springer international publishing springer international publishing nov 2013 (110 Ergebnisse)

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Wolfgang Pauli referred to him as 'my discovery,' Robert Oppenheimer described him as 'one of the most gifted theorists' and Niels Bohr found him enormously stimulating. Who was the man in question, Gunnar Källén (1926-1968) His appearance in the physics sky was like a shooting star. His contributions to the scientific debate caused excitement among young and old. Similar to his friend and mentor, Wolfgang Pauli, he demanded honesty and rigor in physics - a distinct dividing line between fact and speculation. In his obituary, Arthur S. Wightman would write: 'Gunnar Källén was a proud continuer of the tradition in quantum field theory established by Wolfgang Pauli. His papers on quantum electrodynamics in the period 1950-1954 carried the non-perturbative approach to quantum electrodynamics forward to a point beyond which very little essential progress has been made up to the present day. At the time I was trying to puzzle out the grammar of the language of quantum field theory, and here was Källén already writing poetry in the language!'. In addition to being a remarkable scientist, Källén had a very interesting personality, well worth exploring.In her book, physicist Cecilia Jarlskog traces both the personal and scientific trajectory of this unsung hero of the early days of high-energy physics and quantum field theory. A number of invited contributions by members of the Källén family and distinguished researchers from the field, all of them personally acquainted with Källén, combine to form an authentic portrait of the researcher and the man.Last but not least, the reader will become acquainted with some aspects of the history of particle physics in those days, as related by Källén and those who corresponded with him.A commented selection of his most important and not easily accessible papers is included as an added bonus for specialists.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 660 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This practice-oriented book, containing a wealth of high-quality ultrasound images, provides clear, concise, and complete coverage of the normal anatomy of the hand and wrist ¿ tendons, nerves, and vascular structures ¿ as well as the main pathologic conditions encountered in this area. The ultrasound images have been acquired with state of the art scanners and carefully labeled to facilitate recognition of each and every anatomic structure. Helpful comparison is also made with images and findings obtained using other diagnostic techniques, including in particular magnetic resonance imaging. The lucid text is complemented by practical tables summarizing key points for ease of reference.Readers will find Ultrasonography of the Upper Extremity to be a rich source of information on anatomy, examination techniques, and ultrasound appearances of one of the anatomic regions to have benefited the most from the technological revolution that has taken place in the field of ultrasonography during recent years. The book will appeal to both novice and experienced practitioners, including above all radiologists and ultrasound technicians but also rheumatologists and orthopedic surgeons. The author is the Director of the Operative Unit of Ecography at the Institute of Radiology, University Hospital Foundation IRCCS Policlinico San Matteo Pavia (Italy), and is Editor in Chief of The Journal of Ultrasound.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 132 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Klaus von Beyme, a highly distinguished German political scientist, has been recognised as a ¿Pioneer in the Study of Political Theory and Comparative Politics¿. When he received the highly esteemed Mattei Dogan Award during the XXII World Congress of Political Science in Madrid on 12 July 2012, in his laudatio Rainer Eisfeld portrayed Klaus v. Beyme as a ¿Global Scholar and Public Intellectual¿. On the occasion of Klaus v. Beyme¿s 80th birthday this book offers a selection of his major previously published and new texts focusing on ¿Empirical Political Theory¿, ¿The Evolution of Comparative Politics, Revival of Normative Political Theory in Empirical Research¿, ¿Theodor W. Adorno - Political Theory as Theory of Aesthetics¿, ¿Historical Forerunners of Policy Studies¿, ¿Political Institutions ¿ Old and New¿, ¿Representative Democracy and the Populist Temptation¿, ¿Political Advisors to Politicians¿, and on ¿The Concept of Political Class: A New Dimension of Research on Elites ¿.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 180 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This book looks at entrepreneurship and innovation as ways out of the economic crisis in Europe and other regions, and examines the main theoretical issues and practices related to this analysis. The volume addresses such questions as: From an institutional perspective, how do economic crisis conditions affect different types of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship Is it useful for public policymakers and entrepreneurs to understand the basic characteristics of entrepreneurial activity, relations between the institutional environment and entrepreneurship and among entrepreneurship, innovation and social change Featuring case studies from several industries and countries, and a variety of methodological, theoretical, and empirical approaches, the authors build a compelling narrative on the dynamics of entrepreneurship and innovation as drivers of economic growth and organizational renewal. They demonstrate that the strategic and operational relationships that entrepreneurship creates within and outside the enterprise are a fundamental route for leading and mobilizing economic and social resources that permit innovation at the organizational level and in relationships with suppliers, customers, and other stakeholders- in turn, enabling technological innovation, creating new revenue streams through new productive activities and new demand, and ultimately facilitating emergence from economic crisis. The authors consider social, gender, and generational aspects of entrepreneurship, as well as the institutional conditions necessary to promote entrepreneurial activity.