In today's society, the quantity of information available to learners is so vast that new strategies of information processing and exchange must be continually developed and improved. E-Collaborative Knowledge Construction: Learning from Computer-Supported and Virtual Environments explores the construction of beneficial e-collaborative knowledge environments from four vital perspectives: educational, psychological, organizational, and technical. It offers several scenarios where the implementation of e-collaborative knowledge construction is necessary and then not only presents methods for facilitating e-collaborative knowledge construction, but also provides methods for assessing its results. This exciting new publication is a must-have for academics, researchers, and professionals who dare to discover new innovations

Design of Low-Voltage, Low-Power CMOS Operational Amplifier Cells describes the theory and design of the circuit elements that are required to realize a low-voltage, low-power operational amplifier. These elements include constant-gm rail-to-rail input stages, class-AB rail-to-rail output stages and frequency compensation methods. Several examples of each of these circuit elements are investigated. Furthermore, the book illustrates several silicon realizations, giving their measurement results. The text focuses on compact low-voltage low-power operational amplifiers with good performance. Six simple high-performance class-AB amplifiers are realized using a very compact topology making them particularly suitable for use as VLSI library cells. All of the designs can use a supply voltage as low as 3V. One of the amplifier designs dissipates only 50uW with a unity gain frequency of 1.5 MHz. A second set of amplifiers run on a supply voltage slightly above 1V. The amplifiers combine a low power consumption with a gain of 120 dB. In addition, the design of three fully differential operational amplifiers is addressed. Design of Low-Voltage, Low-Power CMOS Operational Amplifier Cells is intended for professional designers of analog circuits. It is also suitable for use as a text book for an advanced course in CMOS operational amplifier design."

For courses in problem solving and programming logic. Making complex programming concepts accessible to every student Starting Out with Programming Logic and Design is a language-independent introductory programming book, teaching students programming concepts and logic without assuming any previous programming experience. Designed for beginners, the text is clear and approachable, making the complex concepts accessible to every student. In this new edition, Gaddis focuses on current languages providing code snippet examples and complete programs for each. The text uses updated, contemporary examples to familiarize students with models and logical thought processes used in programming without further complicating them with language syntax. By using easy-to-understand pseudocode, flowcharts, and other tools, Gaddis illustrates how to design the logic of programs. The book is ideal for a programming logic course taught as a precursor to a language-specific introductory programming course, or for the first part of an introductory programming course.

The latest developments in rendering, visualization, and rasterization hardware are reported in this volume, which contains revised versions of thecontributions to the Sixth Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware, held in Vienna in September 1991 in conjunction with the Eurographics '91 Conference. The book has five parts and a keynote paper, "Issues and Directions for Graphics Hardware Accelerators," by Kurt Akeley. The first part of the book concerns graphics hardware design, including simulation and silicon compilers. The second part contains two papers on graphics systems. The third part focuses on volume (voxel-based) machines, describing two devices to facilitate transformations of volumes. The fourth part includes papers on rasterization systems, including character rasterization and scan-conversion of triangular faces. The papers in the last part of the book focus on rendering machines. They include a programmable rendering engine, primitive shaders, and radiosity implementation on a parallel architecture.

The collection of papers that makes up this book arises largely from the joint activities of two specialist groups of the British Computer Society, namely the Displays Group and the Computer Arts Society. Both these groups are now more than 20 years old and during the whole of this time have held regular, separate meetings. In recent years, however, the two groups have held a joint annual meeting at which presentations of mutual interest have been given and it is mainly from the last two of these that the present papers have been drawn. They fall naturally into four classes: visualisation, art, design and animation-although, as in all such cases, the boundaries between the classes are fuzzy and overlap inevitably occurs. Visualisation The graphic potential of computers has been recognised almost since computing was first used, but it is only comparatively recently that their possibilities as devices for the visualisation of complex. and largely ab stract phenomena has begun to be more fully appreciated. Some workers stress the need to be able to model photographic reality in order to assist in this task. They look to better algorithms and more resolution to achieve this end. Others-Alan Mackay for instance-suggest that it is "not just a matter of providing more and more pixels. It is a matter of providing congenial clues which employ to the greatest extent what we already know.

Thirteen essays explore the varying virtual, physical, cultural and institutional contexts influencing the nature of electronic space for women and explore the intersection of feminisms, power, authority, voice, and computer technologies. It also contains four interviews with prominent scholars, which historicize the disciplinary formation of computers and composition and the impact of technology on the professional lives of women. This collection continues the ongoing conversation exploring the theoretical, pedagogical, and political implications of computer technologies for composition studies, with an primary audience of teachers and theorists of writing in electronic environments.

