What will the future of wireless communications look like? What drives mobile communications systems beyond 3G? In Next Generation Mobile Systems the authors answer these questions and others surrounding the new technologies. The book examines the current research issues driving the wireless world and provides an inclusive overview of how established technologies will evolve to suit next generation mobile systems. While the term ‘4G’ already dominates research in industry and academia, there are still numerous hurdles to take before this ambitious concept can become reality.

Since the turn of the twentieth century, telecommunications has shifted from traditional voice transport to data transport, although digitized voice is still a large contributor. Instead of an evolution of existing transport standards, a revolution was necessary in order to enable additional data-related transport.

The Industrial Communication Technology Handbook focuses on current and newly emerging communication technologies and systems that are evolving in response to the needs of industry and the demands of industry-led consortia and organizations.

Welcome to the Discreet (R) Official Training Courseware for 3ds max 7 (R) software! Consider this book an all-access pass to the production and teaching experience of Discreet’s training experts. The lessons in the manual cover not only the new features found in 3ds max 7, but also their integration into the overall production workflow of using 3ds max. The training is designed for 3ds max users who want to enhance their skills, get familiar with new features, and quickly master how to utilize them. How you work through the tutorials is up to you.

Value-added services – messaging, mobile-commerce, location services, content provisioning – are the moneymakers in today’s telecommunications market. This timely resource explains how a company can commercially offer these services without having to own its own telecommunications network.

It considers how people respond to a female voice in e-commerce (does stereotyping matter?), how a car’s voice can promote safer driving (are “happy” cars better cars?), whether synthetic voices have personality and emotion (is sounding like a person always good?), whether an automated call center should apologize when it cannot understand a spoken request (“To Err is Interface; To Blame, Complex”), and much more. Nass and Brave’s deep understanding of both social science and design, drawn from ten years of research at Nass’s Stanford laboratory, produces results that often challenge conventional wisdom and common design practices. These insights will help designers and marketers build better interfaces, scientists construct better theories, and everyone gain better understandings of the future of the machines that speak with us.

Pondering the “permanent present” of today’s visual culture, Lunenfeld blames the twenty-first century’s inability to imagine the future on a movie and an interface: the too-influential aesthetic of Blade Runner and the ubiquitous desktop of nested files, icons, trash cans, and cascading windows, he argues, have become impediments to our thinking beyond the present. Lunenfeld writes about Euro-Disney, Matthew Barney, the VHS pornucopia that killed off Betamax, the computer as a “solitude enhancement machine,” our embarrassing Y2K hysteria (when TEOTWAWKI??The End of the World As We Know It??didn’t happen), and other faces of what he calls “that overwhelming diversity which for lack of a better term we call the present.”