Authors: Elizabeth Powell Crowe.
Paperback, 426 pages
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
Publication Date: 2008-01-25
Edition: 8

Reviews :

   

"With years of experience online, Elizabeth Powell Crowe has become an authority on online genealogical research. She explains how to trace your family tree in an easy-to-understand way that anyone can follow." --Terry Morgan, AOL Genealogy Forum

...

    Genealogy Online presents a lot of information, much (but not all) of it having to do with finding facts about family lineage on the Internet. Mostly, this is a directory of big genealogy Web sites, newsgroups, mailing lists, and commercial services. It's also an introduction to Web communities and the tools you need to participate in them. These are the things you'll need to understand in order to extract and contribute information about your heritage as part of the Internet community.

Elizabeth Powell Crowe covers RootsWeb, the ROOTS-L mailing list, AfriGeneas, and the remarkable online genealogy resources maintained by the Mormon Church. She also pays attention to the Golden Gate forum on America Online and some of CompuServe's genealogy forums. There's some coverage of standalone family-history software like Family Tree Maker and some useful information about genealogical concepts like Ahnentafels numbers.

Genealogy Online would be better if it included more information about obscure Internet resources sites having to do with particular families or small ethnic groups. There are enough of these to make an annotated directory worthwhile. The author also could dispense with most of the general Internet how-to information, which occupies a lot of this book. --David Wall...

Authors: Severo M. Ornstein.
Paperback, 304 pages
Publisher: 1st Books Library
Publication Date: 2002-11-18

Authors: Karen Collins.
Hardcover, 216 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press
Publication Date: 2008-10-31


Reviews :

    A distinguishing feature of video games is their interactivity, and sound plays an important role in this: a player's actions can trigger dialogue, sound effects, ambient sound, and music. And yet game sound has been neglected in the growing literature on game studies. This book fills that gap, introducing readers to the many complex aspects of game audio, from its development in early games to theoretical discussions of immersion and realism. In Game Sound, Karen Collins draws on a range of sources—including composers, sound designers, voice-over actors and other industry professionals, Internet articles, fan sites, industry conferences, magazines, patent documents, and, of course, the games themselves—to offer a broad overview of the history, theory, and production practice of video game audio.

Game Sound has two underlying themes: how and why games are different from or similar to film or other linear audiovisual media; and technology and the constraints it has placed on the production of game audio. Collins focuses first on the historical development of game audio, from penny arcades through the rise of home games and the recent rapid developments in the industry. She then examines the production process for a contemporary game at a large game company, discussing the roles of composers, sound designers, voice talent, and audio programmers; considers the growing presence of licensed intellectual property (particularly popular music and films) in games; and explores the function of audio in games in theoretical terms. Finally, she discusses the difficulties posed by nonlinearity and interactivity for the composer of game music....

Authors: Gottfried Vossen; Stephan Hagemann.
Paperback, 384 pages
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
Publication Date: 2007-07-27


Reviews :

    The emergence of Web 2.0 is provoking challenging questions for developers: What products and services can our company provide to customers and employees using Rich Internet Applications, mash-ups, Web feeds or Ajax? Which business models are appropriate and how do we implement them? What are best practices and how do we apply them?

If you need answers to these and related questions, you need this book-a comprehensive and reliable resource that guides you into the emerging and unstructured landscape that is Web 2.0.

Gottfried Vossen is a professor of Information Systems and Computer Science at the University of Muenster in Germany. He is the European Editor-in-Chief of Elsevier's Information Systems-An International Journal. Stephan Hagemann is a PhD. Student in Gottfried's research group focused on Web technologies.

* Presents a complete view of Web 2.0 including services and technologies
* Discusses potential new products and services and the technology and programming ability needed to realize them
* Offers 'how to' basics presenting development frameworks and best practices
* Compares and contrasts Web 2.0 with the Semantic Web...

