State Management offers a comprehensive yet concise introduction to the new field of state management, presenting an analysis of basic questions within the theories of bureaucracy, policy-making, principal-agent modelling and policy networks. Focussing upon recent state transformation, it illuminates public sector reform strategies such as New Public Management as well as incorporation, tendering and bidding, decentralization, team production and privatization.
The monograph written by Mihoko Otake combines ideas from chemistry and physics, material science and engineering for the revolutionary development of the so-called gel robots. Electroactive polymers are introduced to build new types of muscular-like actuation for deformable robots. The coverage spans from modelling and design to the development, control and experimental testing. A number of methods are proposed for describing the shapes and motions of such systems. The results are demonstrated for beam-shaped gels curling around an object and starfish-shaped gel robots turning over.
Written by leading market risk academic, Professor Carol Alexander, Pricing, Hedging and Trading Financial Instruments forms part three of the Market Risk Analysis four volume set. This book is an in-depth, practical and accessible guide to the models that are used for pricing and the strategies that are used for hedging financial instruments, and to the markets in which they trade. It provides a comprehensive, rigorous and accessible introduction to bonds, swaps, futures and forwards and options, including variance swaps, volatility indices and their futures and options, to stochastic volatility models and to modelling the implied and local volatility surfaces.
Algorithms known as ‘particle’ methods, whose characteristic feature is the discretization technique when the set of discrete objects is introduced, which are model ‘particles’ considered as some mesh of moving nodes, are becoming more and more widespread in mathematical modelling. Until recently, particle methods have mainly been developed as an alternative to classical numerical methods for solving problems in some applied domains of physics and mathematics. As a result, no specialized monographs on this subject have been available.
