Books published by Springer

This textbook takes on a systematic approach to elaborating on the different subjects within corporate finance. The chapters bring together existing concepts with examples and stories that allow students to easily understand and apply financial tools. In doing so, the book strives to clarify misconceptions in the literature on topics related to firm's ownership and control, problems of the Modigliani-Miller first and second propositions, relationship between options and corporate finance, behavioral finance versus corporate finance, etc.   The book takes into consideration the growing importance of the Asian economy and financial markets in recent years, and constructs the P-index to measure and compare the risk structures of US and China's stocks and stock indexes.   This book is a primary text written for the introductory courses in corporate finance at the M.B.A. level and for the intermediate courses in undergraduate programs, but can also be of great use to Ph.D. students as well as professionals.

This book covers the major findings of almost all types of innovation in agriculture that includes product and process innovation, marketing and organizational innovation, and extended to institutional changes and social welfare in agricultural innovation in Asia. Specially, this book provides the measuring of these types of agricultural innovation on production, economics, and social welfare. Furthermore, this book provides the overview of smart farming in two advanced countries in Asia in this field, which are China and Japan along with its innovation. This book also aims to give an overview on the development of agricultural innovation in the era of digital agriculture over the world.

This book mainly addresses China's current demographic situation and social people-related policies. It aims to solve the issues of demographic transition, population aging, population flow, urbanization, population quality, etc. China is the first large population country, with the vast territory and the huge economic system. It has many issues such as productivity and production relations, superstructure and economic base, and domestic and international relations in various fields and at all levels. Hence, China needs to come up with a set of overall strategies. The author sorts out all of his works in recent years and performs his new academic achievements on demographic issues and social governing strategies. This timely book offers new methods that impact advanced social development with real data.

This proceedings highlights the applications of the newly introduced physical quantity Liutex in hydrodynamics and aerodynamics. Liutex is used to represent the fascinating rotational motion of fluids, i.e., the vortex. Ubiquitously seen in nature and engineering applications, the definition of vortices has been elusive. The Liutex vector provides a unique and systematic description of vortices. The proceedings collects papers presented in the invited workshop "Liutex and Third Generation of Vortex Identification for Engineering Applications" from Aerospace and Aeronautics World Forum 2021. The papers in this book cover both the theoretical aspects of Liutex and many applications in hydrodynamics and aerodynamics. The proceedings is a good reference for researchers in fluid mechanics who are interested in learning about the wide scope of applications of Liutex and using it to develop a new understanding of their research subjects.

Thyroid nodules with benign signs might be subjectively diagnosed as malignant, leading to over treatment, and nodules with malignant signs might be regarded as benign causing insufficient curing. In order to improve the accuracy rate of thyroid nodules, this book analysed ultrasound diagnosis for thyroid nodules in multiple difficult and misdiagnosed cases from thyroid surgeons' perspective and closely combined ultrasound imaging with clinical information, including ultrasound images and palpation of thyroid nodules, ultrasound detection video, gross specimen and pathologic diagnosis to interpret the ultrasound images of thyroid nodules, which can be a reference for thyroid surgeons and beginner.This is the first book which has systematically summarized the ultrasound thyroid nodules from the perspective of surgeons, closely combining the imaging and clinical characteristics.Contains abundant clinical cases, and can be used as a teaching book for beginner and an expert-led training course.Help surgeons to better carry out clinical work, making up for the lack of knowledge in anatomy and clinical pathology.Helps surgeons to perform the preoperative ultrasound evaluation, in order to decrease the missed and misdiagnosed nodules.

This book contributes conceptually, theoretically and morally to a deeper understanding of the distinctive Asian perceptions of punishment, justice and human rights. Researched and prepared by scholars who have not only been conducting studies on the death penalty in the region but have also been advocating for legal reforms, this edited volume touches upon the different justifications for the use of capital punishment in the ASEAN region, exposing the secrecy, sensitivities and dilemmas that mask violations of international human rights laws. The chapters bring in numerous new perspectives which have been overlooked in the traditional discourse surrounding the use of the death penalty, such as that around crimes that do not meet the threshold of 'most serious'; the dignity of death row inmates and their families; contradictions within religion and capital punishment; and the way in which growing authoritarianism and the media are adversely influencing the public's perception andsupport for capital punishment in the region. In examining how public opinion shapes state policies towards the death penalty and how it varies according to different offences and different states, the authors critically analyse how the international human rights mechanisms have specifically called for ASEAN member states to refrain from extending the application of the death penalty and to limit it to the "most serious crimes". Relevant to socio-legal scholars focused on crime and punishment in Southeast Asia, and in the Global South more broadly, this is a landmark collection in criminology and human rights scholarship.

