We live inside systems that correct us before we notice them. A thermostat steadies a room. A clock disciplines a city. A power grid balances every second. An aircraft survives by computation. A medical device listens to the body. A feed learns what holds the eye and quietly reshapes attention. Control - The Hidden Technology is a sweeping, story-driven journey through the feedback loops that made the modern world possible. Moving from ancient water clocks and lighthouse flames to steam go...

This book teaches the basics of duplicate bridge. The bidding system used is American Standard. Examples are used throughout the book to explain how you should bid and play the game. Every chapter ends with a summary of what you should remember. This will make it easier for you to memorize what needs to be memorized. Also there are additional examples for each chapter that you may use as practice deals. The contents of the book is divided in such a way that you may first just read parts of...

Optimization for Learning and ControlComprehensive resource providing a masters’ level introduction to optimization theory and algorithms for learning and controlOptimization for Learning and Control describes how optimization is used in these domains, giving a thorough introduction to both unsupervised learning, supervised learning, and reinforcement learning, with an emphasis on optimization methods for large-scale learning and c...

Movement, dispersal, and migration on land, in the air, and in water, are pervading features of animal life. They are performed by a huge variety of organisms, from the smallest protozoans to the largest whales, and can extend over widely different distance scales, from the microscopic to global. Integrating the study of movement, dispersal, and migration is crucial for a detailed understanding of the spatial scale of adaptation, and for analysing the consequences of landscape and climate ...

Movement, dispersal, and migration on land, in the air, and in water, are pervading features of animal life. They are performed by a huge variety of organisms, from the smallest protozoans to the largest whales, and can extend over widely different distance scales, from the microscopic to global. Integrating the study of movement, dispersal, and migration is crucial for a detailed understanding of the spatial scale of adaptation, and for analysing the consequences of landscape and climate ...

Dung Kai-cheung’s A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On is a playful and imaginative glimpse into the consumerist dreamscape of late-nineties Hong Kong. First published in 1999, it comprises ninety-nine sketches of life just after the handover of the former British colony to China. Each of these stories in miniature begins from a piece of ephemera, usually consumer products or pop culture phenomena, and develops alternately comic and poignant snapshots of urban life.

Dung Kai-cheung’s A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On is a playful and imaginative glimpse into the consumerist dreamscape of late-nineties Hong Kong. First published in 1999, it comprises ninety-nine sketches of life just after the handover of the former British colony to China. Each of these stories in miniature begins from a piece of ephemera, usually consumer products or pop culture phenomena, and develops alternately comic and poignant snapshots of urban life.

Set in the long-lost City of Victoria (a fictional world similar to Hong Kong), Atlas is written from the unified perspective of future archaeologists struggling to rebuild a thrilling metropolis. Divided into four sections—"Theory," "The City," "Streets," and "Signs"—the novel reimagines Victoria through maps and other historical documents and artifacts, mixing real-world scenarios with purely imaginary people and events while incorporating anecdotes and actual and fictional soci...

Climate change has an impact on the ability of transboundary water management institutions to deliver on their respective mandates. The starting point for this book is that actors within transboundary water management institutions develop responses to the climate change debate, as distinct from the physical phenomenon of climate change. Actors respond to this debate broadly in three distinct ways – adapt, resist (as in avoiding the issue) and subvert (as in using the debate to fulfil their...

This new edition of Biological Oceanography has been greatly updated and expanded since its initial publication in 2004. It presents current understanding of ocean ecology emphasizing the character of marine organisms from viruses to fish and worms, together with their significance to their habitats and to each other.The book initially emphasizes pelagic organisms and processes, but benthos, hydrothermal vents, climate-change effects, and fisheries all receive attention. T...

Population ecology has matured to a sophisticated science with astonishing potential for contributing solutions to wildlife conservation and management challenges. And yet, much of the applied power of wildlife population ecology remains untapped because its broad sweep across disparate subfields has been isolated in specialized texts. In this book, L. Scott Mills covers the full spectrum of applied wildlife population ecology, including genomic tools for non-invasive genetic sampling, pre...

The natural world is full of rhythms. How do birds know when to return to their nesting grounds? What effect do the seasons have on our wellbeing, and how does the season in which we are born affect our subsequent life chances? How did humans get the idea that there were seasons 50,000 years ago? Seasons of Life explains why the seasons occur, the impact of seasonal change and how organisms have evolved to anticipate these changes. For although we mask the effects of seasonal chan...