This volume presents an original framework for the study of video games that use visual materials and narrative conventions from ancient Greece and Rome. It focuses on the culturally rich continuum of ancient Greek and Roman games, treating them not just as representations, but as functional interactive products that require the player to interpret, communicate with and alter them. Tracking the movement of such concepts across different media, the study builds an interconnected picture of antiquity in video games within a wider transmedial environment. Ancient Greece and Rome in Videogames presents a wide array of games from several different genres, ranging from the blood-spilling violence of god-killing and gladiatorial combat to meticulous strategizing over virtual Roman Empires and often bizarre adventures in pseudo-ancient places. Readers encounter instances in which players become intimately engaged with the "epic mode" of spectacle in God of War, moments of negotiation with colonised lands in Rome: Total War and Imperium Romanum, and multi-layered narratives rich with ancient traditions in games such as Eleusis and Salammbo. The case study approach draws on close analysis of outstanding examples of the genre to uncover how both representation and gameplay function in such "ancient games".

SQL Server 2008 is the latest update to Microsoft's flagship database management system. This is the largest update since SQL Server 2005, and it brings increased ability to deliver data across more platforms, and thus many different types of devices. New functionality also allows for easy storage and retrieval of digitized images and video. These attributes address the recent explosion in the popularity of web-based video and server and desktop virtualization. The Real MCTS SQL Server 2008 Exam 70-433 Prep Kit prepares readers for the Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist exam: SQL Server 2008, Database Development. This is a new exam in the SQL Server product family, and is comprised of some objectives from exam 70-431 from SQL Server 2005, and covers new, expanded query capabilities in SQL Server 2008. According to Microsoft: Exam 70-431 for SQL Server 2005 was passed by over 35,000 people.

150,000 people passed a similar exam for SQL Server 2000.

Additionally, this exam is a pre-requisite for those going on to obtain the MCITP: Database Developer 2008:

Successful candidates for the SQL Server 2005 MCITP 2,500.

The Prep Kit offers practice exams via the book's companion site.
This is The 'Real' Microsoft Exam Prep Kit, and provides the reader with independent and unbiased exam tips and warnings everything they need to know to ensure certification success.Authored by Mark Horninger, a nationally recognized leader in SQL Server with over 50 Microsoft certifications to his credit; Mark knows what it takes to successfully navigate Microsoft exams.Complete study package offers Syngress proven pedagogy including practice exams via the book s companion site
"

Designed to provide software engineers, students, and IT professionals with an understanding of the fundamentals of project management in the technology/IT field, this book serves as a practical introduction to the subject. Updated with information on how Fundamentals of Project Management integrates with and complements Project Management Institute's Project Management Body of Knowledge, this collection explains fundamental methodologies and techniques while also discussing new technology, tools, and virtual work environments. Examples and case studies are based on technology projects, and there are sample documents ranging from initial RFP to closing reports and different meeting agendas, status reports, cost analysis, and technical specifications. The book includes 60 templates to lead technology professionals through the six phases of the project life cycle: planning, design, development, integration, deployment, and postdeployment. A chapter on using social media is also included.

Covering key areas of evaluation and methodology, client-side applications, specialist and novel technologies, along with initial appraisals of disabilities, this important book provides comprehensive coverage of web accessibility. Written by leading experts in the field, it provides an overview of existing research and also looks at future developments, providing a much deeper insight than can be obtained through existing research libraries, aggregations, or search engines.

Disaster management is a process or strategy that is implemented when any type of catastrophic event takes place. The process may be initiated when anything threatens to disrupt normal operations or puts the lives of human beings at risk. Governments on all levels as well as many businesses create some sort of disaster plan that make it possible to overcome the catastrophe and return to normal function as quickly as possible. Response to natural disasters (e.g., floods, earthquakes) or technological disaster (e.g., nuclear, chemical) is an extreme complex process that involves severe time pressure, various uncertainties, high non-linearity and many stakeholders. Disaster management often requires several autonomous agencies to collaboratively mitigate, prepare, respond, and recover from heterogeneous and dynamic sets of hazards to society. Almost all disasters involve high degrees of novelty to deal with most unexpected various uncertainties and dynamic time pressures. Existing studies and approaches within disaster management have mainly been focused on some specific type of disasters with certain agency oriented. There is a lack of a general framework to deal with similarities and synergies among different disasters by taking their specific features into account. This book provides with various decisions analysis theories and support tools in complex systems in general and in disaster management in particular. The book is also generated during a long-term preparation of a European project proposal among most leading experts in the areas related to the book title. Chapters are evaluated based on quality and originality in theory and methodology, application oriented, relevance to the title of the book.