This book presents parts of the iM3F 2022 proceedings from the mechatronics as well as the intelligent manufacturing tracks. It highlights recent trends and key challenges in mechatronics as well as the advent of intelligent manufacturing engineering and technology that are non-trivial in embracing Industry 4.0 as well as addressing the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The book deliberates on conventional as well as advanced solutions that are utilized in the variety of mechatronics and intelligent manufacturing-based applications. The readers are envisaged to gain an insightful view on the current trends, issues, mitigating factors as well as solutions from this book.

The book spans across the research domains of mechanisation and automation, agrobusiness, food processing and value addition, climate smart agriculture, rural sanitation, agro biotechnology, and rural energy.

This book is the first coherent presentation of the latest research and practices concerned with how recent advances in mobile information and communication technology (ICT) and the Internet of Things (IoT) are utilized to enhance the value of the city and change the way that city planning and management are carried out. Its salient feature is the pursuit of the individual-oriented evaluative point of view regarding the city. This view considers the value of the city to be the total of visit-values individuals feel and appreciate when they visit the city. The visit-value is conceptualized as the intangible asset value of the attractiveness of the city that visitors form in their minds based on their experiences and activities in the city, transactions with city space, and communications with other people. Visitors to the city may well be quite heterogeneous individuals with different motives and preferences. Thus, to enhance the value of the city, quite different visit values of heterogeneous individuals should be enhanced simultaneously, which necessitates the use of ICT and IoT in living spaces. Based on this view, the city utilizing ICT and IoT to enhance the value of the city is called the social city. Whereas many other books deal with the impacts of the advances in mobile ICT on the city, they only discuss how these advances change the infrastructure of the city but do not discuss how these technological advances can be utilized to enhance the city's value. This book first develops the concept of the social city based on an individual micro-behavioral approach. Then, it presents the latest studies on technological components of the social city, such as the human-sensing technology for estimating individual behavior, decision making, and mood; the visualizing technology of the thermal 3-dimensional environment of the city; and the social-sensing technology using social networking service (SNS) for measuring and creating an atmosphere of city space. Finally, it envisages the future of the social city.

This book contains select chapters on support vector algorithms from different perspectives, including mathematical background, properties of various kernel functions, and several applications. The main focus of this book is on orthogonal kernel functions, and the properties of the classical kernel functions-Chebyshev, Legendre, Gegenbauer, and Jacobi-are reviewed in some chapters. Moreover, the fractional form of these kernel functions is introduced in the same chapters, and for ease of use for these kernel functions, a tutorial on a Python package named ORSVM is presented. The book also exhibits a variety of applications for support vector algorithms, and in addition to the classification, these algorithms along with the introduced kernel functions are utilized for solving ordinary, partial, integro, and fractional differential equations.On the other hand, nowadays, the real-time and big data applications of support vector algorithms are growing. Consequently, the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) parallelizing the procedure of support vector algorithms based on orthogonal kernel functions is presented. The book sheds light on how to use support vector algorithms based on orthogonal kernel functions in different situations and gives a significant perspective to all machine learning and scientific machine learning researchers all around the world to utilize fractional orthogonal kernel functions in their pattern recognition or scientific computing problems.

This book introduces the geological background of sandstone-type uranium deposits in the Ordos Basin, Northwest China. Through comparative study of a large number of practical data such as uranium, coal and oil boreholes, the research system takes sedimentary basin as a unit and fully utilizes geologicalprinciples and test analysis to study the basic geological, geophysical, geochemical and remote sensing image characteristics of the basin, and to restores the favorable uranium-forming geological background brought by the change of the cognitive sedimentary environment conditions. It can be used as a reference for researchers, practitioners and as well as teachers and graduate students working in uranium deposit geology, sedimentary geology and related areas

This book perfects the theoretical system of fracture mechanics of nonhomogeneous materials through the establishment of the piecewise exponential model and expands the fracture research scope to nonhomogeneous materials containing complex interfaces through proposing the domain-independent interaction integral concept. The piecewise exponential model has overcome the problem of fracture mechanics of nonhomogeneous materials and clarified the doubt of traditional exponential models in recent 30 years. The domain-independent interaction integral method is not affected by material nonhomogeneity and discontinuity, which greatly facilitates its numerical implementation in the investigation of fracture behaviors of nonhomogeneous materials with complex interfaces.

