This book reports the best practices that companies established in Latin America are implementing in their manufacturing processes in order to generate high quality products and stay in the market. It lists the technologies, production and administrative philosophies that are being implemented, presenting a collection of successful cases of studies from Latin America. The book describes how the tools and techniques are being integrated, modified and combined to create new technical resources for assisting the decision making process for better economic performance in manufacturing companies. The efforts deployed for assisting the transformation of raw materials into products and services are described. The authors explain the main key success factors or drivers for success of each tool, technique or hybrid combination approach applied to solve manufacturing problems.

This unique text/reference presents a detailed review of noise removal for photographs and video. An international selection of expert contributors provide their insights into the fundamental challenges that remain in the field of denoising, examining how to properly model noise in real scenarios, how to tailor denoising algorithms to these models, and how to evaluate the results in a way that is consistent with perceived image quality. The book offers comprehensive coverage from problem formulation to the evaluation of denoising methods, from historical perspectives to state-of-the-art algorithms, and from fast real-time techniques that can be implemented in-camera to powerful and computationally intensive methods for off-line processing.

This book offers an analysis of China in its muddling through of financial reforms towards adopting a local real property tax. The research is designed to serve dual purposes. First, it is an effort to provide an independent perspective on an urgent public policy under consideration by the Chinese government and to reflect upon this policy’s process, which started over a dozen years ago yet is still in the fermenting stage with no sight of fruition. Additionally, this project is intended to share China’s experience with other developing and transitional countries, so they can discern the difficulties China has faced and understand what may entangle them in the modernization of their taxation systems.

French Louisiana music emerged from the bayous and prairies of Southwest Louisiana in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pioneered by impoverished Acadian and Afro-Caribbean settlers, the sound is marked by a high-pitched fiddle playing loud and fast above the bellow of a diatonic accordion. With lyrics about disaster and heartache sung cheerfully in a French dialect, the effect is dissonant and haunting. French Louisiana music was largely ignored in mainstream music culture, except by a handful of collectors, scholars, and commercial promoters who sought to popularize it.

The three-volume set LNCS 101164, 11165, and 11166 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 19th Pacific-Rim Conference on Multimedia, PCM 2018, held in Hefei, China, in September 2018.
The 209 regular papers presented together with 20 special session papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 452 submissions. The papers cover topics such as: multimedia content analysis; multimedia signal processing and communications; and multimedia applications and services.

The three-volume set LNCS 101164, 11165, and 11166 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 19th Pacific-Rim Conference on Multimedia, PCM 2018, held in Hefei, China, in September 2018.
The 209 regular papers presented together with 20 special session papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 452 submissions. The papers cover topics such as: multimedia content analysis; multimedia signal processing and communications; and multimedia applications and services.

The two-volume set LNCS 11185 + 11186 constitutes the proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Social Informatics, SocInfo 2018, held in Saint-Petersburg, Russia, in September 2018. The 30 full and 32 short papers presented in these proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from 110 submissions. They deal with the applications of methods of the social sciences in the study of socio-technical systems, and computer science methods to analyze complex social processes, as well as those that make use of social concepts in the design of information systems.

Dieses einführende Lehrbuch zeigt den gesamten Weg von der elementaren Ermittlung von Wahrscheinlichkeiten bis zur Erstellung theoretischer Wahrscheinlichkeitsverteilungen auf. Es erklärt außerdem detailliert den Ablauf des statistischen Schließens, ausgehend von der Stichprobenauswahl über die Stichprobenauswertung bis zur Parameterschätzung und Hypothesenprüfung.

Warum haben Führungspersonen Erfolg in ihrem Kontext? Was machen sie anders als die anderen? Das Buch bildet Macherinnen und Macher ab, die Herausforderungen meistern, etwas wagen und damit Wirkung erzielen. Sie haben eine Mission, eine Haltung, eine Meinung und setzen sie um. Das Buch gibt Einblick in ihren realen Alltag in Unternehmen, Start-ups und öffentlichen Institutionen.

Dieses Buch liefert eine Fülle an hilfreichen Informationen, die den Berufsaussteigern von Nutzen sein können, die Umbruchphase vom Arbeitsleben in den Ruhestand zu bewältigen. Es gibt in dieser Zeit erfreuliche Gestaltungsspielräume, aber es kann auch zu Krisen kommen. Zu den möglichen Schwierigkeiten in diesem Lebensabschnitt werden Lösungswege dargestellt, damit diese geschickt umgangen oder gelindert werden können.

This book discusses functional starch and its applications in food, focusing on starches with possible health benefits or novel applications.

This book describes recent trends in growth curve modelling research in various subject areas, both theoretical and applied. It explains and explores the growth curve model as a valuable tool for gaining insights into several research topics of interest to academics and practitioners alike. The book’s primary goal is to disseminate applications of the growth curve model to real-world problems, and to address related theoretical issues. The book will be of interest to a broad readership: for applied statisticians, it illustrates the importance of growth curve modelling as applied to actual field data; for more theoretically inclined statisticians, it highlights a number of theoretical issues that warrant further investigation.

This book discusses the basic theories and structures employed in handling the Central-SAR relationship under the “One Country, Two Systems” policy from the perspective of ruling by law. It also explores the fundamental principles and methods used in the division of powers between the central authorities and the SARs, and investigates the institutions responsible for handling the Central-SAR relationship and their practices. Further, it presents case studies since 1997 to help readers better understand the Central-SAR relationship. Lastly, the author raises some new questions for readers who want to further study this topic.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Verification and Evaluation of Computer and Communication Systems ( VECoS 2018) held at Grenoble, France, in September 2018.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Software Architecture, ECSA 2018, held in Madrid, Spain, in September 2018. The 17 full papers presented together with 7 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 96 submissions. They are organized in topical sections as follows: Self-Adaptive Architectures, IoT Architectures, Embedded and Cyber-Physical Systems, Microservices Architectures, Service-Oriented Architectures, Architectural Design Decisions, Software Architecture in Practice.