This book describes some of the developments in Command, Control and Communication (C3) systems. The topics cover the design of large real-time man-machine systems, which are now a vital area of intensive scientific and financial investment. C3 systems are for complex resource management and planning, and although this has a predominantly military connotation, similar systems are now developing in civil sector applications, public utilities and banking.

Illuminates how algorithms, intertwined with human biases, damage political discourse and civic engagement.

Algorithmic Worldmaking is an urgent exploration of the dynamic relationship between algorithms that encode their human creators’ assumptions and the humans whose choices are shaped by these algorithms in search engines, social media, and other digital spaces. Transcending discussions of one or the other, Jeremy David Johnson traces the corrupting political and social influences that arise from their mutual interaction.

Johnson uses the concept of kosmos in its sense of a dynamic order to frame the interplay between algorithms, humans, and their environments. He first shows how algorithms, far from being objective or unbiased, perpetuate human errors. Johnson then suggests a framework of four parts—navigation, exploration, maintenance, and monetization—to map the variety of political consequences to a society influenced by these four factors.

Citing controversies at major platforms such as Google, YouTube, and Facebook, Johnson demonstrates how algorithms limit and shape human thought. He makes several persuasive arguments. First, algorithms and humans share agency but humans have exceptional responsibility. Second, the algorithmic kosmos mirrors and shapes social oppression. Third, algorithms incentivize capitalist exploitation. Last, these influences damage democratic deliberation.

This landmark study is essential for scholars and students of political science, media studies, and those interested in the perilous implications of algorithmic systems on civic and political life.

Digital technology and the Internet have revolutionized film criticism, programming, and preservation in deeply paradoxical ways. The Internet allows almost everyone to participate in critical discourse, but many print publications and salaried positions for professional film critics have been eliminated. Digital technologies have broadened access to filmmaking capabilities, as well as making thousands of older films available on DVD and electronically. At the same time, however, fewer older films can be viewed in their original celluloid format, and newer, digitally produced films that have no “material” prototype are threatened by ever-changing servers that render them obsolete and inaccessible.

Cineaste, one of the oldest and most influential publications focusing on film, has investigated these trends through a series of symposia with the top film critics, programmers, and preservationists in the United States and beyond. This volume compiles several of these symposia: “Film Criticism in America Today” (2000), “International Film Criticism Today” (2005), “Film Criticism in the Age of the Internet” (2008), “Film Criticism: The Next Generation” (2013), “The Art of Repertory Film Exhibition and Digital Age Challenges” (2010), and “Film Preservation in the Digital Age” (2011). It also includes interviews with the late, celebrated New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael and the critic John Bloom (“Joe Bob Briggs”), as well as interviews with the programmers/curators Peter von Bagh and Mark Cousins and with the film preservationist George Feltenstein. This authoritative collection of primary-source documents will be essential reading for scholars, students, and film enthusiasts.

Coderspeak delves into the hidden world of software development, offering a combined anthropological and technical approach that explores the coder community's impact on our digital landscape.

Software applications have taken over our lives. We use and are used by software many times a day. Nevertheless, we know very little about the invisibly ubiquitous workers who write software. Who are they and how do they perceive their practice? How does that shape how they collaborate to build the myriad of apps that we use every day? And how does that impact the users of apps?

Coderspeak provides a critical approach to the digital transformation of our world through an engaging and thoughtful analysis of the people who write software applications. It is a focused and in-depth look at one programming language and its community, Ruby, based on ethnographic research at a London company and conversations with members of the wider Ruby community in Europe, the Americas, and Japan.

This book shows that the place where people write code, the language they write it in, and the stories shared by that community are crucial in questioning and unpacking what it means to be a coder. Understanding this social group is essential if we are to grasp a future (and a present) in which computer programming increasingly dominates our lives.
 

Meet the people who design the algorithms that capture our musical tastes.
 