This book systematically outlines the development of ancient Chinese. Consisting of 20 chapters, the self-contained work presents macro-level discussions on a broad range of topics, including: philology, phonology, exegetics, certain words' special meanings, sentence types, the flexible use of words, different grammars in ancient and modern times, and rhetoric. Though chiefly focusing on vocabulary, the book also addresses grammar, and points out grammar problems that differ considerably from those in modern Chinese, in addition to combining morphology and syntax. Further, unlike the majority of textbooks on the subject, it pays more attention to the rhetoric used in ancient Chinese literary works. Rather than simply analyzing linguistic phenomena, the book also (and more importantly) provides a meaningful approach to the study of ancient Chinese. Accordingly, it offers a valuable asset for researchers, graduate students, and everyone else who is interested in ancient Chinese.

Cryptography is now ubiquitous - moving beyond the traditional environments, such as government communications and banking systems, we see cryptographic techniques realized in Web browsers, e-mail programs, cell phones, manufacturing systems, embedded software, smart buildings, cars, and even medical implants. Today's designers need a comprehensive understanding of applied cryptography. After an introduction to cryptography and data security, the authors explain the main techniques in modern cryptography, with chapters addressing stream ciphers, the Data Encryption Standard (DES) and 3DES, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), block ciphers, the RSA cryptosystem, public-key cryptosystems based on the discrete logarithm problem, elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC), digital signatures, hash functions, Message Authentication Codes (MACs), and methods for key establishment, including certificates and public-key infrastructure (PKI). Throughout the book, the authors focus on communicating the essentials and keeping the mathematics to a minimum, and they move quickly from explaining the foundations to describing practical implementations, including recent topics such as lightweight ciphers for RFIDs and mobile devices, and current key-length recommendations. The authors have considerable experience teaching applied cryptography to engineering and computer science students and to professionals, and they make extensive use of examples, problems, and chapter reviews, while the book's website offers slides, projects and links to further resources. This is a suitable textbook for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses and also for self-study by engineers.

This book offers a philosophical account of violence, engaged with both empirical and theoretical debates in disciplines such as cognitive science, sociology, psychiatry, anthropology, political theory, evolutionary biology, and theology. The primary thesis is that violence is intertwined with morality and typically enacted for "moral" reasons. To show this, the book compellingly demonstrates how morality operates to trigger and justify violence and how people, in their violent behaviors, can engage and disengage with discrete moralities. The author's fundamental account of language, and in particular its normative aspects, is particularly insightful as regards extending the range of what is to be understood as violence beyond the domain of physical harm. By employing concepts such as "coalition enforcement", "moral bubbles", "cognitive niches", "overmoralization", and "military intelligence", the book aims to spell out how perpetrators and victims of violence systematically disagree about the very nature of violence. The author's original claim is that disagreement can be understood naturalistically, described by an account of morality informed by evolutionary perspectives as well. This book helps us come to terms with the fact that we are intrinsically "violent beings". To acknowledge this condition, and our stupefying capacity to inflict harm, is a responsibility we must face up to: such understanding could ultimately be of help in order to achieve a safer ownership of our destinies, by individuating and reinforcing those cognitive firewalls that would prevent violence from always escalating and overflowing. This second edition is thoroughly revised and integrated with two new chapters to cover new aspects of violence and its understanding, such as the role of looting finance in facilitating violent outcomes and the attack to scientific cognition and human creativity.

This book examines the processes and dynamics of cooperation between different actors in civil peace service projects in Kenya, Sierra Leone and Liberia. The joint handling of conflicts and peacebuilding challenges by local and international actors has a long tradition in German peace work and is becoming increasingly important in a globalized world. Therefore, the book explores the question, relevant for both academia and peace practitioners, to what extent an equal partnership can exist in the context of civil conflict transformation. By focusing on the opportunities and challenges of cooperation, the work succeeds in focusing on everyday activities, analyzing the actual processes and frictions of peace work, and making a valuable contribution to critical peace research and the discussion of hybridity and friction.

