springer springer jun 1999 (393 results)

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -In the ten years since the first MAAMAW was held in 1989, at King's College, Cambridge, the field of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) has flourished. It has attracted an increasing amount of theoretical and applied research. During this decade, important efforts have been made to establish the scientific and technical foundations of MAS. MAAMAW publications are testimony to the progress achieved in key areas such as agent modelling and reasoning, multi-agent interaction and communication, and multi-agent organisation and social structure. Research results have covered a wide range of inter-related topics in each area including agent architectures, reasoning models, logics, conflict resolution, negotiation, resource allocation, load balancing, learning; social behaviour and interaction, languages and protocols, interagent and agent-human communication, social models, agent roles, norms and social laws, and static and dynamic organisational structures. The feasibility and the viability of the proposed models and techniques have been demonstrated through MAS applications in heterogeneous domains including electronic commerce, co-operative work, telecommunications, social and biological systems, robotics, office and business automation, public administration, social simulations and banking. As the applicability of the technology became understood, the multi-agent paradigm has been progressively accepted by product managers and system developers, giving rise to a considerable amount of business expectation from industry. These expectations do not rest on the concept or metaphor of agent, but on the development of MAS useful in an industrial setting, with real-time systems presenting the biggest challenge.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -Leaps of Faith is a compelling and highly praised critique of beliefs in paranormal phenomena, miracles, and the like, written by the noted British psychologist Nicholas Humphrey. The author argues that our beliefs in the supernatural typically originate in anxiety about the future and are sustained by an entrenched belief in the duality of mind and body. More than just a debunking of supernaturalism, Leaps of Faith explores the psychology of the all-too-human tendency for wishful thinking. It explains why we hark after a fantasy world of magic and miracles - even when, arguably, we already live in the only world that offers real hope of fulfillment.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 260 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -This book is a tour-de-force on how human consciousness may have evolved. From the 'phantom pain' experienced by people who have lost their limbs to the uncanny faculty of 'blindsight,' Humphrey argues that raw sensations are central to all conscious states and that consciousness must have evolved, just like all other mental faculties, over time from our ancestors' bodily responses to pain and pleasure. 'Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 240 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware - From the editors of the wildly successful Beyond Calculation comes another exploration of the overwhelming impact of computers on our future. This time, the essays focus on the human impact of computer technology and culture: how computers will affect the ways we teach, learn, communicate, relate to each other, and live in the coming decades. The contributors, representing the best of many fields, include Secretary of Defense William Perry on how computers will affect warfare; Brian Ferrin on technology and storytelling; Patti Maes on intelligent agents; Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann on the quality of information; Eliot Soloway on the impact of computers on education; and many more. Like Beyond Calculation, praised by the New York Times for its 'astonishing intellectual reach,' this sequel engages readers with some of the most compelling and important issues of our time.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. Neuware - Contemporary Issues in Marketing provides an innovative approach to learning about key marketing concepts based on a collaboration with Marketing Week.This book provides an overview of the main elements of marketing together with the key issues in contemporary marketing, explored through the reproduction of significant clippings from Marketing Week. Questions on these clippings can be used as assignments and seminar topics, whilst answers and possible 'problem solving' approaches are suggested.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -In Chapter 6, we describe the concept of braid equivalence from the topological point of view. This will lead us to a new concept braid homotopy that is discussed fully in the next chapter. As just mentioned, in Chapter 7, we shall discuss the difference between braid equivalence and braid homotopy. Also in this chapter, we define a homotopy braid invariant that turns out to be the so-called Milnor number. Chapter 8 is a quick review of knot theory, including Alexander's theorem. While, Chapters 9 is devoted to Markov's theorem, which allows the application of this theory to other fields. This was one of the motivations Artin had in mind when he began studying braid theory. In Chapter 10, we discuss the primary applications of braid theory to knot theory, including the introduction of the most important invariants of knot theory, the Alexander polynomial and the Jones polynomial. In Chapter 11, motivated by Dirac's string problem, the ordinary braid group is generalized to the braid groups of various surfaces. We discuss these groups from an intuitive and diagrammatic point of view. In the last short chapter 12, we present without proof one theorem, due to Gorin and Lin [GoL] , that is a surprising application of braid theory to the theory of algebraic equations.