This book contains 24 technical papers presented at the fourth edition of the Advances in Architectural Geometry conference, AAG 2014, held in London, England, September 2014. It offers engineers, mathematicians, designers, and contractors insight into the efficient design, analysis, and manufacture of complex shapes, which will help open up new horizons for architecture. The book examines geometric aspects involved in architectural design, ranging from initial conception to final fabrication. It focuses on four key topics: applied geometry, architecture, computational design, and also practice in the form of case studies. In addition, the book also features algorithms, proposed implementation, experimental results, and illustrations. Overall, the book presents both theoretical and practical work linked to new geometrical developments in architecture. It gathers the diverse components of the contemporary architectural tendencies that push the building envelope towards free form in order to respond to multiple current design challenges. With its introduction of novel computational algorithms and tools, this book will prove an ideal resource to both newcomers to the field as well as advanced practitioners.

Project management has become a widespread instrument enabling organizations to efficiently master the challenges of steadily shortening product life cycles, global markets and decreasing profit margins. With projects increasing in size and complexity, their planning and control represents one of the most crucial management tasks. This is especially true for scheduling, which is concerned with establishing execution dates for the sub-activities to be performed in order to complete the project. The ability to manage projects where resources must be allocated between concurrent projects or even sub-activities of a single project requires the use of commercial project management software packages. However, the results yielded by the solution procedures included are often rather unsatisfactory. Scheduling of Resource-Constrained Projects develops more efficient procedures, which can easily be integrated into software packages by incorporated programming languages, and thus should be of great interest for practitioners as well as scientists working in the field of project management. The book is divided into two parts. In Part I, the project management process is described and the management tasks to be accomplished during project planning and control are discussed. This allows for identifying the major scheduling problems arising in the planning process, among which the resource-constrained project scheduling problem is the most important. Part II deals with efficient computer-based procedures for the resource-constrained project scheduling problem and its generalized version. Since both problems are NP-hard, the development of such procedures which yield satisfactory solutions in a reasonable amount of computation time is very challenging, and a number of new and very promising approaches are introduced. This includes heuristic procedures based on priority rules and tabu search as well as lower bound methods and branch and bound procedures which can be applied for computing optimal solutions.

These Proceedings of the Third International Workshop introduce research results in the areas of information integration, development of GIS and GIS-applications for a wide spectrum of information systems varying considerably in purpose and scale. The new class of GIS - intelligent GIS - is considered, including principles of their building and programming technologies. Special attention is drawn to the development of ontologies and their use in GIS and GIS-applications.

This book presents a comprehensive survey of the Vesta system for software configuration management (SCM). Vesta, unlike other SCM systems, is specifically designed to handle very large software projects comprising tens of millions of lines of code and beyond. Researchers in the field of software engineering and specialists in the construction of software development tools will especially benefit from this work, but it will also appeal to those responsible for designing and deploying configuration management solutions for large software systems.

Three important but hard-to-achieve properties lie at the heart of Vesta's unique approach to software configuration management:

Every build is repeatable

Every build is incremental

Every build is consistent

To realize these properties in a practical SCM system, Vesta provides a novel repository to store the versions of the files that make up an evolving software system and a flexible language for writing modular configuration descriptions that define how the system is put together. This book explains in depth these facilities and the suite of tools that supports them, together with a methodology for applying them in practice.

Readers who seek more information about Vesta may download the entire system as well as other publications, reference documents, and user documentation from the Vesta home page at http: //www.vestasys.org.

This handy textbook covers all you need to know to get started using Powerpoint for presentations.Learning Made Simple books give you skills without frills. They are matched to the main qualifications, and written by experienced teachers and authors to make often tricky subjects simple to learn. Every book is designed carefully to provide bite-sized lessons matched to your needs. Learning Made Simple titles provide both a new colourful way to study and a useful adjunct to any training course. Using full colour throughout, and written by leading teachers and writers, Learning Made Simple books will help readers learn new skills and develop their talents. Whether studying at college, training at work, or reading at home, aiming for a qualification or simply getting up to speed, Learning Made Simple books will give you the advantage of easy, well-organised training materials in a handy volume with two or four-page sections for each topic for ease of use.

This handy textbook covers all you need to know about word processing.Learning Made Simple books give you skills without frills. They are matched to the main qualifications, and written by experienced teachers and authors to make often tricky subjects simple to learn. Every book is designed carefully to provide bite-sized lessons matched to your needs. Learning Made Simple titles provide both a new colorful way to study and a useful adjunct to any training course. Using full color throughout, and written by leading teachers and writers, Learning Made Simple books will help you learn new skills and develop your talents. Whether studying at college, training at work, or reading at home, aiming for a qualification or simply getting up to speed, Learning Made Simple books will give you the advantage of easy, well-organised training materials in a handy volume with two and four-page sections for each topic for ease of use.

