From termite mounds and caterpillar cocoons to the elaborate nests of social birds and the deadly traps of spiders, the constructions of the animal world can amaze and at times even rival our own feats of engineering. But how do creatures with such small brains build these complex structures? What drives them to do it?
IN LITTLE MORE THAN HALF A DECADE, Facebook has gone from a dorm-room novelty to a company with 500 million users. It is one of the fastest growing companies in history, an essential part of the social life not only of teenagers but hundreds of millions of adults worldwide. As Facebook spreads around the globe, it creates surprising...
Today, it seems everyone—from multinational corporations to your kid’s second-grade teacher—has a blog. They all have one, in part, because they have information they want to share with others—from customers and clients to neighbors and parents. But to actually build a good blog—to create a blog people want to...
Modeling problems in this book are addressed mainly from the computational viewpoint. The primary concerns are how to define an objective function for the optimal solution to a image analysis or computer vision problem and how to find the optimal solution. The solution is defined in an optimization sense because the perfect solution is...
Accessing remote instrumentation worldwide is one of the goals of e-Science. The task of enabling the execution of complex experiments that involve the use of distributed scientific instruments must be supported by a number of different architectural domains, which inter-work in a coordinated fashion to provide the necessary functionality....
The GNU Autotools make it easy for developers to create software that is portable across many UNIX-like operating systems. Thousands of open source software packages use the Autotools, but the learning curve is unfortunately steep, and it can be difficult for a beginner to find anything more than basic reference material on using the powerful...
Functional programming languages like F#, Erlang, and Scala are attracting attention as an efficient way to handle the new requirements for programming multi-processor and high-availability applications. Microsoft's new F# is a true functional language and C# uses functional language features for LINQ and other recent...
The main motivation to write this book came from all our problems to find suitable material for a textbook that would really help us to teach the practical aspects of data analysis together with the needed theoretical underpinnings. Many books out there tackle either one or the other of these aspects (and, especially for the latter, there are...
At some level, design can be seen as a method of using creativity to impose tyranny on the world. Not tyranny in its classical sense, but rather tyranny on a much more modest, much more personal scale.
In the progression from problem to idea to solution, the designer may describe what she does in commercial terms (business...
Business intelligence solutions transform business data into conclusive, fact-based, and actionable information and enable businesses to spot customer trends, create customer loyalty, enhance supplier relationships, reduce financial risk, and uncover new sales opportunities. The goal of business intelligence is to make sense of change-to...
Thanks to its inherent resilience to failure and the increasing availability of open-source cloud infrastructure software and virtualization software stacks, services delivered from the cloud have expanded past web applications to include storage, raw computing, and access to specialized services. The possibility of satisfying maintenance and...
Designing the Obvious belongs in the toolbox of every person charged with the design and development of Web-based software, from the CEO to the programming team. Designing the Obvious explores the character traits of great Web applications and uses them as guiding principles of application design so the end result of every project...
