springer apr 2003 (22 Ergebnisse)

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Grade inflation runs rampant at most colleges and universities, but faculty and administrators are seemingly unwilling to face the problem. This book explains why, exposing many of the misconceptions surrounding college grading. Based on historical research and the results of a yearlong, on-line course evaluation experiment conducted at Duke University during the 1998-1999 academic year, the effects of student grading on various educational processes, and their subsequent impact on student and faculty behavior, is examined. Principal conclusions of this investigation are that instructors' grading practices have a significant influence on end-of-course teaching evaluations, and that student expectations of grading practices play an important role in the courses that students decide to take. The latter effect has a serious impact on course enrollments in the natural sciences and mathematics, while the combination of both mean that faculty have an incentive to award high grades, and students have an incentive to choose courses with faculty who do. Grade inflation is the natural consequence of this incentive system. Material contained in this book is essential reading for anyone involved in efforts to reform our postsecondary educational system, or for those who simply wish to survive and prosper in it.Valen Johnson is a Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Michigan. Prior to accepting an appointment in Ann Arbor, he was a Professor of Statistics and Decision Sciences at Duke University, where data for this book was collected. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Much theoretical and historical work engaged with the question of the 'postcolonial' is built upon an imagined, unified premodern 'Middle Ages' in Europe. One of the results of this has been that in recent years scholars in medieval and early modern studies have been critically assessing the uses of postcolonial and subaltern theoretical perspectives in their fields, and considering what their periods have to say to postcolonial theorists. This book offers a series of original essays that explore with specificity the methodological, textual, cultural, and historiographic moves required for postcolonial engagements with premodern times.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - The globalization of trade, monetary and fiscal policies, capital markets, and investment patterns is reshaping the world economy and is leading to new financial, commercial, and marketing structures as well as unprecedented economies of scale. Simultaneously, national and international awareness and to strengthen. There is consensus among responses to accelerating environmental degradation continue most developed countries that the rapidly evolving new economic order needs to be well integrated with policies to maintain or restore environmental quality. Many challenges remain, however, in evaluating the geo-ecological implications of economic globalization, and in formulating the appropriate management responses. In lakes and rivers, the management of water supply and quality has largely proceeded on the basis of local considerations rather than at the global scale that has been more typical of environmental management of the atmosphere and ocean. It is increasingly apparent, however, that high-quality water resources are now in critically short supply not only because of local problems such as over-irrigation and eutrophication, but also as a result of larger-scale climate effects on the hydrosphere. This magnitude of impact will increasingly require the integrated monitoring and management of water resources on a planetary scale, with world criteria for environmental assessment, restoration, and conservation strategies. The increasing extent of world trade in potable freshwater heightens the urgency for establishing international approaches, criteria, and regulations.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - At two previous conferences of Working Group 3. 7, the evaluation of the implementation of computerised school information systems (SISs) in Hong Kong and The Netherlands were presented. Here, we will present the results of similar research in England. The rationale for these studies was to fill the gap in our knowledge on this important type of computer use in schools, and, by that, to gain insight into the factors that prove to promote successful SIS implementation. In England SIMS (School Information Management System) has the largest market share of computerised school administration systems. SIMS is a modular but integrated system in that once entered, data is available between modules. Briefly, SIMS consists of about twenty modules that support the work of clerical staff and school managers and teachers (for details see Wild & Walker 2001). 2. RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND RESEARCH FRAMEWORK The following questions were addressed: - The extent of, and ways in which SIMS was used in schools; - The user opinion on the quality of SIMS; The nature and effects of the implementation process, and the characteristics of the schools into which SIMS was introduced; - Factors affecting the degree of SIMS use. The variables relating to the above issues that were investigated in this study fell into five distinct categories according to Visscher's model (see Figure 1), i. e. , features of SIMS use, the implementation process, school organisation, and the intendedlunintended effects. The study assumed possible interrelationships between all these variable groups.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Security and Privacy in the Age of Uncertainty covers issues related to security and privacy of information in a wide range of applications including: \*Secure Networks and Distributed Systems; \*Secure Multicast Communication and Secure Mobile Networks; \*Intrusion Prevention and Detection; \*Access Control Policies and Models; \*Security Protocols; \*Security and Control of IT in Society. This volume contains the papers selected for presentation at the 18th International Conference on Information Security (SEC2003) and at the associated workshops. The conference and workshops were sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Athens, Greece in May 2003.