ALBERT

Description / Table of Contents: "Case Study Research: Principles and Practices aims to provide a general understanding of the case study method as well as specific tools for its successful implementation. These tools can be utilized in all fields where the case study method is prominent, including anthropology, business, communications, economics, education, medicine, political science, social work, and sociology."--BOOK JACKET

Description / Table of Contents: This book provides a compact self-contained introduction to the theory and application of Bayesian statistical methods. The book is accessible to readers having a basic familiarity with probability, yet allows more advanced readers to quickly grasp the principles underlying Bayesian theory and methods. The examples and computer code allow the reader to understand and implement basic Bayesian data analyses using standard statistical models and to extend the standard models to specialized data analysis situations. The book begins with fundamental notions such as probability, exchangeability and Bayes' rule, and ends with modern topics such as variable selection in regression, generalized linear mixed effects models, and semiparametric copula estimation. Numerous examples from the social, biological and physical sciences show how to implement these methodologies in practice. Monte Carlo summaries of posterior distributions play an important role in Bayesian data analysis. The open-source R statistical computing environment provides sufficient functionality to make Monte Carlo estimation very easy for a large number of statistical models and example R-code is provided throughout the text. Much of the example code can be run ``as is'' in R, and essentially all of it can be run after downloading the relevant datasets from the companion website for this book. Peter Hoff is an Associate Professor of Statistics and Biostatistics at the University of Washington. He has developed a variety of Bayesian methods for multivariate data, including covariance and copula estimation, cluster analysis, mixture modeling and social network analysis. He is on the editorial board of the Annals of Applied Statistics.

Description / Table of Contents: The IUGS/IAGC Global Geochemical Baselines Programme aims to establish a global geochemical reference baseline for 〉60 determinants in a range of media for environmental and other applications. The European contribution to the programme has been carried out by government institutions from 26 countries under the auspices of the Forum of European Geological Surveys (FOREGS) The main objectives of this European survey were: 1) to apply standardised methods of sampling, chemical analysis and data management to prepare a geochemical baseline across Europe; and 2) to use this reference network to level national baseline datasets. Samples of stream water, stream sediment and three types of soil (organic top layer, minerogenic top and sub soil) have been collected at 900 stations, each representing a catchment area of 100 km2, corresponding to a sampling density of about one sample per 4700 km2. In addition, the uppermost 25 cm of floodplain sediment was sampled from 790 sites each representing a catchment area of 1000 km2. All soil and sediment samples were prepared at the same laboratory, and all samples of particular sample types were analysed by the same method at the same laboratory. More than 50 elements, both total and aqua regia extractable concentrations, and other parameters (such as pH and grain size) were determined on the 〈2 mm grain size fraction of minerogenic samples, and total concentrations of organic soil samples were measured after using a strong acid digestion. Nine laboratories of European geological surveys carried out the analytical work. Altogether, 360 geochemical maps showing the distribution of elements across Europe have been prepared. All the results and field observations are organised in a common database and the maps are published as a Geochemical Atlas of Europe. All the sampling sites were photographed and this photo archive is also available. Samples have been archived in the Slovak Republic for possible future use. Initial results show that the distribution patterns of both water and solid samples are related to such factors as large-scale tectonic provinces, geochemical variation of large lithological units, extension of the Weichselian glaciation, and contamination reflecting industrialized areas and regions of intensive agriculture. Key words (GeoRef Thesaurus, AGI): geochemical surveys, baseline studies, soils, sediments, stream water, sampling, sample preparation, chemical analysis, geochemical maps, atlas, areal geology, Europe

Description / Table of Contents: Konsequent zweisprachig und praxisnah. Eine wirkungsvolle Hilfe für alle, die international agieren: Die Reihe 'Training International' stellt wichtige Kompetenzen kompakt und zweisprachig dar. Auf der linken Seite steht jeweils der deutsche Text, rechts die gleichen Inhalte in internationalem Business English. So kann der Leser sich gezielt Wissen aneignen - auch kurzfristig für konkrete Anforderungen - und gleichzeitig fast beiläufig seine Sprachkenntnisse erweitern. Außerdem geben die Bände interkulturelle Tipps und liefern Handlungsvorschläge. Die Themen wurden nach Beratung mit Personal- und Bildungsabteilungen von Unternehmen bedarfsgerecht ausgewählt. Mitarbeitergespräche unterstützen die zielorientierte und partnerschaftliche Führung. Das Buch behandelt alle relevanten Aspekte des Themas, darunter Gesprächsarten, -techniken und auch -störungen. Es liefert Tipps, Gesprächsleitfäden sowie kompaktes Hintergrundwissen.

