Captain Cook made three voyages to the Pacific, discovered the east coast of Australia, stove a hole in his boat within the Great Barrier Reef, tried to find the Northwest Passage, had countless encounters with natives—and died during one of them—and was one of the greatest explorers the world has ever known. His Journals are a sober but fascinating account of how it felt to redefine the boundaries of the known world.

Filled with colorful characters and history, Double Entry takes us from the ancient origins of accounting in Mesopotamia to the frontiers of modern finance. At the heart of the story is double-entry bookkeeping: the first system that allowed merchants to actually measure the worth of their businesses. Luca Pacioli--monk, mathematician, alchemist, and friend of Leonardo da Vinci--incorporated Arabic mathematics to formulate a system that could work across all trades and nations. As Jane Gleeson-White reveals, double-entry accounting was nothing short of revolutionary: it fueled the Renaissance, enabled capitalism to flourish, and created the global economy. John Maynard Keynes would use it to calculate GDP, the measure of a nation's wealth. Yet double-entry accounting has had its failures. With the costs of sudden corporate collapses such as Enron and Lehman Brothers, and its disregard of environmental and human costs, the time may have come to re-create it for the future.

Genetic algorithms are founded upon the principle of evolution, i.e., survival of the fittest. Hence evolution programming techniques, based on genetic algorithms, are applicable to many hard optimization problems, such as optimization of functions with linear and nonlinear constraints, the traveling salesman problem, and problems of scheduling, partitioning, and control. The importance of these techniques is still growing, since evolution programs are parallel in nature, and parallelism is one of the most promising directions in computer science.
The book is self-contained and the only prerequisite is basic undergraduate mathematics. This third edition has been substantially revised and extended by three new chapters and by additional appendices containing working material to cover recent developments and a change in the perception of evolutionary computation.

A basic problem in computer vision is to understand the structure of a real world scene given several images of it. Techniques for solving this problem are taken from projective geometry and photogrammetry. Here, the authors cover the geometric principles and their algebraic representation in terms of camera projection matrices, the fundamental matrix and the trifocal tensor. The theory and methods of computation of these entities are discussed with real examples, as is their use in the reconstruction of scenes from multiple images. The new edition features an extended introduction covering the key ideas in the book (which itself has been updated with additional examples and appendices) and significant new results which have appeared since the first edition. Comprehensive background material is provided, so readers familiar with linear algebra and basic numerical methods can understand the projective geometry and estimation algorithms presented, and implement the algorithms directly from the book.

The Fashion History Reader is an innovative work that provides a broad introduction to the complex literature in the fields of fashion studies, and dress and fashion history.
A comprehensive resource for those who wish to further their engagement with fashion as a contemporary phenomenon, the book connects a diverse range of approaches and incorporates non-Western literature within better-known studies from Europe and North America.
It identifies the history of fashion as a meeting point between the long-standing historical investigation of ‘dress’ and ‘costume’ and the more recent development of those sociological and anthropological-inspired studies that have come to be called ‘fashion theory’.
Twenty-three chapters and over forty shorter ‘Snapshot’ texts cover a wide range of topics and approaches within the history of fashion, ranging from object-based studies to theory-driven analyses. The book is divided into six parts, surveying some of the key themes in the history of fashion. Themes also move in and across time, providing a chronology to enable student learning:
* parts 1-3 cover the 15th to the 18th century
* parts 4 and 5 cover the 19th century to the contemporary (with particular attention given to non-European countries)
* and part 6 provides a survey of the global setting and current globalised nature of fashion.
A comprehensive introduction by the editors will contextualise debates for students, synthesising past history and bringing them up to date through a discussion of globalisation. Each section also includes a short, accessible introduction by the editors, placing each chapter within the wider, thematic treatment of fashion and its history, and an Annotated Guide to Further Reading encourages students to enhance their learning independently.

Warren Buffet once memorably described derivatives as “financial weapons of mass destruction”. Read this sensational and controversial account of the often dazzling business of derivatives trading, and see if you agree.
No money is ever really made in financial markets. Markets merely transfer wealth. As to how to make money? Well, it is basically theft, misrepresentation, lies, cheating, deception or force. It is impossible to make the staggering amounts made in derivatives in good years honestly.
Traders, Guns & Money is a wry and wickedly comic exposé of the culture, games, and pure deceptions played out every day in trading rooms around the world, usually with other people’s money. Whether you move in the financial world yourself, know people who do, or have money invested in stocks, shares or derivatives, this is a fascinating read guaranteed to make you think.

Data measured as angles or two-dimensional orientations are found almost everywhere in science. They commonly arise in biology, geography, geophysics, medicine, meteorology and oceanography, and many other areas. Examples of such data include departure directions of birds from release points, fracture plane orientations, the directional movement of animals after stimulation, wind and ocean current directions, and biorhythms. Statistical methods for handling such data have developed rapidly in the last twenty years, particularly data display, correlation, regression and analysis of tempered or spatially structured data. Further, some of the exciting modern developments in general statistical methodology, particularly nonparametric smoothing methods and bootstrap-based methods, have contributed significantly to relatively intractable data analysis problems. This book provides a unified and up-to-date account of techniques for handling circular data.

