This book collects selected high quality articles submitted to the 2nd International Conference on Natural Fibers (ICNF2015). A wide range of topics is covered related to various aspects of natural fibres such as agriculture, extraction and processing, surface modification and functionalization, advanced structures, nano fibres, composites and nanocomposites, design and product development, app…
This work responds to the increasing global need of measuring and analyzing impacts, vulnerabilities and coping capacity of countries, regions and communities regarding climate change, extreme weather conditions, natural disasters and institutional constraints. The case of Mexico, analyzed in this work, provides lessons for further developing countries to assess natural disasters vulnerability,…
This book presents Systems Engineering from a modern, multidisciplinary engineering approach, providing the understanding that all aspects of systems design, systems, software, test, security, maintenance and the full life-cycle must be factored in to any large-scale system design; up front, not factored in later. It lays out a step-by-step approach to systems-of-systems architectural design, d…
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Multidisciplinary Social Networks Conference, MISNC 2015, held in Matsuyama, Japan, in September 2015. The 49 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 125 submissions. The papers deal with the following topics: multidisciplinary research on social networks; ethical issues related to SNS; informati…
Michael Nofer examines whether and to what extent Social Media can be used to predict stock returns. Market-relevant information is available on various platforms on the Internet, which largely consist of user generated content. For instance, emotions can be extracted in order to identify the investors' risk appetite and in turn the willingness to invest in stocks. Discussion forums also provid…
This textbook teaches advanced undergraduate and first-year graduate students in Engineering and Applied Sciences to gather and analyze empirical observations (data) in order to aid in making design decisions. While science is about discovery, the primary paradigm of engineering and "applied science" is design. Scientists are in the discovery business and want, in general, to understand the …
This book investigates the functional adequacy as well as the affective impression made by feedback messages on mobile devices. It presents an easily adoptable experimental setup to examine context effects on various feedback messages and applies it to auditory, tactile and auditory-tactile feedback messages. This approach provides insights into the relationship between the affective impression…
This book describes the important role of emotion in a hyper-connected society and how product development and manufacture change. It explores how our work and lifestyle may be affected by forthcoming technologies and presents key research on multisensory informatics, one of the most important tools for making the most of emotion. This fourth volume of the Emotional Engineering Series focuse…
This book examines how theories of human emotion can be applied to engineering in order to improve product design and value. ‘Emotional Engineering Vol. 3’ establishes the idea that customer satisfaction can be maximised by using knowledge and experience in a more flexible manner to respond to a fast-changing world. This integration of emotion and knowledge introduces the reader to the conc…
The monograph constitutes an attempt to demonstrate that trilinguals should be considered as learners and speakers in their own right as opposed to L2 learners with a view to enumerating consequences this would bring to third or additional language teaching. Its theoretical part offers an insight into the structure of the multilingual mental lexicon which is a product of the interplay of a whol…