In his classsic book, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and powerful Ideas , Seymour Papert set out a vision of how computers could change school. In The Children's Machine he now looks back over a decade during which American schools acquired more than three million computers and assesses progress and resistance to progress.

Written by the pioneer and foremost authority on the subject, this new book is both a comprehensive university textbook and professional/research reference on the finite-difference time-domain (FD-TD) computational solution method for Maxwell's equations. It presents in-depth discussions of: The revolutionary Berenger PML absorbing boundary condition; FD-TD modelling of nonlinear, dispersive, and gain optical materials used in lasers and optical microchips; unstructured FD-TD meshes for modelling of complex systems; 2.5-dimensional body-of-revolution FD-TD algorithms; Linear and nonlinear electronic circuit models, including a seamless tie-in to SPICE; Digital signal postprocessing of FD-TD data; FD-TD modelling of microlaser cavities; and FD-TD software development for the latest Intel and Cray massively parallel computers.

This second volume of Computers and Typography reflects the new developments in this rapidly-changing field. It complements, without in any way supplanting, Volume 1 through an extensive elaboration of issues that were considered only briefly by its precursor. Presented as a series of integrated case studies and interviews, the book includes information on: - the skills needed for quality website design, - the impact of computers upon publishing and corporate design, - the use of computers within the educational field, - the progress of child-oriented typefaces, and - issues in screen layout when designing educational and training software. The clarity and breadth of each presentation makes this a valuable book for all concerned in education, training, design, and typography and so will attract a wide and varied readership.

The present book deals with the construction of solutions of linear partial differential equations by means of integral operators which transform analytic functions of a complex variable into such solutions. The theory of analytic functions has achieved a high degree of deve lopment and simplicity, and the operator method permits us to exploit this theory in the study of differential equations. Although the study of existence and uniqueness of solutions has been highly developed, much less attention has been paid to the investigation of function theo retical properties and to the explicit construction of regular and singular solutions using a unified general procedure. This book attempts to fill in the gap in this direction. Integral operators of various types have been used for a long time in the mathematical literature. In this connection one needs only to mention Euler and Laplace. The author has not attempted to give a complete account of all known operators, but rather has aimed at developing a unified approach. For this purpose he uses special operators which preserve various function theoretical properties of analytic functions, such as domains of regularity, validity of series development, connection between the coefficients of these developments and location and character of singularities, etc. However, all efforts were made to give a complete bibliography to help the reader to find more detailed information.

* Preface * Introduction * LLL and PSLQ * Pisot and Salem Numbers * Rudin-Shapiro Polynomials * Fekete Polynomials * Products of Cyclotomic Polynomials * Location of Zeros * Maximal Vanishing * Diophantine Approximation of Zeros * The Integer-Chebyshev Problem * The Prouhet-Tarry-Escott Problem * The Easier Waring Problem * The Erdös-Szekeres Problem * Barker Polynomials and Golay Pairs * The Littlewood Problem * Spectra * Appendix A: A Compendium of Inequalities * B: Lattice Basis Reduction and Integer Relations * C: Explicit Merit Factor Formulae * D: Research Problems * References * Index

Nearly a decade ago, Johanna Drucker cofounded the University of Virginia’s SpecLab, a digital humanities laboratory dedicated to risky projects with serious aims. In SpecLab she explores the implications of these radical efforts to use critical practices and aesthetic principles against the authority of technology based on analytic models of knowledge. Inspired by the imaginative frontiers of graphic arts and experimental literature and the technical possibilities of computation and information management, the projects Drucker engages range from Subjective Meteorology to Artists’ Books Online to the as yet unrealized ’Patacritical Demon, an interactive tool for exposing the structures that underlie our interpretations of text. Illuminating the kind of future such experiments could enable, SpecLab functions as more than a set of case studies at the intersection of computers and humanistic inquiry. It also exemplifies Drucker’s contention that humanists must play a role in designing models of knowledge for the digital age—models that will determine how our culture will function in years to come.