This book looks closely at the endings of narrative digital games, examining their ways of concluding the processes of both storytelling and play in order to gain insight into what endings are and how we identify them in different media. While narrative digital games share many representational strategies for signalling their upcoming end with more traditional narrative media - such as novels or movies - they also show many forms of endings that often radically differ from our conventional understanding of conclusion and closure. From vast game worlds that remain open for play after a story's finale, to multiple endings that are often hailed as a means for players to create their own stories, to the potentially tragic endings of failure and "game over", digital games question the traditional singularity and finality of endings. Using a broad range of examples, this book delves deeply into these and other forms and their functions, both to reveal the closural specificities of the ludonarrative hybrid that digital games are, as well as to find the core elements that characterise endings in any medium. It examines how endings make themselves known to players and raises the question of how well-established closural conventions blend with play and a player's effort to achieve a goal. As an interdisciplinary study that draws on game studies as much as on transmedial narratology, Forms and Functions of Endings in Narrative Digital Games is suited for scholars and students of digital games as well as for narratologists yet to become familiar with this medium.

My iPad for Seniors, 5th Edition, is a comprehensive guide to using all of Apple’s iPad models. It includes everything from basic setup information to finding and installing new apps to using the iPad for communication, entertainment, and productivity. The information presented in this book is targeted at users aged 50 and up; whenever possible, one best way for any given task is presented, and instructions are simplified with older users in mind. In addition, much content specific for people 50+ is included.

This edition features completely new content from front to back. The emphasis is on how this audience uses their iPads, covering those apps and features in simple step-by-step fashion. Coverage of relevant apps is included in the appropriate content chapters, instead of taking up space in their own chapters.

- Use Siri to dictate email, messages, notes and more

- Take video with the front and rear camera

- Video chat with your friends using FaceTime over Wi-Fi or cellular

- Stream audio and video to Apple TV and other devices

- Connect your iPad to your Wi-Fi network and cellular networks

- Move information between your computer and iPad

- Share photos using Shared Photo Stream

- Edit and share photos and video

- Entertain yourself with movies, TV shows, YouTube, podcasts, games and more

- Quickly and easily keep up with your social networks using integrated FaceBook and Twitter features

- Use iCloud tabs in Safari to make browsing easier across devices

- Download apps to make your iPad even more useful

- Use Passbook to keep track of movie and airline tickets and much more

- Create documents and spreadsheets

- Build and display presentations

- Find locations and get directions using the new Maps app

- Connect with your friends and family using apps such as FaceTime, Skype and Facebook

Includes case studies illustrating the business processes that underlines the use of big data and health analytics to improve healthcare delivery Discusses AI based smart paradigms for reliable predictions of infectious disease dynamics which can help or prevent disease transmission Highlights the different aspects of using extended reality for diverse healthcare applications and aggregates the current state of research Offers intelligent models of the smart recommender system for personal well-being services and computer-aided drug discovery and design methods Presents novel innovative techniques for extracting user social behavior known as sentiment analysis for healthcare related purposes

A very concise guide to a popular programming language, so there is a healthy demand for content which teaches who to utilize JavaScript. The book's broad coverage (paired with being compact) makes it more appealing than competitor's books currently on the market. Compared to online material, it has the benefit of material being presented in one coherent sequence. Author utilizes many years of teaching experience to communicate an effective way for teaching JavaScript quickly.

This book examines the implementation of emerging technology projects in the service-based Indian IT sector. The title shows how emerging technologies impact IT-enabled Services (ITeS) organizations and examines the mobility prospects for engineers and students looking to enter IT. Indian IT, dominated by organizations offering ITeS, provides services to clients across the world. Fueling this sector's growth are engineering graduates. Emerging technologies such as AI, Big Data, Cloud, and Blockchain, have brought the IT and engineering education sectors to a crossroads, with global implications. The IT sector is facing growing demands for new technology solutions from its clients and it is engineering students who are expected to upskill in order to build these solutions. The volume provides a rare, bottom-up look at the intersection of technology, education and organizational structure, based on an ethnographic study. This book will be a helpful and unique resource for managers in IT enabled Services grappling with emerging technologies, researchers looking at how emerging technologies impact organizations and for those developing innovative IT courses in higher education. Readers interested in the global structure of IT education and industry will also find a fresh, ethnographically-informed take on these issues.

