a comprehensive understanding of the principles, applications, and challenges, making it a reference to recognize the full potential of the RIS technology in modern wireless communication systems.

This book covers theoretical concepts of climate change related phenomena, different components of geospatial technology and application of geospatial technology on analysis of climate changes. Besides the book will also cover different characteristics of climate resilience, how resilience relates to the adaptation and mitigation and role of geospatial science, techniques, and tools in building climate resilience of a society. This text is suitable for researchers, academicians, urban planners, environmentalists, policy makers, scientists, ecologists, administrators etc.

This book offers a contemporary, cutting-edge, and advanced critical analysis of the first twenty months of the war between Russia and Ukraine. Following a realist approach and with a focus on political discord, economic sanctions, and media limitations, the book sheds light onto the deadlock between the conflicting parties. It dissects the diplomatic endeavors and missteps, varying political perspectives, Western support strategies, and the intricate global dynamics that triggered this existential crisis.The critical assessment of political antecedents, including the Budapest Memorandum, the Bucharest Summit Declaration, and the Minsk Agreements 1 and 2, uncovers hidden political motives aimed at setting the stage for a proxy war. Additionally, the book scrutinizes the financial dimensions of the conflict, strategies for post-conflict reconstruction, and the emerging Zeitenwende phenomenon reshaping the geopolitical landscape of the Global North.This book's insights suggest a potential shift towards a new multipolar global order, representing a significant realignment in the distribution of geopolitical and geo-economic influence. A must-read for scholars and academics seeking a profound understanding of this pivotal conflict and its far-reaching implications.

This book provides a comprehensive coverage of the state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in vision-based structural health monitoring (SHM). In this data explosion epoch, AI-aided SHM and rapid damage assessment after natural hazards have become of great interest in civil and structural engineering, where using machine and deep learning in vision-based SHM brings new research direction. As researchers begin to apply these concepts to the structural engineering domain, especially in SHM, several critical scientific questions need to be addressed: (1) What can AI solve for the SHM problems? (2) What are the relevant AI technologies? (3) What is the effectiveness of the AI approaches in vision-based SHM? (4) How to improve the adaptability of the AI approaches for practical projects? (5) How to build a resilient AI-aided disaster prevention system making use of the vision-based SHM? This book introduces and implements the state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning technologies for vision-based SHM applications. Specifically, corresponding to the above-mentioned scientific questions, it consists of: (1) motivation, background & progress of AI-aided vision-based SHM, (2) fundamentals of machine learning & deep learning approaches, (3) basic AI applications in vision-based SHM, (4) advanced topics & approaches, and (5) resilient AI-aided applications. In the introduction, a brief coverage about the development progress of AI technologies in the vision-based area is presented. It gives the readers the motivations and background of the relevant research. In Part I, basic knowledges of machine and deep learning are introduced, which provide the foundation for the readers irrespective of their background. In Part II, to verify the effectiveness of the AI methods, the key procedure of the typical AI-aided SHM applications (classification, localization, and segmentation) is explored, including vision data collection, data pre-processing, transfer learning-based training mechanism, evaluation, and analysis. In Part III, advanced AI topics, e.g., generative adversarial network, semi-supervised learning, and active learning, are discussed. They aim to address several critical issues in practical projects, e.g., the lack of well-labeled data and imbalanced labels, to improve the adaptability of the AI models. In Part IV, the new concept of "resilient AI" is introduced to establish an intelligent disaster prevention system, multi-modality learning, multi-task learning, and interpretable AI technologies. These advances are aimed towards increasing the robustness and explainability of the AI-enabled SHM system, and ultimately leading to improved resiliency.The scope covered in this book is not only beneficial for education purposes but also is essential for modern industrial applications. The target audience is broad and includes students, engineers, and researchers in civil engineering, statistics, and computer science. Unique Book Features: - Provide a comprehensive review of the rapidly expanding field of vision-based structural health monitoring (SHM) using artificial intelligence approaches. - Re-organize fundamental knowledge specific to the machine and deep learning in vision tasks.- Include comprehensive details about the procedure of conducting AI approaches for vision-based SHM along with examples and exercises.- Cover a vast array of special topics and advanced AI-enabled vision-based SHM applications.- List a few potential extensions for inspiring the readers for future investigation.

This book discusses asset life-cycle management, especially, human dimensions on the management of infrastructure and industry-sector assets. The book explores advances decision support systems based on the applications of Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) technologies such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), machine learning, and digital twinning for monitoring, diagnostics, prognostics. It includes methodologies and cases applied to different operational contexts. The book also considers the implications of the applications of international standards, local regulations and industry guidelines to risk and resilience engineering asset operations.

