François Dufour - Böcker

It's not easy to eat well. To choose food wisely, you need to know where it comes from and how it's produced. As consumers, most of us don't know what we're getting and eating in our supermarkets and restaurants. When rumours and food scares circulate in the media, we panic. Since most of us know very little about the real state of agriculture today and the ways in which the global agricultural industry produces the foods that end up on our plates, we have no basis on which to make informed judgements. In this important new book, José Bové and François Dufour – two men from modest farming backgrounds who have become international icons of the resistance to global capitalism – unveil the workings of the agricultural industry today and lay down the principles for the creation of a new agriculture for the twenty-first century. Following on from their international bestseller The World is not For Sale, Bové and Dufour have joined forces again to build a constructive programme for the food of the future. They seek to make available to every citizen the facts they need in order to understand the crisis of agriculture today and to see how we can move beyond it. Presenting a positive agenda for a new kind of agriculture, they lay the foundations for a renewal of trust between farmers and citizen-consumers in a way that would bring food – and the production of food – back into the heart of modern society.

It's not easy to eat well. To choose food wisely, you need to know where it comes from and how it's produced. As consumers, most of us don't know what we're getting and eating in our supermarkets and restaurants. When rumours and food scares circulate in the media, we panic. Since most of us know very little about the real state of agriculture today and the ways in which the global agricultural industry produces the foods that end up on our plates, we have no basis on which to make informed judgements. In this important new book, José Bové and François Dufour – two men from modest farming backgrounds who have become international icons of the resistance to global capitalism – unveil the workings of the agricultural industry today and lay down the principles for the creation of a new agriculture for the twenty-first century. Following on from their international bestseller The World is not For Sale, Bové and Dufour have joined forces again to build a constructive programme for the food of the future. They seek to make available to every citizen the facts they need in order to understand the crisis of agriculture today and to see how we can move beyond it. Presenting a positive agenda for a new kind of agriculture, they lay the foundations for a renewal of trust between farmers and citizen-consumers in a way that would bring food – and the production of food – back into the heart of modern society.

The intent of this book is to present recent results in the control theory for the long run average continuous control problem of piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs). The book focuses mainly on the long run average cost criteria and  extends to the PDMPs some well-known techniques related to discrete-time and continuous-time Markov decision processes, including the so-called ``average inequality approach'', ``vanishing discount technique'' and ``policy iteration algorithm''. We believe that what is unique about our approach is that, by using the special features of the PDMPs, we trace a parallel with the general theory for discrete-time Markov Decision Processes rather than the continuous-time case. The two main reasons for doing that is to use the powerful tools developed in the discrete-time framework and to avoid working with the infinitesimal generator associated to a PDMP, which in most cases has its domain of definition difficult to be characterized. Although the book is mainly intended to be a theoretically oriented text, it also contains some motivational examples. The book is targeted primarily for advanced students and practitioners of control theory. The book will be a valuable source for experts in the field of Markov decision processes. Moreover,  the book should be suitable for certain advanced courses or seminars. As  background, one needs an acquaintance with the theory of Markov decision processes and some knowledge of stochastic processes and modern analysis.

Mark H.A. Davis introduced the Piecewise-Deterministic Markov Process (PDMP) class of stochastic hybrid models in an article in 1984. Today it is used to model a variety of complex systems in the fields of engineering, economics, management sciences, biology, Internet traffic, networks and many more. Yet, despite this, there is very little in the way of literature devoted to the development of numerical methods for PDMDs to solve problems of practical importance, or the computational control of PDMPs.This book therefore presents a collection of mathematical tools that have been recently developed to tackle such problems. It begins by doing so through examples in several application domains such as reliability. The second part is devoted to the study and simulation of expectations of functionals of PDMPs. Finally, the third part introduces the development of numerical techniques for optimal control problems such as stopping and impulse control problems.

In this lively and hard-hitting book Jose Bove and Francois Dufour recount the dramatic events of their famous demonstration against McDonald's and examine the issues behind the resulting campaign, which has now stretched from France and Seattle around the world.