Market: Those in economics, especially thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, cybernetics, information theory, resource use, and evolutionary economic behavior. This book presents an innovative and challenging look at evolution on several scales, from the earth and its geology and chemistry to living organisms to social and economic systems. Applying the principles of thermodynamics and the concepts of information gathering and self- organization, the author characterizes the direction of evolution in each case as an accumulation of "distinguishability" information--a type of universal knowledge.

When facing momentous societal change, such as the transformation to a sustainable world, the sciences must impress their importance upon the public and convince scientific and policy institutions in order to obtain the means to carry out their mission. This book represents the first attempt to integrate disciplinary views on the topic of transformation towards sustainability.

“What is colour?”, “What is the precise meaning of the statement ‘the stock exchange closes at a 5% drop this evening’?”, “How are TV viewers defined?”, or “How can images produce meaning?” Such everyday questions are examined in this book. To make our analysis intuitive and understandable, numerous concrete examples illustrate our theoretical framework and concepts. The examples include gaming, fictional skits in leisure entertainment, and enigmas. The golden thread running through the text revisits the informational process and places the datum as its pivot. The epistemological perspective of our novel approach is that of “radical relativity”. This is based on the precept that a perceptual trace carries with it the spectrum of the process that has engendered it. Given this, the informational tracking endeavour tracks the meaning-making process, notably through interpretive scaffoldings that leads to plausible realities.

The objective of this chapter is to present an approach for target track ing in cluttered environment, which incorporates the advanced concept of generalized data (kinematics and attribute) association (GDA) to improve track maintenance performance in complicated situations (closely spaced and/or crossing targets), when kinematics data are insufficient for correct decision making.

The speed with which the various economies recover from the Covid-19 pandemic will significantly determine the economic pressure placed on the environment in the medium-to-long-term. Furthermore, the pandemic has highlighted the strong interrelations between natural and societal systems, with societal resilience depending on a resilient environmental support system. In this context, the book argues that the pandemic represents a wake-up call for financial systems to be better prepared for the climate crisis and social risk, and has provided a stimulus to scale down the reliance of the global economy on fossil fuels. The first part of the book provides a deep and creative discussion between leading international researchers and experts on the policy options and financial instruments which can help to catalyze the green finance transition in the post-Covid-19 era. The contributions show that sustainable finance is emerging as a powerful tool to advance the transition towards a more environmentally and socially sustainable economic model. Instruments such as sovereign green bonds, green securities, and other sustainability-related securities can play a significant role in the post-Covid-19 world to fund economic stimulus and to lead the way to new and more sustainable future. The second part of the book supports the debate by highlighting a number of selected case studies on financing transitions in different regional contexts including Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. The book marks a significant contribution to the literature on environmental economics and finance, climate change, and sustainability transitions. Chapter 12 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This book showcases over 100 cutting-edge research papers from the 4th International Conference on Research into Design (ICoRD’13) – the largest in India in this area – written by eminent researchers from over 20 countries, on the design process, methods and tools, for supporting global product development (GPD). The special features of the book are the variety of insights into the GPD process, and the host of methods and tools at the cutting edge of all major areas of design research for its support. The main benefit of this book for researchers in engineering design and GPD are access to the latest quality research in this area; for practitioners and educators, it is exposure to an empirically validated suite of methods and tools that can be taught and practiced.

The Social Determinants of Health (SDH) are defined by the World Health Organization as “the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life”. Social determinants, as well as psychosocial factors, are elements that have a significant influence on people's health and well-being. These factors include psychological, social and also cultural aspects, which can affect a person's behavior and health. These psychosocial determinants may include stress, education, poverty, social exclusion, discrimination and violence. Such factors can act as protective or, on the contrary, increase the risk of physical and mental illness and affect the quality of life of individuals.

The International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management is sponsored by the Chinese Industrial Engineering Institution, CMES, which is the only national-level academic society for Industrial Engineering. The conference is held annually as the major event in this arena. Being the largest and the most authoritative international academic conference held in China, it provides an academic platform for experts and entrepreneurs in the areas of international industrial engineering and management to exchange their research findings. Many experts in various fields from China and around the world gather together at the conference to review, exchange, summarize and promote their achievements in the fields of industrial engineering and engineering management. For example, some experts pay special attention to the current state of the application of related techniques in China as well as their future prospects, such as green product design, quality control and management, supply chain and logistics management to address the need for, amongst other things low-carbon, energy-saving and emission-reduction. They also offer opinions on the outlook for the development of related techniques. The proceedings offers impressive methods and concrete applications for experts from colleges and universities, research institutions and enterprises who are engaged in theoretical research into industrial engineering and engineering management and its applications. As all the papers are of great value from both an academic and a practical point of view, they also provide research data for international scholars who are investigating Chinese style enterprises and engineering management.

This book - in conjunction with the volume LNAI 5755 - constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Intelligent Computing, ICIC 2009, held in Ulsan, South Korea in September 2009. The 214 revised full papers of these two volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 1082 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on Supervised & Semi-supervised Learning, Machine Learning Theory and Methods, Biological and Quantum Computing, Intelligent Computing in Bioinformatics, Intelligent Computing in Computational Biology and Drug Design, Computational Genomics and Proteomics, Intelligent Computing in Signal Processing, Intelligent Computing in Pattern Recognition, Intelligent Computing in Image Processing, Intelligent Computing in Communication and Computer Networks, Intelligent Computing in Robotics, Intelligent Computing in Computer Vision, Intelligent Agent and Web Applications, Intelligent Sensor Networks, Intelligent Fault Diagnosis & Financial Engineering, Intelligent Control and Automation, Intelligent Data Fusion and Security, Intelligent Prediction & Time Series Analysis, Natural Language Processing and Expert Systems, Intelligent Image/Document Retrievals, Computational Analysis and Data Mining in Biological Systems, Knowledge-Based Systems and Intelligent Computing in Medical Imaging, Applications of Intelligent Computing in Information Assurance & Security, Computational Analysis and Applications in Biomedical System, Intelligent Computing Algorithms in Banking and Finance, and Network-Based Intelligent Technologies.