Agrarian reforms transformed the Mexican countryside in the late twentieth century but without, in many cases, altering fundamental power relationships. This study of the Tehuacán Valley in the state of Puebla highlights different strategies to manipulate the local implementation of federal government programs. With their very differing successes in the struggle to regain and maintain control of land and water rights, these strategies raise important questions about the meaning of the phrase "locally controlled development."

Because Mexico is dependent on irrigation for 45 percent of its cash crop production, national policy has focused on developing vast government controlled and financed irrigation systems. In the Tehuacán Valley, however, the inhabitants have developed a complex irrigation system without government aid or supervision. Yet, in contrast to most parts of Mexico, water rights can be bought and sold as a commodity, leading to accumulation, stratification, and emergence of a regional elite whose power is based on ownership of land and water. The analysis provides an important contribution to the understanding of local control.

The findings of this study will be important to a wide audience involved in the study of irrigation, local agricultural systems, and the interplay between local power structures and the national government in developing countries. The book also presents unique material on gravity-fed, horizontal wells, known as qanat in the Middle East, which had been unknown in the literature on Latin America before this book.

Telecommunication and internet services are constantly subject to change, seeking the customer's full satisfaction. Enriching these services with innovative approaches such as contextaware, social, mobile, adaptable and interactive mechanisms, enables users to experience a variety of personalized services seamlessly across different platforms and technologies. In this sense, advertising is no exception, especially if we consider that it will become the business enabler for next generation services. Nevertheless, currently there is no cross-domain solution capable of delivering real-time advertising across heterogeneous environments or domains, and at the same time, address user needs, desires and intentions. This is because most of the products available today are only used within isolated environments / silos. Therefore, managing advertising campaigns across different verticals is still very complex. However, leveraging on the advances provided by Next Generation Networks, together with the design principles inherent to Service Oriented Architectures and capabilities offered by Service Delivery Platforms, this scenario is about to change. Based on key conceptual entities called enablers, this work aims to change the current scenario. More concretely, this book introduces three distinct but complementary enablers. The Human Enabler provides a real-time context brokerage system capable of securely managing different types of user-related data in a standardized way. The Reasoning Enabler is the result of a welldefined methodology that enables new knowledge to be reasoned, based on previously stored data, by aggregating, correlating and inferring new information about people and their contexts. Lastly, the Session Management Enabler is responsible for abstracting the communication layers. It provides a context-aware multimedia delivery system capable of personalizing and adapting multimedia content according to a set of user and system pre-defined context data or rules, respectively. Altogether, they form the Converged User-Centric Advertising System and introduce new features that address the needs of both users and advertisers.

A transnational approach to understanding and analyzing knowledge circulation.

The contributors to this collection focus on what happens to knowledge and know-how at national borders. Rather than treating it as flowing like currents across them, or diffusing out from center to periphery, they stress the human intervention that shapes how knowledge is processed, mobilized, and repurposed in transnational transactions to serve diverse interests, constraints, and environments. The chapters consider both what knowledge travels and how it travels across borders of varying permeability that impede or facilitate its movement. They look closely at a variety of platforms and objects of knowledge, from tangible commodities—like hybrid wheat seeds, penicillin, Robusta coffee, naval weaponry, seed banks, satellites and high-performance computers—to the more conceptual apparatuses of plant phenotype data and  statistics. Moreover, this volume decenters the Global North, tracking how knowledge moves along multiple paths across the borders of Mexico, India, Portugal, Guinea-Bissau, the Soviet Union, China, Angola, Palestine and the West Bank, as well as the United States and the United Kingdom. An important new work of transnational history, this collection recasts the way we understand and analyze knowledge circulation.

Expert and knowledge-based systems have great potential for industrial control systems, particularly in the process industries. Recognising the importance of this emerging area, the Institution of Electrical Engineers organised a Vacation School on the subject, for engineers from industry and academia, at the University of Strathclyde in September 1990.

Like most cities, Poland’s Kraków developed around and because of its favorable geography. Before Warsaw, Kraków served as Poland’s capital for half a millennium. It has functioned as a cultural center, an industrial center, a center of learning, and home for millions of people. Behind all of this lies the city’s environment: its fauna and plant life, the Vistula River, the surrounding countryside rich with resources, and man-made change that has allowed the city to flourish. In Kraków: An Ecobiography, the contributors use the city as a lens to focus these social and natural intricacies to shed new light on one of Europe’s urban treasures. With chapters on pollution, water systems, the city’s natural network with the surrounding area, urban infrastructure, and more, Kraków demonstrates how much an environmental perspective can bring to the understanding of Poland’s history and the challenges presented by the heritage of the past.