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 292 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -Image-based rendering, as an area of overlap between computer graphics and computer vision, uses computer vision techniques to aid in sythesizing new views of scenes. Image-based rendering methods are having a substantial impact on the field of computer graphics, and also play an important role in the related field of multimedia systems, for applications such as teleconferencing, remote instruction and surgery, virtual reality and entertainment.The book develops a novel way of formalizing the view synthesis problem under the full perspective model, yielding a clean, linear warping equation. It shows new techniques for dealing with visibility issues such as partial occlusion and 'holes'. Furthermore, the author thoroughly re-evaluates the requirements that view synthesis places on stereo algorithms and introduces two novel stereo algorithms specifically tailored to the application of view synthesis.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 188 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -Whyanothertextbook The statistical community generally agrees that at the upper undergraduate level, or the beginning master¿s level, students of statistics should begin to study the mathematical methods of the eld. We assume that by thentheywillhavestudiedtheusualtwo yearcollegesequence,includingcalculus through multiple integrals and the basics of matrix algebra. Therefore, they are ready to learn the foundations of their subject, in much more depth than is usual in an applied, ¿cookbook,¿ introduction to statistical methodology. There are a number of well written, widely used textbooks for such a course. These seem to re ect a consensus for what needs to be taught and how it should be taught. So, why do we need yet another book for this spot in the curriculum I learned mathematical statistics with the help of the standard texts. Since then, Ihavetaughtthiscourseandsimilaronesmanytimes,atseveraldifferentuniversi ties,usingwell thought oftextbooks.Butfromthebeginning,Ifeltthatsomething was wrong. It took me several years to articulate the problem, and many more to assemble my solution into the book you have in your hand. You see, I spend the rest of my day in statistical consulting and statistical re search. I should have been preparing my mathematical statistics students to join me in this exciting work. But from seeing what the better graduating seniors and beginning graduate students usually knew, I concluded that the standard curricu lumwasnotteachingthemtobesophisticatedcitizensofthestatisticalcommunity.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 476 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -Over the past decade there has been an increasing demand for suitable material in the area of mathematical modelling as applied to science and engineering. There has been a constant movement in the emphasis from developing proficiency in purely mathematical techniques to an approach which caters for industrial and scientific applications in emerging new technologies. In this textbook we have attempted to present the important fundamental concepts of mathematical modelling and to demonstrate their use in solving certain scientific and engineering problems. This text, which serves as a general introduction to the area of mathematical modelling, is aimed at advanced undergraduate students in mathematics or closely related disciplines, e.g., students who have some prerequisite knowledge such as one-variable calculus, linear algebra and ordinary differential equations. Some prior knowledge of computer programming would be useful but is not considered essential. The text also contains some more challenging material which could prove attractive to graduate students in engineering or science who are involved in mathematical modelling. In preparing the text we have tried to use our experience of teaching mathematical modelling to undergraduate students in a wide range of areas including mathematics and computer science and disciplines in engineering and science. An important aspect of the text is the use made of scientific computer software packages such as MAPLE for symbolic algebraic manipulations and MA TLAB for numerical simulation.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 304 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -This monograph deals with two aspects of the theory of elliptic genus: its topological aspect involving elliptic functions, and its representation theoretic aspect involving vertex operator super-algebras. For the second aspect, elliptic genera are shown to have the structure of modules over certain vertex operator super-algebras. The vertex operators corresponding to parallel tensor fields on closed Riemannian Spin Kähler manifolds such as Riemannian tensors and Kähler forms are shown to give rise to Virasoro algebras and affine Lie algebras. This monograph is chiefly intended for topologists and it includes accounts on topics outside of topology such as vertex operator algebras.