Smart By Nature

"Describes strategies for greening the campus and the curriculum, conducting environmental audits, rethinking school food, and transforming schools into models of sustainable community"-- P. [4] of cover.

This book is a resumption of the work “Integrated M/E Design: Building Systems Engineering” published by Anil Ahuja in 1997. Together with an international group of authors from the engineering, urban planning, and architecture fields, Mr. Ahuja discussed new trends and paradigms in the smart buildings and smart city sectors and extended the topic of the previous publication from the building to the entire city. A smart, sustainable building is not just about the building itself. There are things happening in the inside of the building and on the outside. A smart building connects the inside with the outside, provides efficiencies on both sides, synchronizes the outside infrastructure with its inside systems, and integrates nature and its occupants in its design. A smart building doesn’t just provide technology solutions. It is about constant exchange between the inside and the outside of the building, the contribution of the building to the quality of the entire neighborhood and the rest of the city, how the smart building can connect people in a sharing community, and how technology can be the key to make it happen.

This book aims to gather high-quality research papers on developing theories, frameworks, architectures, and algorithms for solving complex challenges in smart healthcare applications for real industry use. It explores the recent theoretical and practical applications of metaheuristics and optimization in various smart healthcare contexts. The book also discusses the capability of optimization techniques to obtain optimal parameters in ML and DL technologies. It provides an open platform for academics and engineers to share their unique ideas and investigate the potential convergence of existing systems and advanced metaheuristic algorithms. The book's outcome will enable decision-makers and practitioners to select suitable optimization approaches for scheduling patients in crowded environments with minimized human errors. The healthcare system aims to improve the lives of disabled, elderly, sick individuals, and children. IoT-based systems simplify decision-making and task automation, offering an automated foundation. Nature-inspired metaheuristics and mining algorithms are crucial for healthcare applications, reducing costs, increasing efficiency, enabling accurate data analysis, and enhancing patient care. Metaheuristics improve algorithm performance and address challenges in data mining and ML, making them essential in healthcare research. Real-time IoT-based healthcare systems can be modeled using an IoT-based metaheuristic approach to generate optimal solutions. Metaheuristics are powerful technologies for optimization problems in healthcare systems. They balance exact methods, which guarantee optimal solutions but require significant computational resources, with fast but low-quality greedy methods. Metaheuristic algorithms find better solutions while minimizing computational time. The scientific community is increasingly interested in metaheuristics, incorporating techniques from AI, operations research, and soft computing. New metaheuristics offer efficient ways to address optimization problems and tackle unsolved challenges. They can be parameterized to control performance and adjust the trade-off between solution quality and resource utilization. Metaheuristics manage the trade-off between performance and solution quality, making them highly applicable to real-time applications with pragmatic objectives.

This book focuses primarily on the nature-inspired approach for designing smart applications. It includes several implementation paradigms such as design and path planning of wireless network, security mechanism and implementation for dynamic as well as static nodes, learning method of cloud computing, data exploration and management, data analysis and optimization, decision taking in conflicting environment, etc. The book fundamentally highlights the recent research advancements in the field of engineering and science.

For many of us, thinking about the future conjures up images of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: a post-apocalyptic dystopia stripped of nature. Richard Louv, author of the landmark bestseller Last Child in the Woods, urges us to change our vision of the future, suggesting that if we reconceive environmentalism and sustainability, they will evolve into a larger movement that will touch every part of society. This New Nature Movement taps into the restorative powers of the natural world to boost mental acuity and creativity; promote health and wellness; build smarter and more sustainable businesses, communities, and economies; and ultimately strengthen human bonds. Supported by groundbreaking research, anecdotal evidence, and compelling personal stories, Louv offers renewed optimism while challenging us to rethink the way we live.

Jimmy, the Nature SMART Ninja is the fourth book in Dr. Mary Massey's SMART Parts series about Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Jimmy is introduced to the reader in the series' introductory book, Ellie Rae Discovers Eight Ways to be SMART. Each subsequent book highlights one character and his/her "SMART part" or dominant intelligence. Jimmy is Nature SMART and has a great love and innate understanding of nature. He is interested in animal habitats, weather systems, and plant life. His interaction with his friends is often times based on his naturalist abilities and the conversations that emerge from playing outdoors together.