"Current Topics in Membranes" provides a systematic, comprehensive, and rigorous approach to specific topics relevant to the study of cellular membranes. Each volume is a guest edited compendium of membrane biology.
*Discusses the current stat of electrostatics in biomolecular simulations and future directions
*Includes information on time and length scales in lipid bilayer simulations
*Includes a chapter on the nature of lipid rafts

This book highlights recent developments in the field, presented at the Social Simulation 2015 conference in Groningen, The Netherlands. It covers advances both in applications and methods of social simulation. Societal issues addressed range across complexities in economic systems, opinion dynamics and civil violence, changing mobility patterns, different land-use, transition in the energy system, food production and consumption, ecosystem management and historical processes. Methodological developments cover how to use empirical data in validating models in general, formalization of behavioral theory in agent behavior, construction of artificial populations for experimentation, replication of models, and agent-based models that can be run in a web browser. Social simulation is a rapidly evolving field. Social scientists are increasingly interested in social simulation as a tool to tackle the complex non-linear dynamics of society. Furthermore, the software and hardware tools available for social simulation are becoming more and more powerful. This book is an important source for readers interested in the newest developments in the ways in which the simulation of social interaction contributes to our understanding and managing of complex social phenomena.

Although recognized as a key to the design process, prototyping often falls victim to budget cuts, deadlines, or lack of access to sophisticated tools. This can lead to sloppy and ineffective prototypes or the abandonment of them altogether. Rather than lose this important step, people are turning to Microsoft Excel(r) to create effective, simple, and inexpensive prototypes. Conveniently, the software is available to nearly everyone, and most are proficient in its basic functionality.
Effective Prototyping with Excel offers how-to guidance on how everyone can use basic Excel skills to create prototypes ranging from narrative wire frames to hi-fidelity prototypes. A wide array of software design problems and business demands are solved via practical step-by-step examples and illustrations.
Step-by-step guide to prototyping with a simple and affordable tool nearly everyone already has on their desktop.
Quickly and easily allows web and software designers to explore usability, design alternatives, and test theories prior to starting production.
Perfect companion to Effective Prototyping for Software Makers with the same author team and full-color treatment, useful case studies, and hands-on exercises."

Modeling is a key component to sciences from mathematics to life science, including environmental and ecological studies. By looking at the underlying concepts of the software, we can make sure that we build mathematically feasible models and that we get the most out of the data and information that we have. This book shows how models can be analyzed using simple math and software to generate meaningful qualitative descriptions of system dynamics. This book shows that even without a full analytical, mathematically rigorous analysis of the equations, there may be ways to derive some qualitative understanding of the general behavior of a system. By relating some of the modeling approaches and systems theory to real-world examples the book illustrates how these approaches can help understand concepts such as sustainability, peak oil, adaptive management, optimal harvest and other practical applications.
* Relates modeling approaches and systems theory to real-world examples
* Teaches students to build mathematically feasible models and get the most out of the data and information available
* Wide range of applications in hydrology, population dynamics, market cycles, sustainability theory, management, and more

Throughout the world, high-profile large organizations (aerospace and defense, automotive, banking, chemicals, financial service providers, healthcare, high tech, insurance, oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, retail, telecommunications, and utilities) and governments are using SAP software to process their most mission-critical, highly sensitive data. With more than 100,000 installations, SAP is the world's largest enterprise software company and the world's third largest independent software supplier overall.
Despite this widespread use, there have been very few books written on SAP implementation and security, despite a great deal of interest. (There are 220,000 members in an on-line SAP 'community' seeking information, ideas and tools on the IT Toolbox Website alone.) Managing SAP user authentication and authorizations is becoming more complex than ever, as there are more and more SAP products involved that have very different access issues. It's a complex area that requires focused expertise.
This book is designed for these network and systems administrator who deal with the complexity of having to make judgmental decisions regarding enormously complicated and technical data in the SAP landscape, as well as pay attention to new compliance rules and security regulations.
Most SAP users experience significant challenges when trying to manage and mitigate the risks in existing or new security solutions and usually end up facing repetitive, expensive re-work and perpetuated compliance challenges. This book is designed to help them properly and efficiently manage these challenges on an ongoing basis. It aims to remove the 'Black Box' mystique that surrounds SAP security.
* The most comprehensive coverage of the essentials of SAP security currently available: risk and control management, identity and access management, data protection and privacy, corporate governance, legal and regulatory compliance.
* This book contains information about SAP security that is not available anywhere else to help the reader avoid the "gotchas" that may leave them vulnerable during times of upgrade or other system changes
*Companion Web site provides custom SAP scripts, which readers can download to install, configure and troubleshoot SAP.

