Telecommunication transmission systems

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John Middleton

"The Swahili of East Africa have a long and distinctive history as a literate, Muslim, urban, and mercantile society. In this book a leading Africanist presents the first full-length anthropological account of the Swahili and offers an original analysis of their little-understood and unusual culture." "Swahili towns, some urban with elegant stone buildings and others more rural with palm-leaf-matting houses, are spread along the thousand-mile East African coast. Because each local community is culturally different from its neighbors, previous historians and anthropologists have viewed the Swahili as a series of isolated and "detribalized" groups. John Middleton argues, on the contrary, that beneath the cultural variation is a single structure, that of a well-defined and complex trading society that has shown little change through the ages. Drawing on his own field research and on earlier writings on the Swahili, Middleton describes this centuries-old mercantile culture--its local and descent groupings, marriage patterns, religion, and values. He traces the history of their colonized past as subjects to Arabs, portuguese, British, and others and shows that, although their economic and political role has continually been a subordinate one, their sense of unique identity enables then to persist as an ongoing civilization."--BOOK JACKET.

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Christopher Allen

"The 17th century has always been considered the golden age - the grand siecle - of French culture. The reigns of Louis XIII and Louis XIV witnessed an unprecedented flowering of literature and philosophy, of music, architecture and art. The poetic history painting of Poussin, the landscapes of Claude Lorrain, the portraits of Philippe de Champaigne, and the celebratory art of Le Brun at the court of Louis XIV at Versailles were among its greatest achievements. Yet the subject-matter and formal conventions most prized at the time can make it difficult for the modern viewer to appreciate the artists' aims and to judge success or failure." "Thanks to new research, it is now possible to set the major figures within the framework of the concerns and theoretical debates of the grand siecle itself. Christopher Allen, one of the few authorities on the subject outside the French-speaking world, brilliantly enables us to see beyond mere form to the meanings the artists intended us to enjoy."--Jacket.

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Serge Abrate, Bruno Castanié, Yapa D. S. Rajapakse

<p>This book presents a broad view of the current state of the art regarding the dynamic response of composite and sandwich structures subjected to impacts and explosions. Each chapter combines a thorough assessment of the literature with original contributions made by the authors. <br>The first section deals with fluid-structure interactions in marine structures. The first chapter focuses on hull slamming and particularly cases in which the deformation of the structure affects the motion of the fluid during the water entry of flexible hulls.^ Chapter 2 presents an extensive series of tests underwater and in the air to determine the effects of explosions on composite and sandwich structures. Full-scale structures were subjected to significant explosive charges, and such results are extremely rare in the open literature. Chapter 3 describes a simple geometrical theory of diffraction for describing the interaction of an underwater blast wave with submerged structures.<br>The second section addresses the problem of impact on laminated composite structures with chapters devoted to ballistic impacts on pre-stressed composite structures, tests developed to simulate dynamic failure in marine structures, damage mechanisms and energy absorption in low velocity impacts, perforation, the numerical simulation of intra and inter-ply damage during impact, and hail impact on laminated composites.^ <br>Sandwich structures with laminated facings are considered in Section 3 with chapters dealing with the discrete modeling of honeycomb core during the indentation of sandwich structures, the behavior of fold core sandwich structures during impact, and impact on helicopter blades. The fourth section consists of two chapters presenting experimental results and numerical simulation of composite structures subjected to crash.</p><p>This volume is intended for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, and engineers interested and involved in analysis and design of composite structures. </p>

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Stephanie Bull and Kevin O'Farrell

In this work, Stephanie Bull and Kevin O'Farrell bring together practising clinicians who provide an insight into using contemporary art therapy with people with learning disabilities.