vdm verlag dr müller mär 2008 (130 resultados)

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - With the steadily increasing availability of information on the internet and in corporate databases, the demand for structured approaches to identifying and making use of relevant information is growing rapidly. This book provides an introduction on how heterogeneous data sources can be integrated to form a single source of information for a given information need. State of the art information retrieval methods are described and a workflow-based approach to data integration is introduced in this book. Besides theoretical foundations, the book provides details on the pracatical application of pattern-based workflows to retrieve the data which is required in a particular situation. The pattern-based approach for information retrieval can be used for applications in knowledge management and other areas where relevant information is stored in various data sources.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - Microactuation systems are currently enabled only using large external appratus. This essentially defeats the original purpose of miniaturization. We employ flagellated bacteria as reconfigurable actuators in low Reynolds number fluidic environments. The bacteria are self-contained and are able to draw energy directly from the surrounding environment. Furthermore, flagellated bacteria can be utilized as both individual microactuators and in arrays to create useful works in a variety of microfluidic environments, and controlled in a directed manner using many different kinds of external stimuli, such as temperature, food, and a specific wavelength of lights. The book is addressed to professionals in Science and Technology like fluid mechanicians, microbiologists and nanoengineers. It is also directed towards researchers in Microfluidics, Micro/Nanofabrication and Biophyics.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - A significant part of American playwright David Rabe's work centers on the phenomenon of male aggression and violence. The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Sticks and Bones and Streamers comprise what has come to be known as Rabe's Vietnam Trilogy. In all of them, Rabe portrays male characters in crisis - men inculcated with their culture's race and gender stereotypes yet insecure about their own identity. Does the much-discussed 'crisis of masculinity' really exist The study offers a glimpse at how specific historical events and socio-cultural developments in the United States shaped a concept of masculinity later unmasked as a myth. A detailed analysis of Rabe's plays looks at such topics as war and soldiering as defining means of masculinity. It also examines how the paradigm of manhood correlates to such aspects as race and gender, and what consequence (ill-fated) father-son-relationships can have on the male psyche. This book is addressed to students interested in David Rabe's work but also for anyone researching topics like gender, race and identity in contemporary American literature.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - Human Rights NGOs have long been seen as authentic voice of the people and conscience of the world. Scholars have portrayed them as altruistic agents who confront powerful states on behalf of disempowered victims of human rights abuses. But are human rights campaigns in fact this act of moral altruism or do global human rights organisations have other reasons to pick up a certain case and turn it into a rights campaign The book looks at two campaigns the biggest human rights organisation, Amnesty International, has conducted between 1999 and 2005 and contextualises them in Western public attention and international politics. Comparing both campaigns the book argues that they were very much alike despite considerable differences between the human rights violations on the ground. In both instance Amnesty International told a 'human rights fairy story' that changed according to the dominant image in Western public opinion and international decision making. Human rights work should therefore not be seen as purely altruistic embodiment of the world's conscience but as political act as it is shaped by the dominant public opinion and aims to influence international decision making.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - The work addresses the Internet as a terrain of techno-political controversies between various cultures with their interests and values, which have influenced the development of the Internet since the start. It describes the techno-political cultures of the Internet and addresses some structural changes of the Internet that seem to deviate from some of the pragmatic ideas that hitherto have guided the design of the internet. It examines the dynamics of the RFC/IETF/ISOC and the recent Internet Governance Forum as regulatory instances that are expected to handle the challenges of the Internet. It is argued that the Internet faces some structural changes that cannot easily be met or resolved through the procedures of IETF/ISOC and Internet Governance.