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This book presents state-of-the-art research, challenges and solutions in the area of human¿robot collaboration (HRC) in manufacturing. It enables readers to better understand the dynamic behaviour of manufacturing processes, and gives more insight into on-demand adaptive control techniques for industrial robots.With increasing complexity and dynamism in today¿s manufacturing practice, more precise, robust and practical approaches are needed to support real-time shop-floor operations. This book presents a collection of recent developments and innovations in this area, relying on a wide range of research efforts.The book is divided into five parts. The first part presents a broad-based review of the key areas of HRC, establishing a common ground of understanding in key aspects. Subsequent chapters focus on selected areas of HRC subject to intense recent interest. The second part discusses human safety within HRC. The third, fourth and fifth parts provide in-depth views of relevant methodologies and algorithms. Discussing dynamic planning and monitoring, adaptive control and multi-modal decision making, the latter parts facilitate a better understanding of HRC in real situations. The balance between scope and depth, and theory and applications, means this book appeals to a wide readership, including academic researchers, graduate students, practicing engineers, and those within a variety of roles in manufacturing sectors.

This book aims to quantify and discuss how societies have directly and indirectly benefited from ecosystem services in Patagonia; not only in terms of provisioning and cultural services, but also regulating and supporting services. Patagonia, a region that stretches across two countries (ca. 10% in Chile and 90% in Argentina), is home to some of the most extensive wilderness areas on our planet. Natural grasslands comprise almost 30% of the Americas, including the Patagonian steppe, while Patagonian southern temperate forests are important for carbon sequestration and storage, play a pivotal role in water regulation, and have become widely recognized for their ecotourism value. However, profound changes are now underway that could affect key ecosystem functions and ultimately human well-being. In this context, one major challenge we face in Patagonia is that ecosystem services are often ignored in economic markets, government policies and land management practices. The book explores the synergies and trade-offs between conservation and economic development as natural landscapes and seascapes continue to degrade in Patagonia. Historically, economic markets have largely focused on the provisioning services (forest products, livestock) while neglecting the interdependent roles of regulating services (erosion and climate control), supporting services (nutrient cycling) and cultural services (recreation, local identity, tourism). Therefore, the present work focuses on ecosystem functions and ecosystem services, as well as on trends in biodiversity and the interactions between natural environments and land-use activities throughout Patagonia.

This new volume ¿Iridium Catalysts for Organic Reactions¿ in the series ¿Topics in Organometallic Chemistry¿ intends to update several representative well-known reactions and to introduce other less known or new reactions in particular covering sustainability aspects. Iridium complexes are efficient in many catalytic homogeneous transformations providing high efficiency in both results, activity and selectivity. The interest of the book lies in the presentation of the advances, new perspectives and application in a variety of representative iridium-catalysed reaction. All chapters in the volume are contributed by relevant international experts in the field. The book is aimed at researchers, graduate students and synthetic chemists at all levels in academia and industry.

This book discusses dignity in the organizational context. Combining diverse theoretical and methodological approaches, as well as empirical studies, this book examines the concept of dignity between organizations and a variety of stakeholders. Going beyond the traditional approach of the relationship between company and employees, and beyond the traditional perspective of human dignity in a Kantian or post-Kantian approach, this volume innovates by discussing dignity from different epistemic perspectives, bringing to the fore dignity, inserted in different organizational and cultural contexts.The volume is divided into five parts. The first part is dedicated to the concept of dignity in the organizational sphere (dignity inside organizations, dignity between organizations and their stakeholders, and dignity in business-to-business relationships) discussed under different epistemic approaches. The second part deals with dignity in the relationships between companies and employees. The third part deals with the relationship between companies and clients. The fourth part of the book studies business-to-business relationships, addressing the educational sector, restaurants, and microcredit. Finally, the fifth part focuses on the relationships between the organizational dignity construct and other constructs, such as stress, spirituality and trust. Opening new theoretical and methodological perspectives for the study of dignity, this book will be of use to researchers and students studying management, leadership, and business strategy, as well as management and HR professionals.

