Authors: Gareth Loy.
Hardcover, 500 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press
Publication Date: 2006-06-23


Reviews :

    "Mathematics can be as effortless as humming a tune, if you know the tune," writes Gareth Loy. In Musimathics, Loy teaches us the tune, providing a friendly and spirited tour of the mathematics of music—a commonsense, self-contained introduction for the nonspecialist reader. It is designed for musicians who find their art increasingly mediated by technology, and for anyone who is interested in the intersection of art and science.

In this volume, Loy presents the materials of music (notes, intervals, and scales); the physical properties of music (frequency, amplitude, duration, and timbre); the perception of music and sound (how we hear); and music composition. Musimathics is carefully structured so that new topics depend strictly on topics already presented, carrying the reader progressively from basic subjects to more advanced ones. Cross-references point to related topics and an extensive glossary defines commonly used terms. The book explains the mathematics and physics of music for the reader whose mathematics may not have gone beyond the early undergraduate level. Calling himself "a composer seduced into mathematics," Loy provides answers to foundational questions about the mathematics of music accessibly yet rigorously. The topics are all subjects that contemporary composers, musicians, and musical engineers have found to be important. The examples given are all practical problems in music and audio. The level of scholarship and the pedagogical approach also make Musimathics ideal for classroom use. Additional material can be found at a companion web site....

Authors: Lauren St John.
Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Scribner
Publication Date: 2008-07-08
Edition: Reprint

Reviews :

    This is a story about a paradise lost. . . . About an African dream that began with a murder . . .

In 1978, in the final, bloodiest phase of the Rhodesian civil war, eleven-year-old Lauren St John moves with her family to Rainbow's End, a wild, beautiful farm and game reserve set on the banks of a slowflowing river. The house has been the scene of a horrific attack by guerrillas, and when Lauren's family settles there, a chain of events is set in motion that will change her life irrevocably.

Rainbow's End captures the overwhelming beauty and extraordinary danger of life in the African bush. Lauren's childhood reads like a girl's own adventure story. At the height of the war, Lauren rides through the wilderness on her horse, Morning Star, encountering lions, crocodiles, snakes, vicious ostriches, and mad cows. Many of the animals are pets, including Miss Piggy and Bacon and an elegant giraffe named Jenny. The constant threat of ruthless guerrillas prowling the land underscores everything, making each day more dangerous, vivid, and prized than the last.

After Independence, Lauren comes to the bitter realization that she'd been on the wrong side of the civil war. While she and her family believed that they were fighting for democracy over Communism, others saw the war as black against white. And when Robert Mugabe comes into power, he oversees the torture and persecution of thousands of members of an opposing tribe and goes on to become one of Africa's legendary dictators. The ending of this beautiful memoir is a fist to the stomach as Lauren realizes that she can be British or American, but she cannot be African. She can love it -- be willing to die for it -- but she cannot claim Africa because she is white....

Authors: Van Lindberg.
Paperback, 390 pages
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Publication Date: 2008-07-01


Reviews :

    "Clear, correct, and deep, this is a welcome addition to discussions of law and computing for anyone -- even lawyers!" -- Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society

If you work in information technology, intellectual property is central to your job -- but dealing with the complexities of the legal system can be mind-boggling. This book is for anyone who wants to understand how the legal system deals with intellectual property rights for code and other content. You'll get a clear look at intellectual property issues from a developer's point of view, including practical advice about situations you're likely to encounter.

Written by an intellectual property attorney who is also a programmer, Intellectual Property and Open Source helps you understand patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, and licenses, with special focus on the issues surrounding open source development and the GPL. This book answers questions such as:

How do open source and intellectual property work together? What are the most important intellectual property-related issues when starting a business or open source project? How should you handle copyright, licensing and other issues when accepting a patch from another developer? How can you pursue your own ideas while working for someone else? What parts of a patent should be reviewed to see if it applies to your work? When is your idea a trade secret? How can you reverse engineer a product without getting into trouble? What should you think about when choosing an open source license for your project?

Most legal sources are too scattered, too arcane, and too hard to read.Intellectual Property and Open Source is a friendly, easy-to-follow overview of the law that programmers, system administrators, graphic designers, and many others will find essential....

Authors: Jim Corbett.
Paperback, 200 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Publication Date: 1989-03-17


Reviews :

    Most of Jim Corbett's books contain collections of stories that recount adventures tracking and shooting man-eaters in the Indian Himalaya. This volume, however, consists of a single story, often considered the most exciting of all Corbett's jungle tales. He gives a carefully-detailed account of a notorious leopard that terrorized life in the hills of the colonial United Provinces. This story represents Corbett's most sustained and unique effort....