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - Challenges related to energy consumption, moisture, and mold control in buildings have reached a crises level. This book introduces a mathematical model for understanding traditional architecture and finding solutions for our current energy efficiency, moisture, and mold related problems. Based on lessons from the past, this book introduces a new understanding of thermal mass in buildings that include utilizing latent thermal mass to control moisture and reduce energy consumption in buildings. Here in this book, you will find a holistic evaluation model that assists architects and designers in producing healthy buildings with low energy consumption. This book discusses the use of field monitoring and computer simulation for both heat and moisture transfer to test and analyze suggested design and control strategies to reduce energy consumption in buildings as well as to improve air quality and depress mold growth. This book also suggests general design guidelines to improve energy performance of buildings and to enhance thermal comfort. This book is very valuable for Researchers, Architects, Engineers, Builders, and Policy makers who are involved in the design and construction of buildings.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - The development of the graphics hardware in the last few years made them much faster. This brings new possibilities for complex visualizations in real-time. One application where a real-time visualization is very important is the interventional imaging for minimal-invasive surgeries. Thereby the physician has to do the surgery based on the provided visualization. In this book a new, complex technique is described which improves this visualization by integrating the pre-operative data, such as CT, directly in the final visualization together with the image from the interventional imaging system, such as ultrasound. The benefit of this technique is that the physician has all important information directly at the intervention. Besides the technique itself the book gives an overview on related techniques in medical visualization and describes how the new technique can be implemented on graphics hardware. In a result section images for the special medical application of liver biopsy are shown. This book is mainly for computer scientists with a focus on medical visualization but it can also be interesting for medical staff to see what happens before an image is showing up on the screen.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - Many of today's languages used in software engineering have bad built-in support for software composition. It is important for software engineering to provide languages and tools to define, reuse and compose software components. Still, many languages available today for programming, modeling, markup, scripting and rule writing do not support a proper way of defining components. They do not include concepts about how to compose components and thus there are no tools for these languages to execute compositions. Invasive Software Composition offers generic composition concepts that can be injected into arbitrary languages. This book introduces an EBNF and MOF-based metamodeling approach through which languages can be extended with Invasive Software Composition concepts. It describes the architecture of the Eclipse Component Model Generator: a tool built on modern technology such as the Eclipse Modeling Framework and the Eclipse Platform. The book demonstrates on different examples how components are defined and compositions are executed with the tool. This book targets software engineers, researchers and students interested in modern software composition and metamodeling techniques.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - This study examined the relationship between student-therapists' clinical experience and three therapeutic factors shown in the literature to be associated with client outcome - the therapy alliance, the number of dropouts, and the number of completed sessions therapists have with their clients. Data were gathered from 24 student-therapists and 420 cases seen at an accredited Marriage and Family Therapy program in the Southeast. Clinical experience was measured using two formats: Time in the training program and the number of client-contact hours accrued by student-therapists. Results showed a negative, significant relationship between clinical experience and the number of dropouts, and a positive, significant relationship between clinical experience and the number of sessions completed with clients.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - In the discipline of International Relations, 'power' has long been equated with military or economic strength. In this book I argue that we need a somewhat broader and more differentiated notion of power that helps us understand how states exert influences over outcomes in international relations. Although the notion of 'soft power' pops up in many recent works on U.S. foreign policy, no one has so far undertook a systematic study on the workings of this type of power. By applying this concept empirically to the wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003 I will show that soft power is not only interesting as an analytical construct but that it is indeed relevant for the conduct of foreign policy. Many commentators have puzzled over why a state as 'powerful' as the United States was unable to achieve its preferred outcome in the 2003 Iraq war. This book proposes an answer.