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 404 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -The Eighth EPSRC Numerical Analysis Summer School was held at the Uni versity of Leicester from the 5th to the 17th of July, 1998. This was the third Numerical Analysis Summer School to be held in Leicester. The previous meetings, in 1992 and 1994, had been carefully structured to ensure that each week had a coherent 'theme'. For the 1998 meeting, in order to widen the audience, we decided to relax this constraint. Speakers were chosen to cover what may appear, at first sight, to be quite diverse areas of numeri cal analysis. However, we were pleased with the extent to which the ideas cohered, and particularly enjoyed the discussions which arose from differing interpretations of those ideas. We would like to thank all six of our main speakers for the care which they took in the preparation and delivery of their lectures. In this volume we present their lecture notes in alphabetical rather than chronological order. Nick Higham, Alastair Spence and Nick Trefethen were the speakers in week 1, while Bernardo Cockburn, Stig Larsson and Bob Skeel were the speakers in week 2. Another new feature of this meeting compared to its predecessors was that we had 'invited seminars'. A numer of established academics based in the UK were asked to participate in the afternoon seminar program. 268 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -Mathematics majors at Michigan State University take a ¿Capstone¿ course near the end of their undergraduate careers. The content of this course varies with each offering. Its purpose is to bring together different topics from the undergraduate curriculum and introduce students to a developing area in mathematics. This text was originally written for a Capstone course. Basicwavelettheoryisanaturaltopicforsuchacourse. Byname, wavelets date back only to the 1980s. On the boundary between mathematics and engineering, wavelet theory shows students that mathematics research is still thriving, with important applications in areas such as image compression and the numerical solution of differential equations. The author believes that the essentials of wavelet theory are suf ciently elementary to be taught successfully to advanced undergraduates. This text is intended for undergraduates, so only a basic background in linear algebra and analysis is assumed. We do not require familiarity with complex numbers and the roots of unity. These are introduced in the rst two sections of chapter 1. In the remainder of chapter 1 we review linear algebra. Students should be familiar with the basic de nitions in sections 1. 3 and 1. 4. From our viewpoint, linear transformations are the primary object of study; v Preface vi a matrix arises as a realization of a linear transformation. Many students may have been exposed to the material on change of basis in section 1. 4, but may bene t from seeing it again. In section 1.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 524 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware - This book provides an upto date information on metric, connection and curva ture symmetries used in geometry and physics. More specifically, we present the characterizations and classifications of Riemannian and Lorentzian manifolds (in particular, the spacetimes of general relativity) admitting metric (i.e., Killing, ho mothetic and conformal), connection (i.e., affine conformal and projective) and curvature symmetries. Our approach, in this book, has the following outstanding features: (a) It is the first-ever attempt of a comprehensive collection of the works of a very large number of researchers on all the above mentioned symmetries. (b) We have aimed at bringing together the researchers interested in differential geometry and the mathematical physics of general relativity by giving an invariant as well as the index form of the main formulas and results. (c) Attempt has been made to support several main mathematical results by citing physical example(s) as applied to general relativity. (d) Overall the presentation is self contained, fairly accessible and in some special cases supported by an extensive list of cited references. (e) The material covered should stimulate future research on symmetries. Chapters 1 and 2 contain most of the prerequisites for reading the rest of the book. We present the language of semi-Euclidean spaces, manifolds, their tensor calculus; geometry of null curves, non-degenerate and degenerate (light like) hypersurfaces. All this is described in invariant as well as the index form.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. Neuware - TO THE INSTRUCTOR I hear, I forget. I see, I remember. I do, I understand. Anonymous OBJECTIVES OF WORKSHOP CALCULUS 1. Impel students to be active learners. 2. Help students to develop confidence about their ability to think about and do mathematics. 3. Encourage students to read, write, and discuss mathematical ideas. 4. Enhance students' understanding of the fundamental concepts under- ing the calculus. 5. Prepare students to use calculus in other disciplines. 6. Inspire students to continue their study of mathematics. 7. Provide an environment where students enjoy learning and doing ma- ematics. xi xii To the Instructor THE WORKSHOP APPROACH Workshop Calculus with Graphing Calculators: Guided Exploration with Review provides students with a gateway into the study of calculus. The two-volume series integrates a review of basic precalculus ideas with the study of c- cepts traditionally encountered in beginning calculus: functions, limits, - rivatives, integrals, and an introduction to integration techniques and d- ferential equations. It seeks to help students develop the confidence, understanding, and skills necessary for using calculus in the natural and - cial sciences, and for continuing their study of mathematics.