Authors: Glenn Rifkin. George Harrar.
Hardcover, 332 pages
Publisher: Contemporary Books
Publication Date: 1988-10

Authors:
Paperback, 436 pages
Publisher: Springer
Publication Date: 1999-03-12
Edition: 1

Reviews :

    IDEAL 98 contains over 50 original contributions presenting some of the most recent development in data engineering: data processing, data analysis, and knowledge acquisition, with a particular focus on Financial Engineering and Data Mining. More specifically, these proceedings examine the following aspects of this emerging field, including: Under "Financial Engineering" - Stock and Portfolio Management; Genetic Algorithms for Computational Finance; Exchange Rate Prediction; Financial Applications. Under "Data Mining" - Probabilistic Learning; Clustering and Classification; Rule Extraction; Evolutionary Computing in Data Mining; Data Mining Applications. This volume is ideal for researchers, scientists, engineers, as well as other professionals who are interested in intelligent data engineering....

Authors: Graham Davis.
Hardcover, 172 pages
Publisher: Readers Digest
Publication Date: 2004-10-07


Reviews :

    Now that you know how to take digital photographs, what do you do next? Here's the perfect resource to learn how to enhance, organize, share, and show off your photos with creative hands-on projects-from scrapbooks, T-shirts, puzzles, mouse pads, invitations, personalized cards and gifts, a family Web site, and much more. Easy-to-follow instructions and step-by-step tutorials make the process easy and fun....

Authors:
Hardcover, 571 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press
Publication Date: 2004-04-01


Reviews :

    Herbert Simon (1916-2001), in the course of a long and distinguished career in the social and behavioral sciences, made lasting contributions to many disciplines, including economics, psychology, computer science, and artificial intelligence. In 1978 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his research into the decision-making process within economic organizations. His well-known book The Sciences of the Artificial addresses the implications of the decision-making and problem-solving processes for the social sciences.

This book (the title is a variation on the title of Simon's autobiography, Models of My Life) is a collection of short essays, all original, by colleagues from many fields who felt Simon's influence and mourn his loss. Mixing reminiscence and analysis, the book represents "a small acknowledgment of a large debt."

Each of the more than forty contributors was asked to write about the one work by Simon that he or she had found most influential. The editors then grouped the essays into four sections: "Modeling Man," "Organizations and Administration," "Modeling Systems," and "Minds and Machines." The contributors include such prominent figures as Kenneth Arrow, William Baumol, William Cooper, Gerd Gigerenzer, Daniel Kahneman, David Klahr, Franco Modigliani, Paul Samuelson, and Vernon Smith. Although they consider topics as disparate as "Is Bounded Rationality Unboundedly Rational?" and "Personal Recollections from 15 Years of Monthly Meetings," each essay is a testament to the legacy of Herbert Simon—to see the unity rather than the divergences among disciplines....

Authors: Paul Strathern.
Paperback, 112 pages
Publisher: Anchor
Publication Date: 1999-04-20
Edition: 1st Anchor Books Ed

Reviews :

    Turing and the Computer offers an encapsulation of the groundwork that led to the invention of the computer as we know it and an absorbing account of the man who helped develop it. Eccentric and principled, Alan Turing would lay aside a brilliant career in mathematics to serve his country by breaking German codes during the Second World War. Openly homosexual, he would later be put on trial on indecency charges and forced to undergo hormone treatments that wrecked his body and his spirit. But the modern machine he helped create lives on. Just a few of the big ideas included in this riveting book are how Turing mapped out the theory of computers before a single computer had been conceived, how Turing's Colossus broke the German Enigma codes, and Turing's proof of the existence of artificial intelligence....

    Few concepts in the history of 20th-century thought are as rich with both philosophical and practical implications as the computer. And few people in the history of computing are as intellectually and personally complex as Alan Turing, the man whose brilliant mathematical imagination laid the foundation for computers as we know them. You could easily spend the rest of the millennium reading up on Turing and his ideas, but if you've only got an afternoon, this engaging, pamphlet-length summary of the man's life and work should get you nicely up to speed.

