Juan Li - Böcker

Taoist adepts developed tai chi as both a martial art and a way to cultivate their physical body, energy body, and spirit body. Like all Taoist exercises, its main purpose is to form a connection to the basic energy that is the foundation of all life: chi.Until the beginning of the twentieth century, tai chi was considered a secret practice that was passed down only within a closely knit structure of family and loyal disciples. Despite its widespread growth in popularity as a martial art and health exercise, many of its underlying internal practices remain unknown. The Inner Structure of Tai Chiexplores the deep, internal work necessary for the effective practice of tai chi. Designed for practitioners at every level, the book contains step-by-step illustrated instructions for mastering the 13 forms of early Yang-style tai chi, also known as Tai Chi Chi Kung. The authors demonstrate the relationship of the inner structure of tai chi to the absorption, transformation, and circulation of the three forces that animate all life--the Universal force, the Cosmic force, and the Earth force--revealing the principles and practices necessary to receive the full spectrum of physical, psychological, and spiritual benefits that tai chi can bring.

Today’s highly parameterized large-scale distributed computing systems may be composed  of a large number of various components (computers, databases, etc) and must provide a wide range of services. The users of such systems, located at different (geographical or managerial) network cluster may have a limited access to the system’s services and resources, and different, often conflicting, expectations and requirements. Moreover, the information and data processed in such dynamic environments may be incomplete, imprecise, fragmentary, and overloading. All of the above mentioned issues require some intelligent scalable methodologies for the management of the whole complex structure, which unfortunately may increase the energy consumption of such systems. An optimal energy utilization has reached to a point that many information technology (IT) managers and corporate executives are all up in arms to identify scalable solution that can reduce electricity consumption (so that the total cost of operation is minimized) of their respective large-scale computing systems and simultaneously improve upon or maintain the current throughput of the system. This book in its eight chapters, addresses the fundamental issues related to the energy usage and the optimal low-cost system design in high performance ``green computing’’ systems. The recent evolutionary and general metaheuristic-based solutions for energy optimization in data processing, scheduling, resource allocation, and communication in modern computational grids, could and network computing are presented along with several important conventional technologies to cover the hot topics from the fundamental theory of the ‘’green computing’’ concept and to describe the basic architectures of systems. This book points out the potential application areas and provides detailed examples of application case studies in low-energy computational systems. The development trends and open research issuesare also outlined.  All of those technologies have formed the foundation for the green computing that we know of today.

Today’s highly parameterized large-scale distributed computing systems may be composed  of a large number of various components (computers, databases, etc) and must provide a wide range of services. The users of such systems, located at different (geographical or managerial) network cluster may have a limited access to the system’s services and resources, and different, often conflicting, expectations and requirements. Moreover, the information and data processed in such dynamic environments may be incomplete, imprecise, fragmentary, and overloading. All of the above mentioned issues require some intelligent scalable methodologies for the management of the whole complex structure, which unfortunately may increase the energy consumption of such systems. An optimal energy utilization has reached to a point that many information technology (IT) managers and corporate executives are all up in arms to identify scalable solution that can reduce electricity consumption (so that the total cost of operation is minimized) of their respective large-scale computing systems and simultaneously improve upon or maintain the current throughput of the system. This book in its eight chapters, addresses the fundamental issues related to the energy usage and the optimal low-cost system design in high performance ``green computing’’ systems. The recent evolutionary and general metaheuristic-based solutions for energy optimization in data processing, scheduling, resource allocation, and communication in modern computational grids, could and network computing are presented along with several important conventional technologies to cover the hot topics from the fundamental theory of the ‘’green computing’’ concept and to describe the basic architectures of systems. This book points out the potential application areas and provides detailed examples of application case studies in low-energy computational systems. The development trends and open research issuesare also outlined.  All of those technologies have formed the foundation for the green computing that we know of today.

Multi-objective optimization problems (MOPs) and uncertain optimization problems (UOPs) which widely exist in real life are challengeable problems in the fields of decision making, system designing, and scheduling, amongst others. Decomposition exploits the ideas of ‘making things simple’ and ‘divide and conquer’ to transform a complex problem into a series of simple ones with the aim of reducing the computational complexity. In order to tackle the abovementioned two types of complicated optimization problems, this book introduces the decomposition strategy and conducts a systematic study to perfect the usage of decomposition in the field of multi-objective optimization, and extend the usage of decomposition in the field of uncertain optimization.

This book introduces readers to environmental background investigation, pollution source intensity evaluation and risk assessment approaches used at three main types of groundwater-contaminated sites: municipal domestic waste landfills, hazardous waste landfills and oil-contaminated sites.

This book introduces readers to environmental background investigation, pollution source intensity evaluation and risk assessment approaches used at three main types of groundwater-contaminated sites: municipal domestic waste landfills, hazardous waste landfills and oil-contaminated sites.

The book highlights recent research on cement, concrete, refractory materials, fire-resistant materials, paints, glass, product quality testing methods, environmental protection and recycling wastes in building material industry.