Markov decision process (MDP) models are widely used for modeling sequential decision-making problems that arise in engineering, economics, computer science, and the social sciences. Many real-world problems modeled by MDPs have huge state and/or action spaces, giving an opening to the curse of dimensionality and so making practical...
This first-of-its-kind title addresses the failures of an often fragmented healthcare system in managing vulnerable patients with multiple, chronic, co-morbid conditions -- patients who are frequently unresponsive to the methods and approaches used to treat other patients with conditions that are less complicated. The book...
Anecdotal clinical reports of tumor remissions after viral infections laid the foundation for
the field of oncolytic virotherapy. Advances in molecular virology, tumor biology, and
immunology have enabled more refined studies of tumor-selective viruses. Concomitant
with the resurgence of cancer immunotherapy and after...
PCM Enhanced Building Envelopes presents the latest research in the field of thermal energy storage technologies that can be applied to solar heating and cooling with the aim of shifting and reducing building energy demand. It discusses both practical and technical issues, as well as the advantages of using common phase change...
From her position at Harvard University's Department of Government for over thirty-five years, Judith Shklar (1928-92) taught a long list of prominent political theorists and published prolifically in the domains of modern and American political thought. She was a highly original theorist of liberalism, possessing a broad and...
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.
We must find new and innovative ways of conceptualizing transboundary energy issues, of embedding concerns of ethics or justice into energy policy, and of operationalizing response to them. This book stems from the emergent gap;...
This book provides readers with a comprehensive and up-to-date guide to non-invasive mechanical ventilation in palliative medicine, focusing on why and when it may be necessary. Physicians will find a practical guide to this specific context, particularly focused on pulmonary function and physiology in the elderly, and on ventilatory...
This book scrutinizes global financial flows and stocks, both financial assets and liabilities and their impact on the global balance of economic power, especially as they affect the largest and fastest-growing countries in both the developed and the developing world. It shows how financial flows can promote economic growth and...
This first-of-its-kind textbook marks a revolutionary effort to reform medical education nationally by providing a comprehensive, high-quality resource to serve as a foundation for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) health education across multiple disciplines. Addressing the decades-long unequal weight of...
This book conceptualises and illustrates temporary appropriation as an urban phenomenon, exploring its contributions to citizenship, urban social sustainability and urban health. It explains how some forms of appropriation can be subversive, existing in a grey area between legal and illegal activities in the city.
This book presents a much-needed discussion on ethnic identification and morphosyntactic variation in San Francisco Chinatown?a community that has received very little attention in linguistic research. An investigation of original, interactive speech data sheds light on how first- and second-generation Chinese Americans...
This book highlights recent findings in industrial, manufacturing and mechanical engineering, and provides an overview of the state of the art in these fields, mainly in Russia and Eastern Europe. A broad range of topics and issues in modern engineering are discussed, including the dynamics of machines and working processes, friction, wear and...