The Caucasus is one of the most complicated regions in the world: with many different peoples and political units, differing religious allegiances, and frequent conflicts, and where historically major world powers have clashed with each other. Until now there has been no single book for those wishing to learn about this complex region. This book...

More than one-third of the population of the United States now lives in the South, a region where politics, race relations, and the economy have changed dramatically since World War II. Yet historians and journalists continue to disagree over whether the modern South is dominating, deviating from, or converging with the rest of the nation. Has...

The southern coast of the North Sea is mainly protected by a single line of defence against flooding. The traditional means for heightening and strengthening the existing coastal barriers are limited due to the increased enormous resource costs, i.e. building materials, funding and space. On the other hand, further interests and needs such as...

The articles in this book present advanced soft methods related to genetic and evolutionary algorithms, immune systems, formulation of deterministic neural networks and Bayesian NN. Many attention is paid to hybrid systems for inverse analysis fusing soft methods and the finite element method. Numerical efficiency of these soft methods is...

This state-of-the-art textbook examines four research directions in harmonic analysis and features some of the latest applications in the field, including cosmic microwave background analysis, human cortex image denoising, and wireless communication. The work is the first one that combines spline theory (from a numerical or...

In order to be useful and transfer adequate knowledge skills to the learner, a multimedia program design needs to have a sound pedagogical base. Technology-Assisted Problem Solving for Engineering Education: Interactive Multimedia Applications explores best practices in assisting students in understanding engineering concepts through...

Nobody knows more about how to work quickly under pressure and still produce top-notch results than...

This book analyses Irene Némirovsky’s literary production in its relationship to the literary and cultural context of the inter-war period in France. It examines topics of central importance to our understanding of the literary field in France in the period, such as: the close relationship between politics and literature; the...

Jews and Judaism in Modern China explores and compares the dynamics at work in two of the oldest, intact and starkly contrasting civilizations on earth; Jewish and Chinese. The book studies how they interact in modernity and how each civilization views the other, and analyses areas of cooperation between scholars, activists and...

The purpose of this book is to collect contributions that deal with the use of nature inspired metaheuristics for solving multi-objective combinatorial optimization problems. Such a collection intends to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art developments in this field, with the aim of motivating more researchers in operations research,...

Substate nationalism, especially in the past fifteen years, has noticeably affected the political and territorial stability of many countries, both democratic and democratizing. Norms exist to limit the behavior of collective agents in relation to individuals; the set of universally accepted human rights provides a basic framework. There is a...

Though the digital camera is one of the hottest selling gadgets on the market today, the technology can be intimidating and frustrating to first-time users. To new users, going from click to pictures with a digital camera can be overwhelming thanks to memory sticks, docking stations, computers, image editing software, printers, special papers,...