Best books of 2021, Financial Times 'Grab some popcorn and take a front row seat, because Robin Wigglesworth has an astonishing story to tell you' Tim Harford, author of How to Make the World Add Up 'A fascinating account of an investment revolution' Ian Fraser, Literary Review 'A magisterial, delightfully written history offering up portraits of the academic scribblers and entrepreneurial practitioners who created the index-fund revolution' The Wall Street Journal 'Wigglesworth has written an important book' Patrick Hosking, Financial Editor, The Times 'A terrific read' Gregory Zuckerman, author of The Man Who Solved the Market 'A fascinating journey and a crucial book for anyone trying to understand the financial markets' Bradley Hope, author of Billion Dollar Whale --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In Trillions, Financial Times journalist Robin Wigglesworth unveils the vivid secret history of index funds, bringing to life the colourful characters behind their birth, growth and evolution into a world-conquering phenomenon. It is the untold story behind one of the most pressing financial uncertainties of our time. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 'An easy-to-understand and fun read, full of lively characters and little-known details of how finance really works today' Gillian Tett, author of Anthro-Vision

This enthusiastic introduction provides support for Excel beginners and focuses on using the program immediately for maximum efficiency. With 1,104 screenshots and explicit information on everything from rows, columns, and cells to subtotaling, sorting, and pivot tables, this guide aims to alleviate the frustrations that come with using the program for the first time. This manual offers strategies for avoiding problems and streamlining efficiency and assists readers from start to finish, turning Excel 2010 novices into experts.

YouTube's most successful purveyor of computer nostalgia brings those stories to print. This book celebrates the most exciting period in the history of technology - the arrival of the home computer and home gaming console. For a time, an exciting and ever-changing array of different companies fought for supremacy, leaving a lasting legacy of great gameplay and surreal design we'll never experience again. Features screenshots of nostalgic games that will bring joy to the heart of anyone who grew up in the 80s or early 90s, alongside stunning studio photography of the computers that imprinted themselves on a generation's minds

Here is a book containing information about more than 500 Web sites about dinosaurs. Sites are rated for quality and cross-referenced by type, level of complexity, and availability of special features.

The main objective of this book is to provide to mechanical scientists and engineers the kinetic modeling tools necessary for predicting the damage state of organic composite matrices submitted to hydrolytic and oxidative ageing. These tools are derived from the degradation mechanisms and their validity is successfully checked from many experimental data. They can be interfaced with existing or under development computer codes for predicting the lifetime of composite structures. Particular attention is paid to the relationships between damage state and use properties in view of defining structural end-of-life criteria. For this purpose the book is divided into three main parts. The first one is devoted to the presentation of the common aspects to all types of chemical degradation processes. Emphasis is put on specific aspects of composite structures, such as the role of interphase/interface or the anisotropy of reagent diffusion, but also on current issues in the field of material ageing such as the study of multiphysics couplings. The second part is focused on humid ageing. Physical processes linked to plasticization and swelling, are distinguished from chemical processes in particular from the matrix hydrolysis and its resulting damages at the microstructural scale (osmotic cracking, blistering, etc.). The third part concerns thermal ageing. The ultimate objective is to predict the consequences of thermal oxidation on thermomechanical properties of organic composite matrices, in particular on their glass transition temperature and elastic and fracture properties. In each part, the kinetic approach is illustrated by several practical examples.

Design systems optimized for deep learning models. Written for software engineers, this book teaches you how to implement a maintainable platform for developing deep learning models. In   Engineering Deep Learning Systems  you will learn how to: Transfer your software development skills to deep learning systems Recognize and solve common engineering challenges for deep learning systems Understand the deep learning development cycle Automate training for models in TensorFlow and PyTorch Optimize dataset management, training, model serving and hyperparameter tuning Pick the right open-source project for your platform Engineering Deep Learning Systems is a practical guide for software engineers and data scientists who are designing and building platforms for deep learning. It’s full of hands-on examples that will help you transfer your software development skills to implementing deep learning platforms. You’ll learn how to build automated and scalable services for core tasks like dataset management, model training/serving, and hyperparameter tuning. This book is the perfect way to step into an exciting—and lucrative—career as a deep learning engineer. about the technology Behind every deep learning researcher is a team of engineers bringing their models to production. To build these systems, you need to understand how a deep learning system’s platform differs from other distributed systems. By mastering the core ideas in this book, you’ll be able to support deep learning systems in a way that’s fast, repeatable, and reliable.

