Optics and photonics offer new and vibrant approaches to meeting the challenges of the 21st century concerning energy conservation, education, agriculture, personal health and the environment. One of the most effective ways to address these global problems is to provide updated and reliable content on light-based technologies. Optical thin films and meta-materials, lasers, optical communication…
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the radiation left over from the Big Bang, is arguably the most important topic in modern cosmology. Its theory and observation have revolutionized cosmology from an order-of-magnitude science to a precision science. This graduate textbook describes CMB physics from first principles in a detailed yet pedagogical way, assuming only that the reader has a wor…
This book is a critical analysis of the concept of marine protected areas (MPAs) particularly as a tool for marine resource management. It explains the reasons for the extraordinary rise of MPAs to the top of the political agenda for marine policy, and evaluates the scientific credentials for the unprecedented popularity of this management option. The book reveals the role played by two policy …
This book investigates the regime of consumer benchmarks in the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and explores to what extent this regime meets each of the goals of the Directive. In particular, it assesses whether the consumer benchmarks are suitable in terms of achieving the three goals of the Directive: achieving a high level of consumer protection, increasing the smooth functioning of t…
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 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 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…
This monograph offers a detailed analysis of the creation, pilot implementation, and possible wide adoption of the real property tax at the local level in China. Starting in 2003, as China’s economy gradually recovered from the Asian financial crisis that started in 1998, the real property market entered a period of rapid expansion, followed immediately by rampant speculation, rising housing …
The purpose of this book is to present the principles of alternative investments in management. The individual chapters provide a detailed analysis of various classes of alternative investments on the financial market. Despite many different definitions of alternative investments, it can be assumed that a classical approach to alternative investments includes hedge funds, fund of funds (FOF), m…