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Fractional-order Systems and Controls details the use of fractional calculus in the description and modeling of systems, and in a range of control design and practical applications. It is largely self-contained, covering the fundamentals of fractional calculus together with some analytical and numerical techniques and providing MATLAB® codes for the simulation of fractional-order control (FOC) systems. Many different FOC schemes are presented for control and dynamic systems problems. Practical material relating to a wide variety of applications is also provided. All the control schemes and applications are presented in the monograph with either system simulation results or real experimental results, or both. Fractional-order Systems and Controls provides readers with a basic understanding of FOC concepts and methods, so they can extend their use of FOC in other industrial system applications, thereby expanding their range of disciplines by exploiting this versatile new set of control techniques.

La obra, compuesta de dos tomos, fue considerada una obra folletinesca (subgénero, que en Francia se conoció como feulleton-roman, en boga entre finales del siglo XIX y principios del siglo XX) probablemente para restarle importancia a la durísima crítica contra la Compañía de Jesús que esta obra contiene. Blasco Ibañez la escribió en su juventud, y más tarde la repudiaría, al no incluirla en sus Obras completas. Blasco Ibáñez dedicó gran parte de su tiempo al estudio de la Iglesia y su funcionamiento. Éste es el germen de la novela, en la cual se narra la historia de los Baselga, una familia noble de la España de comienzos del siglo XIX, íntimamente relacionada con los Jesuitas. En la novela, la Compañía de Jesús teje con infinita paciencia una tela de araña contra esta acaudalada familia con el fín de apropiarse de su fortuna. A lo largo de toda la novela se trata esta relación, analizando el comportamiento y funcionamiento de la Compañía de Jesús de una forma extensa.

By the 1780s in the city of Barcelona alone, more than 150 factories shipped calicoes to every major city in Spain and across the Atlantic. This book narrates the lives of families on both sides of the Atlantic who profited from the craze for calicoes, and in doing so helped the Spanish empire to flourish in the eighteenth century.

Technological Innovation: Strategy and Management offers a comprehensive analysis of technological innovation management from a strategic and integrated approach. The book covers the most relevant topics on the discipline of Innovation Management, such as the conceptual framework for innovation and technology, the study of innovation sources, the strategic management of innovation and technology, innovation enablers (organization, leadership, culture, human capital, creativity and learning), innovation outcomes (product and process innovation), and the evaluation and control of the innovation process. It particularly highlights the role of innovation and technology to build sustainable competitive advantages. The book references the most relevant and updated research work in this realm. This can be helpful for researchers, scholars and practitioners who want to have an updated guide on the state-of-the-art technological innovation management.

Addressing the open problem of engineering normative open systems using the multi-agent paradigm, normative open systems are explained as systems in which heterogeneous and autonomous entities and institutions coexist in a complex social and legal framework that can evolve to address the different and often conflicting objectives of the many stakeholders involved. Presenting a software engineering approach which covers both the analysis and design of these kinds of systems, and which deals with the open issues in the area, ROMAS (Regulated Open Multi-Agent Systems) defines a specific multi-agent architecture, meta-model, methodology and CASE tool. This CASE tool is based on Model-Driven technology and integrates the graphical design with the formal verification of some properties of these systems by means of model checking techniques. Utilizing tables to enhance reader insights into the most important requirements for designing normative open multi-agent systems, the book also provides a detailed and easy to understand description of the ROMAS approach and the advantages of using ROMAS. This method is illustrated with case studies, in which the reader may develop a comprehensive understanding of applying ROMAS to a given problem. The case studies are presented with illustrations of the developments. Reading this book will help readers to understand the increasing demand for normative open systems and their development requirements; understand how multi-agent systems approaches can be used to deal with the development of systems of this kind; to learn an easy to use and complete engineering method for large-scale and complex normative systems and to recognize how Model-Driven technology can be used to integrate the analysis, design, verification and implementation of multi-agent systems.

This book explores the popular and elite debates over the creation of a two-sex model of human bodies in eighteenth-century Spain.

In The Promise of the Foreign, Vicente L. Rafael argues that translation was key to the emergence of Filipino nationalism in the nineteenth century. Acts of translation entailed technics from which issued the promise of nationhood. Such a promise consisted of revising the heterogeneous and violent origins of the nation by mediating one’s encounter with things foreign while preserving their strangeness. Rafael examines the workings of the foreign in the Filipinos’ fascination with Castilian, the language of the Spanish colonizers. In Castilian, Filipino nationalists saw the possibility of arriving at a lingua franca with which to overcome linguistic, regional, and class differences. Yet they were also keenly aware of the social limits and political hazards of this linguistic fantasy. Through close readings of nationalist newspapers and novels, the vernacular theater, and accounts of the 1896 anticolonial revolution, Rafael traces the deep ambivalence with which elite nationalists and lower-class Filipinos alike regarded Castilian. The widespread belief in the potency of Castilian meant that colonial subjects came in contact with a recurring foreignness within their own language and society. Rafael shows how they sought to tap into this uncanny power, seeing in it both the promise of nationhood and a menace to its realization. Tracing the genesis of this promise and the ramifications of its betrayal, Rafael sheds light on the paradox of nationhood arising from the possibilities and risks of translation. By repeatedly opening borders to the arrival of something other and new, translation compels the nation to host foreign presences to which it invariably finds itself held hostage. While this condition is perhaps common to other nations, Rafael shows how its unfolding in the Philippine colony would come to be claimed by Filipinos, as would the names of the dead and their ghostly emanations.