Since its existence in the 1950s, consumer policy in Germany has been understood and pursued primarily as a bundle of actions and measures initiated and institutionalised by the state. In many cases, the state has also issued corresponding mandates and set up support models, which has created the impression that we are basically dealing with a 'consumer policy from above' imposed by macro-politics. Not that there have not been repeated attempts in the past decades to give impetus to consumer policy from the middle of civil society - often in the form of small citizens' initiatives. And in recent years in particular, a number of new consumer organisations have emerged which operate much closer to the grass roots. Nevertheless, the impression seems to have taken root among the large, government-related 'players' in the field, who have been in the 'business' for decades, not to mention government-internal consumer policy, that consumer policy concerns a policy field that is essentially ordered by a collaboration of the state on the one hand, and consumer protection organisations representing all consumers equally on the other, while the many small consumer initiatives, not even started by individual committed consumers, regularly fall behind in comparison. This perspective refers largely to the view of and from the centre of politics. This volume is intended to go some way towards countering the institutionally prevailing impression that, in principle, there is only 'consumer policy from above' that is really effective and assertive.The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence. A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content.

The diary notes that Ludger Kühnhardt took while visiting or staying in 235 countries and territories around the world create a fascinating panorama, reflected in the personal impressions, encounters and experiences of a political scientist and journalist working all over the world. The book reconstructs the connections between Europe's transformations and the emerging global era over six decades from 1960 to the threshold of the post-Corona world of 2020.

The notes that Ludger Kühnhardt wrote in 235 countries and territories around the world create a fascinating panorama, reflected in the personal impressions, encounters and experiences of a political scientist and journalist working all over the world. The book reconstructs the connections between Europe's transformations and the emerging global era over six decades from 1960 to the threshold of the post-Corona world of 2020.

This volume contains the proceedings of the 2023 iteration of the ISPGAYA meeting, titled "Digital Sustainability: Inclusion and Transformation" and held in Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal. The conference and resulting book intend to explore the involvement of Portugal, a country on the semi-periphery of the world system, in developments regarding the understanding of and progress toward sustainability. The conference was organized by ISPGAYA, an institution belonging to the private polytechnic higher education system in Portugal, and brought together participants from around the world. This volume intends to establish a milestone in the multidimensional approach to the theme of sustainability, affirming the concept's multi and interdisciplinary nature and bringing together scholars across disciplines.

This book expands our understanding of art markets and their impact on art creation through interdisciplinary contributions by economists and art historians. The study of art history has been traditionally focused on the description of artistic innovations, the role of the artists that made them and the meaning of the artworks they created. It has often neglected the broader reasons why certain innovations took place in certain places, in specific times and in particular ways. Exploring old, modern and contemporary art markets, the book shows that the impact of institutional and economic factors has been critical in shaping the evolution of art history, and quantitative methods can be useful to improve our understanding of the history of figurative arts and the relationship between market structure and creativity. It is of great interest to cultural economists, art historians and students and scholars interested in understanding art markets.

This two-volume set, CCIS 2068 and 2069, constitutes selected papers presented during the Second Pan-African Conference on Artificial Intelligence, PanAfriCon AI 2023, held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in October 2023. The set goal of the conference is to exchange the best practices of joint Pan-African efforts to provide solutions for Africa's key 21st century challenges in the social, economic and ecologic domains. The 29 papers were thoroughly reviewed and selected from 134 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: Medical AI; Natural Language Processing, Text and Speech Processing; AI in Finance and Cyber Security; Autonomous Vehicles; AI Ethics and Life Sciences.

This edited volume brings together papers by both eminent and rising scholars to celebrate Saul Kripke¿s singular contributions to modal logic. Kripke¿s work on modal logic helped usher in a new semantic epoch for the field and made facility with modal logic indispensable not only to technically oriented philosophers but to theoretical computer scientists and others as well. This volume features previously unpublished work of Kripke¿s as well as a brief intellectual biography recounting the story of how Kripke became interested in, and made his first contributions to, modal logic. However, the majority of the volume¿s contributions are forward-looking, and produce new philosophical and technical insights by engaging with ideas tracing back to Kripke.

