Government-Opposition in Southern European Countries during the Economic Crisis
Government-Opposition in Southern European Countries during the Economic Crisis

Author: Elisabetta De Giorgi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-12-22

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 1317407334

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As a result of the financial crisis, opposition parties have had to choose between the need to cooperate with the majority in order to contribute to necessary socio-economic changes, and the opportunity to stress their adversarial position vis-à-vis governments taking radical and unpopular measures. This book examines how opposition parties address this dilemma. It relies on a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the behaviour of the opposition parties in parliament, in light of the socio-economic issues that have arisen in recent years. It focuses in particular on the impact that the economic malaise has had on the government-opposition dynamics in the four southern European democracies most acutely hit by the crisis: Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain, as well as in the European Parliament. Each chapter utilizes a combination of empirical data analysis and qualitative process-tracking to understand the opposition parties’ complicated choice between supporting and dissenting. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Legislative Studies.

Distributed and Parallel Embedded Systems
Distributed and Parallel Embedded Systems

Author: Franz J. Rammig

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-03-09

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0387355707

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Embedded systems are becoming one of the major driving forces in computer science. Furthermore, it is the impact of embedded information technology that dictates the pace in most engineering domains. Nearly all technical products above a certain level of complexity are not only controlled but increasingly even dominated by their embedded computer systems. Traditionally, such embedded control systems have been implemented in a monolithic, centralized way. Recently, distributed solutions are gaining increasing importance. In this approach, the control task is carried out by a number of controllers distributed over the entire system and connected by some interconnect network, like fieldbuses. Such a distributed embedded system may consist of a few controllers up to several hundred, as in today's top-range automobiles. Distribution and parallelism in embedded systems design increase the engineering challenges and require new development methods and tools. This book is the result of the International Workshop on Distributed and Parallel Embedded Systems (DIPES'98), organized by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Groups 10.3 (Concurrent Systems) and 10.5 (Design and Engineering of Electronic Systems). The workshop took place in October 1998 in Schloss Eringerfeld, near Paderborn, Germany, and the resulting book reflects the most recent points of view of experts from Brazil, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and the USA. The book is organized in six chapters: `Formalisms for Embedded System Design': IP-based system design and various approaches to multi-language formalisms. `Synthesis from Synchronous/Asynchronous Specification': Synthesis techniques based on Message Sequence Charts (MSC), StateCharts, and Predicate/Transition Nets. `Partitioning and Load-Balancing': Application in simulation models and target systems. `Verification and Validation': Formal techniques for precise verification and more pragmatic approaches to validation. `Design Environments' for distributed embedded systems and their impact on the industrial state of the art. `Object Oriented Approaches': Impact of OO-techniques on distributed embedded systems. £/LIST£ This volume will be essential reading for computer science researchers and application developers.

Computers and Education in the 21st Century
Computers and Education in the 21st Century

Author: Manuel Ortega

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2007-05-08

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 0306475324

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ConieD is the biannual Congress on Computers in Education, organised by the Spanish Association for the Development of Computers in Education (ADIE). The last Congress, held in Puertollano (Ciudad Real), brought together researchers in different areas, ranging from web applications, educational environments, or Human-Computer Interaction to Artificial Intelligence in Education. The common leitmotiv of the major part of the lectures was the World Wide Web. In particular, the focus was on the real possibilities that this media presents in order to make the access of students to educational resources possible anywhere and anytime. This fact was highlighted in the Conclusions of the Congress following this Preface as the Introduction. From the full 92 papers presented to the Programme Committee we have selected the best 24 papers that we are presenting in this book. The selection of papers was a very difficult process, taking into account that the papers presented in the Congress (60) were all good enough to appear in this book. Only the restrictions of the extension of this book have limited the number of papers to 24. These papers represent the current high-quality contributions of Spanish research groups in Computers in Education. Manuel Ortega Cantero José Bravo Rodríguez Editors xiii Introduction ConieD’99 (1st National Congress on Computers in Education) has brought together a very important group of Spanish and Latin American researchers devoted to studying the application and use of computers in education.

Increasing Seismic Safety by Combining Engineering Technologies and Seismological Data
Increasing Seismic Safety by Combining Engineering Technologies and Seismological Data

Author: Marco Mucciarelli

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2008-11-30

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 1402091966

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The current state-of-the-art allows seismologists to give statistical estimates of the probability of a large earthquake striking a given region, identifying the areas in which the seismic hazard is the highest. However, the usefulness of these estimates is limited, without information about local subsoil conditions and the vulnerability of buildings. Identifying the sites where a local ampli?cation of seismic shaking will occur, and identifying the buildings that will be the weakest under the seismic shaking is the only strategy that allows effective defence against earthquake damage at an affordable cost, by applying selective reinforcement only to the structures that need it. Unfortunately, too often the Earth’s surface acted as a divide between seism- ogists and engineers. Now it is becoming clear that the building behaviour largely depends on the seismic input and the buildings on their turn act as seismic sources, in an intricate interplay that non-linear phenomena make even more complex. These phenomena are often the cause of observed damage enhancement during past ear- quakes. While research may pursue complex models to fully understand soil dyn- ics under seismic loading, we need, at the same time, simple models valid on average, whose results can be easily transferred to end users without prohibitive expenditure. Very complex models require a large amount of data that can only be obtained at a very high cost or may be impossible to get at all.

