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Birds and Beasts of Ancient Mesoamerica links Precolumbian animal imagery with scientific data related to animal morphology and behavior, providing in-depth studies of the symbolic importance of animals and birds in Postclassic period Mesoamerica. Representations of animal deities in Mesoamerica can be traced back at least to Middle Preclassic Olmec murals, stone carvings, and portable art such as lapidary work and ceramics. Throughout the history of Mesoamerica real animals were merged with fantastical creatures, creating zoological oddities not unlike medieval European bestiaries. According to Spanish chroniclers, the Aztec emperor was known to keep exotic animals in royal aviaries and zoos. The Postclassic period was characterized by an iconography that was shared from central Mexico to the Yucatan peninsula and south to Belize. In addition to highlighting the symbolic importance of nonhuman creatures in general, the volume focuses on the importance of the calendrical and astronomical symbolism associated with animals and birds. Inspired by and dedicated to the work of Mesoamerican scholar Cecelia Klein and featuring imagery from painted books, monumental sculpture, portable arts, and archaeological evidence from the field of zooarchaeology, Birds and Beasts of Ancient Mesoamerica highlights the significance of the animal world in Postclassic and early colonial Mesoamerica. It will be important to students and scholars studying Mesoamerican art history, archaeology, ethnohistory, and zoology.

The field of visible light communication (VLC) has diverse applications to the end user including streaming audio, video, high-speed data browsing, voice over internet and online gaming. This comprehensive textbook discusses fundamental aspects, research activities and modulation techniques in the field of VLC.Visible Light Communication: A Comprehensive Theory and Applications with MATLAB® discusses topics including line of sight (LOS) propagation model, non-line of sight (NLOS) propagation model, carrier less amplitude and phase modulation, multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO), non-linearities of optical sources, orthogonal frequency-division multiple access, non-orthogonal multiple access and single-carrier frequency-division multiple access in depth. Primarily written for senior undergraduate and graduate students in the field of electronics and communication engineering for courses on optical wireless communication and VLC, this book: Provides up-to-date literature in the field of VLC Presents MATLAB codes and simulations to help readers understand simulations Discusses applications of VLC in enabling vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communication Covers topics including radio frequency (RF) based wireless communications and VLC Presents modulation formats along with the derivations of probability of error expressions pertaining to different variants of optical OFDM

This book demonstrates the research on VLC based indoor localization in four aspects: first, it constructs the concept and model of the system; second, positioning algorithms, as the main issue in indoor localization, are detailed; third, many approaches are proposed to further improve the positioning performance; fourth, challenges will be detailed. Impulse response with multipath reflections are analyzed. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is proposed, and positioning performance is largely improved compared to On-off-keying (OOK) modulation. The readers will get a broad view of VLC based indoor localization from the background to the future challenges.