No one has ever described American democracy with more accurate insight or more profoundly than Alexis de Tocqueville. After meeting with Americans on extensive travels in the United States, and intense study of documents and authorities, he authored the landmark Democracy in America, publishing its two volumes in 1835 and 1840. Ever...

When I meet old friends and they ask, "How are you?" I often reply, "I'm fine; it's the world I am worried about." "Aren't we all" is the common response. Most people have a rather vague sense of concern about the future, but some worry about specific threats such as climate change or population...

But people are clever. They tinker and...

A guide to optimizing programs on the PC and Unix platforms, this book covers the expediency of optimization and the methods to increase the speed of programs via optimization. Discussed are typical mistakes made by programmers that lessen the performance of the system along with easily implemented solutions. Detailed descriptions of the...

Automated instrumentation can be found in a wide variety of settings,...

Hardware-intrinsic security is a young field dealing with secure secret key storage. By generating the secret keys from the intrinsic properties of the silicon, e.g., from intrinsic Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs), no permanent secret key storage is required anymore, and the key is only present in the device for a minimal amount of time....

In the past ten years or so, software architecture has emerged as a central notion in the development of complex software systems. Software architecture is now accepted in the software engineering research and development community as a manageable and meaningful abstraction of the system under development and is applied throughout the...

Geometric algebra (GA) is a powerful new mathematical system for computational geometry. Although its origins can be traced back to Hermann Grassmann (1844), its development as a language for space–time geometry with applications to all of physics did not begin until 1966. Suddenly, in the year 2000 it was recognized that a specialized...

One familiar problem encountered in association mining exercises is that they...

E-marketing impacts all aspects of marketing from strategy and planning through the marketing mix, marketing communications and buyer behaviour to marketing research. eMarketing eXcellence highlights the most significant opportunities, pitfalls and defines the new marketing approaches needed. It highlights best practice in applying digital...

Over a decade ago, a small team of designers met in a small conference room on the second floor of Building 41 at Microsoft to create a brand-new language, C#. The guiding principles of the language emphasized simplicity, familiarity, safety, and practicality. Of course, all those principles needed to balance against one another; none are...

The four previous meetings of the...