In the final book of his astonishing career, Carl Sagan brilliantly examines the burning questions of our lives, our world, and the universe around us. These luminous, entertaining essays travel both the vastness of the cosmos and the intimacy of the human mind, posing such fascinating questions as how did the universe originate and how will...

Phil Factor is a legend in his own runtime. Scurrilous, absurd, confessional and scathing by turns, Confessions of an IT Manager targets the idiocy, incompetence and overreach of the IT management industry from vantage point all the way up and down the greasy pole. Phil Factor (real name witheld to protest the guilty) has over 20 years...

It wasn’t too long ago when a fellow developer at work asked me to look at his screen. He had stumbled across some new technology, and asked: ‘Hey, have you heard about this?’ All too often such questions are answered with a...

Design is a deeply ingrained part of the human psyche. Since the earliest days when we were painting cave walls, we have been interested in creating objects that that tell a story or simply brighten up our surroundings. The advent of the computer has brought our interest in design to a whole new level. We can now manipulate our creations as...

Braille edition of the popular bestseller. "Let go of the idea that gentle, relaxed people can't be super-achievers," advises Dr. Richard Carlson in his widely popular self-help book, DON'T SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF. In 100 chapters--each only a few pages long--Dr. Carlson shares his ideas for living a calmer, richer life. This...

We are all familiar with the everyday notion of two-sided symmetry, as viewed for example in the external form of the human body. But in its broadest interpretation symmetry is a property which involves regularity and repetition. In this sense symmetry can be found everywhere, especially in science and art. The aim of this book is to present...

• An interdisciplinary project based on over 15 years of research in...

Analysis of semantic relations and predicate-argument structure is one of the core pieces of any system for natural language understanding. This field has a long history, but has also undergone significant change in recent years. The advent of systematically defined resources for semantic structures has enabled the creation of large corpora...

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Data integration is a critical problem in our increasingly interconnected but inevitably heterogeneous world. There are numerous data sources available in organizational databases and on public information systems like the World Wide Web. Not surprisingly, the sources often use different vocabularies and different data structures, being...