Description / Table of Contents: As we discover more about the role of the ocean in global changes and identify the effects of global change on the ocean, understanding its chemical composition and processes becomes increasingly paramount. However, understanding these processes requires a wide range of measurements in the vast ocean, from the sea surface to deep-ocean trenches, from the tropics to the poles. Practical Guidelines for the Analysis of Seawater provides a common analytical basis for generating quality-assured and reliable data on chemical parameters in the ocean. A source of practical know-how, the book covers sampling and storage, analytical methodology, and guidelines and procedures for quality assurance. It presents analytical methods with the step-by-step procedures that help practitioners implement these methods successfully into the laboratory, making them instantly applicable without consulting further literature. The book also contains essential information for developing or improving quality control and quality assurance programs in the laboratory. It includes the availability and measurement of standard reference materials, blank estimation and correction, control of recoveries, and statistical evaluation of quality assurance data. Analytical chemistry is a very active and fast moving area. Despite the development of innovative new analytical techniques for chemical trace element research, obtaining reliable data at ultra-trace levels remains a formidable challenge. A complete and practical guide, this book delineates proven methods that consistently yield reproducible data in routine work.

Description / Table of Contents: In a social world whose pace continues to accelerate the future becomes an increasingly difficult terrain. While the focus of social life is narrowing down to the present, the futures we create on a daily basis cast ever longer shadows. This book addresses this paradox and its deep ethical implications

Description / Table of Contents: This book provides the first clear, comprehensive, and accessible account of complex adaptive social systems, by two of the field's leading authorities. Such systems--whether political parties, stock markets, or ant colonies--present some of the most intriguing theoretical and practical challenges confronting the social sciences. Engagingly written, and balancing technical detail with intuitive explanations, Complex Adaptive Systems focuses on the key tools and ideas that have emerged in the field since the mid-1990s, as well as the techniques needed to investigate such systems. It provides a

Description / Table of Contents: Paleoseismology has become an important component of seismic risk analysis, which is mandated for nuclear power plants, dams, waste repositories, and other critical structures. This book is the first in the English language to be devoted solely to paleoseismology. It summarizes the development of the field from the 1960s to the present, encompassing material that is currently widely dispersed in journal articles.

Description / Table of Contents: Es ist von grossem Interesse, den fundamentalen physikalischen Prozess zu isolieren, der die beobachteten Eigenschaften von Seismizitätsmustern erklärt. Wir präsentieren vier numerische Studien, die die Effektivität von Fluiden und der strukturellen Heterogenität von Verwerfungszonen im Hinblick auf die Genese von Erdbebenkomplexität untersuchen. Die dreidimensionalen, kontinuierlichen Modelle werden von der empirischen `rate and state' Beschreibung der Entwicklung des Reibungskoeffizienten bestimmt, und|vom jeweiligen Problem abhängig|von elasto-hydraulischen Wechselwirkungen oder heterogenen Reibungsverhältnissen auf der zweidimensionalen Verwerfungszone. Zu Beginn wird gezeigt, dass für bestimmte Bereiche von hydraulisch relevanten Parametern der Prozess des `dilatant hardening', d. h. Verhärtungen aufgrund der Erweiterung des Porenraumes, ausreicht, um beschleunigende Instabilitäten zu stabilisieren, was zu heterogenen raum-zeitlichen Verschiebungen führt...

Description / Table of Contents: The Arctic is undergoing rapid and dramatic environmental and social transformations due to climate change. This has ramifications for the entire planet, as change spreads through interconnected global networks that are environmental, cultural, economic and political. Today, with the major thrust of research shifting away from deciphering causes and monitoring trends, the central preoccupation of a growing circle of actors has become the exploration of strategies for responding and adapting to climate change. But to understand the far-reaching nature of climate change impacts and the complexities of adaptation, a truly interdisciplinary approach is required. Unique in the UN system, UNESCO brings together the domains of natural sciences, social sciences, culture, education and communication. Given this broad mandate, UNESCO favors integrated approaches for monitoring and adapting to climate change in the Arctic, fostering dialogue among scientists, circumpolar communities and decision-makers. This book brings together the knowledge, concerns and visions of leading Arctic scientists in the natural and social sciences, prominent Chukchi, Even, Inuit and Saami leaders from across the circumpolar North, and international experts in education, health and ethics. They highlight the urgent need for a sustained interdisciplinary and multi-actor approach to monitoring, managing and responding to climate change in the Arctic, and explore avenues by which this can be achieved.--Publisher's description