This book offers a didactic and a self-contained treatment of the physics of liquid and flowing matter with a statistical mechanics approach. Experimental and theoretical methods that were developed to study fluids are now frequently applied to a number of more complex systems generically referred to as soft matter. As for simple liquids, also for complex fluids it is important to understand how their macroscopic behavior is determined by the interactions between the component units. Moreover, in recent years new and relevant insights have emerged from the study of anomalous phases and metastable states of matter. In addition to the traditional topics concerning fluids in normal conditions, the authors of this book discuss recent developments in the field of disordered systems in condensed and soft matter. In particular they emphasize computer simulation techniques that are used in the study of soft matter and the theoriesand study of slow glassy dynamics. For these reasons the book includes a specific chapter about metastability, supercooled liquids and glass transition.The book is written for graduate students and active researchers in the field.

This edited volume discusses the development of the new social and impact economy in ten countries around the globe. The new social and impact economy is an attempt to conceptualize developments after the 2008 economic crisis, which emphasized the pifalls of the Neo-Liberal economic system. In the aftermath of the crisis, new organizational entities evolved, which combined social and business objectives as part of their mission. Using data gathered by two recent international research projects¿the ICSEM project and the FAB-MOVE project¿the book provides an initial portrait of the forces at play in the evolution of the new social and impact economy, linking those to the past crisis as well as to Covid19 and comparing the emergence of the phenomenon in a varied group of countries. The book begins with an overview of the classical definitions of social economy and proposes a comprehensive concept of new social and impact economy, its characteristics, and sources. Ten country chapters as well as a comparative chapter on international social economy organizations follow. The volume concludes with an overall analysis of the data from the country chapters, forming a typology of social economy traditions and linking it to recent Post Capitalism trends.Creating a conceptual framework to analyze the new phenomena in social economy, this volume is ideal for academics and practitioners in the fields of social economy; social, economic and welfare policies; social and business entrepreneurship in a comparative fashion; social and technological innovation as well as CSR specialists and practitioners.

This book provides a systematic and comprehensive overview of machine learning with cognitive science methods and technologies which have played an important role at the core of practical solutions for a wide scope of tasks between handheld apps, industrial process control, autonomous vehicles, environmental policies, life sciences, playing computer games, computational theory, and engineering development.The chapters in this book focus on readers interested in machine learning, cognitive and neuro-inspired computational systems ¿ theories, mechanisms, and architecture, which underline human and animal behaviour, and their application to conscious and intelligent systems. In the current version, it focuses on the successful implementation and step-by-step explanation of practical applications of the domain. It also offers a wide range of inspiring and interesting cutting-edge contributions to applications of machine learning and cognitive science such as healthcare products, medical electronics, and gaming.Overall, this book provides valuable information on effective, cutting-edge techniques and approaches for students, researchers, practitioners, and academicians working in the field of AI, neural network, machine learning, and cognitive science. Furthermore, the purpose of this book is to address the interests of a broad spectrum of practitioners, students, and researchers, who are interested in applying machine learning and cognitive science methods in their respective domains.

Tax practitioners are unfamiliar with tax theory. Tax economists remain unfamiliar with tax law and tax administration. Most textbooks relate mainly to the US, UK or European experiences. Students in emerging economies remain unfamiliar with their own taxation history. This textbook fills those gaps. It covers the concept of taxes in regards to their rationale, principles, design, and common errors. It addresses distortions in consumer choices and production decisions caused by tax and redressals. The main principles of taxation¿efficiency, equity, stabilization, revenue productivity, administrative feasibility, international neutrality¿are presented and discussed. The efficiency principle requires the minimisation of distortions in the market caused by tax. Equity in taxation is another principle that is maintained through progressivity in the tax structure. Similarly, other principles have their own ramifications that are also addressed. A country¿s constitutional specification of tax assignment to different levels of government¿central, state, municipal¿are elaborated. The UK is more centralised than the US and India. India has amended its constitution to introduce a goods and services tax (GST) covering both central and state governments. Drafting of tax law is crucial for clarity and this aspect is addressed. Furthermore, the author illustrates different types of taxes such as individual income tax, corporate income tax, wealth tax, retail sales/value added/goods and services tax, selective excises, property tax, minimum taxes such as the minimum alternate tax (MAT), cash-flow tax, financial transactions tax, fringe benefits tax, customs duties and export taxes, environment tax and global carbon tax, and user charges. An emerging concern regarding the inadequacy of international taxation of multinational corporations is covered in some detail. Structural aspects of tax administration are given particular attention.

