Nutritional status is recognized as a major determinant in health and disease. Effective treatment of chronic conditions such as obesity or of diseases of the skin requires the integration of clinical and nutritional management. Nutritional and Clinical Management of Chronic Conditions and Diseases, like its predecessor, Nutritional Aspects...

The twentieth century began with the rediscovery of Mendel’s rules of inheritance and ended with the complete sequence of the human genome, one of the most monumental scientific accomplishments of all time. What lies in the future? What will the twenty-first century, the century of genomics, bring? Will geneticists a hundred years from...

The clock or time synchronization problem in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) requires a procedure for providing a common notion of time across the nodes of WSNs. In general, clock synchronization is viewed as a critical factor in maintaining the good functioning of WSNs due mainly to their decentralized organization and timing uncertainties...

The recognition of object categories has a rich history in computer vision. In the 1970s, generic object recognition systems sought to model and recognize objects based on their coarse, prototypical shape. These early systems employed complex 3-D models, which offered invariance to viewpoint (including image translation, rotation, and scale),...

The browser war between Firefox and Internet Explorer presents an intriguing case: how did Firefox manage to achieve a relatively significant market share in a ‘winner-takes-all’ industry? Why did  Firefox manage to gain some market share while other competitors have failed? Is this because of the Open Source characteristics...

Nanostructured materials is one of the hottest and fastest growing areas in today's materials science field, along with the related field of solid state physics. Nanostructured materials and their based technologies have opened up exciting new possibilites for future applications in a number of areas including aerospace, automotive, x-ray...

We would like to welcome you to the proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Signal Processing, Image Processing and Pattern Recognition (SIP 2009), which was organized as part of the 2009 International Mega-Conference on Future Generation Information Technology (FGIT 2009), held during December 10–12, 2009, at the...

Imagine a windowless room in a nondescript office building. Inoffensive tan carpet lines the floors, fluorescent lights hum softly overhead, and 20 seated Microsoft employees flank a rectangular folding table in the center of...

Healthcare, a vital industry that touches most of us in our lives, faces major challenges in demographics, technology, and finance. Longer life expectancy and an aging population, technological advancements that keep people younger and healthier, and financial issues are a constant strain on healthcare organizations resources and management....

This book focuses on motions of incompressible fluids of a freely moving surface being influenced by both the Earth’s rotation and density stratification. In contrast to traditional textbooks in the field of geophysical fluid dynamics, such as those by by Cushman-Roisin (1994) and Gill (1982), this book uses the method of...

The intention of this booklet is a brief but general introduction into the treatment of the Finite Element Method (FEM). The FEM has become the leading method in computer–oriented mechanics, so that many scientific branches have grown up besides over the last decades. Nevertheless, the FEM today is a question of economy. On the one hand...

It is commonly accepted today that optical fiber communications have revolutionized telecommunications. Indeed, dramatic changes have been induced in the way we interact with our relatives, friends, and colleagues: we retrieve information, we entertain and educate ourselves, we buy and sell, we organize our activities, and so on, in a long...