As a programmer working for Logica UK in London in the mid-1980’s, I became a passionate advocate of formal methods. Extrapolating from small successes with VDM and JSP, I was sure that widespread use of formal methods would bring an end to the software crisis.

One approach especially intrigued me. John Guttag and Jim...

This monograph describes the synthesis and use of biologically-inspired artificial hydrocarbon networks (AHNs) for approximation models associated with machine learning and a novel computational algorithm with which to exploit them. The reader is first introduced to various kinds of algorithms designed to deal with approximation problems and...

Why do so many scorecard projects fail? Why do managers treat information as a source of power to be protected, instead of an asset to be exploited? Clearly there has to be a better way of managing perfomance. After witnessing countless initiatives fail, Oracle thought leader and former Gartner analyst Frank Buytendijk challenges conventional...

Reproductive biology is the basis of species improvement and a thorough understanding of this is needed for plant improvement, whether by conventional or biotechnological methods. This book presents an up to date and comprehensive description of reproduction in lower plants, gymnosperms and higher plants. It covers general plant biology,...

Progress in biology is dependent on the ability to observe, measure, and model the behavior of organisms at multiple levels of abstraction, from the microscopic to the macroscopic. There has been a tremendous growth recently in the techniques to probe the structure and workings of cellular and organ-level mechanisms. Significant advances have...

As depicted in David Lodge’s celebrated novel Small World, the perceived size of our world experienced a progressive decrease as jet airplanes became affordable to ever greater shares of the earth’s population. Yet, the really dramatic shrinking had to wait until the mid-1990s, when Internet became widespread and the information...