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - The importance of scalability and fault-tolerance in modern distributed systems has led to considerable research in multi-cast gossip protocols. Ina gossip protocol, each node forwards messages to a small set of 'gossip partners' chosen at random from the entire group membership; traditional strong reliability guarantees are traded for probabilistic guaranties, potentially yielding greater scalability and fault tolerance. Nodes only stores a small random subset of the membership as maintaining complete membership views at each node is expensive. These protocols are subtle, and while they have been the subject of much simulation and analysis, formal proofs of key properties - in particular the probability of network partitioning - have remained elusive.In this thesis we give a new scalable gossip-based algorithm for local view maintenance, with a lower bound on the expected partition time. We develop probabilistic bounds on the in-degree (hence the load) of individual nodes, argue that the undirected connectivity graph is an expander and that protocols lacking our reinforcement component eventually converge to star-like networks. Heavy churn and view randomness are also addressed.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - 'We're Bikini Kill. And we want Revolution Girl-style now!!!' In the early 1990s, a female youth movement named Riot Grrrl formed around the feminist punk band Bikini Kill. The band's singer, Kathleen Hanna, became one of the most visible and outspoken activists of Riot Grrrl, which gained momentum particularly in the Pacific Northwest and Washington, D.C. Jannika Bock looks at the beginnings of the youth movement and uncovers its reliance on Second Wave feminists and their works. In her analysis she traces Riot Grrrl's double allegiance: its indebtedness to feminism and the (male) punk scene, two seemingly opposing discourses. Culminating in a case study of Biniki Kill and their first CD Jannika Bock demonstrates how Riot Grrrl re-interpreted the punk narrative in feminist terms. The book is geared towards Americanists and Musicologists, former activists of the youth movement and all people interested in this exciting part of US cultural history.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - Flinders Street Station in Melbourne currently serves a dual purpose, providing both a transient space that links the city to its suburban roots and creating a physical barrier between the city and its watercourse. Flinders Station stands at the new centre of Melbourne on the North banks of the Yarra River. The geographical isolation and entrenched suburban nature of Melbourne has led to the celebration of train travel as a cultural phenomenon. Twice daily Flinders Station filters Melbourne's commuters en route between the city and suburbia. The integration of a new public space as a commuter thoroughfare into the existing rail station introduces a transitory space between the disconnected urban/suburban landscapes of the commuter experience. The train station is seen as a fascinating place of cultural significance where the world of fast movement is intermittently juxtaposed with that of dwelling and leisure. This book redesigns Flinders Street Station, filtering travelers through a new public landscape to activate the connection between city, river, and suburbia while heightening the sense of urban arrival and departure.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - An important aspect in the calculation of emissions is the knowledge of the emission abatement technologies that are in place in the different emission sectors. One of the sectors for which insight is needed into abatement measures being taken is the energy-material intensive sector of iron and steel. The iron and steel sector is a significant source of emissions of air pollutants in which a variety in technologies and abatement measures is applied. An analysis has been performed on the different techniques for iron and steel making and the emission control measures that are in place in the various world regions. Different methodologies can be applied to calculate global emissions from this sector. The methodologies defined and applied vary from detailed calculations for an individual facility to more aggregated methodologies to calculate emissions by country and on a global scale. An overview of emissions calculated using these different methods provides an insight in the uncertainty in global emission inventories on iron and steel making. This book intends to provide guidance to scientists and academic audience in the field of climate change especially in emission and enviromental impact as well as experts and managers specialized in environmental assessment.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - Modern industrial facilities, such as oil refineries, chemical factories, electric power generation plants, etc. are large, complex, distributed systems. These systems are monitored and controlled by networks of special purpose embedded computing devices such as sensors, actuators, and PLCs. These industrial control networks are commonly called SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) networks. The increasing interconnectivity of SCADA networks has exposed them to a wide range of network security problems. One of the important issues in securing SCADA networks is to identify vulnerabilities in the communication protocols. This book analyses existing qualitative security assessment guidelines, specifically attack and vulnerability taxonomies, and proposes a new framework for organizing information about known attacks and vulnerabilities to find unknown or similar vulnerabilities in new systems. This framework is used to organize information related to known vulnerabilities in SCADA protocols into a taxonomy that provides a systematic methodology for the security assessment of other SCADA protocols.