The people who make music recommender systems have lofty goals: they want to broaden listeners’ horizons and help obscure musicians find audiences, taking advantage of the enormous catalogs offered by companies like Spotify, Apple Music, and Pandora. But for their critics, recommender systems seem to embody all the potential harms of algorithms: they flatten culture into numbers, they normalize ever-broadening data collection, and they profile their users for commercial ends. Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork, anthropologist Nick Seaver describes how the makers of music recommendation navigate these tensions: how product managers understand their relationship with the users they want to help and to capture; how scientists conceive of listening itself as a kind of data processing; and how engineers imagine the geography of the world of music as a space they care for and control.
 
Computing Taste rehumanizes the algorithmic systems that shape our world, drawing attention to the people who build and maintain them. In this vividly theorized book, Seaver brings the thinking of programmers into conversation with the discipline of anthropology, opening up the cultural world of computation in a wide-ranging exploration that travels from cosmology to calculation, myth to machine learning, and captivation to care.

In Curating Deviance, Marc Francis scavenges film history for signs of vibrant, wayward life in the film programming of US art house and repertory cinemas between 1968 and 1989. Francis examines how creative and savvy programmers screened films by the likes of John Waters, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Russ Meyer, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and a bevy of others in major cities across the United States, forming intertextual constellations in their repertory calendars. These programs allied a dizzying range of sexual and gendered outlaws, including stigmatized practices often overlooked by LGBT-focused queer theory. Curating Deviance reveals how repertory and art cinemas built a coalition of outcasts stigmatized for their taboo desires or identities, rekindling queer utopian imaginaries.

Robust control theory allows for changes in a system whilst maintaining stability and performance. Applications of this technique are very important for dependable embedded systems, making technologies such as drones and other autonomous systems with sophisticated embedded controllers and systems relatively common-place.

EnTwine: Critical and Creative Teaching with Twine is the first full-length collection devoted to teaching with the popular, digital story-telling platform Twine. Until now, few scholarly accounts have focused on how disparate communities use, share, and learn about Twine. Contributors to this volume demonstrate how Twine helps to forge communities of practice committed to learning and sharing together, inside and outside of classrooms. The book’s case studies range across humanities, STEM, industry, and activist contexts. Authors from across the world share how they use Twine in teaching—whether creating Twines for students, holding workshops, or using Twine to build communities and preserve the voices of the people who use it. Readers will find practical examples in the Twine Objects featured at the end of each section as well as a wealth of open-access resources hosted in an online repository and connected to the book’s digital version. EnTwine invites readers, teachers, students, and makers of all kinds to learn, adapt, share, and teach with Twine.

The practice of Model-based Systems Engineering is becoming more widely adopted in industry, academia and commerce and, as the use of modelling matures in the real world, so the need for more guidance on how to model effectively and efficiently becomes more prominent. This book describes a number of systems-level 'patterns' (pre-defined, reusable sets of views) that may be applied using the systems modelling language SysML for the development of any number of different applications and as the foundations for a system model.

Modern electrical power systems are facing complex challenges, arising from distributed generation and intermittent renewable energy. Fuzzy logic is one approach to meeting this challenge and providing reliability and power quality.

A Guide to MATLAB® Object-Oriented Programming is the first book to deliver broad coverage of the documented and undocumented object-oriented features of MATLAB®. Unlike the typical approach of other resources, this guide explains why each feature is important, demonstrates how each feature is used, and promotes an understanding of the interactions between features.

Uncovering race, gender, and sexual biases in popular self-publishing platforms

The average reader need not go far in a bookstore before, knowingly or not, they encounter authors who started their careers by self-publishing prior to achieving commercial success. Examples include Margaret Atwood, Andy Weir, Colleen Hoover, Anna Todd, E. L. James, Scarlett St. Clair, and many more. Such stories of self-made writers are compelling and seem more attainable to others with the accessibility of modern publishing platforms such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Kobo, Wattpad, Webtoon, Radish, Inkitt, Qidian, Tapas, and Swoon Reads. However, as Claire Parnell uncovers in her examination of the two most popular—Amazon and Wattpad—these services in fact perpetuate systemic racial, gender, and sexual bias against authors of color and queer authors through their technological, economic, social, and cultural structures.

