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This book focuses on the discoveries in M. truncatula genomic research which has been undertaken in the last two decades. Legumes are important for their economic values as food, feed, and fodder and also serve as the pillar of sustainable agriculture because of its biological nitrogen fixation capacity. Medicago truncatula was established as a model legume in the 1990s and has been well adopted as a model internationally since then. M. truncatula is an autogamous, diploid (2n = 16) species with a short generation time, and relatively small genome size (~375 Mbp). The M. truncatula genome was initially sequenced by the International Medicago Genome Annotation Group (IMGAG) in 2011 and has been well-annotated. M. truncatula research benefits from the availability of several genetic and genomic tools, such as gene expression atlas (MtGEA), insertion and neutron bombardment mutant populations, anda HapMap panel containing 384 sequenced inbred lines for genome-wide association studies. This book covers the current status and latest advancements of the M. truncatula genomics and transcriptomics resources along with a glimpse of newly developed tools that makes M. truncatula a front runner model in functional genomic studies.

This book explores the possibility of integrating design thinking into today¿s technical contexts. Despite the popularity of design thinking in research and practice, this area is still too often treated in isolation without a clear, consistent connection to the world of software development.The book presents design thinking approaches and experiences that can facilitate the development of software-intensive products and services. It argues that design thinking and related software engineering practices, including requirements engineering and user-centric design (UX) approaches, are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they provide complementary methods and tools for designing software-intensive systems with a human-centric approach.Bringing together prominent experts and practitioners to share their insights, approaches and experiences, the book sheds new light on the specific interpretations and meanings of design thinking in various fields such as engineering, management, and information technology. As such, it provides a framework for professionals to demonstrate the potential of design thinking for software development, while offering academic researchers a roadmap for further research.

This monograph explores classical electrodynamics from a geometrical perspective with a clear visual presentation throughout. Featuring over 200 figures, readers will delve into the definitions, properties, and uses of directed quantities in classical field theory. With an emphasis on both mathematical and electrodynamic concepts, the author¿s illustrative approach will help readers understand the critical role directed quantities play in physics and mathematics.Chapters are organized so that they gradually scale in complexity, and carefully guide readers through important topics. The first three chapters introduce directed quantities in three dimensions with and without the metric, as well as the development of the algebra and analysis of directed quantities. Chapters four through seven then focus on electrodynamics without the metric, such as the premetric case, waves, and fully covariant four-dimensional electrodynamics. Complementing the book¿s careful structure, exercises are included throughout for readers seeking further opportunities to practice the material.Directed Quantities in Electrodynamics will appeal to students, lecturers, and researchers of electromagnetism. It is particularly suitable as a supplement to standard textbooks on electrodynamics.

This book covers a domain that is significantly impacted by the growth of soft computing. Internet of Things (IoT)-related applications are gaining much attention with more and more devices which are getting connected, and they become the potential components of some smart applications. Thus, a global enthusiasm has sparked over various domains such as health, agriculture, energy, security, and retail. So, in this book, the main objective is to capture this multifaceted nature of IoT and machine learning in one single place. According to the contribution of each chapter, the book also provides a future direction for IoT and machine learning research. The objectives of this book are to identify different issues, suggest feasible solutions to those identified issues, and enable researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry to interact with each other regarding emerging technologies related to IoT and machine learning. In this book, we look for novel chapters that recommend new methodologies, recent advancement, system architectures, and other solutions to prevail over the limitations of IoT and machine learning.

Change management is not just affected globally by environmental and social conditions, including political and technological changes, but also through convergence, which helps conceptualize change over the past decades. The media industry, in particular, is being challenged by the rise of social media, the crisis of refinancing especially for quality news media, the ¿misinformation epidemic¿, and the changing role of legacy media. The evolving nature of media usage and communication, the rise of produsage and influencers, and intermediaries and their personalized algorithmic content are also factors that impact the industry, along with data privacy and privacy management, and the ¿new responsibilities¿ of companies such as sustainability, agility and resilience, etc.This book focuses on permanent change management in the media and related industries. It provides insights into the most common and crucial phenomena of media and change management in general, while also revealing some more specific issues brought about by technical and social innovations. The authors expand the meaning of media management beyond the management functions within the industry to include the management of different media. The book serves as a useful guide for researchers, students, and practitioners alike, as they are all affected by change processes.

This monograph offers a comprehensive study of contingent a priori truths. Building onto a theoretical framework developed by the philosopher and logician Saul Kripke, the author also presents a new approach to these truths.The first part of the book details the many theories on contingent a priori truths. The coverage examines the cases of Kripke and David Kaplan, Donnellan and the de re requirement, Evans and weak contingency, as well as Plantinga, Salmon, Soames, and the pseudo a priori. Overall, it provides a systematic discussion and critical review of all these many positions.Next, the author develops an alternative approach. His working hypothesis is that performative verbs must play a central role in Kripke¿s examples, even if they do not show up at the surface structure of the corresponding sentences. This opens up an entirely new way of looking at Kripke¿s cases and of treating them by exploring some aspects of the theory of illocutionary acts. His discussion also examines brute facts and institutional facts, indexicals and performatives, as well as Frege¿s theory of definitions.Providing an authoritative exploration into contingent a priori truths, this book will be of interest to students, academics, and researchers in philosophy and logic.

This book furthers the historical and technical debate by looking at reasoning as the action of language when it is devoted to explaining or foretelling, based on the authors¿ centennial combined experience in fuzzy logic. A simple logical model mixing abductions and deductions is introduced in order to attain speculations, conjectures that may be responsible for induction, and creativity in reasoning. A central point and a dire hypothesis of the book are that such process can be implemented by computation and as such can lead to a new approach to automatic thinking and reasoning. On top of the technical approach, the relationship between reasoning and thinking is also analyzed trying to establish links with notions and concepts of thinkers from the European Middle Age to the current days.This book is recommended to young researchers that are interested in either the scientific or philosophical aspects of computational thinking, and can further the debate between the two approaches.

