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  • Book cover of Splintering Urbanism

    This text offers an international and interdisciplinary analysis of the complex interactions between infrastructure networks and urban spaces. Drawing on case studies and examples from across the globe, it offers a statement on the urban condition.

  • Book cover of Telecommunications and the City

    Telecommunications and the City provides the first critical and state-of-the-art review of the relations between telecommunications and all aspects of city development and management. Drawing on a range of theoretical approaches and a wide body of recent research, the book addresses key academic and policy debates about technological change and the future of cities with a fresh perspective. Through this approach, the complex and crucial transformations underway in cities in which telecommunications have central importance are mapped out and illustrated. Key areas where telecommunications impinge on the economic, social, physical, enviromental and institutional development of cities are illustrated by using boxed extracts and wide range of case study examples from Europe, Japan and North America. Rejecting the extremes of optimism and pessimism in current hype about cities and telecommunications, Telecommunications and the City offers a sophisticated new perspective through which city-telecommunications relations can be understood.

  • Book cover of Urban Operating Systems

    A new wave of enthusiasm for smart cities, urban data, and the Internet of Things has created the impression that computation can solve almost any urban problem. Subjecting this claim to critical scrutiny, in this book, Andrés Luque-Ayala and Simon Marvin examine the cultural, historical, and contemporary contexts in which urban computational logics have emerged. They consider the rationalities and techniques that constitute emerging computational forms of urbanization, including work on digital urbanism, smart cities, and, more recently, platform urbanism. They explore the modest potentials and serious contradictions of reconfiguring urban life, city services, and urban-networked infrastructure through computational operating systems—an urban OS. Luque-Ayala and Marvin argue that in order to understand how digital technologies transform and shape the city, it is necessary to analyze the underlying computational logics themselves. Drawing on fieldwork that stretches across eleven cities in American, European, and Asian contexts, they investigate how digital products, services, and ecosystems are reshaping the ways in which the city is imagined, known, and governed. They discuss the reconstitution of the contemporary city through digital technologies, practices, and techniques, including data-driven governance, predictive analytics, digital mapping, urban sensing, digitally enabled control rooms, civic hacking, and open data narratives. Focusing on the relationship between the emerging operating systems of the city and their traditional infrastructures, they shed light on the political implications of using computer technologies to understand and generate new urban spaces and flows.

  • Book cover of Urban Infrastructure in Transition

    Achieving sustainable energy and resource use is vital if cities are to thrive or even function in the long term. Focusing on cities in the United Kingdom, Germany and Denmark, this book examines the mounting pressures for changes in the management style of utility services in Europe, pressures that stem from a wide range of sources such as liberalization and privatization of markets, tighter environmental standards, new economic incentives, competing technologies and changing consumption patterns. The authors show how changes in the management of utility services can contribute to achieving greater sustainability in urban regions. Whilst more efficient technology has a part to play, truly significant improvements in quality of life will be delivered only when the flow of material and energy through cities is focused on the goal of sustainability in each local context.

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  • Book cover of World Cities And Climate Change

    Relationships between cities and socio-technical energy, water, waste and transport networks are changing. Global Urbanism argues that this is not something that is happening naturally but is the product of social, economic, political and spatial processes and that these changes have profound implications for the mutual organisation of urbanism and resource flows and consequently for the shape of contemporary and future cities.

  • Book cover of Digital Communication over Fading Channels

    The four short years since Digital Communication over Fading Channels became an instant classic have seen a virtual explosion of significant new work on the subject, both by the authors and by numerous researchers around the world. Foremost among these is a great deal of progress in the area of transmit diversity and space-time coding and the associated multiple input-multiple output (MIMO) channel. This new edition gathers these and other results, previously scattered throughout numerous publications, into a single convenient and informative volume. Like its predecessor, this Second Edition discusses in detail coherent and noncoherent communication systems as well as a large variety of fading channel models typical of communication links found in the real world. Coverage includes single- and multichannel reception and, in the case of the latter, a large variety of diversity types. The moment generating function (MGF)-based approach for performance analysis, introduced by the authors in the first edition and referred to in literally hundreds of publications, still represents the backbone of the book's presentation. Important features of this new edition include: * An all-new, comprehensive chapter on transmit diversity, space-time coding, and the MIMO channel, focusing on performance evaluation * Coverage of new and improved diversity schemes * Performance analyses of previously known schemes in new and different fading scenarios * A new chapter on the outage probability of cellular mobile radio systems * A new chapter on the capacity of fading channels * And much more Digital Communication over Fading Channels, Second Edition is an indispensable resource for graduate students, researchers investigating these systems, and practicing engineers responsible for evaluating their performance.

  • Book cover of Low Carbon Nation?

    What does the transition to a Low Carbon Britain mean for the future development of cities and regions across the country? Does it reinforce existing ‘business as usual’ or create new transformational opportunities? Low Carbon Nation? takes an interdisciplinary approach to tackle this critical question, by looking across the different dimensions of technological, scientific, social and economic change within the diverse city and regional contexts of the UK. Hodson and Marvin set out how the transition to low carbon futures needs to be understood as a dual response to the wider financial and economic crisis and to critical ecological concerns about the implications of global climate change. The book develops a novel framework for understanding how the transition to low carbon is informed by historical legacies that shape the geographical, political and cultural dimensions of low carbon responses. Through a programme of research in Scotland, Wales, the North East of England, Greater London, and Greater Manchester, the authors set out different styles of low carbon urban and regional response. Through in-depth illustration of this in newly devolved nations, an old industrial region, a global city-region and in an entrepreneurial city, international lessons can be drawn about the limits and the unrealised opportunities of low carbon transition. This book is key reading for students on geography, economics, planning and social science degrees, as well as those studying sustainability in related contexts trying to understand the urban and regional politics of low carbon transition. It is also an essential resource for policymakers, public officials, elected representatives, environmentalists and business leaders concerned with shaping the direction and type of transition.

  • Book cover of Probability Distributions Involving Gaussian Random Variables

    This book is intended for use by students, academicians and practicing engineers who in the course of their daily study or research have need for the probability distributions and associated statistics of random variables that are themselves Gaussian or in various forms derived from them. The format of the book is primarily that of a handbook in that, for the most part, the results are merely presented in their final form without derivation or discussion. As such the reader must rely on the typographical accuracy of the documented expressions, which the author has taken great pains to assure. Also included at the end of the book are numerous curves illustrating the behavior of a variety of the probability measures presented in mathematical form. The author wishes to acknowledge his many colleagues in industry and academia for the encouragement and support they provided for this project without which it might never have gotten started. INTRODUCTION There are certain reference works that engineers and scientists alike find invaluable in their day-to-day work activities. Many of these reference volumes are of a generic nature such as tables of integrals, tables of series, handbooks of mathematical formulas and transforms, etc. (see Refs. 1, 2, 3, and 4 for example), whereas others are collections of technical papers and textbooks that directly relate to the individual's specific field of specialty.

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