This book provides an overview of the current development status of remediation technologies involving electrochemical processes, which are used to clean up soils that are contaminated with different types of contaminants (organics, inorganics, metalloids and radioactive). Written by internationally recognized experts, it comprises 21 chapters describing the characteristics and theoretical foundations of various electrochemical applications of soil remediation. The book¿s opening section discusses the fundamental properties and characteristics of the soil, which are essential to understand the processes that can most effectively remove organic and inorganic compounds. This part also focuses on the primary processes that contribute to the application of electrochemically assisted remediation, hydrodynamic aspects and kinetics of contaminants in the soil. It also reviews the techniques that have been developed for the treatment of contaminated soils using electrochemistry, and discusses different strategies used to enhance performance, the type of electrode and electrolyte, and the most important operating conditions. In turn, the book¿s second part deals with practical applications of technologies related to the separation of pollutants from soil. Special emphasis is given to the characteristics of these technologies regarding transport of the contaminants and soil toxicity after treatment. The third part is dedicated to new technologies, including electrokinetic remediation and hybrid approaches, for the treatment of emerging contaminants by ex-situ and in-situ production of strong oxidant species used for soil remediation. It also discusses pre-pilot scale for soil treatment and the use of solar photovoltaic panels as an energy source for powering electrochemical systems, which can reduce both the investment and maintenance costs of electrochemically assisted processes.

This book explores the application of deep learning techniques within a particularly difficult computational type of computer vision (CV) problem ¿ super-resolution (SR). The authors present and discuss ways to apply computational intelligence (CI) methods to SR. The volume also explores the possibility of using different kinds of CV techniques to develop and enhance the tools/processes related to SR. The application areas covered include biomedical engineering, healthcare applications, medicine, histology, and material science. The book will be a valuable reference for anyone concerned with multiple multimodal images, especially professionals working in remote sensing, nanotechnology and immunology at research institutes, healthcare facilities, biotechnology institutions, agribusiness services, veterinary facilities, and universities.

The book includes the latest research advances and cutting-edge analyses of real case studies in the disciplines of Industrial Engineering and Operations Management from diverse international contexts.This work presents a revised version of the best papers presented at the XIII International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Industrial Management promoted by ADINGOR (Asociación para el Desarrollo de la Ingeniería de Organización), which took place at the Polytechnic School of Engineering of Gijón (University of Oviedo), Asturias, Spain, from July 11th to 12th, 2019.

This book proposes another unique basis for the origins of religion from disturbances in brain function. It proposes the novel idea that near-death and out-of-body experiences (ND/OBE) engendered ¿a sense of the divine¿ in ancient man.As the author points out, key aspects of ND/OBE are thematic of all later established religions. These include journeys to heaven, sightings of brightly-lit godlike figures, and dead people now alive. Thus, ND/OBE could be the originating source of these spiritual motifs. To this, the author adds a fourth factor: various brain influences contribute to or modulate ND/OBE. Such cognate neurological disorders include REM-sleep intrusions, sleep paralysis, narcolepsy, and the Guillain-Barré syndrome. Errors due to aberrant switching between key neural control centers disrupt critical state-boundaries between consciousness and dreaming. This may induce NDE. Thus, in this state, subjects temporarily fail to understand where they are, undergo loss of self, and detached from the world. They imagine a ¿union with Gods.¿ Here, then, is the biological basis of ineffability.Ancient humans gained beliefs about the "supernatural" through day-to-day existence. This book argues that near death experiences and cognate neurological conditions, some genetically-determined, could have facilitated, even augmented such beliefs. Hence, in configuring another realm of ¿spiritual¿ experience beyond the known environment, these neurological possibilities offer effective traction.