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 196 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 15 International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety and Security of Distributed Systems, SSS 2013, held in Osaka, Japan, in November 2013. The 23 regular papers and 12 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 68 submissions. The Symposium is organized in several tracks, reflecting topics to self-\* properties. The tracks are self-stabilization, fault tolerance and dependability; formal methods and distributed systems; ad-hoc, sensors, mobile agents and robot networks and P2P, social, self-organizing, autonomic and opportunistic networks.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 404 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Social Informatics, SocInfo 2013, held in Kyoto, Japan, in November 2013. The 23 full papers, 15 short papers and three poster papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 103 submissions. The papers present original research work on studying the interplay between socially-centric platforms and social phenomena.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 512 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence, UCAmI 2013, held in Guanacaste, Costa Rica, in December 2013. The 46 research papers presented together with 8 papers of the workshop UrbAI 2013 were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are grouped in topical sections on human interaction in ambient intelligence, ICT instrumentation and middleware support for smart environments and objects, adding intelligence for environment adaption and key application domains for ambient intelligence.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 420 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Advances in Information Technology, IAIT 2013, held in Bangkok, Thailand, in December 2013. The 23 revised papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. They deal with all areas related to applied information technology.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 280 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This volume describes the most recent findings on the structure of ILs interpreted through cutting-edge experimental and theoretical methods. Research in the field of ionic liquids (ILs) keeps a fast and steady pace. Since these new-generation molten salts first appeared in the chemistry and physics landscape, a large number of new compounds has been synthesized. Most of themdisplay unexpected behaviour and possess stunning properties. The coverage in this book ranges from the mesoscopic structure of ILs to their interaction with proteins. The reader will learn how diffraction techniques (small and large angle X-Ray and neutron scattering, powder methods), X-Ray absorption spectroscopies (EXAFS/XANES), optical methods (IR, RAMAN), NMR and calorimetric methods can help the study of ILs, both as neat liquids and inmixtures with other compounds. It will enable the reader to choose the best method to suit their experimental needs. A detailed survey of theoretical methods, both quantum-chemical and classical, and of their predictive power will accompany the exposition of experimental ones. This book is a must read for postgraduate students, for post-docs, and for researchers who are interested in understanding the structural properties of ILs.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 208 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Multiple Access Communications, MACOM 2013, held in Vilnius, Lithuania, in December 2013. The 16 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. They describe the latest advancements in the field of multiple access communications with an emphasis on OFDM techniques, channel coding, spectrum management, medium access control protocols and different aspects of wireless access networks.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 200 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This book provides a concise review of the thermo-physical phenomena which regulate heat and moisture transportation in Nearly Zero Energy Buildings envelopes, and their relationship with the growth of biological organisms.It describes the main microorganisms proliferating on contemporary building elements and within buildings. It also states the consequences of biological growth on durability, aesthetics and human health; and provides the main methods for the analytical and experimental evaluation of proliferation.Finally, through the review of recent developments, remedial actions to counter the biological phenomenon are examined, and an outline is provided for future innovations in a field not yet widely investigated.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 104 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Parameterized and Exact Computation, IPEC 2013, in Sophia Antipolis, France, in September 2013.The 29 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 58 submissions. The topics addressed cover research in all aspects of parameterized/exact algorithms and complexity including but are not limited to new techniques for the design and analysis of parameterized and exact algorithms, fixed-parameter tractability results, parameterized complexity theory, relationship between parameterized complexity and traditional complexity classifications, applications of parameterized and exact computation, and implementation issues of parameterized and exact algorithms.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 388 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Algorithms and Models for the Web Graph, WAW 2013, held in Cambridge, MA, USA, in December 2013. The 17 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this volume. They address topics related to graph-theoretic and algorithmic aspects of related complex networks, including citation networks, social networks, biological networks, molecular networks and other networks arising from the Internet.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 244 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed conference proceedings of the Second International Conference on Big Data Analytics, BDA 2013, held in Mysore, India, in December 2013. The 13 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 49 submissions and cover topics on mining social media data, perspectives on big data analysis, graph analysis, big data in practice.