Praised by instructors for its concise, focused approach and user-friendly format, the Illustrated Series engages both computer rookies and hot shots in mastering Microsoft Office 2013 applications quickly and efficiently. Skills are accessible and easy-to-follow thanks to the Illustrated Series' hallmark 2-page layout, which allows students to see an entire task in one view. New Learning Outcomes outline the skills covered in each lesson, and larger full-color screens represent exactly what students should see on their own computers. Each unit begins with a brief overview of the principles of the lesson, and introduces a case study for further application.

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are becoming increasingly attractive for researchers from various disciplines, such as operations research, computer science, industrial engineering, electrical engineering, social science, economics, etc. This book presents an insightful, comprehensive, and up-to-date treatment of EAs, such as genetic algorithms, differential evolution, evolution strategy, constraint optimization, multimodal optimization, multiobjective optimization, combinatorial optimization, evolvable hardware, estimation of distribution algorithms, ant colony optimization, particle swarm optimization, artificial immune systems, artificial life, genetic programming, etc.

It emphasises the initiative ideas of the algorithm, contains discussions in the contexts, and suggests further readings and possible research projects. All the methods form a pedagogical way to make EAs easy and interesting.

This textbook also introduces the applications of EAs as many as possible. At least one real-life application is introduced by the end of almost every chapter. The authors focus on the kernel part of applications, such as how to model real-life problems, how to encode and decode the individuals, how to design effective search operators according to the chromosome structures, etc.

This textbook adopts pedagogical ways of making EAs easy and interesting. Its methods include an introduction at the beginning of each chapter, emphasising the initiative, discussions in the contexts, summaries at the end of every chapter, suggested further reading, exercises, and possible research projects.

Introduction to Evolutionary Algorithms will enable students to:

establish a strong background on evolutionary algorithms;

appreciate the cutting edge of EAs;

perform their own research projects by simulating the application introduced in the book; and

apply their intuitive ideas to academic search.

This book is aimed at senior undergraduate students or first-year graduate students as a textbook or self-study material."

As this comprehensive and multi-disciplinary anthology makes clear, virtuality has a pedigree that pre-dates the computer age and modern virtual worlds, a pedigree that can be traced back to classical mythology and beyond. Equally, the concept of virtuality is not the province of one field of study alone but is the foundation and driving force of many, both theoretical and applied. Our conceptualizations and applications of virtuality are multiple, as is shown across the nine sections of the book that move from philosophy to technologies and applications before returning to philosophy again for a discussion of the utopias and dystopias of virtuality. The almost 50 essays contained within range freely across subjects that include the potential of virtuality, ethics, virtuality and self, presence and immersion, virtual emotions, image, sound and literature, computer games, AI and A-Life, Augmented Reality and Real Virtuality, law and economics, medical and military applications, religion, and cybersex. Throughout, contributors discuss differences between virtuality, reality, and actuality, in debates filtered through the lenses of the disciplines represented here, and speculate on future directions. It is not at all clear that there are differences and, if such distinctions are to be found, the boundaries between virtuality, reality, and actuality continually shift as ideas, modes of organization, and behaviors constantly flow from one to the other regardless of direction. The Handbook presents no unified definition of virtuality to comfort the reader, rather a multiplicity of questions and approaches underpinned by provocative statements that should further fuel the debates surrounding our notions of virtuality.

The recent rapid advances in wireless technologies have created a demand for high quality multimedia applications and services. These advanced multimedia applications give rise to a new set of challenges in providing Quality of Service (QoS) when delivering these services over wireless networks. The Handbook of Research on Wireless Multimedia: Quality of Service and Solutions highlights and discusses the underlying QoS issues that arise in the delivery of real-time multimedia services over wireless networks. This cutting-edge book presents state-of-the-art solutions from leading researchers active in the field to address the QoS issues for different wireless multimedia applications.

In the last decade parallel computing has been put forward as the only computational answer to the increasing computational needs arising from very large and complex fluid dynamic problems. Considerable efforts are being made to use parallel computers efficiently to solve several fluid dynamic problems originating in aerospace, climate modelling and environmental applications.