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Communications via satellite introduces a number of new technical problems for mobile networks and applications. Satellite links have fundamentally different properties from terrestrial wired or wireless networks. Some of the properties include larger latency, bursty error characteristics, asymmetric capability, and unconventional network architecture. These differences have far-reaching effects on many satellite communication issues.Internetworking and Computing over Satellite Networks's emphasis is on data networking, internetworking and distributed computing issues. The material surveys recent work in the area of satellite networks, introduces certain state-of-the-art technologies, and presents recent research results in these areas. A variety of issues involving applications, network architecture, medium access controls, multicast routing, asymmetric routing, transport protocols, TCP performance enhancement techniques, data broadcast, and information disseminations, are addressed. This is one of the first books to be focused on the internetworking and computing aspect of satellite networks.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Baruch S. Blumberg NASA Astrobiology Institute, Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, USA Scientific research is one of the major human enterprises. Many governments are convinced that research and its products provide the means to enrich an economic life that is no longer sustained by traditional manufacturing and service industries. The public has a high expectation of medical research and many are convinced that, with the expenditure of sufficient money, all human diseases can be conquered; they look forward to a long and disease free life. There is also a great interest in many sectors of society to understand nature not only in order to 'control' it or learn how best to cope with its uncertainties, but to accumulate knowledge for its own sake. Finally, scientific research contributes significantly to the intellectual stores of humanity and provides an important process to explore the most profound questions of life. Modem science is rarely a solitary occupation. It requires heavy investments in equipment, supplies, buildings and field capabilities. Scientists need a band of fellow explorers with whom to share the adventure, discuss experiments and results, and, perhaps most importantly, enable the testing and retesting of their hypotheses by themselves and by others. This was certainly the case in my own research which led eventually to the discovery of the Hepatitis B virus, and later to the vaccine for it. Scientific training is very specialized, whereas the solutions to problems transcend narrow disciplinary borders.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Abelard is one of the foremost protagonists of the 'twelfth-century Renaissance'. He 'picks up the baton' from Boethius resuming the activity of commenting on Aristotle's works. The present book focuses on the logical-grammatical analysis of natural language, which for Abelard is a fragment of 'scientific Latin'. Tools of modern categorial grammar are employed to clarify many of the problems raised by historiography (such as meaning, abstract entities and universals). Among the merits of the volume is the fact that it has enlightened the radical interplay between the traditions of Aristotle's and Priscian's commentators and, in this context, Abelard's peculiar role in exploring a new field of linguistic inquiry. An ample analysis of grammatical sources and critical literature allows to evaluate the progress which is at the basis of the forthcoming terministic logic. The book is aimed at scholars of medieval philosophy as well as historians of logic and linguistics.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - The question of inclusive education is one which many societies are attempting to address. It is a fundamentally serious and complex issue raising challenges that cover conceptual, organizational, pedagogical, curricular and socio-economic concerns and questions. In this edited collection of papers the reader is confronted with these challenges through, on the one hand, a critical informative analysis of some of the key existing ideas and, on the other, a series of alternative insights and questions requiring further exploration and debate. Adding to the overall qu- ity of the book is the much needed cross-cultural dimension in terms of insights, knowledge, understanding and difficult questions. This is an important book in which new research and interpretations are reported on and discussed. Overall, the papers provide a serious critique of such factors as: the limitations of existing definitions of inclusive education; the narrowness of the focus within which inclusive issues are too often presented; the negative impacts of marketisation, performativity and the standards agenda on the realisation of inclusive values and practice and the constraints of significant socio-economic inequalities and disadvantages within and between communities and schools. These raise serious questions concerning the extent to which schools can make a positive difference in the lives of many pupils.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Thistext, as the tide states, is acompilationofpapersdevoted to the studyofath erosclerosis,hypertensionanddiabetes.Thesethree distinctdisease entities,although not entirely unrelated, are three ofthe most important disease conditions in the world today.As such, this volumeofresearch papers isofobvious medical impor tance.Thejustificationofthe energy,time and financial resources directed towards the studyofeachofthese three diseases requiressome discussion. The majority of papers amongst the three diseases that are discussed in this volume are dedicated to the studyofatherosclerosis.This is not by accident.Car diovasculardisease isthenumberonekillertodayintheworld. IntheUnitedStates almost61 millionAmericanshaveoneormoreformsofcardiovasculardisease.These diseases claimed nearly 1million lives in 1998 alone.Although approximately 80% ofthosewho dieofcardiovasculardisease are 65 yearsofageorolder,asignificant numberofpeople are killed by cardiovascular disease below the ageof65.Ather osclerotic heart disease in the eoronary vaseulature eausedapproximately~ million deaths in the United States in 1998.At least 12,400,000people are alive todayin the United States with a historyofmyocardial infarctions or ehest pain or both. Clearly,atherosclerotie disease inthe heart isamajormedicalproblem.This disease affeetsbothmenandwomen.Althoughmen are more likelyto experienee aheart attaekand are atgreater risk for eardiovaseular disease,more then ~ofthe people alive today with a historyofheart attacks or angina are females. As weIl,women whodo havemyoeardialinfarctionsare twice aslikely to diefromtheeventwithin afew weeks.Atheroscleroticvasculardisease isnotlimitedtojustthe heart.Anath erosclerotic ischemic event is the primary causeofstroke today.Although it isnot weIl appreciated, stroke is the number 3 killer inAmerica today and the leading causeofdebilitatingneurological damage.Atherosclerotic vascular disease therefore, has acostintermsofhuman life,qualityoflifeandfinancialburden today thatno otherdisease canmatch.Theseriousnessofthis medicalproblemdemands research attention.