In 1862, the gardener James Bateman sent several specimens of the Christmas orchid to Charles Darwin. This orchid was first planted in Britain in 1855 and it did not blossom until 1857. It had been discovered several decades before by the French botanist Louis-Marie Aubert du Petit-Thouars in Madagascar in 1822. The most significant...

The International Symposium on Smart Graphics serves as a scientific forum that attracts researchers and practitioners from the fields of computer graphics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, human–computer interaction, interface design, and information visualization. Initiated by Andreas Butz, Antonio Kr¨uger, and...

concerned with the study of the development and use of advanced information technologies and systems for national, international, and societal security-related applications. In the past few years,we have witnessed that ISI experienced tremendous growth and attracted significant interest involving academic researchers in related fields...

A number of forces are driving this explosion. The first is internationalization encompassing a dramatic growth in...

Having your own blog isn’t just for the nerdy anymore. Today, it seems everyone—from multinational corporations to a neighbor up the street—has a blog. They all have one, in part, because the folks at WordPress make it easy to have one. But to actually build a good blog—to create a blog people want to read—takes...

Non-photorealistic computer graphics is a multidisciplinary field in the research community, involving computer arts, computer graphics, computer vision, digital image/video processing and visual cognitive psychology. It aims at the computer generation of images and animations that are made in part “by hand” in appearance,...

The Information Systems Examination Board (ISEB) of BCS (www.bcs.org.uk/iseb) instigated the Foundation Certificate in Software Testing in 1998; since then over 40,000 Foundation Certificates have been awarded. An intermediate level qualification was introduced in 2007 as a step towards the more advanced Practitioner...

Acomputing cloudis more thana collection of computer resources, because it provides mechanisms to manage those resources. In a cloud computing platform, software is migrating from the desktop to the "clouds," promising users, at any time and anywhere, access to their...

If you are a Webmaster or Web page designer and want to create dynamic, data-driven Web pages, this book is for you. If you are an experienced database administrator who wants to take advantage of the Web to publish or collect data, this...

Take a deep breath and get ready to have a rollicking good time. That’s right — this is a computer book, but it’s fun. What a concept! Whether you’re brand-spanking new to the Office suite or a grizzled old Office veteran, I guarantee...