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -There has been a great deal of excitement in the last ten years over the emer gence of new mathematical techniques for the analysis and control of nonlinear systems: Witness the emergence of a set of simplified tools for the analysis of bifurcations, chaos, and other complicated dynamical behavior and the develop ment of a comprehensive theory of geometric nonlinear control. Coupled with this set of analytic advances has been the vast increase in computational power available for both the simulation and visualization of nonlinear systems as well as for the implementation in real time of sophisticated, real-time nonlinear control laws. Thus, technological advances havebolstered the impact of analytic advances and produced a tremendous variety of new problems and applications that are nonlinear in an essential way. Nonlinear controllaws have been implemented for sophisticated flight control systems on board helicopters, and vertical take offand landing aircraft; adaptive, nonlinearcontrollaws havebeen implementedfor robot manipulators operating either singly, or in cooperation on a multi-fingered robot hand; adaptive control laws have been implemented forjetengines andautomotive fuel injection systems, as well as for automated highway systems and air traffic management systems, to mention a few examples. Bifurcation theory has been used to explain and understand the onset of fiutterin the dynamics of aircraft wing structures, the onset of oscillations in nonlinear circuits, surge and stall in aircraft engines, voltage collapse in a power transmission network.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 700 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware - The decade prior to publication has seen an explosive growth in com- tational speed and memory and a rapid enrichment in our understa- ing of arti cial neural networks. These two factors have cooperated to at last provide systems engineers and statisticians with a working, prac- cal, and successful ability to routinely make accurate complex, nonlinear models of such ill-understood phenomena as physical, economic, social, and information-based time series and signals and of the patterns h- den in high-dimensional data. The models are based closely on the data itself and require only little prior understanding of the stochastic mec- nisms underlying these phenomena. Among these models, the feedforward neural networks, also called multilayer perceptrons, have lent themselves to the design of the widest range of successful forecasters, pattern clas- ers, controllers, and sensors. In a number of problems in optical character recognition and medical diagnostics, such systems provide state-of-the-art performance and such performance is also expected in speech recognition applications. The successful application of feedforward neural networks to time series forecasting has been multiply demonstrated and quite visibly so in the formation of market funds in which investment decisions are based largely on neural network-based forecasts of performance. The purpose of this monograph, accomplished by exposing the meth- ology driving these developments, is to enable you to engage in these - plications and, by being brought to several research frontiers, to advance the methodology itself.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -Today's microprocessors are the powerful descendants of the von Neumann 1 computer dating back to a memo of Burks, Goldstine, and von Neumann of 1946. The so-called von Neumann architecture is characterized by a se quential control flow resulting in a sequential instruction stream. A program counter addresses the next instruction if the preceding instruction is not a control instruction such as, e. g. , jump, branch, subprogram call or return. An instruction is coded in an instruction format of fixed or variable length, where the opcode is followed by one or more operands that can be data, addresses of data, or the address of an instruction in the case of a control instruction. The opcode defines the types of operands. Code and data are stored in a common storage that is linear, addressed in units of memory words (bytes, words, etc. ). The overwhelming design criterion of the von Neumann computer was the minimization of hardware and especially of storage. The most simple implementation of a von Neumann computer is characterized by a microar chitecture that defines a closely coupled control and arithmetic logic unit (ALU), a storage unit, and an I/O unit, all connected by a single connection unit. The instruction fetch by the control unit alternates with operand fetches and result stores for the AL U.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 416 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -This book is intended as a self-contained exposition of hyperbolic functional dif ferential inequalities and their applications. Its aim is to give a systematic and unified presentation of recent developments of the following problems: (i) functional differential inequalities generated by initial and mixed problems, (ii) existence theory of local and global solutions, (iii) functional integral equations generated by hyperbolic equations, (iv) numerical method of lines for hyperbolic problems, (v) difference methods for initial and initial-boundary value problems. Beside classical solutions, the following classes of weak solutions are treated: Ca ratheodory solutions for quasilinear equations, entropy solutions and viscosity so lutions for nonlinear problems and solutions in the Friedrichs sense for almost linear equations. The theory of difference and differential difference equations ge nerated by original problems is discussed and its applications to the constructions of numerical methods for functional differential problems are presented. The monograph is intended for different groups of scientists. Pure mathemati cians and graduate students will find an advanced theory of functional differential problems. Applied mathematicians and research engineers will find numerical al gorithms for many hyperbolic problems. The classical theory of partial differential inequalities has been described exten sively in the monographs [138, 140, 195, 225). As is well known, they found applica tions in differential problems. The basic examples of such questions are: estimates of solutions of partial equations, estimates of the domain of the existence of solu tions, criteria of uniqueness and estimates of the error of approximate solutions.