As open access initiatives, electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) provide Internet access to graduate student research documents from hundreds of academic institutions, thus furthering international scholarly communication. The last decade has seen change and collaboration among colleagues of varied disciplines and across institutional boundaries. There is a need for practical information for academics, database managers and library catalogers in dealing with the complexities of devel...

The Accidental Taxonomist is the most comprehensive guide available to the art and science of building information taxonomies. Heather Heddenone of todays leading writers instructors and consultants on indexing and taxonomy topicswalks readers through the process displaying her trademark ability to present highly technical information in straightforward comprehensible English. Drawing on numerous real-world examples Hedden explains how to create terms and relationships select taxonomy mana...

From the author of the highly praised The Pencil and The Evolution of Useful Things comes another captivating history of the seemingly mundane: the book and its storage.Most of us take for granted that our books are vertical on our shelves with the spines facing out, but Henry Petroski, inveterately curious engineer, didn't. As a result, readers are guided along the astonishing evolution from papyrus scrolls boxed at Alexandria to upright books she...

The imperatives surrounding museum representations of place have shifted from the late eighteenth century to today. The political significance of place itself has changed and continues to change at all scales, from local, civic, regional to national and supranational. At the same time, changes in population flows, migration patterns and demographic movement now underscore both cultural and political practice, be it in the accommodation of ’diversity’ in cultural and social policy, scholarl...

This book follows the methodologies of complex adaptive systems research in their application to addressing the problems of terrorism, specifically terrorist networks, their structure and various methods of mapping and interdicting them as well as exploring the complex landscape of network-centric and irregular warfare. A variety of new models and approaches are presented here, including Dynamic Network Analysis, DIME/PMESII models, percolation models and emergent models of insurgency. In ...

Student feedback has appeared in the forefront of higher education quality, particularly the issues of effectiveness and the use of student feedback to affect improvement in higher education teaching and learning, and other areas of the students' tertiary experience. Despite this, there has been a relative lack of academic literature available, especially in a book format. This book focuses on the experiences of academics, higher education leaders and managers with expertise in these areas...

The shift from traditional documentary to “factual entertainment” television has been the subject of much debate and criticism, particularly with regard to the representation of science. New types of factual programming that combine documentary techniques with those of entertainment formats (such as drama, game-shows and reality TV) have come in for strident criticism. Often featuring spectacular visual effects produced by Computer Generated Imagery these programmes blur the boundaries bet...

Recently, the subject of nonlinear control systems analysis has grown rapidly and this book provides a simple and self-contained presentation of their stability and feedback stabilization which enables the reader to learn and understand major techniques used in mathematical control theory. In particular: the important techniques of proving global stability properties are presented closely linked with corresponding methods of nonlinear feedback stabilization; a general framework of methods ...

This book, edited and authored by a closely collaborating network of social scientists and psychologists, recasts typical research topics in these fields into the language of nonlinear, dynamic and complex systems. The aim is to provide scientists with different backgrounds - physics, applied mathematics and computer sciences - with the opportunity to apply the tools of their trade to an altogether new range of possible applications. At the same time, this book will serve as a first refere...

In this book, the authors propose efficient characterizations of the non-convex regions that appear in many control problems, such as those involving collision/obstacle avoidance and, in a broader sense, in the description of feasible sets for optimization-based control design involving contradictory objectives.The text deals with a large class of systems that require the solution of appropriate optimization problems over a feasible region, which is neither convex nor compact. The ...

Which are the oldest public libraries in the world? In what years were the first books printed in French, Thai, Japanese, Arabic, Turkish? What are the oldest extant texts written in Chinese, English, Russian, Spanish? When was the first major computer database used in libraries? What are the titles of the largest, smallest or most expensive books ever published? Where is the world's busiest public library? Which three books were the first to contain photographs? In its updated and expande...

The Culture of Mean is the first book-length feminist critical exploration of representations of youth bullying in media. Bringing into conversation scholarship on feminism, media, new communication technologies, surveillance, gender, race, sexuality, and class, Emily D. Ryalls critically examines the explosion of discourse about youth bullying that has occurred in the United States during the last two decades. Countering the monolithic and extreme cultural reaction to narratives ...