Parallel CFD Conferences are international and aim to increase discussion among researchers worldwide.

Topics covered in this particular book include typical CFD areas such as turbulence, Navier-Stokes and Euler solvers, reactive flows, with a good balance between both university and industrial applications. In addition, other applications making extensive use of CFD such as climate modelling and environmental applications are also included.

Anyone involved in the challenging field of Parallel Computational Fluid Dynamics will find this volume useful in their daily work.

An Introduction to R and Python for Data Analysis helps teach students to code in both R and Python simultaneously. As both R and Python can be used in similar manners, it is useful and efficient to learn both at the same time, helping lecturers and students to teach and learn more, save time, whilst reinforcing the shared concepts and differences of the systems. This tandem learning is highly useful for students, helping them to become literate in both languages, and develop skills which will be handy after their studies. This book presumes no prior experience with computing, and is intended to be used by students from a variety of backgrounds. The side-by-side formatting of this book helps introductory graduate students quickly grasp the basics of R and Python, with the exercises providing helping them to teach themselves the skills they will need upon the completion of their course, as employers now ask for competency in both R and Python. Teachers and lecturers will also find this book useful in their teaching, providing a singular work to help ensure their students are well trained in both computer languages. All data for exercises can be found here: https://github.com/tbrown122387/r_and_python_book/tree/master/data. Key features: - Teaches R and Python in a "side-by-side" way. - Examples are tailored to aspiring data scientists and statisticians, not software engineers. - Designed for introductory graduate students. - Does not assume any mathematical background.

This monograph provides, for the first time, a most comprehensive statistical account of composite sampling as an ingenious environmental sampling method to help accomplish observational economy in a variety of environmental and ecological studies. Sampling consists of selection, acquisition, and quantification of a part of the population. But often what is desirable is not affordable, and what is affordable is not adequate. How do we deal with this dilemma? Operationally, composite sampling recognizes the distinction between selection, acquisition, and quantification. In certain applications, it is a common experience that the costs of selection and acquisition are not very high, but the cost of quantification, or measurement, is substantially high. In such situations, one may select a sample sufficiently large to satisfy the requirement of representativeness and precision and then, by combining several sampling units into composites, reduce the cost of measurement to an affordable level. Thus composite sampling offers an approach to deal with the classical dilemma of desirable versus affordable sample sizes, when conventional statistical methods fail to resolve the problem. Composite sampling, at least under idealized conditions, incurs no loss of information for estimating the population means. But an important limitation to the method has been the loss of information on individual sample values, such as the extremely large value. In many of the situations where individual sample values are of interest or concern, composite sampling methods can be suitably modified to retrieve the information on individual sample values that may be lost due to compositing. In this monograph, we present statistical solutions to these and other issues that arise in the context of applications of composite sampling. Content Level Research

This is a textbook for undergraduate students of chemical and biological engineering. It is also useful for graduate students and professional engineers and numerical analysts. All reactive chemical and biological processes are highly nonlinear allowing for multiple steady states. This book addresses the bifurcation characteristics of chemical and biological processes as the general case and treats systems with a unique steady state as special cases. It uses a system approach which is the most efficient for knowledge organization and transfer. The book develops mathematical models for many commercial processes utilizing the mass, momentum, and heat-balance equations coupled to the rates of the processes that take place within the boundaries of the system. design and optimization of the chemical and biological industrial equipment and plants, such as single and batteries of CSTRs, porous and nonporous catalyst pellets and their effectiveness factors, tubular catalytic and noncatalytic reactors, fluidized bed catalytic reactors, coupled fluidized beds such as reactor-regenerator systems (industrial fluid catalytic cracking units), fluidized bed reformers for producing hydrogen or syngas, fermenters for fuel ethanol, simulation of the brain acetylcholine neurocycle, anaerobic digesters, co and countercurrent absorption columns, and many more. The book also includes verification against industrial data. The book's CD contains nearly 100 MATLAB programs which are meant to teach the readers how to solve a variety of important chemical and biological engineering problems. The algorithms include solving transcendental and algebraic equations, with and without bifurcation; as well as initial and boundary value ordinary differential equations. Said Elnashaie is Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of British Columbia. is a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Mathematics at Auburn with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering. The active interaction of these authors has brought about this new and modern interdisciplinary book