The contributed volume puts emphasis on a superior role of water in (bio)systems exposed to a mechanical stimulus. It is well known that water plays an extraordinary role in our life. It feeds mammalian or other organism after distributing over its whole volume to support certain physiological and locomotive (friction-adhesion) processes to mention but two of them, both of extreme relevance.Water content, not only in the mammalian organism but also in other biosystems such as whether those of soil which is equipped with microbiome or the ones pertinent to plants, having their own natural network of water vessels, is always subjected to a force field.The decisive force field applied to the biosystems makes them biomechanically agitated irrespective of whether they are subjected to external or internal force-field conditions. It ought to be noted that the decisive mechanical factor shows up in a close relation with the space-and-time scale in which it is causing certain specific phenomena to occur.The scale problem, emphasizing the range of action of gravitational force, thus the millimeter or bigger force vs. distance scale, is supposed to enter the so-called macroscale approach to water transportation through soil or plants¿ roots system. It is merely related to a percolation problem, which assumes to properly inspect the random network architecture assigned to the biosystems invoked. The capillarity conditions turn out to be of prior importance, and the porous-medium effect has to be treated, and solved in a fairly approximate way.The deeper the scale is penetrated by a force-exerting and hydrated agent the more non-gravitational force fields manifest. This can be envisaged in terms of the corresponding thermodynamic (non-Newtonian) forces, and the phenomena of interest are mostly attributed to suitable changes of the osmotic pressure. In low Reynolds number conditions, thus in the (sub)micrometer distance-scale zone, they are related with the corresponding viscosity changes of the aqueous, e.g. cytoplasmatic solutions, of semi-diluted and concentrated (but also electrolytic) characteristics. For example, they can be observed in articulating systems of mammals, in their skin, and to some extent, in other living beings, such as lizards, geckos or even insects. Through their articulating devices an external mechanical stimulus is transmitted from macro- to nanoscale, wherein the corresponding osmotic-pressure conditions apply.The content of the proposed work can be distributed twofold. First, the biomechanical mammalian-type (or, similar) systems with extraordinary relevance of water for their functioning will be presented, also including a presentation of water itself as a key physicochemical system/medium. Second, the suitably chosen related systems, mainly of soil and plant addressing provenience, will be examined thoroughly. As a common denominator of all of them, it is proposed to look at their hydrophobic and/or (de)hydration effects, and how do they impact on their basic mechanical (and related, such as chemo-mechanical or piezoelectric, etc.) properties. An additional tacit assumption employed throughout the monograph concerns statistical scalability of the presented biosystems which is equivalent to take for granted a certain similarity between local and global system¿s properties, mostly those of mechanical nature. The presented work¿s chapters also focus on biodiversity and ecological aspects in the world of animals and plants, and the related systems. The chapters¿ contents underscore the bioinspiration as the key landmark of the proposed monograph.

The field of extracellular vesicles (EVs) has progressed immensely in recent times with evidences highlighting their importance in physiology and pathology. This book entails extensive reflective literature on many subtypes of EVs including exosomes, exomeres, ectosomes, apoptotic vesicles, bacterial EVs and fungal EVs. The book further discusses the biogenesis and secretion of these EVs, detailing the biological pathways and proteins involved. Research investigating the biological functions of EVs is rapidly increasing and the current knowledge around their role in progression of diseases such as cancer, neurodegeneration and metabolic disorders is discussed in multiple chapters. The implications of EVs in intercellular communication and the significance of biologically active cargo carried within these EVs are further examined. Moreover, the numerous applications of EVs in diagnostics and treatment of diseases are reviewed in detail, particularly their potential as biomarkers and drug delivery vehicles. Taken together, this book is a compilation of the key implications of EVs that are secreted by virtually all cell types. Readers will gain a perspective into the biology, functions and applications of EVs and their constantly evolving knowledge base.

This book presents a range of innovative analytical frameworks that can be used to approach the complexities of children¿s understandings and experiences of well-being in a locally oriented, context-sensitive and multi-nationally comparative way. It addresses the challenges of undertaking research on children¿s understandings of well-being from a multi-national qualitative perspective. Chapters in the book present results that show how children from various places all over the world conceptualize and experience well-being as well as how this is linked local, regional and national social, political and cultural contexts.