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 212 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries, ICADL 2013, held in Bangalore, India, in December 2013. The 15 revised full papers, 6 revised short papers and 10 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 87 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on information retrieval; social architecture for digital libraries and information policy; digital library applications and systems; data mining for digital libraries; collaboration and communities; analysing social media and social networks; mobile devices and services; and metadata and information extraction.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 216 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 20th International Colloquium on Structural Information and Communication Complexity, SIROCCO 2013, held in Ischia, Italy, in July 2013. The 28 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 67 submissions. SIROCCO is devoted to the study of communication and knowledge in distributed systems. Special emphasis is given to innovative approaches and fundamental understanding, in addition to efforts to optimize current designs. The typical areas include distributed computing, communication networks, game theory, parallel computing, social networks, mobile computing (including autonomous robots), peer to peer systems, communication complexity, fault tolerant graph theories and randomized/probabilistic issues in networks.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 368 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Cryptology in India, INDOCRYPT 2013, held in Mumbai, India, in December 2013. The 15 revised full papers presented together with 6 short papers the abstracts of 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 76 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on provable security; hash functions and signatures; side channel attacks; symmetric key cryptanalysis; key exchange and secret sharing; efficient implementation and hardware; and coding theory in cryptography.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 340 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This book examines technological and social events during 2011 and 2012, a period that saw the rise of the hacktivist, the move to mobile platforms, and the ubiquity of social networks. It covers key technological issues such as hacking, cyber-crime, cyber-security and cyber-warfare, the internet, smart phones, electronic security, and information privacy. This book traces the rise into prominence of these issues while also exploring the resulting cultural reaction. The authors¿ analysis forms the basis of a discussion on future technological directions and their potential impact on society. The book includes forewords by Professor Margaret Gardner AO, Vice-Chancellor and President of RMIT University, and by Professor Robyn Owens, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) at the University of Western Australia. Security and the Networked Society provides a reference for professionals and industry analysts studying digital technologies. Advanced-level students in computer science and electrical engineering will also find this book useful as a thought-provoking resource.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 316 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -After a brief review of global tectonics and the structure of the crust and upper mantle, the basic relations of conductive heat transport and the rock thermal properties are introduced as well as the various methods for measuring thermal conductivity and heat generation due to the decay of radioactive elements. The authors analyze geothermal flow and the thermal state of the lithosphere and deep interior and discuss the fundamental problems related to the formation, upwelling mechanisms, solidification and cooling of magmas. The text presents analytical methods that allow us to gain information on heat and groundwater flow from the analyses of temperature¿depth data. It also provides ample data and examples to facilitate understanding of the different topics. This book is useful to researchers and graduate students interested in pure and applied geothermics.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 132 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence, AI\*IA 2013, held in Turin, Italy, in December 2013. The 45 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 86 submissions. The conference covers broadly the many aspects of theoretical and applied Artificial Intelligence as follows: knowledge representation and reasoning, machine learning, natural language processing, planning, distributed AI: robotics and MAS, recommender systems and semantic Web and AI applications.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 560 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This book examines the growing trend of recognition and practices of CSR in private enterprises in developing countries. It identifies the challenges and deficiencies in these practices and proposes means for improvement. Based on a sound theoretical foundation, this book focusses on the case of Bangladesh and the ready-made garment industry to exemplify the described developments.After a brief introduction the book outlines the standards of Corporate Social Responsibility. It compares the trends in CSR practices both in developed and developing countries and then embarks on CSR practices in the private sector in Bangladesh to finally present a detailed analysis of CSR and its practices in the ready-made garment industry. The book not only compares developing countries with developed, but as well provides an assessment and analysis of different stages of CSR within the South Asian area.