This book covers the distinguishing characteristics and tropes of visual novels (VNs) as choice-based games and analyzes VNs like 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors; Hatoful Boyfriend; and Monster Prom, some of the best examples of the genre as illustrations. The author covers structuring branching narrative and plot, designing impactful and compelling choices, writing entertaining relationships and character interactions, understanding the importance of a VN's prose, and planning a VN's overall narrative design and story delivery. The book contains exercises at the end of chapters to practice the techniques discussed. By the end of the book, if the reader finishes all the exercises, they may have several portfolio pieces or a significant portion of their own VN project designed. Features: Discusses different aspects and genres of VNs, what makes them enjoyable, and successful techniques developers can incorporate into their own games Analyzes various VNs and choice-based games that use these successful techniques Shares tips from developers on portfolio pieces, hiring a team to work on VNs, and plotting and outlining VNs Branching Story, Unlocked Dialogue: Designing and Writing Visual Novels is a valuable resource for developers and narrative designers interested in working on VNs. The book will show them how they can design their own VN projects, design branching narratives, develop entertaining plots and relationships, design impactful and compelling choices, and write prose that's a pleasure to read.

Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Information Technology and Software Engineering presents selected articles from this major event, which was held in Beijing, December 8-10, 2012. This book presents the latest research trends, methods and experimental results in the fields of information technology and software engineering, covering various state-of-the-art research theories and approaches. The subjects range from intelligent computing to information processing, software engineering, Web, unified modeling language (UML), multimedia, communication technologies, system identification, graphics and visualizing, etc. The proceedings provide a major interdisciplinary forum for researchers and engineers to present the most innovative studies and advances, which can serve as an excellent reference work for researchers and graduate students working on information technology and software engineering. Prof. Wei Lu, Dr. Guoqiang Cai, Prof. Weibin Liu and Dr. Weiwei Xing all work at Beijing Jiaotong University.

This book was written to provide resource materials for teachers to use in their introductory or intermediate statistics class. The chapter content is ordered along the lines of many popular statistics books so it should be easy to supplement the content and exercises with class lecture materials. The book contains R script programs to demonstrate important topics and concepts covered in a statistics course, including probability, random sampling, population distribution types, role of the Central Limit Theorem, creation of sampling distributions for statistics, and more. The chapters contain T/F quizzes to test basic knowledge of the topics covered. In addition, the book chapters contain numerous exercises with answers or solutions to the exercises provided. The chapter exercises reinforce an understanding of the statistical concepts presented in the chapters. An instructor can select any of the supplemental materials to enhance lectures and/or provide additional coverage of concepts and topics in their statistics book.

This book uses the R statistical package which contains an extensive library of functions. The R software is free and easily downloaded and installed. The R programs are run in the R Studio software which is a graphical user interface for Windows. The R Studio software makes accessing R programs, viewing output from the exercises, and graphical displays easier to manage. The first chapter of the book covers the fundamentals of the R statistical package. This includes installation of R and R Studio, accessing R packages and libraries of functions. The chapter also covers how to access manuals and technical documentation, as well as, basic R commands used in the R script programs in the chapters. This chapter is important for the instructor to master so that the software can be installed and the R script programs run. The R software is free so students can also install the software and run the R script programs in the chapters. Teachers and students can run the R software on university computers, at home, or on laptop computers making it more available than many commercial software packages.

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Videogames and Agency explores the trend in videogames and their marketing to offer a player higher volumes, or even more distinct kinds, of player freedom. The book offers a new conceptual framework that helps us understand how this freedom to act is discussed by designers, and how that in turn reflects in their design principles. What can we learn from existing theories around agency? How do paratextual materials reflect design intention with regards to what the player can and cannot do in a videogame? How does game design shape the possibility space for player action? Through these questions and selected case studies that include AAA and independent games alike, the book presents a unique approach to studying agency that combines game design, game studies, and game developer discourse. By doing so, the book examines what discourses around player action, as well as a game's design can reveal about the nature of agency and videogame aesthetics. This book will appeal to readers specifically interested in videogames, such as game studies scholars or game designers, but also to media studies students and media and screen studies scholars less familiar with digital games.

This book offers a creative and accessible exploration of two comic book series: Y: The Last Man and Saga It examines themes pertinent to the 21st century and its challenges, such as those of diversity and religious pluralism, issues of gender and war, heroes and moral failures, and forgiveness and seeking justice Through close interdisciplinary reading and personal narratives, the author delves into the complex worlds of Y and Saga in search of an ethics, meaning, and a path resonant with real world struggles Reading these works side-by-side, the analysis draws parallels and seeks common themes around four central ideas: seeking and making meaning in a meaningless world; love and parenting through oppression and grief; peacefulness when surrounded by violence; and the perils and hopes of diversity and communion This timely, attentive, and thoughtful study will resonate with scholars and students of comic studies, media and cultural studies, philosophy, theology, literature, psychology, and popular culture studies

This volume provides an overview of multimedia data mining and knowledge discovery and discusses the variety of hot topics in multimedia data mining research. It describes the objectives and current tendencies in multimedia data mining research and their applications. Each part contains an overview of its chapters and leads the reader with a structured approach through the diverse subjects in the field.

