Place of publication from publisher's website.

Imagine waking up to the gentle noises of the city, and moving through your day with complete confidence that you will get where you need to go quickly and efficiently. Soft City is about ease and comfort, where density has a human dimension, adapting to our ever-changing needs, nurturing relationships, and accommodating the pleasures of everyday life. How do we move from the current reality in most cites—separated uses and lengthy commutes in single-occupancy vehicles that drain human, environmental, and community resources—to support a soft city approach? In Soft City David Sim, partner and creative director at Gehl, shows how this is possible, presenting ideas and graphic examples from around the globe. He draws from his vast design experience to make a case for a dense and diverse built environment at a human scale, which he presents through a series of observations of older and newer places, and a range of simple built phenomena, some traditional and some totally new inventions. Sim shows that increasing density is not enough. The soft city must consider the organization and layout of the built environment for more fluid movement and comfort, a diversity of building types, and thoughtful design to ensure a sustainable urban environment and society. Soft City begins with the big ideas of happiness and quality of life, and then shows how they are tied to the way we live. The heart of the book is highly visual and shows the building blocks for neighborhoods: building types and their organization and orientation; how we can get along as we get around a city; and living with the weather. As every citizen deals with the reality of a changing climate, Soft City explores how the built environment can adapt and respond. Soft City offers inspiration, ideas, and guidance for anyone interested in city building. Sim shows how to make any city more efficient, more livable, and better connected to the environment.

Eric Carle’s classic story of the life cycle of a flower is told through the adventures of a tiny seed. This mini-book includes a piece of detachable seed-embedded paper housed on the inside front cover. Readers can plant the entire piece of paper and watch as their very own tiny seeds grow into beautiful wildflowers.

The book covers the theory and application of soft computing techniques namely; neural networks, fuzzy logic, evolutionary computing and complex systems. The book is a collection of selected, edited papers presented at the 4th conference RACS Recent Advances in Soft Computing held in Nottingham, December 2002. It provides the latest developments in applications of soft computing techniques as well as advances in theoretical aspects of soft computing.

The vigorous development of the internet and other information technologies have significantly expanded the amount and variety of sources of information available on decision making. This book presents the current trends of soft computing applications to the fields of measurements and information acquisition. Main topics are the production and presentation of information including multimedia, virtual environment, and computer animation as well as the improvement of decisions made on the basis of this information in various applications ranging from engineering to business. In order to make high-quality decisions, one has to fuse information of different kinds from a variety of sources with differing degrees of reliability and uncertainty. The necessity to use intelligent methodologies in the analysis of such systems is demonstrated as well as the inspiring relation of computational intelligence to its natural counterpart. This book includes several contributions demonstrating a further movement towards the interdisciplinary collaboration of the biological and computer sciences with examples from biology and robotics.

In The Power of Soft, Hilary Gallo Reveals a more effective way to get what you want—both in and out of the board room. Hilary spent years negotiating multi-million pound deals as a lawyer and began to notice that tough, bullying behaviour rarely got him or his clients the outcomes they were looking for. Over the years he began to develop a new way of approaching negotiations—the power of soft—and soon found his work and home life getting richer. In life and in business we often mask our inner vulnerability by adopting a hard, unwavering and ultimately ineffective approach. Instead, Gallo proves that our true power stems from drawing strength from our mental core and balancing that inner strength with a softer, more approachable front. He teaches us to see reality more clearly by looking past our judgments and preconceptions and to focus our energy on what we actually need to achieve. What started as a negotiation tactic soon became a philosophy for life. Whether closing a business deal or trying to get your kids to bed, The Power of Soft is an elegant, holistic and most of all effective method to get what you need and still be kind.

This book contains select contributions presented at the International Conference on Nonlinear Applied Analysis and Optimization (ICNAAO-2021), held at the Department of Mathematics Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi, India, from 21–23 December 2021. The book discusses topics in the areas of nonlinear analysis, fixed point theory, dynamical systems, optimization, fractals, applications to differential/integral equations, signal and image processing, and soft computing, and exposes the young talents with the newer dimensions in these areas with their practical approaches and to tackle the real-life problems in engineering, medical and social sciences. Scientists from the U.S.A., Austria, France, Mexico, Romania, and India have contributed their research. All the submissions are peer reviewed by experts in their fields.