"A new, updated edition of a popular book on the history, science, and engineering of bicycles. The bicycle is almost unique among human-powered machines in that it uses human muscles in a near-optimum way. This new edition of the bible of bicycle enthusiasts provides just about everything you could want to know about the history of bicycles, how human beings propel them, what makes them go fas…
A new way of thinking about data science and data ethics that is informed by the ideas of intersectional feminism. Today, data science is a form of power. It has been used to expose injustice, improve health outcomes, and topple governments. But it has also been used to discriminate, police, and surveil. This potential for good, on the one hand, and harm, on the other, makes it essential to ask…
An investigation of the America-Rome analogy that goes deeper than the facile comparisons made on talk shows and in glossy magazine articles.America's post-Cold War strategic dominance and its pre-recession affluence inspired pundits to make celebratory comparisons to ancient Rome at its most powerful. Now, with America no longer perceived as invulnerable, engaged in protracted fighting in Iraq…
Originally published: 1999.Accurate, balanced AND imaginative.In this highly original book, ecologist Vaclav Smil presents a comprehensive and integrated survey of all the forms of energy that shape our world, from the sun to the human body, from bread to microchips. Written in a scientifically sophisticated yet accessible style, Energies consists of eighty-two short essays organized under six …
"In Solar Revolution, fund manager and former corporate buyout specialist Travis Bradford argues - on the basis of standard business and economic forecasting models - that over the next two decades solar energy will increasingly become the best and cheapest choice for most electricity and energy applications. Solar Revolution outlines the path by which the transition to solar technology and sus…
Many environmental problems cross national boundaries and can be addressed only through international cooperation. In this book Robert Darst examines transnational efforts to promote environmental protection in the USSR and in five of its successor states--Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania--from the late 1960s to the present. The core of the book is a c…
Based on the author’s twenty years of experience, this book shows the practicality of modern, conceptually new, wide area voltage control in transmission and distribution smart grids, in detail. Evidence is given of the great advantages of this approach, as well as what can be gained by new control functionalities which modern technologies now available can provide. The distinction between s…
This book addresses the vector control of three-phase AC machines, in particular induction motors with squirrel-cage rotors (IM), permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSM) and doubly-fed induction machines (DFIM), from a practical design and development perspective. The main focus is on the application of IM and PMSM in electrical drive systems, where field-orientated control has been successf…
A faded image of a family gathered at a festively served dinner table, raising their glasses in unison. A group of small children, sitting in orderly rows, with stuffed toys at their feet and a portrait of Lenin looming over their heads. A pensive older woman against a snowy landscape, her gaze directed lovingly at a tombstone. These are a few of the evocative images in In Visible Presence by O…
Nuclear fusion research tells us that the Sun uses one gram of hydrogen to make as much energy as can be obtained by burning eight tons of petroleum. If nuclear fusion—the process that makes the stars shine—could be domesticated for commercial energy production, the world would gain an inexhaustible source of energy that neither depletes natural resources nor produces greenhouse gases. In S…