At a time when there is a real reckoning with the discrimination that has resulted in publishing opportunities for only relatively few privileged authors—who are often White, upper class, and male—self-publishing presents itself as an equalizer of sorts. Exploring that idea, Parnell shows that these platforms are not just intermediaries for information; they structure content and users in multiple, often inequitable, ways through their ability to set market conditions and apply algorithmic sorting. Combining original interviews, walkthrough method, metadata analysis, and more, Parnell finds that self-publishing platforms reproduce challenges for authors from marginalized communities. Far from equalizing the market, the new platforms instead frequently perpetuate the stubborn barriers to mainstream success for BIPOC and queer authors.

There is a growing interest in the development and deployment of surveillance systems in public and private locations. Conventional approaches rely on the installation of wide area CCTV (Closed Circuit Television), but the explosion in the numbers of cameras that have to be monitored, the increasing costs of providing monitoring personnel and the limitations that humans have to maintain sustained levels of concentration severely limit the effectiveness of these systems. Advances in information and communication technologies, such as computer vision for face recognition and human behaviour analysis, digital annotation and storage of video, transmission of video/audio streams over wired and wireless networks, can potentially provide significant improvements in this field.

Modern computing systems of all kinds accumulate various data at an almost unimaginable rate. Alongside the advances in technology that make such storage possible has grown a realisation that buried within this mass of data there may exist some knowledge of considerable value. This could be information critical for a company's business success or something leading to a scientific or medical discovery or breakthrough. Most data is simply stored and never examined, but machine-learning technology has the potential to extract knowledge of value (i.e. data mining).

A wide-ranging history of the algorithm.

Bringing together the histories of mathematics, computer science, and linguistic thought, Language and the Rise of the Algorithm reveals how recent developments in artificial intelligence are reopening an issue that troubled mathematicians well before the computer age: How do you draw the line between computational rules and the complexities of making systems comprehensible to people? By attending to this question, we come to see that the modern idea of the algorithm is implicated in a long history of attempts to maintain a disciplinary boundary separating technical knowledge from the languages people speak day to day.
 
Here, Jeffrey M. Binder offers a compelling tour of four visions of universal computation that addressed this issue in very different ways: G. W. Leibniz’s calculus ratiocinator; a universal algebra scheme Nicolas de Condorcet designed during the French Revolution; George Boole’s nineteenth-century logic system; and the early programming language ALGOL, short for algorithmic language. These episodes show that symbolic computation has repeatedly become entangled in debates about the nature of communication. Machine learning, in its increasing dependence on words, erodes the line between technical and everyday language, revealing the urgent stakes underlying this boundary.
 
The idea of the algorithm is a levee holding back the social complexity of language, and it is about to break. This book is about the flood that inspired its construction.

“I love maps. I love math. And gosh, do I love this book, which so beautifully and clearly sounds the depths of both.” —Ben Orlin, author of Math with Bad Drawings

Explore the surprising connections between math and maps—and the myriad ways they’ve shaped our world and us.

Why are coastlines and borders so difficult to measure? How does a UPS driver deliver hundreds of packages in a single day? And where do elusive serial killers hide? The answers lie in the crucial connection between maps and math.

In Mapmatics, mathematician Paulina Rowińska leads us on a riveting journey around the globe to discover how maps and math are deeply entwined, and always have been. From a sixteenth-century map, an indispensable navigation tool that exaggerates the size of northern countries, to public transport maps that both guide and confound passengers, to congressional maps that can empower or silence whole communities, she reveals how maps and math have shaped not only our sense of space but our worldview. In her hands, we learn how to read maps like a mathematician—to extract richer information and, just as importantly, to question our conclusions by asking what we don’t see.

Written with authority and compassion, wit and unforgettable storytelling, this is math exposition at its best. By unpacking the math behind the maps we depend on, Mapmatics illuminates how our world works and, ultimately, how we can better look after it.

An “original” (Nature) and “expansive journey through time and place” (Guardian) that uncovers the surprising connections between math and maps—and the myriad ways they’ve shaped our world and us.