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Global warming, melting polar caps, rising sea levels and intensifying wave-current action, factors responsible for the alarming phenomena of coastal erosion on the one hand and adverse environmental impacts and the high cost of 'hard' protection schemes, on the other, have created interest in the detailed examination of the potential and range of applicability of the emerging and promising category of 'soft' shore protection methods. 'Soft' methods such as beach nourishment, submerged breakwaters, artificial reefs, gravity drain systems, floating breakwaters, plantations of hydrophylous shrubs or even dry branches, applied mostly during the past 20 years, are recognised as possessing technical, environmental and financial advantageous properties deserving more attention and further developmental experimentation than has occured hitherto. On the other hand, 'hard' shore protection methods such as seawalls, groins and detached breakwaters, artefacts borrowed from port design and construction technology, no matter how well designed and well implemented they may be, can hardly avoid intensification of the consequential erosive, often devastating, effects on the down-drift shores. Moreover, they often do not constitute environmentally and financially attractive solutions for long stretches of eroding shoreline. Engineers and scientists practising design and implementation of shore defence schemes have been aware for many years of the public demand for improved shore protection technologies. They are encouraging efforts that promise enrichment of those environmentally sound and financially attractive methods that can be safely applied.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Stress Echocardiography - Its Role in the Diagnosis and Evaluation of Coronary Artery Disease - Second Edition by Thomas Marwick is a concise, practical guide for anyone new to the field of stress echocardiography or an excellent summary of the existing evidence base for the experienced user. Dr. W.F. Armstrong described the first edition of this book in his Foreword to the first edition as 'a thorough, comprehensive review of the basic and advanced concepts of stress echocardiography. This text represents an excellent starting point for individuals wishing to gain initial familiarity with stress echocardiography and a superb reference source for more experienced investigators and clinicians finding a need to further develop their understanding of the technique and advance its clinical relevance in their laboratories.'.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - The constantly evolving technological infrastructure of the modem world presents a great challenge of developing software systems with increasing size, complexity, and functionality. The software engineering field has seen changes and innovations to meet these and other continuously growing challenges by developing and implementing useful software engineering methodologies. Among the more recent advances are those made in the context of software portability, formal verification techniques, software measurement, and software reuse. However, despite the introduction of some important and useful paradigms in the software engineering discipline, their technological transfer on a larger scale has been extremely gradual and limited. For example, many software development organizations may not have a well-defined software assurance team, which can be considered as a key ingredient in the development of a high-quality and dependable software product. Recently, the software engineering field has observed an increased integration or fusion with the computational intelligence (Cl) field, which is comprised of primarily the mature technologies of fuzzy logic, neural networks, genetic algorithms, genetic programming, and rough sets. Hybrid systems that combine two or more of these individual technologies are also categorized under the Cl umbrella. Software engineering is unlike the other well-founded engineering disciplines, primarily due to its human component (designers, developers, testers, etc. ) factor. The highly non-mechanical and intuitive nature of the human factor characterizes many of the problems associated with software engineering, including those observed in development effort estimation, software quality and reliability prediction, software design, and softwaretesting.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - French novelist Marcel Proust instructs us that, 'a voyage of discovery consists, not of seeking new landscapes, but of seeing through new eyes.' Nowhere in the practice of education do we need to see through new eyes than in the domain of assessment. We have been trapped by our collective experiences to see a limited array of things to be assessed, a very few ways of assessing them, limited strategies for communicating results and inflexible roles of players in the assessment drama. This edited book of readings jolts us out of traditional habits of mind about assessment. An international team of innovative thinkers relies on the best current research on learning and cognition, to describe how to use assessment to promote, not merely check for, student learning. In effect, they explore a new vision of assessment for the new millennium. The authors address the rapidly expanding array of achievement targets students must hit, the increasingly productive variety of assessment methods available to educators, innovative ways of collecting and communicating evidence of learning, and a fundamental redefinition of both students' and teachers' roles in the assessment process.