In the past decade, the movement to lighter-weight and increasingly agile methods has been the most significant change to affect the software enterprise since the advent of the waterfall model in the 1970s. Originated by a variety of thought and practice leaders and proven in real-world, successful experiments, the methods have proven...

Biotechnology is one of the major new technologies of the twenty-first century that covers multi-disciplinary issues, including DNA techniques, cloning, genetics, and the application of microbiology to the production of goods. It continues to revolutionize the treatments of many diseases, and it is used to deal with environmental solutions....

The aim of the two-volume set of Placenta and Trophoblast: Methods and Protocols is to offer contemporary approaches for studying the biology of the placenta. The chapters contained herein also address critical features of the female organ within which the embryo is housed, the uterus, and some aspects of the embryo–fetus itself,...

This book addresses core recommendations by the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences - an umbrella organisation consisting of sixteen professional societies in the United States - regarding the mathematical preparation of the teachers. According to the Board, the concept of a capstone course in a mathematics education program...

This book exposes a number of mathematical models for fracture of growing difficulty. All models are treated in a unified way, based on incremental energy minimization. They differ from each other by the assumptions made on the inelastic part of the total energy, here called the "cohesive energy". Each model describes a specific...

In a dynamic computing environment, such as the Grid, resource management plays a crucial role for making distributed resources available on-demand to anyone from anywhere at any time without undermining the resource autonomy; this becomes an art when dealing with heterogeneous resources distributed under multiple trust domains spanning across...

This book introduces Local Binary Patterns (LBP), arguably one of the most powerful texture descriptors, and LBP variants. This volume provides the latest reviews of the literature and a presentation of some of the best LBP variants by researchers at the forefront of textual analysis research and research on LBP descriptors and variants. The...

If you’ve ever heard outrageous stories about online illegal drug stores, hit men for hire, celebrities busted for child porn, mad scientific experiments, and Illuminati rituals, you’ve probably heard of the “dark web”, alternatively called...