More like poems for piano than traditional, structured songs, the music of George Winston plays like a lyrical soundtrack to the natural world's rhythms, and nowhere is this more brilliantly enacted than on his third album, Winter into Spring. There are wondrous, beautiful melodies here, but what's amazing is Winston's intense inspiration that spills from his spirit and flows straight to the keys. He uses simple techniques that would hardly impress the most intellectual of music critics but can bring any listener with an artist's heart to tears. Tense and full of motion, his Steinway urgently rolls through songs like aspen leaves fluttering in the wind. From the first sparse, tinkling notes of "January Stars," Winston pulls you into his solitary dreamscape and doesn't let you go until the CD's end. During "January Stars" it's hard not to imagine standing in crunchy snow while staring up at stars glittering in a black, expansive sky. Another standout, the 10-minute "Rain," may be the most archetypal of Winston pieces. Beginning with serene, deliberate melodies, the piece jumps into a chiming complexity that grows until the listener is drenched in streams of urgent, rushing-watery notes. It's fitting Winston named this album after a transition because the music couldn't take you to lovelier places. A masterpiece.

Karen Karleski, amazon.com

Yoko Matsugane (Matsugane Yoko) (born May 26, 1982) is a Japanese gravure (or bikini) idol from Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan. She is famous for her voluptuous figure.
She has released several DVDs and photobooks and has appeared on several TV shows in Japan. As of January 2006, Yoko left her modeling agency, but is still active in producing DVDs and photo sets. At the times of the release of her latest DVD she usually attends promotional events where her fans get to meet their idol and take a picture with her. These events are most often held in department stores in the Akihabara district of Tokyo.

If you are looking for excellent solo piano music, look no further. Autumn is the predecessor to George Winston's 1982 masterpiece, December, and fittingly poses as a worthy runner-up to the pianist's very best work. It's difficult to capture such passionate performance on a solo piano studio recording, but George Winston's sincerity and emotion shimmers through each track on this remarkable disc.

Aaron Blight, AMAZON.com

Caifanes - El Nervio del Volcan
Original Release Date: June 28, 1994 | FLAC | 342MB | rs.com

An up-close look at the theory behind and application of extremum seeking
Originally developed as a method of adaptive control for hard-to-model systems, extremum seeking solves some of the same problems as today's neural network techniques, but in a more rigorous and practical way. Following the resurgence in popularity of extremum-seeking control in aerospace and automotive engineering, Real-Time Optimization by Extremum-Seeking Control presents the theoretical foundations and selected applications of this method of real-time optimization.

The use of evolutionary computation techniques has grown considerably over the past several years. Over this time, the use and applications of these techniques have been further enhanced resulting in a set of computational intelligence (also known as modern heuristics) tools that are particularly adept for solving complex optimization problems. Moreover, they are characteristically more robust than traditional methods based on formal logics or mathematical programming for many real world OR/MS problems. Hence, evolutionary computation techniques have dealt with complex optimization problems better than traditional optimization techniques although they can be applied to easy and simple problems where conventional techniques work well. Clearly there is a need for a volume that both reviews state-of-the-art evolutionary computation techniques, and surveys the most recent developments in their use for solving complex OR/MS problems. This volume on Evolutionary Optimization seeks to fill this need.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimization, EvoCOP 2006, held in Budapest, Hungary in April 2006.
The 24 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 77 submissions. The papers cover evolutionary algorithms as well as various other metaheuristics, like scatter search, tabu search, memetic algorithms, variable neighborhood search, greedy randomized adaptive search procedures, ant colony optimization, and particle swarm optimization algorithms. The papers deal with representations, heuristics, analysis of problem structures, and comparisons of algorithms. The list of studied combinatorial optimization problems includes prominent examples like graph coloring, knapsack problems, the traveling salesperson problem, scheduling, graph matching, as well as specific real-world problems.

This book uses the unifying thread of SEARCH as a way of bringing together the major techniques used in symbolic Artificial Intelligence. The authors include program code to illustrate concepts in both POP-11 and Prolog. Each chapter covers a technique and is then divided into three sections: 1) an introduction to the technique; 2) development of a low-level of (POP-11) implementation; and 3) development of a high-level (Prolog) implementation.
This is a practical book which should be valuable to those experienced in artificial intelligence, students with some programming background, and academics and professionals looking for a concise discussion of artificial intelligence through SEARCH