We design to elicit responses from people. We want them to buy something, read more, or take action of some kind. Designing without understanding what makes people act the way they do is like exploring a new city without a map: results will be haphazard, confusing, and inefficient. This book combines real science and research with practical...
In August of 2006, an engineering VP from one of Altera’s customers approached
Misha Burich, VP of Engineering at Altera, asking for help in reliably being able to
predict the cost, schedule and quality of system designs reliant on FPGA designs.
At this time, I was responsible for defining the design flow requirements for...
What will data management technologies look like in ten years? While the future's difficult to predict, this book provides students, researchers and professionals alike with a brief and engaging look at one prescient trend: the convergence of search and database technologies. This convergence has given rise to a new breed of...
Why is astronomy considered a science while astrology is considered only a pseudoscience?
In other words, how can we prove that a theory faithfully describes reality,
and that this theory can then be used to predict unknown facts? Karl Popper, the
well-known philosopher, studied these problems and summarized his conclusions in
one...
A major part of natural language processing now depends on the use of text data to build linguistic analyzers. We consider statistical, computational approaches to modeling linguistic structure. We seek to unify across many approaches and many kinds of linguistic structures. Assuming a basic understanding of natural language processing and/or...
What do people learn when they do not know that they are learning? Until recently all of the work in the area of implicit learning focused on empirical questions and methods. In this book, Axel Cleeremans explores unintentional learning from an information-processing perspective. He introduces a theoretical framework that unifies existing...
Information is the lifeblood of knowledge, the flotsam of events and perspectives
created in every second of history. There is so much to capture and yet so little
time and so few resources to make sense of it all. Just as we get tantalisingly
close, the holy grail of true knowledge slips further over the horizon.
The constant and speedy progress made by humankind in the industrial revolution,
and more recently in the information technology era can be directly attributed to
sharing of knowledge between various disciplines, reuse of the knowledge as science
and technology advanced, and inclusion of this knowledge in the curriculum.
The phrases...
The purpose of this book is to teach fundamentals of programming concepts and
skills needed for basic problem solving, all using MATLABW as the vehicle.
MATLAB is a powerful software package that has built-in functions to accomplish
a diverse range of tasks, from mathematical operations to three-dimensional
imaging. Additionally,...
As quantum theory enters its second century, it is fitting to examine just how far it has come as a tool for the chemist. Beginning with Max Planck’s agonizing conclusion in 1900 that linked energy emission in discreet bundles to the resultant black-body radiation curve, a body of knowledge has developed with profound consequences in...
Software engineering is a pessimistic discipline. The glass is always half empty
rather than half full. Not surprising really, we are hardened to the grind of improving
quality, painstakingly testing and, never quite, eliminating bugs. Critical review is
of the essence. We know there is “no silver bullet”.
When I wrote Practical Oracle 8i, there was a three-week lag between publication and the first e-mail asking me when I was going to produce a 9i version of the book—thanks to Larry Ellison’s timing of the
launch of 9i. That question has been repeated many times (with changes in version number) over the
last 12...