Distrust. Division. Disparity. Is our world in disrepair? Ethics and civics have always mattered, but perhaps they matter now more than ever before. Recently, with the rise of online teaching and movements like #PlayApartTogether, games have become increasingly acknowledged as platforms for civic deliberation and value sharing. We the Gamers explores these possibilities by examining how we connect, communicate, analyze, and discover when we play games. Combining research-based perspectives and current examples, this volume shows how games can be used in ethics, civics, and social studies education to inspire learning, critical thinking, and civic change. We the Gamers introduces and explores various educational frameworks through a range of games and interactive experiences including board and card games, online games, virtual reality and augmented reality games, and digital games like Minecraft, Executive Command, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, Fortnite, When Rivers Were Trails, Politicraft, Quandary, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The book systematically evaluates the types of skills, concepts, and knowledge needed for civic and ethical engagement, and details how games can foster these skills in classrooms, remote learning environments, and other educational settings. We the Gamers also explores the obstacles to learning with games and how to overcome those obstacles by encouraging equity and inclusion, care and compassion, and fairness and justice. Featuring helpful tips and case studies, We the Gamers shows teachers the strengths and limitations of games in helping students connect with civics and ethics, and imagines how we might repair and remake our world through gaming, together.

This book promotes the experimental mathematics approach in the context of secondary mathematics curriculum by exploring mathematical models depending on parameters that were typically considered advanced in the pre-digital education era. This approach, by drawing on the power of computers to perform numerical computations and graphical constructions, stimulates formal learning of mathematics through making sense of a computational experiment. It allows one (in the spirit of Freudenthal) to bridge serious mathematical content and contemporary teaching practice. In other words, the notion of teaching experiment can be extended to include a true mathematical experiment. When used appropriately, the approach creates conditions for collateral learning (in the spirit of Dewey) to occur including the development of skills important for engineering applications of mathematics. In the context of a mathematics teacher education program, thebook addresses a call for the preparation of teachers capable of utilizing modern technology tools for the modeling-based teaching of mathematics with a focus on methods conducive to the improvement of the whole STEM education at the secondary level. By the same token, using the book's pedagogy and its mathematical content in a pre-college classroom can assist teachers in introducing students to the ideas that develop the foundation of engineering profession."

As schools continue to explore the transition from traditional education to teaching and learning online, new instructional design frameworks are needed that can support with the development of e-learning content. The e-learning frameworks examined within this book have eight dimensions: (1) institutional, (2) pedagogical, (3) technological, (4) interface design, (5) evaluation, (6) management, (7) resource support, and (8) ethical. Each of these dimensions contains a group of concerns or issues that need to be examined to assess and develop an institutions e-capability in order to introduce the best e-learning practices. Challenges and Opportunities for the Global Implementation of E-Learning Frameworks presents global perspectives on the latest best practices and success stories of institutions that were able to effectively implement e-learning frameworks. An e-learning framework is used as a guide to examine e-learning practices in countries around the globe to reflect on opportunities and challenges for implementing quality learning. In this book, therefore, tips for success factors and issues relevant to failures will be presented along with an analysis of similarities and differences between several countries and educational lessons. While highlighting topics such as course design and development, ICT use in the classroom, and e-learning for different subjects, this book is ideal for university leaders, practitioners in e-learning, continuing education institutions, government agencies, course developers, in-service and preservice teachers, administrators, practitioners, stakeholders, researchers, academicians, and students seeking knowledge on how e-learning frameworks are being implemented across the globe.