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - The Global Compact (GC) is a multistakeholder initiative that was introduced in 1999 by former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan. The initiative aims at filling the governance void of the global economy. While 47% of the 2659 participating companies are based in Europe, U.S. American companies constitute only 3% of the business participants. This book analyzes reasons for joining or not joining the Global Compact. Six determinants are used to analyze a company's decision to join or not to join the initiative; they are the consumer's, employee's, and shareholder's expectations, the feasability of the Compact's requirements, the company's world view regarding the United Nations as well as Corporate Social Responsibility, and, finally, the CEO's information regarding litigation risk. In addition, companies' compliance with the Global Compact's principles or alternative initiatives is assessed by using a compliance model taken from IR theory.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - Mysticism and the sciences have traditionally been theoretical enemies, and the closer that philosophy allies itself with the sciences, the greater the philosophical tendency has been to attack mysticism as a possible avenue towards the acquisition of knowledge and/or understanding. Science and modern philosophy generally aim for epistemic disclosure of their contents, and, conversely, mysticism either aims at the restriction of esoteric knowledge, or claims such knowledge to be non-transferable. Thus the mystic is typically seen by analytic philosophers as a variety of 'private language' speaker, although the plausibility of such a position is seemingly foreclosed by Wittgenstein's work in the Philosophical Investigations. Yorke re-examines Wittgenstein's conclusion on the matter of private language, and argues that so-called 'ineffable' mystical experiences, far from being a 'beetle in a box', can play a viable role in our public language-games, via renewed efforts at articulation.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - The German banking sector is in a transition phase that it has never faced before. It was settled and the market was divided under the different institutes. The German banking system is still based on the principle of the three pillars. Due to different banking laws which didn't allow a consolidation of the home market in the past the German banks were missing larger economies of scale and scope. As the market conditions changed due to new markets, economical changes, new international and national regulations and also demographical changes the pressure on the German banks grew tremendously. New banking institutes entered the market which had better boundary conditions in their home markets to grow and were now able to put pressure on the German banking market. The author Sven Redenbach analyzes the difficult situation in the German banking sector and shows the limiting factors for growth. Building on this he shows how the future trends German banks might face and what factors have to change that they can become successful again internationally. The book addresses banking industry experts, economists and managers.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - Hundreds of millions of people experiment with drugs of abuse, but only a small percentage of them become addicted. Vulnerability to develop addiction has been associated with impulsivity and/or novelty-seeking. It is currently believed that individual predisposition to vulnerability to addiction interacts with neurobiological adaptation in specific brain areas induced by chronic drug use. The present book presents an overview of the different scientific theories that attempt to explain how addiction develops and the neurobiological substrates that render some individuals vulnerable to this disorder. Recent neurobiological and behavioral data on the Roman rats, an animal model of vulnerability to drug addiction, is used to illustrate some of the phenomena described in the book. This book should help shed some light in the field of drug addiction and should be especially useful for students and professionals that attempt to approach the field from a neurobiological perspective.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - As the number of Latinos in the United States has been growing, making them the largest ethnic minority at the beginning of the twenty-first century, their presence in film has been increasing as well. Some Hispanic actors, like Antonio Banderas, Jennifer Lopez or Salma Hayek, have even become major stars. And Latinos have gained importance not only as actors on screen, but also behind the scenes as directors, producers and screenwriters. Has this growing influence changed their representation in Hollywood film After a brief historical overview of the dominant images of Hispanics in American film, the author focuses on movies made since the 1980s. She explores contemporary Latino images in Hollywood film and compares them to past images, while also looking for new representations. To what extent are traditional depictions like the Latin lover, the bandit, the spitfire or the gangster still continued today Which new representations have the Latinos in the movie industry contributed to balance the often stereotypical images of major Hollywood productions The book is intended for people in film, media or ethnic studies and for film fans interested in Latino actors and movies.