This open access book is the first to systematically introduce the principles of urban informatics and its application to every aspect of the city that involves its functioning, control, management, and future planning. It introduces new models and tools being developed to understand and implement these technologies that enable cities to function more efficiently – to become ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’. The smart city has quickly emerged as computers have become ever smaller to the point where they can be embedded into the very fabric of the city, as well as being central to new ways in which the population can communicate and act. When cities are wired in this way, they have the potential to become sentient and responsive, generating massive streams of ‘big’ data in real time as well as providing immense opportunities for extracting new forms of urban data through crowdsourcing. This book offers a comprehensive review of the methods that form the core of urban informatics from various kinds of urban remote sensing to new approaches to machine learning and statistical modelling. It provides a detailed technical introduction to the wide array of tools information scientists need to develop the key urban analytics that are fundamental to learning about the smart city, and it outlines ways in which these tools can be used to inform design and policy so that cities can become more efficient with a greater concern for environment and equity.

Using a wealth of international case studies and photos, Ecotourism: An Introduction provides an accessible and comprehensive introduction to the key foundations, concepts and issues related to Ecotourism, the fasted growing segment of the global tourism industry. Among the topics covered are: * the foundations of ecotourism * tourism and ecotourism policy * the economics, marketing and management of ecotourism * the social and ecological impacts of tourism * ecotourism and development * the role of ethics in ecotourism The book includes case studies from Scotland, Austria, the USA, Canada, Mexico and Australia.

In the last several years, much has been written about growing economic challenges, increasing income inequality, and political polarization in the United States. Addressing these new realities in America's metropolitan regions, this book argues that a few lessons are emerging: first, inequity is bad for economic growth; second, bringing together the concerns of equity and growth requires concerted local action; and third, the fundamental building block for doing this is the creation of diverse and dynamic epistemic (or knowledge) communities, which help to overcome political polarization and to address the challenges of economic restructuring and social divides.

TRB’s National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Report 716: Travel Demand Forecasting: Parameters and Techniques provides guidelines on travel demand forecasting procedures and their application for helping to solve common transportation problems.

Sequence stratigraphy represents a new paradigm in geology. The principal hypothesis is that stratigraphie successions may be subdivided into discrete sequences bounded by widespread unconformities. There are two parts to this hypothesis. First, it suggests that the driving forces which generate sequences and their bounding unconformities also generate predietable three-dimensional stratigraphies. In re cent years stratigraphie research guided by sequence models has brought about fundamental im provements in our understanding of stratigraphie processes and the controls of basin architecture. Sequence models have provided a powerful framework for mapping and numerieal modeling, enabling the science of stratigraphy to advance with rapid strides. This research has demonstrated the importance of a wide range of processes for the generation of cyclie sequences, including eustasy, tectonics, and orbital forcing of climate change. The main objective of this book is to document the sequence record and to discuss our current state of knowledge about sequence-generating processes.

Complex Social Networks is a newly emerging (hot) topic with applications in a variety of domains, such as communication networks, engineering networks, social networks, and biological networks. In the last decade, there has been an explosive growth of research on complex real-world networks, a theme that is becoming pervasive in many disciplines, ranging from mathematics and computer science to the social and biological sciences. Optimization of complex communication networks requires a deep understanding of the interplay between the dynamics of the physical network and the information dynamics within the network. Although there are a few books addressing social networks or complex networks, none of them has specially focused on the optimization perspective of studying these networks. This book provides the basic theory of complex networks with several new mathematical approaches and optimization techniques to design and analyze dynamic complex networks. A wide range of applications and optimization problems derived from research areas such as cellular and molecular chemistry, operations research, brain physiology, epidemiology, and ecology.