BlogTalk, the International Conference on Social Software, brings together different groups of people using and advancing the Internet and its usage: technical and conceptual developers, researchers with interdisciplinary backgrounds, and practitioners alike. The focus is on social software as an expression of a culture that is based on the exchange of information, ideas and knowledge. The present volume includes 6 papers from BlogTalk 2008 as well as 11 papers from BlogTalk 2009. The areas discussed include: forms and consequences of emerging social software practices; social software in enterprise and educational environments; the political impact of social software; applications, prototypes, concepts and standards.

Perceiving complex multidimensional problems has proven to be a difficult task for people to overcome. However, introducing composite indicators into such problems allows the opportunity to reduce the problem's complexity. Emerging Trends in the Development and Application of Composite Indicators is an authoritative reference source for the latest scholarly research on the benefits and challenges presented by building composite indicators, and how these techniques promote optimized critical thinking. Highlighting various indicator types and quantitative methods, this book is ideally designed for developers, researchers, public officials, and upper-level students.

In the last few years the automobile design process is required to become more responsible and responsibly related to environmental needs. Basing the automotive design not only on the appearance, the visual appearance of the vehicle needs to be thought together and deeply integrated with the power developed by the engine. The purpose of this book is to try to present the new technologies development scenario, and not to give any indication about the direction that should be given to the research in this complex and multi-disciplinary challenging field.

Investigating the incessant technology growth and the even higher complexity of engineering systems, one of the crucial requirements to confidently steer both scientific and industrial challenges is to identify an appropriate measurement approach. A general process can be considered effective and under control if the following elements are consciously and cyclically managed: numeric target, adequate tools, output analysis, and corrective actions. The role of metrology is to rigorously harmonize this virtuous circle, providing guidance in terms of instruments, standards, and techniques to improve the robustness and the accuracy of the results. This book is designed to offer an interdisciplinary experience into the science of measurement, not only covering high-level measurement strategies but also supplying analytical details and experimental setups.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 14th International Workshop on Algebraic Development Techniques, WADT'99, held in Toulouse, France in September 1999. The 23 revised full papers presented together with three invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 69 workshop presentations. The papers address the following topics: algebraic specification and other specification formalisms, test and validation, concurrent processes applications, logic and validation, combining formalisms, subsorts and partiality, structuring, rewriting, co-algebras and sketches, refinement, institutions and categories, and ASM specifications.