springer netherlands apr 1984 (16 results)

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -General Editor: Peter Calow. Department of Zoology. University of Sheffield. England The main aim of this series will be to illustrate and to explain the way organisms 'make a living' in nature. At the heart of this - their func tional biology - is the way organisms acquire and then make use of resources in metabolism, movement, growth, reproduction, and so on. These processes will form the fundamental framework of all the books in the series. Each book will concentrate on a particular taxon (species, family, class or even phylum) and will bring together information on the form, physiology, ecology and evolutionary biology of the group. The aim will be not only to describe how organisms work, but also to consider why they have come to work in that way. By concentrating on taxa which are well known, it is hoped that the series will not only illustrate the success of selection, but also show the constraints imposed upon it by the physiological, morphological and developmentallimita tions of the groups. Another important feature of the series will be its organismic orienta tion. Each book will emphasise the importance of functional integra tion in the day-to-day lives and the evolution of organisms. This is crucial since, though it may be true that organisms can be considered as collections of gene-determined traits, they nevertheless interact with their environment as integrated wholes and it is in this context that individual traits have been subjected to natural selection and have evolved. 232 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -It is a common statement that because of its simplicity the bacterial cell makes an ideal model for the study of a wide variety of biological systems and phenomena. While no-one would dispute that much of our under standing of biological function derives from the study of the humble bacterium, the concept of a simple life-form would be hotly disputed by any scientist engaged in the determination of the relationship between structure and function within the bacterial cell. Bacteria are particularly amenable to intensive study; their physiology can be probed with powerful biochemical, genetical and immunological techniques. Each piece of information obtained inevitably raises as many questions as answers, and can lead to a highly confused picture being presented to the lay reader. Nowhere is this more evident than in the study of the surface layers of the bacterial cell. Examination of the early electron micrographs suggested that the bacterial cytoplasm was surrounded by some sort of semi-rigid layer, possessing sufficient intrinsic strength to protect the organism from osmotic lysis. The belief that the surface layers were rather passive led to their neglect, while researchers concentrated on the superficially more exciting cytoplasmic components. Over the last twenty years our view of the bacterial envelope has undergone extensive revision, revealing a structure of enormous complexity. 236 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on the Design, Construction and Operation of Solar Central Receiver Projects, Varese, Italy, June 4-8, 1984 118 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Growing specialization and diversification have brought a host of monographs and textbooks on increasingly specialized topics. However, the 'tree' of knowledge of mathematics and related fields does not' grow only by putting forth new branches. It also happens, quite often in fact, that branches which were thought to be completely disparate are suddenly seen to be related. Further, the kind and level of sophistication of mathematics applied in various sciences has changed drastically in recent years: measure theory is used (non-trivially) in regional and theoretical economics; algebraic geometry interacts with physics; the Minkowsky lemma, coding theory arid the struc ture of water meet one another in packing and covering theory; quantum fields, crystal defects and mathematical programming profit from homotopy theory; lie algebras are relevant to filtering; and prediction and electrical engineering can use Stein spaces. And in addition to this there are such new emerging subdisciplines as 'completely integrable systems', 'chaos, synergetics and large-5cale order', which are almost impossible to fit into the existing classification schemes. They draw upon widely different sections of mathematics. This program, Mathematics and Its Applications, is devoted to such (new) interrelations as exampla gratia: - a central concept which plays an important role in several different mathe matical and/or scientific specialized areas; - new applications of the results and ideas from one area of scientific en deavor into another; - influences which the results, problems and concepts of one field of enquiry have and have had on the development of another. 380 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -My interest in the issues considered here arose out of my great frustration in trying to attack the all-pervasive relativism of my students in introductory ethics courses at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. I am grateful to my students for forcing me to take moral relativism and skepticism seriously and for compelling me to argue for my own dogmatically maintained version of moral objectivism. The result is before the reader. The conclusions reached here (which can be described either as a minimal objectivism or as a moderate verson of relativism) are considerably weaker than those that I had expected and would have liked to have defended. I have arrived at these views kicking and screaming and have resisted them to the best of my ability. The arguments of this book are directed at those who deny that moral judgments can ever be correct (in any sense that is opposed to mistaken) and who also deny that we are ever rationally com pelled to accept one moral judgment as opposed to another. I have sought to take their views seriously and to fight them on their own grounds without making use of any assumptions that they would be unwilling to grant. My conclusion is that, while it is possible to refute the kind of extreme irrationalism that one often encounters, it is impossible to defend the kind of objectivist meta-ethical views that most of us want to hold, without begging the question against the non-objectivist. 