What can humans do? What can machines do? How do humans delegate actions to machines? In this book, Harry Collins and Martin Kusch combine insights from sociology and philosophy to provide a novel answer to these increasingly important questions. The authors begin by distinguishing between two basic types of intentional behavior, which they call polimorphic actions and mimeomorphic actions. Pol…
"A Bradford book."Homeostasis, a key concept in biology, refers to the tendency toward stability in the various bodily states that make up the internal environment. Examples include temperature regulation and oxygen consumption. The body's needs, however, do not remain constant. When an organism is under stress, the central nervous system works with the endocrine system to use resources to main…
Santiago Ramon y Cajal (1852-1934) made prolific and lasting contributions to understanding "the life of the infinitely small." Santiago Ram?on y Cajal (1852-1934) made prolific and lasting contributions to understanding "the life of the infinitely small." Widely thought of as the founder of neuroscience, Cajal made remarkable explorations into the organization and function of the ner…
Based on the author's thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1977, presented under title: Robustness and stability aspects of stochastic multivariable feedback system design."This book on stability theory and robustness will interest researchers and advanced graduate students in the area of feedback control engineering, circuits, and systems. It will also appeal to mathematicians who ar…
Software has gone from obscurity to indispensability in less than fifty years. Although other industries have followed a similar trajectory, software and its supporting industry are different. In this book the authors explain, from a variety of perspectives, how software and the software industry are different--technologically, organizationally, and socially. The growing importance of software …
"In Snap to Grid, an idiosyncratic guide to the interactive, telematic era, Peter Lunenfeld maps out the trajectories that digital technologies have traced upon our cultural imaginary. His evaluation of new media includes an impassioned discussion - informed by the discourses of technology, aesthetics, and cultural theory - of the digital artists, designers, and makers who matter most. "Snap to…
In this revealing study, Larry Hirschhorn examines the rituals, or social defenses, organizations develop to cope with change. Using extended ease studies from offices, factories, and social services, he describes why these often irrational practices that fragment and injure individuals within the workplace exist, how they operate, and how they can be reshaped to enhance people's work experienc…
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems, RR 2015, held in Berlin, Germany, in August 2015. The 5 full papers, 4 technical communications presented together with 4 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 16 submissions. The scale and the heterogenous nature of web data poses many challenges, and turns ba…
Introductory textbook covering all the main features of the 'web programming' languages PHP and MySQL together with detailed examples that will enable readers (whether students on a taught course or independent learners) to use them to create their own applications or understand existing ones. A particular focus is the use of PHP to generate MySQL commands from a script as it is executed. E…
Web Programming with Dart is for programmers who want to master the new Dart programming language from Google, and also web developers who want to understand how Dart can integrate perfectly with HTML5 and CSS3. With this book you will understand the ins and outs of the language, how the tools work, and how to get the most from the core functions and libraries. Web Programming with Dart is a…