Information and communication technology has helped to provide a more effective network infrastructure and development platform for logistics and service operations. In order to meet the needs of consumers and particularly to promote low-carbon development processes, new types of services will also emerge. LISS 2013 is a prime international forum for both researchers and industry practitioners to exchange the latest fundamental advances in the state of the art and practice of logistics, informatics, service operations and service science. Experts and researchers from related fields will discuss current issues and future development opportunities discuss and analyze developing trends and exchange the latest research and academic thought. The theme of the conference is Logistics and Service Science based on the Internet of Things.

In the spring of 2010, Toronto lost one of its most important queer civic heroes. Weaving together interviews and stories, Army of Lovers is a biography of Will Munro and a document of a galvanizing period when various subcultures — the queer community, the art scene, the independent music universe, the grassroots activist enclaves — came together.

Information and communication technology has helped to provide a more effective network infrastructure and development platform for logistics and service operations. In order to meet the needs of consumers, and particularly to promote low-carbon development processes, new types of services will also emerge. LISS 2012 is a prime international forum for both researchers and industry practitioners to exchange the latest fundamental advances in the state of the art and practice of logistics, informatics, service operations and service science. Experts and researchers from related fields will discuss current issues and future development opportunities, discuss and analyze developing trends and exchange the latest research and academic thought. The theme of the conference is Logistics and Service Science based on the Internet of Things.

Blurring is almost an omnipresent effect on natural images. The main causes of blurring in images include: (a) the existence of objects at different depths within the scene which is known as defocus blur; (b) blurring due to motion either of objects in the scene or the imaging device; and (c) blurring due to atmospheric turbulence. Automatic estimation of spatially varying sharpness/blurriness has several applications including depth estimation, image quality assessment, information retrieval, image restoration, among others. There are some cases in which blur is intentionally introduced or enhanced; for example, in artistic photography and cinematography in which blur is intentionally introduced to emphasize a certain image region. Bokeh is a technique that introduces defocus blur with aesthetic purposes. Additionally, in trending applications like augmented and virtual reality usually, blur is introduced in order to provide/enhance depth perception. Digital images and videos are produced every day in astonishing amounts and the demand for higher quality is constantly rising which creates a need for advanced image quality assessment. Additionally, image quality assessment is important for the performance of image processing algorithms. It has been determined that image noise and artifacts can affect the performance of algorithms such as face detection and recognition, image saliency detection, and video target tracking. Therefore, image quality assessment (IQA) has been a topic of intense research in the fields of image processing and computer vision. Since humans are the end consumers of multimedia signals, subjective quality metrics provide the most reliable results; however, their cost in addition to time requirements makes them unfeasible for practical applications. Thus, objective quality metrics are usually preferred.

Software development is hard, but creating good software is even harder, especially if your main job is something other than developing software. Engineer Your Software! opens the world of software engineering, weaving engineering techniques and measurement into software development activities. Focusing on architecture and design, Engineer Your Software! claims that no matter how you write software, design and engineering matter and can be applied at any point in the process. Engineer Your Software! provides advice, patterns, design criteria, measures, and techniques that will help you get it right the first time. Engineer Your Software! also provides solutions to many vexing issues that developers run into time and time again. Developed over 40 years of creating large software applications, these lessons are sprinkled with real-world examples from actual software projects. Along the way, the author describes common design principles and design patterns that can make life a lot easier for anyone tasked with writing anything from a simple script to the largest enterprise-scale systems.

Drawing on international comparisons of data on happiness, this book offers both general and academic audiences a simple, deep, and honest answer to the timeless question: "What makes people happy"? The conventional recipe for happiness has long included money, marriage, and parenthood as basic ingredients. What research is telling us, however, is that these elements don't relate to happiness in quite the way we might expect them to. Redistributing Happiness: How Social Policies Shape Life Satisfaction explores the factors that determine "life satisfaction" and demonstrate how an individual's happiness is largely shaped by social context—by where they live and local policies, norms and attitudes about religious beliefs, economic and political security, income redistribution, and more. The book begins with a review of the contributions of other disciplines—such as economics, psychology, and political science—to common explanations of the sources of happiness. Next, the authors offer an international comparison based on their own research on what makes people happy, taking into consideration factors such as marriage, children, money, and job status. Most importantly, special attention is paid to how social policies and social context directly affect people's happiness. All readers high school age and up will enjoy the book's comprehensive—and fascinating—answer to the happiness question because of how the authors connect an individual's experience to the broader environment of the social system and situation in which that person resides.

