Bücher veröffentlicht von World Scientific Europe Ltd

Today's physics has led to incredible advances in the technology we use in daily life - from cell phones and GPS systems to PET scans and more. Current theories in physics have been amazingly effective in practical terms. Yet all is far from well: the two foundational concepts in physics - Quantum Theory and General Relativity - are incompatible with each other, and observations of the universe show that our theories are incomplete - at best.While physicists have tried to paper over this impasse by inventing dark matter and dark energy, they remain unobserved mysteries. Adding fuel to the fire of current crises, artificial intelligence threatens to replace our most cherished theories and procedures with arcane algorithms. Worse yet perhaps, the public understands physics poorly, either taking it for granted or fearing and rejecting it completely.Physicists dream of a new universal theory that will completely change how we see our world, much as Einstein did with relativity and Newton with gravity. Likewise, society loves the romantic notion of a single genius heroically creating a massive paradigm shift. Still, is this scenario likely today? Perhaps the next steps in physics will be incremental rather than gigantic.In Physics in Crisis, Bruno Mansoulié uses simple language, insightful examples, and his personal experience as a working physicist to address these fundamental questions and reflect on how today's crises in physics might be solved.

In the corporate underground, creative intrapreneurs produce ideas autonomously and without the consent of management. Such informal activity frequently 'corrects' and compensates for the weaknesses of formal organizational systems. The corporate underground is an adjusting element for a number of organizational paradoxes. This imposes a certain legitimacy on covert activities such as bootlegging and constructive deviance. It reflects a basic axiom of the evolutionary perspective: change and creativity are reliant upon elements of redundancy, waste and inefficiency.With contributions from 16 leading experts in this field, the book offers a comprehensive picture of the nature of covert creativity for theory, research and practice. The chapters cover a wide range of facets of underground activity, including basic information, the sensitive transition from underground to formal disclosure at an organization, and psychological factors. This book is a valuable compendium for academics and practitioners interested in R&D and innovation. Management seeking to better manage their innovative capabilities in their companies will also benefit from this book.

A product''s design is based on what customers want and how much they are willing to pay for it determines its quality. The production process is supposed to achieve the required quality. Due to the natural process variation the quality of a product or service varies. Thus, quality can be defined as fitness for intended use or, in other words, how well the product performs its intended function. It is a written or unwritten commitment to a known or unknown consumer in the market. Quality management ensures that a product or service is fit for its purpose. It has three main components: quality planning, quality control and quality improvement. Quality management is focused not only on product and service quality, but also on the means to maintain it. Quality management, therefore, uses quality control tools to achieve more consistent quality.This book aims to provide the readers with the essential practical knowledge and understanding of quality-related issues to make correct decisions faster. Hence, they can effectively contribute to a modern dynamic production environment.The book covers the essential tools used in quality control and quality management. There are a lot of practical questions and answers on quality.

Modern Finance and Risk Management is dedicated to our colleague, academic mentor, and adviser Professor Hermann Locarek-Junge. During his academic career, Hermann Locarek-Junge published several important contributions to the field of risk management and portfolio management and served as the chairman and board member of the German Finance Association (DGF) and the Data Science Society (Gesellschaft f├╝r Klassifikation).A short foreword by the mentors of Hermann Locarek-Junge and an introduction by the editors mark the beginning of the Festschrift. The first section on Modern Finance includes chapters on asset management, entrepreneurship, and behavioural finance. The second section on Modern Risk Management contains seven contributions covering considerations of risk measurement, risk management, and regulation. Finally, the third section includes topics on commodities and energy finance.This Festschrift comprises 20 original contributions of notable scholars in finance who have worked with Hermann Locarek-Junge over the last four decades. Due to numerous connections to practice and applications, Modern Finance and Risk Management is relevant and attractive not only to academics and researchers but also to practitioners in industry and banking.

In the modern world, data is a vital asset for any organization, regardless of industry or size. The world is built upon data. However, data without knowledge is useless. The aim of this book, briefly, is to introduce new approaches that can be used to shape and forecast the future by combining the two disciplines of Statistics and Economics.Readers of Modeling and Advanced Techniques in Modern Economics can find valuable information from a diverse group of experts on topics such as finance, econometric models, stochastic financial models and machine learning, and application of models to financial and macroeconomic data.

