This book bridges the gap between playing with robots in school and studying robotics at the upper undergraduate and graduate levels to prepare for careers in industry and research. Robotic algorithms are presented formally, but using only mathematics known by high-school and first-year college students, such as calculus, matrices and probability. ...
The average person can name more bird species than they think, but do we really know what a bird "species" is? This book takes up several fascinating aspects of bird life to elucidate this basic concept in biology. From genetic and physiological basics to the phenomena of bird song and bird migration, it analyzes various interactions of b...
This report provides an overview of policy strategies on early childhood education settings (from birth to primary schooling) in eight countries. Data were collected using a policy questionnaire addressed to and completed by the National Research Coordinator(s) (NRC) of Chile, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Italy, Poland, the Russian Federat...
A series of reforms have greatly improved the efficiency, reliability, and environmental performance of the Chinese power sector. However, significant challenges remain: rapidly rising electricity demand, concerns about power system reliability and energy security, environmental degradation and climate change. China's government explicitly set...
This book focuses on both the theory and practice associated with the tools and approaches for decisionmaking in the face of deep uncertainty. It explores approaches and tools supporting the design of strategic plans under deep uncertainty, and their testing in the real world, including barriers and enablers for their use in practice. The book broa...
Embedded Firmware Solutions is the perfect introduction and daily-use field guide - for the thousands of firmware designers, hardware engineers, architects, managers, and developers--to Intel's new firmware direction (including Quark coverage), showing how to integrate Intel® Architecture designs into their plans.
Featuring hands-on exampl...
Unannounced and unmarked, blocks turn up all over Ruby programs. Their use ranges from some of Ruby's most basic structures, such as loops, to some of its most sophisticated tricks. Similar to closures or lambdas in other languages, blocks enable some of Ruby's vaunted efficiency. Blocks even allow other people to write some of the code y...
Consumers prefer fast, no-nonsense web experiences, yet reports show that the top 2,000 retail websites have grown increasingly bigger and slower over the past three years. In this O'Reilly report, content strategist Terrence Dorsey examines why web pages have become so fat, and offers guidelines to help your company reverse the trend.
Bigg...
Imagine you had to write a postmortem containing statements like these?
- We were unable to resolve the outage as quickly as we would have hoped because our decision making was impacted by extreme stress.
- We spent two hours repeatedly applying the fix that worked during the previous outage, only to find out that it made no difference in this on...
The data you encounter in the real world is usually easier to think of as objects or documents than as the tables and rows required by a standard RDBMS. RavenDB, a modern document-oriented database written in .NET, requires no schema to be declared and enables developers to work with data more naturally. RavenDB applications are high-performance, l...
In this bold and original study, Jeff Kochan constructively combines the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) with Martin Heidegger's early existential conception of science. Kochan shows convincingly that these apparently quite different approaches to science are, in fact, largely compatible, even mutually reinforcing.
By combining Heid...
This book explores the key dimensions of a future education system designed to enable individuals, schools, and communities to achieve the twin twenty-first century challenges of sustainability and human well-being. For much of the twentieth century, Western education systems prepared students to enter the workforce, contribute to society and succe...
This volume offers insights from modeling relations between teacher quality, instructional quality and student outcomes in mathematics across countries. The relations explored take the educational context, such as school climate, into account. The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement's Trends in Mathematics a...
"This compact book argues that ideas about accountability and legitimation – drawn from work on environmental governance – can open up new analytical perspectives on what is holding back effective energy system transformation. With bite-size chapters and illustrative cases that draw on the work of five expert witnesses, this is a novel int...
Horrified by the Holocaust, social psychologist Stanley Milgram wondered if he could recreate the Holocaust in the laboratory setting. Unabated for more than half a century, his (in)famous results have continued to intrigue scholars. Based on unpublished archival data from Milgram's personal collection, volume one of this two-volume set introd...
This book deals with the relevance of recognition and validation of non-formal and informal learning in education and training, the workplace and society. In an increasing number of countries, it is at the top of the policy and research agenda ranking among the possible ways to redress the glaring lack of relevant academic and vocational qualificat...
