This complete, authoritative study of the growing discipline of archaeoastronomy examines the role of astronomy in antiquity. Professor Guilio Magli provides a clear, up-to-date survey of current thinking on the motives of the ancients for building fabulous and mysterious monuments all over our planet. Was it an attempt to reproduce the sky on Earth? To bring down the power of the stars to where they could see it, worship it, and use it? The connecting thread is astronomy. Magli uses astronomy as a key to understanding our ancestors’ way of thinking. It is a challenge he likes to call "predicting the past."

This book is a collection of research findings presented at 2023 2nd International Joint Conference on Frontiers of Energy and Environmental Engineering (CFEEE 2023), held in Sanya, China on September 1-3, 2023. The conference was co-organized by Hainan Institute of Zhejiang University, Sanya Global Energy Research Institute, South China University of Technology, IEEE PES China Satellite Technical Committee - Smart Buildings, Loadsand Customer Systems, and supported by CoreShare Academy Exchange Center. The book covers topics including Planning, Operation, Economics and Market in Modern Power Systems, Renewable Energy, Energy Storage, Advanced Power System Technologies, Electric Vehicle, Integrated Energy System, Energy Internet, Environmental Analysis and Monitoring, Energy Security and Clean Use, Environmental Pollution and Pollution Control. The contributions from leading experts in the field highlight innovative solutions and strategies developed to address pressing global challenges. It offers valuable insights into the latest technologies and future directions of the frontiers of energy and environmental engineering fields, making it a must-read for researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and students interested in these fields.

This book presents work collected through the Liquefaction Experiments and Analysis Projects (LEAP) in 2019 (LEAP-ASIA-2019) following the LEAP-UCD-2017 whose results have been published as a first volume. In addition to the research targets set in the previous one, such as the repeatability, variability, and sensitivity of lateral spreading on mildly sloping liquefiable sand, this volume includes research efforts to validate the generalized scaling law (hereafter “GSL”) for the identical prototype with the one employed in UCD-2017. In LEAP-ASIA-2019, 10 institutes around the world conducted 23 tests in total. It was the first multi-institutional attempts to investigate the validity of the generalized scaling law for the saturated sandy sloping deposit with wide range of initial conditions. The experimental data provided a unique basis for assessing the capabilities of six different simulation platforms for numerical simulation of soil liquefaction. The results of the experiments and the numerical simulations are presented and discussed in papers submitted by the project participants.

This book contains the best selected research papers presented at ICTCS 2020: Fifth International Conference on Information and Communication Technology for Competitive Strategies. The conference was held at Jaipur, Rajasthan, India, during 11–12 December 2020. The book covers state-of-the-art as well as emerging topics pertaining to ICT and effective strategies for its implementation for engineering and managerial applications. This book contains papers mainly focused on ICT for computation, algorithms and data analytics, and IT security.

This volume presents papers from the biennial International Laser Radar Conference (ILRC), the world’s leading event in the field of atmospheric research using lidar. With growing environmental concerns to address such as air quality deterioration, stratospheric ozone depletion, extreme weather events, and changing climate, the lidar technique has never been as critical as it is today to monitor, alert, and help solve current and emerging problems of this century. The 30th occurrence of the ILRC unveils many of the newest results and discoveries in atmospheric science and laser remote sensing technology. The 30th ILRC conference program included all contemporary ILRC themes, leveraging on both the past events’ legacy and the latest advances in lidar technologies and scientific discoveries, with participation by young scientists particularly encouraged.

This book proposes a new interdisciplinary understanding of urban design in China based on a study of the transformative effects of socio-spatial design and planning on communities and their governance.
This is framed by an examination of the social projects, spaces, and realities that have shaped three contexts critical to the understanding of urban design problems in China: the histories of “collective forms” and “collective spaces”, such as that of the urban danwei (work-unit), which inform current community building and planning; socio-spatial changes in urban and rural development; and disparate practices of “spatialised governmentality”.

This richly illustrated book serves as the ideal guide to the items that litter the world’s beaches. Forget sea shells and other fauna and flora. Here, you will find what a beachcomber is actually most likely to encounter these days: glass, plastic, wood, metal, paper, oil, and other sources of marine pollution!

This book focuses on the status quo and the latest information on the water-soil-agriculture nexus in MENA region countries. It presents several case studies and applications from e.g. Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan, while also sharing and discussing the latest findings.

This book is based on over 150 scientific papers about the Dogu’a Tembien district in Ethiopia. To reach a broader public of people interested in geosites and human-environment interactions, the authors here add a geoguide about this mountain district in Ethiopia(13°30’ N, 39°10’ E; upto 2850 m high) which shows a varied lithology.

This book is an introduction to a new branch of archaeology that scrutinises landscapes to find evidence of past human activity. Such evidence can be hard to detect at ground-level, but may be visible in remote sensing (RS) imagery from aerial platforms and satellites.

This book mainly provides a comprehensive treatment of the SiBCN ceramics and their matrix CMCs, aspect of theme content including material design and preparation, microstructural feature and evolutionary process, mechanical and thermophysical properties, resistance to oxidation, thermal shock and ablation, and the mechanisms of oxidation, ablation and crystallization of SiBCN-based materials. Furthermore, this book offers the necessary fundamentals to ensure a basic understanding of the structure and properties of metastable Si-based ceramics and their composites for undergraduate and postgraduate students in materials-related disciplines in higher education, as well as for scientific research, production development and technical management in the fields of metastable materials, mechanical alloying processing nonequilibrium structure, organic-inorganic composites, etc.