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The Mathematical Foundations of Music

“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.

Improving Collaborative Planning and Management

Collaborative approaches are increasingly common across a range of governance and policy areas. Single-issue, single-organization solutions often prove ineffective for complex, contentious, and diffuse problems. Collaborative efforts allow cross-jurisdictional governance and policy, involving groups that may operate on different decision-making levels. In Beyond Consensus, Richard Margerum examines the full range of collaborative enterprises in natural resource management, urban planning, and environmental policy.

Technology and Policy Options

Tackling climate change and improving energy security are two of the twenty-first century's greatest challenges. In this book, Marilyn Brown and Benjamin Sovacool offer detailed assessments of the most advanced commercially available technologies for strengthening global energy security, mitigating the effects of climate change, and enhancing resilience through adaptation and geo-engineering. They also evaluate the barriers to the deployment of these technologies and critically review public policy options crucial to their adoption.

An International Security Reader

In recent years, a new wave of scholarship has argued that democracies have unique advantages that enable them to compete vigorously in international politics. Challenging long-held beliefs--some of which go back to Thucydides’ account of the clash between democratic Athens and authoritarian Sparta--that democracy is a liability in the harsh world of international affairs, many scholars now claim that democracies win most of their wars.

Using the tools of information technology to understand the molecular machinery of the cell offers both challenges and opportunities to computational scientists. Over the past decade, novel algorithms have been developed both for analyzing biological data and for synthetic biology problems such as protein engineering.

The Political Economy of the Global Environment

This comprehensive and accessible book fills the need for a political economy view of global environmental politics, focusing on the ways international economic processes affect environmental outcomes. It examines the main actors and forces shaping global environmental management, particularly in the developing world.

Third Edition

This text offers a comprehensive presentation of the mathematics required to tackle problems in economic analyses. To give a better understanding of the mathematical concepts, the text follows the logic of the development of mathematics rather than that of an economics course. The only prerequisite is high school algebra, but the book goes on to cover all the mathematics needed for undergraduate economics. It is also a useful reference for graduate students.

A Gentle Introduction

The combination of two of the twentieth century’s most influential and revolutionary scientific theories, information theory and quantum mechanics, gave rise to a radically new view of computing and information. Quantum information processing explores the implications of using quantum mechanics instead of classical mechanics to model information and its processing. Quantum computing is not about changing the physical substrate on which computation is done from classical to quantum but about changing the notion of computation itself, at the most basic level.

The ability to manage knowledge has become increasingly important in today’s knowledge economy. Knowledge is considered a valuable commodity, embedded in products and in the tacit knowledge of highly mobile individual employees. Knowledge management (KM) represents a deliberate and systematic approach to cultivating and sharing an organization’s knowledge base. It is a highly multidisciplinary field that encompasses both information technology and intellectual capital.

Mobile robots range from the Mars Pathfinder mission's teleoperated Sojourner to the cleaning robots in the Paris Metro. This text offers students and other interested readers an introduction to the fundamentals of mobile robotics, spanning the mechanical, motor, sensory, perceptual, and cognitive layers the field comprises. The text focuses on mobility itself, offering an overview of the mechanisms that allow a mobile robot to move through a real world environment to perform its tasks, including locomotion, sensing, localization, and motion planning.