This book presents papers by eleven European scholars that explore the ambivalent representations of an American West that follows “no single trajectory, creating instead a series of lines and rhythms, always moving, crossing, and folding” (Neil Campbell). The papers explore the use of the American West as an ideal or a realistic setting in different cultural productions, ranging from music (“Sing-along Melodies of the West”) to film (“Western Images in Motion”) or comics (“Graphic Representations of the American West”), and including popular cultural fields like podcasts, fashion, and gastronomy (“Performing the West”).

'Birgitte Andersen revisits in a modern context the ideas of Kuznets on technological growth paths, but emphasises the structural variety in patenting where earlier authors focused on aggregate trends. This is an important contribution for scholars interested in the interface between the recent history of technology and evolutionary economics.' - John Cantwell, Rutgers University, US

No Permanent Waves boldly enters the ongoing debates over the utility of the "wave" metaphor for capturing the complex history of women's rights by offering fresh perspectives on the diverse movements that comprise U.S. feminism, past and present. Seventeen essays--both original and reprinted--address continuities, conflicts, and transformations among women's movements in the United States from the early nineteenth century through today. A respected group of contributors from diverse generations and backgrounds argue for new chronologies, more inclusive conceptualizations of feminist agendas and participants, and fuller engagements with contestations around particular issues and practices. Race, class, and sexuality are explored within histories of women's rights and feminism as well as the cultural and intellectual currents and social and political priorities that marked movements for women's advancement and liberation. These essays question whether the concept of waves surging and receding can fully capture the complexities of U.S. feminisms and suggest models for reimagining these histories from radio waves to hip-hop.

A collection of essays discussing the philosophy and foundations of quantum gravity. Written by leading philosophers and physicists in the field, chapters cover the important conceptual questions in the search for a quantum theory of gravity, and the current state of understanding among philosophers and physicists.

In this thesis, we present novel model predictive control (MPC) formulations based on a convex open-loop optimal control problem to tackle the problem setup of trajectory tracking and path following as well as the control of systems with unknown system dynamic. In particular, we consider the framework of relaxed barrier function based MPC (rbMPC). We extend the existing stability theory to the trajectory tracking and the path following problem. We establish important system theoretic properties like closed-loop stability and exact constraint satisfaction under suitable assumptions. Moreover, we evaluate the developed MPC algorithms in the area of automated driving in simulations as well as in a real-world driving scenario. Further, we consider the control of completely unknown systems based on online optimization. We divide the overall problem into the design of an estimation algorithm and a control algorithm. The control algorithm is a model-independent receding horizon control algorithm in which important system theoretic properties like convergence to the origin are guaranteed without the knowledge of the true system parameters. The estimation and control algorithm are combined together and convergence to the origin of the closed-loop system for fully unknown linear time-invariant discrete-time systems is shown.

The equations which we are going to study in these notes were first presented in 1963 by E. N. Lorenz. They define a three-dimensional system of ordinary differential equations that depends on three real positive parameters. As we vary the parameters, we change the behaviour of the flow determined by the equations. For some parameter values, numerically computed solutions of the equations oscillate, apparently forever, in the pseudo-random way we now call "chaotic"; this is the main reason for the immense amount of interest generated by the equations in the eighteen years since Lorenz first presented them. In addition, there are some parameter values for which we see "preturbulence", a phenomenon in which trajectories oscillate chaotically for long periods of time before finally settling down to stable stationary or stable periodic behaviour, others in which we see "intermittent chaos", where trajectories alternate be tween chaotic and apparently stable periodic behaviours, and yet others in which we see "noisy periodicity", where trajectories appear chaotic though they stay very close to a non-stable periodic orbit. Though the Lorenz equations were not much studied in the years be tween 1963 and 1975, the number of man, woman, and computer hours spent on them in recent years - since they came to the general attention of mathematicians and other researchers - must be truly immense.

The verbal categories of tense and aspect have been studied traditionally from the point of view of their reference to the timing and time-perspective of the speaker’s reported experience. They are universal categories both in terms of the semantic-functional domain they cover as well as in terms of their syntactic and morphological realization. Nevertheless, their treatment in contemporary linguistics is often restricted and narrow based, often involving mere recapitulatoin of traditional semantic and morphotactic studies. The present volume arises out of a symposium held at UCLA in May 1979, in which a group of linguists gathered to re-open the subject of tense-and-aspect from a variety of perspectives, including — in addition to the traditional semantics — also discourse-pragmatics, psycholinguistics, child language, Creolization and diachronic change. The languages discussed in this volume include Russian, Turkish, English, Indonesian, Ameslan, Eskimo, various Creoles, Mandari, Hebrew, Bantu and others. The emphasis throughout is not only on the description of language-specific tense-aspect phenomenon, but more on the search for universal categories and principles which underlie the cross-language variety of tense and aspect. In particular, many of the participants address themselves to the relationship between propositional-semantics and discourse-pragmatics, in so far as these two functional domains interact within tense-aspect systems.

This book provides the reader with some insight into the mathematical models of random processes with continuous time, stochastic differential equations and stochastic integrals. An advanced development of the mathematical methods of optimal statistical decisions, statistical sequential analysis, and informational estimation of risks, and new methods and solutions to the important problems of the theory of optimal control are presented. The new original results obtained by this author and published shortly in her numerous scientific-research papers are presented in a systematic way in this book. The book is intended for engineers, students, post-graduate students, and scientist researchers. The presentation of the material is accessible to engineers.