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 232 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Thisvolume analyses, from a computational point of view, how culture may arise, develop and evolve through time. The four sectionsin this book examine and analyse the modelling of culture, group and organisation culture, culture simulation, and culture-sensitive technology design.Different research disciplines have different perspectives on culture, making it difficult to compare and integrate different concepts and models of culture. By taking a computational perspective this book nevertheless enables the integration of concepts that play a role in culture, even though they might originate from different disciplines.Culture is usually regarded as something vague and qualitative and thus difficult to deal with in a computational and formal setting. Taking a computational approach to culture thus encompasses a twofold risk: taking a too simplistic approach to cultural influence on behaviour; or trying to capture too much, hence not leading to useful computational tools. However, the approaches and insights in this collection show how different perspectives by leading researchers described in thirteen chapters still can form a coherent picture. The book thus illustrates the potential of using computing systems to better understand culture.By describing methods, theories and concrete application results about the integration of cultural aspects into computer systems, this book provides inspiration to researchers of all disciplines alike and presents the start of an interdisciplinary dialogue on culture.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 256 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This volume brings together papers on a wide spectrum of topics within the broad area of language acquisition, stressing the interconnections between applied and theoretical linguistics, as well as language research methodology. These contributions in honor of Professor Jan Majer have been grouped in two sections: language learning, and discourse and communication. The former discusses issues varying from aspects of first, second, and third language acquisition, individual learner differences (i.e. gender, attitudes, learning strategies), and second language research methodology to the analysis of features of learner spoken language, the role of feedback in foreign language instruction, and the position of culture in EFL textbooks. The second part of the volume offers a theoretical counterbalance to the applied nature of the first one. Here, the contributions touch upon spoken and written language analysis, language awareness, and aspects of the English language; also, selected issues of language philosophy are discussed. The wide range of topics covered in the publication, authored by specialists in their respective areas, reflects Professor Majer¿s academic interests and corresponds to the complex nature of the general field the volume aims to portray.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 288 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Whether considered a divine gift or a Promethean conquest, science has indisputably and indelibly marked the course of human history. A product of the intellectual elite, but always nourished by the many fruits of its applications, science appears today to be a perfect system, whose laws and discoveries guide all human activities. Yet the foundations of its authority remain an open question, entailing disquieting aspects that are also to be identified in modern science. Furthermore it is seen to be exerting an increasing power over mankind. Readers are invited to follow an itinerary through the history of science, a voyage which, in the end, enables them to catch a glimpse of two divergent futures: One in which science accelerates the downfall of Homo sapiens, and another in which it helps our species to engage in a new and positive adventure, whose outcome nobody can know.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 308 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This wide-ranging and accessible book serves as a fascinating guide to the strategies and concepts that help us understand the boundaries between physics, on the one hand, and sociology, economics, and biology on the other. From cooperation and criticality to flock dynamics and fractals, the author addresses many of the topics belonging to the broad theme of complexity. He chooses excellent examples (requiring no prior mathematical knowledge) to illuminate these ideas and their implications. The lively style and clear description of the relevant models will appeal both to novices and those with an existing knowledge of the field.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 216 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -State-of-the-art database systems manage and process a variety of complex objects, including strings and trees. For such objects equality comparisons are often not meaningful and must be replaced by similarity comparisons. This book describes the concepts and techniques to incorporate similarity into database systems. We start out by discussing the properties of strings and trees, and identify the edit distance as the de facto standard for comparing complex objects. Since the edit distance is computationally expensive, token-based distances have been introduced to speed up edit distance computations. The basic idea is to decompose complex objects into sets of tokens that can be compared efficiently. Token-based distances are used to compute an approximation of the edit distance and prune expensive edit distance calculations. A key observation when computing similarity joins is that many of the object pairs, for which the similarity is computed, are very different from each other. Filters exploit this property to improve the performance of similarity joins. A filter preprocesses the input data sets and produces a set of candidate pairs. The distance function is evaluated on the candidate pairs only. We describe the essential query processing techniques for filters based on lower and upper bounds. For token equality joins we describe prefix, size, positional and partitioning filters, which can be used to avoid the computation of small intersections that are not needed since the similarity would be too low.