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This book offers an overview of the gasification process as a crucial thermochemical method for addressing the problem of plastic waste. The authors explore various strategies to minimize post-consumer plastic waste and provide a detailed analysis of one of the most promising methods for converting it into high-value products. The chapters reports on the gasification process and its potential for transforming plastic waste into energy and valuable resources. Readers will learn about methods for reducing plastic waste and treating them using the gasification process. Thermochemical processes for upcycling plastic waste into products with higher value, such as chemicals, fuels, and advanced materials are also covered in this book.

This volume celebrates mineral sciences and what are considered the most important progresses and breakthroughs in this discipline. Authoritative authors, who, in most cases, are the direct discoverers recount the steps of their research, which represent landmark developments of mineralogy and mineralogical crystallography.

The book dives into the socio-historical roots of the current ¿disintegration¿ of the Yemeni state, proposing that it is the result of a long process of devaluation of the Yemeni economy through imperialistic means, in the historical era of Advanced American imperialism¿starting in the 1970s¿that is facing the rise of China since the 1980s. As the United States feels threatened by the blossoming of Chinese influence on the Red Sea and the strategic maritime straits of Hormuz and Bab-el-Mandeb, it is of utmost importance to understand the centrality of the war on Yemen. The disintegration of the Yemeni state since 2015, involving the disintegration of Yemeni sovereignty (in part through the fragmentation of the country), is a means of creating political chaos in a strategic country. The goal is to limit the growth of Chinese influence in the region of the Arab world, which threatens the financial superstructure of the global economic system based on the US dollar.

This book presents an important reflection on the concept and limits of the Fundamental Right to Health as opposed to a supposed ¿Right to Hope¿ in the context of the treatment of patients with advanced cancer. The central idea of the work is the question of whether and to what extent patients with advanced cancer have the right to legally demand a palliative treatment whose efficacy has not been proven from the point of view of the desired objectives. The book demonstrates how hope cannot be subject to legal protection and, also, that, even if theoretical-legal reasons were not sufficient for the absence of an abstract right to hope, ethical reasons would be. The work concludes that the best palliative care, rather than palliative treatment, guarantees the best right to health for advanced cancer patients, especially in terminal cases.In addition to this theoretical discussion, the book also presents the results of a qualitative research the author conducted with 48 advancedcancer patients in Brazil and Germany to investigate their expectations towards chemotherapy. This study has confirmed that many patients decide to undergo often toxic and exhausting treatments, unrealistically believing that their cancer is curable or that, as long as they continue with a course of chemotherapy, cancer may be beaten. Palliative Treatment for Advanced Cancer Patients: Can Hope Be a Right? will be of interest to health professionals and social workers working with advanced cancer patients, as well as to researchers in the fields of public health, bioethics, medical ethics and health law, especially those interested in the growing interdisciplinary field of end-of-life decision-making.

This book covers well testing methods included the latest developments in the field. It explains classic topics in depth, in depth such as layered reservoirs, naturally fractured reservoirs, and wellbore effects, and also newer developments, such as well testing for horizontal wells. This book is perfect reference for junior and senior reservoir, production, and geology engineers, who want to improve their knowledge of well test analysis and current best practices.The book is a valuable addition to any reservoir and production engineer's library.

This is an open access book. In view of growing conflicts over strategic georesources, the use of the geological subsurface in the sense of a regional resource is becoming increasingly important. In this context, georeservoirs are playing an important role for the energy transition not only as a source of energy but also as a storage facility and deep geological disposal for energy waste. The success of the energy transition also depends to a large extent on the efficient and safe use of underground resources.This book complements the previous basic book (GeomInt¿Integrity of Host Rocks) with a series of application examples in different rock formations, clay, salt, and crystalline. The methodology developed in GeomInt is used, among others, in the Mont Terri underground research laboratory (Opalinus Clay), in the large borehole test in Springen (salt rock) and in the ¿Reiche Zeche¿ teaching and research mine (crystalline rock). In addition, new methodological developments are also taken up in experiments and models and embedded in workflows for geotechnical system analyses. The present book summarizes the results of the collaborative project ¿GeomInt2: Geomechanical integrity of host and barrier rocks - experiment, modeling and analysis of discontinuities¿ within the program: Geo Research for Sustainability (GEO: N) of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

