At the place known as Head-Smashed-In in southwestern Alberta, Aboriginal people practiced a form of group hunting for nearly 6,000 years before European contact. The large communal bison traps of the Plains were the single greatest food-getting method ever developed in human history. Hunters, working with their knowledge of the land and of buffalo behaviour, drove their quarry over a cliff and…
This book is devoted to the demands of research and industrial centers for diagnostics, monitoring and decision making systems that result from the increasing complexity of automation and systems, the need to ensure the highest level of reliability and safety, and continuing research and the development of innovative approaches to fault diagnosis. The contributions combine domains of engineerin…
This book focuses on emerging technologies in the field of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) namely efficient information dissemination between vehicles, infrastructures, pedestrians and public transportation systems. It covers the state-of-the-art of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs), with centralized and decentralized (Peer-to-Peer) communication architectures, considering several ap…
Laparoscopic colectomy has been introduced in the early 90ies as a new technique with proven improvement in short and long term outcome. Despite significant patient benefits the overall adoption rate remains low. On the other hand significant more advanced techniques such as single incision laparoscopy, robotics and transanal access surgery have been introduced in the last several years and are…
Amer-European settlement of the Great Plains transformed bountiful Native soil into pasture and cropland, distorting the prairie ecosystem as it was understood and used by the peoples who originally populated the land. Settlers justified this transformation with the unexamined premise of deficiency, according to which the Great Plains region was inadequate in flora and fauna and the region lack…
This unique reference fulfills the unmet need of a textbook that addresses the scope of practice for surgeons practicing in rural regions. The text provides up-to-date content covering a wide breadth of topics relevant to surgical care in rural areas, with focus on the surgical diseases that are often treated by surgical subspecialists in the urban setting. Written by experts in each subspecial…
While diverse in their subject matter, the essays have thematic unity in their focus on the old HBC territory and its peoples from the 1600s to the present. More than an anthology, the chapters of An Ethnohistorian in Rupert’s Land provide examples of Brown’s exceptional skill in the close study of texts, including oral documents, images, artifacts, and other cultural expressions. The volum…
This book provides an overview of the research work on data privacy and privacy enhancing technologies carried by the participants of the ARES project. ARES (Advanced Research in Privacy an Security, CSD2007-00004) has been one of the most important research projects funded by the Spanish Government in the fields of computer security and privacy. It is part of the now extinct CONSOLIDER INGENIO…
This book presents an intelligent, integrated, problem-independent method for multiresponse process optimization. In contrast to traditional approaches, the idea of this method is to provide a unique model for the optimization of various processes, without imposition of assumptions relating to the type of process, the type and number of process parameters and responses, or interdependences amon…
This book provides a complete study on neural structures exhibiting nonlinear and stochastic dynamics, elaborating on neural dynamics by introducing advanced models of neural networks. It overviews the main findings in the modelling of neural dynamics in terms of electrical circuits and examines their stability properties with the use of dynamical systems theory. It is suitable for researche…