Contemporary high-frequency engineering design heavily relies on full-wave electromagnetic (EM) analysis. This is primarily due to its versatility and ability to account for phenomena that are important from the point of view of system performance. Unfortunately, versatility comes at the price of a high computational cost of accurate evaluation. Consequently, utilization of simulation models in the design processes is challenging although highly desirable. The aforementioned problems can be alleviated by means of surrogate modeling techniques, the most popular of which are data-driven models. Although a large variety of methods are available, they are all affected by the curse of dimensionality. This is especially pronounced in high-frequency electronics, where typical system responses are highly nonlinear. Construction of practically useful surrogates covering wide ranges of parameters and operating conditions is a considerable challenge.Surrogate Modeling for High-Frequency Design presents a selection of works representing recent advancements in surrogate modeling and their applications to high-frequency design. Some chapters provide a review of specific topics such as neural network modeling of microwave components, while others describe recent attempts to improve existing modeling methodologies. Furthermore, the book features numerous applications of surrogate modeling methodologies to design optimization and uncertainty quantification of antenna, microwave, and analog RF circuits.

Mathematical Methods and Models in Composites (Second Edition) provides an in-depth treatment of modern and rigorous mathematical methods and models applied to composites modeling on the micro-, meso-, and macro scale. There has been a steady growth in the diversity of such methods and models that are used in the analysis and characterization of composites, their behavior, and their associated phenomena and processes. This second edition expands upon the success of the first edition, and has been substantially revised and updated.Written by well-known experts in different areas of applied mathematics, physics, and composite engineering, this book is mainly focused on continuous fiber reinforced composites and their ever increasing range of applications (for example, in the aerospace industry), though it also covers other kind of composites. The chapters cover a range of topics including, but not limited to: scaling and homogenization procedures in composites, thin plate and wave solutions in anisotropic materials, laminated structures, fiber-reinforced nonlinearly elastic solids, buckling and postbuckling, fracture and damage analysis of composites, and highly efficient methods for simulation of composites manufacturing such as resin transfer molding. The results presented are useful for the design, fabrication, testing and industrial applications of composite components and structures.This book is an essential reference for graduate and doctoral students, as well as researchers in mathematics, physics and composite engineering. Explanations and references in the book are sufficiently detailed so as to provide the necessary background to further investigate the fascinating subject of composites modeling and explore relevant research literature. It is also suitable for non-experts who wish to have an overview of the mathematical methods and models used for composites, and of the open problems in this area that require further research.

The COVID-19 global health pandemic, which started in late December 2019, forced many countries to adopt unusual measures such as social distancing and strict lockdowns. It changed many of our certainties and practices, including the foundations of the market-led version of capitalism, by bringing social and health considerations back to the forefront of firms' considerations, investors' strategies and governments' priorities. Under the effects of this unprecedented crisis, all sectors of finance and real economy have been seriously affected.Health uncertainties and their increasing consequences for human life and activities require stronger and faster actions to shape pathways towards sustainability and better resilience. The COVID-19 health crisis is a visible part of a greater iceberg: the World Health Organization has tracked, over recent years, a large number of epidemic events around the world, suggesting that many other similar diseases could appear and evolve in the future from epidemic to pandemic in a globalized world.Financial Transformations Beyond the COVID-19 Health Crisis was specifically designed to provide the readers with new results, recent findings and future outlook on the impacts of COVID-19 on financial markets, firm behaviors, and finance and investment strategies. It favors multidimensional perspectives and brings together conceptual, empirical and policy-oriented chapters, using quantitative and qualitative methods alike. This is a timely and comprehensive collection of theoretical, empirical and policy contributions from renowned scholars around the world, and provides the thoughts and insights required to rethink the financial sector in the event of new shocks of the same nature.

Specialists from around the world have contributed to this unique textbook on the surgical skills essential for the urgent treatment of craniofacial injuries caused by war and terrorist incidents. It explores a wide range of considerations including how to work with limited resources and logistical problems, preparation for terror attacks, preservation of sight and cosmetic appearance, and also features a simulation training module proven to be academically successful and economical to run. The content is ideal for all nonspecialist clinicians and students of medicine, dentistry and nursing, and also for teaching programmes involving the psychopathology of trauma.

After the gradual slowing down of the "third wave of democratization," electoral authoritarianism is rapidly emerging as a dominant form of contemporary autocracy. Political parties play a key role within the political and institutional structures of electoral autocracies. Pro-regime parties provide the dictatorial executive with electoral and legislative tools of sustaining power. At the same time, permitted opposition parties, while normally incapable of challenging the regime, are important for regime sustainability because they perform such vital functions as co-opting actual or potential opposition groups, facilitating power-sharing, and mobilizing electoral participation. The interactions among the dominant parties and the permitted opposition parties, if displaying sustainable cross-temporal patterns, constitute authoritarian party systems.Authoritarian Party Systems provides a theoretical discussion of electoral authoritarianism with special reference to authoritarian party systems; a methodological overview of party system research with special reference to the problems caused by the authoritarian nature of the observed party systems; a comprehensive cross-regional and historical overview of authoritarian party systems; a quantitative analysis of their structural characteristics, including fragmentation, party system format, volatility, and nationalization; and in-depth discussions of the political regime determinants of authoritarian party systems and of the interplay between party systems and other components of the authoritarian institutional order. Quantitative analysis has been performed on an original database comprising cases of party-structured authoritarian regimes between 1945-2019. This content of the book is illustrated by case studies drawn from across the spectrum of contemporary authoritarian regimes.

