Your encounters with GIS to date may be similar to those of a Martian arriving on Earth and being faced with a motor car. Imagine a Martian coming to Earth and stumbling across a motor car showroom. Very soon he (or she) has heard of a ‘car’ and may even have seen a few glossy brochures. Perhaps you are in the same...

The Internet encompasses all types of websites, from social media monoliths to individual blogs, from Justin Timberlake fan sites to Fortune 500 businesses. Everyone has a voice, and the medium has become the ultimate level playing field for those seeking to interact with the world through an always-on, instantly available, nearly...

CPUs are now scaling horizontally, adding more and more...

Google AdWords is a huge opportunity for businesses and other organizations to improve their results from Google search, to increase sales, to try out new business ideas, and in general to make the Web friendlier. However, it’s also a way to spend money without realizing much return. Helping you to use AdWords effectively from...

Few technical lerms have gained such rapid notoriety as the appela tion "NP-complete." In the short lime since its introduction in the early 1970's, this term has come to symbolize the abyss of inherent intractability that algorithm designers increasingly face as they seek to solve larger and more complex problems. A...

The twentieth century witnessed the birth of revolutionary ideas in the phys- ical sciences. These ideas began to shake the traditional view of the universe dating back to the days of Newton, even to the days of Galileo. Albert Ein- stein is usually identified as the creator of the relativity theory, a theory that is used to model the...

I first met Peter Plesch in the late 1950s when he had established his vacuum techniques in Keele and I was embarking on my PhD. My visit to Keele was to seek advice (freely given) on handling sensitive reaction systems. I rapidly came to appreciate that Peter operated on a somewhat higher intellectual plane than many academics. All...

Computer vision seeks a process that starts with a noisy, ambiguous signal from a TV camera and ends with a high-level description of discrete objects located in 3-dimensional space and identified in a human classification. In this book we address this process at several levels. We first treat the low-level image-processing issues of...

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 term photorealistic is thrown around a lot and is often undefined. Although it seems obvious—photorealistic means something looks like a photo—the word requires a greater explanation. There are many facets to photorealism. This is true because as a CG artist, you have control over everything. Achieving 100 percent realism...

Gamification may be a new term, but the idea of using game-thinking and game mechanics to solve problems and engage audiences isn’t exactly new. The military has been using games and simulations for hundreds (if not thousands) of years, and the U.S. military has been a pioneer in the use of video games across branches. Three...

In 2009, it is estimated that more than 1.5 billion people have access to the Internet, including 220 million in the U.S. alone. Throw in 338 million Chinese users, 55 million German users, 48 million British users, 38 million Russian users, and 67 million Brazilians, and you can see the meaning of the word “world” in the...