\begin{table}-\end{table} and \begin{figure}-\end{figure} are very useful placing figures and tables in a LaTeX document. However, it sometime creates lots of white spaces besides the figure/table. If you need to fit your document within a certain number of pages, you might want fully utilize those wasted white spaces.
You can use wrapfig.sty or wrapfloat.sty to wrap texts around a figure/table. Example:...\usepackage{wrap fig}
...
...
\begin{wrapfigure}{r}{0.5\textwidth} % put a figure on the right-hand side.
\centering
\includegraphics[scale=0.5]{7balls.pdf}
\caption{The 3D synthetic data set. \label{dataset}}
\end{wrap figure}
%
The GeoSOM uses a 10 frequency geodesic dome as the lattice which
contains 1002 neurons. The 2D SOM is trained on a $37\times27$
hexagonal grid (999 neurons). For both SOMs, the initial learning
rate is 0.8 and the initial update radius is 20, both of which
linearly decrease according to the training time. The neighborhood
function is the Gaussian. The experiment is conducted on a Pentium
IV 3.0GHz workstation with 1 GB memory. The operating system is
Windows XP Professional Edition. Note that the GeoSOM was
implemented in Java and SOM\_PAK was written in C.
This generates: | 