This book aims at providing an empirical understanding of the main drivers affecting investors¿ preferences in financing new ventures through equity crowdfunding (ECF) and determining fundraising campaign success. ECF is increasing in prominence as a route for new ventures in obtaining external financial resources. To raise capital, entrepreneurs are required to convey quality signals of their proposals with real-time information and knowledge sharing. This book advances knowledge in entrepreneurial finance by investigating the factors that affect individuals¿ decisions to participate in ECF. The authors adopt a data mining approach to extract publicly available information from a multitude of crowdfunding platforms across different countries, producing a unique dataset. The book uses an innovative hybrid analysis to generate knowledge patterns creating data-driven models on one hand, and on the other test research hypotheses adoptingstatistical models to investigate empirical evidence in line, or in contrast, with the extant literature. The book also integrates organizational theories to examine the extent to which ECF platform managers follow a strategy of isomorphism in their choice of information disclosure. The final part of the book discusses how signals are interpreted by investors, how these affect financing preferences, and ultimately the successful completion of a fundraising campaign. The book will be of interest to academics and practitioners in entrepreneurial finance, FinTech, and investment behaviour.

This book constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Performance Evaluation Methodologies and Tools, VALUETOOLS 2022, held in November 2022. Due to the safety concerns and travel restrictions caused by COVID-19, VALUETOOLS 2022 took place online in a live stream. The conference provides a world-leading and multidisciplinary venue for researchers and practitioners in diverse disciplines such as computer science, networks and telecommunications, operations research, optimization, control theory and manufacturing. The 18 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 47 submissions and are grouped in thematically as following: game theory; queueing models; applications; retrial queues; performance analysis and networking; distributed computing.

This book provides the first systematic study on three types of incentives for organ donation. It covers extensive research conducted in four culturally different societies: Hong Kong, mainland China, Iran and the United States, and shows on the basis of the research that a new model of incentives can be constructed to enhance organ donation in contemporary societies. The book focuses on three types of incentives: honorary incentives, commonly adopted in the United States and other Western countries by offering things such as a thank-you card and a memorial park for donors to encourage donations motivated by pure altruism; compensationalist incentives, adopted in the Islamic Republic of Iran to encourage donation by providing monetary compensation to unrelated living donors for appreciating their altruistic contribution of donation; and familist incentives, implemented in Israel and mainland China to provide priority to organ transplantation to donors and/or their family members. The book demonstrates that a new model of incentives must go beyond offering only one type of incentives and should rather include different types of incentives that are practically effective, politically legitimate and ethically justifiable for particular societies. This implies that suitable incentive measures may vary from society to society to optimize organ donation. This book provides a clear reference for both the scholars and practitioners in the field of organ transplantation, as well as for general readers interested in bioethics and health care policy.

Cross-Impact Balances (CIB) is a method frequently used for research, in companies and in administrations for the systematic construction of qualitative scenarios. This book introduces the fundamentals of the method and uses a clear step-by-step example to explain how scenarios can be constructed with CIB. It describes possible problems in applying the method and offers help for various use cases. It includes a detailed discussion of the design decisions that shape a CIB application and the methods that can be used to collect the necessary data. The application examples presented provide a first impression of the possibilities of the method. A discussion of the strengths and limitations of the method offers guidance on the use cases in which CIB can be profitably applied. The book is valuable for researchers and practitioners in the field of scenario analysis.

This book presents a comprehensive analysis of stability, stabilization, and fault detection in networked control systems, with a focus on unmanned marine vehicles. It investigates the challenges of network-based control in areas like heading control, fault detection filter and controller design, dynamic positioning, and cooperative target tracking. Communication networks in control systems can induce delays and dropouts, so the book presents the importance of stability analysis, stabilize, and fault detection. To help readers gain a deeper understanding of these concepts, the book provides fundamental concepts and real-world examples.This book is a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners working in the field of network-based control for unmanned marine vehicles.

