This book was originally published in Japanese in October 1998 with the intention of providing a straightforward presentation of the sophisticated techniques used in optical waveguide analyses. Apparently, we were successful because the Japanese version has been well accepted by students in undergraduate, postgraduate, and Ph.D. courses as well as by researchers at universities and colleges and by researchers and engineers in the private sector of the optoelectronics field. Since we did not want to change the fundamental presentation of the original, this English version is, except for the newly added optical fiber analyses and problems, essentially a direct translation of the Japanese version. <...>

Presumably you are reading this book because you want to learn about exploring the subsurface. Your interest may be an active one in that you intend to actually go into the field and collect information; or you may be interested only in learning how subsurface information is gathered so you will be better equipped to judge recommendations for action based on field surveys. In either case you probably intend to lend your talents to improving humanity's lot by identifying sources for much-needed resources, protecting water supplies, providing safe building sites, locating areas for safe disposal of certain wastes, or extending knowledge of our forebears by finding where they lived and worked. We hope that this book will provide you with tools to accomplish your objectives and that you will be stimulated to continue your quest <...>

In this chapter, we review the principles and basic tools of crystallography. A thorough understanding of crystallography is a prerequisite for anybody who wishes to learn transmission electron microscopy (ТЕМ) and its applications to solid (mostly inorganic) materials. All diffraction techniques, whether they use x-rays, neutrons, or electrons, make extensive use of the concept of reciprocal space and, as we shall see repeatedly later on in this book, ТЕМ is a unique tool for directly probing this space. Hence, it is important that the ТЕМ user become as familiar with reciprocal space as with direct or crystal space.

Objectives:

• This section deals with detailed study of the principles of data warehousing, data mining, and knowledge discovery.

• The availability of very large volumes of such data has created a problem of how to extract useful, task-oriented knowledge.

• The aim of data mining is to extract implicit, previously unknown and potentially useful patterns from data.

• Data warehousing represents an ideal vision of maintaining a central repository of all organizational data.

• Centralization of data is needed to maximize user access and analysis.