The field of polymer nanocomposites has become essential for engineering and military industries over the last few decades as it applies to computing, sensors, biomedical microelectronics, hard coating, and many other domains. Due to their outstanding mechanical and thermal features, polymer nanocomposite materials have recently been developed and now have a wide range of applications. Polymer Nanocomposites for Advanced Engineering and Military Applications provides emerging research on recent advances in the fabrication methods, properties, and applications of various nano-fillers including surface-modification methods and chemical functionalization. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as barrier properties, biomedical microelectronics, and matrix processing, this book is ideally designed for engineers, industrialists, chemists, government officials, military professionals, practitioners, academicians, researchers, and students.

This book, companion to Foundations of Location Analysis (Springer, 2011), highlights some of the applications of location analysis within the spheres of businesses, those that deal with public services and applications that deal with law enforcement and first responders. While the Foundations book reviewed the theory and first contributions, this book describes how different location techniques have been used to solve real problems. Since many real problems comprise multiple objectives, in this book there is more presence of tools from multicriteria decision making and multiple-objective optimization. The section on business applications looks at such problems as locating bank branches, the potential location of a logistics park, sustainable forest management and layout problems in a hospital, a much more difficult type of problem than mere location problems. The section on public services presents chapters on the design of habitats for wildlife, control of forest fires, the location of intelligent sensors along highways for timely emergency response, locating breast cancer screening centers, an economic analysis for the locations of post offices and school location. The final section of the book includes chapters on the well-known problem of locating fire stations, a model for the location of sensors for travel time information, the problem of police districting, locations of jails, location of Coast Guard vessels and finally, a survey of military applications of location analysis throughout different periods of recent history.

This book addresses the morality of engaging in weapons research, a topic that has been neglected but which is extremely important. It is argued that this activity is both morally wrong and morally unjustifiable, and this implies that moral persons should not engage in it. The argument is not based on any pacifist assumptions: it is not assumed that neither individuals nor states should not defend themselves. What is wrong with weapons research is that it is the first step in the production of weapons, weapons are the means to harm, and harming without justification is always wrong. Those who study science, for instance those who are interested in the responsibilities of the scientist, are given a new perspective, while those who are practicing scientists will realize that they should not consider working to design new or improved weapons systems. This book is of interest to students and researchers working in ethics and technology, philosophy of technology, military ethics, and history of technology.

Offers an authoritative synthesis of knowledge of the planet Mercury after the MESSENGER mission, for researchers and students in planetary science.

First Published in 1997. The alternation between high vowels and glides is shown here to follow from the interaction of phonological constraints as defined by Prince and Smolensky's (1993) Optimality Theory. The alternation stems from simultaneously comparing moraic and nonmoraic parses of high vowels for constraint satisfaction

Swarm intelligence algorithms are a form of nature-based optimization algorithms. Their main inspiration is the cooperative behavior of animals within specific communities. This can be described as simple behaviors of individuals along with the mechanisms for sharing knowledge between them, resulting in the complex behavior of the entire community. Examples of such behavior can be found in ant colonies, bee swarms, schools of fish or bird flocks. Swarm intelligence algorithms are used to solve difficult optimization problems for which there are no exact solving methods or the use of such methods is impossible, e.g. due to unacceptable computational time. This set comprises two volumes: Swarm Intelligence Algorithms: A Tutorial and Swarm Intelligence Algorithms: Modifications and Applications. The first volume thoroughly presents the basics of 24 algorithms selected from the entire family of swarm intelligence algorithms. It contains a detailed explanation of how each algorithm works, along with relevant program codes in Matlab and the C ++ programming language, as well as numerical examples illustrating step-by-step how individual algorithms work. The second volume describes selected modifications of these algorithms and presents their practical applications. This book presents 24 swarm algorithms together with their modifications and practical applications. Each chapter is devoted to one algorithm. It contains a short description along with a pseudo-code showing the various stages of its operation. In addition, each chapter contains a description of selected modifications of the algorithm and shows how it can be used to solve a selected practical problem.