Economists use the term "bandwagon effect" to describe the benefit a consumer enjoys as a result of others' using the same product or service. The history of videocassettes offers a striking example of the power of bandwagon effects. Originally there were two technical standards for videocassettes in the United States: Beta and VHS. Beta was widely regarded to have better picture quality, but V…
"Parallel computation will become the norm in the coming decades. Unfortunately, advances in parallel hardware have far outpaced parallel applications of software. There are currently two approaches to applying parallelism to applications. One is to write completely new applications in new languages. But abandoning applications that work is unacceptable to most nonacademic users of high-perform…
"A Bradford book."Based on papers presented at the Sixteenth International Symposium on Attention and Performance held at Kyoto Research Park, Kyoto, Japan, July 11-15, 1994.The contributions to this volume, the sixteenth in the prestigious Attention and Performance series, revisit the issue of modularity, the idea that many functions are independently realized in specialized, autonomous module…
"A Bradford book."Artificial life, a field that seeks to increase the role of synthesis in the study of biological phenomena, has great potential, both for unlocking the secrets of life and for raising a host of disturbing issues -- scientific and technical as well as philosophical and ethical. This book brings together a series of overview articles that appeared in the first three issues of th…
The authors introduce this new approach to programming language design, describe its evolution and design principles, and present a formal specification of a metaobject protocol for CLOS. The CLOS metaobject protocol is an elegant, high-performance extension to the CommonLisp Object System. The authors, who developed the metaobject protocol and who were among the group that developed CLOS, intr…
"The idea behind Xerox's interdisciplinary Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) is simple: if you put creative people in a hothouse setting, innovation will naturally emerge. PARC Artist-in-Residence Program (PAIR) brings artists who use new media to PARC and pairs them with researchers who often use the same media, though in different contexts. This is radically different from most corporate suppo…
Revision of the author's thesis (doctoral)--Harvard University, 1986.Glru Necipoglu brings together largely unpublished sources, both written and visual, along with information derived from the architectural remains to uncover the processes through which the meaning of the palace was once produced, before it came to represent a stereotyped microcosm of oriental despotism imbued with the exotic …
Although Vanvitelli was one of the most notable architects of his century, as Caserta was one of its major buildings, this study by a leading scholar of Baroque and Neapolitan architecture is the first book in English on the architect and his masterpiece.The great palace of Caserta, near Naples, probably the largest building erected in Europe in the eighteenth century, became an archetypal expr…
Gathered from twenty leading authorities in computer science, the chapters of The Computer Age range across a broad spectrum of topics -- from technological trends and needs to social questions, such as the changing economics of information, ownership principles, regulation, the range of potential computer uses, from science and business to the home.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
Cambridge, Massachusetts is a rich mixture of closely mingled examples of architectural periods; 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th century, with the 21st century already near the drawing board and before the planning board. Yet implicit in the city is a continuity overruling what might be chaos. The Cambridge Historical Commission was established not to piously preserve a static past, but to make mani…