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 324 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -MPEG-4 is the multimedia standard for combining interactivity, natural and synthetic digital video, audio and computer-graphics. Typical applications are: internet, video conferencing, mobile videophones, multimedia cooperative work, teleteaching and games. With MPEG-4 the next step from block-based video (ISO/IEC MPEG-1, MPEG-2, CCITT H.261, ITU-T H.263) to arbitrarily-shaped visual objects is taken. This significant step demands a new methodology for system analysis and design to meet the considerably higher flexibility of MPEG-4.Motion estimation is a central part of MPEG-1/2/4 and H.261/H.263 video compression standards and has attracted much attention in research and industry, for the following reasons: it is computationally the most demanding algorithm of a video encoder (about 60-80% of the total computation time), it has a high impact on the visual quality of a video encoder, and it is not standardized, thus being open to competition.Algorithms, Complexity Analysis, and VLSI Architectures for MPEG-4 Motion Estimation covers in detail every single step in the design of a MPEG-1/2/4 or H.261/H.263 compliant video encoder: Fast motion estimation algorithmsComplexity analysis toolsDetailed complexity analysis of a software implementation of MPEG-4 videoComplexity and visual quality analysis of fast motion estimation algorithms within MPEG-4Design space on motion estimation VLSI architecturesDetailed VLSI design examples of (1) a high throughput and (2) a low-power MPEG-4 motion estimator.Algorithms, Complexity Analysis and VLSI Architectures for MPEG-4 Motion Estimation is an important introduction to numerous algorithmic, architectural and system design aspects of the multimedia standard MPEG-4. As such, all researchers, students and practitioners working in image processing, video coding or system and VLSI design will find this book of interest.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 252 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -The present book is intended to be a systematic text on topological vector spaces and presupposes familiarity with the elements of general topology and linear algebra. The author has found it unnecessary to rederive these results, since they are equally basic for many other areas of mathematics, and every beginning graduate student is likely to have made their acquaintance. Simi larly, the elementary facts on Hilbert and Banach spaces are widely known and are not discussed in detail in this book, which is :plainly addressed to those readers who have attained and wish to get beyond the introductory level. The book has its origin in courses given by the author at Washington State University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Ttibingen in the years 1958-1963. At that time there existed no reasonably ccmplete text on topological vector spaces in English, and there seemed to be a genuine need for a book on this subject. This situation changed in 1963 with the appearance of the book by Kelley, Namioka et al. [1] which, through its many elegant proofs, has had some influence on the final draft of this manuscript. Yet the two books appear to be sufficiently different in spirit and subject matter to justify the publication of this manuscript; in particular, the present book includes a discussion of topological tensor products, nuclear spaces, ordered topological vector spaces, and an appendix on positive operators.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 368 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -For many years Serge Lang has given talks to undergraduates on selected items in mathematics which could be extracted at a level understandable by students who have had calculus. Written in a conversational tone, Lang now presents a collection of those talks as a book. The talks could be given by faculty, but even better, they may be given by students in seminars run by the students themselves. Undergraduates, and even some high school students, will enjoy the talks which cover prime numbers, the abc conjecture, approximation theorems of analysis, Bruhat-Tits spaces, harmonic and symmetric polynomials, and more in a lively and informal style.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 132 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -Bones and joints are always under mechanical loading a key concept in understanding bone metabolism. Among the most common diseases of bones and joints in the elderly are osteoporosis and joint osteoarthritis. Dynamic changes in mechanical loading give rise to problems resulting in stenosis of the spinal column at the cervical, thoracic, and lumbar levels. Mechanical loading also accelerates joint destruction caused by inflammation from such conditions as chronic rheumatoid arthritis. An understanding of mechanical loading is essential therefore to clinicians, basic researchers, and engineers working with bones and joints. Providing up-to-date research and clinical findings, the contents of this volume are from the papers, symposia, and special lectures presented at the 12th Annual Meeting of the Orthopaedic Research Meeting of the Japanese Orthopaedic Association in Niigata, in October 1997.