An off duty firefighter witnesses a murder while deer hunting. When he reports this to the local sheriff, he realizes that the murderer is a prominent elected official. With the body gone from the scene, and no evidence left, the enigma begins; who is dead and why?The witness, and the hunting land owner who is also a firefighter, begin to experience booby-trapped fires designed to kill them. Fires in abandoned buildings, assassination attempts by shooting and dirty politicians and c...

MR Fingerprinting is emerging as a clinically feasible and versatile tool for quantitative MR imaging. Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting for Quantitative MRI focuses on all aspects of MR Fingerprinting techniques and applications. Presenting a detailed and clear description of the technology, implementation, clinical translation issues and applications, it emphasizes different perspectives of MR signals and their utilization, with the goal of inspiring readers to explore new MR Fingerprint...

This authored monograph presents a study on fundamental limits and robustness of stability and stabilization of time-delay systems, with an emphasis on time-varying delay, robust stabilization, and newly emerged areas such as networked control and multi-agent systems. The authors systematically develop an operator-theoretic approach that departs from both the traditional algebraic approach and the currently pervasive LMI solution methods. This approach is built on the classical small-gain ...

This book explores the issue of energy security in China. It starts by defining the energy security structure, and by pointing out the importance of structural issues related to China’s energy security, arguing that the structural problem is an important manifestation of China’s energy issues and the risk and potential harm due to structural imbalance is the foremost energy security challenge. From an energy structure perspective, the book subsequently analyzes the security of resources in...

Evolutionary computation algorithms are employed to minimize functions with large number of variables. Biogeography-based optimization (BBO) is an optimization algorithm that is based on the science of biogeography, which researches the migration patterns of species. These migration paradigms provide the main logic behind BBO. Due to the cross-disciplinary nature of the optimization problems, there is a need to develop multiple approaches to tackle them and to study the theoretical reasoni...

Basalt fiber possesses many superior properties, such as excellent mechanical properties, high resistance to the chemical, temperature and environmental attacks, and outstanding electrical and sound insulation. In addition, it is cost-effective and environmentally friendly because the raw materials are widely found in nature and the fiber can be discarded into the environment without any negative effect. Basalt fiber has attracted great attention as reinforcement for composites in recent y...

The Three-volume set LNCS 14596, 14596 and 14598 constitutes the proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Wisdom, Well-Being, Win-Win, iConference 2024, which was hosted virtually by University of Tsukuba, Japan and in presence by Jilin University, Changchun, China, during April 15–26, 2024.The 36 full papers and 55 short papers are presented in these proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from 218 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical ...

The Three-volume set LNCS 14596, 14597 and 14598 constitutes the proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Wisdom, Well-Being, Win-Win, iConference 2024, which was hosted virtually by University of Tsukuba, Japan and in presence by Jilin University, Changchun, China, during April 15–26, 2024.The 36 full papers and 55 short papers are presented in these proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from 218 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical ...

The Three-volume set LNCS 14596, 14596 and 14598 constitutes the proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Wisdom, Well-Being, Win-Win, iConference 2024, which was hosted virtually by University of Tsukuba, Japan and in presence by Jilin University, Changchun, China, during April 15–26, 2024.The 36 full papers and 55 short papers are presented in these proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from 218 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical ...

This two-volume set LNCS 13971 + 13972 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Information for a Better World: Normality, Virtuality, Physicality, Inclusivity, held in March 2023.The 36 full papers and the 46 short papers presented in these proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from 197 submissions. They cover topics such as: Archives and Records, Behavioral Research, Information Governance and Ethics, AI and Machine Learning, Data Sc...

The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods spans the entire research process, from data collection to analysis and interpretation. This second edition has been comprehensively updated and expanded, from 39 to 49 chapters. In addition to a new section of chapters focussing on ethics, privacy and the politics of social media data, the new edition provides broader coverage of topics such as:Data sourcesScraping and spidering dataLocat...

This accessible Handbook provides a comprehensive exploration and overview of computational social science (CSS), bringing together global experts to examine its boundary-spanning nature. With an interdisciplinary focus, chapters shed light on the transformative power of computational approaches in social science and take a forward-looking approach to anticipate the next wave of innovations in CSS including those driven by generative AI and large language models.Covering diverse to...