Search

Computer Animation: Algorithms and Techniques, Fourth Edition, surveys computer algorithms and programming techniques for specifying and generating motion for graphical objects, that is, computer animation. It is primarily concerned with three-dimensional (3D) computer animation. In this edition, the most current techniques are covered along with the theory and high-level computation that have earned the book a reputation as the best technically oriented animation resource. As in previous editions, the book addresses practical issues, provides accessible techniques, and offers straightforward implementations.

In compelling and illuminating fashion, Stumping God explains the roots of modern religious politics and encourages readers to move beyond the haze of rhetorical appeals that--for better or worse--continually clouds the political process.--Rev. Harry Know, president and CEO of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice "Conscience"

Traditioned innovation is a habit of being and living that cultivates a certain kind of moral imagination shaped by storytelling and expressed in creative, transformational action. Moral imagination is about character, which depends on ongoing formation that takes place in friendships and communities that embody traditions and that are sustained by institutions. There is no quick-fix or set of techniques that will create a mindset of traditioned innovation. But we do believe that you can learn to cultivate it by Becoming immersed in an imaginative engagement with the story of God told through Scripture Learning from exemplary institutions, communities, and people practicing traditioned innovation. Discovering new skills for integrating character formation and dense networks of friendships, communities and institutions into your leadership and life. Navigating the Future will explore stories and tips for cultivating traditioned innovation that will stimulate your thinking and inspire your imagination for more faithful and fruitful living along with the cultivation of more vibrant, life-giving institutions.

We develop a method for learning patterns from a set of positive examples to retrieve semantic content from tree-structured data. Specifically, we focus on HTML documents on the World Wide Web, which contain a wealth of semantic information and have a useful underlying tree structure. A user provides examples of relevant data they wish to extract from a web site through a simple user interface in a web browser. To construct patterns, we use the notion of the edit distance between the subtrees represented by these examples to distill them into a more general pattern. This pattern may then be used to retrieve other instances of the selected data from the same page or other similar pages. By linking patterns and their components with semantic labels using RDF, we can create semantic "overlays" for Web information which are useful in such projects as the Semantic Web and the Haystack information management environment.

This dissertation examines the political uses of religion in the 1980 presidential election, doing so within the broader context of how and why those uses emerged, as well as how they functioned to usher in a new era, setting the parameters for future presidential candidates' uses of religion in presidential elections. I go about this by first examining several streams that converged in 1980, among them: the expansion of the American conservative movement upon its inclusion of religious conservatism as a major concern; the various historical factors that led to the engagement of religious conservatives in American politics; the surfacing of religious rhetoric in presidential politics during the 1976 election; and the disappointment experienced by religious conservatives during the Carter presidency. I then closely examine of the candidacies of Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, and John B. Anderson in 1980, showing the ways in which these candidates constructed lasting discourses of political religion and signaled the emergence of a new religious era in presidential politics. Finally, I observe the legacy of the 1980 presidential election, offering lessons from it to inform what appears to be the present dawn of a new religious era in American politics.