–Edward O. Wilson, Pellegrino Research Professor, emeritus, Harvard...

Beginning Rails 3 is the practical starting point for anyone wanting to learn how to build dynamic web applications using the latest release of the Rails framework for Ruby. You'll learn how all of the components of Rails fit together and how you can leverage them to create sophisticated web applications with less code and more...

The Internet is like the Old West a frontier rich with opportunity and hope, but also a rough-and-tumble land of questionable characters, dubious legal jurisdictions, and hidden dangers. And just like the Old West, if you want to stake out your territory, you have to get there first and fend for yourself. On the web, that means defending your...

Situated in northwestern Africa along the Mediterranean Sea, Algeria is the second-largest country on the continent. Comparatively, it is slightly less than 3.5 times the size of Texas, with a total area of 2,381,740 sq km (919,595 sq mi). Extending about 2,400 km (1,500 mi) e–w and 2,100 km (1,300 mi) n–s, Algeria is bounded on...

The Glorious Foods of Greece is the magnum opus of Greek cuisine, the first book that takes the reader on a long and fascinating journey beyond the familiar Greece of blue-and-white postcard images and ubiquitous grilled fish and moussaka into the country's many different regions, where local customs and foodways have remaained...

Groundwater in the...

Award-winning nature photographers Ellen and Josh Anon reveal their secrets to creating stunning nature images using their field-tested methods and the very latest Photoshop techniques. The book is packed with practical workflows and...

Being a manager can be an intimidating and challenging task. Managing involves teaching new skills to employees, helping land a new customer, accomplishing an important assignment, increasing performance, and much more. The process of management can be...

The 2010 Asian Conference on Computer Vision took place in the southern hemisphere, in “The Land of the Long White Cloud” in Maori language, also known as New Zealand, in the beautiful town of Queenstown. If we try to segment the world we realize that New Zealand does not belong officially to any continent. Similarly, in computer...

There are many anecdotes, articles, and books about optimizing in specific scenarios. Sometimes, these include hard numbers; if so, it’s usually for hardware that is several years old. Often, the discussion is very specific, such as optimizing memory copies for a specific chip, and the...

Similar to many research and application fields, geography has moved from a datapoor and computation-poor to a data-rich and computation-rich environment. The scope, coverage, and volume of digital geographic datasets are growing rapidly. Public and private sector agencies are creating, processing, and disseminating digital data on land use,...

Remember the Nowhere Man from the Beatles’ classic animated movie Yellow Submarine? He was the nerdy little fellow always going round in circles, writing books, making music, taking pictures, directing plays, and making movies, always so very busy. But he was also very sad because no one could see his work; the Blue Meanies had...