Author Paul Strathern sets Turing's accomplishments in their historical context. He starts with the long prehistory of the computer--its roots in devices such as the abacus, the slide rule, and Charles Babbage's remarkably sophisticated 19th-century "difference engine." Strathern then moves deftly through the great mathematical debates that led to Turing's formulation of the abstract "universal computing machine" in the mid-1930s. The author also lucidly presents Turing's contributions to turning that abstraction into a concrete mechanism, beginning with Turing's work on the Colossus machine, which cracked Germany's secret codes during World War II.

Strathern conveys with equal vividness the haunted private side of Turing's life--his furtive homosexuality, his difficult relationships, and his conviction in the early '50s on charges of indecency, a not-so-private scandal that apparently led to his suicide. The book owes its rich detail to the work of pioneering Turing biographer Alan Hodges, and Strathern graciously acknowledges the debt. But the accomplishment of packing Turing's big life and big ideas into such a compact package is entirely Strathern's own. --Julian Dibbell...

Authors: Michael S. Malone.
Paperback, 448 pages
Publisher: Portfolio Trade
Publication Date: 2008-03-25


Reviews :

    Others have written about the rise of Hewlett-Packard, including Dave Packard himself in The HP Way. But acclaimed journalist Michael S. Malone is the first to get the full story, based on exclusive access to corporate and private archives, along with hundreds of interviews.

Malone draws on his new material to show how some of the most influential products of our time were invented and how a culture of innovation led HP to unparalleled success for decades.

He also shows what was really behind the HP Way—the groundbreaking management philosophy that put people ahead of products or profits. It was a hard-nosed business philosophy that created a ferociously competitive and adaptive company—arguably the world’s greatest company....

Authors: Fay Zadeh.
Hardcover, 310 pages
Publisher: T S I Pr
Publication Date: 1998-07-01

Authors: Robert Slater.
Paperback, 398 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press
Publication Date: 1989-02-15


Reviews :

    Who are the masterminds of today's electronic revolution and what motivated them? That's the question Time correspondent Robert Slater asked as he traveled to Silicon Valley to interview the designers, entrepreneurs, hardware engineers, and software writers who have given us the modern computer.

Robert Slater is a member of the reporting staff of the Time Jerusalem bureau....

Authors: Ken Auletta.
Paperback, 384 pages
Publisher: Harvest Books/Harcourt, Brace and Company
Publication Date: 1998-06-01


Reviews :

    ...

    Few industries can grab the world's attention these days--and hold the promise of totally reshaping its future--like communications. Bestselling author Ken Auletta profiles many of the field's leading lights in great depth in The New Yorker, and 17 of his most compelling essays since 1992 have been collected in a book that offers close-up details as well as long-range perspectives on movers and shakers such as Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, and Ted Turner. Available in paperback, The Highwaymen: Warriors of the Information Superhighway has been extensively revised and expanded since its original publication. --Howard Rothman...

Authors: Sam Williams.
Hardcover, 240 pages
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Publication Date: 2002-03-01


Reviews :

    Free as in Freedom interweaves biographical snapshots of GNU project founder Richard Stallman with the political, social and economic history of the free software movement. It examines Stallman's unique personality and how that personality has been at turns a driving force and a drawback in terms of the movement's overall success. Free as in Freedom examines one man's 20-year attempt to codify and communicate the ethics of 1970s era "hacking" culture in such a way that later generations might easily share and build upon the knowledge of their computing forebears. The book documents Stallman's personal evolution from teenage misfit to prescient adult hacker to political leader and examines how that evolution has shaped the free software movement. Like Alan Greenspan in the financial sector, Richard Stallman has assumed the role of tribal elder within the hacking community, a community that bills itself as anarchic and averse to central leadership or authority. How did this paradox come about? Free as in Freedom provides an answer. It also looks at how the latest twists and turns in the software marketplace have diminished Stallman's leadership role in some areas while augmenting it in others. Finally, Free as in Freedom examines both Stallman and the free software movement from historical viewpoint. Will future generations see Stallman as a genius or crackpot? The answer to that question depends partly on which side of the free software debate the reader currently stands and partly upon the reader's own outlook for the future. 100 years from now, when terms such as "computer," "operating system" and perhaps even "software" itself seem hopelessly quaint, will Richard Stallman's particular vision of freedom still resonate, or will it have taken its place alongside other utopian concepts on the 'ash-heap of history?'...