With nearly 48 percent of all U.S. undergraduates attending community and technical colleges, the two-year sector is an integral part of our nation's higher education system and a vital part of our nation's future. The need for effective faculty evaluation and professional development within two-year colleges stems partly from the size of this sector and also from the diversity of its program offerings and its student body. Miller and his co-authors bring timely, authoritative, and practical material to two audiences in this rapidly growing field of education: first, teachers who have permanent appointments but could use professional development and improvement; and, second, the already large and still growing number of part-time instructors who could use more evaluating and improving. This book is intended to be a direct assistance for these groups as well as to administrators who must make personal decisions.

This professional book is for human resource managers and staff development officers of two-year colleges. A greater emphasis needs to be placed on human resource management, according to Miller and his co-authors, that will result in better personnel decision making.

The starting point for this collection is a chapter by Dick Allwright on the language learning and teaching classroom experience entitled "Six Promising Directions in Applied Linguistics." The other distinguished contributors respond to this discussion with their own interpretations and from their own experience. The collection problematizes prescription, efficiency, and technical solutions as orientations to classroom language learning. Complexity and idiosyncrasy, on the other hand, are recognized as central concepts in a move towards centralizing teachers' and learners' own understanding of "classroom life," in the contexts of language learning, adult literacy education and language teacher education.

Pattern Theory provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of the modern challenges in signal, data, and pattern analysis in speech recognition, computational linguistics, image analysis and computer vision. Aimed at graduate students in biomedical engineering, mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering with a good background in mathematics and probability, the text includes numerous exercises and an extensive bibliography. Additional resources including extended proofs, selected solutions and examples are available on a companion website.
The book commences with a short overview of pattern theory and the basics of statistics and estimation theory. Chapters 3-6 discuss the role of representation of patterns via condition structure. Chapters 7 and 8 examine the second central component of pattern theory: groups of geometric transformation applied to the representation of geometric objects. Chapter 9 moves into probabilistic structures in the continuum, studying random processes and random fields indexed over subsets of Rn. Chapters 10 and 11 continue with transformations and patterns indexed over the continuum. Chapters 12-14 extend from the pure representations of shapes to the Bayes estimation of shapes and their parametric representation. Chapters 15 and 16 study the estimation of infinite dimensional shape in the newly emergent field of Computational Anatomy. Finally, Chapters 17 and 18 look at inference, exploring random sampling approaches for estimation of model order and parametric representing of shapes.

Surfing the Cosmos is an original book of photographs and text that visually explores the high/low of energy in the slums of Rio de Janeiro as compared with the high-tech physics of CERN, where discovering the origins of the universe and the elementary particles from which it is made are examined. Within this visual story are the unplanned beautiful drawings that humans make in space with electrical wires, whether from the favela or CERN. These "drawings" inspired a series of artworks/photographs that are pictured in this book, often along with their photographic source or the spirit of the community from which they are derived (either favela or CERN). The human energy of the favela is also mirrored in CERN with one specific comparison of the graffiti from Rio and the chalkboards of CERN, both viewed as works of art and sources that motivated the author's response as demonstrated in his previous works through examples including paintings, fashion scarves, handmade rugs from Nepal, bamboo cotton face masks along with surfboards (chalkboards) and skatedecks.

Here, distinguished science historian Arthur I. Miller delves into the connections between modern art and modern physics. He takes us on a wide-ranging study to demonstrate that scientists and artists have a common aim: a visual interpretation of both the visible and invisible aspects of nature. Along the way, we encounter the philosophy of mind and language, cognitive science and neurophysiology in our search for the origins and meaning of visual imagery. At a time when the media are overeager to portray science as a godless, dehumanising exercise undermining the very fabric of society, this sixth book by Professor Miller shows how scientists are struggling to understand nature, convince their peers, inform the public and deal with the reactions to their research. Thus, Insights of Genuis must interest everyone who cares about science and its place in our culture.