Description / Table of Contents: This book integrates spatial and behavioral perspectives - in a word, those of the Rochester and Michigan schools - into a unified theory of voter choice and party strategy. The theory encompasses both policy and non-policy factors, effects of turnout, voter discounting of party promises, expectations of coalition governments, and party motivations based on policy as well as office. Optimal (Nash equilibrium) strategies are determined for alternative models for presidential elections in the US and France, and for parliamentary elections in Britain and Norway. These polities cover a wide range of electoral rules, number of major parties, and governmental structures. The analyses suggest that the more competitive parties generally take policy positions that come close to maximizing their electoral support, and that these vote-maximizing positions correlate strongly with the mean policy positions of their supporters

Description / Table of Contents: The Pollen Flora of Yunnan, China is the first book of the series of pollen morphological studies of tree plants growing in the wild in the Yunnan Province and in the surrounding area of China: Asian Environmental History. The series will present the first detailed work on the pollen flora of China. This book includes electron microscope photographs and light micrographs of 67 species of Gymnosperm, Myricaceae and Juglandaceae and can be used for research on many areas including pollen analysis and plant taxonomy.

Description / Table of Contents: PREFACE The characteristics of natural disasters in modern mega-cities have been complicated and diversified since the end of 20th century and originated not only from geo-physical and global changes of natural hazards, such as earthquakes, tsunami, floods, storms, landslides, and drought, but also from the recent structural changes of our post-industrial societies. In fact, the Japanese urban area has become more and more vulnerable to newly emerging risks of low probability but high consequence type (LPHC type), which have been induced technologically and socially in modern society. For example, the estimated damage exposed by the floods has increased five times during the past 20 years in terms of unit-exposed space (inundated area in the case of flooding). This is due to the high concentration of both population and social infrastructures in residential districts, in spite of the success in decreasing the total number of human casualties of flood disasters, thanks to the tremendous amount of investment in constructing such physical structural facilities as dams, dikes, banks, etc. In return, we unfortunately face the soaring marginal cost of reducing disaster risk up to an acceptable level. In addition, we have such a new type of multi-disasters in modern mega-cities that a single small-scale hazard episode in an urban area might trigger a series of "catastrophic disasters" in a cascading manner under current interwoven and complicated urban water systems, such as from a small-scale river channel up to a large-scale river embankment. There seems to be many cases in which "natural disasters with totally different characteristics may happen before people forget about the previous disasters", in contrast with the famous expression "natural disasters occur when people are not thinking about them". Until very recently, people used to take precautionary steps against storms and/or inundation disasters at their homes in accordance with the amount of rainfall or the rise of water in adjacent rivers, and would listen to radio or TV news reports that predicted the routes of typhoons, and would standby at their homes or work places. Nowadays, such self-help practices to reduce possible damage of disasters have waned, reflecting a public relience on the remarkable improvements in basic social infrastructure to prevent disasters. Our country seems to have been transformed into a "hands-off society of leaving the management responsibility to regulatory authorities" in which people wait until they receive warning information or evacuation orders from the local government who are specialized in disaster prevention. However, when we face unexpected or surprise conditions, ordinary citizens become unable to understand the nature of risks, partly due to the complex processes of the regulatory management systems specialized in current disaster prevention schemes. They stop making their own choices regarding proactive responses to the emerging risks that have been so-called socio-technologically or socioculturally constructed in our post-industrial society. In fact, newcomers who have migrated and settled in newly developed lowland areas that used to be flood plains tend to be unable to inherit past disaster experiences. They tend to claim more and more "safety measures of intensified structural facilities" as well as an expansion of the "disaster relief measures" in cases where local residents become victims. But they prefer to leave management judgment regarding distinction between "safety and danger" to governmental institutions, as indicated in our recent case studies on a series of catastrophic flood disasters, such as the 2000 Tokai Floods in Nagoya and the 2004 Niigata-Fukui Floods. This also leads to another management issue of the increase in social costs to deal with the unexpected nature of risks, even by taking a proper combination of both structural and non-structural measures depending on which level of risks the community and residents may accept in long-term. Moreover, we are concerned about this kind of emerging disaster risks growing larger and continuing to increase, as suggested by the recent IPCC reports of global and regional climate changes. Here appears an integrated risk management approach to deal with natural disasters as social risk phenomena in terms of enhancing a variety of proactive or participatory ways that governmental institutions, communities, and residents could jointly carry out proper risk management against newly emerging disaster risks. To make our modern societies sustainable in terms of our lives, socio-cultural assets, and environmental resources in this risk society, it is vital to create a kind of societal governance system resilient to unexpected or surprise disasters not only by promoting a proper understanding of the nature of "risks" in their community but also by strengthening their preparedness to "risks" in the whole cycle of disaster prevention, from the