Today’s financial system is considerably more complex than in years past, as new financial instruments have been introduced that are not well understood even by the people and institutions that invest in them. Numerous high-risk opportunities are available, and the number of people who unwittingly wander into such ventures seems to grow...

Reinventing Financial Regulation offers an analysis of the fundamental flaws that plague the current system of financial regulation, one built around ideas of "risk-sensitivity" and "capital adequacy." Author Avinash Persaud argues that while some sensible reforms have been introduced, a fresh...

Getting a Big Data Job For Dummies is the ultimate guide to landing a position in one of the fastest-growing fields in the modern economy. Learn exactly what "big data" means, why it's so important across all industries, and how you can...

Corrosion costs billions of dollars to each and every single economy in the world. Corrosion is a chemical process, and it is crucial to understand the dynamics from a chemical perspective before proceeding with analyses, designs and solutions from an engineering aspect. The opposite is also true in the sense that scientists should take into...

Currency values, prices, consumption and incomes are at the heart of the economic performance of all countries. In order to make a meaningful comparison between one economy and another, economists routinely make use of purchasing power parity (PPP) exchange rates, but while PPP rates are widely used and well understood, they take a lot of...

This volume examines the relations between popular culture production and export and the state in East and Southeast Asia including the urban centres and middle-classes of Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Thailand, and the Philippines. It addresses the shift in official thinking toward the role of popular...

Risk and reward are always foremost in the determination of investment decisions and business transactions. Advances in the area of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) have enabled the development of new business paradigms. Such paradigms involve transactions taking place between loosely connected parties, often totally or partially...

Nanotechnology is a new and emerging discipline that is multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary. The usage of nanosystems, nanomaterials, nano-devices, etc. permeates all aspects of society. Cancer targeting and curing nanosystems are being introduced into the biomedical and pharmaceutical industries; so are lightweight energy absorbing or...

The book describes the industrial revolution associated with the implementation of electric power generation by photovoltaics (PV). The book’s editor and contributing authors are among the leading pioneers in PV from its industrial birth in 1954 all the way up to the stormy developments during the first decade of the new century. The...

During bull and bear markets, there is a group of hedge funds and professional traders which have been consistently outperforming traditional investment strategies for the past 30 odd years. They have shown remarkable uncorrelated performance and in the great bear market of 2008 they had record gains.  These traders are highly secretive...

Agroecosystem is an ideal dynamic functional system with a set of chemical and biological interaction taking place in plant surface either below or above the ground levels. These levels of interaction activities fundamentally with microorganism-plant-soil systems are extended upto the level of entire agricultural economy. Greatly simplified,...

This is the story of how the French Crown and local institutions accommodated one another as they sought to forge...