Darriwilian to Sandbian (Ordovician) Graptolites from Northwest China analyzes the significance of these exquisite, mostly pyritic, graptolites of the middle to late Ordovician period from North China and Tarim, China—locations that have developed the world's most complete successions of strata and fossil records. The book provides the first systematic account of the renowned graptolite faunas, with over 100 species belonging to 45 genera and 15 families preserved in black shale and limest...

This Springer Brief provides a comprehensive overview of the background and recent developments of big data. The value chain of big data is divided into four phases: data generation, data acquisition, data storage and data analysis. For each phase, the book introduces the general background, discusses technical challenges and reviews the latest advances. Technologies under discussion include cloud computing, Internet of Things, data centers, Hadoop and more. The authors also explore severa...

Extensively revised and updated, this new edition of a classic resource provides powerplant engineers with a full range of information from basic operations to leading-edge technologies, including steam generation, turbines and diesels, fuels and fuel handling, pollution control, plant electrical systems, and instrumentation and control. New material covers various energy resources for power generation, nuclear plant systems, hydroelectric power stations, alternative and cogeneration energ...

The book introduces tourism earth-science as a new scientific discipline by applying the principles of earth-science in the study of natural and human tourism resources. It involves studying the geo-scientific characteristics of these tourism resources through surveys, evaluation and aesthetic value assessment. It also discusses about the principles behind geopark establishment and management. It is an important publication providing direction for geopark and tourism developments in China....

This book provides several efficient Kalman filters (linear or nonlinear) under information theoretic criteria. They achieve excellent performance in complicated non-Gaussian noises with low computation complexity and have great practical application potential. The book combines all these perspectives and results in a single resource for students and practitioners in relevant application fields. Each chapter starts with a brief review of fundamentals, presents the material focused on the m...

When did China make the decisive turn from tradition to modernity? For decades, the received wisdom would have pointed to the May Fourth movement, with its titanic battles between the champions of iconoclasm and the traditionalists, and its shift to more populist forms of politics. A growing body of recent research has, however, called into question how decisive the turn was, when it happened, and what relation the resulting modernity bore to the agendas of people who might have considered...

Doing English in Asia: Global Literature and Culture examines the effect of globalization on the curriculum of Asian universities. As knowledge of the English language has increasingly been understood as necessary to excel in international business, a number of Asian universities have replaced the traditional study of English literature and culture with applied English or English for specified purposes. This edited collection tackles the question of how to teach English language and cultur...

Recently, criterion functions based on information theoretic measures (entropy, mutual information, information divergence) have attracted attention and become an emerging area of study in signal processing and system identification domain. This book presents a systematic framework for system identification and information processing, investigating system identification from an information theory point of view. The book is divided into six chapters, which cover the information needed to un...

Kangaroo doesn't want to go to prison?Too bad, Kangaroo!Be seeing you.Welcome to the spacefaring future, where humanity travels between planets with ease and has abused that power to establish outposts in some questionable places.Take Venus, for example: a sister world to Mother Earth, similar in size and gravity, it's also known for having a toxic atmosphere and hellish landscape at ground level. B...

Kangaroo's back!And this time it's personal...Maybe?On the way home from his latest mission, secret agent Kangaroo's spacecraft is wrecked by a rogue mining robot. The agency tracks the bot back to the Moon, where a retired asteroid miner—code named "Clementine"—might have information about who's behind the sabotage.Clementine will only deal with Jessica Chu, Kangaroo's personal physician and a former military doctor once deployed in ...

While traditional approaches in pattern recognition and computer vision have continued to evolve, along with the advances of artificial intelligence (AI), this unique compendium presents recent research activities in deep learning, graph-based and semantic-based approaches and applications.The book covers the most recent advances as well as traditional topics in pattern recognition and computer vision in this new AI area in the first part. The second part presents emerging applicat...

This book comprises selected papers from the First International Conference on Convective Flow Boiling. The purpose of the conference is to examine state-of-science and recent developments in technology of flow boiling, i.e., boiling systems which are affected by convective flows.