Advance Praise For The Singularity is Near

"Ray Kurzweil is the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence. His intriguing new book envisions a future in which information technologies have advanced so far and fast that they enable humanity to transcend its biological...

Most nonlinear differential equations arising in natural sciences admit chaotic behaviour and cannot be solved analytically. Integrable systems lie on the other extreme. They possess regular, stable, and well behaved solutions known as solitons and instantons. These solutions play important roles in pure and applied mathematics as well as in...

The arrival of the computer in educational and psychological testing has led to the current popularity of adaptive testing---a testing format in which the computer uses statistical information about the test items to automatically adapt their selection to a real-time update of the test taker’s ability estimate. This book covers such key...

This is an accessible book on the advanced symmetry methods for differential equations. Subjects such as conservation laws, Lie-Bäcklund symmetries, contact transformations, adjoint symmetries, Nöther's Theorem, mappings with some modification, potential symmetries, nonlocal symmetries, nonlocal mappings, and non-classical...

The increasing complexity of our world demands new perspectives on the role of technology in human decision making. We need new technology to cope with the increasingly complex and information-rich nature of our modern society. This is particularly true for critical environments such as crisis management and traffic management, where humans...

The book presents a wealth of material about the polar oceans, more specifically the ice-covered areas and peripheral seas. It provides a detailed history of the changing climate of the polar oceans as observed by satellite sensors in the last three decades. The satellite research data show spatial distributions of surface temperature, sea...

Alessandra Celletti’s proposed book presents classical celestial mechanics and its interplay with dynamical systems in a way that would be suitable for advance level undergraduate students as well as postgraduate students and researchers. First she uses paradigmatic models, such as the logistic map or the standard map, to introduce the...

The discovery of caged carbon structures, in 1985, established a whole new field of carbon chemistry. Unlike graphite and diamond, these structures known as fullerenes are finite in structure and are relevant to a wide variety of fields including supramolecular assemblies, nanostructures, optoelectronic devices and a whole range of biological...

How can a robot decide what motions to perform in order to achieve tasks in the physical world...

From the authors of The Evolution and Extinction of the Dinosaurs comes an introduction to the study of dinosaurs for non-specialists designed to excite readers about science by using dinosaurs to illustrate and discuss geology, natural history and evolution. While focusing on dinosaurs it also uses them to convey other aspects of the...

In the near future, organic semiconductors may be used in a variety of products, including flat-screen TVs, e-book readers, and third-generation organic photovoltaics applications, to name just a few. While organic electronics has received increased attention in scientific journals, those working in this burgeoning field require more in-depth...

There is perhaps no more compelling discipline in the behavioral and brain sciences today than cognitive neuroscience. This book provides a systematic examination of the cognitive neuroscience of attention, taking as its thesis that attention is not a unitary function of the brain. To fully understand attention, therefore, requires examination...