Why are coastlines and borders so difficult to measure? How does a UPS driver deliver hundreds of packages in a single day? Where do elusive serial killers hide? The answers lie in the crucial connection between maps and math.

In Mapmatics, mathematician Paulina Rowińska leads us on a riveting journey around the globe to discover how maps and math are deeply entwined and always have been. From a sixteenth-century navigation tool that exaggerates the size of northern countries to public-transport maps that both guide and confound passengers, Rowińska reveals how maps and math have shaped not only our sense of space but also our worldview. Written with authority and compassion, wit and unforgettable storytelling, Mapmatics unpacks the math behind the maps we depend on, illuminating how our world works and how we can better look after it.

This book combines the teaching of the MATLAB® programming language with the presentation and development of carefully selected electrical and computer engineering (ECE) fundamentals. This is what distinguishes it from other books concerned with MATLAB®: it is directed specifically to ECE concerns. Students will see, quite explicitly, how and why MATLAB® is well suited to solve practical ECE problems.

Labelled transition systems are mathematical models for dynamic behaviour, or processes, and thus form a research field of common interest to logicians and theoretical computer scientists. In computer science, this notion is a fundamental one in the formal analysis of programming languages, in particular in process theory. In modal logic, transition systems are the central object of study under the name of Kripke models. This volume collects a number of research papers on modal logic and process theory. Its unifying theme is the notion of a bisimulation. Bisimulations are relations over transition systems, and provide a key tool in identifying the processes represented by these structures. The volume offers an up-to-date overview of perspectives on labeled transition systems and bisimulations.

This book provides a hands-on introduction to model-based requirements engineering and management by describing a set of views that form the basis for the approach. These views take into account each individual requirement in terms of its description, but then also provide each requirement with meaning by putting it into the correct 'context'. A requirement that has been put into a context is known as a 'use case' and may be based upon either stakeholders or levels of hierarchy in a system. Each use case must then be analysed and validated by defining a combination of scenarios and formal mathematical and logic-based proofs that provide the rigour required for safety-critical and mission-critical systems.

For any organisation to be successful in an increasingly competitive and global working environment, it is essential that there is a clear understanding of all aspects of the business. Given that no two organisations are exactly alike, there is no definitive understanding of exactly what these aspects are as they will depend on the organisation's nature, size and so on. Some of the aspects of the business that must be considered include: process models, process descriptions, competencies, standards, methodologies, infrastructure, people and business goals.

On the oeuvre of Nobuo Uematsu, the Beethoven of video game music.

Japanese musician and composer Nobuo Uematsu has built his career and reputation on his soundtracks to the enduring Final Fantasy video game series, which are notable for their remarkable cinematic feel. Today Uematsu is one of Japan’s most beloved living composers, credited with inspiring a new generation of classical music fans. This volume, the first book-length study of the music of Uematsu, takes a variety of different analytical approaches to his body of work. It offers readers interested in ludomusicology—the study of and research into video game music—a variety of ways with which to understand Uematsu’s compositional process and the role that video game music has in the overall gaming experience.

Nonlinear Optimization in Electrical Engineering with Applications in MATLAB® provides an introductory course on nonlinear optimization in electrical engineering, with a focus on applications such as the design of electric, microwave, and photonic circuits, wireless communications, and digital filter design.

The first multi-disciplinary study of the connection between memory and music in video games.

This book allows readers to understand the relationships and memories they often form around games, and music is central to this process. The quest into the past begins with this book, a map that leads to the intersection between nostalgia and videogame music. Informed by research on musicology, memory, and practices of gaming culture, this edited volume discusses different forms of nostalgia, considers how videogames display their relation to those forms, and explores the ways theoretically self-conscious positions can be found in games. An important scholarly addition to the burgeoning field of ludomusicology, this book will appeal to researchers, educators, practitioners, undergraduate and graduate students, and videogame fans and players alike.

Games are often a fun perk of a tech company job, and employees can “play to win” in the competition to succeed. But in studying “Behemoth” (a pseudonym for a top American tech company), Tongyu Wu discovered that gaming work culture was far more insidious.