A comprehensive Introduction to the world of brain and behavior computational models
This book provides a broad collection of articles covering different aspects of computational modeling efforts in psychology and neuroscience. Specifically, it discusses models that span different brain regions (hippocampus, amygdala, basal ganglia, visual cortex), different species (humans, rats, fruit flies), and different modeling methods (neural network, Bayesian, reinforcement learning, data fitting, and Hodgkin-Huxley models, among others).
Computational Models of Brain and Behavior is divided into four sections: (a) Models of brain disorders; (b) Neural models of behavioral processes; (c) Models of neural processes, brain regions and neurotransmitters, and (d) Neural modeling approaches. It provides in-depth coverage of models of psychiatric disorders, including depression, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), schizophrenia, and dyslexia; models of neurological disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and epilepsy; early sensory and perceptual processes; models of olfaction; higher/systems level models and low-level models; Pavlovian and instrumental conditioning; linking information theory to neurobiology; and more.
Covers computational approximations to intellectual disability in down syndrome
Discusses computational models of pharmacological and immunological treatment in Alzheimer's disease
Examines neural circuit models of serotonergic system (from microcircuits to cognition)
Educates on information theory, memory, prediction, and timing in associative learning
Computational Models of Brain and Behavior is written for advanced undergraduate, Master's and PhD-level students—as well as researchers involved in computational neuroscience modeling research.

From Publishers Weekly
Oxford University zoologist Parker tackles one of biology's biggest mysteries in this nontechnical account. He provides a relatively simple explanation for the sudden explosion of life forms that defines the boundary between the pre-Cambrian and Cambrian eras approximately 543 million years ago: "The Cambrian explosion was triggered by the sudden evolution of vision" in simple organisms. In Parker's "Light Switch" theory, active predation became possible with the advent of vision, and prey species found themselves under extreme pressure to adapt in ways that would make them less likely to be spotted. New habitats opened as organisms were able to see their environment for the first time, and an enormous amount of specialization occurred as species differentiated. Parker claims that his theory is far more robust than previous attempts to explain the surge in diversity, even those most recently advanced by proponents of a snowball earth (the theory presented by Gabrielle Walker in Snowball Earth). In readable prose, Parker provides detailed information on the fossil record as well as a wealth of interesting material on the role light plays in environments and how vision operates across a host of species. Although at times his tangents are a bit distracting, Parker's book will bring his controversial ideas to the general public.

Although mammals and birds are widely regarded as the smartest creatures on earth, it has lately become clear that a very distant branch of the tree of life has also sprouted higher intelligence: the cephalopods, consisting of the squid, the cuttlefish, and above all the octopus. In captivity, octopuses have been known to identify individual human keepers, raid neighboring tanks for food, turn off lightbulbs by spouting jets of water, plug drains, and make daring escapes. How is it that a creature with such gifts evolved through an evolutionary lineage so radically distant from our own? What does it mean that evolution built minds not once but at least twice? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter?

In Other Minds , Peter Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and a skilled scuba diver, tells a bold new story of how subjective experience crept into being—how nature became aware of itself. As Godfrey-Smith stresses, it is a story that largely occurs in the ocean, where animals first appeared. Tracking the mind’s fitful development, Godfrey-Smith shows how unruly clumps of seaborne cells began living together and became capable of sensing, acting, and signaling. As these primitive organisms became more entangled with others, they grew more complicated. The first nervous systems evolved, probably in ancient relatives of jellyfish; later on, the cephalopods, which began as inconspicuous mollusks, abandoned their shells and rose above the ocean floor, searching for prey and acquiring the greater intelligence needed to do so. Taking an independent route, mammals and birds later began their own evolutionary journeys.

But what kind of intelligence do cephalopods possess? Drawing on the latest scientific research and his own scuba-diving adventures, Godfrey-Smith probes the many mysteries that surround the lineage. How did the octopus, a solitary creature with little social life, become so smart? What is it like to have eight tentacles that are so packed with neurons that they virtually “think for themselves”? What happens when some octopuses abandon their hermit-like ways and congregate, as they do in a unique location off the coast of Australia?

By tracing the question of inner life back to its roots and comparing human beings with our most remarkable animal relatives, Godfrey-Smith casts crucial new light on the octopus mind—and on our own.

Until the mid-1980s, AI researchers assumed that an intelligent system doing high-level reasoning was necessary for the coupling of perception and action. In this traditional model, cognition mediates between perception and plans of action. Realizing that this core AI, as it was known, was illusory, Rodney A. Brooks turned the field of AI on its head by introducing the behavior-based approach to robotics. The cornerstone of behavior-based robotics is the realization that the coupling of perception and action gives rise to all the power of intelligence and that cognition is only in the eye of an observer. Behavior-based robotics has been the basis of successful applications in entertainment, service industries, agriculture, mining, and the home. It has given rise to both autonomous mobile robots and more recent humanoid robots such as Brooks' Cog. This book represents Brooks' initial formulation of and contributions to the development of the behavior-based approach to robotics. It presents all of the key philosophical and technical ideas that put this bottom-up approach at the forefront of current research in not only AI but all of cognitive science.