Science and its offshoot, technology, enter into the very fabric of our society in so many ways that we cannot imagine life without them. We are surrounded by crises and debates over climate change, stem-cell research, AIDS, evolutionary theory and “intelligent design,” the use of DNA in solving crimes, and many other issues. Society is virtually forced to follow our natural tendency, which is to give great weight to the opinions of scientific experts. How is it that these experts have come to acquire such authority, and just how far does their authority reach? Does specialized knowledge entitle scientists to moral authority as well? How does scientific authority actually function in our society, and what are the countervailing social forces (including those deriving from law, politics, and religion) with which it has to contend? Theodore Brown seeks to answer such questions in this magisterial work of synthesis about the role of science in society. In Part I, he elucidates the concept of authority and its relation to autonomy, and then traces the historical growth of scientific authority and its place in contemporary American society. In Part II, he analyzes how scientific authority plays out in relation to other social domains, such as law, religion, government, and the public sphere.

The two-volume set LNCS 10174 and 10175 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 20th IACR International Conference on the Practice and Theory in Public-Key Cryptography, PKC 2017, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in March 2017. The 34 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 160 submissions. They are organized in topical sections such as Cryptanalysis, Protocols, Encrpytion Schemes, Leakage-Resilient and Non-Malleable Codes, Number Theory and Diffie-Hellman, Encryption with Access Control, Special Signatures, Fully Homomorphic Encryption, Real-World Schemes, Multiparty Computation and Primitives.

As software systems become ubiquitous, the issues of dependability become more and more crucial. Given that solutions to these issues must be considered from the very beginning of the design process, it is reasonable that dependability is addressed at the architectural level. This book comes as a result of an effort to bring together the research communities of software architectures and dependability. This state-of-the-art survey contains 16 carefully selected papers originating from the Twin Workshops on Architecting Dependable Systems (WADS 2004) accomplished as part of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2004) in Edinburgh, UK and of the International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2004) in Florence, Italy. The papers are organised in topical sections on architectures for dependable services, monitoring and reconfiguration in software architectures, dependability support for software architectures, architectural evaluation, and architectural abstractions for dependability.

A fascinating collection of tales and lore from the ancient Oracle at Delphi, this book provides both a collection of good stories and finds spiritual enlightenment weaved throughout these diverse offerings.

This book reviews selected topics charterized by great progress and covers the field from theoretical areas to experimental ones. It contains fundamental areas, quantum query complexity, quantum statistical inference, quantum cloning, quantum entanglement, additivity. It treats three types of quantum security system, quantum public key cryptography, quantum key distribution, and quantum steganography. A photonic system is highlighted for the realization of quantum information processing.

Powerful Devices studies spiritual warfare performances as an apparatus for disestablishing structures of power and knowledge, and establishing righteousness in their stead. Drawing on performance studies’ emphasis on radicality and breaking of social norms as devices of social transformation, the book demonstrates how Christian groups with dominant cultural power but who perceive themselves as embattled wield the ideas of performance activism. Combining religious studies with ethnography, Powerful Devices explores Nigerian Pentecostals and US Evangelicals’ praxis of transnational spiritual warfare. By closely studying spiritual warfare prayers as a “device,” Powerful Devices shows how the rituals of prayer enable an apprehension of time, paradigms of self-enhancement, and the subversion of politics and authority. A critical intervention, Powerful Devices explores charismatic Christianity’s relationship to science and secular authority, technology and temporality, neoliberalism, and reactionary ideology.

This three-volume set LNAI 6911, LNAI 6912, and LNAI 6913 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the European conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases: ECML PKDD 2011, held in Athens, Greece, in September 2011. The 121 revised full papers presented together with 10 invited talks and 11 demos in the three volumes, were carefully reviewed and selected from about 600 paper submissions. The papers address all areas related to machine learning and knowledge discovery in databases as well as other innovative application domains such as supervised and unsupervised learning with some innovative contributions in fundamental issues; dimensionality reduction, distance and similarity learning, model learning and matrix/tensor analysis; graph mining, graphical models, hidden markov models, kernel methods, active and ensemble learning, semi-supervised and transductive learning, mining sparse representations, model learning, inductive logic programming, and statistical learning. a significant part of the papers covers novel and timely applications of data mining and machine learning in industrial domains.

Professor Richard S. Michalski passed away on September 20, 2007. Once we learned about his untimely death we immediately realized that we would no longer have with us a truly exceptional scholar and researcher who for several decades had been inf- encing the work of numerous scientists all over the world - not only in his area of expertise, notably machine learning, but also in the broadly understood areas of data analysis, data mining, knowledge discovery and many others. In fact, his influence was even much broader due to his creative vision, integrity, scientific excellence and exceptionally wide intellectual horizons which extended to history, political science and arts. Professor Michalski’s death was a particularly deep loss to the whole Polish sci- tific community and the Polish Academy of Sciences in particular. After graduation, he began his research career at the Institute of Automatic Control, Polish Academy of Science in Warsaw. In 1970 he left his native country and hold various prestigious positions at top US universities. His research gained impetus and he soon established himself as a world authority in his areas of interest – notably, he was widely cons- ered a father of machine learning.

Oracle Performance Survival Guide A Systematic Approach to Database Optimization The fast, complete, start-to-finish guide to optimizing Oracle performance Oracle Performance Survival Guide offers a structured, systematic, start-to-finish methodology for optimizing Oracle performance as efficiently as possible. Leading Oracle expert Guy Harrison shows how to maximize your tuning investment by focusing on causes rather than symptoms, and by quickly identifying the areas that deliver the greatest “bang for the buck.” Writing for DBAs and developers with all levels of experience, Harrison covers every area of Oracle performance management, from application design through SQL tuning, contention management through memory and physical IO management. He also presents up-to-the-minute guidance for optimizing the performance of the Oracle 11g Release 2. You’ll start by mastering Oracle structured performance tuning principles and tools, including techniques for tracing and monitoring Oracle execution. Harrison illuminates the interaction between applications and databases, guides you through choosing tuning tools, and introduces upfront design techniques that lead to higher-performance applications. He also presents a collection of downloadable scripts for reporting on all aspects of database performance. Coverage includes • “Tuning by layers,” the most effective, highest-value approach to Oracle performance optimization • Making the most of Oracle’s core tools for tracing, monitoring, and diagnosing performance • Highly efficient database logical and physical design, indexing, transaction design, and API use • SQL and PL/SQL tuning, including the use of parallel SQL techniques • Minimizing contention for locks, latches, shared memory, and other database resources • Optimizing memory and physical disk IO • Tuning Real Application Cluster (RAC) databases guyharrison.net informit.com/ph