Play to Submission shows how Behemoth’s games undermined and manipulated workers. They lost their work-life balance and the constant competition made labor organizing difficult. Nonetheless, many workers embraced management’s games as a chance to show off their “gamer” identities and create a workplace culture with privileged insiders and exiled outsiders, with female and migrant workers usually in the latter group. Moreover, Wu indicates this may be the future of work for high- and low-skilled and, creative workers in an environment where capitalists have heightened demands for technology and creativity.

Drawing from 13 months of ethnographic work, Wu presents a persistent reality in which the company reaps the reward of surplus productivity, leaving employees themselves in a highly competitive and sometimes precarious work position.

Portable Biosensors and Point-of-Care Systems describes the principles, design and applications of a new generation of analytical and diagnostic biomedical devices, characterized by their very small size, ease of use, multi-analytical capabilities and speed to provide handheld and mobile point-of-care (POC) diagnostics.

The contents of this book were first presented as a series of lectures at the first IEE Vacation School on Semi-Custom IC Design and VLSI held at the University of Edinburgh on 4-8 July 1983. The earlier chapters provide an introduction to silicon IC technology and include descriptions of the various processing techniques employed in the manufacture of microelectronic components. Different types of semi-custom IC are then reviewed and the factors that have to be considered in choosing a semi-custom technique are examined in detail. Logic design is next presented as an activity that is best carried out at a higher level of abstraction than the customary/logic gate level by using the algorithmic state machine (ASM) method. In the sections that follow, computer aids to design and design automation tools are introduced as essential requirements for the rapid and error-free design of semicustom ICs. Testing strategies and the need to design for testability are also covered in some detail.

Much of the innovative programming that powers the Internet, creates operating systems, and produces software is the result of “open source” code, that is, code that is freely distributed—as opposed to being kept secret—by those who write it. Leaving source code open has generated some of the most sophisticated developments in computer technology, including, most notably, Linux and Apache, which pose a significant challenge to Microsoft in the marketplace. As Steven Weber discusses, open source’s success in a highly competitive industry has subverted many assumptions about how businesses are run, and how intellectual products are created and protected.

Traditionally, intellectual property law has allowed companies to control knowledge and has guarded the rights of the innovator, at the expense of industry-wide cooperation. In turn, engineers of new software code are richly rewarded; but, as Weber shows, in spite of the conventional wisdom that innovation is driven by the promise of individual and corporate wealth, ensuring the free distribution of code among computer programmers can empower a more effective process for building intellectual products. In the case of Open Source, independent programmers—sometimes hundreds or thousands of them—make unpaid contributions to software that develops organically, through trial and error.

Weber argues that the success of open source is not a freakish exception to economic principles. The open source community is guided by standards, rules, decisionmaking procedures, and sanctioning mechanisms. Weber explains the political and economic dynamics of this mysterious but important market development.

Swarm Intelligence (SI) is one of the most important and challenging paradigms under the umbrella of computational intelligence. It focuses on the research of collective behaviours of a swarm in nature and/or social phenomenon to solve complicated and difficult problems which cannot be handled by traditional approaches. Thousands of papers are published each year presenting new algorithms, new improvements and numerous real world applications. This makes it hard for researchers and students to share their ideas with other colleagues; follow up the works from other researchers with common interests; and to follow new developments and innovative approaches. This complete and timely collection fills this gap by presenting the latest research systematically and thoroughly to provide readers with a full view of the field of swarm. Students will learn the principles and theories of typical swarm intelligence algorithms; scholars will be inspired with promising research directions; and practitioners will find suitable methods for their applications of interest along with useful instructions.

Swarm Intelligence (SI) is one of the most important and challenging paradigms under the umbrella of computational intelligence. It focuses on the research of collective behaviours of a swarm in nature and/or social phenomenon to solve complicated and difficult problems which cannot be handled by traditional approaches. Thousands of papers are published each year presenting new algorithms, new improvements and numerous real world applications. This makes it hard for researchers and students to share their ideas with other colleagues; follow up the works from other researchers with common interests; and to follow new developments and innovative approaches. This complete and timely collection fills this gap by presenting the latest research systematically and thoroughly to provide readers with a full view of the field of swarm. Students will learn the principles and theories of typical swarm intelligence algorithms; scholars will be inspired with promising research directions; and practitioners will find suitable methods for their applications of interest along with useful instructions.