This book from Jürgen Claus is a milestone among the books dedicated to the planet sea A knowledgeable overview of marine architectures from both the Pacific and Atlantic regions Discusses the seascape as a fluid studio for visual artists

In GPU Pro5 Advanced Rendering Techniques, section editors Wolfgang Engel, Christopher Oat, Carsten Dachsbacher, Michal Valient, Wessam Bahnassi, and Marius Bjorge have once again assembled a high-quality collection of cutting-edge techniques for advanced graphics processing unit (GPU) programming.

Divided into six sections, the book covers rendering, lighting, effects in image space, mobile devices, 3D engine design, and compute. It explores rasterization of liquids, ray tracing of art assets that would otherwise be used in a rasterized engine, physically based area lights, volumetric light effects, screen-space grass, the usage of quaternions, and a quadtree implementation on the GPU. It also addresses the latest developments in deferred lighting on mobile devices, OpenCL optimizations for mobile devices, morph targets, and tiled deferred blending methods.

In color throughout, GPU Pro5 is the only book that incorporates contributions from more than 50 experts who cover the latest developments in graphics programming for games and movies. It presents ready-to-use ideas and procedures that can help solve many of your daily graphics programming challenges. Example programs with source code are provided on the book s CRC Press web page."

"The first edition of Deep Learning with Python is one of the best books on the subject. The second edition made it even better." - Todd Cook The bestseller revised! Deep Learning with Python, Second Edition is a comprehensive introduction to the field of deep learning using Python and the powerful Keras library. Written by Google AI researcher Francois Chollet, the creator of Keras, this revised edition has been updated with new chapters, new tools, and cutting-edge techniques drawn from the latest research. You'll build your understanding through practical examples and intuitive explanations that make the complexities of deep learning accessible and understandable. about the technology Machine learning has made remarkable progress in recent years. We've gone from near-unusable speech recognition, to near-human accuracy. From machines that couldn't beat a serious Go player, to defeating a world champion. Medical imaging diagnostics, weather forecasting, and natural language question answering have suddenly become tractable problems. Behind this progress is deep learning-a combination of engineering advances, best practices, and theory that enables a wealth of previously impossible smart applications across every industry sector about the book Deep Learning with Python introduces the field of deep learning using the Python language and the powerful Keras library. You'll learn directly from the creator of Keras, Francois Chollet, building your understanding through intuitive explanations and practical examples. Updated from the original bestseller with over 50% new content, this second edition includes new chapters, cutting-edge innovations, and coverage of the very latest deep learning tools. You'll explore challenging concepts and practice with applications in computer vision, natural-language processing, and generative models. By the time you finish, you'll have the knowledge and hands-on skills to apply deep learning in your own projects. what's inside Deep learning from first principles Image-classification, imagine segmentation, and object detection Deep learning for natural language processing Timeseries forecasting Neural style transfer, text generation, and image generation about the reader Readers need intermediate Python skills. No previous experience with Keras, TensorFlow, or machine learning is required. about the author Francois Chollet works on deep learning at Google in Mountain View, CA. He is the creator of the Keras deep-learning library, as well as a contributor to the TensorFlow machine-learning framework. He also does AI research, with a focus on abstraction and reasoning. His papers have been published at major conferences in the field, including the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), the Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), and others.

Students are guided through the latest trends in computer concepts and technology in an exciting and easy-to-follow format. Updated for currency, DISCOVERING COMPUTERS provides s the most up-to-date information on the latest technology in today's digital world.

Get fast answers to your G Suite questions with this friendly resource G Suite For Dummies is the fun guide to the productivity suite that's quickly winning over professional and personal users. This book shares the steps on how to collaborate in the cloud, create documents and spreadsheets, build presentations, and connect with chat or video. Written in the easy-to-follow For Dummies style, G Suite For Dummies covers the essential components of Google's popular software, including: Google Docs for word processing Gmail for email Google Calendar for scheduling and day planning Google Sheets for spreadsheet functionality Google Drive for data storage Google Hangouts and Google Meet for videoconferencing and calling capability The book helps navigate the G Suite payment plans and subscription options as well as settings that ensure your own privacy and security while operating in the cloud. Perfect for anyone hoping to get things done with this tool, G Suite For Dummies belongs on the bookshelf of every G Suite user who needs help from time to time.

