Savvy companies recognize the value of a strong community. Think of Nike and its community of runners, Nike+, and you’ll quickly understand that creating and fostering an online community around a product or brand is a powerful way to boost marketing efforts, gain valuable insight into consumers, increase revenue, improve consumer loyalty, and enhance customer service efforts. Companies no…
This book is the first of two volumes that look at the changed landscape of higher education and the academic profession. This volume focuses on academic work, examining the significant changes that have taken place in the backgrounds, specialisations, expectations and work roles of academic staff. The academic profession is ageing, and becoming increasingly insecure, more accountable, more int…
This book carves the beginnings of a new path in the arguably weary discipline of economics. It combines a variety of perspectives – from the history of ideas to epistemology – in order to try to understand what has gone so wrong with economics and articulate a coherent way forward. This is undertaken through a dual path of deconstruction and reconstruction. Mainstream economics is broken d…
This book offers an essential compendium on the analysis and design of synchronous motors for variable-speed applications. Focusing on synchronous reluctance and ferrite permanent-magnet (PM) synchronous reluctance machines, it provides a broad perspective on three-phase machines for variable speed applications, a field currently dominated by asynchronous machines and rare-earth PM synchronous …
This book presents a broad overview of the current state of knowledge regarding the Red Sea, from its geological formation and oceanographic development to the environmental influences on its ecology and the changes it is experiencing due to the rapid development of its coastlines and role as one of the world’s major transport routes. The book gathers invited contributions from researchers wi…
This book contains a history of real and complex analysis in the nineteenth century, from the work of Lagrange and Fourier to the origins of set theory and the modern foundations of analysis. It studies the works of many contributors including Gauss, Cauchy, Riemann, and Weierstrass. This book is unique owing to the treatment of real and complex analysis as overlapping, inter-related subject…
This volume focuses on those instances when benign and even beneficial relationships between microbes and their hosts opportunistically change and become detrimental toward the host. It examines the triggering events which can factor into these changes, such as reduction in the host’s capacity for mounting an effective defensive response due to nutritional deprivation, coinfections and seemi…
This book explains how major world economies are recognizing the need for a major push in cyber policy environments. It helps readers understand why these nations are committing substantial resources to cybersecurity, and to the development of standards, rules and guidelines in order to address cyber-threats and catch up with global trends and technological developments. A key focus is on speci…
This book demonstrates both successes and failures in attempts to get closer to the ideal of good urban governance in cities in North-America, Europe, and Asia. It presents a value menu and deliberately does not come up with “one best way” for improving urban governance. Good urban governance is presented as a balancing act, an interplay between government, business and civil society in whi…
From a device for measuring film thickness in vacuum, the quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) has in the past two decades evolved into a versatile instrument for analyzing soft matter at solid/liquid and solid/gas interfaces that found applications in diverse fields including the life sciences, material science, polymer research and electrochemistry. As a consequence of this success, the QCM is n…