Multimedia has two fundamental characteristics that can be expressed by the following formula: Multimedia = Multiple Media + Hypermedia. How can software engineering take advantage of these two characteristics? Will these two characteristics pose problems in multimedia systems design? These are some of the issues to be explored in this book. The first two chapters will be of interest to managers, software engineers, programmers, and people interested in gaining an overall understanding of multimedia software engineering. The next six chapters present multimedia software engineering according to the conceptual framework introduced in Chapter One. This is of particular use to practitioners, system developers, multimedia application designers, programmers, and people interested in prototyping multimedia applications. The next three chapters are more research-oriented and are mainly intended for researchers working on the specification, modeling, and analysis of distributed multimedia systems, but will also be relevant to scientists, researchers, and software engineers interested in the systems and theoretical aspects of multimedia software engineering. Multimedia Software Engineering can be used as a textbook in a graduate course on multimedia software engineering or in an undergraduate course on software design where the emphasis is on multimedia applications. It is especially suitable for a project-oriented course.

Discover 40+ recipes like Mooshroom Burgers, Suspicious Stew, and The Cake! Featuring recipes that are ideal for every skill level (and player type), this cookbook is just what you need to bring a touch of Minecraft into your kitchen. So, what are you waiting for? It's time to gather, cook, and eat! Building can be hungry work. And sometimes, you just need to take a break and enjoy the fruits of your labor, whether that's a quick baked potato while you're hunkered down, waiting for a creeper to quit skulking at your door, or creating a celebratory feast for all your friends! Minecraft: The Official Cookbook gives you everything you need to build awesome meals, no matter your skill level.

Presenting theory while using "Mathematica" in a complementary way, Modern Differential Geometry of Curves and Surfaces with Mathematica, the third edition of Alfred Gray's famous textbook, covers how to define and compute standard geometric functions using "Mathematica" for constructing new curves and surfaces from existing ones. Since Gray's death, authors Abbena and Salamon have stepped in to bring the book up to date. While maintaining Gray's intuitive approach, they reorganized the material to provide a clearer division between the text and the "Mathematica" code and added a "Mathematica" notebook as an appendix to each chapter. They also address important new topics, such as quaternions.

The approach of this book is at times more computational than is usual for a book on the subject. For example, Brioshi's formula for the Gaussian curvature in terms of the first fundamental form can be too complicated for use in hand calculations, but"Mathematica "handles it easily, either through computations or through graphing curvature. Another part of "Mathematica" that can be used effectively in differential geometry is its special function library, where nonstandard spaces of constant curvature can be defined in terms of elliptic functions and then plotted.

Using the techniques described in this book, readers will understand concepts geometrically, plotting curves and surfaces on a monitor and then printing them. Containing more than 300 illustrations, the book demonstrates how to use "Mathematica" to plot many interesting curves and surfaces. Including as many topics of the classical differential geometry and surfaces as possible, it highlights important theorems with many examples.It includes 300 miniprograms for computing and plotting various geometric objects, alleviating the drudgery of computing things such as the curvature and torsion of a curve in space.

Games are poised for a major evolution, driven by growth in technical sophistication and audience reach. Characters that create powerful social and emotional connections with players throughout the game-play itself (not just in cut scenes) will be essential to next-generation games. However, the principles of sophisticated character design and interaction are not widely understood within the game development community. Further complicating the situation are powerful gender and cultural issues that can influence perception of characters. Katherine Isbister has spent the last 10 years examining what makes interactions with computer characters useful and engaging to different audiences. This work has revealed that the key to good design is leveraging player psychology: understanding what's memorable, exciting, and useful to a person about real-life social interactions, and applying those insights to character design. Game designers who create great characters often make use of these psychological principles without realizing it. Better Game Characters by Design gives game design professionals and other interactive media designers a framework for understanding how social roles and perceptions affect players' reactions to characters, helping produce stronger designs and better results.

