Join thousands of book lovers
Sign up to our newsletter and receive discounts and inspiration for your next reading experience.
By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy.You can, at any time, unsubscribe from our newsletters.
A polymorphous concept, power has imposed itself since ancient times. Whether it characterizes the phenomena of domination, exclusion or voluntary submission, it illuminates social relations and, since the 20th Century, interpersonal relations. This book offers, first of all, a daring panorama through its intertwining of different theoretical propositions relating to power, across time and across disciplines. It then presents the work of researchers in information and communication sciences who draw from these proposals the materials allowing them to develop their own analyses. These analyses revisit discursive power with respect to contemporary formations of communication and information. They investigate digital technologies by problematizing the phenomena of influence, control and access to knowledge. Finally, they reflect on the media in the light of inherent powers of social mediation, advertising and journalism.
This monograph studies the relationships between fractional Brownian motion (fBm) and other processes of more simple form. In particular, this book solves the problem of the projection of fBm onto the space of Gaussian martingales that can be represented as Wiener integrals with respect to a Wiener process. It is proved that there exists a unique martingale closest to fBm in the uniform integral norm. Numerical results concerning the approximation problem are given. The upper bounds of distances from fBm to the different subspaces of Gaussian martingales are evaluated and the numerical calculations are involved. The approximations of fBm by a uniformly convergent series of Lebesgue integrals, semimartingales and absolutely continuous processes are presented. As auxiliary but interesting results, the bounds from below and from above for the coefficient appearing in the representation of fBm via the Wiener process are established and some new inequalities for Gamma functions, and even for trigonometric functions, are obtained.
Information in all its forms is at the heart of the economic intelligence process. It is also a powerful vector of innovation and, more than ever, a balance between economic and societal forces. Strategic Intelligence for the Future 1 analyzes the need for the French economic intelligence to mutate in order to develop the economy, strengthen social cohesion and protect vital interests. This mutation requires a change of attitudes and a new way of thinking, widely open to global change and new technologies. The focus of the French economic intelligence on conventional objectives such as business and the economy does not allow for the integration of its multiple possible fields and thus its global nature. The strategy, foresight and temporal dynamics necessary to the understanding of the world, and the new balance of power and control of complex situations, have thus increased the time needed to put this in place. Both theoretical and practical, this book provides a basis from which to develop "enhanced economic intelligence" leading to the implementation of global security.
This series of books collects a diverse array of work that provides the reader with theoretical and applied information on data analysis methods, models and techniques, along with appropriate applications.Volume 2 begins with an introductory chapter by Gilbert Saporta, a leading expert in the field, who summarizes the developments in data analysis over the last 50 years. The book is then divided into four parts: Part 1 examines (in)dependence relationships, innovation in the Nordic countries, dentistry journals, dependence among growth rates of GDP of V4 countries, emissions mitigation, and five-star ratings; Part 2 investigates access to credit for SMEs, gender-based impacts given Southern Europe's economic crisis, and labor market transition probabilities; Part 3 looks at recruitment at university job-placement offices and the Program for International Student Assessment; and Part 4 examines discriminants, PageRank, and the political spectrum of Germany.
Reformulation and Acquisition of Linguistic Complexity proposes a new answer to the question of the appropriation or acquisition of a mother tongue - a complex object, one that is both stable and perpetually evolving. This answer is based on the reformulating principle that children spontaneously apply; a principle that is illustrated here with children retelling the same story. These children are all 6, 8 or 10 years old and speak French, Italian, Croatian or Polish as a first language. This book demonstrates that the acquisition of any mother tongue is explained by the application of various reformulation procedures between source predications and reformulated predications. These procedures are comparable from one language to another, and different from one age group to another. This book also studies certain complex phenomena at the lexical and syntactical levels, and analyzes how children, depending on their age, treat these phenomena. Finally, we show that the acquisition of a mother tongue is a fundamentally linguistic activity.
The Earth's oceans are currently undergoing unprecedented changes: rivers have suffered a severe reduction in their sediment transport, and as a result, sediment input to the oceans has dropped lower than ever before. These inputs have varied over millennia as a result of both natural occurrences and human actions, such as the building of dams and the extraction of materials from riverbeds. Sedimentary Crisis at the Global Scale 1 examines how river basins have been affected by the sedimentary crises of various historical epochs. By studying global balances, it provides insights into the profound disruption of the solid transport of fluvial bodies. The book also explores studies of various rivers, from the Amazon, which remains relatively unaffected, to dying rivers such as the Colorado and the Nile.