later versions. In addition, the CD-ROM contains a complete solutions manual that includes detailed solutions to all the problems in the book. If the reader does not wish to consult these solutions, then a brief list of answers is provided in printed form at the end of the book. Iwouldliketothankmyfamilymembersfortheirhelpandcontinuedsupportwi- out which this book would not have been possible. I would also like to acknowledge the help of the editior at Springer-Verlag (Dr. Thomas Ditzinger) for his assistance in bringing this book out in its present form. Finally, I would like to thank my brother, Nicola, for preparing most of the line drawings in both editions. In this edition, I am providing two email addresses for my readers to contact me (pkattan@tedata. net. jo and pkattan@lsu. edu). The old email address that appeared in the ?rst edition was cancelled in 2004. December 2006 Peter I. Kattan PrefacetotheFirstEdition 3 This is a book for people who love ?nite elements and MATLAB . We will use the popular computer package MATLAB as a matrix calculator for doing ?nite element analysis. Problems will be solved mainly using MATLAB to carry out the tedious and lengthy matrix calculations in addition to some manual manipulations especially when applying the boundary conditions. In particular the steps of the ?nite element method are emphasized in this book. The reader will not ?nd ready-made MATLAB programsforuseasblackboxes. Insteadstep-by-stepsolutionsof?niteelementpr- lems are examined in detail using MATLAB.

This book provides comprehensive coverage of fundamentals of database management system. It contains a detailed description on Relational Database Management System Concepts. There are a variety of solved examples and review questions with solutions. This book is for those who require a better understanding of relational data modeling, its purpose, its nature, and the standards used in creating relational data model.

This book contains the collection of papers presented at the conference of the International Federation for Information Processing Working Group 8.2 "Information and Organizations." The conference took place during June 21-24, 2009 at the Universidade do Minho in Guimaraes, Portugal. The conference entitled "CreativeSME - The Role of IS in Leveraging the Intelligence and Creativity of SME's" attracted high-quality submissions from across the world. Each paper was reviewed by at least two reviewers in a double-blind review process. In addition to the 19 papers presented at the conference, there were five panels and four workshops, which covered a range of issues relevant to SMEs, creativity and information systems. We would like to show our appreciation of the efforts of our two invited keynote speakers, Michael Dowling of the University of Regensburg, Germany and Carlos Zorrinho, Portuguese coordinator of the Lisbon Strategy and the Technological Plan. The following organizations supported the conference through financial or other contributions and we would like to thank them for their engagement: "

Systems for Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) are currently separate. The potential of the latest technologies and changes in operational and analytical applications over the last decade have given rise to the unification of these systems, which can be of benefit for both workloads. Research and industry have reacted and prototypes of hybrid database systems are now appearing.

Benchmarks are the standard method for evaluating, comparing and supporting the development of new database systems. Because of the separation of OLTP and OLAP systems, existing benchmarks are only focused on one or the other. With the rise of hybrid database systems, benchmarks to assess these systems will be needed as well.

Based on the examination of existing benchmarks, a new benchmark for hybrid database systems is introduced in this book. It is furthermore used to determine the effect of adding OLAP to an OLTP workload and is applied to analyze the impact of typically used optimizations in the historically separate OLTP and OLAP domains in mixed-workload scenarios.

This book presents computer programming as a key method for solving mathematical problems. There are two versions of the book, one for MATLAB and one for Python. The book was inspired by the Springer book TCSE 6: A Primer on Scientific Programming with Python (by Langtangen), but the style is more accessible and concise, in keeping with the needs of engineering students. The book outlines the shortest possible path from no previous experience with programming to a set of skills that allows the students to write simple programs for solving common mathematical problems with numerical methods in engineering and science courses. The emphasis is on generic algorithms, clean design of programs, use of functions, and automatic tests for verification.

