As advances in the earth sciences lead to...

"Interpreting Economic and Social Data" aims at rehabilitating the descriptive function of socio-economic statistics, bridging the gap between today's statistical theory on one hand, and econometric and mathematical models of society on the other. It does this by offering a deeper understanding of data and methods with surprising...

Political sociologists increasingly use a wide variety...

Clinical Data-Mining (CDM) involves the conceptualization, extraction, analysis, and interpretation of available clinical data for practice knowledge-building, clinical decision-making and practitioner reflection. Depending upon the type of data mined, CDM can be qualitative or quantitative; it is generally retrospective, but may be...

Building an accurate...

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...

Ecologists sometimes have a less-than-rigorous background in quantitative methods, yet research within this broad field is becoming increasingly mathematical. Written in a step-by-step fashion, Fractals and Multifractals in Ecology and...

This book is a detailed discussion of the Diesel Combustion phenomena like ignition delay, fuel air mixing, rate of heat release, and emissions of smoke, particulate and nitric oxide. The book enables quantitative evaluation of these important phenomena and parameters. Most importantly, it attempts to model them with constants that are...

Engineers around the world depend on MATLAB for its power, usability, and outstanding graphics capabilities. Yet too often, engineering students are either left on their own to acquire the background they need to use MATLAB, or they must learn the program concurrently within an advanced course. Both of these options delay students from...

Uncertain data is inherent in many important applications, such as environmental surveillance, market analysis, and quantitative economics research. Due to the importance of those applications and rapidly increasing amounts of uncertain data collected and accumulated, analyzing large collections of uncertain data has become an important task....

How do we ensure that our Web sites actually give users what they need? What are the best ways to understand our users' goals, behaviors, and attitudes, and then turn that understanding into business results? Personas bring user research to life and make it actionable, ensuring we're making the right decisions based on the right...