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - Grapheme-to-phoneme conversion (g2p) is a core component of any text-to-speech system. This book discusses how adding simple syllabification and stress assignment constraints, namely 'one nucleus per syllable' and 'one main stress per word', to a joint n-gram model for g2p conversion leads to a dramatic improvement in conversion accuracy. The model is evaluated on German, English and French, and compares well to state-of-the-art approaches. Secondly, the benefit to be gained from morphological preprocessing for g2p conversion is assessed. While morphological information has been incorporated in some past systems, its contribution has never been quantitatively assessed for German. We compare the relevance of morphological preprocessing with respect to the morphological segmentation method, training set size, the g2p conversion algorithm, and two languages, English and German. This work is particularly valuabel for professionals working with speech syntesis systems.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - Germany is World Champion in Exports. Almost all big enterprises have relations abroad and achieve a big part of their turnover there. This also applies more and more for SMEs. More than 70 percent of the SMEs are exporters. The trend towards internationalisation is still going on and there is no sign for deceleration or even freezing. But many enterprises are in alert because of the high costs caused by Expatriates, especially when travelling with their families. Studies prove that the rate of premature failures of assignments abroad is still of 10-40%, sometimes even higher. Besides of the traditional problems in long-term assignments there are new challenges for the enterprises and among them especially for the SMEs. The author shows that transferability of given solutions for big enterprises to SMEs is limited and introduces alternative assignment forms like short-term assignments, International Commuter and Frequent Traveller in connection with SMEs. Additionally he gives recommendations about basic behaviour in Malaysia. This book should guide decision-makers in SMEs and in all Human Resources Departments, candidates for assignments abroad and Malaysia visitors.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - Among the instruments to support electricity generation from renewable energy sources (RES-E), feed-in tariff (FIT) systems are the most frequently used measure in the Member States of the European Union. Within the last 20 years several FIT designs have been implemented in the EU countries, leading to dynamically developing RES-E markets. This book investigates different feed-in tariff design options and describes their consequences for RES-E generators, investors and electricity consumers. Innovative solutions to reduce electricity generation costs, to promote certain technologies or to take into account local conditions of renewable energy sources are analysed. The author uses several examples from the Member States of the European Union to illustrate the different FIT options. The results shall provide a basis for countries planning the implementation or further development of feed-in tariff systems and serve as a source of information for readers interested in energy policy and RES-E support.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - Sensor motes are small devices with sensing, computing and wireless communication capabilities. Such devices form a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) which can be used for many applications like gathering of environmental data and even monitoring enemy activity on a battlefield. In order to achieve this efficient ad-hoc routing protocols must be used. Such routing protocols are of prime research interest. There exist many different approaches most of which are studied through simulation only. At the same time real hardware platforms for this research become widely available and affordable. In this book a real world environmental monitoring task is taken and a complete WSN application for this task is developed. As hardware platform Crossbow Technology's Cricket motes are used. They are programmed using TinyOS operating system and the NesC language. The usability of various state-of-the-art routing mechanisms for the specific application is discussed. Finally some of these are selected and implemented for use in the developed WSN application. The performance of the different available routing protocols is then measured and compared through actual deployment of the WSN.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - The pattern of learning intended for children is that most of them learn through examples. Consequently, what teachers do to pupils and what pupils do to fellowpupils, school buildings or grounds is much more important than what they say in their learning. On the whole the attitude of teachers and pupils affects teaching and academic performance of learners too.This work therefore examines public primary school teachers` perceptions of the factors contributing to safe school learning environments. It also uses a four-step self-study process, namely: building awareness and community; developing a group focus; implementing ideas of the group focus; and reflecting on the practice. In this work, classroom teachers` experiences suggest that the process developed discourages teachers from direct instruction and encourages them to actively engage students more in their learning. On one hand, the classroom teachers in the work experienced fewer discipline problems in their classrooms after using the process. On the other hand, they changed their attitudes towards their learners and their classroom relationship.The book targets a number of people, to be precise, primary school teachers, student teachers and teacher educators in teacher training colleges and colleges of education.