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 344 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -The analysis of justice between generations proposed in this book is based first of all on a critical reading of Rawls' theory of justice, but it also pays attention to the existential and cultural context of our intuitions about intergenerational equity. Although the desire for justice supplies an independent reason for action, the unprecedented character of the context in which that reason must operate necessarily raises the question of its psychological support: we want justice for future people, but what interest do we have in their welfare in the first place I have tried to capture this double orientation by making use of Thomas Nagel's conceptual dichotomy between the objective, detached point of view, and the subjective (in our case: the cuturally and historically situated) perspective. There is, on the one hand, a desire for justice that tends towards the definition of transhistorical standards, detached from the particular values ofthe time and place; there is, on the other hand, a motivational background that is tied to our present position in history, and nourished by the values we presently believe in. I have attempted to bridge the gap between the one and the other dimension by different conceptual avenues, the principal one being a time-related interpretation of Rawls' concept of equal liberty: justice wants us to maintain the worth of liberty over time by perpetuating the conditions of its meaningful exercise.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 184 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -This volume presents a completely new and very substantial body of information about the origin of agriculture and plant use in Africa. All the evidence is very recent and for the first time all this archaeobotanical evidence is brought together in one volume (at present the information is unpublished or published in many disparate journals, confer ence reports, monographs, site reports, etc. ). Early publications concerned with the origins of African plant domestication relied almost exclusively on inferences made from the modem distribution of the wild progenitors of African cultivars; there existed virtually no archaeobotanical data at that time. Even as recently as the early 1990s direct evidence for the transition to farming and the relative roles of indigenous versus Near Eastern crops was lacking for most of Africa. This volume changes that and presents a wide range of ex citing new evidence, including case studies from Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Uganda, Egypt, and Sudan, which range in date from 8000 BP to the present day. The volume ad dresses topics such as the role of wild plant resources in hunter-gatherer and farming com munities, the origins of agriculture, the agricultural foundation of complex societies, long-distance trade, the exchange of foods and crops, and the human impact on local vege tation-all key issues of current research in archaeology, anthropology, agronomy, ecol ogy, and economic history.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 300 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -This bibliography contains the publications of Husserl and the main secondary literature on Husserl, from Husserl's earliest publication (1887) till today (1997). As the collection of material was conduded in lune 1997, the list of publications for the year 1997 is of course incomplete. In this bibliography publications in the following languages have been induded: German, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch - for both primary and secondary literature. Since this bibliography has been based primarily on the consultation of the induded documents (and not restricted to copying already existing bibliographies), it was not possible to indude publications in languages other than those mentioned. The bibliography has been constructed in the following way: 1. The list of Husserl's works and secondary literature by individual authors is preceded by a list of all edited volumes in which a text by or on Husserl is published. This list is ordered chronologica11y and runs from 1921 ti11 1997 (inclusive). Edited volumes of the same year are classified according to language, and this in the order mentioned above: German, English, French, etc. Edited volumes with a title in more than one language are classified according to the above order of languages (this of course concerns only the title of the edited volume, not the title(s) of the individual contributions). This order is maintained throughout the other parts of the bibliography.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 460 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -Changes in health care are at a breakneck pace. Regardless of the many changes we have collectively experienced, delivering health care has been, is, and will continue to be an enormously information-intensive process. Whether caring for a patient or a population, whether managing a clinic or a continuum, we are in a knowledge exchange business. A major task for our industry, and the task for chief information officers (CIOs), is to find and apply improved strategies and technologies for managing healthcare information. In a fiercely competitive healthcare marketplace, the pressures to suc ceed in this undertaking-and the rewards associated with success-are enormous. While the task is still daunting, we can all be encouraged by progress being made in information management. There are documented successes throughout health care, and there is growing recognition by healthcare chief executive officers and boards that information strategies, and their deployment, are essential to organizational efficiency, quite pos sibly organizational survival.