This book is a revision of Random Point Processes written by D. L. Snyder and published by John Wiley and Sons in 1975. More emphasis is given to point processes on multidimensional spaces, especially to pro cesses in two dimensions. This reflects the tremendous increase that has taken place in the use of point-process models for the description of data from which images of objects of interest are formed in a wide variety of scientific and engineering disciplines. A new chapter, Translated Poisson Processes, has been added, and several of the chapters of the fIrst edition have been modifIed to accommodate this new material. Some parts of the fIrst edition have been deleted to make room. Chapter 7 of the fIrst edition, which was about general marked point-processes, has been eliminated, but much of the material appears elsewhere in the new text. With some re luctance, we concluded it necessary to eliminate the topic of hypothesis testing for point-process models. Much of the material of the fIrst edition was motivated by the use of point-process models in applications at the Biomedical Computer Labo ratory of Washington University, as is evident from the following excerpt from the Preface to the first edition. "It was Jerome R. Cox, Jr. , founder and [1974] director of Washington University's Biomedical Computer Laboratory, who ftrst interested me [D. L. S.

The starting point for this collection is a chapter by Dick Allwright on the language learning and teaching classroom experience entitled "Six Promising Directions in Applied Linguistics," The other distinguished contributors respond to this discussion with their own interpretations and from their own experience. The collection problematizes prescription, efficiency, and technical solutions as orientations to classroom language learning. Complexity and idiosyncrasy, on the other hand, are recognized as central concepts in a move towards centralizing teachers' and learners' own understanding of "classroom life," in the contexts of language learning, adult literacy education and language teacher education.

An analysis of one of the three great papers Einstein published in 1905, each of which was to alter forever the field it dealt with. The second of these papers, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", established what Einstein sometimes referred to as the "so-called Theory of Relativity". Miller uses the paper to provide a window on the intense intellectual struggles of physicists in the first decade of the 20th century: the interplay between physical theory and empirical data; the fiercely held notions that could not be articulated clearly or verified experimentally; the great intellectual investment in existing theories, data, and interpretations - and associated intellectual inertia - and the drive to the long-sought-for unification of the sciences. Since its original publication, this book has become a standard reference and sourcebook for the history and philosophy of science; however, it can equally well serve as a text on twentieth-century philosophy.

Is there a number at the root of the universe? A primal number that everything in the world hinges on? This question exercised many great minds of the twentieth century, among them the groundbreaking physicist Wolfgang Pauli and the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Their obsession with the power of certain numbers including 137, which describes the atom s fine-structure constant and has great Kabbalistic significance led them to develop an unlikely friendship and to embark on a joint mystical quest reaching deep into medieval alchemy, dream interpretation, and the Chinese Book of Changes. 137 explores the profound intersection of modern science with the occult, but above all it is the tale of an extraordinary, fruitful friendship between two of the greatest thinkers of our times. Originally published in hardcover as Deciphering the Cosmic Number."

This book provides a panoramic view from 1927-1938 of the development of a physical theory that has been on the cutting-edge of theoretical physics ever since P. A. M. Dirac's quantization of the electromagnetic field in 1927: quantum electrodynamics. Like the classic papers chosen for this volume, the introductory Frame-Setting Essay emphasizes conceptual transformations which carried physicists to the threshold of renormalization theory. The published papers and correspondence of Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac and Pauli provide a fascinating analysis of the meaning and structure of a scientific theory. This book goes beyond the historical and philosophical into current physics. Unavailability of English-language versions of certain key papers, some of which are provided in this book, has prevented their implications from being fully realized. Awareness of research from sixty years ago could well provide insights for future developments.

An authority on creativity introduces us to AI-powered computers that are creating art, literature, and music that may well surpass the creations of humans.Today's computers are composing music that sounds "more Bach than Bach," turning photographs into paintings in the style of Van Gogh's Starry Night, and even writing screenplays. But are computers truly creative--or are they merely tools to be used by musicians, artists, and writers? In this book, Arthur I. Miller takes us on a tour of creativity in the age of machines. Miller, an authority on creativity, identifies the key factors essential to the creative process, from "the need for introspection" to "the ability to discover the key problem." He talks to people on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, encountering computers that mimic the brain and machines that have defeated champions in chess, Jeopardy!, and Go. In the central part of the book, Miller explores the riches of computer-created art, introducing us to artists and computer scientists who have, among much else, unleashed an artificial neural network to create a nightmarish, multi-eyed dog-cat; taught AI to imagine; developed a robot that paints; created algorithms for poetry; and produced the world's first computer-composed musical, Beyond the Fence, staged by Android Lloyd Webber and friends. But, Miller writes, in order to be truly creative, machines will need to step into the world. He probes the nature of consciousness and speaks to researchers trying to develop emotions and consciousness in computers. Miller argues that computers can already be as creative as humans--and someday will surpass us. But this is not a dystopian account; Miller celebrates the creative possibilities of artificial intelligence in art, music, and literature.