Springer S Progress

Here comes Lucien Springer. Age: forty-seven. Still handsome though muchly vodka'd novelist, currently abashed by acute creative dysfunction. Sole preoccupation amid these artistic doldrums: pursuit of fair women. Springer is a randy incorrigible who is guided by only one inflexible precept: no protracted affairs. And thus he has slyly sustained eighteen years of marriage. Enter, then, Jessica Cornford. Age: almost half of Lucien's. Lush of body and roguish of mind. Whereupon what begins as bawdy interlude becomes perhaps the most untidy extramarital lech in literature. Rabelaisian yet uncannily wise, both ribald and bittersweet, "Springer's Progress" is that rarest of gifts, a mature love story. It is an also exuberant linguistic romp, a novel saturated with irrepressible wordplay and outrageous literary thieveries. Contemplating his own work, Lucien Springer modestly restricts his ambition to "a phrase or three worth some lonely pretty girl's midnight underlining." For the discerning reader, David Markson has contrived a hundred of them.

​Engineers love to build “things” and have an innate sense of wanting to help society. However, these desires are often not connected or developed through reflections on the complexities of philosophy, biology, economics, politics, environment, and culture. To guide future efforts and to best bring about human flourishment and a just world, Engineering and Philosophy: Reimagining Technology and Progress brings together practitioners and scholars to inspire deeper conversations on the nature and varieties of engineering. The perspectives in this book are an act of reimagination: how does engineering serve society, and in a vital sense, how should it.

This book presents recent advances made in materials science and engineering within Russian academia, particularly groups working in the Ural Federal University District. Topics explored in this volume include structure formation analysis of complicated alloys, non-ferrous metals metallurgy, composite composed materials science, and high-pressure treatment of metals and alloys. The finding discussed in this volume are to critical to multiple industries including manufacturing, structural materials, oil and gas, coatings, and metal fabrication.

This book is an exposition of recent progress on the Donaldson–Thomas (DT) theory. The DT invariant was introduced by R. Thomas in 1998 as a virtual counting of stable coherent sheaves on Calabi–Yau 3-folds. Later, it turned out that the DT invariants have many interesting properties and appear in several contexts such as the Gromov–Witten/Donaldson–Thomas conjecture on curve-counting theories, wall-crossing in derived categories with respect to Bridgeland stability conditions, BPS state counting in string theory, and others. Recently, a deeper structure of the moduli spaces of coherent sheaves on Calabi–Yau 3-folds was found through derived algebraic geometry. These moduli spaces admit shifted symplectic structures and the associated d-critical structures, which lead to refined versions of DT invariants such as cohomological DT invariants. The idea of cohomological DT invariants led to a mathematical definition of the Gopakumar–Vafa invariant, which was first proposed by Gopakumar–Vafa in 1998, but its precise mathematical definition has not been available until recently. This book surveys the recent progress on DT invariants and related topics, with a focus on applications to curve-counting theories.

Heparins remain amongst the most commonly used drugs in clinical practice. Almost 100 years have passed since the initial discovery of this complex substance and, during this time, understanding of the nature and uses of heparin and related molecules has grown dramatically. The aim of this volume is to summarise the developments that have led to the current status of both heparins as drugs and the field of heparin research, with a focus on the particularly rapid progress that has been made over the past three decades. Individual sections are dedicated to the nature of heparin as a biological molecule, the current approaches and techniques that are used to ensure the safety and reliability of heparin as a medicine, the clinical pharmacology of heparin as an anticoagulant drug, effects and potential applications of heparin aside of those involving haemostasis and, finally, the nature and potential uses of heparin-like materials from both natural and synthetic sources.

A top priority in climate research is obtaining broad-extent and long-term data to support analyses of historical patterns and trends, and for model development and evaluation. Along with directly measured climate data from the present and recent past, it is important to obtain estimates of long past climate variations spanning multiple centuries and millennia. These longer time perspectives are needed for assessing the unusualness of recent climate changes, as well as for providing insight on the range, variation and overall dynamics of the climate system over time spans exceeding available records from instruments, such as rain gauges and thermometers. Tree rings have become increasingly valuable in providing this long-term information because extensive data networks have been developed in temperate and boreal zones of the Earth, and quantitative methods for analyzing these data have advanced. Tree rings are among the most useful paleoclimate information sources available because they provide a high degree of chronological accuracy, high replication, and extensive spatial coverage spanning recent centuries. With the expansion and extension of tree-ring data and analytical capacity new climatic insights from tree rings are being used in a variety of applications, including for interpretation of past changes in ecosystems and human societies. This volume presents an overview of the current state of dendroclimatology, its contributions over the last 30 years, and its future potential. The material included is useful not only to those who generate tree-ring records of past climate-dendroclimatologists, but also to users of their results-climatologists, hydrologists, ecologists and archeologists. ‘With the pressing climatic questions of the 21st century demanding a deeper understanding of the climate system and our impact upon it, this thoughtful volume comes at critical moment. It will be of fundamental importance in not only guiding researchers, but in educating scientists and the interested lay person on the both incredible power and potential pitfalls of reconstructing climate using tree-ring analysis.’, Glen M. MacDonald, UCLA Institute of the Environment, CA, USA ‘This is an up-to-date treatment of all branches of tree-ring science, by the world’s experts in the field, reminding us that tree rings are the most important source of proxy data on climate change. Should be read by all budding dendrochronology scientists.’, Alan Robock, Rutgers University, NJ, USA

Shipping is the world’s oldest sharing economy and is conducted in a self-organizing manner. Shipping is capital, energy, and information intensive, and with the growing impact of digitalization and climate change, there is a need to rethink the management and operations of this critical global industry - assisted in no small way by maritime informatics. Building upon the recently published inaugural book Maritime Informatics by Springer, this book will address some of the most recent practical developments and experiences, particularly from a global perspective. The focus of the book is to address contemporary movements to tackle global concerns and to complement Maritime Informatics.

This compendium introduces game theory and gamification to a number of different domains and describes their professional application in information systems. It explains how playful functions can be implemented in various contexts and highlights a range of concrete scenarios planned and developed for several large corporations. In its first part the book presents the fundamentals, concepts and theories of gamification. This is followed by separate application-oriented sections – each containing several cases – that focus on the use of gamification in customer management, innovation management, teaching and learning, mobile applications and as an element of virtual worlds. The book offers a valuable resource for readers looking for inspiration and guidance in finding a practical approach to gamification.