Climate change is an inevitable and urgent global challenge with long-term implications for the sustainable development of all countries. To overcome this human crisis, the scientific consensus is driving global action towards low carbon economics. Though this action has to involve all sectors (industries, governments, and citizens) and at all levels (global, national and regional levels), the implementation of climate strategies will predominantly be at the regional level. By establishing...

What are the random-like phenomena that can be found everywhere in real-life world? When carrying out a random sampling survey on the traffic situation, we often obtain some descriptive results such as approximately expedite, a little crowded and so on, therefore, the average level should be regarded as the random fuzzy phenomenon, which is one of the random-like phenomena. Decision makers usually need to make the decision for these problems with random-like phenomena. Which model should b...

Why has the world been unable to address global warming? Science policy expert Roger Pielke, Jr., says it's not the fault of those who reject the Kyoto Protocol, but those who support it, and the magical thinking that the agreement represents. In The Climate Fix, Pielke offers a way to repair climate policy, shifting the debate away from meaningless targets and toward a revolution in how the world's economy is powered, while de-fanging the venomous politics surrounding the crisis....

This book considers classical and current theory and practice, of supervised, unsupervised and semi-supervised pattern recognition, to build a complete background for professionals and students of engineering. The authors, leading experts in the field of pattern recognition, have provided an up-to-date, self-contained volume encapsulating this wide spectrum of information. The very latest methods are incorporated in this edition: semi-supervised learning, combining clustering algorithms, a...

Tackling the questions that systems designers care about, this book brings queueing theory decisively back to computer science. The book is written with computer scientists and engineers in mind and is full of examples from computer systems, as well as manufacturing and operations research. Fun and readable, the book is highly approachable, even for undergraduates, while still being thoroughly rigorous and also covering a much wider span of topics than many queueing books. Readers benefit ...

The failure of the Copenhagen climate conference in December 2009 revealed major flaws in the way the world's policymakers have attempted to prevent dangerous levels of increases in global temperatures. The expert authors in this specially commissioned collection focus on the likely costs and benefits of a very wide range of policy options, including geo-engineering, mitigation of CO2, methane and 'black carbon', expanding forest, research and development of low-carbon energy and encouragi...

This book is unique in presenting channels, techniques and standards for the next generation of MIMO wireless networks. Through a unified framework, it emphasizes how propagation mechanisms impact the system performance under realistic power constraints. Combining a solid mathematical analysis with a physical and intuitive approach to space-time signal processing, the book progressively derives innovative designs for space-time coding and precoding as well as multi-user and multi-cell tech...

Under one cover, Frank P. Incropera provides a comprehensive, objective and critical assessment of all issues germane to the climate change debate: science, technology options, economic ramifications, cultural and behavioural issues, the influence of special interests and public policy, geopolitics and ethical dimensions. The underlying science is treated in depth, but in an approachable and accessible manner. A strong case is made for the reality of anthropogenic climate change, while con...

Each passing year bears witness to the development of ever more powerful computers, increasingly fast and cheap storage media, and even higher bandwidth data connections. This makes it easy to believe that we can now – at least in principle – solve any problem we are faced with so long as we only have enough data. Yet this is not the case. Although large databases allow us to retrieve many different single pieces of information and to compute simple aggregations, general patterns and regul...

Andrew Sancton combines his own broad knowledge of global changes with an outline and comparison of the viewpoints of prominent social scientists to argue that city regions in western liberal democracies will not and cannot be self-governing. Self-government requires a territory delineated by official boundaries but the multiple boundaries of city-regions unlike the clear and undisputed boundaries of provinces and states continue to move outward due to the constant growth and expansion of urb...

Providing a broad but in-depth introduction to neural network and machine learning in a statistical framework, this book provides a single, comprehensive resource for study and further research. All the major popular neural network models and statistical learning approaches are covered with examples and exercises in every chapter to develop a practical working understanding of the content.Each of the twenty-five chapters includes state-of-the-art descriptions and important research...

The positive reciprocal pairwise comparison matrix (PCM) is one of the key components which is used to quantify the qualitative and/or intangible attributes into measurable quantities. This book examines six understudied issues of PCM, i.e. consistency test, inconsistent data identification and adjustment, data collection, missing or uncertain data estimation, and sensitivity analysis of rank reversal. The maximum eigenvalue threshold method is proposed as the new consistency index for the...