Structural operational semantics is a simple, yet powerful mathematical theory for describing the behaviour of programs in an implementation-independent manner. This book provides a self-contained introduction to structural operational semantics, featuring semantic definitions using big-step and small-step semantics of many standard programming language constructs, including control structures, structured declarations and objects, parameter mechanisms and procedural abstraction, concurrency, nondeterminism and the features of functional programming languages. Along the way, the text introduces and applies the relevant proof techniques, including forms of induction and notions of semantic equivalence (including bisimilarity). Thoroughly class-tested, this book has evolved from lecture notes used by the author over a 10-year period at Aalborg University to teach undergraduate and graduate students. The result is a thorough introduction that makes the subject clear to students and computing professionals without sacrificing its rigour. No experience with any specific programming language is required.

The first volume to address the study of evolutionary transitions in plants, Major Evolutionary Transitions in Flowering Plant Reproduction brings together compelling work from the three areas of significant innovation in plant biology: evolution and adaptation in flowers and pollination, mating patterns and gender strategies, and asexual reproduction and polyploidy. Spencer C. H. Barrett assembles here a distinguished group of authors who address evolutionary transitions using comparative and phylogenetic approaches, the tools of genomics, population genetics, and theoretical modeling, and through studies in development and field experiments in ecology. With special focus on evolutionary transitions and shifts in reproductive characters—key elements of biological diversification and research in evolutionary biology—Major Evolutionary Transitions in Flowering Plant Reproduction is the most up-to-date treatment of a fast-moving area of evolutionary biology and ecology.

Wood-pastures are important elements of European cultural identity and have an exceptional ecological value, yet they are in decline all over Europe. The structure of wood-pastures is strongly influenced by grazing and multiple other land uses and by local and regional environmental conditions. This book examines the diverse expressions of wood-pastures across Europe. It provides a new perspective, using a social-ecological framework to explore social and ecological values, governing institutions, threats and conservation approaches. It explores the major drivers of decline, which are shown to be related to accelerated cultural, institutional and developmental changes occurring across Europe over the past century. Case studies are included from North-Western, Southern, and Eastern Europe. Written by renowned scholars and conservationists, the book contributes to developing better, locally adapted conservation policies and management approaches for wood-pastures.

Forest for the Trees is a stunning documentary project that looks at the lives of the tree planters of British Columbia and the stunning landscape in which they work.

“This book provides a recipe for the practical application of technology and is one of the first instances where the tools and technologies that allow for the implementation of solutions to solve specific problems are actually outlined.” --Dr. Krishna Nathan, Vice President, IBM Research This ground-breaking book integrates converging views of e-business processes and offers ways to manage their inherent risks with advanced modeling techniques. Contributors from leading academic and business organizations explore state-of-the-art adaptive risk analysis systems that support business processes in project portfolio management, operations management, supply chain management, inventory control, data mining for customer relationship management, information technology security, finance, e-banking, and more. Today’s new business environments are characterized by increasing sources of uncertainty and variability which challenge current decision-making processes.Handbook of Integrated Risk Management for E-Business: Measuring, Modeling, and Managing Risk provides a roadmap for identifying and mitigating the primary risks associated with each critical e-business process. It also shows you how to transform your processes by empowering your decision-making systems and how to design appropriate risk management systems for decision support.

"This superbly illustrated book traces van Gogh's development as a painter of trees, from the distinctive pollard willows of his home province of North Brabant to the cypress and olive trees of Provence to the parks of Paris. Ralph Skea discusses van Gogh's early life in the Netherlands; his first tree studies in the Dutch landscape; his paintings of trees within townscapes; his particular fascination with orchards, which led to some of his best-known and most loved paintings; and the works he completed in rural Provence"--Amazon.com.

"This book focuses on methods widely used in modeling gene networks including structure discovery, learning, and optimization"--Provided by publisher.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Bioinformatics Research and Applications, ISBRA 2011, held in Changsha, China, in May 2011. The 36 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 92 submissions. Topics presented span all areas of bioinformatics and computational biology, including the development of experimental or commercial systems.

The book focuses on system dependability modeling and calculation, considering the impact of s-dependency and uncertainty. The best suited approaches for practical system dependability modeling and calculation, (1) the minimal cut approach, (2) the Markov process approach, and (3) the Markov minimal cut approach as a combination of (1) and (2) are described in detail and applied to several examples. The stringently used Boolean logic during the whole development process of the approaches is the key for the combination of the approaches on a common basis. For large and complex systems, efficient approximation approaches, e.g. the probable Markov path approach, have been developed, which can take into account s-dependencies be-tween components of complex system structures. A comprehensive analysis of aleatory uncertainty (due to randomness) and epistemic uncertainty (due to lack of knowledge), and their combination, developed on the basis of basic reliability indices and evaluated with the Monte Carlo simulation method, has been carried out. The uncertainty impact on system dependability is investigated and discussed using several examples with different levels of difficulty. The applications cover a wide variety of large and complex (real-world) systems. Actual state-of-the-art definitions of terms of the IEC 60050-192:2015 standard, as well as the dependability indices, are used uniformly in all six chapters of the book.

Tackling one of the most difficult and delicate of the evolutionary questions, this challenging book summarizes the more recent results in phylogenetics and developmental biology that address the evolution of key innovations in metazoans. Divided into three sections, the first considers the phylogenetic issues involving this area of the tree of lif