This is a practical book, to be sure, but it is also a book about hope and posi-
tive change. I am quite sincere. The delivery of electricity is deeply rooted
in the principle of universal access; when clean, reliable energy is available it
contributes to poverty alleviation, improved social conditi ...
Commercial energy storage has moved from the margins to the mainstream as it
fosters flexibility in our smarter, increasingly integrated energy systems. The
energy density, availability, and relatively clean fossil profile of natural gas ensure
its critical role as a fuel for heating and electricity ...
December 2007, San Jose, California: It seems a long time ago.
I walked into a big networking company to head their small
Power over Ethernet (PoE) applications team. Surprisingly,
I hardly knew anything about PoE prior to that day, having been a
switching-power conversion engineer almost all my lif ...
The electrical power grid is often referred to as one of the most complex man-
made systems on Earth. Its importance to all aspects of our daily lives, economic
stability, and national security cannot be overstated, and the need for an updated,
secure, resilient, and smarter power grid infrastructur ...
The next avatar of the Internet will revolutionize our world. In time, it will
provide us a universal remote control, enabling us to monitor and control
physical objects located anywhere on the planet, using a smart phone. It will
make the universe around us programmable, allowing us to script the b ...
Radio frequency identification (RFID) is gaining in popularity, especially
as we find ourselves in this communications age and headed towards a
ubiquitous computing world. Automatic identification systems become
an important aspect not just in today’s technology but also as part of our
daily life. ...
To a quantum mechanic the whole universe is one godawful big interacting wavefunction ?
but to the rest of us, it’s a world full of separate and distinguishable objects that hurt us
when we kick them. At a few months of age, human children recognize objects, expect
them to be permanent and move con ...
Fun. We (your authors) wanted a word to describe our ultimate goal for this book, as well as a word
we hope you (our reader) will use to describe it, and that’s the one we chose. There are others goals,
of course, but in the end, when you’ve finished the book, we’re hoping you’ll have enjoyed th ...
There’s a story (it’s either an old vaudeville joke
or a Zen koan) in which a fisherman asks a fish,
“What’s the water like down there?” and the
fish replies “What is water?” If the story is just
a joke, the point is to make us laugh; but if it’s
a koan, the point is that the most obvious an ...
The basic topic of this book is solving problems from system and control theory using
convex optimization. We show that a wide variety of problems arising in system
and control theory can be reduced to a handful of standard convex and quasiconvex
optimization problems that involve matrix inequalitie ...