This book collects different artificial intelligence methodologies that applied to solve real-world problems. This book has exciting chapters that employ artificial intelligence and applied to different applications based on integration with meta-heuristic and other techniques. The area of applications is including medical diagnosis, text analysis, cloud computing, and others which will enrich the reader. In this sense, the book provides practical and theory content with novel artificial intelligence techniques. The chapters were compiled using a scientific perspective. Accordingly, the book is primarily intended for undergraduate and postgraduate students of science, engineering, and computational mathematics and is applied in courses on artificial intelligence, optimization techniques, advanced machine learning, among others.

This book provides insights into the 5th Edition of the Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Science, Electronics, and Industrial Engineering (CSEI 2022) held in Ambato, Ecuador. This event brings together researchers, students, and professionals from the industrial and academic sectors, seeking to create and strengthen links between issues of joint interest, thus promoting technology and innovation nationwide. The topics of knowledge covered by the event are smart trends for industrial applications, the Internet of things (IoT), control and automation engineering, computer science, and health informatics. The book is helpful for active researchers and practitioners in the field.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 29th International Symposium on Model Checking Software, SPIN 2023, held in Paris, France, during April 26¿27, 2023. The 9 full papers and 2 short papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 21 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: binary decision diagrams, concurrency, testing, synthesis, explicit-state model checking.

The conference proceedings book is a collection of high-quality research articles in the field of intelligent vision and computing. It also serves as a forum for researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry to meet and share their expertise and experience. It provides opportunities for academicians and scientists along with professionals, policymakers, and practitioners from various fields in a global realm to present their research contributions and views, on one forum and interact with members inside and outside their own particular disciplines.

This book constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings the 7th International Conference on Design, Leaning and Innovation, DLI 2022, which took place in Faro, Portugal, in November 21-22, 2022. The 4 revised full papers and 2 short papers presented were carefully selected from 32 submissions on. They were organized in topical sections as follows: Digital Environments and Design Processes Fostering Learning and Interaction, Designs for Innovative Learning with Digital Technology, Digital Approaches Shaping Educational Practices.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th Software Quality Days Conference, SWQD 2023, held in Munich, Germany, during May 23-25, 2023.The Software Quality Days (SWQD) conference started in 2009 and has grown to the biggest conference on software quality in Europe. The program of the SWQD conference is designed to encompass a stimulating mixture of practical presentations and new research topics in scientific presentations. The guiding conference topic of the SWQD 2023 is ¿Higher Software Quality through Zero Waste Development¿.The 4 full papers and 2 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 10 submissions. The volume also contains one invited talk.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Distributed Computer and Communication Networks, DCCN 2022, held in Moscow, Russia, in September 2022.The 27 full papers and 2 short papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 130 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: Distributed Systems Applications, Computer and Communication Networks, Analytical Modeling of Distributed Systems.

This book constitutes revised selected papers from the workshops held at the 28th International European Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing, Euro-Par 2022, which took place in Glasgow, UK, in August 22¿26, 2022Out of a total of 35 submissions 24 papers have been accepted, 19 of these are included in this book.They stem from the following workshops:- Workshop on Algorithms, Models and Tools for Parallel Computing on Heterogeneous Platforms (HeteroPar)- Workshop on Asynchronous Many-Task systems for Exascale (AMTE) - Workshop on Domain Specific Languages for High-Performance Computing (DSL-HPC)- Workshop on Distributed and Heterogeneous Programming in C and C++ (DHPCC++)- Workshop on Resiliency in High Performance Computing in Clouds, Grids, and Clusters (Resilience)In addition, the proceedings alsocontains 6 extended abstracts from the PhD Symposium.

This book collects the main contributions from the 4th edition of the NICFD conference, organized by the Special Interest Group on Non-Ideal Compressible Fluid Dynamics (SIG- 49). It provides some of the latest research findings in the field of NICFD, relevant to a number of engineering applications related to the conversion of renewable and waste energy sources, like, e.g., organic Rankine cycles, super-critical CO2 cycle power plants, combustors operating with supercritical fluids, and heat pumps. The book reports on research encompassing theoretical, computational, and experimental aspects of the gas-dynamics of non-ideal reactive and non-reactive flows and their impact for the design of internal-flow components (turbomachinery, heat exchangers, combustors). All chapters address challenges related to characterizing the behaviour of non-ideal fluids, where state-of-the-art models are used to predict the thermo-physical properties of both pure and multi-phase fluids.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th Italian Workshop on Artificial Life and Evolutionary Computation, WIVACE 2022, held in Gaeta, Italy, during September 14¿16, 2022. The 21 full papers and 3 short papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 45 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: answer set programming; networks and complex systems, metaheuristics, robotics, and machine learningChapters 7, 8, and 9 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Higher Education Learning Methodologies and Technologies Online, HELMeTO 2022, held in Palermo, Italy, in September 2022. The 59 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 126 submissions. The papers present recent research on challenges of implementing emerging technology solution for online, online learning pedagogical frameworks, online learning technologies in practice, online learning strategies and resources, etc.

