Eutrophication - Volume 2

Eutrophication - Volume 2

Eutrophication continues to be a major global challenge and the problem of eutrophication and availability of freshwater for human consumption is an essential ecological issue. The global demand for water resources due to increasing population, economic developments, and emerging energy development schemes has created new environmental challenges for global sustainability. Accordingly, the area of research on eutrophication has expanded considerably in recent years. Eutrophication, acidification and contamination by toxic substances are likely to pose increasing threats to freshwater resources and ecosystems. The consequences of anthropogenic-induced eutrophication of freshwaters are severe deterioration of surface waters and growing public concern, as well as new interest among the scientific community. Eutrophication: causes, consequences & control provides the latest information on many important aspects of the processes of natural and accelerated eutrophication in major aquatic ecosystems around the world.

Eutrophication - Volume 2

Library Data

Library Data

Numerical evidence is everywhere and how best to handle and leverage it is a growing concern in the academic world in general and the academic library world in particular. Libraries are not only storehouses and key contacts for library patrons in accessing numbers, but are also collectors and users of their own data, which is integral to the functioning of the library itself.

Library Data

Perspectives on Poverty in India

Perspectives on Poverty in India

The book examines India s experience with poverty reduction in a period of rapid economic growth. Marshalling evidence from multiple sources of survey data and drawing on new methods, the book asks how India s structural transformation – from rural to urban, and from agriculture to nonfarm sectors – is impacting poverty.Our analysis suggests that since the early 1990s, urban growth has emerged as a much more important driver of poverty reduction than in the past. We focus in particular on the role of small and medium size conurbations in India, both as the urban sub-sector in which urban poverty is overwhelmingly concentrated, and as a sub-sector that could potentially stimulate rural-based poverty reduction. Second, in rural areas, we focus on the nature of intersectoral transformation out of agriculture into the nonfarm economy. Stagnation in agriculture has been accompanied by dynamism in the nonfarm sector, but there is much debate about whether the growth seen has been a symptom of agrarian distress or a source of poverty reduction.Finally, alongside the accelerating economic growth and the highly visible transformation that is occurring in India s major cities, inequality is on the rise. This is raising concern that economic growth in India has by-passed significant segments of the population. The third theme on social exclusion asks if, despite the dramatic growth, historically grounded inequalities along lines of caste, tribe and gender have persisted.This book would be of interest for policymakers, researchers, non-governmental organizations, and international agencies from India and abroad–who wish to know more about India s experience of the last two decades in reducing poverty.

Perspectives on Poverty in India

Numerical Methods for Controlled Stochastic Delay Systems

Numerical Methods for Controlled Stochastic Delay Systems

The Markov chain approximation methods are widely used for the numerical solution of nonlinear stochastic control problems in continuous time. This book extends the methods to stochastic systems with delays. Because such problems are infinite-dimensional, many new issues arise in getting good numerical approximations and in the convergence proofs. Useful forms of numerical algorithms and system approximations are developed in this work, and the convergence proofs are given. All of the usual cost functions are treated as well as singular and impulsive controls. A major concern is on representations and approximations that use minimal memory. Featuring numerical algorithms and examples with applications to control and modern communications systems, this book is the first on the subject and will be of great interest to all those who work with stochastic delay equations and whose main interest is in either the use of the algorithms or in the underlying mathematics. An excellent resource for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners, the work may be used as a graduate-level textbook for a special topics course or seminar on numerical methods in stochastic control.