The Body in Sound, Music and Performance brings together cutting-edge contributions from women working on and researching contemporary sound practice. This highly interdisciplinary book features a host of international contributors and places emphasis on developments beyond the western world, including movements growing across Latin America. Within the book, the body is situated as both the site and centre for knowledge making and creative production. Chapters explore how insightful theoretical analysis, new methods, innovative practises, and sometimes within the socio-cultural conditions of racism, sexism and classicism, the body can rise above, reshape and deconstruct understood ideas about performance practices, composition, and listening/sensing. This book will be of interest to both practitioners and researchers in the fields of sonic arts, sound design, music, acoustics and performance.

1. Provides a comprehensive introduction to the interdisciplinary field of Cognitive Science. 2. Features extended case studies throughout to illustrate key concepts from across different fields. 3. Uniquely adopts a cognitive psychology structure throughout, addressing key issues for each, unlike rival texts which are more thematically based.

The built environment has been digitizing rapidly and is now transforming into a physical world that is at all times supplemented by a fully web-supported and interconnected digital version, often referred to as Digital Twin. This book shows how diverse data models and web technologies can be created and used for the built environment. Key features of this book are its technical nature and technical detail. The first part of the book highlights a large diversity of IT techniques and their use in the AEC domain, from JSON to XML to EXPRESS to RDF/OWL, for modelling geometry, products, properties, sensor and energy data. The second part of the book focuses on diverse software solutions and approaches, including digital twins, federated data storage on the web, IoT, cloud computing, and smart cities. Key research and strategic development opportunities are comprehensively discussed for distributed web-based building data management, IoT integration and cloud computing. This book aims to serve as a guide and reference for experts and professionals in AEC computing and digital construction including Master's students, PhD researchers, and junior to senior IT-oriented AEC professionals.

FinOps brings financial accountability to the variable spend model of cloud. As enterprises move aggressively to cloud, ownership of technology and financial decision-making has shifted to the edges of the organization away from procurement to engineering, architecture, and product teams. FinOps, having grown from a fringe practice to the de facto discipline managing cloud spend, is now practiced by the majority of global enterprises. This second edition provides a road map for adopting and maturing the discipline drawn from the experience of hundreds of real-world practitioners. Seven new chapters include forecasting, adopting Finops, partnering with engineering, sustainability, the UI of FinOps, and connectivity to other frameworks. There are updates throughout the book, including 150 new pages of best practices and dozens of new stories. Drawing on real-world successes and failures of large-scale cloud spenders, the book outlines the process of building a culture of cloud FinOps in your organization. Engineering and finance teams, executives, and FinOps practitioners alike will learn how to build an efficient and effective FinOps machine for data-driven cloud value decision-making. With this book, you'll learn: The DNA of a highly functional cloud FinOps culture A road map to build executive support for FinOps adoption How to understand and forecast your cloud spending How to empower engineering and finance to work together Cost allocation strategies to create accountability for cloud and container spend Strategies for rate discounts from cloud commitments When and how to implement automation of repetitive cost tasks How to empower engineering team action on cost efficiency Using unit economics to drive data-driven decision-making

Explores the history, business, and technology of video games, including social, political, and economic motivations Facilitates learning with clear objectives, key terms, illustrative timelines, color images, tables and graphs Highlights the technical specifications and key titles of all major game consoles, handhelds, personal computers, and mobile platforms Reinforces material with market summaries, reviews of breakthroughs and trends, as well as end-of-chapter activities and quizzes New content in every chapter, from the PC-98, MSX, Amstrad, and ZX Spectrum to expanded coverage on mobile gaming, virtual reality, Steam Deck, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5

Updated new edition of Ralph Kimball's groundbreaking book on dimensional modeling for data warehousing and business intelligence

