Thinking with Diagrams

Thinking with Diagrams

This book provides an introductory overview of the rapid growth in interdisciplinary research into Thinking with Diagrams. Diagrammatic representations are becoming more common in everyday human experience, yet they offer unique challenges to cognitive science research. Neither linguistic nor perceptual theories are sufficient to completely explain their advantages and applications. These research challenges may be part of the reason why so many diagrams are badly designed or badly used. This is ironic when the user interfaces of computer software and the worldwide web are becoming so completely dominated by graphical and diagrammatic representations. This book includes chapters commissioned from leading researchers in the major disciplines involved in diagrams research. They review the philosophical status of diagrams, the cognitive processes involved in their application, and a range of specialist fields in which diagrams are central, including education, architectural design and visual programming languages. The result is immediately relevant to researchers in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, as well as in applied technology areas such as human-computer interaction and information design.

Thinking with Diagrams

Self-Evolvable Systems

Self-Evolvable Systems

This monograph presents key method to successfully manage the growing complexity of systems where conventional engineering and scientific methodologies and technologies based on learning and adaptability come to their limits and new ways are nowadays required. The transition from adaptable to evolvable and finally to self-evolvable systems is highlighted, self-properties such as self-organization, self-configuration, and self-repairing are introduced and challenges and limitations of the self-evolvable engineering systems are evaluated.

Self-Evolvable Systems

Exploring Engineering

Exploring Engineering

Nearly all 4-year college engineering programs, and even some 2-year engineering technology programs, have some form of introduction to engineering requirement for incoming freshman. Moreover,many incoming freshman engineers do not yet have an engineering major in mind. Yet at the same time, U.S. engineering schools are emphasizing engineering as a complex, interdisciplinary body of knowledge. Engineers when put into real jobs will have to at some point draw upon that diverse knowledge.

Exploring Engineering

Wood Machining

Wood Machining

Wood as an engineering material can be technically defined as a hygroscopic, orthotropic, biological, and permeable material having extreme chemical diversity and physical complexity with structures, that vary extensively in their shape, size, properties and function. Therefore, using wood to its best advantage and most efficiency in engineering applications, specific characteristics or chemical, physical and mechanical properties must be considered.

Wood Machining

Computer Organization and Architecture

Computer Organization and Architecture

This is the eBook of the printed book and may not include any media, website access codes, or print supplements that may come packaged with the bound book.

Computer Organization and Architecture

Morning Star

Morning Star

An expanded edition of revered theorist Michael Lwy’s Morning Star: Marxism and Surrealism (previously published in French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Greek), this masterwork collects the author’s essays on the ways in which surrealism intersected with a variety of revolutionary political approaches, ranging from utopian ideals to Marxism and situationism. Taking its title from Andr Breton’s essay ‘Arcane 17,’ which casts the star as the searing firebrand of rebellion, Lwy’s provocative work spans many perspectives. These include surrealist artists who were deeply interested in Marxism and anarchism (Breton among them), as well as Marxists who were deeply interested in surrealism (Walter Benjamin in particular).

Morning Star

Food Mixing

Food Mixing

The mixing of liquids, solids and gases is one of the most common unit operations in the food industry. Mixing increases the homogeneity of a system by reducing non-uniformity or gradients in composition, properties or temperature. Secondary objectives of mixing include control of rates of heat and mass transfer, reactions and structural changes. In food processing applications, additional mixing challenges include sanitary design, complex rheology, desire for continuous processing and the effects of mixing on final product texture and sensory profiles. Mixing ensures delivery of a product with constant properties. For example, consumers expect all containers of soups, breakfast cereals, fruit mixes, etc to contain the same amount of each ingredient. If mixing fails to achieve the required product yield, quality, organoleptic or functional attributes, production costs may increase significantly.

Food Mixing