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 236 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -1 The Purpose of This Text This text has been written in response to two trends that have gained considerable momentum over the past few years. The first is the decision by many undergraduate engineering and science departments to abandon the traditional programming course based on the aging Fortran 77 standard. This decision is not surprising, considering the more modem features found in languages such as Pascal and C. However, Pascal never developed a strong following in scientific computing, and its use is in decline. The new Fortran 90 standard defines a powerful, modem language, but this long-overdue redesign of Fortran has come too late to prevent many colleges and universities from switching to C. The acceptance of C by scientists and engineers is based perhaps as. much on their perceptions of C as an important language, which it certainly is, and on C programming experience as a highly marketable skill, as it is on the suitability of C for scientific computation. For whatever reason, C or its derivative C++ is now widely taught as the first and often only programming language for undergraduates in science and engineering. The second trend is the evolving nature of the undergraduate engineering curriculum. At a growing number of institutions, the traditional approach of stressing theory and mathematics fundamentals in the early undergraduate years, and postponing real engineering applications until later in the curriculum, has been turned upside down.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 500 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -A balanced view of recent research on reading disability is presented by leading international scholars representing various subdisciplines of psychology and allied sciences. The volume provides researchers, graduate students, educators and other professionals with up-dated and practical useful knowledge of and insights into the latest theories and findings of the nature and causes of reading disability. Rational guidelines for assessment, prevention and intervention are also provided, based on such concepts as phonological and orthographical processing, automaticity and metacognition. Several chapters are written without technical terminology, yet with scientific rigor, and should be readable by a wide audience.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 306 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -In 1907 Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer defended his doctoral dissertation on the foundations of mathematics and with this event the modem version of mathematical intuitionism came into being. Brouwer attacked the main currents of the philosophy of mathematics: the formalists and the Platonists. In tum, both these schools began viewing intuitionism as the most harmful party among all known philosophies of mathematics. That was the origin of the now-90-year-old debate over intuitionism. As both sides have appealed in their arguments to philosophical propositions, the discussions have attracted the attention of philosophers as well. One might ask here what role a philosopher can play in controversies over mathematical intuitionism. Can he reasonably enter into disputes among mathematicians I believe that these disputes call for intervention by a philo sopher. The three best-known arguments for intuitionism, those of Brouwer, Heyting and Dummett, are based on ontological and epistemological claims, or appeal to theses that properly belong to a theory of meaning. Those lines of argument should be investigated in order to find what their assumptions are, whether intuitionistic consequences really follow from those assumptions, and finally, whether the premises are sound and not absurd. The intention of this book is thus to consider seriously the arguments of mathematicians, even if philosophy was not their main field of interest. There is little sense in disputing whether what mathematicians said about the objectivity and reality of mathematical facts belongs to philosophy, or not.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 232 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -This book treats modern aspects of open systems, measurement, and decoherence in relativistic quantum theory. It starts with a comprehensive introduction to the problems related to measuring local and nonlocal observables and the constraints imposed by the causality principle. In the articles that follow, the emphasis lies on new theoretical models. Quantum dynamical semigroups and stochastic processes in Hilbert space are introduced, as are dynamical reduction models. Further topics include relativistic generalizations of the continuous spontaneous localization model and of the quantum state diffusion model and decoherence and the dynamical selection of preferred basis sets in the framework of continuous measurement theory and of the decoherent histories approach. Mathematical aspects of quantum measurement theory and dynamical entropies are also studied from the viewpoint of the operational approach to quantum mechanics.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 252 pp. Englisch.