The first edition of Ralph Kimball's "The Data Warehouse Toolkit" introduced the industry to dimensional modeling, and now his books are considered the most authoritative guides in this space. This new third edition is a complete library of updated dimensional modeling techniques, the most comprehensive collection ever. It covers new and enhanced star schema dimensional modeling patterns, adds two new chapters on ETL techniques, includes new and expanded business matrices for 12 case studies, and more.Authored by Ralph Kimball and Margy Ross, known worldwide as educators, consultants, and influential thought leaders in data warehousing and business intelligenceBegins with fundamental design recommendations and progresses through increasingly complex scenariosPresents unique modeling techniques for business applications such as inventory management, procurement, invoicing, accounting, customer relationship management, big data analytics, and moreDraws real-world case studies from a variety of industries, including retail sales, financial services, telecommunications, education, health care, insurance, e-commerce, and more

Design dimensional databases that are easy to understand and provide fast query response with "The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Definitive Guide to Dimensional Modeling, 3rd Edition."

Double Sequence Spaces and Four-Dimensional Matrices provides readers with a clear introduction to the spaces of double sequences and series, as well as their properties. The book then goes beyond this to investigate paranormed double sequence spaces and their algebraic and topological properties, triangle matrices and their domains in certain spaces of double sequences, dual spaces of double sequence spaces, and matrix transformations between double sequence spaces and related topics. Each chapter contains a conclusion section highlighting the importance of results and pointing out possible new ideas that can be studied further. Features Suitable for students at graduate or post-graduate level and researchers Investigates different types of summable spaces and computes their duals Characterizes several four-dimensional matrix classes transforming one summable space into other Discusses several algebraic and topological properties of new sequence spaces generated by the domain of triangles.

Drones are taking the world by storm. The technology and laws governing them change faster than we can keep up with. The Big Book of Drones covers everything from drone law to laws on privacy, discussing the history and evolution of drones to where we are today. If you are new to piloting, it also covers how to fly a drone including a pre-flight checklist. For those who are interested in taking drones to the next level, we discuss how to build your own using a 3D printer as well as many challenging projects for your drone. For the truly advanced, The Big Book of Drones discusses how to hack a drone. This includes how to perform a replay attack, denial of service attack, and how to detect a drone and take it down. Finally, the book also covers drone forensics. This is a new field of study, but one that is steadily growing and will be an essential area of inquiry as drones become more prevalent.

What is "the cloud"? Is it here or there? Should it be allowed? Should I even care? Have you ever imagined the internet as a giant Rube Goldberg machine? Or the fast-evolving cloud computing space as a literal jungle filled with prehistoric beasts? Does a data breach look like a neo-noir nightmare full of turned-up coat collars and rain-soaked alleys? Wouldn't all these vital concepts be easier to understand if they looked as interesting as they are? And wouldn't they be more memorable if we could explain them in rhyme? Whether you're a kid or an adult, the answer is: YES! The medicine in this spoonful of sugar is a sneaky-informative tour through the past, present and future of cloud computing, from mainframes to serverless and from the Internet of Things to artificial intelligence. Forrest is a professional explainer whose highly-rated conference talks and viral cartoon graphics have been teaching engineers to cloud for years. He knows that a picture is worth a thousand words. But he has plenty of words, too. Your hotel key, your boarding pass, The card you swipe to pay for gas, The smart TV atop the bar, The entertainment in your car, Your doorbell, toothbrush, thermostat, The vacuum that attacked your cat, They all connect the cloud and you. Maybe they shouldn't, but they do. As a graduation gift (call it "Oh the Places You'll Go" for engineering students), a cubicle conversation starter, or just a delightfully nerdy bedtime story for your kids, "The Read-Aloud Cloud" will be the definitive introduction to the technologies that everyone uses and nobody understands. You can even read it silently if you want. But good luck with that.

This book is an insightful meta-narrative about schooling which explores the global natural experiment of the COVID-19 pandemic and its potential impact on school culture. The proposed book discusses how the abrupt and somewhat forced digital transformation of schooling on a global scale (caused by the COVID-19 pandemic) did not change the educational status quo. It states that online teaching and learning failed to transform the role of the key school actors, students and teachers as well as the relationship between them, despite megatrends such as digitalisation, automation and the development of artificial intelligence. This focus text discusses why the global experience of distance education did not translate into a significant qualitative change and provides a theoretical framework which enables the reader to interpret and explain the processes that occurred during distance education, as well as understand why extraordinarily little (if nothing) has changed in school culture. It will appeal to scholars and students from the sociology of education and from education studies, particularly those interested in school culture, innovation in education, online teaching and learning, curriculum studies, and education policy.

