Why yet another book on quantum mechanics? Quantum mechanics was born in the first quarter of the twentieth century and has received an enormous number of theoretical and experimental confirmations over the years. It is considered to be the fundamental physical paradigm, and has a wide range of applications, from cosmology to chemistry, and from biology to information sciences. It is one of the greatest intellectual achievements of the past century. As an effect of its invention, the very concept of physical reality was changed, and “observation,” “measurement,” “prediction,” and “state of the system” acquired a new and deeper meaning.

Probability was not unknown in physics: it was introduced by Boltzmann in order to control the behavior of a system with a very large number of particles. It was the missing concept in order to understand the thermodynamics of macroscopic bodies, but the structure of the physical laws remained still deterministic. The introduction of probability was needed as a consequence of our lack of knowledge of the initial conditions of the system and of our inability to solve an enormous number of coupled non-linear differential equations.

The book provides a contemporary understanding of irreversibility, particularly in quantum systems. It explains entropy production in quantum kinetic theory and in the master equation formulation of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. The first half of the book focuses on the foundations of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics with emphasis on quantum mechanics. The second half of the book contains alternative views of quantum statistical mechanics, and topics of current interest for advanced graduate level study and research. Unique to textbooks on this subject, this book contains a discussion of the fundamental Gleason theorem. Quantum entanglements are treated in application to quantum computation and the difficulties arising from decoherence. The relativistic generalization of the Boltzmann equation is derived, and modern transport applications to reservoir ballistic transport are developed.

Many-body theory stands at the foundation of modern quantum statistical mechanics and it is introduced here to graduates in physics, chemistry, engineering and biology. The book focuses on the foundations of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, and provides alternative views of quantum statistical mechanics.

About the Author

W. C. Schieve is Professor Emeritus in the Physics Department and Center for Complex Quantum Systems at the University of Texas, Austin. His research interests lie in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and its applications to areas such as quantum optics, relativistic statistical mechanics, dynamical models in biophysics, and chaos theory.

L. P. Horwitz is Professor of Physics Emeritus in the School of Physics at Tel Aviv University. He is also Professor of Physics at Bar Ilan University, and Research Director in Theoretical Physics at Ariel University.

Adobe Photoshop for VFX Artists is an in-depth guide to creating visual effects art using Photoshop. Taking a straightforward, visual approach to Adobe's best-selling software, this book provides you with everything you need to use Photoshop to meet specific goals for art creation. Develop the skills you need to master professional matte painting and 2D and 3D texturing techniques and secrets. This unique guide is one of the only books available targeted specifically to the VFX artist. Written by a professional Texture Artist at a major Hollywood visual effects studio, you’ll learn insider tips and tricks that are hard to come by. Adobe Photoshop for VFX Artists adheres to the high standards of the professional VFX world, while still offering an abundance of information for the VFX hobbyist.

About the Author

Lopsie Schwartz has worked in the VFX industry as a freelancer and has worked on high-profile movies such as Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, and Hollow Man. She is currently working at Rhythm and Hues Studios as the Departmental Texture Lead.

Invaluable Intermediate/Advanced guide to Photoshop Elements 7 for all photographers, writen by Elements guru and bestselling author Philip Andrews.

This essential guide for intermediate/advanced photographers has now been fully updated for Elements 7.

Bestselling author and Elements guru Philip Andrews turns his expansive knowledge to this powerful application, delivering, once again, a practical approach in a crystal-clear writing style.

For the advanced Elements user, this book offers a standalone guide to advancing knowledge of the software. For those with a little less experience, it works seamlessly in conjunction with Philip's other Elements guide: "Adobe Photoshop Elements 7: A visual introduction to digital photography". Philip expands on the solid foundation delivered by that title to deliver a master-guide that shows you just how powerful this deceptively simple software package can be.

Throughout the book, Philip takes a pro's approach, emphasising a streamlined, non-destructive workflow. Diverse chapters cover the entire spectrum of photographic potential offered by the software, including key areas such as: darkroom techniques, advanced selection techniques, professional retouching, photo restoration, panoramas, collages, RAW processing and printing. Additionally, the content is supplemented by extra great learning tools available on the website: WWW.XXXXXX.com. These include: downloadable resources, and Elements vodcasts.

Essential reading for all photographers using Elements 7.

* Advanced guide to Elements, the natural sequel to the bestselling 'Adobe Photoshop Elements 6'
* Written by Philip Andrews, world-renowned Photoshop elements expert
* Takes a professional approach to this industry-standard software, with a core focus on nondestructive editing throughout

About the Author

Philip Andrews is Adobe Australia's official Photoshop and Elements Ambassador. He is an experienced photographer, author, magazine editor and online course creator. He was previously a lecturer at the Queensland School of Printing and Graphic Arts, Australia and Nescot, England. He is a beta tester for Photoshop, an alpha tester for Photoshop Elements and a Photoshop specialist demonstrator for Adobe Australia. Philip is also co-founder of photo-college.com an online photography training college. He's a regular contributor to several magazines including Shutterbug, Amateur Photographer, Australian Photography and Better Photography, he is senior contributing editor for Better Digital, columnist for What Digital Camera and Co-editor and publisher of Better Photoshop Techniques magazine.