Nowadays, tensors play a central role for the representation, mining, analysis, and fusion of multidimensional, multimodal, and heterogeneous big data in numerous fields. This set on Matrices and Tensors in Signal Processing aims at giving a self-contained and comprehensive presentation of various concepts and methods, starting from fundamental algebraic structures to advanced tensor-based applications, including recently developed tensor models and efficient algorithms for dimensionality reduction and parameter estimation. Although its title suggests an orientation towards signal processing, the results presented in this set will also be of use to readers interested in other disciplines. This first book provides an introduction to matrices and tensors of higher-order based on the structures of vector space and tensor space. Some standard algebraic structures are first described, with a focus on the hilbertian approach for signal representation, and function approximation based on Fourier series and orthogonal polynomial series. Matrices and hypermatrices associated with linear, bilinear and multilinear maps are more particularly studied. Some basic results are presented for block matrices. The notions of decomposition, rank, eigenvalue, singular value, and unfolding of a tensor are introduced, by emphasizing similarities and differences between matrices and tensors of higher-order.
Alternative Takes to the City presents the mosaic of relations and socio-spatial conditions which compose the plurality of contemporary everyday space(s) in cities, offering "a view from below". It proposes a multidisciplinary and gendered approach to the (relational) spatialities and temporalities of the everyday, of new mobilities and of global and local networks which constitute urban life in contemporary cities. The book raises an empirically informed theoretical proposition which springs from the multiplicity of everyday experiences, as a laboratory for understanding recent socio-spatial, political and ideological transformations. Each chapter takes forward the theoretical argument based on one or more examples of concrete cities, in order to unveil the complexity and diversity of the urban condition in changing conjunctures, in which local practices connect and collide with global developments.
Engineering structures may be subjected to extreme high-rate loading conditions, like those associated with natural disasters (earthquakes, tsunamis, rock falls, etc.) or those of anthropic origin (impacts, fluid-structure interactions, shock wave transmissions, etc.). Characterization and modeling of the mechanical behavior of materials under these environments is important in predicting the response of structures and improving designs. This book gathers contributions by eminent researchers in academia and government research laboratories on the latest advances in the understanding of the dynamic process of damage, cracking and fragmentation. It allows the reader to develop an understanding of the key features of the dynamic mechanical behavior of brittle (e.g. granular and cementitious), heterogeneous (e.g. energetic) and ductile (e.g. metallic) materials.
This book explores the unity of life. It proposes that the concept of information is the inner essence of what we today call life. The importance of information for our species is obvious. Human beings are highly dependent on information, constantly exchanging with conspecifics. In a less apparent way, we are the product of genetic and epigenetic information which determines our development in a given environment from a fertilized egg to the adult stage. Even less apparent is that information plays a determining role in ecosystems. This observation may include the prebiotic systems in which life emerged. Our claim is that Nature processes information continuously. This means that even beyond living entities, we can see messages and decoding procedures. Nature can be said to send messages to its own future and then to decode them. Nature "talks" to itself! The systematic organization of messages suggests that, in some respects, we should even speak of the "languages" of Nature.
Managing skills is at the core of Human Resources Management. Based on previous literature and realized with researchers from Magellan, the Research Center in Management of iaeLyon, Skills Management examines how skills can be analyzed at the individual and collective levels, and investigates the focus on different types of skills - including technical, soft, learning, leadership and emotional skills. The book examines how skills management is applied in various contexts and for various populations, cultures and profiles, with examples ranging from middle managers having to develop organizational skills in a changing environment, to engineers having to develop soft skills beyond their technical skills; from police officers developing emotional skills, to the new skills that are needed when a hospital introduces a new approach to shared leadership. In the concluding chapter, this book also investigates how it is sometimes difficult to focus on skills development when organization needs are focused on flexibility.
