Simple, practical, down to earth tools to understand how life works and how to create the life you want. A blend of ancient wisdom and functional tools for today's world.

Concepts embody our knowledge of the kinds of things there are in the world. Tying our past experiences to our present interactions with the environment, they enable us to recognize and understand new objects and events. Concepts are also relevant to understanding domains such as social situations, personality types, and even artistic styles. Yet like other phenomenologically simple cognitive processes such as walking or understanding speech, concept formation and use are maddeningly complex. Research since the 1970s and the decline of the "classical view" of concepts have greatly illuminated the psychology of concepts. But persistent theoretical disputes have sometimes obscured this progress. The Big Book of Concepts goes beyond those disputes to reveal the advances that have been made, focusing on the major empirical discoveries. By reviewing and evaluating research on diverse topics such as category learning, word meaning, conceptual development in infants and children, and the basic level of categorization, the book develops a much broader range of criteria than is usual for evaluating theories of concepts.

The concept of nanoarchitechtonics was introduced to describe the correct manipulation of nanoscale materials in the creation of nano-devices and applications. Nanoarchitectonics has begun to spread into many fields including nanostructured materials synthesis, supramolecular assembly, nanoscale structural fabrications, materials hybridizations, materials and structures for energy and environmental sciences, device and physical application, and bio- and medical applications. Following on from the 2012 title Manipulation of Nanoscale Materials, Concepts and Design of Materials Nanoarchitectonics covers the introductory features underlying the field, presenting a unifying overview of the theoretical aspects and emerging applications that are changing the capability to understand and design advanced functional materials. Edited by pioneers of the field, this book will appeal to researchers working in nanoscience, materials science, supramolecular chemistry, physical chemistry and organic chemistry, as well as graduate students in these areas.

Digital reference is a deceptively simple concept on its face: ""the incorporation of human expertise into the information system."" This lecture seeks to explore the question of how human expertise is incorporated into a variety of information systems, from libraries, to digital libraries, to information retrieval engines, to knowledge bases. What we learn through this endeavor, begun primarily in the library context, is that the models, methods, standards, and experiments in digital reference have wide applicability. We also catch a glimpse of an unfolding future in which ubiquitous computin.

In this charming volume, a noted English mathematician uses humor and anecdote to illuminate the concepts of groups, sets, subsets, topology, Boolean algebra, and other mathematical subjects. 200 illustrations.