Authors: Simon Cann.
Paperback, 480 pages
Publisher: Course Technology PTR
Publication Date: 2006-10-06
Edition: 1

Reviews :

    Cakewalk's software synthesizers are some of the most powerful and most widely used in the market. Until now, there hasn't been one comprehensive resource to help users harness the power of all of these amazing tools. Cakewalk Synthesizers: From Presets to Power User will show you how to operate and get the best results from Cakewalk's complete range of synths, from those that are bundled with Cakewalk's main products (including SONAR, Project5, and Kinetic), to the rgc:audio synthesizers (such as Z3TA ), to Cakewalk's newest synthesizers, including Dimension Pro and Rapture. The book begins by diving into the general theories about synthesis and creating sounds with the featured synthesizers. From there, the chapters focus on each distinct synthesizer, its range of uses, the tools that are available with it, and how to set it up for day-to-day use. In addition to looking at all of the different synthesizers and how to use them in your productions, the book also discusses filters, envelopes, effects, the sfz format, how to make sounds and create patches, and much, much more. Also included with the book is an interview with the creator of many of the synthesizers, as well as sound design master classes from several leading synthesizer programmers. Chances are, you won't have every synthesizer covered in this book. That's okay, because this book has something for everyone, whether you own all the synths covered or you only use the ones that come with your host program. It's also useful if you just want to learn about synthesis. Simply put, this is the ultimate guide to learning about synthesizer programming and to understanding and using all of Cakewalk's synthesizers!...

Authors: Curtis Roads.
Paperback, 423 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press
Publication Date: 2004-09-01


Reviews :

    Below the level of the musical note lies the realm of microsound, of sound particles lasting less than one-tenth of a second. Recent technological advances allow us to probe and manipulate these pinpoints of sound, dissolving the traditional building blocks of music—notes and their intervals—into a more fluid and supple medium. The sensations of point, pulse (series of points), line (tone), and surface (texture) emerge as particle density increases. Sounds coalesce, evaporate, and mutate into other sounds.

Composers have used theories of microsound in computer music since the 1950s. Distinguished practitioners include Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis. Today, with the increased interest in computer and electronic music, many young composers and software synthesis developers are exploring its advantages. Covering all aspects of composition with sound particles, Microsound offers composition theory, historical accounts, technical overviews, acoustical experiments, descriptions of musical works, and aesthetic reflections. The book is accompanied by an audio CD of examples....

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 Axelrod.
Paperback, 248 pages
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publication Date: 1997-08-18


Reviews :

   

Robert Axelrod is widely known for his groundbreaking work in game theory and complexity theory. He is a leader in applying computer modeling to social science problems. His book The Evolution of Cooperation has been hailed as a seminal contribution and has been translated into eight languages since its initial publication. The Complexity of Cooperation is a sequel to that landmark book. It collects seven essays, originally published in a broad range of journals, and adds an extensive new introduction to the collection, along with new prefaces to each essay and a useful new appendix of additional resources. Written in Axelrod's acclaimed, accessible style, this collection serves as an introductory text on complexity theory and computer modeling in the social sciences and as an overview of the current state of the art in the field.

The articles move beyond the basic paradigm of the Prisoner's Dilemma to study a rich set of issues, including how to cope with errors in perception or implementation, how norms emerge, and how new political actors and regions of shared culture can develop. They use the shared methodology of agent-based modeling, a powerful technique that specifies the rules of interaction between individuals and uses computer simulation to discover emergent properties of the social system. The Complexity of Cooperation is essential reading for all social scientists who are interested in issues of cooperation and complexity

...

Authors: Fred Turner.
Paperback, 354 pages
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Publication Date: 2008-05-15


Reviews :

    ...

Authors: Ted Nield.
Hardcover, 304 pages
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publication Date: 2007-11-15


Reviews :

   

To understand continental drift and plate tectonics, the shifting and collisions that make and unmake continents, requires a long view. The Earth, after all, is 4.6 billion years old. This book extends our vision to take in the greatest geological cycle of all--one so vast that our species will probably be extinct long before the current one ends in about 250 million years. And yet this cycle, the grandest pattern in Nature, may well be the fundamental reason our species--or any complex life at all--exists.

This book explores the Supercontinent Cycle from scientists' earliest inkling of the phenomenon to the geological discoveries of today--and from the most recent fusing of all of Earth's landmasses, Pangaea, on which dinosaurs evolved, to the next. Chronicling a 500-million-year cycle, Ted Nield introduces readers to some of the most exciting science of our time. He describes how, long before plate tectonics were understood, geologists first guessed at these vanishing landmasses and came to appreciate the significance of the fusing and fragmenting of supercontinents.

He also uses the story of the supercontinents to consider how scientific ideas develop, and how they sometimes escape the confines of science. Nield takes the example of the recent Indian Ocean tsunami to explain how the whole endeavor of science is itself a supercontinent, whose usefulness in saving human lives, and life on Earth, depends crucially on a freedom to explore the unknown.

(20071001)...