This book is dedicated to the application of the different theoretical models described in Volume 1 to identify the near-, mid- and far-infrared spectra of linear and nonlinear triatomic molecules in gaseous phase or subjected to environmental constraints, useful for the study of environmental sciences, planetology and astrophysics. The Van Vleck contact transformation method, described in Volume 1, is applied in the calculation and analysis of IR transitions between vibration-rotation energy levels. The extended Lakhlifi-Dahoo substitution model is used in the framework of Liouville's formalism and the line profiles of triatomic molecules and their isotopologues subjected to environmental constraints are calculated by applying the cumulant expansion. The applications presented in this book show how interactions at the molecular level modify the infrared spectra of triatomics trapped in a nano-cage (substitution site of a rare gas matrix, clathrate, fullerene, zeolite) or adsorbed on a surface, and how these interactions may be used to identify the characteristics of the perturbing environment.
Agricultural, energy or mineral commodities are traded internationally in two market categories: physical markets and financial markets. More specifically, on the financial markets, contracts are negotiated, the price of which depends on the price of a commodity. These contracts are called derivatives (futures, options contracts, swaps). This book presents, on the one hand, the characteristics of these derivatives and the markets on which they are traded and, on the other hand, those transactions that typically combine an action on the physical market and a transaction on the corresponding financial market. The understanding of commodity financial markets mainly relies on the resources of economic analysis, especially the financial economy, because the use of this discipline is essential to understanding the major operations that are conducted daily by the operators of these markets: traders, producers, processors, financiers.
This book presents an introduction to structural equation modeling (SEM) and facilitates the access of students and researchers in various scientific fields to this powerful statistical tool. It offers a didactic initiation to SEM as well as to the open-source software, lavaan, and the rich and comprehensive technical features it offers. Structural Equation Modeling with lavaan thus helps the reader to gain autonomy in the use of SEM to test path models and dyadic models, perform confirmatory factor analyses and estimate more complex models such as general structural models with latent variables and latent growth models. SEM is approached both from the point of view of its process (i.e. the different stages of its use) and from the point of view of its product (i.e. the results it generates and their reading).
Product information is excessively commercial and technical. There is no single best product for all, and the price/quality ratio can be deceptive. Word of mouth is growing with opinions shared on the internet. This book calls for the reinvention of a new economy based on real requirements, not only for profit or "technology" but for qualities of use and the environment. A product's use is its purpose. An innovation must always be an improvement to qualities of use. The emergence of new technologies, such as connected objects and the autonomous car, form a new trap for innovation, and progress has been limited to the perfection of technique. Marketing must no longer confuse the consumer (the customer) and the user. Complete with methodology for the reader to follow, this book describes how the ecology of use can become the main wealth of an economy based on quality of life and well-being.
The corporate start-up incubator is currently developing in large companies as an essential approach to open innovation. It faces a global system involving varied contexts, issues and actors. Its implementation is an art and to succeed the corporate incubator must become a real "interaction architect". Using testimonials and real case studies, the author takes a dive into the structural and social mysteries of corporate incubators. By analyzing the complex mechanisms of interactions, this book decrypts and reveals the keys to the success of these devices and to opening innovation in a broad sense. The concept of an "interaction architect" is related to the art of building fruitful interactions within human systems. Being aware that social systems exist is good, but knowing how to manage them is better.
The ability of future industry to create interactive, flexible and always-on connections between design, manufacturing and supply is an ongoing challenge, affecting competitiveness, efficiency and resourcing. The goal of enterprise interoperability (EI) research is therefore to address the effectiveness of solutions that will successfully prepare organizations for the advent and uptake of new technologies. This volume outlines results and practical concepts from recent and ongoing European research studies in EI, and examines the results of research and discussions cultivated at the I-ESA 2018 conference, "Smart services and business impact of enterprise interoperability". The conference, designed to encourage collaboration between academic inquiry and real-world industry applications, addressed a number of advanced multidisciplinary topics including Industry 4.0, Big Data, the Internet of Things, Cloud computing, ontology, artificial intelligence, virtual reality and enterprise modelling for future "smart" manufacturing. Readers will find this book to be a source of invaluable knowledge for enterprise architects in a range of industries and organizations.
Earthquake occurrence modeling is a rapidly developing research area. This book deals with its critical issues, ranging from theoretical advances to practical applications. The introductory chapter outlines state-of-the-art earthquake modeling approaches based on stochastic models. Chapter 2 presents seismogenesis in association with the evolving stress field. Chapters 3 to 5 present earthquake occurrence modeling by means of hidden (semi-)Markov models and discuss associated characteristic measures and relative estimation aspects. Further comparisons, the most important results and our concluding remarks are provided in Chapters 6 and 7.
