The objective of this book is to give well-grounded methods for estimation of the uncertainly of measurement results. Starting from the basics of metrology, the book studies this subject in detail, from theoretical analysis all the way to concrete practical recommendations in areas ranging from single measurements in industry, trade, etc. to multiple measurements in experimental sciences. The book derives these recommendations by systematic development of the measurement accuracy theory. An important aspect of this book is that it develops the theory from the strong practical perspective, by giving priority to the physical essence of the problems and paying special attention to properties of measuring instruments and their influence on the uncertainty of measurements. The book also presents basics on characterization, standardization and calibration of measuring instruments as well as methods for calculating limits of errors of measuring instruments. All recommendations are illustrated by detailed examples from measurements of both electrical and mechanical quantities.

This illustrated edition of Sir Anthony Kenny 's acclaimed survey of Western philosophy offers the most concise and compelling story of the complete development of philosophy available.Spanning 2,500 years of thought, An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy provides essential coverage of the most influential philosophers of the Western world, among them Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Jesus, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Berkeley, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Mill, Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein.Replete with over 60 illustrations - ranging from Dufresnoy 's The Death of Socrates, through to the title page of Thomas More 's Utopia, portraits of Hobbes and Rousseau, photographs of Charles Darwin and Bertrand Russell, Freud 's own sketch of the Ego and the Id, and Wittgenstein 's Austrian military identity card - this lucid and masterful work is ideal for anyone with an interest in Western thought.

Information extraction regards the processes of structuring and combining content that is explicitly stated or implied in one or multiple unstructured information sources. It involves a semantic classification and linking of certain pieces of information and is considered as a light form of content understanding by the machine. Currently, there is a considerable interest in integrating the results of information extraction in retrieval systems, because of the growing demand for search engines that return precise answers to flexible information queries. Advanced retrieval models satisfy that need and they rely on tools that automatically build a probabilistic model of the content of a (multi-media) document.
The book focuses on content recognition in text. It elaborates on the past and current most successful algorithms and their application in a variety of domains (e.g., news filtering, mining of biomedical text, intelligence gathering, competitive intelligence, legal information searching, and processing of informal text). An important part discusses current statistical and machine learning algorithms for information detection and classification and integrates their results in probabilistic retrieval models. The book also reveals a number of ideas towards an advanced understanding and synthesis of textual content.

SQL is the international standard language for creating and maintaining relational databases. This book is a compendium of information about SQL and relational database design, development, and maintenance. The nine mini-books cover the full spectrum of issues that arise in building, using, and maintaining relational database systems.
Book I: SQL Concepts
Book II: Relational Database Development
Book III: SQL Queries
Book IV: Data Security
Book V: SQL and Programming
Book VI: SQL and XML...

Get your picture-perfect guide to using all the cool features of Photoshop CS3.
Whether you're new to Photoshop, want to take your skills up a notch, or want to quickly master the new features and enhancements in Photoshop CS3, you've come to the right place. Nine easy-to-follow minibooks cover Photoshop fundamentals plus the newest tools and techniques. "Putting It Together" exercises give you hands-on experience. This is your one-stop guide to Photoshop. You'll learn to:
Specify size and resolution.
Correct contrast, color, and clarity.
Create top-notch selections.
Composite images with layers and blending modes.
Make adjustments with levels and curves.
Prep graphics for print or the Web.

Zope is a powerful Python web application platform for developing complex web applications rapidly and collaboratively. With version 3, Zope has been rebuilt on top of a Component Architecture that combines the best ideas available from modern web platforms.
This book focuses on Zope 3, though it also addresses the needs of Zope 2 developers who want to use Zope 3 features as they are backported into the Zope 2 platform. First, the key concepts of Zope and its Component Architecture are introduced. Each of Zope's capabilities is demonstrated by building a sample application and then extending it with more features.

This book will be useful to a wide audience of engineers, ranging from undergraduate and graduate students, new and advanced academic researchers, to practitioners (mechanical and electrical engineers, computer and system scientists). It is intended for readers whose work involves manufacturing, industrial, robotics, automation, computer and control engineering, and who wish to find out about this important new technology and its potential advantages for control engineering applications.

Creating robust artificial intelligence is one of the greatest challenges for game developers. The commercial success of a game is often dependent upon the quality of the AI, yet the engineering of AI is often begun late in the development process and is frequently misunderstood. In this book, Ian Millington brings extensive professional experience to the problem of improving the quality of AI in games. A game developer since 1987, he was founder of Mindlathe Ltd., at the time the largest specialist AI company in gaming. Ian shows how to think about AI as an integral part of game play. He describes numerous examples from real games and explores the underlying ideas through detailed case studies. He goes further to introduce many techniques little used by developers today. The books CD-ROM contains a library of C++ source code and demonstration programs, and provides access to a website with a complete commercial source code library of AI algorithms and techniques.
* A comprehensive, professional tutorial and reference to implement true AI in games.
* Walks through the entire development process from beginning to end.
* Includes over 100 pseudo code examples of techniques used in commercial games, case studies for all major genres, a CD-ROM and companion website with extensive C++ source code implementations for Windows, and source code libraries for Linux and OS X available through the website.