Authors: Christopher M. Bishop.
Paperback, 504 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Publication Date: 1996-01-18
Edition: 1

Reviews :

    This is the first comprehensive treatment of feed-forward neural networks from the perspective of statistical pattern recognition. After introducing the basic concepts, the book examines techniques for modeling probability density functions and the properties and merits of the multi-layer perceptron and radial basis function network models. Also covered are various forms of error functions, principal algorithms for error function minimalization, learning and generalization in neural networks, and Bayesian techniques and their applications. Designed as a text, with over 100 exercises, this fully up-to-date work will benefit anyone involved in the fields of neural computation and pattern recognition....

    This book provides a solid statistical foundation for neural networks from a pattern recognition perspective. The focus is on the types of neural nets that are most widely used in practical applications, such as the multi-layer perceptron and radial basis function networks. Rather than trying to cover many different types of neural networks, Bishop thoroughly covers topics such as density estimation, error functions, parameter optimization algorithms, data pre-processing, and Bayesian methods. All topics are organized well and all mathematical foundations are explained before being applied to neural networks. The text is suitable for a graduate or advanced undergraduate level course on neural networks or for practitioners interested in applying neural networks to real-world problems. The reader is assumed to have the level of math knowledge necessary for an undergraduate science degree....

Authors: Robert McNeill. William H. McNeill.
Paperback, 368 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Publication Date: 2003-12-17
Edition: 1

Reviews :

    An original vision of world history that reveals the larger patterns of human cooperation and conflict from the earliest times.

Why did the first civilizations emerge when and where they did? How did Islam become a unifying force in the world of its birth? What enabled the West to project its goods and power around the world from the fifteenth century on? Why was agriculture invented seven times and the Internet just once?

In a spirited contribution to the quickening discussion of world-historical questions such as these, J. R. and William H. McNeill explore the webs that have drawn humans together in patterns of interaction and exchange, cooperation and competition, since the beginning. Whether small or large, loose or dense, these webs have provided the medium for the movement of ideas, goods, power, and money within and across cultures, societies, and nations. Avoiding any determinism, environmental or cultural, the McNeills give us a synthesizing picture of the big patterns of world history in a rich, open-ended, concise account. Maps, 25 b/w illustrations....

Authors: John Alderman.
Hardcover, 160 pages
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Publication Date: 2007-05-10


Reviews :

    An unprecedented combination of computer history and striking images, Core Memory reveals modern technology's evolution through the world's most renowned computer collection, the Computer History Museum in the Silicon Valley. Vivid photos capture these historically important machines including the Eniac, Crays 1 3, Apple I and II while authoritative text profiles each, telling the stories of their innovations and peculiarities. Thirty-five machines are profiled in over 100 extraordinary color photographs, making Core Memory a surprising addition to the library of photography collectors and the ultimate geek-chic gift....

Authors: Christopher Kelty.
Paperback, 400 pages
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication Date: 2008


Reviews :

    In Two Bits, Christopher M. Kelty investigates the history and cultural significance of Free Software, revealing the people and practices that have transformed not only software but also music, film, science, and education. Free Software is a set of practices devoted to the collaborative creation of software source code that is made openly and freely available through an unconventional use of copyright law. Kelty explains how these specific practices have reoriented the relations of power around the creation, dissemination, and authorization of all kinds of knowledge. He also makes an important contribution to discussions of public spheres and social imaginaries by demonstrating how Free Software is a “recursive public”—a public organized around the ability to build, modify, and maintain the very infrastructure that gives it life in the first place.

Drawing on ethnographic research that took him from an Internet healthcare start-up company in Boston to media labs in Berlin to young entrepreneurs in Bangalore, Kelty describes the technologies and the moral vision that bind together hackers, geeks, lawyers, and other Free Software advocates. In each case, he shows how their practices and way of life include not only the sharing of software source code but also ways of conceptualizing openness, writing copyright licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing. By exploring in detail how these practices came together as the Free Software movement from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kelty also considers how it is possible to understand the new movements emerging from Free Software: projects such as Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright licenses, and Connexions, a project to create an online scholarly textbook commons....

Authors: Theresa Airey.
Paperback, 208 pages
Publisher: Lark Books
Publication Date: 2005-05-01


Reviews :

    ...

Authors: Rhonda Mcclure.
Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Family Tree Books
Publication Date: 2004-08-19


Reviews :

    Family historians know the value of preserving precious family heirlooms - old letters, diaries, photographs, Bible pages. Yet most have limited, if any, knowledge of the technology needed to safely save these items. Digitizing Your Family History gives readers the tools they need to keep these records permanently. They'll learn to: Utilize a scanner to best save photos and documents; Get maximum results from digital cameras; Enhance vintage photos through electronic editing; Work with printers, PDAs, and more to preserve family records; Organize digital records for easy access in later years; With McClure's instructive guide, genealogists will learn how to better preserve their family memories for future generations....