Swarm Intelligence (SI) is one of the most important and challenging paradigms under the umbrella of computational intelligence. It focuses on the research of collective behaviours of a swarm in nature and/or social phenomenon to solve complicated and difficult problems which cannot be handled by traditional approaches. Thousands of papers are published each year presenting new algorithms, new improvements and numerous real world applications. This makes it hard for researchers and students to share their ideas with other colleagues; follow up the works from other researchers with common interests; and to follow new developments and innovative approaches. This complete and timely collection fills this gap by presenting the latest research systematically and thoroughly to provide readers with a full view of the field of swarm. Students will learn the principles and theories of typical swarm intelligence algorithms; scholars will be inspired with promising research directions; and practitioners will find suitable methods for their applications of interest along with useful instructions.

Systems modelling is an essential enabling technique for any systems engineering enterprise. These modelling techniques, in particular the unified modelling language (UML), have been employed widely in the world of software engineering and very successfully in systems engineering for many years. However, in recent years there has been a perceived need for a tailored version of the UML that meets the needs of today's systems engineering professional. This book provides a pragmatic introduction to the systems engineering modelling language, the SysML, aimed at systems engineering practitioners at any level of ability, ranging from students to experts. The theoretical aspects and syntax of SysML are covered and each concept is explained through a number of example applications. The book also discusses the history of the SysML and shows how it has evolved over a number of years. All aspects of the language are covered and are discussed in an independent and frank manner, based on practical experience of applying the SysML in the real world.

This new edition of this popular text has been fully updated to reflect SysML 1.3, the latest version of the standard, and the discussion has been extended to show the power of SysML as a tool for systems engineering in an MBSE context. Beginning with a thorough introduction to the concepts behind MBSE, and the theoretical aspects and syntax of SysML, the book then describes how to implement SysML and MBSE in an organisation, and how to model real projects effectively and efficiently, illustrated using an extensive case study.

As computers are increasingly embedded, ubiquitous and wirelessly connected, security becomes imperative. This has led to the development of the notion of a 'trusted platform', the chief characteristic of which is the possession of a trusted hardware element which is able to check all or part of the software running on this platform. This enables parties to verify the software environment running on a remote trusted platform, and hence to have some trust that the data sent to that machine will be processed in accordance with agreed rules.

Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs) are small, inexpensive chips which provide a limited set of security functions. They are most commonly found as a motherboard component on laptops and desktops aimed at the corporate or government markets, but can also be found on many consumer-grade machines and servers, or purchased as independent components. Their role is to serve as a Root of Trust - a highly trusted component from which we can bootstrap trust in other parts of a system. TPMs are most useful for three kinds of tasks: remotely identifying a machine, or machine authentication; providing hardware protection of secrets, or data protection; and providing verifiable evidence about a machine's state, or attestation.

Up until a few years ago there were many different modelling languages available to software developers. However, this vast array of choice only served to hinder communication and as a result the Unified Modelling Language (UML) was born. Although the UML has its roots firmly in the software world, the benefits of adopting a standard visual notation have been recognised in many other fields, not least of which is the field of systems engineering. This book concentrates on systems-based applications, rather than the traditional software applications that are more usually associated with the UML. Now fully updated to reflect the changes to UML for its version 2.0 release, this new edition has been substantially re-written and includes new material on systems architectures and life cycle management.

Development of computer science techniques has significantly enhanced computational electromagnetic methods in recent years. The multi-core CPU computers and multiple CPU work stations are popular today for scientific research and engineering computing. How to achieve the best performance on the existing hardware platforms, however, is a major challenge. In addition to the multi-core computers and multiple CPU workstations, distributed computing has become a primary trend due to the low cost of the hardware and the high performance of network systems. In this book we introduce a general hardware acceleration technique that can significantly speed up FDTD simulations and their applications to engineering problems without requiring any additional hardware devices.