Online algorithms are a rich area of research with widespread applications in scheduling, combinatorial optimization, and resource allocation problems. This lucid textbook provides an easy but rigorous introduction to online algorithms for graduate and senior undergraduate students. In-depth coverage of most of the important topics is presented with special emphasis on elegant analysis. The book starts with classical online paradigms like the ski-rental, paging, list-accessing, bin packing, where performance of online algorithms is studied under the worst-case input and moves on to newer paradigms like 'beyond worst case', where online algorithms are augmented with predictions using machine learning algorithms. The book goes on to cover multiple applied problems such as routing in communication networks, server provisioning in cloud systems, communication with energy harvested from renewable sources, and sub-modular partitioning. Finally, a wide range of solved examples and practice exercises are included, allowing hands-on exposure to the concepts.

An IT survival guide for CEOs from the leader of PricewaterhouseCoopers' IT Business Risk Management Practice Managing IT as a Business is a comprehensive guide for CEOs and other executives looking to link corporate strategy with information technology. Until now, the inability of companies to meld IT organizations, systems, and technology and to link these to strategic business drivers has been one of the major obstacles to achieving sustainable IT business value. In this book, Lutchen provides practical advice to executives seeking to make the link between IT and strategy and to minimize key IT business risks. For leaders who want to maximize their IT investment, Managing IT as a Business offers the most enlightened guidance available. Mark D. Lutchen (Harrison, NY) leads PricewaterhouseCoopers' IT Business Risk Management Practice and was the firm's Global CIO during its massive merger (1997 - 98). He has almost 30 years of experience advising key executives in the areas of technology management, globalization, and mergers and acquisitions.

Contrary to popular myth, we do not yet live in the “Information Age.� At best, we live the “Data Age,� obsessed with the production, collection, storage, dissemination, and monetization of digital data. But data, in and of itself, isn’t valuable. Data only becomes valuable when we make sense of it. We rely on “information professionals� to help us understand data, but most fail in their efforts. Why? Not because they lack intelligence or tools, but mostly because they lack the necessary skills. Most information professionals have been trained primarily in the use of data analysis tools (Tableau, PowerBI, Qlik, SAS, Excel, R, etc.), but even the best tools are only useful in the hands of skilled individuals. Anyone can pick up a hammer and pound a nail, but only skilled carpenters can use a hammer to build a reliable structure. Making sense of data is skilled work, and developing those skills requires study and practice. Weaving data into understanding involves several distinct but complementary thinking skills. Foremost among them are critical thinking and scientific thinking. Until information professionals develop these capabilities, we will remain in the dark ages of data. This book is for information professionals, especially those who have been thrust into this important work without having a chance to develop these foundational skills. If you’re an information professional and have never been trained to think critically and scientifically with data, this book will get you started. Once on this path, you’ll be able to help usher in an Information Age worthy of the name.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the First International Conference on 5G for Future Wireless Networks, 5GWN 2017, held in Beijing, China, in April 2017. The 64 full papers were selected from 135 submissions and present the state of the art and practical applications of 5G technologies. The exponentially growing data traffic caused by the development of mobile Internet and smart phones requires powerful networks. The fifth generation (5G) techniques are promising to meet the requirements of this explosive data traffic in future mobile communications.

