Jim Davies

To be effective, data-intensive systems require extensive ongoing customisation to reflect changing user requirements, organisational policies, and the structure and interpretation of the data they hold. Manual customisation is expensive, time-consuming, and error-prone. In large complex systems, the value of the data can be such that exhaustive testing is necessary before any new feature can be added to the existing design. In most cases, the precise details of requirements, policies and data will change during the lifetime of the system, forcing a choice between expensive modification and continued operation with an inefficient design. Engineering Agile Big-Data Systems outlines an approach to dealing with these problems in software and data engineering, describing a methodology for aligning these processes throughout product lifecycles. It discusses tools which can be used to achieve these goals, and, in a number of case studies, shows how the tools and methodology have been used to improve a variety of academic and business systems.

To be effective, data-intensive systems require extensive ongoing customisation to reflect changing user requirements, organisational policies, and the structure and interpretation of the data they hold. Manual customisation is expensive, time-consuming, and error-prone. In large complex systems, the value of the data can be such that exhaustive testing is necessary before any new feature can be added to the existing design. In most cases, the precise details of requirements, policies and data will change during the lifetime of the system, forcing a choice between expensive modification and continued operation with an inefficient design. Engineering Agile Big-Data Systems outlines an approach to dealing with these problems in software and data engineering, describing a methodology for aligning these processes throughout product lifecycles. It discusses tools which can be used to achieve these goals, and, in a number of case studies, shows how the tools and methodology have been used to improve a variety of academic and business systems.

Fortunino Matania is the forgotten genius of illustration. He is perhaps best known in his role providing Great War illustrations such as ‘Goodbye Old Man’ for The Sphere. Art ran in Matania's blood - his father Eduardo was a respected artist, and his cousin Ugo also contributed to The Sphere. Matania was blessed with a photographic memory, was able to work at great speed, producing illustrations that were unnervingly photographic in their realism. Matania’s pictures were superbly accurate and authentic. During the war, he often visited the Western Front, often putting himself in danger to gather material for his work. When not able to do this, he would interview eyewitnesses and take along toy soldiers when he spoke to recovering men in hospital to ensure battle positions were recorded faithfully. Back at his studio, he had an enormous collection of uniforms, weapons and other props to ensure every last detail of his finished picture was correct. This is the first time the entire First World War collection of his works has been published and marks not only a prolific career and exceptional body of work in the art world, it captures much that was written about, but could never have been photographed a century ago yet was etched in the minds of a generation.

Why do some things pass under the radar of our attention, but other things capture our interest? Why do some religions catch on and others fade away? What makes a story, a movie, or a book riveting? Why do some people keep watching the news even though it makes them anxious? The past 20 years have seen a remarkable flourishing of scientific research into exactly these kinds of questions. Professor Jim Davies' fascinating and highly accessible book, Riveted, reveals the evolutionary underpinnings of why we find things compelling, from art to religion and from sports to superstition. Compelling things fit our minds like keys in the ignition, turning us on and keeping us running, and yet we are often unaware of what makes these "keys" fit. What we like and don't like is almost always determined by subconscious forces, and when we try to consciously predict our own preferences we're often wrong. In one study of speed dating, people were asked what kinds of partners they found attractive. When the results came back, the participants' answers before the exercise had no correlation with who they actually found attractive in person! We are beginning to understand just how much the brain makes our decisions for us: we are rewarded with a rush of pleasure when we detect patterns, as the brain thinks we've discovered something significant; the mind urges us to linger on the news channel or rubberneck an accident in case it might pick up important survival information; it even pushes us to pick up People magazine in order to find out about changes in the social structure. Drawing on work from philosophy, anthropology, religious studies, psychology, economics, computer science, and biology, Davies offers a comprehensive explanation to show that in spite of the differences between the many things that we find compelling, they have similar effects on our minds and brains.

This book was first published in 1993. Computing systems are becoming highly complex, harder to understand, and therefore more prone to failure. Where such systems control aircraft for example, system failure could have disastrous consequences. It is important therefore that we are able to employ mathematical techniques to specify the behaviour or safety critical systems. This thesis uses the theory of Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) to show how a real-lime system may be specified. Included is a case study in which a local area network protocol is described at two levels of abstraction, and a general method 14 structuring CSP descriptions of layered protocols is given.

This book was first published in 1993. Computing systems are becoming highly complex, harder to understand, and therefore more prone to failure. Where such systems control aircraft for example, system failure could have disastrous consequences. It is important therefore that we are able to employ mathematical techniques to specify the behaviour or safety critical systems. This thesis uses the theory of Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) to show how a real-lime system may be specified. Included is a case study in which a local area network protocol is described at two levels of abstraction, and a general method 14 structuring CSP descriptions of layered protocols is given.