234 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -One of the ironies of our time is the sparsity of useful analytic tools for understanding change and development within technology itself. For all the diatribes about the disastrous effects of technology on modern life, for all the equally uncritical paeans to technology as the panacea for human ills, the vociferous pro- and anti-technology movements have failed to illuminate the nature of technology. On a more scholarly level, in the midst of claims by Marxists and non-Marxists alike about the technological underpinnings of the major social and economic changes of the last couple of centuries, and despite advice given to government and industry about managing science and technology by a small army of consultants and policy analysts, technology itself remains locked inside an impenetrable black box, a deus ex machina to be invoked when all other explanations of puzzling social and economic pheoomena fail. The discipline that has probably done most to penetrate that black box in recent years by studying the 1 internal development of technology is history. Historians of technology and certain economic historians have carried out careful and detailed studies on the genesis and impact of technological innovations, and the structu-re of the social systems associated with those innovations. Within the past few decades tentative consensus about the periodization and the major traditions within the history of technology has begun to emerge, at least as far as Britain and America in the eighteenth and nineteenth century are concerned. 160 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Descartes's Principles 0. / Philosophy is his longest and most ambitious work; it is the only work in which he attempted to actually deduce scientific knowledge from Cartesian metaphysics, as he repeatedly claimed was possible. Whatever the success of this attempt, there can be no doubt that it was enormously influential. Cartesian celestial mechanics held sway for well over a century, and some of the best minds of that period, including Leibniz, Malebranche, Euler, and the Bernoullis, attempted to modify and quantify the Cartesian theory of vortices into an acceptable alternative to Newton's theory of universal gravitation. Thus, the Principles is not only of inherent and historical interest philosophically but is also a seminal document in the history of science and of 17th Century thought. Principles of Philosophy was first published in Latin, in 1644. In 1647, a French translation, done by the Abbe Claude Picot and containing a great deal of additional material and a number of alterations in the original text, was published with Descartes's enthusiastic approval. Unlike some English translations of portions of the Principles, this translation uses the Latin text as its primary source; however, a good deal of additional material from Picot's translation has been included. There are several reasons for this. First, there is good evidence that Descartes himself was responsible for some of the additional material, including, of course, the Preface to the French translation. 356 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Proceedings of the Seminar held in Brussels, Belgium, October 17-18, 1983 160 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -J. DE GROOTE One of the most ominous and troublesome complications of the liver disease is the appearance of hemorrhagic phenomena. Many careful clini cal observations about the relationship of liver function and of bilia ry tree pathology have been published. A vast amount of research work has been devoted to the subject. The severity of the hemorrhagic disor der is usually in relation to the liver disease. In mild chronic hepa titis or short lasting obstruction slight subcutaneous or mucosal blee ding may (lraw the attention of the patient and the doctor, but they are as such far from dangerous. However in acute hepatic insufficiency, in biliary cirrhosis the bleeding tendency is to be considered as a life threatening complication in about half of the cases. Moreover coagulation disturbances aggravate bleeding not only from ruptured oesophageal or gastric varices but also from gastritis or peptic ulcer. 11enometrorrhagia, epistaxis and gingival bleeding may be very trouble some in these conditions. The use of diagnostic procedures sucl. as liver puncture biopsy and peritoneoscopy are often impossible when platelets and prothrombine time are too low. In order to overcome this difficul ty a procedure has been worked out taking a biopsy through a trans jugular catheter placed in the hepatic vein. If a bleeding from the liver occurs it will be in the circulatory system and not cause any trouble. 198 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -The discovery of the earth's radiation belts in 1957 marked the beginning of what is now known as magnetospheric physics. The field has evolved normally from an early discovery phase through a period of exploration and into an era of quantitative studies of the dynamics of magnetized plasmas as they occur in nature. Such environments are common throughout the universe and have been studied in varying detail at the sun, the planets, pulsars, and certain radio galaxies. The purpose of this book is to describe basic quantitative aspects of magnetospheric physics. We use selected examples from the earth's magnetosphere to show how theory and data together form a quantitative framework for magnetospheric research. We have tried to organize the material along the philosophy of starting simply and adding com plexity only as necessary. We have avoided controversial and relatively new research topics and have tried to use as examples physical processes generally accepted as important within the earth's magnetospheric system. However, even in some of our examples, the question of whether the physical process applied to a particular problem is the dominant process, has yet to be answered. 252 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware 204 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -It was the British music critic Neville Cardus, writing on Debussy, who remarked how 'the great sea of Wagner threatened to overwhelm the world of nineteenth century music'. 