Mammalian Evolutionary Morphology : A Tribute to Frederick S. Szalay
This volume acknowledges and celebrates the contributions of Dr. Frederick S. Szalay to the field of Mammalian Evolutionary Morphology. Professor Szalay has published about 200 articles, four monographs, and six books on this subject. Throughout his career Professor Szalay has been a strong advocate for biologically and evolutionarily meaningful character analysis. In his view, this can be accomplished only through an integrated strategy of functional, adaptational, and historical analysis. Dr. Szalay worked on several different mammalian groups during his career, and the contributions to this volume reflect his broad perspective. Chapters focus on Primates, a group to which Professor Szalay dedicated much of his career. However, other mammalian groups on which he conducted a significant amount of research, such as marsupials and xenarthrans, are also covered in the volume.
Compendium of Surface Microscopic and Dermoscopic Features
This unique guide provides a comprehensive, current, and accurate A-Z encyclopaedia to clarify the meaning of surface microscopic and dermoscopic terminology including a broad range of both melanocytic and non-melanocytic skin lesions.
A Legacy for Living Systems : Gregory Bateson as Precursor to Biosemiotics
This book represents a major attempt to revise this deficiency. Scholars from ecology, biochemistry, evolutionary biology, cognitive science, anthropology and philosophy discuss how Bateson's thinking might lead to a fruitful reframing of central problems in modern science. Most important perhaps, Bateson's bioanthropology is shown to play a key role in developing the set of ideas explored in the new field of biosemiotics. The idea that organismic life is indeed basically semiotic or communicative lies at the heart of the biosemiotic approach to the study of life.The only book of its kind, this volume provides a key resource for the quickly-growing substratum of scholars in the biosciences, philosophy and medicine who are seeking an elegant new approach to exploring highly complex systems.
African Land Reform Under Economic Liberalisation: States, Chiefs, and Rural Communities
This book offers unique in-depth, comprehensive, and comparative analyses of the motivations, context, and outcomes of recent land reforms in Africa. Whereas a considerable number of land reforms have been carried out by African governments since the 1990s, no systematic analysis on their meaning has so far been conducted. In the age of land reform, Africa has seen drastic rural changes. Analysing the relationship between those reforms and change, the chapters in this book reveal not only their socio-economic outcomes, such as accelerated marketisation of land, but also their political outcomes, which have often been contrasting.
Linguistics for the age of AI
One of the original goals of artificial intelligence research was to endow intelligent agents with human-level natural language capabilities. Recent AI research, however, has focused on applying statistical and machine learning approaches to big data rather than attempting to model what people do and how they do it. In this book, Marjorie McShane and Sergei Nirenburg return to the original goal of recreating human-level intelligence in a machine. They present a human-inspired, linguistically sophisticated model of language understanding for intelligent agent systems that emphasizes meaning—the deep, context-sensitive meaning that a person derives from spoken or written language.
Knowledge Cartography : Software Tools and Mapping Techniques
The authors see mapping software as a set of visual tools for reading and writing in a networked age. In an information ocean, the primary challenge is to find meaningful patterns around which we can weave plausible narratives. Maps of concepts, discussions and arguments make the connections between ideas tangible and disputable.With 17 chapters from the leading researchers and practitioners, the reader will find the current state–of-the-art in the field. Part 1 focuses on educational applications in schools and universities, before Part 2 turns to applications in professional communities.
Knowledge and Information Visualization : Searching for Synergies
The basic ideas underlying knowledge visualization and information vi- alization are outlined. In a short preview of the contributions of this volume, the idea behind each approach and its contribution to the goals of the book are outlined. 2 The Basic Concepts of the Book Three basic concepts are the focus of this book: "data", "information", and "kno- edge". There have been numerous attempts to define the terms "data", "information", and "knowledge", among them, the OTEC Homepage "Data, Information, Kno- edge, and Wisdom" (Bellinger, Castro, & Mills, see http://www.syste- thinking.org/dikw/dikw.htm): Data are raw. They are symbols or isolated and non-interpreted facts. Data rep- sent a fact or statement of event without any relation to other data. Data simply exists and has no significance beyond its existence (in and of itself). It can exist in any form, usable or not. It does not have meaning of itself.
Bioinformatics technologies
Solving modern biological problems requires advanced computational methods. Bioinformatics evolved from the active interaction of two fast-developing disciplines, biology and information technology. The central issue of this emerging field is the transformation of often distributed and unstructured biological data into meaningful information. This book describes the application of well-established concepts and techniques from areas like data mining, machine learning, database technologies, and visualization techniques to problems like protein data analysis, genome analysis and sequence databases. Chen has collected contributions from leading researchers in each area. The chapters can be read independently, as each offers a complete overview of its specific area, or, combined, this monograph is a comprehensive treatment that will appeal to students, researchers, and R&D professionals in industry who need a state-of-the-art introduction into this challenging and exciting young field.
Applications of Graph Transformations with Industrial Relevance ; 3rd International Symposium, AGTIVE 2007, Kassel, Germany, October 10-12, 2007, Revised Selected and Invited Papers
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the Third International Symposium on Applications of Graph Transformations, AGTIVE 2007, held in Kassel, Germany, in October 2007.
Analytical and Stochastic Modeling Techniques and Applications ; 15th International Conference, ASMTA 2008 Nicosia, Cyprus, June 4-6, 2008 Proceedings
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Analytical and Stochastic Modeling Techniques and Applications, ASMTA 2008, held in Nicosia, Cyprus, in June 2008.
