Bamba and Haight provide an in-depth understanding of the everyday experiences and perspectives of maltreated children and their substitute caregivers and teachers in Japan. Their innovative research program combines strategies from developmental psychology, ethnography, and action research. Although child advocates from around the world...

Control of Discrete-event Systems provides a survey of the most important topics in the discrete-event systems theory with particular focus on finite-state automata, Petri nets and max-plus algebra. Coverage ranges from introductory material on the basic notions and definitions of discrete-event systems to more recent results. Special...

Thermosetting plastics are a distinct category of plastics whose high performance, durability and reliability at high temperatures makes them suitable for specialty applications ranging from automotive and aerospace through to electronic packaging and consumer products (your melamine kitchen worktop is a thermoset resin!). Recent developments...

In 2006 residential real estate prices peaked and started to fall, then threatened the world's financial institutions in 2007, and confronted the global economy with disaster in 2008. In the past few years, millions of people have lost very substantial portions of their wealth. And while the markets have rebounded considerably, they are...

This meticulous critical assessment of the ground-breaking work of philosopher Stanislaw  Leśniewski focuses exclusively on primary texts and explores the full range of output by one of the master logicians of the Lvov-Warsaw school. The author’s nuanced survey eschews secondary commentary, analyzing Leśniewski's core...

Thermal processing remains one of the most important processes in the food industry. Now in its second edition, Thermal Food Processing: New Technologies and Quality Issues continues to explore the latest developments in the field. Assembling the work of a worldwide panel of experts, this volume highlights topics vital to the...

With the proliferation of huge amounts of (heterogeneous) data on the Web, the importance of information retrieval (IR) has grown considerably over the last few years. Big players in the computer industry, such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, are the primary contributors of technology for fast access to Web-based information; and searching...

• Features contributions from  established researchers in...

This comparative text provides an understanding of major world criminal justice systems by discussing and comparing the systems of six of the world's countries: England, France, Russia, China, Japan, and a new chapter on South Africa -- each representative of a different type of legal system. An additional chapter on Islamic law uses...

This monograph aims to provide an accessible and fairly comprehensive treatment of recent developments on generalised dualities for graphs on surfaces and their applications. Duality arises in many areas, particularly topological and algebraic graph theory, topology, and physics. The importance of duality derives not only from its inherent...

Learn how to be the safe pair of hands in your organisation, consistently delivering exceptional projects on time and to budget. The steep rise in demand for good project managers in recent years has been mirrored by the publication of book after book setting out the formal processes and mechanics of project management. Whether they are...