Computersystemsresearch is heavilyinfluencedby changesincomputertechnol- ogy. As technology changes alterthe characteristics ofthe underlying hardware com- ponents of the system, the algorithms used to manage the system need to be re- examinedand newtechniques need to bedeveloped. Technological influencesare par- ticularly evident in the design of storage management systems such as disk storage managers and file systems. The influences have been so pronounced that techniques developed as recently as ten years ago are being made obsolete. The basic problem for disk storage managers is the unbalanced scaling of hard- warecomponenttechnologies. Disk storage managerdesign depends on the technolo- gy for processors, main memory, and magnetic disks. During the 1980s, processors and main memories benefited from the rapid improvements in semiconductortechnol- ogy and improved by several orders ofmagnitude in performance and capacity. This improvement has not been matched by disk technology, which is bounded by the me- chanics ofrotating magnetic media. Magnetic disks ofthe 1980s have improved by a factor of 10in capacity butonly a factor of2 in performance. This unbalanced scaling ofthe hardware components challenges the disk storage manager to compensate for the slower disks and allow performance to scale with the processor and main memory technology. Unless the performance of file systems can be improved over that of the disks, I/O-bound applications will be unable to use the rapid improvements in processor speeds to improve performance for computer users. Disk storage managers must break this bottleneck and decouple application perfor- mance from the disk.

The Distance Education Evolution: Case Studies addresses issues regarding the development and design of online courses, and the implementation and evaluation of an online learning program. Several chapters include design strategies for online courses that range from the specific to the universal. Many authors address pedagogical issues from both a theoretical and applied perspective. This diverse compilation of contributions by Temple University administrators and faculty gives a comprehensive overview of the distance education experience that can serve as a guide to others interested in providing quality distance education.

In recent decades Multimedia processing has emerged as an important technology to generate content based on images, video, audio, graphics, and text. This book is a compilation of the latest trends and developments in the field of computational intelligence in multimedia processing. The edited book presents a large number of interesting applications to intelligent multimedia processing of various Computational Intelligence techniques including neural networks and fuzzy logic.

From security training simulations to war games to role-playing games, to sports games to gambling, playing video games has become a social phenomena, and the increasing number of players that cross gender, culture, and age is on a dramatic upward trajectory. "Playing Video Games: Motives, Responses, and Consequences" integrates communication, psychology, and technology to examine the psychological and mediated aspects of playing video games. It is the first volume to delve deeply into these aspects of computer game play. It fits squarely into the media psychology arm of entertainment studies, the next big wave in media studies. The book targets one of the most popular and pervasive media in modern times, and it will serve to define the area of study and provide a theoretical spine for future research.
This unique and timely volume will appeal to scholars, researchers, and graduate students in media studies and mass communication, psychology, and marketing.

This first book in the series will describe the Net Generation as visual learners who thrive when surrounded with new technologies and whose needs can be met with the technological innovations. These new learners seek novel ways of studying, such as collaborating with peers, multitasking, as well as use of multimedia, the Internet, and other Information and Communication Technologies. Here we present mathematics as a contemporary subject that is engaging, exciting and enlightening in new ways. For example, in the distributed environment of cyber space, mathematics learners play games, watch presentations on YouTube, create Java applets of mathematics simulations and exchange thoughts over the Instant Messaging tool. How should mathematics education resonate with these learners and technological novelties that excite them?

This study centers on issues of marginality and monstrosity in medieval England. In the middle ages, geography was viewed as divinely ordered, so Britain's location at the periphery of the inhabitable world caused anxiety among its inhabitants. Far from the world's holy center, the geographic margins were considered monstrous. Medieval geography, for centuries scorned as crude, is now the subject of several careful studies. Monsters have likewise been the subject of recent attention in the growing field of "monster studies," though few works situate these creatures firmly in their specific historical contexts. This study sits at the crossroads of these two discourses (geography and monstrosity), treated separately in the established scholarship but inseparable in the minds of medieval authors and artists.

Since the establishment of the CAAD Futures Foundation in 1985, CAAD experts from all over the world meet every two years to present and document the state of the art of research in Computer Aided Architectural Design. Together, the series provides a good record of the evolving state of research in this area over the last fourteen years. The Proceedings this year is the eighth in the series. The conference held at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, includes twenty-five papers presenting new and exciting results and capabilities in areas such as computer graphics, building modeling, digital sketching and drawing systems, Web-based collaboration and information exchange. An overall reading shows that computers in architecture is still a young field, with many exciting results emerging out of both greater understanding of the human processes and information processing needed to support design and also the continuously expanding capabilities of digital technology.

