Introduction: Directions to Baroque Naples

Baroque Technology

As new interactive systems evolve, they frequently hit a sweet spot: A few new tricks to learn, and users gets tremendous benefits, simplifying their lives. But beyond that lies the dark phase of baroque technology: increasing complexity with little payoff. We will look at examples for both sweet-spot and baroque interactive technologies, from GPS devices to window systems, find out how to iden...

Introduction to the Special Issue on Biometrics: Progress and Directions

IN addition to its extensive use in forensic sciences, biometrics technology is rapidly being adopted in a wide varietyof securityapplications suchascomputerandphysical access control, electronic commerce, digital rights management, background checking, homeland security, and defense. Security systems demand high accuracy, high throughput, and low cost from their biometric subsystems. Although ...

Introduction to Future Directions for Monetary Policies in East Asia

A critical part of this reassessment involved monetary policy and, its close cousin in an open economy, exchange-rate policy. Before the crisis, a de facto currency peg against the United States dollar formed the centrepiece of the monetary policy regimes of many of the countries in the region. But the crisis convinced almost everyone, if they had not been convinced by earlier crises, that such...

An Introduction to Sociolinguistics

Introduction to circular data

In many diverse scientific fields, the measurements are directions. For instance, a biologist may be measuring the direction of flight of a bird or the orientation of an animal. A series of such observations is called ”directional data”. Since a direction has no magnitude, these can be conveniently represented as points on the circumference of a unit circle centered at the origin or as unit ...