Smart by Nature

Smart by Nature

Author: Michael K. Stone

Publisher: Contemporary Issues (Watershed

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780970950048

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"Describes strategies for greening the campus and the curriculum, conducting environmental audits, rethinking school food, and transforming schools into models of sustainable community"-- P. [4] of cover.


Nature Smart

Nature Smart

Author: Gwen Diehn

Publisher: Main Street Press

Published: 2004-03

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 9781402714351

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More than 150 nature crafts, including: wind vanes, beach baskets, bird feeders, scented soap, barometers, egg shell mosaics, etc.


Materials Design Inspired by Nature

Materials Design Inspired by Nature

Author: Peter Fratzl

Publisher: Royal Society of Chemistry

Published: 2015-11-09

Total Pages: 421

ISBN-13: 1782626174

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The inner architecture of a material can have an astonishing effect on its overall properties and is vital to understand when designing new materials. Nature is a master at designing hierarchical structures and so researchers are looking at biological examples for inspiration, specifically to understand how nature arranges the inner architectures for a particular function in order to apply these design principles into man-made materials. Materials Design Inspired by Nature is the first book to address the relationship between the inner architecture of natural materials and their physical properties for materials design. The book explores examples from plants, the marine world, arthropods and bacteria, where the inner architecture is exploited to obtain specific mechanical, optical or magnetic properties along with how these design principles are used in man-made products. Details of the experimental methods used to investigate hierarchical structures are also given. Written by leading experts in bio-inspired materials research, this is essential reading for anyone developing new materials.


Strategic Business Models to Support Demand, Supply, and Destination Management in the Tourism and Hospitality Industry

Strategic Business Models to Support Demand, Supply, and Destination Management in the Tourism and Hospitality Industry

Author: Carvalho, Luisa Cagica

Publisher: IGI Global

Published: 2019-08-30

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 152259938X

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The international tourism industry has seen increased growth in the past few years as millions of individuals continue to travel worldwide. As one of the world’s largest economic sectors, creating jobs, driving exports, and generating prosperity worldwide, hospitality and tourism management needs to continually be explored in order to update best business models and practice. Strategic Business Models to Support Demand, Supply, and Destination Management in the Tourism and Hospitality Industry is an essential reference source that emphasizes emergent and innovative aspects and new challenges and issues within the industry with a particular focus on demand, supply, and destination management. Featuring research on topics such as circular economy, consumer behavior, and social networking, this book is ideally designed for business professionals, executives, hotel managers, event coordinators, restaurateurs, travel agents, tour directors, policymakers, government officials, industry professionals, researchers, students, and academicians.


Integration of Nature and Technology for Smart Cities

Integration of Nature and Technology for Smart Cities

Author: Anil Ahuja

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-03-17

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 3319257153

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This book is a resumption of the work “Integrated M/E Design: Building Systems Engineering” published by Anil Ahuja in 1997. Together with an international group of authors from the engineering, urban planning, and architecture fields, Mr. Ahuja discussed new trends and paradigms in the smart buildings and smart city sectors and extended the topic of the previous publication from the building to the entire city. A smart, sustainable building is not just about the building itself. There are things happening in the inside of the building and on the outside. A smart building connects the inside with the outside, provides efficiencies on both sides, synchronizes the outside infrastructure with its inside systems, and integrates nature and its occupants in its design. A smart building doesn’t just provide technology solutions. It is about constant exchange between the inside and the outside of the building, the contribution of the building to the quality of the entire neighborhood and the rest of the city, how the smart building can connect people in a sharing community, and how technology can be the key to make it happen.


The Nature Principle

The Nature Principle

Author: Richard Louv

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Published: 2012-04-17

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 161620141X

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For many of us, thinking about the future conjures up images of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: a post-apocalyptic dystopia stripped of nature. Richard Louv, author of the landmark bestseller Last Child in the Woods, urges us to change our vision of the future, suggesting that if we reconceive environmentalism and sustainability, they will evolve into a larger movement that will touch every part of society. This New Nature Movement taps into the restorative powers of the natural world to boost mental acuity and creativity; promote health and wellness; build smarter and more sustainable businesses, communities, and economies; and ultimately strengthen human bonds. Supported by groundbreaking research, anecdotal evidence, and compelling personal stories, Louv offers renewed optimism while challenging us to rethink the way we live.