This two-volume set, CCIS 2068 and 2069, constitutes selected papers presented during the Second Pan-African Conference on Artificial Intelligence, PanAfriCon AI 2023, held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in October 2023. The set goal of the conference is to exchange the best practices of joint Pan-African efforts to provide solutions for Africa's key 21st century challenges in the social, economic and ecologic domains. The 29 papers were thoroughly reviewed and selected from 134 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: Medical AI; Natural Language Processing, Text and Speech Processing; AI in Finance and Cyber Security; Autonomous Vehicles; AI Ethics and Life Sciences.

Since its beginning the International Conference on Applied Sciences and Advanced Technology (ICASAT) was planned as a multidisciplinary space and as a platform to explore the frontiers of knowledge in different areas such as Machine Vision, Biotechnology, Computer Sciences, Mechatronics and, Sustainability. Also, a multidisciplinary perspective is required in all aspects of science, engineering, and research, moving towards a more complete overview of recent advances. On its third edition, ICASAT received works focused on the Trends and Challenges for Global Sustainable Development. This book is a collection of the works presented during ICASAT 2023.

This book provides a comprehensive, detailed, and coherent spatio-temporal account of Caribbean mangrove evolution from its evolutionary origins to the present that is not available for any mangrove region in the world. Mangroves are intertidal wetland forests that play a crucial role in the maintenance of terrestrial and marine biodiversity, and in the functioning of global biogeochemical cycles (especially the carbon cycle). These ecosystems dominate the tropical/subtropical coasts of all continents and are among the most threatened ecosystems in the world. This book combines all temporal scales, from the geological to the ecological, to provide an integrated picture of mangrove history and the natural and anthropogenic drivers of ecological and evolutionary change. This may be useful not only for understanding the current ecological status of these emblematic ecosystems, but also for informing their conservation in the face of ongoing global change.

Combinatorial Optimization represents a major component of Operations Research, Mathematical Programming, and, in a broader sense, the development of digital intelligence (and society). It covers, in particular, such important areas as network design, location, routing, and scheduling, with major applications in transportation, logistics, health systems, production, communications, and energy.Starting from the exceptional contribution Professor Bernard Gendron made to combinatorial optimization and its applications in multiple areas, the book presents a state-of-the-art view on the field through a combination of surveys, expository articles, and focused methodological and applied research. The authors hail from various Operations Research areas and institutions around the world. Having collaborated closely with Professor Gendron, they drew on his foundational work to showcase a variety of models and algorithms that draw a living picture of the multifaceted word of applied combinatorial optimization.

This text gives a comprehensive, largely self-contained treatment of multivariate heavy tail analysis. Emphasizing regular variation of measures means theory can be presented systematically and without regard to dimension. Tools are developed that allow a flexible definition of "extreme" in higher dimensions and permit different heavy tails to coexist on the same state space leading to "hidden regular variation" and "steroidal regular variation". This emphasizes when estimating risks, it is important to choose the appropriate heavy tail. Theoretical foundations lead naturally to statistical techniques; examples are drawn from risk estimation, finance, climatology and network analysis. Treatments target a broad audience in insurance, finance, data analysis, network science and probability modeling. The prerequisites are modest knowledge of analysis and familiarity with the definition of a measure; regular variation of functions is reviewed but is not a focal point.

This textbook introduces readers to international law by linking it to the Harry Potter universe. Given the current changes in the international sphere away from a state-centric system to a multitude of non-state actors, it tests the legal regime by applying it to the out-of-the-box concept of wizards and thus rids the doctrinal debate of political factors. More specifically, the book explains core concepts of public international law, covering the elements of a state, state responsibility, jurisdiction, enforcement of international law and immunity. In the wizarding world, it addresses questions of statehood by discussing when a wizarding state is responsible for the crimes committed by its wizards, who has jurisdiction over crimes, and how international law is enforced. In addition, it introduces and explains the fundamentals of international humanitarian law, international human rights law, international criminal law, and air law by applying them to the wizarding world. The textbook is intended for anyone looking for an accessible introduction to public international law and its application.

This book focuses on a wide range of distributed machine learning and computing algorithms and their applications in healthcare and engineering systems. The contributors explore how these techniques can be applied to different real-world problems. It is suitable for students and researchers interested in conducting research in multidisciplinary areas that rely on distributed machine learning and computing techniques.