Build your VFX arsenal with quick-access, step-by-step instruction on how to create today's hottest digital VFX shots. This essential toolkit provides techniques for creating effects seen in movies such as "300", "Spiderman 3", "Predator" and others, with lessons on how-to: splatter blood or digitally lop someone's arm off; create a scene with actors running from an explosion; create the 'twin effect' (same actor, same location, 2 performances); and, produce space-ship dog fights. Organized in a 'cookbook' style, this title allows you to reference a certain effect in the index and immediately access concise instructions to create that effect. In this title, techniques are demonstrated in each of the most popular software tools. After Effects, Final Cut Studio, Shake, Photoshop, and Combustion are all covered. Brilliant, 4-color presentation provides inspiration and stimulating visual guidance to the lessons presented, while the companion DVD contains project media files enabling you to put concepts learned into immediate practice. This title provides 4-color, step-by-step instruction for producing today's hottest digital VFX shots. VFX techniques are presented in each of the most popular software tools. Companion DVD features project media files allowing you to immediately implement techniques learned.

About the Author

Bill Byrne is a multimedia digital artist whose work has been exhibited internationally. His visual and sound art focuses on building surrealistic, organic worlds. He makes digital-photomontage-based prints, animated installations and conceptual sound art podcasts. He performs experimental electronic music with a laptop, Game boy and circuit bent toys with his wife Suzanne as The Painful Leg Injuries. They have recently performed at Make magazine's Maker Faire in Austin. On November 14th 2007 he was the invited speaker at Bloomfield College in New Jersey discussing his career as a fine artist and professional designer. Prints of his digital photomontage were chosen to be in Arts and Science Collaborators Digital exhibitions in 2001, 2002, and 2004.

In recent decades Iran has experienced a wide range of changes. These include shifts in the relationship between urban and rural economies, the nationwide growth of the middle class and ensuing social mobility, a higher literacy rate along with the expansion of educational institutions, and new complexities and expectations in gender relations—all within the context of the country’s evolving domestic and international politics. This volume examines the extent and the degree of such vicissitudes in contemporary Iran through the prism of different disciplines. Each chapter provides a thorough analysis of its specifi c and substantive topic, though not in isolation, without neglecting the overarching and interdisciplinary goal of the book to probe the many-sided factors that connect all these radical upheavals and departures together in the still volatile society of contemporary Iran.

"An absorbing, entertaining, and illuminating examination of one of the defining topics of our time."--Professor Aaron T. Beck, University of Philadelphia and President of the Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy, USA

Terrorists, child abductors, muggers, delinquent teenagers, malicious colleagues . . . Who wouldnt be worried? The world can be a dangerous place, for sure. But have we lost the knack of judging risk? Are we letting paranoia get the better of us? In this entertaining and thought-provoking book, based on the most up-to-date scientific research, Daniel and Jason Freeman highlight just how prominent paranoia is today. One in four of us have regular paranoid thoughts. The authors analyse the causes of paranoia, identifying the social and cultural factors that seem to be skewing the way we think and feel about the world around us. And they explain why paranoia may be on the rise and, crucially, what we can do to tackle it. Witty, clear, and compelling, Paranoia takes us beyond the tabloid headlines to pinpoint the real menace at the heart of twenty-first century culture.

About the Author

Dr, Daniel Freeman is a Wellcome Trust Fellow at the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London, and a consultant clinical psychologist in the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. He is one of the worlds leading researchers on paranoia, publishing in the major psychiatry and psychology journals. Jason Freeman is a writer and editor. Together with Daniel Freeman and Philippa Garety, he is co-author of Overcoming Paranoid and Suspicious Thoughts, the first self-help book for people affected by suspicious thoughts.

David Kilcullen is one of the world's most influential experts on counterinsurgency and modern warfare. A Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to General David Petraeus in Iraq, his vision of war dramatically influenced America's decision to rethink its military strategy in Iraq and implement "the surge."

Now, in The Accidental Guerrilla, Kilcullen provides a remarkably fresh perspective on the War on Terror. Kilcullen takes us "on the ground" to uncover the face of modern warfare, illuminating both the big global war (the "War on Terrorism") and its relation to the associated "small wars" across the globe: Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Chechnya, Pakistan and North Africa. Kilcullen sees today's conflicts as a complex pairing of contrasting trends: local social networks and worldwide movements; traditional and postmodern culture; local insurgencies seeking autonomy and a broader pan-Islamic campaign. He warns that America's actions in the war on terrorism have tended to conflate these trends, blurring the distinction between local and global struggles and thus enormously complicating our challenges. Indeed, the US had done a poor job of applying different tactics to these very different situations, continually misidentifying insurgents with limited aims and legitimate grievances (whom he calls "accidental guerrillas") as part of a coordinated worldwide terror network. We must learn how to disentangle these strands, develop strategies that deal with global threats, avoid local conflicts where possible, and win them where necessary.