Employing computer simulations for the study of the evolution of altruism has been popular since Axelrod's book "The Evolution of Cooperation". But have the myriads of simulation studies that followed in Axelrod's footsteps really increased our knowledge about the evolution of altruism or cooperation? This book examines in detail the working mechanisms of simulation based evolutionary explanations of altruism. It shows that the "theoretical insights" that can be derived from simulation studies are often quite arbitrary and of little use for the empirical research. In the final chapter of the book, therefore, a set of epistemological requirements for computer simulations is proposed and recommendations for the proper research design of simulation studies are made.

This book stages a dialogue between international researchers from the broad fields of complexity science and narrative studies. It presents an edited collection of chapters on aspects of how narrative theory from the humanities may be exploited to understand, explain, describe, and communicate aspects of complex systems, such as their emergent properties, feedbacks, and downwards causation; and how ideas from complexity science can inform narrative theory, and help explain, understand, and construct new, more complex models of narrative as a cognitive faculty and as a pervasive cultural form in new and old media. The book is suitable for academics, practitioners, and professionals, and postgraduates in complex systems, narrative theory, literary and film studies, new media and game studies, and science communication.

When managers and ecologists need to make decisions about the environment, they use models to simulate the dynamic systems that interest them. All management decisions affect certain landscapes over time, and those landscapes are composed of intricate webs of dynamic processes that need to be considered in relation to each other. With widespread use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), there is a growing need for complex models ncorporating an increasing amount of data. The open-source Spatial Modeling Environment (SME) was developed to build upon common modeling software, such as STELLA (R), and Powersim (R), among others, to create, run, analyze, and present spatial models of ecosystems, watersheds, populations, and landscapes. In this book, the creators of the Spatial Modeling Environment discuss and illustrate the uses of SME as a modeling tool for all kinds of complex spatial systems. The authors demonstrate the entire process of spatial modeling, beginning with the conceptual design, continuing through formal implementation and analysis, and finally with the interpretation and presentation of the results. A variety of applications and case studies address particular types of ecological and management problems and help to identify potential problems for modelers. Researchers and students interested in spatial modeling will learn how to simulate the complex dynamics of landscapes. Managers and decision makers will acquire tools for predicting changes in landscapes while learning about both the possibilities and the limitations of simulation models. The enclosed CD contains SME, color illustrations and models and data from the examples in the book.

SUCCEEDING IN BUSINESS WITH MICROSOFT OFFICE EXCEL 2010, International Edition prepares your students to solve business problems by moving beyond the basic "point and click" skills to think critically about realistic business situations. When students combine software analysis with their own decision making abilities, they are more likely meet any business challenge with success. The Succeeding in Business Series emphasizes problem-solving, critical thinking, and analysis - challenging students to find efficient and effective solutions.

Geometry is the cornerstone of computer graphics and computer animation, and provides the framework and tools for solving problems in two and three dimensions. This may be in the form of describing simple shapes such as a circle, ellipse, or parabola, or complex problems such as rotating 3D objects about an arbitrary axis.

Geometry for Computer Graphics draws together a wide variety of geometric information that will provide a sourcebook of facts, examples, and proofs for students, academics, researchers, and professional practitioners.

The book is divided into 4 sections: the first summarizes hundreds of formulae used to solve 2D and 3D geometric problems. The second section places these formulae in context in the form of worked examples. The third provides the origin and proofs of these formulae, and communicates mathematical strategies for solving geometric problems. The last section is a glossary of terms used in geometry.

What the book is about This book is about the theory and practice of the use of multimedia, multimodal interfaces for leaming. Yet it is not about technology as such, at least in the sense that the authors do not subscribe to the idea that one should do something just because it is technologically possible. 'Multimedia' has been adopted in some commercial quarters to mean little more than a computer with some form of audio ar (more usually) video attachment. This is a trend which ought to be resisted, as exemplified by the material in this book. Rather than merely using a new technology 'because it is there', there is a need to examine how people leam and eommunicate, and to study diverse ways in which computers ean harness text, sounds, speech, images, moving pietures, gestures, touch, etc. , to promote effective human leaming. We need to identify which media, in whieh combinations, using what mappings of domain to representation, are appropriate far which educational purposes . . The word 'multimodal ' in the title underlies this perspective. The intention is to focus attention less on the technology and more on how to strueture different kinds of information via different sensory channels in order to yield the best possible quality of communication and educational interaction. (Though the reader should refer to Chapter 1 for a discussion of the use of the word 'multimodal' . ) Historically there was little problem.