The book serves as a collection of multi-disciplinary contributions related to Geographic Hypermedia and highlights the technological aspects of GIS. Specifically, it focuses on its database and database management system. The methodologies for modeling and handling geographic data are described.

It presents the novel models, methods and tools applied in Spatial Decision Support paradigm.

This is a visual quick reference book that shows how to get the most out of Office 2010 applciations, particularly if you haven't used the Office suite before.

This text compiles research from a vibrant social simulation community of researchers who have developed unique and innovative approaches to social simulation.

In 1982, Professor Pawlak published his seminal paper on what he called "rough sets" - a work which opened a new direction in the development of theories of incomplete information. Today, a decade and a half later, the theory of rough sets has evolved into a far-reaching methodology for dealing with a wide variety of issues centering on incompleteness and imprecision of information - issues which playa key role in the conception and design of intelligent information systems. "Incomplete Information: Rough Set Analysis" - or RSA for short - presents an up-to-date and highly authoritative account of the current status of the basic theory, its many extensions and wide-ranging applications. Edited by Professor Ewa Orlowska, one of the leading contributors to the theory of rough sets, RSA is a collection of nineteen well-integrated chapters authored by experts in rough set theory and related fields. A common thread that runs through these chapters ties the concept of incompleteness of information to those of indiscernibility and similarity.

This book provides insight and enhanced appreciation of analysis, modeling and control of dynamic systems. The reader is assumed to be familiar with calculus, physics and some programming skills. It might develop the reader's ability to interpret physical significance of mathematical results in system analysis. The book also prepares the reader for more advanced treatment of subsequent knowledge in the automatic control field. Learning objectives are performance-oriented, using for this purpose interactive MATLAB and SIMULINK software tools. It presents realistic problems in order to analyze, design and develop automatic control systems. Learning with computing tools can aid theory and help students to think, analyze and reason in meaningful ways. The book is also complemented with classroom slides and MATLAB and SIMULINK exercise files to aid students to focus on fundamental concepts treated.

Video on Demand Systems brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date research results in this fast moving area. Video on Demand Systems serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most challenging research issues in the field.

Excel-erate your productivity with the only guide you'll need to the latest versions of Microsoft Excel Microsoft Excel offers unsurpassed functionality and accessibility for data exploration and analysis to millions of users around the world. And learning to unlock its full potential is easier than you can imagine with help from Excel All-in-One For Dummies. Follow along with Excel expert and veteran author Paul McFedries as he walks you through every feature and technique you need to know to get the most out of this powerful software. You'll learn how to design worksheets, use formulas and functions, collaborate with colleagues and review their work, create charts and graphics, manage and analyze data, and create macros. Plus, you'll discover all the capabilities Microsoft has included in the newest versions of Excel, including dark mode and accessibility features. This indispensable reference allows you to: Get a firm grasp of Excel basics with the book's step-by-step guides before moving on to more advanced topics, like data analysis Access up-to-date information on all the new versions of Excel, including the ones bundled with Microsoft 365, Office 2021, and the LTSC/Enterprise Edition Enjoy the convenience of a single, comprehensive resource detailing everything you need to know about Excel Perfect for people coming to Excel for the very first time, Excel All-in-One For Dummies, Office 2021 Edition is also a must-read resource for anyone looking for a refresher on foundational or advanced Excel techniques.

"JDBC Metadata, MySQL, and Oracle Recipes" is the only book that focuses on metadata or annotation-based code recipes for JDBC API for use with Oracle and MySQL. It continues where the authors other book, "JDBC Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach," leaves off.

This edition is also a Java EE 5-compliant book, perfect for lightweight Java database development. And it provides cut-and-paste code templates that can be immediately customized and applied in each developer's application development.

Mastering modelling, and in particular numerical models, is becoming a crucial and central question in modern computational mechanics. Various tools, able to quantify the quality of a model with regard to another one taken as the reference, have been derived. Applied to computational strategies, these tools lead to new computational methods which are called "adaptive." The present book is concerned with outlining the state of the art and the latest advances in both these important areas.

Papers are selected from a Workshop (Cachan 17-19 September 1997) which is the third of a series devoted to Error Estimators and Adaptivity in Computational Mechanics. The Cachan Workshop dealt with latest advances in adaptive computational methods in mechanics and their impacts on solving engineering problems. It was centered too on providing answers to simple questions such as: what is being used or can be used at present to solve engineering problems? What should be the state of art in the year 2000? What are the new questions involving error estimators and their applications?