An effective Chief Technology Officer shapes almost every aspect of a modern business. This book shares the experience and advice of veteran CTOs and industry experts for handling IT crises, leading tech teams, and creating an inspiring vision for your company. In   Think Like a CTO  you will learn: Effective interaction and relationship building with other C-level executives Creating long term visions and executing on short term goals Interviewing, hiring, and terminating team members Negotiating salaries and managing promotions Architecting future proofed systems Handling security breaches and ransomware attacks Putting together budgets and working with your CFO Identifying and managing outsourced vendor opportunities Managing and communicating bad news by leading with data, not passion Being the kind of leader that employees want to follow and emulate Becoming a CTO is an incredible accomplishment. It’s also one of the hardest transitions a technologist can make. This high-power and high-pressure role demands skills that are rarely developed as a software engineer.   Think Like a CTO  shines a light on all the areas an aspiring CTO needs to master to succeed. You’ll learn how to build incredible working relationships with the rest of the C-suite, transform a company with private equity, and recruit and manage your development team. With this book as your guide, you’ll quickly become a trusted leader figure with an inspiring vision for your company. about the technology Every modern company is a technology company, and that makes the CTO one of the most important leaders in an organization. The CTO must plan a company’s technology vision, build and lead the team to get it done, and effectively interact with business leaders, clients, and investors. A highly effective CTO is vital for a company’s continued growth and success. This book will show you how to be that CTO. about the reader For technology leaders working in or aspiring towards a CTO role.

Advances in communications technology continue to accelerate. To maintain the competitive edge in such a dynamic environment, today's managers, professionals and engineers can expect to be challenged daily to keep pace with the technical and organizational issues, opportunities and threats surrounding the operation and management of any communications system. The purpose of this book is to enable these people to detect, understand, handle and control a communications system during a crisis.

• Integrated use of real-world examples.
• Numerous case studies illustrate how actual disasters are detected, studies, and successfully controlled.
• Delineates the procedures required for the smooth and safe operation of telecommunications, broadcasting and computer systems during a crisis.

Designed to provide you with the knowledge and skills needed to protect your technology devices from increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks, SECURITY AWARENESS: APPLYING PRACTICAL CYBERSECURITY IN YOUR WORLD, 6th EDITION continues to present the same practical information that has made previous editions so popular. For most students, practical cybersecurity poses daunting challenges: Do I need antivirus software? How can I manage all my passwords? Can I prevent a ransomware attack? Is there a way to make my Web browser secure? What are patches? This text is designed to help you understand the answers to these questions and to protect your devices and even Wi-Fi networks from cyberattacks. In addition, hands-on projects and case studies give you the opportunity to test your knowledge and apply what you have learned.

Are you trying to figure out how to safely use social media but finding yourself struggling? Here’s a book specifically designed to help regular people figure out social media platforms. It begins with a chapter about social media basics: how they normally work, why people use them, and general safety tips. It is easy to get confused by the large number of options that are out there so this book breaks down each major network into its own chapter. Chapters are included for: ·Facebook ·Snapchat ·Pinterest ·LinkedIn ·Instagram ·YouTube ·Twitter ·Reddit, and ·Tumblr. Because each social media platform has its their own rules, benefits, and challenges, each chapter gives a summary of the platform and tells the reader why people use it. Next, each chapter has a glossary of terms to explain language and slang that are used. This will help people who are new to social media learn about terminology like subreddits, retweets, and more. If readers decide to use the platform (or already use it and want to learn more), each chapter guides users through a “how-to� of using each platform. This includes the basic functionality, setting up profiles, settings, and odd features that even current users may not know about. Privacy and safety are also covered, with a platform-specific section devoted to these important issues in each chapter. Two final chapters cover other notable social media platforms that readers might want to know about and archiving tips for saving social media posts and information. This book can help people new to social media, people joining new social media, and people who are already on but want to learn how to better manage and protect their accounts.

This book is both a reference for engineers and scientists and a teaching resource, featuring tutorial chapters and research papers on feature extraction. Until now there has been insufficient consideration of feature selection algorithms, no unified presentation of leading methods, and no systematic comparisons.

