Explore the water, land, and air around us with this entertaining and informative look at our magnificent planet—and learn how your experiments, activities, and everyday actions can help save the environment.This book looks at the wide variety of ecosystems and environmental regions of the Earth, from deserts and forests, to cities and farms, to oceans and ice caps, as well as the atmosphere, weather, energy sources, plants, and animals of each area. Michael Drisco...

A landmark publication in computer-generated poetry drawn from the works of Gertrude Stein.The Stein poems of Jackson Mac Low (1922–2004) were written between 1998 and 2003. Comprising more than 500 pages of text, this edited series of 161 poems—most of them never published—is the poet’s last great work, composed during the final years of a lifetime of prolific creation.The raw material of each poem was produced through Mac Low’s diastic text-selection meth...

Amid the stress of today’s 24/7 world, the pressure to juggle multiple tasks and meet high expectations can be overwhelming.Are you fulfilling all your responsibilities at work but feel empty inside? Are you a high achiever but feel like an "imposter" going through life? Are you overly self-critical and struggle to receive a compliment? Do you feel tired and fatigued most of the time despite getting adequate sleep? You could be suffering from High-Functioning ...

First Published in 2008. Sponsored by the Association of Educational Communication and Technology (AECT), the third edition of this groundbreaking Handbook continues the mission of its predecessors: to provide up-to-date summaries and syntheses of recent research pertinent to the educational uses of information and communication technologies. In addition to updating, this new edition has been expanded from forty-one to fifty-six chapters organized into the following six sections: foundatio...

The second edition of a widely used textbook that explores energy resource options and technologies with a view toward achieving sustainability on local, national, and global scales.Human survival depends on a continuing supply of energy, but the need for ever-increasing amounts of it poses a dilemma: How can we find energy sources that are sustainable and ways to convert and utilize energy that are more efficient? This widely used textbook is designed for advanced...

What price do organizations and nations pay for a poor fit between employees and their work environments?Negative stress imposes a high cost on individual health and well-being as well as organizational health and productivity. This comprehensive textbook examines the definitions of job-related stress and the methods used to assess levels and consequences of occupational stress, along with strategies that may be used by individuals and organizations to confront negative stress and ...

Over the past century, countries around the globe have empowered constitutional courts to safeguard the rule of law. But when can courts effectively perform this vital task? Drawing upon a series of survey experiments fielded in the United States, Germany, Hungary, and Poland, this book demonstrates that judicial independence is critical for judicial efficacy. Independent courts can empower citizens to punish executives who flout the bounds of constitutional rule; weak courts are unable to...

This book contains the articles from the international conference 11th Workshop on Self-Organizing Maps 2016 (WSOM 2016), held at Rice University in Houston, Texas, 6-8 January 2016. WSOM is a biennial international conference series starting with WSOM'97 in Helsinki, Finland, under the guidance and direction of Professor Tuevo Kohonen (Emeritus Professor, Academy of Finland). WSOM brings together the state-of-the-art theory and applications in Competitive Learning Neural Networks: SOMs, L...

Providing a broad but in-depth introduction to neural network and machine learning in a statistical framework, this book provides a single, comprehensive resource for study and further research. All the major popular neural network models and statistical learning approaches are covered with examples and exercises in every chapter to develop a practical working understanding of the content.Each of the twenty-five chapters includes state-of-the-art descriptions and important research...

Provides an in-depth and even treatment of the three pillars of computational intelligence and how they relate to one anotherThis book covers the three fundamental topics that form the basis of computational intelligence: neural networks, fuzzy systems, and evolutionary computation. The text focuses on inspiration, design, theory, and practical aspects of implementing procedures to solve real-world problems. While other books in the three fields that comprise compu...

Markov decision process (MDP) models are widely used for modeling sequential decision-making problems that arise in engineering, economics, computer science, and the social sciences. Many real-world problems modeled by MDPs have huge state and/or action spaces, giving an opening to the curse of dimensionality and so making practical solution of the resulting models intractable. In other cases, the system of interest is too complex to allow explicit specification of some of the MDP model pa...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Design, Modeling, and Evaluation of Cyber Physical Systems, CyPhy 2015, held as part of ESWeek 2015, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in October 2015.The 10 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 13 submissions. They broadly interpret, from a diverse set of disciplines, the modeling, simulation, and evaluation of cyber-physical systems.