A New York Times bestseller: "A passionate and convincing case for the sophistication of nonhuman minds." —Alison Gopnik, The Atlantic Hailed as a classic, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? explores the oddities and complexities of animal cognition—in crows, dolphins, parrots, sheep, wasps, bats, chimpanzees, and bonobos—to reveal how smart animals really are, and how we’ve underestimated their abilities for too long. Did you know that octopuses use coconut shells as tools, that elephants classify humans by gender and language, and that there is a young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University whose flash memory puts that of humans to shame? Fascinating, entertaining, and deeply informed, de Waal’s landmark work will convince you to rethink everything you thought you knew about animal—and human—intelligence.

Who benefits from smart technology? Whose interests are served when we trade our personal data for convenience and connectivity? Smart technology is everywhere: smart umbrellas that light up when rain is in the forecast; smart cars that relieve drivers of the drudgery of driving; smart toothbrushes that send your dental hygiene details to the cloud. Nothing is safe from smartification. In Too Smart, Jathan Sadowski looks at the proliferation of smart stuff in our lives and asks whether the tradeoff—exchanging our personal data for convenience and connectivity—is worth it. Who benefits from smart technology? Sadowski explains how data, once the purview of researchers and policy wonks, has become a form of capital. Smart technology, he argues, is driven by the dual imperatives of digital capitalism: extracting data from, and expanding control over, everything and everybody. He looks at three domains colonized by smart technologies' collection and control systems: the smart self, the smart home, and the smart city. The smart self involves more than self-tracking of steps walked and calories burned; it raises questions about what others do with our data and how they direct our behavior—whether or not we want them to. The smart home collects data about our habits that offer business a window into our domestic spaces. And the smart city, where these systems have space to grow, offers military-grade surveillance capabilities to local authorities. Technology gets smart from our data. We may enjoy the conveniences we get in return (the refrigerator says we're out of milk!), but, Sadowski argues, smart technology advances the interests of corporate technocratic power—and will continue to do so unless we demand oversight and ownership of our data.

In the dramatic narratives that comprise The Republic of Nature, Mark Fiege reframes the canonical account of American history based on the simple but radical premise that nothing in the nation's past can be considered apart from the natural circumstances in which it occurred. Revisiting historical icons so familiar that schoolchildren learn to take them for granted, he makes surprising connections that enable readers to see old stories in a new light. Among the historical moments revisited here, a revolutionary nation arises from its environment and struggles to reconcile the diversity of its people with the claim that nature is the source of liberty. Abraham Lincoln, an unlettered citizen from the countryside, steers the Union through a moment of extreme peril, guided by his clear-eyed vision of nature's capacity for improvement. In Topeka, Kansas, transformations of land and life prompt a lawsuit that culminates in the momentous civil rights case of Brown v. Board of Education. By focusing on materials and processes intrinsic to all things and by highlighting the nature of the United States, Fiege recovers the forgotten and overlooked ground on which so much history has unfolded. In these pages, the nation's birth and development, pain and sorrow, ideals and enduring promise come to life as never before, making a once-familiar past seem new. The Republic of Nature points to a startlingly different version of history that calls on readers to reconnect with fundamental forces that shaped the American experience. For more information, visit the author's website: http://republicofnature.com/

This open access book asks just how climate-smart our food really is. It follows an average day's worth of food and drink to see where it comes from, how far it travels, and the carbon price we all pay for it. From our breakfast tea and toast, through breaktime chocolate bar, to take-away supper, Dave Reay explores the weather extremes the worlds farmers are already dealing with, and what new threats climate change will bring. Readers will encounter heat waves and hurricanes, wildfires and deadly toxins, as well as some truly climate-smart solutions. In every case there are responses that could cut emissions while boosting resilience and livelihoods. Ultimately we are all in this together, our decisions on what food we buy and how we consume it send life-changing ripples right through the global web that is our food supply. As we face a future of 10 billion mouths to feed in a rapidly changing climate, its time to get to know our farmers and herders, our vintners and fisherfolk, a whole lot better. Dave Reay is Professor of Carbon Management at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He has studied climate change for over 20 years, from warming impacts in the Southern Ocean, through carbon fluxes in forests, to greenhouse gas emissions from wetlands and agriculture. In 2018 he received the Chancellors Award for Teaching for his work in climate change education. His latest project involves managing a large area of coastal land in Scotland to regrow native tree species and trap a lifetimes carbon.