The methodological system known as The NuneX Method, so named after its developer, Richard Nunez, took over 14 years of experience, documentation, and experimenting to develop and refine into a workable documentation system. This system can handle the influx of progress and change within information technology and be utilized as a form of technical knowledge management. The main objectives for this methodology are for any technical professional to properly document a project, system implementation, work request, or repair, and maintain a personal library of their own for reference and professional growth. It can even serve as a gauge to measure the success an IT professional achieves as one improves and becomes more aware and open to new ideas and techniques. Use of The NuneX Method can certainly contribute to an IT professional's own personal success story and be a tool to utilize anytime and anywhere. It was developed by an IT professional for IT professionals, namely those who work in the technical areas within Information Technology. techniques for IT professionals who work in technical and engineering level positions. 6. Refinement; 7. Maintenance & Updating documentation and allow for better quality service and professional advancement within a technical career. complete with practical, real-world exercises to enhance the learning process.

Mathematical optimization is used in nearly all computer graphics applications, from computer vision to animation. This book teaches readers the core set of techniques that every computer graphics professional should understand in order to envision and expand the boundaries of what is possible in their work.
Study of this authoritative reference will help readers develop a very powerful tool- the ability to create and decipher mathematical models that can better realize solutions to even the toughest problems confronting computer graphics community today.
The authors are renowned researchers from IMPA, the Brazilian National Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics.
*Distils down a vast and complex world of info on optimization into one short, self-contained volume especially for computer graphics
*Helps CG professionals identify the best technique for solving particular problems quickly, by categorizing the most effective algorithms by application
*Keeps readers current by supplementing the focus on key, classic methods with special end-of-chapter sections on cutting-edge developments

Based on more than 10 years of teaching experience, Blanken and his coeditors have assembled all the topics that should be covered in advanced undergraduate or graduate courses on multimedia retrieval and multimedia databases. The single chapters of this textbook explain the general architecture of multimedia information retrieval systems and cover various metadata languages such as Dublin Core, RDF, or MPEG. The authors emphasize high-level features and show how these are used in mathematical models to support the retrieval process. For each chapter, there 's detail on further reading, and additional exercises and teaching material is available online.

Computational welding mechanics (CWM) provides an important technique for modelling welding processes. Welding simulations are a key tool in improving the design and control of welding processes and the performance of welded components or structures. CWM can be used to model phenomena such as heat generation, thermal stresses and large plastic deformations of components or structures. It also has a wider application in modelling thermomechanical and microstructural phenomena in metals. This important book reviews the principles, methods and applications of CWM.
The book begins by discussing the physics of welding before going on to review modelling methods and options as well as validation techniques. It also reviews applications in areas such as fatigue, buckling and deformation, improved service life of components and process optimisation. Some of the numerical methods described in the book are illustrated using software available from the author which allows readers to explore CWM in more depth.
Computational welding mechanics is a standard work for welding engineers and all those researching welding processes and wider thermomechanical and microstructural phenomena in metals.
Highlights the principles, methods and applications of CWMDiscusses the physics of weldingAssesses modelling methods and validation techniques

Particle models play an important role in many applications in physics, chemistry and biology. They can be studied on the computer with the help of molecular dynamics simulations. This book presents in detail both the necessary numerical methods and techniques (linked-cell method, SPME-method, tree codes, multipole technique) and the theoretical background and foundations. It illustrates the aspects modelling, discretization, algorithms and their parallel implementation with MPI on computer systems with distributed memory. Furthermore, detailed explanations are given to the different steps of numerical simulation, and code examples are provided. With the description of the algorithms and the presentation of the results of various simulations from the areas material science, nanotechnology, biochemistry and astrophysics, the reader of this book will be able to write his own programs for molecular dynamics step by step and to run successful experiments.

As financial systems migrate to a pervasive, online environment, business leaders and layman investors alike must adapt to changes in the market brought about by this new age of business. Strategic E-Commerce Systems and Tools for Competing in the Digital Marketplace advances the body of knowledge on electronic business and commerce with an in-depth look at the opportunities and concerns surrounding online business and finance. This cutting-edge reference aids business leaders, financial managers, investors, and consumers looking to build their portfolios and thrive in modern digital business environments.