This free book belongs to the Maritime Business and Economic History strand of the Palgrave Studies in Maritime Economics book series.This volume highlights the contribution of the shipping industry to the transformations in business and society of the postwar era. Shipping was both an example and an engine of globalization and structural change. I...
This book explores the dataspace paradigm as a best-effort approach to data management within data ecosystems. It establishes the theoretical foundations and principles of real-time linked dataspaces as a data platform for intelligent systems. The book introduces a set of specialized best-effort techniques and models to enable loose administrative ...
This book presents work collected through the Liquefaction Experiments and Analysis Projects (LEAP) in 2017. It addresses the repeatability, variability, and sensitivity of lateral spreading observed in twenty-four centrifuge model tests on mildly sloping liquefiable sand. The centrifuge tests were conducted at nine different centrifuge facilitie...
This open access report explores the nature and extent of students' misconceptions and misunderstandings related to core concepts in physics and mathematics and physics across grades four, eight and 12. Twenty years of data from the IEA's Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and TIMSS Advanced assessments are anal...
This open access monograph argues established democratic norms for freedom of expression should be implemented on the internet. Moderating policies of tech companies as Facebook, Twitter and Google have resulted in posts being removed on an industrial scale. While this moderation is often encouraged by governments - on the pretext that terrorism, b...
This free book presents an overview and step-by-step explanation of process management. It starts with the individual participants' perspectives on their work in a process and its structuring and harmonization, and then moves on to its specification in a model and how it is embedded in the organizational and IT environment of the company. Last...
This book summarizes the key findings from the second cycle of IEA's International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS), conducted in 2018. ICILS seeks to establish how well schools around the globe are responding to the need to provide young people with the necessary digital participatory competencies. Effective use of information ...
This open access book explores the histories and geographies of fishing in North Korea and the surrounding nations. With the ideological and environmental history of North Korea in mind, the book examines the complex interactions between local communities, fish themselves, wider ecosystems and the politics of Pyongyang through the lens of critical ...
Storytelling plays an important part in the vibrant cultural life of Zambia and in many other communities across Africa. This innovative book provides a collection and analysis of oral narrative traditions as practiced by five Bemba-speaking ethnic groups in Zambia. The integration of newly digitalised audio and video recordings into the text enabl...
Geographic information systems (GIS) use a complex mix of cartography, statistical analysis, and database technology to provide everything from web-based interfaces, such as Bing Maps and Google Maps, to tracking applications for delivery services. With GIS Succinctly, author Peter Shaw guides you through it all, starting with a detailed examinatio...
Read the tips and tricks that top developers from the .NET and SQL Server communities use to boost code and query performance in their applications.
50 tips from the .NET and SQL Server communities for boosting performance in your .NET application; Learn the secrets of your fellow developers and read advice from MVPs and other experts; Covers pe...
This book is about making machine learning models and their decisions interpretable. After exploring the concepts of interpretability, you will learn about simple, interpretable models such as decision trees, decision rules and linear regression. Later chapters focus on general model-agnostic methods for interpreting black box models like feature i...
This book for courses in Digital Systems Design introduces students to the fundamental hardware used in modern computers. Coverage includes both the classical approach to digital system design (i.e., pen and paper) in addition to the modern hardware description language (HDL) design approach (computer-based). Using this textbook enables readers to ...
This self-contained textbook covers fundamental aspects of sequence analysis in evolutionary biology, including sequence alignment, phylogeny reconstruction, and coalescent simulation. It addresses these aspects through a series of over 400 computer problems, ranging from elementary to research level to enable learning by doing. Students solve the ...
This book reviews the principles of infection control and the guidelines and standards of care in multiple countries, discussing them within the context of the practice of dentistry. The aim is to enable dental practitioners to ensure that the appropriate measures are adopted for each patient contact, thereby minimizing the risk of transmission of ...
This book for courses in Digital Systems Design introduces students to the fundamental hardware used in modern computers. Coverage includes both the classical approach to digital system design (i.e., pen and paper) in addition to the modern hardware description language (HDL) design approach (computer-based). Using this textbook enables readers to ...