The flow of academic ideas in the area of computational intelligence is impacting industrial practice at considerable speed. Practitioners face the challenge of tracking, understanding and applying the latest techniques, which often prove their value even before the underlying theories are fully understood. This book offers realistic guidelines...

The academic study of diamonds is as multi-faceted as the precious stones themselves. Mineralogists and geographers have written about them, as have historians and economists and students of art and fashion. They each shine their light on a different aspect of this source of luminous radiance. But who would venture to describe the entire...

A fundamental understanding of algorithmic bioprocesses is key to learning how information processing occurs in nature at the cell level. The field is concerned with the interactions between computer science on the one hand and biology, chemistry, and DNA-oriented nanoscience on the other. In particular, this book offers a comprehensive overview...

A single system of economic governance – capitalism – prevails in the world today, both in theory and in practice. Yet there is neither a standard definition of capitalism nor a theory of how it works. Moreover, the most common conception of capitalism is that of a one-level system governed by markets, i.e., supply and demand, where...

This volume investigates the neglected topic of mental action, and shows its importance for the metaphysics, epistemology, and phenomenology of mind. Twelve specially written essays address such questions as the following: Which phenomena should we count as mental actions--imagining, remembering, judging, for instance? How should we explain our...

This book seeks to clarify factors that play an important role in securing the effectiveness of legal regimes that aim at protecting public interests of the international community. In Part 1, the authors focus on theoretical problems arising in the implementation process of those legal regimes from both a constitutional and functional...

This book provides a comprehensive overview of basic theoretical approaches of today’s leadership research. These approaches conceive leadership as an interactive and complex process. They stress the significance of the individual perception for developing and forming leadership relations. Leadership is understood as...

Sexual difference in the brain has long been one of the more intriguing research areas in the field of neuroscience. This thorough and comprehensive text uncovers and explains recent neurobiological and molecular biological studies in the field of neuroscience as they relate to the mechanisms underlying sexual differentiation of the...

In recent years, scholars have emphasized the need for more holistic subsistence analyses, and collaborative publications towards this endeavor have become more numerous in the literature. However, there are relatively few attempts to qualitatively integrate zooarchaeological (animal) and paleoethnobotanical (plant) data, and even fewer attempts...

Recent scandals in the biosciences have highlighted the perils of communicating science. Many observers have therefore begun to ask questions about the pressures on scientists and the media to hype-up claims of scientific breakthroughs. Journalists, science writers and scientists themselves have to report complex and rapidly-developing...

Why do people find monkeys and apes so compelling to watch? One clear answer is that they seem so similar to us-a window into our own minds and how we have evolved over millennia. As Charles Darwin wrote in his Notebook M, "He who understands baboon would do more toward metaphysics than Locke." Darwin recognized that behavior and...