Why doesn't your home page appear on the first page of search results, even when you query your own name? How do other web pages always appear at the top? What creates these powerful rankings? And how? The first book ever about the science of web page rankings, Google's PageRank and Beyond supplies the answers to these and other questions and more.The book serves two very different audiences: the curious science reader and the technical computational reader. The chapters b...

The mathematics behind today's most widely used rating and ranking methodsA website's ranking on Google can spell the difference between success and failure for a new business. NCAA football ratings determine which schools get to play for the big money in postseason bowl games. Product ratings influence everything from the clothes we wear to the movies we select on Netflix. Ratings and rankings are everywhere, but how exactly do they work? Who's #1? offers...

In this insightful book, you'll learn from the best data practitioners in the field just how wide-ranging -- and beautiful -- working with data can be. Join 39 contributors as they explain how they developed simple and elegant solutions on projects ranging from the Mars lander to a Radiohead video.With Beautiful Data, you will:Explore the opportunities and challenges involved in working with the vast number of datasets made available by the WebLearn...

Are all film stars linked to Kevin Bacon? Why do the stock markets rise and fall sharply on the strength of a vague rumour? How does gossip spread so quickly? Are we all related through six degrees of separation? There is a growing awareness of the complex networks that pervade modern society. We see them in the rapid growth of the internet, the ease of global communication, the swift spread of news and information, and in the way epidemics and financial crises develop with startling speed...

An easy to implement, practical, and proven risk management methodology for project managers and decision makersDrawing from the author's work with several major and mega capital projects for Royal Dutch Shell, TransCanada Pipelines, TransAlta, Access Pipeline, MEG Energy, and SNC-Lavalin, Project Risk Management: Essential Methods for Project Teams and Decision Makers reveals how to implement a consistent application of risk methods, including probabilist...

Class-tested and coherent, this textbook teaches classical and web information retrieval, including web search and the related areas of text classification and text clustering from basic concepts. It gives an up-to-date treatment of all aspects of the design and implementation of systems for gathering, indexing, and searching documents; methods for evaluating systems; and an introduction to the use of machine learning methods on text collections. All the important ideas are explained using...

A comprehensive textbook on the tools of mathematical sociology and their applicationsMathematical models and computer simulations of complex social systems have become everyday tools in sociology. Yet until now, students had no up-to-date textbook from which to learn these techniques. Introduction to Mathematical Sociology fills this gap, providing undergraduates with a comprehensive, self-contained primer on the mathematical tools and applications that s...

Sandlot Stats uses the national pastime to help students who love baseball learn—and enjoy—statistics.As Derek Jeter strolls toward the plate, the announcer tosses out a smattering of statistics—from hitting streaks to batting averages. But what do the numbers mean? And how can America’s favorite pastime be a model for learning about statistics? Sandlot Stats is an innovative textbook that explains the mathematical underpinnings of baseball so tha...

This book is a second edition, updated and expanded to explain the technologies that help us find information on the web. Search engines and web navigation tools have become ubiquitous in our day to day use of the web as an information source, a tool for commercial transactions and a social computing tool. Moreover, through the mobile web we have access to the web's services when we are on the move. This book demystifies the tools that we use when interacting with the web, and gives the re...

Our world is being revolutionized by data-driven methods: access to large amounts of data has generated new insights and opened exciting new opportunities in commerce, science, and computing applications. Processing the enormous quantities of data necessary for these advances requires large clusters, making distributed computing paradigms more crucial than ever. MapReduce is a programming model for expressing distributed computations on massive datasets and an execution framework for large...

Software Engineering and Object Oriented Modeling: This book is specially written for those who are interested in understanding software engineering and Object Oriented Modeling concepts using UML in the Computer Engineering and Information technology field and want to gain enhanced knowledge about the power of UML Language in software development.Also everyone with interest in learning UML for Software Engineering for application development can refer to this book to get the knowl...

Computation in Science provides a theoretical background in computation to scientists who use computational methods. It explains how computing is used in the natural sciences, and provides a high-level overview of those aspects of computer science and software engineering that are most relevant for computational science. The focus is on concepts, results, and applications, rather than on proofs and derivations.The unique feature of this book is that it connects the dots be...