The computer's metaphorical desktop, with its onscreen windows and hierarchy of folders, is the only digital work environment most users and designers have ever known. Yet empirical studies show that the traditional desktop design does not provide sufficient support for today's real-life tasks involving collaboration, multitasking, multiple roles, and diverse technologies. In Beyond the Desktop Metaphor, leading researchers and developers consider design approaches for a post-desktop future.
The contributors analyze the limitations of the desktop environment—including the built-in conflict between access and display, the difficulties in managing several tasks simultaneously, and the need to coordinate the multiple technologies and information objects (laptops, PDAs, files, URLs, email) that most people use daily—and propose novel design solutions that work toward a more integrated digital work environment. They describe systems that facilitate access to information, including Lifestreams, Haystack, Task Gallery, GroupBar, and Scalable Fabric, and they argue that the organization of work environments should reflect the social context of work. They consider the notion of activity as a conceptual tool for designing integrated systems, and point to the Kimura and Activity-Based Computing systems as examples.

The increasing availability of molecular and genetic databases coupled with the growing power of computers gives biologists opportunities to address new issues, such as the patterns of molecular evolution, and re-assess old ones, such as the role of adaptation in species diversification.
This book integrates a wide variety of data analysis methods into a single and flexible interface: the R language. This open source language is available for a wide range of computer systems and has been adopted as a computational environment by many authors of statistical software. Adopting R as a main tool for phylogenetic analyses will ease the workflow in biologists' data analyses, ensure greater scientific repeatability, and enhance the exchange of ideas and methodological developments.

Complete Coverage of Xen, Including Version 3.2. Virtualization with Xen is the first book to demonstrate to readers how to install, administer, and maintain a virtual infrastructure based on XenSources latest release, Xen 3.2. It discusses best practices for setting up a Xen environment correctly the first time, maximizing the utilization of server assets while taking advantage of the fastest and most secure enterprise-grade paravirtualization architecture. It covers both basic and advanced topics, such as planning and installation, physical-to-virtual migrations, virtual machine provisioning, resource management, and monitoring and troubleshooting guests and Xen hosts.
* Explore Xens Virtualization Model
Find a complete overview of the architecture model as well of all products: Xen 3.0 , Xen Express, XenServer, and Xen Enterprise.
* Deploy Xen
Understand the system requirements, learn installation methods, and see how to install Xen on a free Linux distribution.
* Master the Administrator Console

Computer graphics is important in many areas including engineering design, architecture, education, and computer art and animation. This book examines a wide array of current methods used in creating real-looking objects in the computer, one of the main aims of computer graphics.
Key features:
* Good foundational mathematical introduction to curves and surfaces; no advanced math required
* Topics organized by different interpolation/approximation techniques, each technique providing useful information about curves and surfaces
* Exposition motivated by numerous examples and exercises sprinkled throughout, aiding the reader
* Includes a gallery of color images, Mathematica code listings, and sections on curves & surfaces by refinement and on sweep surfaces
* Web site maintained and updated by the author, providing readers with errata and auxiliary material

Tuning of SQL code is generally cheaper than changing the data model. Physical and configuration tuning involves a search for bottlenecks that often points to SQL code or data model issues. Building an appropriate data model and writing properly performing SQL code can give 100%+ performance improvement. Physical and configuration tuning often gives at most a 25% performance increase.
Gavin Powell shows that the central theme of Oracle10gR2 Performance Tuning is four-fold: denormalize data models to fit applications; tune SQL code according to both the data model and the application in relation to scalability; create a well-proportioned physical architecture at the time of initial Oracle installation; and most important, mix skill sets to obtain the best results.

The Handbook of Mathematics for Engineers and Scientists covers the main fields of mathematics and focuses on the methods used for obtaining solutions of various classes of mathematical equations that underlie the mathematical modeling of numerous phenomena and processes in science and technology. To accommodate different mathematical backgrounds, the preeminent authors outline the material in a simplified, schematic manner, avoiding special terminology wherever possible. Organized in ascending order of complexity, the material is divided into two parts. The first part is a coherent survey of the most important definitions, formulas, equations, methods, and theorems. It covers arithmetic, elementary and analytic geometry, algebra, differential and integral calculus, special functions, calculus of variations, and probability theory. Numerous specific examples clarify the methods for solving problems and equations. The second part provides many in-depth mathematical tables, including those of exact solutions of various types of equations. This concise, comprehensive compendium of mathematical definitions, formulas, and theorems provides the foundation for exploring scientific and technological phenomena.

Text entry has never been so important as it is today. This is in large part due to the phenomenal, relatively recent success of mobile computing, text messaging on mobile phones, and the proliferation of small devices like the Blackberry and Palm Pilot. Compared with the recent past, when text entry was primarily through the standard qwerty keyboard, people today use a diverse array of devices with the number and variety of such devices ever increasing.
The variety is not just in the devices, but also in the technologies used: Entry modalities have become more varied and include speech recognition and synthesis, handwriting recognition, and even eye-tracking using image processing on web-cams. Statistical language modeling has advanced greatly in the past ten years and so therein is potential to facilitate and improve text entryincreasingly, the way people communicate.
This book consists of four parts, and covers these areas: Guidelines for Designing Better Entry Systems (including research methodologies, measurement, and language modelling); Devices and Modalities; Languages of the world and entry systems in those languages; and variety in users and their difficulties with text entryand the possible design and guideline solutions for those individual user groups.