Books published by Springer Nature Switzerland AG

This text covers the key technologies employed in wireless links that enable increased data rates and thus are likely to be employed in support of 5G wireless transport networks, i.e., backhaul, midhaul, and fronthaul networks. The author presents technologies at an introductory level but nonetheless at a level that imparts to the reader a sound understanding of the fundamentals. The book is intended for those practicing engineers and graduate and upper undergraduate students who have an interest in acquiring, where missing, the necessary technology background in order to comprehend the functioning and capability of 5G based wireless transport links. The author focuses on those technologies that are key to achieving the high data rates and high reliability required of this transport. The material is presented in a clear, concise, and mathematically light fashion.Covers key wireless transport (backhaul, midhaul, and fronthaul) technologies for 5G and beyond, presented in a clear tractable fashion;Outlines the basic wireless transport transmitter/receiver terminal architecture, provides specifications of some such terminals, and indicates the link performance afforded by such terminals;Provides sufficient mathematics to make it technically coherent, but not so much as to make it challenging for a reader with no or limited familiarity with these technologies.

This book provides a general overview and current state of the art of different types of metal oxide nanomaterials, either in nanoparticles or thin film structure. It covers from the development and optimization of different nanofabrication/synthesis techniques for nanostructures which are currently the attention of the research community, the study of the structure and interactions by different characterization techniques of heterostructured materials and the final impact in different applications such as nanotherapy, data storage, super magnets, high-frequency devices. The book¿s 13 chapters provide deep insight into the intriguing science of oxide materials and include contributions on novel technologies to fabricate nanomaterials with a broad range of functional properties (semiconducting, magnetic, ferroelectric, thermoelectric, optical, flexible and mechanical). This book is intended to the experts for consolidation of their knowledge but also for students who aim to learn and get basics of nanostructured metal oxides in diverse forms.

This edited volume examines how climate action plans engage justice at the scale of the city. Recent events in the United States make the context particularly ripe for a discussion of justice in urban climate politics. On the one hand, the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, George Floyd¿s death, and the prominence of racial discrimination in the public realm have mainstreamed the notion of justice. On the other hand, the dire consequences of increased frequency and severity of climate events on vulnerable segments of urban populations are undeniable. While some cities have been proactive about integrating justice in their climate action planning, in most places an explicit and systematic link between both spheres has been lacking. This book explores this interface as it seeks to understand how cities can respond to climate change in a just way and for just outcomes. While resilience strategies based on ¿development¿ may engage historic inequities, they may at the same time result in marginalizing certain populations through various processes, from mismatched solutions to outright exclusion and climate gentrification. By identifying how certain populations are included in or excluded from climate action planning practices, the chapters in this volume draw on case studies to outline the differential outcomes of climate action in American cities, also proposing a template for comparative work beyond the US. The authors tackle the debate about how justice is or is not integrated in climate action plans and assess practical implications, while also making theoretical and methodological contributions. As it fills a gap in the literature at the intersection of justice and climate action, the book produces new insights for a wide-ranging audience: students, practitioners, policy-makers, planners, the non-profit sector, and scholars in geography, urban planning, urban studies, environmental studies, ecology, political science, or anthropology. Along five axes of investigation¿theory, resilience, equity, community, and comparison as method¿the contributors offer various pathways into the intersection between urban climate action and different understandings of justice. Collectively, they invite a reflection that can lead to practical initiatives in climate mitigation, while also advancing the theorization of social justice to account for the urban as a node where (in)justice plays out and can be addressed with significant results.

The book contains two contributions about the work of Emmanuele DiBenedetto and a selection of original papers. The authors are some of the main experts in Harnack¿s inequalities and nonlinear operators. These papers are part of the contributions presented during the conference to celebrate the 70th birthday of Prof. Emmanuele DiBenedetto, which was held at ¿Il Palazzone¿ in Cortona from June 18th to 24th, 2017. The papers are focused on current research topics regarding the qualitative properties of solutions, connections with calculus of variations, Harnack inequality and regularity theory. Some papers are also related to various applications. Many of the authors have shared with Prof. DiBenedetto an intense scientific and personal collaboration, while many others have taken inspiration from and further developed his field of research. The topics of the conference are certainly of great interest for the international mathematical community.

In this book international geography educators discuss the ways in which geographical knowledge is recontextualised in schools and consider effective approaches to facilitate, improve and advance geography education in research and practice. It addresses key topics in recontextualising geography such as the epistemic relationships between the university discipline and the school subject, designing and evaluating the geography curriculum, the role of students in the transformation of knowledge in the classroom and selecting and transforming geographical content knowledge for the primary school curriculum. At an international level, the contributors and editors bring together an advanced collection of research and discussion surrounding the opportunities and challenges of recontextualising geography in education. The book is of interest to geography educators internationally, including academics at universities, teachers in schools, and professional geographers with an interestin education.