The different forms of telepresence in education, in distance learning, in student support, in the use of learning environments or even at the heart of robot systems, are developed in universities and higher education facilities specializing in professional training. They constitute opportunities to reform arguments and give rise to important questions: how should we think about the hierarchy of presence and absence in these techniques in order to make possible "the presence of the absent"? What is the effect on mediation processes? On the perception of the body and on identity? How does it transform collaborative work? Telepresence in Training brings together research that attempts to answer these questions by using studies and practical supports from higher education, with regards to teacher training and telepresence robots in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Quebec.
This book provides the most up-to-date knowledge on water in soils and applications for the best use of our water resources. It first addresses the influence of soils on water quality, which is linked to rock weathering, soil formation, acidity and waterlogging. Here, the constituents of soils - such as clay minerals and iron oxides - play a major role. These modifications also have an impact on biogeochemical processes at the global scale, including the carbon cycle and the composition of the atmosphere. Secondly, this book discusses soil salinity, alkalinity and sodification in climates spanning from Mediterranean to arid. Here, water quality results from the concentration of solutes by evaporation and the transpiration of plants. The proper management of irrigation both protects soils against acidification and ensures sustainable agroecological development, while improper management leads to soil degradation and groundwater overexploitation. Lastly, the book describes how excess transfer of phosphorus in lakes results from a cascade of liberation and immobilization in the structure of the surrounding landscape. This leads to a general integrative method to limit eutrophication and restore the quality of water bodies.
The use of atomic energy for military purposes has given rise to a variety of nuclear accidents from the outset. This applies to all levels of use: from the manufacture of weapons to their commissioning. This book provides an overview of the potential impact of such accidents. The prospective consequences of local and global nuclear war are detailed. Similarly, for each accident, the environmental, ecological, health and socio-economic consequences are reviewed. The contamination of the environment and its fauna and flora is detailed and the effects of ionizing radiation are reported. The same is provided for human populations and the adverse effects on the health and physical and mental states of the populations concerned. The economic cost of accidents is also evaluated. The research presented in this book is based on scientifically recognized publications, and reports from the military forces of the various countries concerned and from the national and international organizations competent in this field (IaeA, WHO, UNSCEAR, IRSN, ICPR, etc.).
Electronics has undergone important and rapid developments over the last 60 years, which have generated a large range of theoretical and practical notions. This book presents a comprehensive treatise of the evolution of electronics for the reader to grasp both fundamental concepts and the associated practical applications through examples and exercises. This first volume of the Fundamentals of Electronics series comprises four chapters devoted to elementary devices, i.e. diodes, bipolar junction transistors and related devices, field effect transistors and amplifiers, their electrical models and the basic functions they can achieve. Volumes to come will deal with systems in the continuous time regime, the various aspects of sampling signals and systems using analog (A) and digital (D) treatments, quantized level systems, as well as DA and AD converter principles and realizations.
Modern science is at a tipping point. A new page in the history of knowledge opens with the "information paradigm", a notion which is gradually supplanting the old mechanistic vision inherited from Galileo and Newton. The author presents an overview of the place of information and communications in our time, explaining some reasons for focusing on these two notions. All areas of knowledge are concerned: philosophy, social sciences, biology, medicine, as well as physics, the so-called "queen of sciences", from quantum to cosmos. This book is intended for scientific scholars as well as those with just a general interest who are anxious to understand the major evolutions that are taking shape in fields of knowledge in the 21st Century.
Digital information, particularly for online newsgathering and reporting, is an industry fraught with uncertainty and rapid innovation. Digital Information Ecosystems: Smart Press crosses academic knowledge with research by media groups to understand this evolution and analyze the future of the sector, including the imminent employment of bots and artificial intelligence. The book adopts an original and multidisciplinary approach to this topic: combining the science of media economics with the experience of a practicing journalist of a major daily newspaper. The result is an essential guide to the opportunities of the media to respond to a changing global digital landscape. Independent news reporting is vital in the contemporary democracy; the media must itself become a new "smart press".
