Skip to main content
Elsevier
View Cart

Elsevier Science

  • Modeling: Gateway to the Unknown

    A Work by Rom Harre
    • 1st Edition
    • Volume 1
    • English
    Edited by Daniel Rothbart of George Mason University in Virginia, this book is a collection of Rom Harré's work on modeling in science (particularly physics and psychology). In over 28 authored books and 240 articles and book chapters, Rom Harré of Georgetown University in Washington, DC is a towering figure in philosophy, linguistics, and social psychology. He has inspired a generation of scholars, both for the ways in which his research is carried out and his profound insights. For Harré, the stunning discoveries of research demand a kind of thinking that is found in the construction and control of models. Iconic modeling is pivotal for representing real-world structures, explaining phenomena, manipulating instruments, constructing theories, and acquiring data.This volume in the new Elsevier book series Studies in Multidisciplinarity includes major topics on the structure and function of models, the debates over scientific realism, explanation through analogical modeling, a metaphysics for physics, the rationale for experimentation, and modeling in social encounters.

  • Natural Gas Conversion VII

    Proceedings of the 7th Natural Gas Conversion Symposium, Dalian, China, 6 - 10 June 2004
    • 1st Edition
    • Volume 147
    • Xinhe Bao + 1 more
    • English
    This volume contains peer-reviewed manuscripts describing the scientific and technological advances presented at the 7th Natural gas Conversion Symposium held in Dalian, China, June 6-10, 2004, and a FREE CD-rom. This symposium continues the tradition of excellence and the status as the premier technical meeting in this area established by previous meetings.The manuscripts have been divided into eight different topics, Industrial Processes, Economics, Technology Demonstration and Commercial Activities;, Production of Hydrogen from Methane, Methanol, and Other Sources; Production of Synthesis; Fischer-Tropsch Synthesis of Hydrocarbons; From Synthesis Gas to; Catalytic Combustion; From Natural Gas to Chemicals; Light Hydrocarbons; and Production and Conversion .These are the most interesting subjects in the utilization of natural gas with recent scientific innovation and technological advances. The book is of interest to all students and researchers active in utilization of natural gas.

  • Insight in Innovation

    Managing Innovation by Understanding the Laws of Innovation
    • 1st Edition
    • Jan Verloop
    • English
    Innovation is an ancient art, may be as old as 500,000 years, but managing innovation is a relatively young management technique, only a few decades old, and has received much less attention than other aspects of innovation such as creativity, entrepreneurship or venturing. This book is not about providing a series of recipes on innovation management or a collection of case stories on how to do innovation or not. The few examples given are well known innovations from (Shell) history and all of them have been described before in the literature. However, this book does not focus on the brilliant result or failure of the innovations, but on the process of innovation in order to understand the features of a well-managed innovation effort. The book has been written around six main themes:1. Understanding innovation as a business process and how it has developed through history.2. For a manager it is essential to appreciate the fundamental difference between inside- and outside-the-box innovation; each one needs its own specific management process.3. The main roles of the innovation manager are managing the innovation funnel, executing the innovation strategy and optimising the value of the innovation portfolio.4. Entrepreneurship is the key resource in innovation and the right conditions have to be created for it to flourish in large companies.5. The value of innovation can be assessed as an option value and in creating intellectual capital for the company.6. Integrating sustainable development in the innovation process requires changes in the management process, in the assessment and valuation of innovation, and in the interaction with the stakeholders.

