The human mind is an unlikely evolutionary adaptation. How did humans acquire cognitive capacities far more powerful than anything a hunting-and-gathering primate needed to survive? Alfred Russel Wallace, co-founder with Darwin of evolutionary theory, saw humans as "divine exceptions" to natural selection. Darwin thought use of...

The Privacy Engineer's Manifesto: Getting...

This book demonstrates bene?ts of abstract and qualitative reasoning that have not received much attention in the context of autonomous robotics before. Bremen, Christian Freksa December 2007 Director of the SFB/TR 8 Spatial Cognition Preface This book addresses spatial representations and reasoning techniques for - bile robot mapping,...

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Traditionally, wetlands were considered separately from river basin systems. However, nowadays it is becoming common practice to follow an integrated approach in wetland-riverine watershed analysis and management. Such approach requires not only adequate representations of all relevant bio-physical parameters, but also of socio-political and...

To do solid academic research, college students need to look beyond the computer search engine. This short, practical book introduces students to the important components of the information-seeking process. The Elements of Library Research provides a foundation for success in any research assignment, from a freshman paper to a senior...

The name "random walk" for a problem of a displacement of a point in a sequence of independent random steps was coined by Karl Pearson in 1905 in a question posed to readers of "Nature". The same year, a similar problem was formulated by Albert Einstein in one of his Annus Mirabilis works. Even earlier such a problem was...

This thesis provides unique information on the Kerr-lens mode-locking (KLM) technique applied to a thin-disk laser. It describes in detail cavity geometry, the qualitative approach to KLM, and self-starting behavior in the regime of both negative and positive dispersion. Comprehensive comparative analysis of KLM and semiconductor saturable...

In 2010, the ALPHA collaboration achieved a first for mankind: the stable, long-term storage of atomic antimatter, a project carried out a the Antiproton Decelerator facility at CERN. A crucial element of this observation was a dedicated silicon vertexing detector used to identify and analyze antihydrogen annihilations. This thesis reports...

In the 1930s a series of seminal works published by Alan Turing, Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church, and others established the theoretical basis for computability. This work, advancing precise characterizations of effective, algorithmic computability, was the culmination of intensive investigations into the foundations of mathematics. In the...

'This study approaches the difficult problem of providing Internet users with a completely transparent view on electronic markets from a product information accessibility point of view. Robert Neumann analyzes economic, ecological, and societal gains of openly accessible product information in the form of theoretical models. Though many...