Numerical Methods for Controlled Stochastic Delay Systems

Methods for Multilevel Analysis and Visualisation of Geographical Networks

Methods for Multilevel Analysis and Visualisation of Geographical Networks

This leading-edge study focuses on the latest techniques in analysing and representing the complex, multi-layered data now available to geographers studying urban zones and their populations. The volume tracks the successful results of the SPANGEO Project, which was set up in 2005 to standardize, and share, the syncretic, multinational mapping techniques already developed by geographers and computer scientists. SPANGEO sought new and responsive ways of visualising urban geographical and social data that reflected the fine-grained detail of the inputs. It allowed for visual representation of the large and complex networks and flows which are such an integral feature of the dynamism of urban geography. SPANGEO developed through the ‘visual analytics loop’ in which geographers collaborated with computer scientists by feeding data into the design of visualisations that in turn spawned the urge to incorporate more varied data into the visualisation. This volume covers all the relevant aspects, from conceptual principles to the tools of network analysis and the actual results flowing from their deployment. Detailed case studies set out in this volume include spatial multi-level analyses of flows in airports and sea ports, as well as the fascinating scientific networks in European cities. The volume shows how the primary concern of geographythe interaction of society with physical spacehas been revivified by the complexities of new cartographical and statistical methodologies, which allow for highly detailed mapping and far more powerful computer analysis of spatial relationships.

Methods for Multilevel Analysis and Visualisation of Geographical Networks

Personal Support Workers

Personal Support Workers

This book is a Canadian adaptation of Lippincott’s Textbook for Nursing Assistants, retaining the book’s direct, conversational writing style and emphasis on professionalism and humanism. This adaptation prepares students to work as Personal Support Workers (who may be designated by other titles, depending upon the province) in long-term, acute, and home health settings. The original text has been adapted to cover the Canadian healthcare system, discuss considerations for caring for native Canadian populations, and present SI units of measurement. Although each province has a slightly different scope of practice, care has been taken to address the most general, overriding issues of concern to all provinces.

Personal Support Workers

Economic Growth and the Environment

Economic Growth and the Environment

Economic Growth and the Environment explores the debate on how to reconcile economic growth with protection of the natural environment, and the closely related discussion on whether an increasing scarcity of natural resources will eventually force economic growth to cease. The debate focuses on whether environmental policies will benefit the economy or not, and is divided into growth optimists and growth pessimists. In general, economists have been optimistic and have pointed to the possibilities of technological progress and substitution, yet they also acknowledge that natural resources and environmental concern do restrict economic growth. The difficulty lies in quantifying the constraint to economic growth. Modern growth economists have constructed models to examine to what extent ‘growth pessimism’ is theoretically warranted. This book provides an introduction to some of these models, brings together the discussion between growth optimists and pessimists, and presents the theory behind their arguments. It aims to present models where both sides can meet and where both are able to derive expected results with the parameter values that they deem appropriate. From there, the discussions can turn to the empirical observations about these parameters.

Economic Growth and the Environment

Education as a Global Concern

Education as a Global Concern

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Education as a Global Concern

Locating Privacy in Tudor London

Locating Privacy in Tudor London

Locating Privacy in Tudor London asks new questions about where private life was lived in the early modern period, about where evidence of it has been preserved, and about how progressive and coherent its history can be said to have been. The Renaissance and the Reformation are generally taken to have produced significant advances in individuality, subjectivity, and interiority, especially among the elite, but this study of middling-sort culture shows privacy to have been an object of suspicion, of competing priorities, and of compulsory betrayals. The institutional archives of civic governance, livery companies, parish churches, and ecclesiastical courts reveal the degree to which society organized itself around principles of preventing privacy, as a condition of order. Also represented in the discussion are such material artifacts as domestic buildings and household furnishings, which were routinely experienced as collective and monitory agents rather than spheres of exclusivity and self-expression. In ‘everyday’ life, it is argued, economic motivations were of more urgent concern than the political paradigms that have usually informed our understanding of the Renaissance. Locating Privacy pursues the case study of Alice Barnham (1523-1604), a previously unknown merchant-class woman, subject of one of the earliest family group paintings from England. Her story is touched by many of the changes-in social structure, religion, the built environment, the spread of literacy, and the history of privacy-that define the sixteenth century.

Locating Privacy in Tudor London

The Whorf Theory Complex

The Whorf Theory Complex

At last — a comprehensive account of the ideas of Benjamin Lee Whorf which not only explains the nature and logic of the linguistic relativity principle but also situates it within a larger ‘theory complex’ delineated in fascinating detail. Whorf’s almost unknown unpublished writings (as well as his published papers) are drawn on to show how twelve elements of theory interweave in a sophisticated account of relations between language, mind, and experience. The role of language in cognition is revealed as a central concern, some of his insights having interesting affinity with modern connectionism. Whorf’s gestaltic ‘isolates’ of experience and meaning, crucial to understanding his reasoning about linguistic relativity, are explained. A little known report written for the Yale anthropology department is used extensively and published for the first time as an appendix. With the Whorf centenary in 1997, this book provides a timely challenge to those who take pleasure in debunking his ideas without bothering to explore their subtlety or even reading them in their original form.

