Chesterfield Fire Department – The Original Thirteen Departments by David C. Creasy, Sr. contains 112 pages of history and unique images of the Chesterfield, Virginia Fire Department. Chesterfield County was formed in 1749 but it was not until 1928 that the first volunteer fire department was organized. Twelve more independent volunteerßO fire departments followed in the years to come. These departments formed the foundation for what would later become the Chesterfield County Fire Department. This book chronicles their organization and growth in those early years. It also describes how they would come together in forming the Association of Chesterfield Fire Departments. Read how this group's efforts truly improved fire protection in the county and started the process of becoming one department. Pictures, many never before published, capture much of this history and illustrate some of Chesterfield Fire Department's “firsts” : - The first fire stations for each volunteer fire department - The first motorized fire unit (1931) - The first fire department ambulance (1952) - The first aerial ladder (1961) - The ground breaking for the fire training center (1962) - The first Fire Alarm Headquarters (1967) - The first diesel powered apparatus (1969) - The first yellow fire apparatus (1970) A portion of the proceeds from this book are being donated to the Chesterfield Fire and EMS Memorial Wall located at the Earnes-Pittman Building in the Chesterfield Government Complex. May we never forget those individuals that have made the ultimate sacrifice in the performance of their duty.

The ?eld of robotics continues to ?ourish and develop. In common with general scienti?c investigation, new ideas and implementations emerge quite spontaneously and these are discussed, used, discarded or subsumed at c- ferences, in the reference journals, as well as through the Internet. After a little more maturity has been acquired by the new concepts, then archival publication as a scienti?c or engineering monograph may occur. The goal of the Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics is to publish new developments and advances in the ?elds of robotics research – rapidly and informally but with a high quality. It is hoped that prospective authors will welcome the opportunity to publish a structured presentation of some of the emerging robotics methodologies and technologies. The edited volume by Antonio Bicchi, Henrik Christensen and Domenico Prattichizzo is the outcome of the second edition of a workshop jointly sponsored by the IEEE Control Systems Society and the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. Noticeably, the previous volume was published in the Springer Lecture Notes on Control and Information Sciences. The authors are recognised as leading scholars internationally. A n- ber of challenging control problems on the forefront of today’s research in robotics and automation are covered, with special emphasis on vision, sensory-feedback control, human-centered robotics, manipulation, planning, ?exible and cooperative robots, assembly systems.

This open access book presents established methods of structural health monitoring (SHM) and discusses their technological merit in the current aerospace environment. While the aerospace industry aims for weight reduction to improve fuel efficiency, reduce environmental impact, and to decrease maintenance time and operating costs, aircraft structures are often designed and built heavier than required in order to accommodate unpredictable failure. A way to overcome this approach is the use of SHM systems to detect the presence of defects. This book covers all major contemporary aerospace-relevant SHM methods, from the basics of each method to the various defect types that SHM is required to detect to discussion of signal processing developments alongside considerations of aerospace safety requirements. It will be of interest to professionals in industry and academic researchers alike, as well as engineering students. This article/publication is based upon work from COST Action CA18203 (ODIN - http://odin-cost.com/), supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) is a funding agency for research and innovation networks. Our Actions help connect research initiatives across Europe and enable scientists to grow their ideas by sharing them with their peers. This boosts their research, career and innovation.

The topics covered include soil mechanics and porous media, glacier and ice dynamics, climatology and lake physics, climate change as well as numerical algorithms. The book, written by well-known experts, addresses researchers and students interested in physical aspects of our environment.

A full account of thermo-poroelasticity and thermo-poromechanics with derivations to problems, for both experienced and novice researchers.

This book summarizes the state-of-the-art in unsupervised learning. The contributors discuss how with the proliferation of massive amounts of unlabeled data, unsupervised learning algorithms, which can automatically discover interesting and useful patterns in such data, have gained popularity among researchers and practitioners. The authors outline how these algorithms have found numerous applications including pattern recognition, market basket analysis, web mining, social network analysis, information retrieval, recommender systems, market research, intrusion detection, and fraud detection. They present how the difficulty of developing theoretically sound approaches that are amenable to objective evaluation have resulted in the proposal of numerous unsupervised learning algorithms over the past half-century. The intended audience includes researchers and practitioners who are increasingly using unsupervised learning algorithms to analyze their data. Topics of interest include anomaly detection, clustering, feature extraction, and applications of unsupervised learning. Each chapter is contributed by a leading expert in the field.