normal, emergency, and recovery phases . Japan's National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention (NIED) has launched a five-year research project (2001-2005) with the aim of making modern societies resilient, not only to a traditional flood but also to possible catastrophic disasters of low probability but high consequence (LPHC). The approach that NIED has tried to explore is necessarily a new type of integrated risk management that should be tailored to the emerging disaster risks of the LPHC type. This includes (1) shifting the management strategy from "disaster prevention with zero risk" to "disaster reduction with an acceptable risk", (2) integrating both structure and non-structure measures (hard and soft measures), and (3) creating a social platform to call for a wide range of stakeholders (governments, communities, residents, corporations, local groups, and NPOs) in planning, designing and implementing an integrated risk management plan resilient to LPHC disasters in both short- and long-term perspectives. In order to tackle these urgent tasks, a new team was formed on the basis of social and human sciences by adding fellows and guest researchers, unlike the conventional team of disaster scientists at the NIED. Then, the team began operations through close cooperation with outside research institutions such as the Disaster Prevention Research Institute of Kyoto University. Our research group has been developing such a participatory platform of disaster risk communication, called the Participatory Flood Risk Communication Support System (Pafrics), that can facilitate community-based participation in planning, designing and implementing processes for a better integrated flood risk management. Pafrics has been particularly developed by taking a number of research outcomes based on the social scientific studies concerning local people's flood risk perception and disaster prevention activities in their community through questionnaire surveys conducted by NIED. Currently, we believe that Pafrics has been developed to such a sufficient level as to be released on the Web, but it is still being repeatedly modified through trials and experiences with new aspects and episodes in new areas. This book intends to provide outcomes of those studies in three parts. The first part expresses some of the important conceptual and methodological issues associated with the "integrated approach of disaster risk management" toward resilient society to emerging disaster risks in mega-cities in Japan. Four types of "integration" are taken into consideration in most of the papers. They are (1) integration of hard (structural control facilities) and soft (institutions and information) measures for shifting the concept of "zero risk" to "an acceptable level of risk", (2) integration of precaution and emergency relief measures, (3) integration of governmental and local community activities toward residents' informed choice of disaster risks, and (4) integration of individual risk management programs towards handling multiple sources of hazards. All papers focus on both the natural and socio-cultural factors of integrated risk management and their uncertainties involved in our modern society, reflecting the recent inter disciplinary development in "risk analysis", "disaster sciences", "resource economics", and "public policy analysis". In the second part, all contributed papers are more or less associated with outcomes of case studies or the social surveys which NIED conducted since the start of the project. Those involved include the 2000 Tokai flood disaster, 2004 Fukui, Niigata Typhoon 23 disasters in Japan, as well as the 2005 Hurricane Catrena in the USA. Many important research topics are addressed in terms of public understanding or perception of disaster risks, public preparedness for reducing risks, attitude of local government officers engaging in disaster prevention, the role of volunteers in disaster prevention or relief activities, based on social scientific disciplines in relation to social psychology, disaster sociology, and disaster insurance and economics, etc. Those contributions are particularly important for the NIED project to look forward to making modern societies resilient to disasters of LPHC type by facilitating residents' participation to risk governance in local communities towards the informed choice of disaster risks. The final part presents a set of papers which illustrate the development of "Pafrics", and some of the lessons we learned from several trials of using Pafrics in workshops, meetings, and lectures. In order to disseminate our model of "Pafrics", several internet-accessible versions are already open on theWeb (http://www.pafrics.org), which is in Japanese for local residents, but a short English version is also available at the same Web site. Finally, we should stress again that all contributions in this book are, more or less, the outcome of joint efforts conducted by all members of the project. However, final responsibility of the views expressed in these chapters lies with the individual authors themselves. We are very grateful for a number of invaluable comments and suggestions provided by the members of advisory body to our project; Dr. Sachio Kubo (Pasco Corporation), Mr. Nobuyuki Kurita (NPO: Rescue Stock Yard), Dr. Kimio Meguro (Tokyo University), Mr. Yukiji Nishida (NPO: Rescue Stock Yard), Dr. Norio Okada (Kyoto University), Dr. Yugo Ono (Hokkaido University), Dr. Isao Takagi (Keio University), and Dr. Kentaro Yoshida (Tsukuba University). We also express our deep gratitude forMs. Reiko Shibakami, Ms. Reiko Kawamura, and other assistants for their sincere and endless effort to support our studies and preparation of these manuscripts during period of the project. We should be very pleased if this book could make a valuable contribution towards a new perspective of "integrated disaster risk management" and "disaster risk governance" in the future.

Description / Table of Contents: The classic aide to econometric students worldwide is now in a new edition. Guide to Econometrics, 6th edition is designed to illuminate the logic of econometrics without formulas, providing intuition, skepticism, insights, humor, and practical advice. Designed for use in a range of courses, from undergraduate to graduate and PhD level. New chapters cover instrumental variables, computation considerations. Includes extensive information on GMM, nonparametrics, and an introduction to wavelets.