With concern for the future of our environment growing stronger and more serious every day, there has never been a better time to take a new approach to some of the most popular gizmos and gadgets on the market and learn how you can convernt to electronics that...

This brief surveys existing techniques to address the problem of long delays and high power consumption for web browsing on smartphones, which can be due to the local computational limitation at the smartphone (e.g., running java scripts or flash objects) level. To address this issue, an architecture called Virtual-Machine based Proxy (VMP)...

In the context of global efforts to control the production, distribution, and use of narcotic drugs, China's treatment of the problem provides an important means of understanding the social, political, and economic limits of national and international policies to regulate drug practices. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, China was...

Obtain better system performance, lower energy consumption, and avoid hand-coding arithmetic functions with this concise guide to automated optimization techniques for hardware and software design. High-level compiler optimizations and high-speed architectures for implementing FIR filters are covered, which can improve performance in...

The so-called “green wave”, triggered by a growing ecological awareness, has resulted in an increased interest in herbal formulations throughout the world, particularly in the last decade. The consumption of medicinal plants has almost doubled in the West during that period. The efficacy of a number of herbal formulations...

Surveillance is a central organizing practice. Gathering personal data and processing them in searchable databases drives administrative efficiency but also raises questions about security, governance, civil liberties and privacy. Surveillance is both globalized in cooperative schemes, such as sharing biometric data, and localized in the...