This book offers a broad range of options for technically adapting, handling and processing wood with specific wood characteristics. It starts by discussing wood anatomy and the general factors leading to the formation of wood characteristics. The individual characteristics are then categorized into four groups: 1. Wood characteristics inherent in a tree’s natural growth. 2. Biotically-induced wood characteristics. 3. Abiotically-induced wood characteristics. 4. Types and causes of cracks. New to this English edition is a comparison of wood characteristics found in trees from the boreal, temperate and tropical climate zones. The results show a clear relationship between the effects of sunshine duration, the vertical and horizontal angle of radiation, and crown coverage and the way wood characteristics form. The book addresses all those who work with wood professionally: foresters, gardeners and arborists who want to be able to observe a living tree and identify its internal features and the causes of its prominent wood characteristics. Based on the findings described in this book they can determine how to avoid certain undesirable characteristics, or alternatively how to promote favorable ones as the tree and stand grow. Botanists and dendrologists will learn how wood characteristics arise, and how they affect living trees and wood products. The needs of wood technologists seeking to prevent adverse wood characteristics from influencing wood processing, or to enhance favorable wood characteristics, are also addressed.

Understanding games--whether computer games, card games, board games, or sports--by analyzing certain common traits. Characteristics of Games offers a new way to understand games: by focusing on certain traits--including number of players, rules, degrees of luck and skill needed, and reward/effort ratio--and using these characteristics as basic points of comparison and analysis. These issues are often discussed by game players and designers but seldom written about in any formal way. This book fills that gap. By emphasizing these player-centric basic concepts, the book provides a framework for game analysis from the viewpoint of a game designer. The book shows what all genres of games--board games, card games, computer games, and sports--have to teach each other. Today's game designers may find solutions to design problems when they look at classic games that have evolved over years of playing.

This volume includes the proceedings of a workshop on Invariant Theory held at Queen's University (Ontario). The workshop was part of the theme year held under the auspices of the Centre de recherches mathematiques (CRM) in Montreal. The gathering brought together two communities of researchers: those working in characteristic 0 and those working in positive characteristic. The book contains three types of papers: survey articles providing introductions to computational invarianttheory, modular invariant theory of finite groups, and the invariant theory of Lie groups; expository works recounting recent research in these three areas and beyond; and open problems of current interest. The book is suitable for graduate students and researchers working in invarianttheory.