This volume of Analog Circuit Design concentrates on three topics: Operational Amplifiers. A-to-D converters and Analog CAD. The book comprises six papers on each topic written by internationally recognised experts. These papers have a tutorial nature aimed at improving the design of analog circuits. The book is divided into three parts. Part I, Operational Amplifiers, presents new technologies for the design of Op-Amps in both bipolar and CMOS technologies. Two papers demonstrate techniques for improving frequency and gain behavior at high voltage. Low voltage bipolar Op-Amp design is treated in another paper. The realization high-speed and high gain VLSI building blocks in CMOS is demonstrated in two papers. The final paper shows how to provide output power with CMOS buffer amplifiers. Part II, Analog-to-Digital Conversion, presents papers which address very high conversion speeds and very high resolution implementations using sigma-delta modulation architectures. Analog to Digital converters provide the link between the analog world of transducers and the digital world of signal processing and computing. High-performance bipolar and MOS technologies result in high-resolution or high-speed convertors which can be applied in digital audio or video systems. Furthermore, the advanced high-speed bipolar technologies show an increase in conversion speed into the gigahertz range. Part III, Analog Computer Aided Design, presents the latest research towards providing analog circuit designers with the tools needed to automate much of the design process. The techniques and methodologies described demonstrate the advances being made in developing analog design tools comparable with those alreadyavailable for digital design. The papers in this volume are based on those presented at the Workshop on Advances in Analog Circuit Design held in Delft, The Netherlands in 1992. The main intention of the workshop was to brainstorm with a group of about 100 analog design experts on the new possibilities and future developments on the above topics. The result of this brainstorming is contained in Analog Circuit Design, which is thus an important reference for researchers and design engineers working in the forefront of analog circuit design and research.

In the recent years, fractional-order systems have been studied by many researchers in the engineering field. It was found that many systems can be described more accurately by fractional differential equations than by integer-order models. Advanced Synchronization Control and Bifurcation of Chaotic Fractional-Order Systems is a scholarly publication that explores new developments related to novel chaotic fractional-order systems, control schemes, and their applications. Featuring coverage on a wide range of topics including chaos synchronization, nonlinear control, and cryptography, this publication is geared toward engineers, IT professionals, researchers, and upper-level graduate students seeking current research on chaotic fractional-order systems and their applications in engineering and computer science.

Computational models can be found everywhere in present day science and engineering. In providing a logical framework and foundation for the specification and design of specification languages, Raymond Turner uses this framework to introduce and study computable models. In doing so he presents the first systematic attempt to provide computational models with a logical foundation.

Computable models have wide-ranging applications from programming language semantics and specification languages, through to knowledge representation languages and formalism for natural language semantics. They are also implicit in computer modelling in many areas of physical and social science.

This detailed investigation into the logical foundations of specification and specification languages and their application to the definition of programming languages, coupled with a clear exposition of theories of data and computable models as mathematical notions will be welcomed by researchers and graduate students.

Computer Aided Innovation (CAI) is a young domain, the goal of which is to support enterprises throughout the complete innovation process. This comprehensive book presents the most up-to-date research on CAI. It addresses the main motivations of the industrial sector regarding the engineering innovation activity with computer tools and methods. The book also discusses organizational, technological and cognitive aspects of the application of CAI methods and tools.

An in-depth look at soft computing methods and their applications in the human sciences, such as the social and the behavioral sciences. Soft computing methods - including fuzzy systems, neural networks, evolutionary computing and probabilistic reasoning - are state-of-the-art methods in theory formation and model construction. The powerful application areas of these methods in the human sciences are demonstrated, including the replacement of statistical models by simpler numerical or linguistic soft computing models and the use of computer simulations with approximate and linguistic constituents. "Dr. Niskanen's work opens new vistas in application of soft computing, fuzzy logic and fuzzy set theory to the human sciences. This book is likely to be viewed in retrospect as a landmark in its field" (Lotfi A. Zadeh, Berkeley)

In the last decade, there has been a burgeoning of activity in the design and implementation of algorithms for algebraic geometric computation. The workshop on Algorithms in Algebraic Geometry that was held in the framework of the IMA Annual Program Year in Applications of Algebraic Geometry by the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications on September 2006 is one tangible indication of the interest. This volume of articles captures some of the spirit of the IMA workshop.

