Macroscope

Throughout history, man has been searching for better ways to gather information about his universe. But although they may have longed for it, not even the most brilliant minds could conceive of a device as infinitely powerful or as immeasurably precise as the Macroscope, until the twenty-first century. This is a story of mans desperate search for a compromise between his mind and his heart, between knowledge and humanity.

Every day, more and more kinds of historical data become available, opening exciting new avenues of inquiry but also new challenges. This updated and expanded book describes and demonstrates the ways these data can be explored to construct cultural heritage knowledge, for research and in teaching and learning. It helps humanities scholars to grasp Big Data in order to do their work, whether that means understanding the underlying algorithms at work in search engines or designing and using their own tools to process large amounts of information.Demonstrating what digital tools have to offer and also what 'digital' does to how we understand the past, the authors introduce the many different tools and developing approaches in Big Data for historical and humanistic scholarship, show how to use them, what to be wary of, and discuss the kinds of questions and new perspectives this new macroscopic perspective opens up. Originally authored 'live' online with ongoing feedback from the wider digital history community, Exploring Big Historical Data breaks new ground and sets the direction for the conversation into the future.Exploring Big Historical Data should be the go-to resource for undergraduate and graduate students confronted by a vast corpus of data, and researchers encountering these methods for the first time. It will also offer a helping hand to the interested individual seeking to make sense of genealogical data or digitized newspapers, and even the local historical society who are trying to see the value in digitizing their holdings.

In this volume, recent advances in analytical and logging technology and their application to the analysis of sediment cores are presented. Developments in providing access to core data and associated datasets, and advances in data mining technology in order to integrate and interpret new and legacy datasets within the wider context of seafloor studies are also discussed.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of 13 international workshops held as part of OTM 2008 in Monterrey, Mexico, in November 2008. The 106 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 171 submissions to the workshops. The volume starts with 19 additional revised poster papers of the OTM 2008 main conferences CoopIS and ODBASE. Topics of the workshop papers are ambient data integration (ADI 2008), agents and web services merging in distributed environment (AWeSoMe 2008), community-based evolution of knowledge-intensive systems (COMBEK 2008), enterprise integration, interoperability and networking (EI2N 2008), system/software architectures (IWSSA 2008), mobile and networking technologies for social applications (MONET 2008), ontology content and evaluation in enterprise & quantitative semantic methods for the internet (OnToContent and QSI 2008), object-role modeling (ORM 2008), pervasive systems (PerSys 2008), reliability in decentralized distributed systems (RDDS 2008), semantic extensions to middleware enabling large scale knowledge (SEMELS 2008), and semantic Web and Web semantics (SWWS 2008).

Michael R. Collings examines the life and work of American science fiction author Piers Anthony. Starmont Reader's Guide 20.

An advanced exploration ofwater-rock interactions Based on the author's fifteen years of teaching and tried-and-tested experiences in the classroom, here is a comprehensive exploration of water-rock interactions. Environmental Surfaces and Interfaces from the Nanoscale to the Global Scale covers aspects ranging from the theory of charged particle surfaces to how minerals grow and dissolve to new frontiers in W-R interactions such as nanoparticles, geomicrobiology, and climate change. Providing basic conceptual understanding along with more complex subject matter, Professor Patricia Maurice encourages students to look beyond the text to ongoing research in the field. Designed to engage the learner, the book features: Numerous case studies to contextualize concepts Practice and thought questions at the end of each chapter Broad coverage from basic theory to cutting-edge topics such as nanotechnology Both basic and applied science This text goes beyond W-R interactions to touch on a broad range of environmental disciplines. While written for advanced undergraduate and graduate students primarily in geochemistry and soil chemistry, Environmental Surfaces and Interfaces from the Nanoscale to the Global Scale will serve the needs of such diverse fields as environmental engineering, hydrogeology, physics, biology, and environmental chemistry.