Ambient intelligence for scientific discovery : Foundations, theories, and systems
Many difficult scientific discovery tasks can only be solved in interactive ways, by combining intelligent computing techniques with intuitive and adaptive user interfaces. It is inevitable to use human intelligence in scientific discovery systems: human eyes can capture complex patterns and relationships, along with detecting the exceptional cases in a data set; the human brain can easily manipulate perceptions to make decisions. Ambient intelligence is about this kind of ubiquitous and autonomous human interaction with information. Scientific discovery is a process of creative perception and communication, dealing with questions like: how do we significantly reduce information while maintaining meaning, or how do we extract patterns from massive data and growing data resources. Originating from the SIGCHI Workshop on Ambient Intelligence for Scientific Discovery, this state-of-the-art survey is organized in three parts: new paradigms in scientific discovery, ambient cognition, and ambient intelligence systems. Many chapters share common features such as interaction, vision, language, and biomedicine.
Algorithms in Bioinformatics : Theory and Implementation
Explores a comprehensive and insightful treatment of the practical application of bioinformatic algorithms in a variety of fields. Delivers a fulsome treatment of some of the main algorithms used to explain biological functions and relationships. It introduces readers to the art of algorithms in a practical manner which is linked with biological theory and interpretation. The book covers many key areas of bioinformatics, including global and local sequence alignment, forced alignment, detection of motifs, Sequence logos, Markov chains or information entropy. Other novel approaches are also described, such as Self-Sequence alignment, Objective Digital Stains (ODSs) or Spectral Forecast and the Discrete Probability Detector (DPD) algorithm. Readers will also benefit from the inclusion of: A detailed presentation of new methods, such as Self-sequence alignment, Objective Digital Stains and Spectral Forecast ; A treatment of sequence alignment, including local sequence alignment, global sequence alignment and forced sequence alignment with full implementations ; Discussions of position-specific weight matrices, including the count, weight, relative frequencies, and log-likelihoods matrices ; A detailed presentation of the methods related to Markov Chains as well as a description of their implementation in Bioinformatics and adjacent fields ; An examination of information and entropy, including sequence logos and explanations related to their meaning ; A chapter on philosophical transactions that allows the reader a broader view of the prediction process ; Extensive worked examples with detailed case studies that point out the meaning of different results
Algebraic Methodology and Software Technology ; 12th International Conference, AMAST 2008 Urbana, IL, USA, July 28-31, 2008 Proceedings
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Algebraic Methodology and Software Technology, AMAST 2008, held in Urbana, IL, USA, in July 2008.
Algebra, Meaning, and Computation ; Essays dedicated to Joseph A. Goguen on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday
This Festschrift volume - published to honor Joseph Goguen on his 65th Birthday on June 28, 2006 - includes 32 refereed papers by leading researchers in the different areas spanned by Joseph Goguen's work. The papers address a broad variety of topics from meaning, meta-logic, specification and composition, behavior and formal languages, as well as models, deduction, and computation.The papers were presented at a Symposium in San Diego, California, USA in June 2006.
Advances in proof-theoretic semantics
This volume is the first ever collection devoted to the field of proof-theoretic semantics. Contributions address topics including the systematics of introduction and elimination rules and proofs of normalization, the categorial characterization of deductions, the relation between Heyting's and Gentzen's approaches to meaning, knowability paradoxes, proof-theoretic foundations of set theory, Dummett's justification of logical laws, Kreisel's theory of constructions, paradoxical reasoning, and the defence of model theory.
25 Years of Model Checking : History, Achievements, Perspectives
Model checking technology is among the foremost applications of logic to computer science and computer engineering. The model checking community has achieved many breakthroughs, bridging the gap between theoretical computer science and hardware and software engineering, and it is reaching out to new challenging areas such as system biology and hybrid systems. Model checking is extensively used in the hardware industry and has also been applied to the verification of many types of software. Model checking has been introduced into computer science and electrical engineering curricula at universities worldwide and has become a universal tool for the analysis of systems.
Can We Talk? : Seven Principles for Managing Difficult Conversations at Work
This book offers guidance on how to create the right conditions for a meaningful discussion. The author identifies the seven key principles that enable both parties to gain a deeper understanding of what the other person may be thinking and will help establish their point of view more clearly: confidence, clarity, compassion, curiosity, compromise, credibility, courage.
Assetization : Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism
In this book, scholars from a range of disciplines argue that the asset—meaning anything that can be controlled, traded, and capitalized as a revenue stream—has become the primary basis of technoscientific capitalism. An asset can be an object or an experience, a sum of money or a life form, a patent or a bodily function. A process of assetization prevails, imposing investment and return as the key rationale, and overtaking commodification and its speculative logic. Although assets can be bought and sold, the point is to get a durable economic rent from them rather than make a killing on the market. Assetization examines how assets are constructed and how a variety of things can be turned into assets, analyzing the interests, activities, skills, organizations, and relations entangled in this process.
Landscape Design in Color : History, Theory, and Practice 1750 to Today
Posits that though color and lighting effects appear natural, fleeting, and difficult to comprehend, the sensory palette of built landscapes and gardens has been carefully constructed to shape our experience and evoke meaning and place character. Landscape Design in Color: History, Theory, and Practice 1750 to Today is an inquiry into the themes, theories, and debates on color and its impact on practice in Western landscape architecture over the past three centuries.
Architectural Drafting for Interior Design
Incorporates material and examples that are meaningful to today's interior designers. Beginning interior designers will learn how to communicate their ideas graphically with a resource that is designed specifically for them. This book addresses their needs by focusing on topics independent of CAD, such as how to draw a floor plan, how to use it to create an interior elevation, and how to understand the relationship between 2D and 3D drawings. Written with NCIDQ, CIDA and NKBA requirements in mind, this book will provide readers with a strong, standards-based foundation in interior design.



