International Electronic Countermeasures Handbook
International Electronic Countermeasures Handbook

Author: Horizon House

Publisher: Artech House

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 9781580538985

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This updated 2004 Edition of the popular International Electronic Countermeasures Handbook contains new and revised entries for defense electronics systems from all nations, including Russian, Eastern European, and Chinese electronic-warfare, electronic-intelligence-gathering, and guided-weapon systems. Packed with more system technical data, photographs, and operational details than ever, the new edition is a must-have resource for military and industry professionals who are concerned with defense electronics in the modern world. The book also describes known threats, providing details of missiles which can be launched from static and mobile ground-based sites, from ships, or from aircraft. Moreover, it presents comprehensive information on the status, parameters, deployment, and manufacturer of each system. This invaluable handbook includes every important class of military surveillance and electronic intelligence system for ESM (electronic support measures); SIGINT (signals intelligence); COMINT (communications intelligence); and DF (direction finding) systems.

Democracy and Diversity in Financial Market Regulation
Democracy and Diversity in Financial Market Regulation

Author: Nicholas Dorn

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-08-13

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 1134659709

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Financial markets have become acknowledged as a source of crisis, and discussion of them has shifted from economics, through legal and regulatory studies, to politics. Events from 2008 onwards raise important, cross-disciplinary questions: must financial markets drive states into political and existential crisis, must public finances take over private losses, must citizens endure austerity? This book argues that there is an alternative. If the financial system were less 'connected', contagion within the market would be reduced and crises would become more localised and intermittent, less global and pervasive. The question then becomes how to reduce connectedness within financial markets. This book argues that the democratic direction of financial market policies can deliver this. Politicising financial market policies – taking discussion of these issues out of the sphere of the 'technical' and putting it into the same democratically contested space as, for example, health and welfare policies – would encourage differing policies to emerge in different countries. Diversity of regulatory regimes would result in some business models being attracted to some jurisdictions, others to others. The resulting heterogeneity, when viewed from a global perspective, would be a reversal of recent and current tendencies towards one single/global 'level playing field', within which all financial firms and sectors have become closely connected and across which contagion inevitably reigns. No doubt the democratisation of financial market policy would be opposed by big firms – their interests being served by regulatory convergence – and considered macabre by some financial regulators and central bankers, who are coalescing into an elite community. However, everyone else, Nicholas Dorn argues here, would be better off in a financial world characterised by greater diversity.

Fuzzy Algorithms for Control
Fuzzy Algorithms for Control

Author: H. B. Verbruggen

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2013-03-09

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 9401144052

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Fuzzy Algorithms for Control gives an overview of the research results of a number of European research groups that are active and play a leading role in the field of fuzzy modeling and control. It contains 12 chapters divided into three parts. Chapters in the first part address the position of fuzzy systems in control engineering and in the AI community. State-of-the-art surveys on fuzzy modeling and control are presented along with a critical assessment of the role of these methodologists in control engineering. The second part is concerned with several analysis and design issues in fuzzy control systems. The analytical issues addressed include the algebraic representation of fuzzy models of different types, their approximation properties, and stability analysis of fuzzy control systems. Several design aspects are addressed, including performance specification for control systems in a fuzzy decision-making framework and complexity reduction in multivariable fuzzy systems. In the third part of the book, a number of applications of fuzzy control are presented. It is shown that fuzzy control in combination with other techniques such as fuzzy data analysis is an effective approach to the control of modern processes which present many challenges for the design of control systems. One has to cope with problems such as process nonlinearity, time-varying characteristics for incomplete process knowledge. Examples of real-world industrial applications presented in this book are a blast furnace, a lime kiln and a solar plant. Other examples of challenging problems in which fuzzy logic plays an important role and which are included in this book are mobile robotics and aircraft control. The aim of this book is to address both theoretical and practical subjects in a balanced way. It will therefore be useful for readers from the academic world and also from industry who want to apply fuzzy control in practice.

Europe in an Age of Austerity
Europe in an Age of Austerity

Author: V. Borooah

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-12-11

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1137396024

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This study discusses and analyses the broad issues that have underpinned the current European economic crisis. It examines the experiences of three countries – Greece, Ireland, and Portugal – which reveal an economic system which lacks the adjustment mechanisms that countries with sovereign currencies take for granted.

The Internet Challenge: Technology and Applications
The Internet Challenge: Technology and Applications

Author: Günter Hommel

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 9401004943

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The International Workshop on "The Internet Challenge: Technology and Applications" is the fifth in a successful series of workshops that were established by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Technische Universitat Berlin. The goal of those workshops is to bring together researchers from both universities in order to exchange research results achieved in common projects of the two partner universities or to present interesting new work that might lead to new cooperation. The series of workshops started in 1990 with the "International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence" and was continued with the "International Workshop on Advanced Software Technology" in 1994. Both workshops have been hosted by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. In 1998 the third workshop took place in Berlin. This "International Workshop on Communication Based Systems" was essentially based on results from the Graduiertenkolleg on Communication Based systems that was funded by the German Research Society (DFG) from 1991 to 2000. The fourth "International Workshop on Robotics and its Applications" was held in Shanghai in 2000 supported by VDIIVDE-GMA and GI.