Mathematical morphology has developed a powerful methodology for segmenting images, based on connected filters and watersheds. We have chosen the abstract framework of node- or edge-weighted graphs for an extensive mathematical and algorithmic description of these tools.Volume 2 proposes two physical models for describing valid flooding on a node- or edge-weighted graph, and establishes how to pass from one to another. Many new flooding algorithms are derived, allowing parallel and local flooding of graphs. Watersheds and flooding are then combined for solving real problems. Their ability to model a real hydrographic basin represented by its digital elevation model constitutes a good validity check of the underlying physical models. The last part of Volume 2 explains why so many different watershed partitions exist for the same graph. Marker-based segmentation is the method of choice for curbing this proliferation. This book proposes new algorithms combining the advantages of the previous methods which treated node- and edge-weighted graphs differently.
In early research work on international communication, the countries of North Africa and the Middle East were seen as part of the "Third World", and the media had to be at the service of development. However, this situation is changing due to the transnationalization and liberalization of the media. Indeed, since the 1990s, the entry of the South - and Arab countries in this case - into the "information society" has become the dominant creed, although the vision is still globalizing and marked by stereotypes. Representations of these societies are closely associated with international relations and geopolitics, characterized by tensions and conflicts. However, a force has come to disrupt the traditional rules of the game: Arab audiences. Digital media, the dissemination of which has been enabled by the implementation of the "information society", empowers them to participate fully in a media confluence. This liberation from the discourse has two major consequences: the media and journalism sector has become more strategic than ever, and action toward development must be reinvented.
Mediation is a very old practice that has been reborn to meet the needs of the contemporary world. It is thus increasingly present in today's societies. This book presents the theoretical foundations of mediation, as well as the way in which teachers and researchers in Information and Communication Sciences (ICS) have taken up this concept. Whether it is communicational, informational, cultural, organizational or societal, mediation belongs to a field of research, instituted by ICS, which sees in it a process of overcoming conflict, restoring communication and deconstructing social connections. Mediation: A Concept for Information and Communication Sciences inaugurates this set through its contribution to a state of the art of the theory and concepts used by the ICS community. It is addressed to teachers, researchers and students, as well as information professionals wishing to think about their daily practice.
In a context where climate change urgently requires us to alter our paradigms, this book explores the possibilities of cities that are both more energy efficient and more respectful of the environment. Based on the observation that urban planning has been detrimentally affected by the compartmentalization of knowledge and practices, this book is conceived as a dialog between transport and urban planning on the one hand, and between engineering and social science on the other. Systemic analysis and a historical approach, integrating the teachings of the last two centuries, constitute at the methodological level the framework in which this dialog unfolds. Based on examples of good practice, Transport and Town Planning identifies an effective set of levers of action and proposes an original method to guide and accompany urban transition with a large share of the initiative reserved for the actors concerned.
The discrete vision of mechanics is based on the founding ideas of Galileo and the principles of relativity and equivalence, which postulate the equality between gravitational mass and inertial mass. To these principles are added the Hodge-Helmholtz decomposition, the principle of accumulation of constraints and the hypothesis of the duality of physical actions. These principles make it possible to establish the equation of motion based on the conservation of acceleration considered as an absolute quantity in a local frame of reference, in the form of a sum of the gradient of the scalar potential and the curl of the vector potential. These potentials, which represent the constraints of compression and rotation, are updated from the discrete operators. Discrete Mechanics: Concepts and Applications shows that this equation of discrete motion is representative of the compressible or incompressible flows of viscous or perfect fluids, the state of stress in an elastic solid or complex fluid and the propagation of nonlinear waves.
Fishes in Lagoons and Estuaries in the Mediterranean 2 extensively covers the systematic, biological, ecological, behavioral and genetic aspects of the sedentary fishes that spend their entire lifecycle in the coastal fringes, sometimes referred to as "extreme environments". This second volume of a set of books on Mediterranean ichthyofauna presents in-depth scientific, historical and current knowledge at the family, genus and species levels. Designed to give rapid and comprehensive access to the body of knowledge on Mediterranean lagoonal and estuarine sedentary fishes (over 1200 scientific works are referenced), this volume is for anyone involved in the use, management or protection of natural environments and their populations, including ecobiologists, geographers, engineers, teachers, students and researchers.
Sign up to our newsletter and receive discounts and inspiration for your next reading experience.
By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy.