Every society forms a set of rules that establishes the boundaries of generally accepted behavior. These rules are often expressed in statements about how people should behave, and the individual rules fit together to form the moral code by which a society lives. Unfortunately, the different rules often have contradictions, and people are some- times uncertain about which rule to follow. For in…
Computer networking or data communications is a set of disciplines concerned with communication between computer systems or devices. It has its requirements and underlying principles. Since the first node of ARPANET (Advanced Research Project Agency Network, later renamed Internet) was established in 1969, the store-and-forward packet switching technologies formed the Internet architecture, whi…
This book is a selected collection of my lecture notes on quantum optics for my PhD thesis students and for an introductory-level graduate course at the University of Maryland. My students and colleagues encouraged me to publish these lecture notes as a textbook or reference book that might be helpful in understanding the quantum theory of light from a relatively elementary, introductory lev…
The uniqueness of the physiological and behavioral characteristics of human beings is used to facilitate the identification or verification process, and it always results in correct classification. However, the distinctive evidence obtained from an individual does not guarantee a 100% matching be performed to the biometric characteristics corresponding another subject, even after considering al…
In our current understanding, there exist four fundamental interactions in nature: electromagnetism, weak interactions, strong interactions, and gravity. Everyone is familiar with electromagnetism. Weak interactions are involved in the decay of nuclei. Strong interactions keep nuclei together. The rules of quantum mechanics have been applied to elec- tromagnetism, the weak and strong interactio…
Last year, I was designing security for a client who was looking for a reference book that talked about security implementations in the Hadoop arena, simply so he could avoid known issues and pitfalls. To my chagrin, I couldn’t locate a single book for him that covered the security aspect of Hadoop in detail or provided options for people who were planning to secure their clusters holding sen…
Why Mac at Work? Because everyone needs an advantage. A few years ago, I spoke at the American Bar Association’s technology conference about how I use my Mac to run circles around other lawyers. This conference happens once a year and is ground zero for cutting-edge legal technology. When I started talking to these Mac lawyers, however, their ugly secret was revealed: although they were usi…
The last time Apple updated the Mac operating system—2009’s Snow Leopard release—the most noteworthy changes happened under the hood. That’s not the case with Lion, the next major version of Mac OS X. Apple has gradually pulled back the curtain on a pretty significant shift for the Mac OS, influenced in large part by Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS. Lion’s big changes naturall…
Information storage is a central pillar of information technology. A large quantity of digital information is being created every moment by individual and corporate consumers of IT. This information needs to be stored, protected, optimized, and managed. Not long ago, information storage was seen as only a bunch of disks or tapes attached to the back of the computer to store data. Even today, o…
The concept. Manufacturing industries worldwide are facing tough challenges as a consequence of the globalization of economy and the openness of the markets. Progress of the economic blocks such as the European Union, NAFTA, and MERCOSUR, and the global agreements such as GATT, in addition to their obvious economic and social consequences, provoke strong paradigm shifts in the way that the manu…