When the colonial slave trade, and then slavery itself, were abolished early in the 19th century, the British empire brazenly set up a new system of trade using Indian rather than African laborers. The new system of "indentured" labor was supposed to be different from slavery because the indenture, or contract, was written for an...

In contrast to the enduring stereotype of a ‘nation of samurai’, this book uses provincial newspapers and local records to hear the voices of ordinary people living in imperial Japan through several decades of war and peace. These voices reveal the authentic experiences, opinions and emotions of men, women and children. They show...

The enormous popularity of the Nintendo Wii, Guitar Hero, and smaller games like Bejeweled or Zuma has turned the stereotype of the obsessed young male gamer on its head. Players of these casual games are not required to possess an intimate knowledge of video game history or to devote weeks or months to play. At the same...

Environmental engineering's future seems boundless because it is based in the myriad ways in which nature solves its own engineering challenges. People have yet to design a system that pumps water 200 feet straight up toward the sky in a system that is silent, requires no mechanical pumps, and never malfunctions, yet giant sequoia trees do this...

In Mental Reality, Galen Strawson argues that much contemporary philosophy of mind gives undue primacy of place to publicly observable phenomena, nonmental phenomena, and behavioral phenomena (understood as publicly observable phenomena) in its account of the nature of mind. It does so at the expense of the phenomena of conscious...

Thomas Aquinas is one of the giants of medieval philosophy, a thinker who had--and who still has--a profound influence on Western thought. Aquinas was a controversial figure in his time who was often engaged in fierce theological debates. He was the foremost classical proponent of natural theology, and the father of the Thomistic school of...

In recent years, the protection of communication services operating in the same of adjacent channels has become more and more challenging. Communication systems need to be protected from natural and man-made interference. This practical reference provides a through understanding of how to protect communication systems from intentional and...

The Chinese share an imprecation (the first of three)—May you live in interesting times.1 The other two are considered even more forbidding—May you come to the attention of those in authority; and May you find what you are looking for. In contrast we, as authors, are blessed to live in interesting times; otherwise our search for...

The idea of quantum computation, in the algorithmic sense, originated from the suggestion by Feynman (1982) that a computer based on the principles of quantum mechanics might be capable of efficiently simulating quantum systems of interest to physicists; such simulation seems to be very difficult with classical computers. Feynman’s...

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The complexity of technical systems increases continuously. Breakdowns and fatal errors occur quite often, respectively. Therefore, the mission of organic computing is to tame these challenges in technical systems by providing appropriate degrees of freedom for self-organised behaviour. Technical systems should adapt to changing requirements...