Religious beliefs and practices, which permeated all aspects of life in antiquity, traveled well-worn routes throughout the Mediterranean: itinerant charismatic practitioners journeying from place to place peddled their skills as healers, purifiers, cursers, and initiators; and vessels decorated with illustrations of myths traveled with them....

Traditionally, cross-layer and joint source-channel coding were seen as incompatible with classically structured networks but recent advances in theory changed this situation. Joint source-channel decoding is now seen as a viable alternative to separate decoding of source and channel codes, if the protocol layers are taken into account. A...

Facing the Music investigates the practices and ideas that have grown from some five decades of cultural diversity in music education, developments in ethnomusicology, and the rise of 'world music'. Speaking from rich, hands-on experience of more than thirty years at various levels of music education (music in schools,...

From his unique perspective, renowned statistician and educator Frederick Mosteller describes many of the projects and events in his long career. From humble beginnings in western Pennsylvania to becoming the founding chairman of Harvard University’s Department of Statistics and beyond, he inspired many statisticians, scientists, and...

Linearity plays a critical role in the study of elementary differential equations; linear differential equations, especially systems thereof, demonstrate a fundamental application of linear algebra. In Differential Equations with Linear Algebra, we explore this interplay between linear algebra and differential equations and examine...

The Nobel Prize-winning scientist’s presentation of his landmark theory

According to Einstein himself, this book is intended "to give an exact insight into the theory of Relativity to those readers who, from a general scientific and philosophical point of view, are interested in the theory, but who are not...

Managing employees and encouraging them to work together toward a common goal is an essential skill that all leaders should possess. Conflict Resolution at Work For Dummies provides the tools and advice you need to restore peace, train your colleagues to get along...

The phenomenal success of the iPhone and the iPod touch has ushered in a “gold rush” for developers, but with well over 100,000 apps in the highly competitive App Store, it has become increasingly difficult for new apps to stand out in the crowd. Achieving consumer awareness and sales longevity for your iPhone app requires a lot...

Semantics in Adaptive and Personalised Services, initially strikes one as a specific and perhaps narrow domain. Yet, a closer examination of the term reveals much more. On one hand there is the issue of semantics. Nowadays, this most often refers to the use of OWL, RDF or some other XML based ontology description language in order to...

With advances driven by pressure from governments, environmental activists, and its associated industries, the subject of electric and hybrid vehicles is becoming increasingly important. Trends clearly suggest that we must educate the engineers of today and tomorrow in the technical details of these vehicles. While there are many books that...

Business is the backbone of American society and is one of the keys to making our system work as well as it has for over two hundred years. Yet as a body of knowledge, business is much younger, and in its brief history, there have been few attempts to present the discipline of business in a single place. The major purpose of the Encyclopedia of...

The convergence of medical science, biology, pharmacology, biomedical engineering, healthcare, and information technology is revolutionizing medical and scientific practice, and has broader social implications still being understood. The Engines of Hippocrates provides a...