This book examines how the developments in veterinary science, philosophy, economics and law converged during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to entrench farm animals along a commodification pathway. It covers two neglected areas of study; the importance of international veterinary conferences to domestic regimes and the influence of early global treaties that dealt with animal health on domestic quarantine measures. The author concludes by arguing that society needs to reconsider its understanding and the place of the welfare paradigm in animal production systems. As it presently stands, this paradigm can be used to justify almost any self-serving reason to abrogate ethical principles.The topic of this book will appeal to a wide readership; not only scholars, students and educators but also people involved in animal production, interested parties and experts in the animal welfare and animal rights sector, as well as policy-makers and regulators, who will find this work informative and thought-provoking.

This book answers the question ¿What is it that viruses do?¿ by presenting three aspects of viral ecology.The first aspect explains how viruses affect the population diversity and energetics of their host communities. Perhaps the most notable example of this concept is our understanding that primary production within ecosystems often depends upon those viruses which serve as controllers of nutrient recycling, connecting the aquatic and terrestrial realms in ways that can be assessed locally and globally. The second aspect describes genetic partnerships which exist between hosts and their viruses. These include processes termed endogeny and lysogeny by which the host carries at least a partial genomic copy of the virus. Fluidity of these collective genomes is expressed on an evolutionary time scale and the mutual life cycles which they produce represent a forging of shared genomic fate that obligates partnership of the virus and its host. The viral sequences represent a source of potential benefit as well as potential peril for the host and can implement phenotypic changes in the host. Hosts often use those changes as tools. As humans, the most notable example would be that mammals rely upon temporary activation of their endogenous viral genes in order to successfully develop a placenta. The third aspect is defending the health of a host, which relies upon activity in two directions. Hosts often use their captured viral genes to identify and subsequently direct battle against invading viruses. This natural concept has been engineered for combating cancer, is useful for suppressing the detrimental consequences of genetic diseases, and has been developed to create targeted antiviral vaccines. But, the defense has to work in two directions and the host can use other symbiotic microorganisms as protection against its viruses.This book will appeal to a wide readership by providing a broad perspective ofviral ecology, and all scientists will find it helpful for gaining a view of fields beyond their specialization.

This volume examines the impact of and interplay between human rights and insurance. National, supranational and international legal instruments regulating the taking-up and pursuit of the business of insurance and reinsurance, (re)insurance distribution and the insurance contract often refer to or impact on human or fundamental rights. Courts are often faced with the sometimes seemingly impossible task of reconciling insurance core principles, practices and mind-sets with the principles and values stemming from human rights protection. In some cases, such as that of discrimination in insurance, this discussion has been going on for decades. Some deal with hot topics which have more recently emerged in light of developments stemming from technologic innovations (¿InsurTech¿). The first part of the book focuses on insurance and the right to equal treatment. Discrimination on the basis of factors such as gender or age is tackled, from the perspectives of the European Union, Canada and South Africa. The second part of the book highlights the very relevant role played by insurance in the upholding of the right to health, covering the United States of America, Africa and Brazil. The third part of the book explores InsurTech's manifold challenges upon the right to privacy, focusing on European Union. The fourth part tackles the threat posed by insurance on the right to life in general, but with a particular focus on the United Kingdom. Written by legal scholars and practitioners, the book offers international, comparative and regional or national perspectives, aiming to contribute to a more thorough and systematic understanding of the interactions between these two very different fields of law, providing the industry as well as the scientific community with insights from both sides of this seemingly difficult to transpose divide.

This book contains a collection of the main contributions from the third edition of the NICFD conference, organized by the Special Interest Group on Non-Ideal Compressible Fluid Dynamics (SIG-49). It provides insight on the latest research findings in the field of NICFD that are relevant to a number of engineering applications related to the conversion of renewable and waste energy sources, like organic Rankine cycles, supercritical CO2 cycle power plants, combustors operating with supercritical fluids, and heat pumps. The various chapters of the book document research encompassing theoretical, computational, and experimental aspects of the gas dynamics of non-ideal reactive and non-reactive flows and their impact for the design of internal flow components (turbomachinery, heat exchangers, combustors). Since the accurate calculation of fluid thermo-physical properties is of great concern in NICFD, all the chapters address this problem by describing state-of-the-art modelsfor the characterization of the properties of pure fluids and mixtures.

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a major global health challenge as the third leading cause for cancer related mortalities worldwide. Despite advances in therapeutic strategies, the five-year survival rate for CRC patients has remained the same over time due to the fact that patients are often diagnosed in advanced metastatic stages. Drug resistance is another common reason for poor prognosis. Researchers are now developing advanced therapeutic strategies such as immunotherapy, targeted therapy, and combination nanotechnology for drug delivery. In addition, the identification of new biomarkers will potentiate early stage diagnosis.This book is the third of three volumes on recent developments in colorectal diagnosis and therapy. Each volume can be read on its own, or together. Each volume focuses on different novel therapeutic advances, biomarkers, and identifies therapeutic targets for treatment. Written by leading international experts in the field, coverage addresses the role of diet habits and lifestyle in reducing gastrointestinal disorders and incidence of CRC. Chapters discuss current and future diagnostic and therapeutic options for colorectal cancer patients, focusing on immunotherapeutics, nanomedicine, biomarkers, and dietary factors for the effective management of colon cancer.