This book is devoted to a novel approach for dimensionality reduction based on the famous nearest neighbor method that is a powerful classification and regression approach. It starts with an introduction to machine learning concepts and a real-world application from the energy domain. Then, unsupervised nearest neighbors (UNN) is introduced as efficient iterative method for dimensionality reduction. Various UNN models are developed step by step, reaching from a simple iterative strategy for discrete latent spaces to a stochastic kernel-based algorithm for learning submanifolds with independent parameterizations. Extensions that allow the embedding of incomplete and noisy patterns are introduced. Various optimization approaches are compared, from evolutionary to swarm-based heuristics. Experimental comparisons to related methodologies taking into account artificial test data sets and also real-world data demonstrate the behavior of UNN in practical scenarios. The book contains numerous color figures to illustrate the introduced concepts and to highlight the experimental results.  

Approaches in Integrative Bioinformatics provides a basic introduction to biological information systems, as well as guidance for the computational analysis of systems biology. This book also covers a range of issues and methods that reveal the multitude of omics data integration types and the relevance that integrative bioinformatics has today. Topics include biological data integration and manipulation, modeling and simulation of metabolic networks, transcriptomics and phenomics, and virtual cell approaches, as well as a number of applications of network biology. It helps to illustrate the value of integrative bioinformatics approaches to the life sciences. This book is intended for researchers and graduate students in the field of Bioinformatics. Professor Ming Chen is the Director of the Bioinformatics Laboratory at the College of Life Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. Professor Ralf Hofestädt is the Chair of the Department of Bioinformatics and Medical Informatics, Bielefeld University, Germany.

Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCM) constitute cognitive models in the form of fuzzy directed graphs consisting of two basic elements: the nodes, which basically correspond to “concepts� bearing different states of activation depending on the knowledge they represent, and the “edges� denoting the causal effects that each source node exercises on the receiving concept expressed through weights. Weights take values in the interval [-1,1], which denotes the positive, negative or neutral causal relationship between two concepts. An FCM can be typically obtained through linguistic terms, inherent to fuzzy systems, but with a structure similar to the neural networks, which facilitates data processing, and has capabilities for training and adaptation. During the last 10 years, an exponential growth of published papers in FCMs was followed showing great impact potential. Different FCM structures and learning schemes have been developed, while numerous studies report their use in many contexts with highly successful modeling results.   The aim of this book is to fill the existing gap in the literature concerning fundamentals, models, extensions and learning algorithms for FCMs in knowledge engineering. It comprehensively covers the state-of-the-art FCM modeling and learning methods, with algorithms, codes and software tools, and provides a set of applications that demonstrate their various usages in applied sciences and engineering.

Sponsored by the International Network of Principals' Centers "This unique book leads to higher levels of student performance by providing a thoughtful context and practical framework for understanding the potential of technology to enrich teaching and learning."
--Lois B. Cohn, IBM certified business transformation consultant

"At last educators have a resource that offers a user-friAndly approach to applying technology to student learning and organizational growth."
--Judith R. Fox, superintendent of schools, Byram Hills School District, Armonk, New York

The push for higher educational standards and greater accountability has increased the demand for better information on the progress of schools and their students. Yet few schools and districts have the technological infrastructure to gather useful and credible data. This timely volume explores the ways in which educators can use technology to improve academic environments, school operations, and learning outcomes.

From the classroom to the school district, Information Technology for Schools presents successful approaches to using technology to serve different educational priorities. The contributing authors discuss the challenge of planning integrated information systems, establishing benchmarks to measure overall progress, and harnessing technology to improve curriculum and teaching practice. They highlight practical questions for educational stakeholders and provide sound advice on building effective information technology systems.

Learn to write C++ programs by interfacing a computer to a wide range of popular and fundamental real-world technologies. Unique and original approach to use the PC to do real things- not just number crunching and graphics – but writing programs to interact with the outside world. Learn C++ programming in an enjoyable and powerful way. Includes a purpose-designed circuit board

