Why do countries celebrate defining religious moments or significant events in their history, and how and why do their leaders select certain events for commemoration and not others? This book is the first systematic study of the role of celebrations and public holidays in the Arab Middle East from the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the...

Completely revised and expanded from four to five volumes, this new edition of the Handbook of Parenting appears at a time that is momentous in the history of parenting. Parenting and the family are today in a greater state of flux, question, and redefinition than perhaps ever before. We are witnessing the emergence of striking...

The practice of enterprise application development has benefited from the emergence of many new enabling technologies. Multi-tiered object-oriented platforms, such as Java and .NET, have become commonplace. These new tools and technologies are capable of building powerful applications, but they are not easily implemented....

• Clear explanations of the concepts and underlying mechanisms of IP multicasting, from the fundamentals to advanced design techniques
• Concepts and techniques are reinforced through real-world network examples, each clearly illustrated in a...

If you have the imaginative power to design complex multimedia projects but can't adapt to programming languages, then Scratch 1.4: Beginner's Guide is the book for you. Imagine how good you'll feel when you drag-and-drop your way to interactive games, stories, graphic artwork, computer animations, and much more using Scratch even...

The flow of academic ideas in the area of computational intelligence is impacting industrial practice at considerable speed. Practitioners face the challenge of tracking, understanding and applying the latest techniques, which often prove their value even before the underlying theories are fully understood. This book offers realistic guidelines...

Human faces are familiar to our visual systems. We easily recognize a person's face in arbitrary lighting conditions and in a variety of poses; detect small appearance changes; and notice subtle expression details. Can computer vision systems process face images as well as human vision systems can? Face image processing has potential...

.NET Web Services Solutions offers just what its title states: practical solutions to the real challenges you face as you use .NET to create applications that communicate with web services and—more to the point—to build and deploy web services of your own. By the time you’re done, you’ll understand how the...