The subjects refer to histories of ancient and modern use of seacoasts; possible macro-projects capable of massive changes in the coastlines of the Dead Sea, Red Sea and Persian Gulf caused by canal and massively scaled hydropower dam installations; relevant macro-projects for the Black Sea and Baltic Sea; possibilities of refreshment of the Aral Sea and Iran’s Lake Uremia with seawater or river freshwater importation macro-projects; potential rehabilitation of some vital arid zone regions now dominated by moving or movable surface granular materials using unique and unusual macro-projects; seawater flooding of land regions situated below present-day global sea-level; harnessing energy and obtaining freshwater from the world’s salt-laden ocean by modern industrial means; various macro-projects designed specifically for the protection (reduction of vulnerability) of particular Earth geographical regions.
This book examines businesses under crisis conditions through a composition of contextual accounts. The Editors argue that crises are transformative, evolutionary and even revolutionary in the development of organizations, industries and markets. Moreover, crises reform the context in which organizations operate, including customers and their behaviour. As such, they need to be viewed as conduits to change, accelerators of evolution and catalysts of innovation in organizations. Emphasising the importance of ‘context’ and its complexities, the book argues that for crisis, as a concept and notion, context is crucial to any understanding of the meaning that should or could be attached to it. Drawing on different types of changes and crises that substantially affect business, including economic, technological, political, and environmental, chapters Bringing together scientific research and case studies on contextual transformations, the book provides a balanced selection of works across business disciplines, including management, strategy, marketing and finance as well as geographic regions, market types and industries. The book examines the context of crises, its indicators and triggers, and encompasses topics such as Artificial Intelligence, e-mobility, changes in consumption patterns, militancy and the impact of pandemics.
Society, globally, has entered into what might be called the “service economy.” Services now constitute the largest share of GDP in most countries and provide the major source of employment in both developed and developing countries. Services permeate all aspects of peoples’ lives and are becoming inseparable from most aspects of economic activity. “Quality management” has been a dominating managerial practice since World War II. With quality management initially associated with manufacturing industries, one might assume the relevance of quality management might decrease with the emergence of the service economy. To the contrary, the emergence of the service economy strengthened the importance of quality issues, which no longer are associated only with manufacturing industries but are increasingly applied in all service sectors, as well. Today, we talk not only about product or service quality but have even expanded the framework of quality to quality of life and quality of environment. Thus, quality and services have emerged in parallel as closely interrelated fields. The Encyclopedia of Quality and the Service Economy explores such relevant questions as: What are the characteristics, nature, and definitions of quality and services? How do we define quality of products, quality of services, or quality of life? How are services distinguished from goods? How do we measure various aspects of quality and services? How can products and service quality be managed most effectively and efficiently? What is the role of customers in creation of values? These questions and more are explored within the pages of this two-volume, A-to-Z reference work.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling & Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation, SBP-BRiMS 2016, held in Washington, DC, USA, in June/July 2016. The 38 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 78 submissions. The goal of this conference was to build a new community of social cyber scholars by bringing together and fostering interaction between members of the scientific, corporate, government and military communities interested in understanding, forecasting and impacting human socio-cultural behavior. For this three challenges have to be met: deep understanding, socio-cognitive reasoning, and re-usable computational technology. Thus papers come from a wide number of disciplines: computer science, psychology, sociology, communication science, public health, bioinformatics, political science, and organizational science.
Crises present significant challenges for organizations. But, while critical events are inevitable, not every business is sufficiently equipped for when things don’t go according to plan. This book focuses on business under crisis conditions, along with organizational responses and adaptation. Adaptation can be seen as a learning process. It encompasses meaningful ways that help companies sustain their viability over the long term. Companies that respond quickly, often achieve more than just surviving. Some organizations will learn from a crisis, develop reactive resilience, and emerge stronger from the period of turbulence. They will be able to explore possibilities and create new patterns of relationships. Bringing together descriptive and prescriptive research studies, chapters explore adaptation in different sectors, including public health, tourism, garment, Information Technology, high-tech companies, global trade networks, hospitality, security and the social sector. Ultimately, the book covers wide range of topics, linking strategy, entrepreneurship, and leadership to reciprocal organizational adaptations that help us delineate crisis, as well as its interconnections in differing settings.
The Handbook of Multimodal-Multisensor Interfaces provides the first authoritative resource on what has become the dominant paradigm for new computer interfaces— user input involving new media (speech, multi-touch, gestures, writing) embedded in multimodal-multisensor interfaces. These interfaces support smart phones, wearables, in-vehicle and robotic applications, and many other areas that are now highly competitive commercially. This edited collection is written by international experts and pioneers in the field. It provides a textbook, reference, and technology roadmap for professionals working in this and related areas. This first volume of the handbook presents relevant theory and neuroscience foundations for guiding the development of high-performance systems. Additional chapters discuss approaches to user modeling and interface designs that support user choice, that synergistically combine modalities with sensors, and that blend multimodal input and output. This volume also highlights an in-depth look at the most common multimodal-multisensor combinations—for example, touch and pen input, haptic and non-speech audio output, and speech-centric systems that co-process either gestures, pen input, gaze, or visible lip movements. A common theme throughout these chapters is supporting mobility and individual differences among users. These handbook chapters provide walk-through examples of system design and processing, information on tools and practical resources for developing and evaluating new systems, and terminology and tutorial support for mastering this emerging field. In the final section of this volume, experts exchange views on a timely and controversial challenge topic, and how they believe multimodal-multisensor interfaces should be designed in the future to most effectively advance human performance.
The natural interaction ability between human and machine mainly involves human-machine dialogue ability, multi-modal sentiment analysis ability, human-machine cooperation ability, and so on. To enable intelligent computers to have multi-modal sentiment analysis ability, it is necessary to equip them with a strong multi-modal sentiment analysis ability during the process of human-computer interaction. This is one of the key technologies for efficient and intelligent human-computer interaction. This book focuses on the research and practical applications of multi-modal sentiment analysis for human-computer natural interaction, particularly in the areas of multi-modal information feature representation, feature fusion, and sentiment classification. Multi-modal sentiment analysis for natural interaction is a comprehensive research field that involves the integration of natural language processing, computer vision, machine learning, pattern recognition, algorithm, robot intelligent system, human-computer interaction, etc. Currently, research on multi-modal sentiment analysis in natural interaction is developing rapidly. This book can be used as a professional textbook in the fields of natural interaction, intelligent question answering (customer service), natural language processing, human-computer interaction, etc. It can also serve as an important reference book for the development of systems and products in intelligent robots, natural language processing, human-computer interaction, and related fields.
The second revised edition of this text will update and present current state of the art clinical approaches to this subject. This book will continue to be the source text of information on drug-induced movement disorders authored and edited by the pioneers in the field. It will be an invaluable addition to the library of any neurologist.