The Anatomy of Architecture: Ontology and Metaphor in Batammaliba Architectural Expression

The Anatomy of Architecture: Ontology and Metaphor in Batammaliba Architectural Expression Review

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The Anatomy of Architecture: Ontology and Metaphor in Batammaliba Architectural Expression Feature

Blier illuminates the extraordinary architecture of the Batammaliba people of Western Africa, revealing these buildings as texts through which we can read the beliefs, psychology, traditions, and social concerns of their inhabitants. In doing so, she explores the role of vernacular architecture as an expression of culture.

"A splendid analysis of the centrality of architecture in the daily lives of the Batammaliba and its integral role in articulating social values....The story is beautifully told in the best of anthropological traditions."—Judith R. Blau, Contemporary Society

"A remarkable study....Blier's volume carries the study of African architecture to a qualitatively new level of scholarship. It introduces a new dimension whereby the architectural medium can be used to illuminate much of the entire belief system of any culture."—Labelle Prussin, African Arts

"In this excellent book Blier provides a richly detailed and searching account of what architecture means to the Batammaliba of northern Togo and Benin....The finest account I have yet read of the relations between systems of beliefs, ritual practices, and African aesthetics and plastic arts....The ethnography and basic insight should be the envy of any social anthropologist."—T.O. Beidelman, Man

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Self-Checking and Fault-Tolerant Digital Design (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Architecture and Design)

Self-Checking and Fault-Tolerant Digital Design (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Architecture and Design) Review

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Self-Checking and Fault-Tolerant Digital Design (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Architecture and Design) Feature

With VLSI chip transistors getting smaller and smaller, today's digital systems are more complex than ever before. This increased complexity leads to more cross-talk, noise, and other sources of transient errors during normal operation. Traditional off-line testing strategies cannot guarantee detection of these transient faults. And with critical applications relying on faster, more powerful chips, fault-tolerant, self-checking mechanisms must be built in to assure reliable operation.

Self-Checking and Fault-Tolerant Digital Design deals extensively with self-checking design techniques and is the only book that emphasizes major techniques for hardware fault tolerance. Graduate students in VLSI design courses as well as practicing designers will appreciate this balanced treatment of the concepts and theory underlying fault tolerance along with the practical techniques used to create fault-tolerant systems.

* Introduces reliability theory and the importance of maintainability
* Presents coding and the construction of several error detecting and correcting codes
* Discusses in depth, the available techniques for fail-safe design of combinational circuits
* Details checker design techniques for detecting erroneous bits and encoding output of self-checking circuits
* Demonstrates how to design self-checking sequential circuits, including a technique for fail-safe state machine design

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