Colored with gripping battlefield experiences that range from the jungles and highlands of Southeast Asia to the mountains of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to the dusty towns of the Middle East, The Accidental Guerrilla will, quite simply, change the way we think about war. This much anticipated book will be a must read for everyone concerned about the war on terror.

About the Author

David Kilcullen is at once part of General David Petraeus' brain trust in Baghdad, an Australian anthropologist, a Pentagon-based counterinsurgency theorist, and an on-the-ground officer/military advisor who has worked in hotspots ranging from East Africa to the Javanese highlands to the jungles of the Philippines. The "go-to guy" for journalists when it comes to counterinsurgency, he was interviewed for a full-hour on Charlie Rose , was the subject of a full-length profile in the New Yorker written by George Packer, and he's quoted frequently in The New York Times. David Kilcullen is a senior fellow at the EastWest Institute.

With Relationscapes, Erin Manning offers a new philosophy of movement challenging the idea that movement is simple displacement in space, knowable only in terms of the actual. Exploring the relation between sensation and thought through the prisms of dance, cinema, art, and new media, Manning argues for the intensity of movement. From this idea of intensity—the incipiency at the heart of movement—Manning develops the concept of preacceleration, which makes palpable how movement creates relational intervals out of which displacements take form.

Discussing her theory of incipient movement in terms of dance and relational movement, Manning describes choreographic practices that work to develop with a body in movement rather than simply stabilizing that body into patterns of displacement. She examines the movement-images of Leni Riefenstahl, Étienne-Jules Marey, and Norman McLaren (drawing on Bergson's idea of duration), and explores the dot-paintings of contemporary Australian Aboriginal artists. Turning to language, Manning proposes a theory of prearticulation claiming that language's affective force depends on a concept of thought in motion.

Relationscapes is a radically empirical book, working directly out of examples and delving into the complexity of relations these examples suggest. It takes a "Whiteheadian perspective," recognizing Whitehead's importance and his influence on process philosophers of the late twentieth century—Deleuze and Guattari in particular. Relationscapes is truly a transdisciplinary book, not aiming to cover the ground of a particular discipline but making clear how the specificity of a particular inquiry can alter key questions that emerge in the interstices between disciplines. It will be of special interest to scholars in new media, philosophy, dance studies, film theory, and art history.

Technologies of Lived Abstraction series

About the Author

Erin Manning holds a University Research Chair in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal. She is director of the Sense Lab and the author of Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty and Ephemeral Territories: Representing Nation, Home, and Identity in Canada.

Grails in Action is a book for practitioners from practitioners. Glen’s “20-hour challenge,” in which he implemented the www.groovyblogs.org service in Grails, has become legendary. That site is still my one-and-only resource for staying up to date with Groovy and Grails. Not only has he been one of the frontrunners of Grails, he made his achievements publicly available, both by sharing his code and by sharing his insights through blogging and public speaking. I have long wished that he would capture his wisdom in a book, and I can hardly believe that I can now hold it in my hands.

Glen’s “from the trenches” experience is ideally complemented by Peter’s insider knowledge, which he has shown thousands of times when answering questions on the Grails user mailing list. If anybody on this planet knows what people ask about Grails, he does.

Writing a good book on Grails is a challenge. As an author, you are tempted to present the full cornucopia of features, but you would like to also get across the simplicity that Grails brings to Java web application development.

Glen and Peter have found an excellent balance between providing a low-barrier entry into the Grails world and covering the issues that you are likely to encounter when using Grails in more demanding scenarios.

Grails in Action takes a practical stance. It leads you through the process of creating a Grails application and explains the sights along the way. This applies to the various pieces of technology: models, tests, views, controllers, services, and the like, but also—and maybe even more importantly—to the sequence of when and how you go from one to the next.

"Anyone with more than a casual interest in Brazilian music history simply must look at this top ethnomusicological study." --Midwest Book Review

"Focus: Music of Northeast Brazil" examines the historical and contemporary manifestations of the music of Brazil, a country with a musical landscape that is layered with complexity and diversity. Based on the author's field research during the past twenty years, the book describes and analyzes the social/historical contexts and contemporary musical practices of Afro-Brazilian religion, selected Carnival traditions, Bahia's black cultural renaissance, the traditions of rural migrants, and currents in new popular music. Part One, Understanding Music in Brazil, presents important issues and topics that encompass all of Brazil, and provides a general survey of Brazil's diverse musical landscape. Part Two, Creating Music in Brazil, presents historical trajectories and contemporary examples of Afro-Brazilian traditions, Carnival music, and northeastern popular music. Part Three, Focusing In, presents two case studies that explore the ground-level activities of contemporary musicians in Northeast Brazil and the ways in which they move between local, national, and international realms. The accompanying CD offers vivid musical examples that are discussed in the text.

About the Author

University of Florida, USA