Biology, medicine and biochemistry have become data-centric fields for which Deep Learning methods are delivering groundbreaking results. Addressing high impact challenges, Deep Learning in Biology and Medicine provides an accessible and organic collection of Deep Learning essays on bioinformatics and medicine. It caters for a wide readership, ranging from machine learning practitioners and data scientists seeking methodological knowledge to address biomedical applications, to life science specialists in search of a gentle reference for advanced data analytics.With contributions from internationally renowned experts, the book covers foundational methodologies in a wide spectrum of life sciences applications, including electronic health record processing, diagnostic imaging, text processing, as well as omics-data processing. This survey of consolidated problems is complemented by a selection of advanced applications, including cheminformatics and biomedical interaction network analysis. A modern and mindful approach to the use of data-driven methodologies in the life sciences also requires careful consideration of the associated societal, ethical, legal and transparency challenges, which are covered in the concluding chapters of this book.

Wear is one of the main reasons mechanical components and materials become inoperable, rendering enormous costs to society over time. Estimating wear allows engineers to predict the useful life of modern mechanical elements, reduce the costs of inoperability, or obtain optimal designs (i.e. selecting proper materials, shapes, and surface finishing according to mechanical conditions and durability) to reduce the impact of wear.Wear in Advanced Engineering Applications and Materials presents recent computational and practical research studying damage and wear in advanced engineering applications and materials. As such, this book covers numerical formulations based on the finite element method (FEM) - and the boundary element method (BEM) - as well as theoretical and experimental research to predict the wear response or life-limiting failure of engineering applications.

Quantum Computing for the Brain argues that the brain is the killer application for quantum computing. No other system is as complex, as multidimensional in time and space, as dynamic, as less well-understood, as of peak interest, and as in need of three-dimensional modeling as it functions in real-life, as the brain.Quantum computing has emerged as a platform suited to contemporary data processing needs, surpassing classical computing and supercomputing. This book shows how quantum computing''s increased capacity to model classical data with quantum states and the ability to run more complex permutations of problems can be employed in neuroscience applications such as neural signaling and synaptic integration. State-of-the-art methods are discussed such as quantum machine learning, tensor networks, Born machines, quantum kernel learning, wavelet transforms, Rydberg atom arrays, ion traps, boson sampling, graph-theoretic models, quantum optical machine learning, neuromorphic architectures, spiking neural networks, quantum teleportation, and quantum walks.Quantum Computing for the Brain is a comprehensive one-stop resource for an improved understanding of the converging research frontiers of foundational physics, information theory, and neuroscience in the context of quantum computing.

Existing literature focuses on the alleged merits of the Stirling engine. These are indeed latent but, decades on, remain to be fully realised. This is despite the fact that Stirling and other closed-cycle prime-movers offer a contribution to an ultra-low carbon economy. By contrast with solar panels, the initial manufacture of Stirling engines makes no demands on scarce or exotic raw materials. Further, calculating embodied carbon per kWh favours the Stirling engine by a wide margin.However, the reader expecting to find the Stirling engine promoted as a panacea for energy problems may be surprised to find the reverse. Stirling and Thermal-Lag Engines reflects upon the fact that there is more to be gained by approaching its subject as a problem than as a solution. The Achilles heel of the Stirling engine is a low numerical value of specific work, defined as work per cycle per swept volume per unit of charge pressure and conventionally denoted Beale number NB. Measured values remain unimproved since 1818, quantified here for the first time at 2% of the NB of the modern internal combustion engine! The low figure is traced to incomplete utilisation of the working gas. Only a small percentage of the charge gas - if any - is processed through a complete cycle, i.e., between temperature extremes.The book offers ready-made tools including a simplified algorithm for particle trajectory map construction; an author-patented mechanism delivering optimised working-gas distribution; flow and heat transfer data re-acquired in context and an illustrated re-derivation of the academically respected Method of Characteristics which now copes with shock formation and flow-area discontinuities. All formulations are presented in sufficient detail to allow the reader to 'pick up and run' with them using the data offered in the book.The various strands are drawn together in a comprehensively engineered design of an internally focusing solar Stirling engine, presented in a form allowing a reader with access to basic machining facilities to construct one.The sun does not always shine. But neither will the oil always flow. This new title offers an entrée to technology appropriate to the 21st century.