The Jews, Nationalism and the Universalist Ideal examines the rise of contemporary globalism, as well as it’s historical predecessors from the past, as parts of a common historical ideological whole which seeks to replace ethnic nationalism with internationalism. A mission which is termed universalism in this book. Both ancient and contemporary, this is the back story of an ideology which has had a monumental impact upon the development of human civilization. The book tells the history of the Jewish people intertwined with memoirs from the author’s life and seamlessly weaves in eye-opening historical references. It’s a thought-provoking look into the struggles of nationalism and universalism. It’s a history lesson with a bold message. Do you find yourself baffled, frustrated, or shocked by current events in the world today? Then this book is for you.

This book concerns the development of novel finite elements for the structural analysis of composite beams and blades. The introduction of material damping is also an important aspect of composite structures and it is presented here in terms of their static and dynamic behavior. The book thoroughly presents a new shear beam finite element, which entails new blade section mechanics, capable of predicting structural blade coupling due to composite coupling and/or internal section geometry. Theoretical background is further expanded towards the inclusion of nonlinear structural blade models and damping mechanics for composite structures. The models effectively include geometrically nonlinear terms due to large displacements and rotations, improve the modeling accuracy of very large flexible blades, and enable the modeling of rotational stiffening and buckling, as well as, nonlinear structural coupling. Validation simulations on specimen level study the geometric nonlinearities effect on the modal frequencies and damping values of composite strips of various angle-ply laminations under either tensile or buckling loading. A series of correlation cases between numerical predictions and experimental measurements give credence to the developed nonlinear beam finite element models and underline the essential role of new nonlinear damping and stiffness terms.

Time delays exist in many engineering systems such as transportation, communication, process engineering and networked control systems. In recent years, time delay systems have attracted recurring interests from research community. Much of the effort has been focused on stability analysis and stabilization of time delay systems using the so-called Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional together with a linear matrix inequality approach, which provides an efficient numerical tool for handling systems with delays in state and/or inputs. Recently, some more interesting and fundamental development for systems with input/output (i/o) delays has been made using time domain or frequency domain approaches. These approaches lead to analytical solutions to time delay problems in terms of Riccati equations or spectral factorizations. This monograph presents simple analytical solutions to control and estimation problems for systems with multiple i/o delays via elementary tools such as projection. We propose a re-organized innovation analysis approach for delay systems and establish a duality between optimal control of systems with multiple input delays and smoothing estimation for delay free systems. These appealing new techniques are applied to solve control and estimation problems for systems with multiple i/o delays and state delays under both the H2 and H-infinity performance criteria.

Production engineering and management involve a series of planning and control activities in a production system. A production system can be as small as a shop with only one machine or as big as a global operation including many manufacturing plants, distribution centers, and retail locations in multiple continents. The product of a production system can also vary in complexity based on the material used, technology employed, etc. Every product, whether a pencil or an airplane, is produced in a system which depends on good management to be successful. Production management has been at the center of industrial engineering and management science disciplines since the industrial revolution. The tools and techniques of production management have been so successful that they have been adopted to various service industries, as well. The book is intended to be a valuable resource to undergraduate and graduate students interested in the applications of production management under fuzziness. The chapters represent all areas of production management and are organized to reflect the natural order of production management tasks. In all chapters, special attention is given to applicability and wherever possible, numerical examples are presented. While the reader is expected to have a fairly good understanding of the fuzzy logic, the book provides the necessary notation and preliminary knowledge needed in each chapter.