On Optimal Interconnections for VLSI describes, from a geometric perspective, algorithms for high-performance, high-density interconnections during the global and detailed routing phases of circuit layout. First, the book addresses area minimization, with a focus on near-optimal approximation algorithms for minimum-cost Steiner routing. In addition to practical implementations of recent methods, the implications of recent results on spanning tree degree bounds and the method of Zelikovsky are discussed. Second, the book addresses delay minimization, starting with a discussion of accurate, yet algorithmically tractable, delay models. Recent minimum-delay constructions are highlighted, including provably good cost-radius tradeoffs, critical-sink routing algorithms, Elmore delay-optimal routing, graph Steiner arborescences, non-tree routing, and wiresizing. Third, the book addresses skew minimization for clock routing and prescribed-delay routing formulations. The discussion starts with early matching-based constructions and goes on to treat zero-skew routing with provably minimum wirelength, as well as planar clock routing. Finally, the book concludes with a discussion of multiple (competing) objectives, i.e., how to optimize area, delay, skew, and other objectives simultaneously. These techniques are useful when the routing instance has heterogeneous resources or is highly congested, as in FPGA routing, multi-chip packaging, and very dense layouts. Throughout the book, the emphasis is on practical algorithms and a complete self-contained development. On Optimal Interconnections for VLSI will be of use to both circuit designers (CAD tool users) as well as researchers and developers in the area of performance-driven physical design.

Advances In Digital Government presents a collection of in-depth articles that addresses a representative cross-section of the matrix of issues involved in implementing digital government systems. These articles constitute a survey of both the technical and policy dimensions related to the design, planning and deployment of digital government systems. The research and development projects within the technical dimension represent a wide range of governmental functions, including the provisioning of health and human services, management of energy information, multi-agency integration, and criminal justice applications. The technical issues dealt with in these projects include database and ontology integration, distributed architectures, scalability, and security and privacy. The human factors research emphasizes compliance with access standards for the disabled and the policy articles contain both conceptual models for developing digital government systems as well as real management experiences and results in deploying them. Advances In Digital Government presents digital government issues from the perspectives of different communities and societies. This geographic and social diversity illuminates a unique array of policy and social perspectives, exposing practitioners to new and useful ways of thinking about digital government.

Asynchronous Pulse Logic is a comprehensive analysis of a newly developed asynchronous circuit family. The book covers circuit theory, practical circuits, design tools and an example of the design of a simple asynchronous microprocessor using the circuit family. Asynchronous Pulse Logic will be of interest to industrial and academic researcher working on high-speed VLSI systems. Graduate students will find this useful reference for computer-aided design of asynchronous or related VLSI systems.

This book focuses on object-oriented concurrent computing, which can be considered a model of concurrent programming, and proposes a new programming language, ConcurrentSmalltalk, which is based on object-oriented concurrent computing. The book also shows the efficiency of object-oriented concurrent computing through the design, implementation, and evaluation of ConcurrentSmalltalk. ConcurrentSmalltalk is designed to be upwardly compatible with Smalltalk-80. In the book, the ConcurrentSmalltalk object model is first proposed. Next, issues which arise from maintaining compatibility with Smalltalk-80 are discussed. Finally, the ConcurrentSmalltalk virtual machine which executes the ConcurrentSmalltalk programs is proposed.

Client/Server applications are of increasing importance in industry, and have been improved by advanced distributed object-oriented techniques, dedicated tool support and both multimedia and mobile computing extensions. Recent responses to this trend are standardized distributed platforms and models including the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) of the Open Software Foundation (OS F), Open Distributed Processing (ODP), and the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) of the Object Management Group (OMG). These proceedings are the compilation of papers from the technical stream of the IFIPIIEEE International Conference on Distributed Platforms, Dresden, Germany. This conference has been sponsored by IFIP TC6.1, by the IEEE Communications Society, and by the German Association of Computer Science (GI -Gesellschaft fur Informatik). ICDP'96 was organized jointly by Dresden University of Technology and Aachen University of Technology. It is closely related to the International Workshop on OSF DCE in Karlsruhe, 1993, and to the IFIP International Conference on Open Distributed Processing. ICDP has been designed to bring together researchers and practitioners who are studying and developing new methodologies, tools and technologies for advanced client/server environ ments, distributed systems, and network applications based on distributed platforms."

Written by one of the founding fathers of Quantum Information, this book gives an accessible (albeit mathematically rigorous), self-contained introduction to quantum information theory. The central role is played by the concept of quantum channel and its entropic and information characteristics. In this revised edition, the main results have been updated to reflect the most recent developments in this very active field of research.