This book covers the range of methodological approaches, methods and tools currently used in various areas of building science and technology research and addresses the current lack of research-method literature in this field. The book covers the use of measurement-based methods in which data is collected by measuring the properties and their variations in ¿actual¿ physical systems, simulation-based methods which work with ¿models¿ of systems or processes to describe, examine and analyze their behaviors, performances and operations, and data-driven methodologies in which data is collected via measurement or simulation to identify and examine the associations and patterns and predict the future in a targeted system. The book presents a survey of key methodologies in various specialized areas of building science and technology research including window systems, building enclosure, energy performance, lighting and daylighting, computational fluid dynamics, indoor and outdoor thermal comfort, and life cycle environmental impacts.Provides advanced insight into the research methods and presents the key methodologies within the field of building science and technology.Reviews simulation-based and experimentation/field-based methods of data collection and analysis in diverse areas of building science and technology, such as energy performance, window and enclosure studies, environmental LCA, daylighting, CFD, and thermal comfort.Provides a range of perspectives from building science faculty and researcher contributors with diverse research interests.Appropriate for use in university courses.

This book focuses on the role of hydrogen sulfide in the protection of plants against abiotic stresses and abiotic stress-induced complications by the way of converging advanced key methods of proteomics, genomics, and metabolomics. It provides an update on the biosynthesis, signaling, and mechanism of action of hydrogen sulfide in combating abiotic stresses in plants. Also, special emphasis is given to the interaction of hydrogen sulfide with other signaling molecules (such as nitric oxide, carbon monoxide, hydrogen peroxide etc.), phytohormones, mineral nutrients, ions, and ion channels in plants.This work, uniquely, covers key aspects of hydrogen sulfide signaling in relation to abiotic stresses in plants, including programmed cell death, stomatal movement, and fruit ripening.

This exciting new book brings fresh knowledge of affective pedagogies in early childhood education and care. The book draws on cultural-historical theory in alignment with visual methodologies to elucidate infant-toddlers¿ affective pedagogies through analysis of case examples. The book reveals contemporary pedagogical practices in the infant-toddler space like mealtimes, nappy change and play. These pedagogical practices show the highly specialised nature of working with infant-toddlers such as the affective relations between educators and infant-toddlers, affective dialogue, affective engagement, and the creation of affective spaces. The value of collaboration is highlighted through creating an affective space for educators to become aware, reflect and position themselves as effective and affective educators. The book introduces innovative methodological tools such as images and collective drawings for collaborative reflection.

This book encompasses current knowledge of soil microbiomes and their potential biotechnological application for plant growth, crop yield, and soil health under the natural as well as harsh environmental conditions for sustainable agriculture. The microbes are ubiquitous in nature. The soil is a natural hotspot of the soil microbiome. The soil microbiome plays a critical role in the maintenance of global nutrient balance and ecosystem functioning. The soil microbiomes are associated with plant ecosystems through the intense network of plant¿microbe interactions. The microbes present in bulk soil move toward the rhizospheric region due to the release of different nutrients by plant systems. The rhizospheric microbes may survive or proliferate in rhizospheric zone depending on the extent of influences of the chemicals secreted into the soil by roots. The root exudates contain the principal nutrients factors (amino acids, glucose, fructose, and sucrose). The microbes present in rhizospheric region have capabilities to fix atmospheric nitrogen, produce different phytohormones, and solubilize phosphorus, potassium, and zinc. The plant systems take these nutrients for their growth and developments. These soil and plant associated microbes also play an important role in protection of plants from different plant pathogenic organisms by producing different secondary metabolites such as ammonia, hydrogen cyanide, siderophores, and hydrolytic enzymes. The soil microbiomes with plant growth-promoting (PGP) attributes have emerged as an important and promising tool for sustainable agriculture. The soil microbiomes promote the plant growth and enhance the crop yield and soil fertility via directly or indirectly different plant growth-promoting mechanism. The soil microbes help the plant for adaptation in extreme habitats by mitigating the abiotic stress of high/low temperatures, hypersalinity, drought, and acidic/alkaline soil. These PGP microbes are used as biofertilizers/bioinoculants to replace the harmful chemical fertilizers for sustainable agriculture and environments.The aim of the book ¿Soil Microbiomes for Sustainable Agriculture¿ is to provide the recent advances in mechanisms of plant growth promotion and applications of soil microbiomes for mitigation of different abiotic stresses in plants. The book is useful to scientists, researchers, and students related to microbiology, biotechnology, agriculture, molecular biology, environmental biology, and related subjects.

