Objects are essential for how, together, people create and experience social life and relate to the physical environment around them. Interacting with Objects: Language, materiality, and social activity presents studies which use video recordings of real-life settings to explore how objects feature in social interaction and activity. The studies consider many objects (e.g. paper documents, food, a camera, art, furniture, and even the human body), across various situations, such as shopping, visiting the doctor, interviews and meetings, surgery, and instruction in dance, craft, or cooking. Analyses reveal in precise detail how, as people interact, objects are seen, touched and handled, heard, created, transformed, planned, imagined, shared, discussed, or appreciated. With the companion collection Multiactivity in Social Interaction: Beyond multitasking, the book advances understanding of the complex organisation and accomplishment of social interaction, especially the significance of embodiment, materiality, participation and temporality. By focussing on objects in and for actual occasions of human action, Interacting with Objects: Language, materiality, and social activity will interest many researchers and practitioners in language and social interaction, communication and discourse, design, and also more widely within anthropology, sociology, psychology, and related disciplines.

A thorough rethinking of a field deserves to take a shape that is in itself new. Interacting with Print delivers on this premise, reworking the history of print through a unique effort in authorial collaboration. The book itself is not a typical monograph—rather, it is a “multigraph,” the collective work of twenty-two scholars who together have assembled an alphabetically arranged tour of key concepts for the study of print culture, from Anthologies and Binding to Publicity and Taste. Each entry builds on its term in order to resituate print and book history within a broader media ecology throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The central theme is interactivity, in three senses: people interacting with print; print interacting with the non-print media that it has long been thought, erroneously, to have displaced; and people interacting with each other through print. The resulting book will introduce new energy to the field of print studies and lead to considerable new avenues of investigation.

Make your everyday interactions with children intentional and purposeful with these steps: Be Present, Connect, and Extend Learning.

Recent progress in the theory and computation of electronic structure is bringing an unprecedented level of capability for research. Many-body methods are becoming essential tools vital for quantitative calculations and understanding materials phenomena in physics, chemistry, materials science and other fields. This book provides a unified exposition of the most-used tools: many-body perturbation theory, dynamical mean field theory and quantum Monte Carlo simulations. Each topic is introduced with a less technical overview for a broad readership, followed by in-depth descriptions and mathematical formulation. Practical guidelines, illustrations and exercises are chosen to enable readers to appreciate the complementary approaches, their relationships, and the advantages and disadvantages of each method. This book is designed for graduate students and researchers who want to use and understand these advanced computational tools, get a broad overview, and acquire a basis for participating in new developments.

Moderating Usability Tests provides insight and guidance for usability testing. To a large extent, successful usability testing depends on the skills of the person facilitating the test. However, most usability specialists still learn how to conduct tests through an apprentice system with little formal training. This book is the resource for new and experienced moderators to learn about the rules and practices for interacting. Authors Dumas and Loring draw on their combined 40 years of usability testing experience to develop and present the most effective principles and practices – both practical and ethical – for moderating successful usability tests. The videos are available from the publisher's companion web site. Presents the ten “golden rules that maximize every session’s value Offers targeted advice on how to maintain objectivity Discusses the ethical considerations that apply in all usability testing Explains how to reduce the stress that participants often feel Considers the special requirements of remote usability testing Demonstrates good and bad moderating techniques with laboratory videos accessible from the publisher’s companion web site

At what point in the development of a new field should a book be written about it? This question is seldom easy to answer. In the case of interacting particle systems, important progress continues to be made at a substantial pace. A number of problems which are nearly as old as the subject itself remain open, and new problem areas continue to arise and develop. Thus one might argue that the time is not yet ripe for a book on this subject. On the other hand, this field is now about fifteen years old. Many important of several basic models is problems have been solved and the analysis almost complete. The papers written on this subject number in the hundreds. It has become increasingly difficult for newcomers to master the proliferating literature, and for workers in allied areas to make effective use of it. Thus I have concluded that this is an appropriate time to pause and take stock of the progress made to date. It is my hope that this book will not only provide a useful account of much of this progress, but that it will also help stimulate the future vigorous development of this field.

Computer science as an engineering discipline has been spectacularly successful. Yet it is also a philosophical enterprise in the way it represents the world and creates and manipulates models of reality, people, and action. In this book, Paul Dourish addresses the philosophical bases of human-computer interaction. He looks at how what he calls "embodied interaction"—an approach to interacting with software systems that emphasizes skilled, engaged practice rather than disembodied rationality—reflects the phenomenological approaches of Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and other twentieth-century philosophers. The phenomenological tradition emphasizes the primacy of natural practice over abstract cognition in everyday activity. Dourish shows how this perspective can shed light on the foundational underpinnings of current research on embodied interaction. He looks in particular at how tangible and social approaches to interaction are related, how they can be used to analyze and understand embodied interaction, and how they could affect the design of future interactive systems.