Nature-Inspired Computing for Smart Application Design

Nature-Inspired Computing for Smart Application Design

Author: Santosh Kumar Das

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-03-17

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 9813361956

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This book focuses primarily on the nature-inspired approach for designing smart applications. It includes several implementation paradigms such as design and path planning of wireless network, security mechanism and implementation for dynamic as well as static nodes, learning method of cloud computing, data exploration and management, data analysis and optimization, decision taking in conflicting environment, etc. The book fundamentally highlights the recent research advancements in the field of engineering and science.


Nature-Inspired Methods for Smart Healthcare Systems and Medical Data

Nature-Inspired Methods for Smart Healthcare Systems and Medical Data

Author: Ahmed M. Anter

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2024-01-02

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 3031459520

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This book aims to gather high-quality research papers on developing theories, frameworks, architectures, and algorithms for solving complex challenges in smart healthcare applications for real industry use. It explores the recent theoretical and practical applications of metaheuristics and optimization in various smart healthcare contexts. The book also discusses the capability of optimization techniques to obtain optimal parameters in ML and DL technologies. It provides an open platform for academics and engineers to share their unique ideas and investigate the potential convergence of existing systems and advanced metaheuristic algorithms. The book's outcome will enable decision-makers and practitioners to select suitable optimization approaches for scheduling patients in crowded environments with minimized human errors. The healthcare system aims to improve the lives of disabled, elderly, sick individuals, and children. IoT-based systems simplify decision-making and task automation, offering an automated foundation. Nature-inspired metaheuristics and mining algorithms are crucial for healthcare applications, reducing costs, increasing efficiency, enabling accurate data analysis, and enhancing patient care. Metaheuristics improve algorithm performance and address challenges in data mining and ML, making them essential in healthcare research. Real-time IoT-based healthcare systems can be modeled using an IoT-based metaheuristic approach to generate optimal solutions. Metaheuristics are powerful technologies for optimization problems in healthcare systems. They balance exact methods, which guarantee optimal solutions but require significant computational resources, with fast but low-quality greedy methods. Metaheuristic algorithms find better solutions while minimizing computational time. The scientific community is increasingly interested in metaheuristics, incorporating techniques from AI, operations research, and soft computing. New metaheuristics offer efficient ways to address optimization problems and tackle unsolved challenges. They can be parameterized to control performance and adjust the trade-off between solution quality and resource utilization. Metaheuristics manage the trade-off between performance and solution quality, making them highly applicable to real-time applications with pragmatic objectives.


Too Smart

Too Smart

Author: Jathan Sadowski

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2020-03-24

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 026253858X

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Who benefits from smart technology? Whose interests are served when we trade our personal data for convenience and connectivity? Smart technology is everywhere: smart umbrellas that light up when rain is in the forecast; smart cars that relieve drivers of the drudgery of driving; smart toothbrushes that send your dental hygiene details to the cloud. Nothing is safe from smartification. In Too Smart, Jathan Sadowski looks at the proliferation of smart stuff in our lives and asks whether the tradeoff—exchanging our personal data for convenience and connectivity—is worth it. Who benefits from smart technology? Sadowski explains how data, once the purview of researchers and policy wonks, has become a form of capital. Smart technology, he argues, is driven by the dual imperatives of digital capitalism: extracting data from, and expanding control over, everything and everybody. He looks at three domains colonized by smart technologies' collection and control systems: the smart self, the smart home, and the smart city. The smart self involves more than self-tracking of steps walked and calories burned; it raises questions about what others do with our data and how they direct our behavior—whether or not we want them to. The smart home collects data about our habits that offer business a window into our domestic spaces. And the smart city, where these systems have space to grow, offers military-grade surveillance capabilities to local authorities. Technology gets smart from our data. We may enjoy the conveniences we get in return (the refrigerator says we're out of milk!), but, Sadowski argues, smart technology advances the interests of corporate technocratic power—and will continue to do so unless we demand oversight and ownership of our data.


Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

Author: Frans de Waal

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2016-04-25

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 0393246191

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A New York Times bestseller: "A passionate and convincing case for the sophistication of nonhuman minds." —Alison Gopnik, The Atlantic Hailed as a classic, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? explores the oddities and complexities of animal cognition—in crows, dolphins, parrots, sheep, wasps, bats, chimpanzees, and bonobos—to reveal how smart animals really are, and how we’ve underestimated their abilities for too long. Did you know that octopuses use coconut shells as tools, that elephants classify humans by gender and language, and that there is a young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University whose flash memory puts that of humans to shame? Fascinating, entertaining, and deeply informed, de Waal’s landmark work will convince you to rethink everything you thought you knew about animal—and human—intelligence.