This book presents a coherent description of the theoretical and practical aspects of Coloured Petri Nets (CP-nets or CPN). It shows how CP-nets have been de veloped - from being a promising theoretical model to being a full-fledged lan guage for the design, specification, simulation, validation and implementation of large software systems (and other systems in which human beings and/or com puters communicate by means of some more or less formal rules). The book contains the formal definition of CP-nets and the mathematical theory behind their analysis methods. However, it has been the intention to write the book in such a way that it also becomes attractive to readers who are more interested in applications than the underlying mathematics. This means that a large part of the book is written in a style which is closer to an engineering textbook (or a users' manual) than it is to a typical textbook in theoretical computer science. The book consists of three separate volumes. The first volume defines the net model (i. e. , hierarchical CP-nets) and the basic concepts (e. g. , the different behavioural properties such as deadlocks, fair ness and home markings). It gives a detailed presentation of many small exam ples and a brief overview of some industrial applications. It introduces the for mal analysis methods. Finally, it contains a description of a set of CPN tools which support the practical use of CP-nets.

Working with Sound is an exploration of the ever-changing working practices of audio development in the era of hybrid collaboration in the games industry. Through learnings from the pre-pandemic remote and isolated worlds of audio work, sound designers, composers and dialogue designers find themselves equipped uniquely to thrive in the hybrid, remote, and studio-based realms of today's fast-evolving working landscapes. With unique insights into navigating the worlds of isolation and collaboration, this book explores ways of thinking and working in this world, equipping the reader with inspiration to sustainably tackle the many stages of the development process. Working with Sound is an essential guide for professionals working in dynamic audio teams of all sizes, as well as the designers, producers, artists, animators and programmers who collaborate closely with their colleagues working on game audio and sound.

In the third paper in this chapter, Mike Pratt provides an historical intro duction to solid modeling. He presents the development of the three most freqently used techniques: cellular subdivision, constructive solid modeling and boundary representation. Although each of these techniques devel oped more or less independently, today the designer's needs dictate that a successful system allows access to all of these methods. For example, sculptured surfaces are generally represented using a boundary represen tation. However, the design of a complex vehicle generally dictates that a sculptured surface representation is most efficient for the 'skin' while constructive solid geometry representation is most efficent for the inter nal mechanism. Pratt also discusses the emerging concept of design by 'feature line'. Finally, he addresses the very important problem of data exchange between solid modeling systems and the progress that is being made towards developing an international standard. With the advent of reasonably low cost scientific workstations with rea sonable to outstanding graphics capabilities, scientists and engineers are increasingly turning to computer analysis for answers to fundamental ques tions and to computer graphics for present~tion of those answers. Although the current crop of workstations exhibit quite impressive computational ca pability, they are still not capable of solving many problems in a reasonable time frame, e. g. , executing computational fluid dynamics and finite element codes or generating complex ray traced or radiosity based images. In the sixth chapter Mike Muuss of the U. S.

YOU HAVE TO OWN THIS BOOK!

"Software Exorcism: A Handbook for Debugging and Optimizing Legacy Code" takes an unflinching, no bulls$&# look at behavioral problems in the software engineering industry, shedding much-needed light on the social forces that make it difficult for programmers to do their job. Do you have a co-worker who perpetually writes bad code that "you" are forced to clean up? This is your book. While there are plenty of books on the market that cover debugging and short-term workarounds for bad code, Reverend Bill Blunden takes a revolutionary step beyond them by bringing our attention to the underlying illnesses that plague the software industry as a whole.

Further, "Software Exorcism" discusses tools and techniques for effective and aggressive debugging, gives optimization strategies that appeal to all levels of programmers, and presents in-depth treatments of technical issues with honest assessments that are not biased toward proprietary solutions.