Electronic information about the individual is derived from what we say about ourselves, shaped by commentary from others and extended through electronic exchanges with both human and computer based intelligent agents.Digital Identity and Social Media will examine the impact of social media and distributed social spaces on our contemporary understandings of digital identity. This book will benefit researchers, practitioners, the wider educational community across all sectors, educational technologists, and individuals who are interested in how social media and emerging technologies will impact formal education and the social implications that surround the reformulation and fluidity of virtual communities. In addition, professionals and researchers working in the field of information and communication technologies and knowledge management in various disciplines will find this title to be an invaluable resource.

This book introduces the Vienna Simulator Suite for 3rd-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP)-compatible Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) simulators and presents applications to demonstrate their uses for describing, designing, and optimizing wireless cellular LTE-A networks. Part One addresses LTE and LTE-A link level techniques. As there has been high demand for the downlink (DL) simulator, it constitutes the central focus of the majority of the chapters. This part of the book reports on relevant highlights, including single-user (SU), multi-user (MU) and single-input-single-output (SISO) as well as multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) transmissions. Furthermore, it summarizes the optimal pilot pattern for high-speed communications as well as different synchronization issues. One chapter is devoted to experiments that show how the link level simulator can provide input to a testbed. This section also uses measurements to present and validate fundamental results on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmissions that are not limited to LTE-A. One chapter exclusively deals with the newest tool, the uplink (UL) link level simulator, and presents cutting-edge results. In turn, Part Two focuses on system-level simulations. From early on, system-level simulations have been in high demand, as people are naturally seeking answers when scenarios with numerous base stations and hundreds of users are investigated. This part not only explains how mathematical abstraction can be employed to speed up simulations by several hundred times without sacrificing precision, but also illustrates new theories on how to abstract large urban heterogeneous networks with indoor small cells. It also reports on advanced applications such as train and car transmissions to demonstrate the tools' capabilities.

Featuring stunning concept art and visual details, this is the second volume of artwork of Blizzard's Hearthstone game. Something stirs in the dark... The second volume of The Art of Hearthstone dives deep into the depths of the Year of the Kraken, the first year of Hearthstone's standard format. Consisting of hundreds of illustrations from the corruptive cults of Whispers of the Old Gods, the glamourous disco of One Night in Karazhan, and the turf wars of Means Streets of Gadgetzan, this book goes into detail about the Hearthstone team's artistic process for card art, game boards, and other visual designs, while also exploring the challenges and triumphs of creating a game enjoyed by millions upon millions of players around the globe.

The chapters of this book summarize the lectures delivered du ring the NATO Advanced Study Institute (ASI) on Computational Methods in Mechanisms, that took place in the Sts. Constantin and Elena Resort, near Varna, on the Bulgarian Coast of the Black Sea, June 16-28, 1997. The purpose of the ASI was to bring together leading researchers in the area of mechanical systems at large, with special emphasis in the computational issues around their analysis, synthesis, and optimization, during two weeks of lectures and discussion. A total of 89 participants from 23 count ries played an active role during the lectures and sessions of contributed papers. Many of the latter are being currently reviewed for publication in specialized journals. The subject of the book is mechanical systems, Le., systems composed of rigid and flexible bodies, coupled by mechanical means so as to constrain their various bodies in a goal-oriented manner, usually driven under computer con trol. Applications of the discipline are thus of the most varied nature, ranging from transportation systems to biomedical devices. U nder normal operation conditions, the constitutive bodies of a mechanical system can be consid ered to be rigid, the rigidity property then easing dramatically the analysis of the kinematics and dynamics of the system at hand. Examples of these systems are the suspension of a terrestrial vehicle negotiating a curve at speeds within the allowed or recommended limits and the links of multiaxis industrial robots performing conventional pick-and-place operations."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.