Video segmentation is the most fundamental process for appropriate index ing and retrieval of video intervals. In general, video streams are composed 1 of shots delimited by physical shot boundaries. Substantial work has been done on how to detect such shot boundaries automatically (Arman et aI. , 1993) (Zhang et aI. , 1993) (Zhang et aI. , 1995) (Kobla et aI. , 1997). Through the inte gration of technologies such as image processing, speech/character recognition and natural language understanding, keywords can be extracted and associated with these shots for indexing (Wactlar et aI. , 1996). A single shot, however, rarely carries enough amount of information to be meaningful by itself. Usu ally, it is a semantically meaningful interval that most users are interested in re trieving. Generally, such meaningful intervals span several consecutive shots. There hardly exists any efficient and reliable technique, either automatic or manual, to identify all semantically meaningful intervals within a video stream. Works by (Smith and Davenport, 1992) (Oomoto and Tanaka, 1993) (Weiss et aI. , 1995) (Hjelsvold et aI. , 1996) suggest manually defining all such inter vals in the database in advance. However, even an hour long video may have an indefinite number of meaningful intervals. Moreover, video data is multi interpretative. Therefore, given a query, what is a meaningful interval to an annotator may not be meaningful to the user who issues the query. In practice, manual indexing of meaningful intervals is labour intensive and inadequate.

This book provides an overview of recent developments and applications of the Land Use Scanner model, which has been used in spatial planning for well over a decade. Internationally recognized as among the best of its kind, this versatile model can be applied at a national level for trend extrapolation, scenario studies and optimization, yet can also be employed in a smaller-scale regional context, as demonstrated by the assortment of regional case studies included in the book. Alongside these practical examples from the Netherlands, readers will find discussion of more theoretical aspects of land-use models as well as an assessment of various studies that aim to develop the Land-Use Scanner model further.

Spanning the divide between the abstractions of land-use modelling and the imperatives of policy making, this is a cutting-edge account of the way in which the Land-Use Scanner approach is able to interrogate a spectrum of issues that range from climate change to transportation efficiency. Aimed at planners, researchers and policy makers who need to stay abreast of the latest advances in land-use modelling techniques in the context of planning practice, the book guides the reader through the applications supported by current instrumentation. It affords the opportunity for a wide readership to benefit from the extensive and acknowledged expertise of Dutch planners, who have originated a host of much-used models."

Exploring Digital Design takes a multi-disciplinary look at digital design research where digital design is embedded in a larger socio-cultural context. Working from socio-technical research areas such as Participatory Design (PD), Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), the book explores how humanities offer new insights into digital design, and discusses a variety of digital design research practices, methods, and theoretical approaches spanning established disciplinary borders. The aim of the book is to explore the diversity of contemporary digital design practices in which commonly shared aspects are interpreted and integrated into different disciplinary and interdisciplinary conversations. It is the conversations and explorations with humanities that further distinguish this book within digital design research. Illustrated with real examples from digital design research practices from a variety of research projects and from a broad range of contexts Exploring Digital Design offers a basis for understanding the disciplinary roots as well as the interdisciplinary dialogues in digital design research, providing theoretical, empirical, and methodological sources for understanding digital design research. The first half of the book Exploring Digital Design is authored as a multi-disciplinary approach to digital design research, and represents novel perspectives and analyses in this research. The contributors are Gunnar Liestol, Andrew Morrison and Christina Moertberg in addition to the editors. Although primarily written for researchers and graduate students, digital design practioners will also find the book useful. Overall, Exploring Digital Design provides an excellent introduction to, and resource for, research into digital design.

Game Studies is a rapidly growing area of contemporary scholarship, yet volumes in the area have tended to focus on more general issues. With Playing with the Past, game studies is taken to the next level by offering a specific and detailed analysis of one area of digital game play -- the representation of history. The collection focuses on the ways in which gamers engage with, play with, recreate, subvert, reverse and direct the historical past, and what effect this has on the ways in which we go about constructing the present or imagining a future. What can World War Two strategy games teach us about the reality of this complex and multifaceted period? Do the possibilities of playing with the past change the way we understand history? If we embody a colonialist's perspective to conquer 'primitive' tribes in Colonization, does this privilege a distinct way of viewing history as benevolent intervention over imperialist expansion? The fusion of these two fields allows the editors to pose new questions about the ways in which gamers interact with their game worlds. Drawing these threads together, the collection concludes by asking whether digital games - which represent history or historical change - alter the way we, today, understand history itself.

This revealing book is about software development, the developers themselves, and how their work is organized and managed. The latest original research from Australia, Europe, and the UK is used to examine the differences between the image and reality of work in this industry. Chapters also cover issues surrounding the management of 'knowledge work and workers' and professionals in order to expose some of the problems of the management of software development work and workers.