This book provides business owners and practitioners with a comprehensive and pragmatic guide to pricing, which lays out the essential steps to professionalizing pricing from day one all the way to a more mature stage. It not only details the key activities leading to result-driven pricing strategies and execution but also addresses the most important pillars of good pricing governance. To do so, the book covers a broad range of pricing topics relevant at different stages of business evolution, e.g. determining the starting point of the pricing journey, identifying unique selling propositions, gauging willingness to pay (WTP), conducting effective customer profiling, improving promotions, and managing distribution from a pricing standpoint. The book fills a gap in the current pricing literature, which largely consists of descriptive and retrospective narratives cataloging past pricing strategies and tactics that never delve into the underlying rationale and methodologies. It provides readers with clear, actionable insights on how to price their own products and services.

Crowds are misleading, both in their simplicity and in their complexity. On the one hand, they behave according to expected trends; on the other, they present sudden shifts and frantic, unexpected behavior. Therefore, "betting against the crowd," whether in politics, sports, or finance, requires a deep understanding of the crowd's dynamics. In this book, Prof. Neuman addresses this challenge by delving into the complexity of crowds. The book involves foundational issues and novel ideas, such as why crowds behave unexpectedly, why betting against the crowd is possible only in short time frames, why is it important to be attentive to suspicious signs that are indicative of the crowd's behavior, and why the long tail of fatalities in armed conflicts leaves us surprised by blitz attacks of violent mobs. The book combines scientific knowledge, experiments, and accessible, often humorous, exposition. It can be read by anyone with a basic science education who seeks to understand crowds and how one can act within and against them.

This book aims to explore different aspects of networks in relation to the archaeology of buildings. It is divided into three major themes: the trade in materials, the exchange of knowledge (of techniques and/or materials), and the exchange of style. Within each of these themes, two primary aspects are addressed--notably, who were the actors and how did the network function? In medieval and post-medieval Europe, the development of buildings, of style and the use of material, cannot be understood from a local, regional or even national perspective. Not only were the borders different than in modern-day Europe, but the contacts of inhabitants also transcended local and regional boundaries. This volume describes the continuous exchange of aesthetic ideals, technological developments and building materials during this period. This volume is a culmination of four years of sessions held at the European Archaeology Association (EAA) conference between 2016-2020 on the topic. It is of interest to archaeologists, architects, and scholars of built heritage.

This book explores recent developments in electrically conducting graphene-containing polymer composites for electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding and flame-retardant applications. It emphasizes the exceptional performance of graphene and graphene-based materials in these composites. The comprehensive overview covers the fundamental principles of EMI shielding, flame retardancy, and polymer composite processing, addressing critical aspects related to the development of advanced graphene-containing materials. The book aims to fill the gap in reviews that specifically focus on EMI shielding and flame retardancy fundamentals, processing techniques, and application-specific developments.An important aspect discussed is the customization of electrical properties through blend morphology modification and selective localization of graphene-based nanofillers. This aspect has not been adequately covered in previous articles or books. By addressing this research gap, the book becomes an essential resource for researchers seeking a deeper understanding of molecular aspects and result interpretation. With a focus on processing advanced functional composite materials for EMI shielding and flame retardancy, the book promotes a molecular understanding of the subject matter. It is expected to pave the way for future advancements in advanced polymer composites. Researchers and scholars will find this book invaluable as it provides a holistic overview of fundamental concepts and insights into ongoing research intricacies.

This book presents an introduction to the non-linear mechanics of materials, focusing on a unified energetical approach. It begins by summarizing the framework of a thermodynamic description of continua, including a description of the kinematics of deformation, and a summary of the equations of motion. After a short description of the motion of the system and the mechanical interaction, the book introduces the Lagrangean and Hamiltonian functionals of the system, transitioning to the quasistatic characterization with emphasis on the role of potential energy and pseudo-potential of dissipation. The framework is then extended to fracture and damage mechanics with a similar energetical approach proposed for material damage and wear. The book looks at homogenization in non-linear mechanics for locally plastic or damaged material with an analysis of stability and bifurcation of the equilibrium path. Lastly, inverse problems in non-linear mechanics are introduced using optimal control theory. All the concepts introduced in the book are illustrated using analytical solutions on beams, rods, plates, or using spherical and cylindrical symmetries. Graduate students and researchers working on continuum mechanics and interested in a deeper understanding of materials damage, wear, and fatigue will find this book instructive and informative.