  • Neuromimetic Semantics

    Coordination, quantification, and collective predicates
    • 1st Edition
    • Harry Howard
    • English
    This book attempts to marry truth-conditional semantics with cognitive linguistics in the church of computational neuroscience. To this end, it examines the truth-conditional meanings of coordinators, quantifiers, and collective predicates as neurophysiological phenomena that are amenable to a neurocomputational analysis. Drawing inspiration from work on visual processing, and especially the simple/complex cell distinction in early vision (V1), we claim that a similar two-layer architecture is sufficient to learn the truth-conditional meanings of the logical coordinators and logical quantifiers. As a prerequisite, much discussion is given over to what a neurologically plausible representation of the meanings of these items would look like. We eventually settle on a representation in terms of correlation, so that, for instance, the semantic input to the universal operators (e.g. and, all)is represented as maximally correlated, while the semantic input to the universal negative operators (e.g. nor, no)is represented as maximally anticorrelated. On the basis this representation, the hypothesis can be offered that the function of the logical operators is to extract an invariant feature from natural situations, that of degree of correlation between parts of the situation. This result sets up an elegant formal analogy to recent models of visual processing, which argue that the function of early vision is to reduce the redundancy inherent in natural images. Computational simulations are designed in which the logical operators are learned by associating their phonological form with some degree of correlation in the inputs, so that the overall function of the system is as a simple kind of pattern recognition. Several learning rules are assayed, especially those of the Hebbian sort, which are the ones with the most neurological support. Learning vector quantization (LVQ) is shown to be a perspicuous and efficient means of learning the patterns that are of interest. We draw a formal parallelism between the initial, competitive layer of LVQ and the simple cell layer in V1, and between the final, linear layer of LVQ and the complex cell layer in V1, in that the initial layers are both selective, while the final layers both generalize. It is also shown how the representations argued for can be used to draw the traditionally-recogn... inferences arising from coordination and quantification, and why the inference of subalternacy breaks down for collective predicates. Finally, the analogies between early vision and the logical operators allow us to advance the claim of cognitive linguistics that language is not processed by proprietary algorithms, but rather by algorithms that are general to the entire brain. Thus in the debate between objectivist and experiential metaphysics, this book falls squarely into the camp of the latter. Yet it does so by means of a rigorous formal, mathematical, and neurological exposition – in contradiction of the experiential claim that formal analysis has no place in the understanding of cognition. To make our own counter-claim as explicit as possible, we present a sketch of the LVQ structure in terms of mereotopology, in which the initial layer of the network performs topological operations, while the final layer performs mereological operations. The book is meant to be self-contained, in the sense that it does not assume any prior knowledge of any of the many areas that are touched upon. It therefore contains mini-summaries of biological visual processing, especially the retinocortical and ventral /what?/ parvocellular pathways; computational models of neural signaling, and in particular the reduction of the Hodgkin-Huxley equations to the connectionist and integrate-and-fire neurons; Hebbian learning rules and the elaboration of learning vector quantization; the linguistic pathway in the left hemisphere; memory and the hippocampus; truth-conditional vs. image-schematic semantics; objectivist vs. experiential metaphysics; and mereotopology. All of the simulations are implemented in MATLAB, and the code is available from the book’s website.

  • The Integration of Process Design and Control

    • 1st Edition
    • Volume 17
    • Panos Seferlis + 1 more
    • English
    Traditionally, process design and control system design are performed sequentially. It is only recently displayed that a simultaneous approach to the design and control leads to significant economic benefits and improved dynamic performance during plant operation. Extensive research in issues such as 'interactions of design and control', 'analysis and design of plant wide control systems', 'integrated methods for design and control' has resulted in impressive advances and significant new technologies that have enriched the variety of instruments available for the design engineer in her endeavour to design and operate new processes. The field of integrated process design and control has reached a maturity level that mingles the best from process knowledge and understanding and control theory on one side, with the best from numerical analysis and optimisation on the other. Direct implementation of integrated methods should soon become the mainstream design procedure.Within this context 'The Integration of Process Design and Control', bringing together the developments in a variety of topics related to the integrated design and control, will be a real asset for design engineers, practitioners and researchers. Although the individual chapters reach a depth of analysis close to the frontier of current research status, the structure of the book and the autonomous nature of the chapters make the book suitable for a newcomer in the area.The book comprises four distinct parts: Part A: Process characterization and controllability analysisPart B: Integrated process design and control ⊣ MethodsPart C: Plant wide interactions of design and controlPart D: Integrated process design and control ⊣ ExtensionsBy the end of the book, the reader will have developed a commanding comprehension of the main aspects of integrated design and control, the ability to critically assess the key characteristics and elements related to the interactions between design and control and the capacity to implement the new technology in practice.