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 128 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -As the number of cores on a chip continues to climb, architects will need to address both bandwidth and power consumption issues related to the interconnection network. Electrical interconnects are not likely to scale well to a large number of processors for energy efficiency reasons, and the problem is compounded by the fact that there is a fixed total power budget for a die, dictated by the amount of heat that can be dissipated without special (and expensive) cooling and packaging techniques. Thus, there is a need to seek alternatives to electrical signaling for on-chip interconnection applications. Photonics, which has a fundamentally different mechanism of signal propagation, offers the potential to not only overcome the drawbacks of electrical signaling, but also enable the architect to build energy efficient, scalable systems. The purpose of this book is to introduce computer architects to the possibilities and challenges of working with photons and designing on-chip photonic interconnection networks.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 112 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -The book is composed of eight chapters, each of which are organised as walks around the Tewkesbury (UK) countryside, which move from the specific to increasingly broader ideas. So, the MS starts with an individual¿s relationship to their environment (Avon and Severn Valleys Loop) that leads to a description of conservation issues at local, national and international levels, and ultimately to a discussion of the importance of Citizen Science (Coombe Hill ¿ Apperley ¿Deerhurst).The following chapter (Mythe Bridge ¿ Forthampton ¿ Tewkesbury) looks at science as it is actually practiced and its role in modern society by an analysis of the theory of Continental Drift and a biography of Alfred Wegener. This is a story that really deserves a much wider audience, as the idea was, in my opinion, as revolutionary as general relativity or quantum mechanics, and Wegener himself was such a heroic character.The following chapter (Tewkesbury Ham) also uses biography ¿ this time of Alfred Russel Wallace - to investigate his ideas about how animal and plant distributions are inextricably linked to geological change. Wallace was every bit as heroic as Wegener, lived an even more adventurous life, and also deserves to be more widely known and appreciated. 2013 is the centenary of his death and he will be much in the news this year, so it would be timely to publish an account of his life and work suitable for the general public.The chapters on Wegener and Wallace set the scene for a detailed discussion of biogeography.This has been an active area of research for the past 30 years and I think it¿s about time that somebody wrote about what has been an intellectually exciting and profoundly significant development in our view of ourselves and the world we live in. ¿Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 116 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Bandwidth extension of speech is used in the International Telecommunication Union G.729.1 standard in which the narrowband bitstream is combined with quantized high-band parameters. Although this system produces high-quality wideband speech, the additional bits used to represent the high band can be further reduced. In addition to the algorithm used in the G.729.1 standard, bandwidth extension methods based on spectrum prediction have also been proposed. Although these algorithms do not require additional bits, they perform poorly when the correlation between the low and the high band is weak. In this book, two wideband speech coding algorithms that rely on bandwidth extension are developed. The algorithms operate as wrappers around existing narrowband compression schemes. More specifically, in these algorithms, the low band is encoded using an existing toll-quality narrowband system, whereas the high band is generated using the proposed extension techniques. The first method relies only on transmitted high-band information to generate the wideband speech. The second algorithm uses a constrained minimum mean square error estimator that combines transmitted high-band envelope information with a predictive scheme driven by narrowband features. Both algorithms make use of novel perceptual models based on loudness that determine optimum quantization strategies for wideband recovery and synthesis. Objective and subjective evaluations reveal that the proposed system performs at a lower average bit rate while improving speech quality when compared to other similar algorithms.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 84 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Research on multiculturalism and information and communication technology (ICT) has been important to understanding recent history, planning for future large-scale initiatives, and understanding unrealized expectations for social and technological change. This interdisciplinary area of research has examined interactions between ICT and culture at the group and society levels. However, there is debate within the literature as to the nature of the relationship between culture and technology. In this synthesis, we suggest that the tensions result from the competing ideologies that drive researchers, allowing us to conceptualize the relationship between culture and ICT under three primary models, each with its own assumptions: 1) Social informatics, 2) Social determinism, and 3) Technological determinism. Social informatics views the relationship to be one of sociotechnical interaction, in which culture and ICTs affect each other mutually and iteratively, rather than linearly; the vast majority of the literature approach the relationships between ICT and culture under the assumptions of social informatics. From a socially deterministic perspective, ICTs are viewed as the dependent variable in the equation, whereas, from a technologically deterministic perspective, ICTs are an independent variable. The issues of multiculturalism and ICTs attracted much scholarly attention and have been explored under a myriad of contexts, with substantial literature on global development, social and political issues, business and public administration as well as education and scholarly collaboration. We synthesize here research in the areas of global development, social and political issues, and business collaboration. Finally we conclude by proposing under-explored areas for future research directions.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 104 pp. Englisch.