In todaya (TM)s competitive world, industries are focusing on shorter lead times, improved quality, reduced cost, increased profit, improved productivity and better customer service. As ERP and other information management systems have been widely implemented, information growth poses new challenges to decision makers in areas ranging from shop floor control to supply chain management and design.

Frontiers in Computing Technologies for Manufacturing Applications presents an overview of the state-of-the-art intelligent computing in manufacturing. Modelling, data processing, algorithms and computational analysis of difficult problems found in advanced manufacturing are discussed. It is the first book to bring together combinatorial optimization, information systems and fault diagnosis and monitoring in a consistent manner. Techniques are presented in order to aid decision makers needing to consider multiple, conflicting objectives in their decision processes. In particular, the use of metaheuristic optimization techniques for multi-objective problems is discussed. Readers will learn about computational technologies that can improve the performance of manufacturing systems ranging from manufacturing equipment to supply chains.

Frontiers in Computing Technologies for Manufacturing Applications will be of interest to students in industrial and mechanical engineering as well as information engineers needing practical examples for the successful integration of information in manufacturing applications. The book will also appeal to technical decision makers involved in production planning, logistics, supply chain, industrial ecology, manufacturing information systems, faultdiagnosis and monitoring.

Compression and Coding Algorithms describes in detail the coding mechanisms that are available for use in data compression systems. The well known Huffman coding technique is one mechanism, but there have been many others developed over the past few decades, and this book describes, explains and assesses them. People undertaking research of software development in the areas of compression and coding algorithms will find this book an indispensable reference. In particular, the careful and detailed description of algorithms and their implementation, plus accompanying pseudo-code that can be readily implemented on computer, make this book a definitive reference in an area currently without one.

For organizations, it's imperative to have the ability to analyze data sources, harmonize disparate data elements, and communicate the results of the analysis in an effective manner to stakeholders. Created by certified enterprise data architect Jeff Voivoda, this simple guide to data analysis and harmonization begins by identifying the problems caused by inefficient data storage. It moves through the life cycle of identifying, gathering, recording, harmonizing and presenting data so that it is organized and comprehensible.Other key areas covered include the following: Seeking out the right experts Reviewing data standards and considerations Grouping and managing data Understanding the practical applications of data analysis Suggesting next steps in the development life cycle.It's essential to understand data requirements, management tools, and industry-wide standards if you want your organization to succeed or improve on its already strong position. Determine your next strategic step and manage your data as an asset with "Data Analysis and Harmonization."

"Pro Crystal Enterprise/BusinessObjects XI Programming" shows you how to create customized solutions using the Business Objects/Crystal Enterprise object model. Here youll see the object model utilized to create professional-quality tools like on-demand web services, report metadata extraction, scheduling, security, and user management.

Author Carl Ganz explains in detail how to build advanced reporting solutions for Crystal Enterprise/Business Objects XI. He shows how to integrate CE/BO XI with .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio to create more flexible, tailored, and responsive reporting solutions than have previously been possible. In short, you'll surpass what you thought you could achieve, and learn to create almost any imaginable reporting solution that Business Objects XI can handle.

As instructors move further into the incorporation of 21st century technologies in adult education, a new paradigm of digitally-enriched mediated learning has emerged. ""Adult Learning in the Digital Age: Perspectives on Online Technologies and Outcomes"" provides a comprehensive framework of trends and issues related to adult learning for the facilitation of authentic learning in the age of digital technology. This significant reference source offers researchers, academicians, and practitioners a valuable compendium of expert ideas, practical experiences, field challenges, and potential opportunities concerning the advancement of new technological and pedagogical techniques used in adult schooling.

This self-contained book systematically explores the statistical dynamics on and of complex networks having relevance across a large number of scientific disciplines. The theories related to complex networks are increasingly being used by researchers for their usefulness in harnessing the most difficult problems of a particular discipline. The book is a collection of surveys and cutting-edge research contributions exploring the interdisciplinary relationship of dynamics on and of complex networks. Topics covered include complex networks found in nature-genetic pathways, ecological networks, linguistic systems, and social systems-as well as man-made systems such as the World Wide Web and peer-to-peer networks.

The contributed chapters in this volume are intended to promote cross-fertilization in several research areas, and will be valuable to newcomers in the field, experienced researchers, practitioners, and graduate students interested in systems exhibiting an underlying complex network structure in disciplines such as computer science, biology, statistical physics, nonlinear dynamics, linguistics, and the social sciences.