The book aims to provide city administrators and planners with a tool to accompany them in experimenting with the regeneration of no longer used parts of the built heritage, called leftovers, by adopting an innovative approach. A new and radically different form of project, with the task of proposing a new aesthetic code and a style of thought aimed at creating shelters for nomads of the third millennium.In the design field, the 21st century will be destined to measure itself against temporariness and precariousness, also in terms of aesthetic practices. Based on this hypothesis, the text identifies the design of the unfinished as the perspective for attributing to the leftovers a character, which is representative of the conditions of the just begun century. Through a transdisciplinary, exhibition-like and reversible approach, the elements of degradation of the existing work are welcomed in the project as a "gift", to be translated into a syntax aimed at giving form and meaning to the internal and external environments, with the inclusion of "additional components".

The book presents governance with a particular focus on the social and spatial aspects of climate responsiveness and reads the practice of governance across different scales. It conceptualizes a framework of scale composed of three main categories including (i) scientific knowledge, (ii) plans and policies, and (iii) authorities of action. This framework presents ¿practice¿ as the social context in which these three can interplay adaptively. Within this framework, the book presents case studies from Turkey, Italy, Ecuador, Chile and the UK, that reach meaningful planning and design solutions at national, city, and neighbourhood scales in the face of climate change. It offers implementation clues that are transferable to ever-increasing climate action around the globe. The book will be of interest to both professionals and scholars involved in urban design, urban planning and architecture, especially those in the field of climate responsive urbanism. It will also be a valuable resource for non-governmental organizations and social enterprises dealing with sustainability and climate change policies.

The focus of this book is the application of artificial neural networks in uncertain dynamical systems. It explains how to use neural networks in concert with adaptive techniques for system identification, state estimation, and control problems. The authors begin with a brief historical overview of adaptive control, followed by a review of mathematical preliminaries. In the subsequent chapters, they present several neural network-based control schemes. Each chapter starts with a concise introduction to the problem under study, and a neural network-based control strategy is designed for the simplest case scenario. After these designs are discussed, different practical limitations (i.e., saturation constraints and unavailability of all system states) are gradually added, and other control schemes are developed based on the primary scenario. Through these exercises, the authors present structures that not only provide mathematical tools for navigating control problems, but also supply solutions that are pertinent to real-life systems.

This book investigates the consequences of mountaineering (hiking, trekking, climbing) on the natural environment. These consequences are divided into three groups: 1) transformations caused by the mountaineer¿s, or other people¿s, stay in a mountaineering region; 2) transformations caused by the mountaineer¿s travel (movement) through a mountaineering region, with the consideration of the ground type (rock, rock and grass, grass, residual soil, snow, ice), and 3) transformations caused by the use of mountaineering equipment. Each of the three groups are examined individually for their direct interference with the environment, i.e. caused by the main activities of climbing, trekking and hiking (both for elite and mass mountaineering) and their indirect interference caused by auxiliary activity (mainly in the case of mass mountaineering). Auxiliary activity includes guide services, transport of equipment, use of base camp facilities and the delivery of artificial support equipment, andsupports the main activity. The consequences of mountaineering on the natural environment are characterized in terms of individual components of the environment (land relief, soil, vegetation, fauna, and landscape) and location/zone of mountaineering activity (hiking, trekking or climbing zone). Because of the connections and interdependence between particular components of the environment (biotic and abiotic), only preservation of each of them can bring the desired effect ¿ a reduction in the negative impact of mountaineering. This book presents comprehensive research outcomes and serves as a platform for more detailed, future studies.

This edited book deepens the engagement between 21st century philosophy of mind and the emerging technologies which are transforming our environment. Many new technologies appear to have important implications for the human mind, the nature of our cognition, our sense of identity and even perhaps what we think human beings are. They prompt questions such as: Would an uploaded mind be 'me'? Does our reliance on smart phones, or wearable gadgets enhance or diminish the human mind? and: How does our deep reliance upon ambient artificial intelligence change the shape of the human mind? Readers will discover the best philosophical analysis of what current and near future 21st technology means for the metaphysics of mind. Important questions are addressed on matters relating to the extended mind and the distributed self. Expert authors explore the role that the ubiquitous smart phone might have in creating new forms of self-knowledge. They consider machine consciousness, brain enhancement and smart ambient technology, and what they can tell us about phenomenal consciousness.While ideas of artificial general intelligence, cognitive enhancements and the smart environment are widely commented on, serious analysis of their philosophical implications is only getting started. These contributions from top scholars are therefore very timely, and are of particular relevance to students and scholars of the philosophy of mind, philosophy of technology, computer science and psychology.