This book presents a collection of high-quality research papers, presented at the Second International Symposium on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BioInfoMed¿2022). It offers a comprehensive look into some of the fastest growing fields of science, such as biomedicine, bioinformatics, artificial intelligence, and mathematical modeling. The different chapters of the work include both practical solutions and strictly scientific considerations expanding knowledge about the future bioinformatics and biomedical engineering challenges. We believe that the presented works will have a great impact not only on the development and the application of new methods for modeling, decision making and data mining in healthcare and biomedicine, but also it will provide a source of inspiration for researchers who can implement the proposed methods into their practice and scientific studies.

This book examines the issues on noble metal influence on gaseous combustion. The book focuses on the new data on combustion processes having practical applications and includes fire safety issues in the use of noble metals in hydrogen recombiners for NPP, as well as in catalytically stabilized (CS) combustion technology including stimulation of combustion of hydrogen-blended hydrocarbons, synthesis of carbon nanotubes, and determination of catalytic ignition limits in noble metal-hydrogen-hydrocarbon systems to meet the challenges of explosion safety.

In 2023, the Brent oil benchmark, a key international oil price marker for global crude oil underwent a substantial change. It incorporated another key benchmark, West Texas Intermediate oil from Midland, produced in the US and sold into European and Asian markets. Brent is used to set prices for over 70 per cent of global crude oil, so this fundamental change in the composition of the benchmarks is making some observers question its future development and even its survival. Lessons from the past are very important for the future, particularly in this case. This book revisits the history and genesis of the Brent oil benchmark and how it came to dominate the global oil market for oil. With chapters written by the individuals involved in trading and shaping the market, it brings the richness and texture to the usual historical narrative by recalling the events, companies and people who shaped its history. It introduces the historical background to the international oil markets and the reasons for a move from OPEC-set prices to oil benchmarks. It discusses the role of the North Sea in the international oil markets, as well as the role of the British government in the British national oil and gas monopoly (British National Oil Corporation or BNOC). The development of the North Sea oil, which coincided with the liberalisation policies in the UK and US, is also discussed, alongside the challenges of the oil exchange (International Petroleum Exchange) in London, the home of Brent and looks at the failures, attempted takeovers, and its eventual sale to the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE). It finally discusses the growing market ecosystem of the price reporting agencies (PRAs), which play a key role in establishing the value of the Brent benchmark.

This book is the first research monograph that explores a new research field and practical applications produced by the combined use of two of the most advanced and powerful technologies available in today¿s world ¿ Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Augmented Reality (AR). It is written by a team of 50 researchers and practitioners from 16 countries, which has enabled a thorough coverage of emerging or previously unexplored subject areas.The authors consider practical, theoretical, and cultural aspects of ¿AI-powered AR¿ and ¿AR-enriched AI¿, and their usage in a large variety of areas, such as education, medicine, healthcare, dentistry, pharmacy, active lifestyle, smart services, fashion, retail, recommender systems, and several others.Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence: The Fusion of Advanced Technologies is essential reading not only for researchers, practitioners and technology developers, but also for students (both graduates and undergraduates) and anyone who is interested in building a comprehensive understanding of the emerging fields of ¿intelligent augmented environments¿ and ¿artificial intelligence presented by augmented reality¿.

The book provides a pedagogic and comprehensive introduction to homogenization theory with a special focus on problems set for non-periodic media. The presentation encompasses both deterministic and probabilistic settings. It also mixes the most abstract aspects with some more practical aspects regarding the numerical approaches necessary to simulate such multiscale problems. Based on lecture courses of the authors, the book is suitable for graduate students of mathematics and engineering.