"This volume of the ASP Conference Series contains presentations that were given at the 17th annual conference on Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems (ADASS XVII), which was held on 23-26 September 2007 at the Kensington Town Hall, London, UK. A number of key topics are chosen by the Programme Organising Committe each year for special emphasis according to their timeliness and to aid in the selection of invited speakers. This year these included Data Preservation, Footprints and Mosaics, High Energy Physics Computing, Algorithms and Image Processing, and Data Mining and Visualisation. The Programme of oral presentations consisted of 13 invited speakers with another 38 speakers contributing smaller talks. The programme also contained a set of more than 150 informal presentations in the form of posters. The standard format of ADASS also includes a number of less structured yearly events which focus on topics of special interest. The first of these are the large group Birds of a Feather discussion sessions. Four of these took place in the late afternoon or early evening after the day's oral programme. Three Focus Demonstrations allowed speakers to display new software and facilities to a large audience, while fourteen Floor Demonstrations addressed very small groups. It has become tradition within ADASS to use the Sunday before the formal beginning of the conference as something of a training day. This year we were fortunate enough to have two very high quality tutorial sessions on the subjects of 3D Visualisation and Data Mining."--Publisher's website.

The concept is fundamental in statistics and tailors to the emergence of collective behaviours. Communication then asks for uncertainty considerations - noise, indeterminacy or approximation - and its wider impact on the couple perception-action. Clustering being all about uncertainty handling, data set representation appears not to be the only solution: Introducing hierarchies with adapted metrics, a priori pre-improving the data resolution are other methods in need of evaluation. The technology together with increasing semantics enables to involve synthetic data as simulation results for the multiplication of sources. Part B plays with another couple important for complex systems: state vs. transition. State-first descriptions would characterize physics, while transition-first would fit biology. That could stem from life producing dynamical systems in essence.

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Scalable Interactive Visualization" that was published in Informatics

The exploration of the subnuclear world is done through increasingly complex experiments covering a wide range of energy and performed in a large variety of environments from particle accelerators, underground detectors to satellites and space laboratory. The achievement of these research programs calls for novel techniques, new materials and instrumentation to be used in detectors, often of large scale. Therefore, fundamental physics is at the forefront of technological advance and also leads to many applications. Among these, medical applications have a particular importance due to health and social benefits they bring to the public.

This thesis presents studies of the starless core populations of three nearby molecular clouds made as part of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope Gould Belt Survey. These studies combine observations made using the SCUBA-2 submillimetre camera with data from several other instruments, including the Herschel Space Observatory, to identify and characterise starless cores in the Ophiuchus, Taurus and Cepheus molecular clouds. The temperatures, masses and stability against collapse of the starless cores are measured, the latter through detailed virial analysis, including a determination of the external pressure on the cores. The book illustrates core stability on the “virial plane”, in which core stability is plotted against core confinement mode, showing that starless cores are typically confined by external pressure rather than self-gravity. It also presents an analytical model of the evolution of starless cores in the “virial plane”, demonstrating that a pressure-confined starless core may evolve due to virial stability rather than gravitational collapse, which means that a core can only be definitively considered to be prestellar if it is gravitationally bound.