In honor of professor and renowned statistician R. Dennis Cook, this festschrift explores his influential contributions to an array of statistical disciplines ranging from experimental design and population genetics, to statistical diagnostics and all areas of regression-related inference and analysis. Since the early 1990s, Prof. Cook has led the development of dimension reduction methodology in three distinct but related regression contexts: envelopes, sufficient dimension reduction (SDR), and regression graphics. In particular, he has made fundamental and pioneering contributions to SDR, inventing or co-inventing many popular dimension reduction methods, such as sliced average variance estimation, the minimum discrepancy approach, model-free variable selection, and sufficient dimension reduction subspaces. A prolific researcher and mentor, Prof. Cook is known for his ability to identify research problems in statistics that are both challenging and important, as well as his deep appreciation for the applied side of statistics. This collection of Prof. Cook's collaborators, colleagues, friends, and former students reflects the broad array of his contributions to the research and instructional arenas of statistics.

Collecting the work of the foremost scientists in the field, Discrete-Event Modeling and Simulation: Theory and Applications presents the state of the art in modeling discrete-event systems using the discrete-event system specification (DEVS) approach. It introduces the latest advances, recent extensions of formal techniques, and real-world examples of various applications. The book covers many topics that pertain to several layers of the modeling and simulation architecture. It discusses DEVS model development support and the interaction of DEVS with other methodologies. It describes different forms of simulation supported by DEVS, the use of real-time DEVS simulation, the relationship between DEVS and graph transformation, the influence of DEVS variants on simulation performance, and interoperability and composability with emphasis on DEVS standardization. The text also examines extensions to DEVS, new formalisms, and abstractions of DEVS models as well as the theory and analysis behind real-world system identification and control. To support the generation and search of optimal models of a system, a framework is developed based on the system entity structure and its transformation to DEVS simulation models. In addition, the book explores numerous interesting examples that illustrate the use of DEVS to build successful applications, including optical network-on-chip, construction/building design, process control, workflow systems, and environmental models. A one-stop resource on advances in DEVS theory, applications, and methodology, this volume offers a sampling of the best research in the area, a broad picture of the DEVS landscape, and trend-setting applications enabled by the DEVS approach. It provides the basis for future research discoveries and encourages the development of new applications.

Multimedia data comprising of images, audio and video is becoming increasingly common. The decreasing costs of consumer electronic devices such as digital cameras and digital camcorders, along with the ease of transportation facilitated by the Internet, has lead to a phenomenal rise in the amount of multimedia data generated and distributed. Given that this trend of increased use of multimedia data is likely to accelerate, there is an urgent need for providing a clear means of capturing, storing, indexing, retrieving, analyzing and summarizing such data. Content-based access to multimedia data is of primary importance since it is the natural way by which human beings interact with such information. To facilitate the content-based access of multimedia information, the first step is to derive feature measures from these data so that a feature space representation of the data content can be formed. This can subsequently allow for mapping the feature space to the symbol space (semantics) either automatically or through human intervention. Thus, signal to symbol mapping, useful for any practical system, can be successfully achieved. Perspectives on Content-Based Multimedia Systems provides a comprehensive set of techniques to tackle these important issues. This book offers detailed solutions to a wide range of practical problems in building real systems by providing specifics of three systems built by the authors. While providing a systems focus, it also equips the reader with a keen understanding of the fundamental issues, including a formalism for content-based multimedia database systems, multimedia feature extraction, object-based techniques, signature-based techniques and fuzzy retrieval techniques. The performance evaluation issues of practical systems is also explained. This book brings together essential elements of building a content-based multimedia database system in a way that makes them accessible to practitioners in computer science and electrical engineering. It can also serve as a textbook for graduate-level courses.

Introduction to Mathcad 15, 3/e is ideal for Freshman or Introductory courses in Engineering and Computer Science. Introduces Mathcad's basic mathematical and data analysis functions (e.g., trigonometric, regression, and interpolation functions) using easy-to-follow examples, then applies the functions to examples drawn from emerging or rapidly developing fields in engineering. ESource-Prentice Hall's Engineering Source-provides a complete, flexible introductory engineering and computing program. ESource allows professors to fully customize their textbooks through the ESource website. Professors are not only able to pick and choose modules, but also sections of modules, incorporate their own materials, and re-paginate and re-index the complete project. prenhall.com/esource

Continued progress in Speech Technology in the face of ever-increasing demands on the performance levels of applications is a challenge to the whole speech and language science community. Robust recognition and understanding of spontaneous speech in varied environments, good comprehensibility and naturalness of expressive speech synthesis are goals that cannot be achieved without a change of paradigm. This book argues for interdisciplinary communication and cooperation in problem-solving in general, and discusses the interaction between speech and language engineering and phonetics in particular. With a number of reports on innovative speech technology research as well as more theoretical discussions, it addresses the practical, scientific and sometimes the philosophical problems that stand in the way of cross-disciplinary collaboration and illuminates some of the many possible ways forward.

Audience: Researchers and professionals in speech technology and computational linguists.