Master the Spring Framework, its fundamentals and core topics, and share the authors’ insights and real-world experiences. This book goes well beyond the basics: you'll learn how to leverage the latest Spring Framework 6 to build the various tiers and parts of today's modern, complex enterprise Java applications systems, top to bottom, including data access, SQL generation with jOOQ, persistence with Hibernate, transactions, set up security, classic web and presentation tiers and adding in some reactivity. Spring 6 will be based on the latest available Long Term Support (LTS) release, Java 17. So, you will be able to do the following in your Spring applications: use records, use new utility methods in String class; utilize Local-Variable Syntax for Lambda Parameters; Nested Based Access Control, and more. Integrating Spring with the most used frameworks and libraries is covered in this book, such as Testcontainers, Hibernate, jOOQ, Kafka and many others. A full sample application allows you to apply many of the technologies and techniques covered in Pro Spring 6 and see how they work together. This book updates the perennial bestseller with the latest that Spring Framework 6 has to offer. Now in its sixth edition, this popular title is by far the most comprehensive and definitive treatment of Spring available. After reading this book, you'll be armed with the power of Spring to build complex applications, top to bottom. The agile, lightweight, open-source Spring Framework continues to be the de facto leading enterprise Java application development framework for today's Java programmers and developers. What You Will Learn What’s new in Spring Framework 6 and how to use it with the latest LTS version of Java, Java 17 How to integrate Spring with the most renowned and practical frameworks and dependencies How to build complex enterprise cloud-native applications using Spring 6 How to master data access, persistence and transactions How to use with Spring Batch, Integration and other key Spring projects This Book Is ForExperienced Java and enterprise Java developers and programmers. Some experience with Spring highly recommended. 

The aim of this book is to unlock the power of the freeware R language to advanced university students and researchers dealing with whole-rock geochemistry of (meta-) igneous rocks. The first part covers data input/output, calculation of commonly used indexes and plotting in R. The core of the book then focusses on the presentation and practical implementations of modelling techniques used for fingerprinting processes such as partial melting, fractional crystallization, binary mixing or AFC using major-, trace-element and radiogenic isotope data. The reader will be given a firm theoretical basis for forward/reverse modelling, followed by exercises dealing with typical problems likely to be encountered in real life, and their solutions using R. The concluding sections demonstrate, using practical examples, how a researcher can proceed in developing a realistic model simulating natural systems. The appendices outline the fundamentals of the R language and provide a quick introduction to the open-source R-package GCDkit for interpretation of whole-rock geochemical data from igneous and metamorphic rocks.

This book contains innovative research from leading researchers who presented their work at the 17th International Conference on Knowledge-Based and Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, KES 2013, held in Kitakyusha, Japan, in September 2013. The conference provided a competitive field of 236 contributors, from which 38 authors expanded their contributions and only 21 published. A plethora of techniques and innovative applications are represented within this volume. The chapters are organized using four themes. These topics include: data mining, knowledge management, advanced information processes and system modelling applications. Each topic contains multiple contributions and many offer case studies or innovative examples. Anyone that wants to work with information repositories or process knowledge should consider reading one or more chapters focused on their technique of choice. They may also benefit from reading other chapters to assess if an alternative technique represents a more suitable approach. This book will benefit anyone already working with Knowledge-Based or Intelligent Information Systems, however is suitable for students and researchers seeking to learn more about modern Artificial Intelligence techniques.

This book covers the basic theory, practical details and advanced research of the implementation of evolutionary methods on physical substrates. Most of the examples are from electronic engineering applications, including transistor-level design and system-level implementation. The authors present an overview of the successes achieved, and the book will act as a point of reference for both academic and industrial researchers.

The aim of this book is to advocate and promote network models of linguistic systems that are both based on thorough mathematical models and substantiated in terms of linguistics. In this way, the book contributes first steps towards establishing a statistical network theory as a theoretical basis of linguistic network analysis the boarder of the natural sciences and the humanities. This book addresses researchers who want to get familiar with theoretical developments, computational models and their empirical evaluation in the field of complex linguistic networks. It is intended to all those who are interested in statistical models of linguistic systems from the point of view of network research. This includes all relevant areas of linguistics ranging from phonological, morphological and lexical networks on the one hand and syntactic, semantic and pragmatic networks on the other. In this sense, the volume concerns readers from many disciplines such as physics, linguistics, computer science and information science. It may also be of interest for the upcoming area of systems biology with which the chapters collected here share the view on systems from the point of view of network analysis.