1 There is an analogy in mid-nineteenth century agriculture where the great sea of Justus von Liebig developed a tidal wave which to this day conceals much of the original work and merit of others in the same field. Not only the general public but even students of agriculture may, or may not, recall the names of Persoz, Kuhlmann and Ville in France, Thaer and Sprengel in Germany, or even Lawes and Gilbert in England, to mention a few of them, whose pioneer works were not pub licised in the same didactic and polemical manner as those of Liebig. Among such pioneers was Jean Baptiste Boussingault (1802-1887) whose funda mental researches contributed to the emergence of agriculture from an empirical corpus of facts to the status of a science. Yet apart from his work in animal and crop science he also engaged in metallurgical investigations, biology and pure chemistry. The scientific world was already approaching the end of an era in which it was possible to embrace several disciplines adequately. With increasing specialisation, institutionalism and profeSsionalism in science the polymath was a gradually disappearing species. 302 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Information analysis, a popular subject among vegetation ecologists not too many years ago, is revisited in this short monograph. The overview provided and the systematic presentation of ideas and algorithms should interest data analysts with backgrounds in this or other fields of natural science where the question of classifi cation is addressed. The text gives the detailed descriptions and the listings of the computer programs. The authors were recipients of grant support from the Italian Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche 'Gruppo Biologia Naturalistica' (E. Feoli) and the Canadian Na tional Science and Engineering Research Council (L. Orl6ci) during completion of the project. The respective institutions of the University of Western Ontario and the University of Trieste provided facilities and computer time. Mrs. Stefani Tichbourne (London) typed the manuscript, Mr. Aulo Zampar (Trieste) gave computing assis tance and Mr. Furio Poropat (Trieste) translated some programs. We are most grateful to them. E. Feoli M. Lagonegro L. 156 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This is a book about dreaming and knowing, and about thinking that one can ascertain the difference. It is a book about the Bernards of the world who would have us believe that there is a humanly uncreated world existing en Boi that freely dis closes its forever fixed ontology, even though they too must accept that -many of the worlds we make as we try to under stand ourselves are counterfeit. It is a book about the real estate of the human mind. The book is about Leibniz and Kant, and about methods of science. It is also about what is now called pseudo-science. It tries to show how Kant struggled to mark the limits of the humanly knowable, and how thi s strug gle involved him in trying to answer questions of importance then and now. Some are philosophers' questions: the epistemo logical status of mathematics, the role of space and time in knowing, the nature of the conceptual constraints on our ef forts to hypothesize the possible. Some are questions of per ennial human interest: Can spirits exist How is the soul re lated to the body How can we legitimately talk about God, if at all Finally, Kant teaches that these are all questions bearing on our entitlements in claiming to know. Leibniz fashioned a way of talking about nature and super nature that I call the Double Government Methodology. 360 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Monte Carlo methods have been a tool of theoretical and computational scientists for many years. In particular, the invention and percolation of the algorithm of Metropolis, Rosenbluth, Rosenbluth, Teller, and Teller sparked a rapid growth of applications to classical statistical mechanics. Although proposals for treatment of quantum systems had been made even earlier, only a few serious calculations had heen carried out. Ruch calculations are generally more consuming of computer resources than for classical systems and no universal algorithm had--or indeed has yet-- emerged. However, with advances in techniques and in sheer computing power, Monte Carlo methods have been used with considerable success in treating quantum fluids and crystals, simple models of nuclear matter, and few-body nuclei. Research at several institutions suggest that they may offer a new approach to quantum chemistry, one that is independent of basis ann yet capable of chemical accuracy. That. Monte Carlo methods can attain the very great precision needed is itself a remarkable achievement. More recently, new interest in such methods has arisen in two new a~as. Particle theorists, in particular K. Wilson, have drawn attention to the rich analogy between quantum field theoty and statistical mechanics and to the merits of Monte Carlo calculations for lattice gauge theories. This has become a rapidly growing sub-field. A related development is associated with lattice problems in quantum physics, particularly with models of solid state systems. The~ is much ferment in the calculation of various one-dimensional problems such as the'Hubbard model. 304 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Within the last 10 years the world has come to a point where the easily explorable oil deposits have now been found, and it is anticipated that such deposits will be depleted by the beginning of the Twenty-first Century. However, the increasing demand of man kind for energy has caused technologists to look into ways of find ing new sources or to reevaluat:e unconventional sources which, in the past, have not been economical. In this respect, heavy crude and tar sand oils are becoming important in fulfilling the world's energy requirements. What are heavy crude and tar sand oils There is still some confusion as to their definitions, inasmuch as they vary among organizations and countries. In an effort to set agreed meanings, UNITAR, in a meeting in February 1982 in Venezuela, proposed the following definitions (see also Table 1): 1. Heavy crude oil and tar sand oil are petroleum or petroleum like liquids or semi-solids naturally occurring in porous media. The porous media are sands, sandstone, and carbonate rocks. 2. These oils will be characterized by viscosity and density. Viscosity will be used to define heavy crude oil and tar sand oil, and density (oAPI) will be used when viscosity measurements are not available. 3. Heavy crude oil has a gas-free viscosity of 100-10000 mPa.s (cp) 3 o at reservoir temperatures, or a density of 943 kg/m (20 API) 3 o o to 1000 kg/m (10 API) at 15.6 C and at atmospheric oressure. 442 pp. Englisch.