This book is a must-read for technologists, retailers, and investors who seek to understand the warehouse automation industry and the tradeoffs of the various technologies. It walks through an array of automation options using understandable terms. It describes the history of the industry and how e-commerce catapulted warehouse automation to the forefront of supply chain operations. The Warehouse Revolution will also be of interest to those who are just curious and seek to understand what’s happening behind the curtain–the highly choreographed movement of people and machines that enable packages to show up at our respective doorsteps in less than a day.

The warehouses of the future will come in a variety of forms, but with a few common ingredients. Firstly, human operational handling of items in warehouses is increasingly being replaced by automated item handling. Extended warehouse automation counteracts the scarcity of human operators and supports the quality of picking processes. Secondly, the development of models to simulate and analyse warehouse designs and their components facilitates the challenging task of developing warehouses that take into account each customer’s individual requirements and logistic processes. Automation in Warehouse Development addresses both types of automation from the innovative perspective of applied science. In particular, it describes the outcomes of the Falcon project, a joint endeavour by a consortium of industrial and academic partners. The results include a model-based approach to automate warehouse control design, analysis models for warehouse design, concepts for robotic item handling and computer vision, and autonomous transport in warehouses. Automation in Warehouse Development is targeted at both academic researchers and industrial practitioners. It provides state-of-the art research on warehouse automation and model-based warehouse design. These topics have been addressed from a systems engineering perspective by researchers from different disciplines including software, control, and mechanical engineering, with a clear focus on the industrial applications of their research.

In the 1960s, the cooperative networks of food stores, restaurants, bakeries, bookstores, and housing alternatives were part counterculture, part social experiment, part economic utopia, and part revolutionary political statement. The co-ops gave activists a place where they could both express themselves and accomplish at least some small-scale changes. By the mid-1970s, dozens of food co-ops and other consumer- and work-owned enterprises were operating throughout the Twin Cities, and an alternative economic network - with a People's Warehouse at its hub - was beginning to transform the economic landscape of the metropolitan Minneapolis-St. Paul area. However, these co-op activists could not always agree among themselves on their goals. Craig Cox, a journalist who was active in the co-op movement, here provides the first book to look at food co-ops during the 1960s and 1970s. He presents a dramatic story of hope and conflict within the Minneapolis network, one of the largest co-op structures in the country. His "view from the front" of the "Co-op War" that ensued between those who wanted personal liberation through the movement and those who wanted a working-class revolution challenges us to re-thing possiblities for social and political change. Cox provides not a cynical portrait of sixties idealism, but a moving insight into an era when anything seemed possible.

"Most histories of economic life explore how markets are built. This book looks instead at how they have been dismantled. Soon after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, they began the process of transforming the economy, and indeed all of society, in accordance with communist ideology. Asserting their authority and creating a Soviet republic involved confiscating property and demolishing existing systems of exchanging goods. At a national level, industries like transport and banking were brought under state control. At the local level, everything from apartments to personal possessions were subject to seizure. In analyzing the confiscation of property and its redistribution, historian Anne O'Donnell focuses on the lived experience of revolution, drawing upon archival sources such as popular petitions, neighborhood meeting transcripts, audits of state agencies, and testimony in court cases. Telling the stories of both people who were dispossessed and the bureaucrats who inventoried and managed the property that now belonged to the state, O'Donnell reveals the making of an illiberal state, arguing that Soviet statecraft was built upon imperfect attempts to install new forms of valuation consistent with communist principles through chaotic property seizures. The work also offers a novel look at the everyday life of revolutionary Russia"--

Mao Zedong launched the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" 30 years ago. This documentary history of the event presents a selection of key primary documents dealing with the Cultural Revolution's massive and bloody assault on China's political and social systems.

A history of color and commerce from haute couture to automobile showrooms to interior design. When the fashion industry declares that lime green is the new black, or instructs us to “think pink!,” it is not the result of a backroom deal forged by a secretive cabal of fashion journalists, designers, manufacturers, and the editor of Vogue. It is the latest development of a color revolution that has been unfolding for more than a century. In this book, the award-winning historian Regina Lee Blaszczyk traces the relationship of color and commerce, from haute couture to automobile showrooms to interior design, describing the often unrecognized role of the color profession in consumer culture. Blaszczyk examines the evolution of the color profession from 1850 to 1970, telling the stories of innovators who managed the color cornucopia that modern artificial dyes and pigments made possible. These “color stylists,” “color forecasters,” and “color engineers” helped corporations understand the art of illusion and the psychology of color. Blaszczyk describes the strategic burst of color that took place in the 1920s, when General Motors introduced a bright blue sedan to compete with Ford's all-black Model T and when housewares became available in a range of brilliant hues. She explains the process of color forecasting—not a conspiracy to manipulate hapless consumers but a careful reading of cultural trends and consumer taste. And she shows how color information flowed from the fashion houses of Paris to textile mills in New Jersey. Today professional colorists are part of design management teams at such global corporations as Hilton, Disney, and Toyota. The Color Revolution tells the history of how colorists help industry capture the hearts and dollars of consumers.

“Anyone interested in digging deeper into some of the less-examined facets of late imperial and early Soviet Russia will be well rewarded.” —American Historical Review Nikolai Charushin’s memoirs of his experience as a member of the revolutionary populist movement in Russia are familiar to historians, but A Generation of Revolutionaries provides a broader and more engaging look at the lives and relationships beyond these memoirs. It shows how, after years of incarceration, Charushin and friends thrived in Siberian exile, raising children and contributing to science and culture there. While Charushin’s memoirs end with his return to European Russia, this sweeping biography follows this group as they engaged in Russia’s fin de siècle society, took part in the 1917 revolution, and struggled in its aftermath. A Generation of Revolutionaries provides vibrant and deeply personal insights into the turbulent history of Russia from the Great Reforms to the era of Stalinism and beyond. In doing so, it tells the story of a remarkable circle of friends whose lives balanced love, family, and career with exile, imprisonment, and revolution.