This text offers a comprehensive treatment of VHDL and its applications to the design and simulation of real, industry-standard circuits. It focuses on the use of VHDL rather than solely on the language, showing why and how certain types of circuits are inferred from the language constructs and how any of the four simulation categories can be...

The classical view of concepts in psychology was challenged in the 1970s when experimental evidence showed that concept categories are graded and thus cannot be represented adequately by classical sets. The possibility of using fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logic for representing and dealing with concepts was recognized initially but then...

This popular introductory linguistics text is unique in the way various themes are integrated throughout the book. One primary theme is the question, "How is a speaker's communicative intent recognized?" Rather than treat phonology, phonetics, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics as completely separate fields, the text...

Computer-generated effects are often blamed for bad Hollywood movies. Yet when a critic complains that "technology swamps storytelling" (in a review of Van Helsing, calling it "an example of everything that is wrong with Hollywood computer-generated effects movies"), it says more about the weakness of the story than the...

This book provides an innovative, integrated, and methodical approach to understanding complex financial models, integrating topics usually presented separately into a comprehensive whole. The book brings together financial models and high-level mathematics, reviewing the mathematical background necessary for understanding these models...

We live today in a global web of interdependence, connected technologically, economically, politically, and socially. As a result of these expanding and deepening interdependencies, it has become impossible fully to control -- or foretell -- the effects of our actions. The world is rife with unintended consequences. The first law of human...

Organizing is such a common activity that we often do it without thinking much about it. In our daily lives we organize physical things--books on shelves, cutlery in kitchen drawers--and digital things--Web pages, MP3 files, scientific datasets. Millions of people create and browse Web sites, blog, tag, tweet, and upload and download content...

The combination of two of the twentieth century's most influential and revolutionary scientific theories, information theory and quantum mechanics, gave rise to a radically new view of computing and information. Quantum information processing explores the implications of using quantum mechanics instead of classical mechanics to model...

Investors and analysts often need to look into a firm's operations more deeply than traditional financial statements and models allow. This book describes newly developed tools for using operations metrics to discern and influence the valuation of a firm. It is the first to present these techniques from a unified perspective: that of...

Computer graphics (or CG) has changed the way we experience the art of moving images. Computer graphics is the difference between Steamboat Willie and Buzz Lightyear, between ping pong and PONG. It began in 1963 when an MIT graduate student named Ivan Sutherland created Sketchpad, the first true computer animation program. Sutherland...

This book introduces programming to readers with a background in the arts and humanities; there are no prerequisites, and no knowledge of computation is assumed. In it, Nick Montfort reveals programming to be not merely a technical exercise within given constraints but a tool for sketching, brainstorming, and inquiring about important topics....

In 1988, Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn challenged connectionist theorists to explain the systematicity of cognition. In a highly influential critical analysis of connectionism, they argued that connectionist explanations, at best, can only inform us about details of the neural substrate; explanations at the cognitive level must be classical...