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - The population in Kerala, India is frequently displayed as more literate, more educated, healthier and less poverty struck than those of other Indian states. Women's high development scores are particularly often brought to the forefront when general information about Kerala is distributed. Kerala thus, might seem like a perfect display of social development, a success story for women's emancipation in an 'underdeveloped' part of the world. This book explores critical feminist voices questioning the results of modern emancipation and suggests the critique launched by feminists in Kerala to be relevant when re-examining gender equality in Scandinavia.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - This dissertation proposes an interdisciplinary integration of empirically grounded musicological evidence into linguistic curricula. Phonological, syntactic, and neurological convergences between music and language are identified. However, differences in semantic content and the deliberateness ascribed to a musical or linguistic event inhibit the extent to which a music-language comparison can advance without qualification. Two experiments were conducted, the first presenting a unique music-linguistic phenomenon, suggesting that the major and minor modes in music are non-arbitrarily associated with certain linguistic stimuli ('kiki' and 'bouba', respectively) in accord with their phonetic characteristics (e.g. vowel and consonant quality). This topic is considered in the light of evidence from synaesthesia and sound symbolism. The second experiment explores the level of accord between the linguistic and musical academic communities on subjects relevant to an interdisciplinary discussion. A questionnaire form was administered, with results indicating that an insufficient amount of agreement exists between the two fields to facilitate a productive exchange and evaluation of ideas.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - People often seem to place science and religion as opposing forces in today`s society. Consequently, many have compared the practicing of science to that of religion, however,few have explored the cognitive differences between science and religion. The present work drew a parallel between the cogniton of religion and the dual-process theories of reasoning literature and hypothesized that scientific and religious contexts would elicit different types of processing. Studies included presenting participants with vignettes (scientific or religious) and asking them to reason and recall the material. Results supported the hypothesis that context elicits one type of processing over the other. However, the effect of context was in the opposite direction as hypothesized. Several possible reasons for the reversed trend in the results are discussed including story construction, participants` dependence on expert knowledge, and measures of individual differences. Directions for future work are suggested. The book is addressed to professionals in Psychology and related fields with an interest in the cognition of religion, reasoning, and recall.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - Amongst the general population it is widely held that it is possible to say how much of a characteristic is due to nature and how much is due tonurture. The thought in the background here is that some causes are more important than others. However, there is a longstanding consensus within biology that such talk is in fact meaningless. So what is going on here One answer is that talk of causal importance should be understood in non-causal terms. I consider three possibilities of how this might be done. The second answer is that despite the consensus it is possible to weigh causes. I explore five attempts utilizing the notions of information, limit setting, causal depth (both as necessity and priority), and invariance and insensitivity. Ultimately none of these attempts succeed. However, I argue that it is possible to answer a similar but separate question, namely, how much difference genes/the environment make to a characteristic.The account offered is the first book-length philosophical treatment of whether it is possible to weigh the causes of development and it will be of interest to philosophers of biology and philosophers more generally.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - Traversing Paris is an analysis of the travel writing of Annie Ernaux, François Maspero and Jean Rolin and the photography of Anaik Frantz. The book examines the writing practices of three French writers working in the closing decades of the twentieth century in Paris. The aim is to discover whether travel writing, a practice chosen by all three, belongs to a specific discourse which suits the writing practice of the authors in their treatment of the contemporary urban space of Paris. The five chapters follow the stages of a journey drawing on theoretical and critical approaches by McIlvanney, Thomas, Giard, Sheringham, Barthes, Foucault, Burton, Forsdick, Scott and de Certeau, and the work concludes with a framework for further research in travel writing practices. The key author under study is Annie Ernaux, and Mansfield's Traversing Paris provides a major contribution to the study of her journal writing, examining in detail her 1993 book, Journal du dehors and her subsequent work in 2000 La Vie extérieure.