  • Parallel Computational Fluid Dynamics 2003

    Advanced Numerical Methods, Software and Applications
    • 1st Edition
    • Boris Chetverushkin + 3 more
    • English
    The book is devoted to using of parallel multiprocessor computer systems for numerical simulation of the problems which can be described by the equations of continuum mechanics. Parallel algorithms and software, the problems of meta-computing are discussed in details, some results of high performance simulation of modern gas dynamic problems, combustion phenomena, plasma physics etc are presented.

  • Time-to-Contact

    • 1st Edition
    • Volume 135
    • Heiko Hecht + 1 more
    • English
    Time-to-contact is the visual information that observers use in fundamental tasks such as landing an airplane or hitting a ball. Time-to-contact has been a hot topic in perception and action for many years and although many articles have been published on this topic, a comprehensive overview or assessment of the theory does not yet exist. This book fills an important gap and will have appeal to the perception and action community. The book is divided into four sections. Section one covers the foundation of time-to-contact, Section two covers different behavioral approaches to time-to-contact estimation, Section three focuses on time-to-contact as perception and strategy, and Section four covers time-to-contact and action regulation.

  • Luminescence and the Solid State

    • 2nd Edition
    • Volume 21
    • Richard C. Ropp
    • English
    Since the first date of publication of this book in 1991, the subject of phosphors and luminescence has assumed even more importance in the overall scheme of technological development. Many new types of displays have appeared which depend upon phosphors in their operation. Some of these were pure conjecture in 1991 but are a reality in 2004. Descriptions have been included of the newer (as well as the older) types of displays in this edition along with an annotated portrait of the phosphors used in each category. Many of these new light sources promise to displace and make obsolete our current light sources, such as incandescent lamps, fluorescent lamps and the ubiquitous colour Cathode Ray Tube now used in TV and computer monitors. The importance of solid state science are summarized in the introductory chapters of this edition, and many of the chapters have been completely rewritten or revised. Each chapter has a special contribution to make in the overall understanding of the solid state science of phosphors and luminescence.

  • Failure Analysis Case Studies III

    • 1st Edition
    • David R.H. Jones
    • English
    This volume is the third in the series of sourcebooks on Failure Analysis and Structural Integrity published by Elsevier. It comprises 35 case studies describing detailed analyses of real engineering failures and structural integrity problems chosen from volumes 7, 8 and 9 of the Elsevier journal Engineering Failure Analysis. It is an essential reference, helping people avoid or analyse engineering failures, design and manufacture for greater safety and economy, and assess operating, maintenance and fitness-for-purpose procedures.

  • Spitsbergen Push Moraines

    Including a translation of K. Gripp: Glaciologische und geologische Ergebnisse der Hamburgischen Spitzbergen-Expedition 1927
    • 1st Edition
    • Volume 4
    • J.J.M. van der Meer
    • English
    The book deals with push moraines on Spitsbergen. The main body is a translation of the original German report by Karl Gripp on a 1927 expedition. The quality of Gripp's work is evaluated to see whether it stands the test of time. It is found that it is very modern, every year people still go into the field with the same research questions. It is also found that most likely Gripp's report contains the first description of features that we now take for granted, for instance the description of looped moraines to detect surges. Push moraines are still being studied and to show where we stand now two papers have been added that analyse two particular examples, Holmströmbreen and Sefströmbreen. The two examples are geographically close together, but reflect two completely different settings: terrestrial Holmströmbreen and tidewater Sefströmbreen.Since a few years we know of the De Geer Archive, a collection of glass negatives of Spitsbergen, relating to De Geer's expeditions between 1882 and 1910. The negatives have only emerged recently and a collection of prints relating to Holmströmbreen and Sefströmbreen is included here. Together with a third paper incorporated in the book, this time an evaluation of De Geer's photos and maps of the Sefströmbreen surge, this material shows the importance of incorporating historical documentation in our studies.

Browse by Publisher