From technologist and strategist Brian Evergreen, a bold new agenda for the role of organizational leaders in creating a more human future with technology Social good initiatives are incompatible with the current network of systems that make up and support the private and public sectors. Millions of dollars have been invested in bringing leaders together from organizations around the world to design solutions for global challenges such as the climate crisis, child labor, racism, war, and many more. Despite executive buy-in, alignment of core capabilities and resources, passionate leadership, and well-designed strategies, these initiatives inevitably fail (with a few, notable exceptions). The dawn of the Internet ignited a global redesign and rebuild of the interlocking systems that make up and support the private and public sectors today. The era of Digital Transformation extended this further through the adoption of cloud technologies and distributed computing. With a recent wave of technological advancements, organizations have arrived at another global redesign and rebuilding of the network of systems that make up society: Autonomous Transformation, revealing an opportunity for leaders to create Profitable Good through systemic design in combination with emerging autonomous technologies and surprising and remarkable partnerships. Autonomous Transformation provides a blueprint for leaders and managers who have aspired or attempted to harness artificial intelligence and its adjacent technologies for the betterment of their organization and the world, weaving strategy, business, economics, systemic design, and philosophy into four actionable steps with accompanying frameworks: Clear the Digital Fog See the Systems Choose a Problem Future Design Inevitability

Incident response is critical for the active defense of any network, and incident responders need up-to-date, immediately applicable techniques with which to engage the adversary. Applied Incident Response details effective ways to respond to advanced attacks against local and remote network resources, providing proven response techniques and a framework through which to apply them. As a starting point for new incident handlers, or as a technical reference for hardened IR veterans, this book details the latest techniques for responding to threats against your network, including: Preparing your environment for effective incident response Leveraging MITRE ATT&CK and threat intelligence for active network defense Local and remote triage of systems using PowerShell, WMIC, and open-source tools Acquiring RAM and disk images locally and remotely Analyzing RAM with Volatility and Rekall Deep-dive forensic analysis of system drives using open-source or commercial tools Leveraging Security Onion and Elastic Stack for network security monitoring Techniques for log analysis and aggregating high-value logs Static and dynamic analysis of malware with YARA rules, FLARE VM, and Cuckoo Sandbox Detecting and responding to lateral movement techniques, including pass-the-hash, pass-the-ticket, Kerberoasting, malicious use of PowerShell, and many more Effective threat hunting techniques Adversary emulation with Atomic Red Team Improving preventive and detective controls

Deep learning is an artificially intelligent entity that teaches itself and can be utilized to make predictions. Deep learning mimics the human brain and provides learned solutions addressing many challenging problems in the area of visual computing. From object recognition to image classification for diagnostics, deep learning has shown the power of artificial deep neural networks in solving real world visual computing problems with super-human accuracy. The introduction of deep learning into the field of visual computing has meant to be the death of most of the traditional image processing and computer vision techniques. Today, deep learning is considered to be the most powerful, accurate, efficient and effective method with the potential to solve many of the most challenging problems in visual computing. This book provides an insight into deep machine learning and the challenges in visual computing to tackle the novel method of machine learning. It introduces readers to the world of deep neural network architectures with easy-to-understand explanations. From face recognition to image classification for diagnosis of cancer, the book provides unique examples of solved problems in applied visual computing using deep learning. Interested and enthusiastic readers of modern machine learning methods will find this book easy to follow. They will find it a handy guide for designing and implementing their own projects in the field of visual computing.

O'Brien's Introduction to Information Systems 16e reflects the contemporary use of enterprise-wide business systems. New real-world case studies continue to correspond with this industry reality. The text's focus is on teaching the future manager the potential effect on business of the most current IT technologies such as the Internet, Intranets, and Extranets for enterprise collaboration, and how IT contributes to competitive advantage, reengineering business processes, problem solving, and decision-making. The benchmark text for the syllabus organized by technology (a week on databases, a week on networks, a week on systems development, etc.) taught from a managerial perspective. O'Brien defines technology and then explains how companies use the technology to improve performance. Real world cases finalize the explanation.