Inspired by the website that the New York Times hailed as "redefining mourning," this book is a fresh and irreverent examination into navigating grief and resilience in the age of social media, offering comfort and community for coping with the mess of loss through candid original essays from a variety of voices, accompanied by gorgeous two-color illustrations and wry infographics. At a time when we mourn public figures and national tragedies with hashtags, where intimate posts about loss go viral and we receive automated birthday reminders for dead friends, it’s clear we are navigating new terrain without a road map. Let’s face it: most of us have always had a difficult time talking about death and sharing our grief. We’re awkward and uncertain; we avoid, ignore, or even deny feelings of sadness; we offer platitudes; we send sympathy bouquets whittled out of fruit. Enter Rebecca Soffer and Gabrielle Birkner, who can help us do better. Each having lost parents as young adults, they co-founded Modern Loss, responding to a need to change the dialogue around the messy experience of grief. Now, in this wise and often funny book, they offer the insights of the Modern Loss community to help us cry, laugh, grieve, identify, and—above all—empathize. Soffer and Birkner, along with forty guest contributors including Lucy Kalanithi, singer Amanda Palmer, and CNN’s Brian Stelter, reveal their own stories on a wide range of topics including triggers, sex, secrets, and inheritance. Accompanied by beautiful hand-drawn illustrations and witty "how to" cartoons, each contribution provides a unique perspective on loss as well as a remarkable life-affirming message. Brutally honest and inspiring, Modern Loss invites us to talk intimately and humorously about grief, helping us confront the humanity (and mortality) we all share. Beginners welcome.

If you want to land your kids in therapy, then by all means, give them everything under the sun. In his work as a family psychologist, Michael Carr-Gregg has noticed a worrying trend in our modern parenting styles, which sees kids running riot and parents running for cover. In our desire to give our kids the best, we may have given them way too much, and overlooked the importance of setting boundaries. He believes it's a recipe for disaster. In Strictly Parenting, Michael asks parents to take a good hard look at the way they are parenting - to toughen up and stop trying to be their kids' best friends. He instead offers practical evidence-based solutions on how to take back the reins and start making the most of the precious family years. With a user-friendly A-Z guide covering all the tricky issues that parents encounter over the years - everything from birthday parties and bedtimes to sex and drugs - this is an invaluable and very timely resource for parents of all school-aged kids.

This book offers a unique and scholarly perspective on a little-studied subject: maritime crime and policing. The seas and oceans cover 70 percent of the earth’s surface and 90 percent of world trade by volume travels by sea. Furthermore, the refugee crisis has produced an inflow of people attempting to find a better life, particularly in Northwest Europe and the UK, which has had an impact on the maritime domains of European ports. While there has been attention paid to the role of maritime policing by scholars in maritime security studies, little attention has been paid by criminologists and policing studies scholars. This book aims to fill this gap. Bringing together a range of international scholars, this book covers a variety of topics pertinent to maritime crime and its policing, such as fraud, piracy and armed robbery at sea, illegal and unregulated fishing, smuggling, people trafficking, illegal immigration, illegal dumping and pollution, arms trafficking, terrorism, and cargo theft. It brings together new perspectives on several key criminological themes such as transnational organised crime, criminalisation, and securitisation and provides a bold new direction for the landlocked discipline of criminology and policing studies. An accessible and compelling read, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of criminology, policing, sociology, politics, migration studies, and all those interested in the policing of the sea.

This book presents a novel computation of the topographic LS factor of the USLE model to estimate spatial soil erosion. In developing countries, soil erosion is one of the main concerns as it adversely affects agriculture and reduces food production. Therefore, the author presents a particularly relevant approach, as he demonstrates how the C++ programming allows us to identify important erosion stages like detachment and deposition. He does this by assessing the annual rate of soil erosion from the Shakkar River watershed in India using distributed information and applying RS and GIS techniques. He also discusses different approaches that have been proposed to work out the influence of topography on erosion. Simulated and observed data of sediment loss are compared for the period 1992 to 2006.This book provides an easy-to-understand basic piece of soil erosion and hydrological research and reaches out to young researchers and students at the graduate and undergraduate level as well as applicants of soil erosion models.