You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Despite efforts to increase renewables, the global energy mix is still likely to be dominated by fossil-fuels in the foreseeable future, particularly gas for electricity and oil for land, air and sea transport. The reliance on depleting conventional oil and natural gas resources and the geographic distribution of these reserves can have geopolitical implications for energy importers and exporters. Global Energy Policy and Security examines the security of global and national energy supplies, as well as the sensitivity and impacts of sustainable energy policies which emphasize the various political, economic, technological, financial and social factors that influence energy supply, demand and...
This book is about learning from data using the Generalized Additive Models for Location, Scale and Shape (GAMLSS). GAMLSS extends the Generalized Linear Models (GLMs) and Generalized Additive Models (GAMs) to accommodate large complex datasets, which are increasingly prevalent. In particular, the GAMLSS statistical framework enables flexible regression and smoothing models to be fitted to the data. The GAMLSS model assumes that the response variable has any parametric (continuous, discrete or mixed) distribution which might be heavy- or light-tailed, and positively or negatively skewed. In addition, all the parameters of the distribution (location, scale, shape) can be modelled as linear or...
Presents problems and methodologies related to the syntax, semantics, and ambiguities of visual languages. Defines and formalizes visual languages for interactive computing, as well as visual notation interpretation.
This book is an up-to-date primer covering the most important subjects in energy economics, with particular attention paid to oil, natural gas, and nuclear energy, and without an excessive amount of mathematics. The first three survey chapters constitute an introductory (and mostly non-technical) short course in modern energy economics. Most of the technical analysis is taken up in the following four chapters, while the last chapter is a completely non-technical summation that can be read independent of the rest of the book. Written in a user-friendly tone, it is suitable as a textbook for undergraduate and/or graduate students, but most of the book should be accessible to anyone with a serious interest in energy economics.
This book constitutes the joint refereed proceedings of nine international workshops held as part of OTM 2005 in Agia Napa, Cyprus in October/November 2005.The 145 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 268 submissions. Topics addressed are agents, Web services and ontologies merging (AWeSOMe 2005), context-aware mobile systems (CAMS 2005), grid computing and its application to data analysis (GADA 2005), inter-organizational systems and interoperability of enterprise software and applications (MIOS+INTEROP 2005), object-role modeling (ORM 2005), a PHD symposium (PhDS 2005), semantic-based geographical information systems (SeBGIS 2005), Web semantics (SWWS 2005), and ontologies, semantics and e-learning (WOSE 2005).
The Essentials of Data Science: Knowledge Discovery Using R presents the concepts of data science through a hands-on approach using free and open source software. It systematically drives an accessible journey through data analysis and machine learning to discover and share knowledge from data. Building on over thirty years’ experience in teaching and practising data science, the author encourages a programming-by-example approach to ensure students and practitioners attune to the practise of data science while building their data skills. Proven frameworks are provided as reusable templates. Real world case studies then provide insight for the data scientist to swiftly adapt the templates to new tasks and datasets. The book begins by introducing data science. It then reviews R’s capabilities for analysing data by writing computer programs. These programs are developed and explained step by step. From analysing and visualising data, the framework moves on to tried and tested machine learning techniques for predictive modelling and knowledge discovery. Literate programming and a consistent style are a focus throughout the book.
This is a book about statistical distributions, their properties, and their application to modelling the dependence of the location, scale, and shape of the distribution of a response variable on explanatory variables. It will be especially useful to applied statisticians and data scientists in a wide range of application areas, and also to those interested in the theoretical properties of distributions. This book follows the earlier book ‘Flexible Regression and Smoothing: Using GAMLSS in R’, [Stasinopoulos et al., 2017], which focused on the GAMLSS model and software. GAMLSS (the Generalized Additive Model for Location, Scale, and Shape, [Rigby and Stasinopoulos, 2005]), is a regressio...
Hands-on Machine Learning with R provides a practical and applied approach to learning and developing intuition into today’s most popular machine learning methods. This book serves as a practitioner’s guide to the machine learning process and is meant to help the reader learn to apply the machine learning stack within R, which includes using various R packages such as glmnet, h2o, ranger, xgboost, keras, and others to effectively model and gain insight from their data. The book favors a hands-on approach, providing an intuitive understanding of machine learning concepts through concrete examples and just a little bit of theory. Throughout this book, the reader will be exposed to the enti...
It is a great pleasure to share with you the Springer LNCS proceedings of the Second World Summit on the Knowledge Society, WSKS 2009, organized by the Open - search Society, Ngo, http://www.open-knowledge-society.org, and held in Samaria Hotel, in the beautiful city of Chania in Crete, Greece, September 16–18, 2009. The 2nd World Summit on the Knowledge Society (WSKS 2009) was an inter- tional scientific event devoted to promoting dialogue on the main aspects of the knowledge society towards a better world for all. The multidimensional economic and social crisis of the last couple of years has brought to the fore the need to discuss in depth new policies and strategies for a human centric...
The purpose of this book is three-fold. The first purpose is to posit that the fundamental substance of the universe is energy, and that energy is required (consumed) for any material transformation, or information transmission. The labor theory of value, articulated by the physiocrats and elaborated by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, J.B. Say and Karl Marx was a rough first approximation of the value creation process, in the 17th and 18th centuries, but is now obsolete. Labor is now (mostly) performed by machines, not by humans (or animals). The second aim of the book is to argue that the economy is a living (open) system -- an “island of order” –that exists far from both thermodynamic and...