The Whorf Theory Complex

Hormone-Disruptive Chemical Contaminants in Food

Hormone-Disruptive Chemical Contaminants in Food

Today, we are surrounded by a multitude of different chemicals that are essential components of our everyday life. As a consequence, there are various hazardous substances like dioxins, phthalates and flame-retardants circulating in the environment. These have an impact on ecosystems, wildlife and possibly human health. In recent years, the phenomenon called endocrine disruption has raised considerable concern. This book discusses the scientific basis of this issue using epidemiological and experimental in vitro and in vivo data about chemicals targeting the hormonal systems. It also provides an up-to-date review of international initiatives (including high-throughput screening, use of model organisms and in silico applications) aiming to screen, detect and functionally test these chemicals. The authors are highly experienced academics and acknowledged experts with both multidisciplinary and international expertise. The book provides an up-to-date, in-depth review of the current field of food safety research describing many of the ‘hot topics’ currently debated. Recent media attention concerning, for example, dioxins in meat and bisphenol A in baby bottles has created a growing interest in food safety-related issues from both consumers and authorities. In addition, European legislation REACH, which requires industry to extensively test chemicals, has led to new initiatives within this area. This book presents a comprehensive overview of the recent international initiatives formed to meet the challenges of environmental pollutants in our food.

Hormone-Disruptive Chemical Contaminants in Food

From Transmitted Deprivation to Social Exclusion

From Transmitted Deprivation to Social Exclusion

John Welshman’s new book fills a major gap in social policy: the history of debates over ‘transmitted deprivation’, and their relationship with current initiatives on social exclusion. The book explores the content and background to Sir Keith Joseph’s famous ‘cycle of deprivation’ speech in 1972, examining his own personality and family background, his concern with ‘problem families’, and the wider policy context of the early 1970s. Tracing the direction taken by the DHSS-SSRC Research Programme on Transmitted Deprivation, it seeks to understand why the Programme was set up, and why it took the direction it did. With this background, the book explores New Labour’s approach to child poverty, initiatives such as Sure Start, the influence of research on inter-generational continuities, and its new stance on social exclusion. The author argues that, while earlier writers have acknowledged the intellectual debt that New Labour owes to Joseph, and noted similarities between current policy approaches to child poverty and earlier debates, the Government’s most recent attempts to tackle social exclusion mean that these continuities are now more striking than ever before. Making extensive use of archival sources, private papers, contemporary published documents, and oral interviews with retired civil servants and social scientists, ‘Policy, Poverty and Parenting’ is the only book-length treatment of this important but neglected strand of the history of social policy. It will be of interest to students and researchers working on contemporary history, social policy, political science, public policy, sociology, and public health.

From Transmitted Deprivation to Social Exclusion

Global Logistics

Global Logistics

The field of logistics continues to develop at a remarkable pace. Until recently, logistics was barely considered in the long-term plans of even major companies, but its strategic role is now recognized and it lies at the heart of long-term plans in almost every business. There are many reasons for this change: communications and information technology are offering new oppotunities; world trade is growing; competition is forcing operations to adopt new practices and become ever more efficient; and there is increasing concern for the environment. Add to this the increased emphasis on customer satisfaction, flexible operations and time compression, and it becomes clear why it is so important for organizations to get their logistics right.

Global Logistics

AspectJ in Action

AspectJ in Action

A software system is the realization of a set of concerns. One of the central premises of object-oriented , is that each concern should be implemented as a separate module. However, there are certain system-wide concerns, such as logging, security, performance, and so forth, that often need to be addressed in many, if not all of the modules. Consequently, the code to handle these system-wide concerns may be mixed in with the core logic of a huge number of modules, resulting in lower productivity, poor quality, and systems that are hard to evolve.,

Aspect-oriented programming overcomes these problems by modularizing the system-wide concerns.

AspectJ in Action