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - The symposiumwas motivatedby theincreasing need for modelling of material behaviourundervarious mechan icalconditions. This need is driven by the evolut ion ofcomputer capac ityand the resulting ability for engineers and scien tiststo address complexproblems . Reliable models formaterialbehaviour, including accurate numericalvalues of parameters ,are necessary for a continued beneficial development ofthe computational side of solid mechanics .High rate plasticity ,thermally assisted creep and phasetransformationsare only a fewexamplesof areas where more accurate modelsare needed. Experiments are necessary for the establishment ofmodels and parameters , and modified versionsof conventional test methods can make important contributions . Also modern optical methodsoffer a highpotentialfor futureexperimental development. Numerical simulations ofexperiments and so-called inverse modelling arealso frequentlyused techniques. The aim of the symposium was to bring together researchers with an interest in the areaofexperimental and computational aspects ofmaterial modelling for exchange and discussionofpromising methodsandresults. Abisko,a national park in the Swedish mountain district about 200 km north of the arctic circle and about one hourve dri from the airport ofKiruna,was chosen for the symposium. The tourist hotel in the park , overlookinga beautiful lake , offered a suitablevenue for the symposium. This environment with tracks for short walks (and long hikes),goals for small excursions and a hotel with restaurant and bar ve the ga delegatesmany opportunitiesto meet , socialiseand discuss during breaks and evenings.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Econophysics describes phenomena in the development and dynamics of economic systems by using of a physicMly motivated methodology. First of all, Mandelbrot had analyzed economic and social relations in terms of modern statistical physics. Since then, the number of publications related to this topic has increased irresistible greatly. To be fair to this historical evolution, I point out, however, that physical and economic concepts had already been connected long ago. Terms such as work, power, and efficiency factor have similar physical and economic meanings. Many physical discoveries for instance in thermodynamics, optics, solid state physics, or chemical physics correspond to a parallel evolution in the fields of technology and economics. The term econophysics, or social physics, also is not a recent idea. For ex ample, in the small book Sozialphysik published in 1925 [221], R. L£mmel demonstrates how social and economic problems can be understood by applying simple physical relations. Of course, the content of early social physics and the topics of modern econophysics are widely different. Nevertheless, the basic idea (i.e., the description and the explanation of economic phenomena in terms of a physical theory) did not change over the whole time. At this point, an important warning should be pronounced.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - French novelist Marcel Proust instructs us that, 'a voyage of discovery consists, not of seeking new landscapes, but of seeing through new eyes.' Nowhere in the practice of education do we need to see through new eyes than in the domain of assessment. We have been trapped by our collective experiences to see a limited array of things to be assessed, a very few ways of assessing them, limited strategies for communicating results and inflexible roles of players in the assessment drama. This edited book of readings jolts us out of traditional habits of mind about assessment. An international team of innovative thinkers relies on the best current research on learning and cognition, to describe how to use assessment to promote, not merely check for, student learning. In effect, they explore a new vision of assessment for the new millennium. The authors address the rapidly expanding array of achievement targets students must hit, the increasingly productive variety of assessment methods available to educators, innovative ways of collecting and communicating evidence of learning, and a fundamental redefinition of both students' and teachers' roles in the assessment process.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - High Performance Computing Systems and Applications contains fully refereed papers from the 15th Annual Symposium on High Performance Computing. These papers cover both fundamental and applied topics in HPC: parallel algorithms, distributed systems and architectures, distributed memory and performance, high level applications, tools and solvers, numerical methods and simulation, advanced computing systems, and the emerging area of computational grids.High Performance Computing Systems and Applications is suitable as a secondary text for graduate level courses, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Subjects of the book are Heart Failure and Atrial Fibrillation, two emerging pathologies in the field of cardiology, to which many investigators are now addressing their research. Their diffusion in the sick population represents a major public health problem at the beginning of the third millennium. The volume aims to present the latest approaches to the management ofheart failureand atrial fibrillation, emphasising in particular the intrinsic relation existing between them, the results after 10 years of biventricular pacing, the innovative pacing techniques now available,and the use of new drugs, devices or ablation procedures for the prevention and treatment ofatrial fibrillationrecurrences.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Scientific computing is a fast growing and fast changing area whose applications to various branches of science, engineering, medicine, economics (and others) are increasing in number and relevance every day. There are two main reasons (among others) that make scientific computing change so rapidly. One is the increasing number of different research areas beginning to make use of numerical simulation: from nanotechnology to genomics, from computer aided diagnosis and operations in medical applications (which involve often com plete simulations of parts of the human body) to economics and finance. Each new application, and each new aspect of earlier applications, draws heavily on the know how that has been acquired on other problems with similar mathematical features. It has to be pointed out that the lofty perspective of mathematics succeeds quite often in finding connections among very different phenomena, that tum out in the end to share the same mathematical and numerical structure. In tum, new applica tions contribute to the cross-fertilization by 'sending back' new interpretations and suggestions which are often useful in more classical applications. All this creates a resonance effect that contributes greatly to the growth rate of the whole field.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Software Visualization: From Theory to Practice was initially selected as a special volume for 'The Annals of Software Engineering (ANSE) Journal', which has been discontinued. This special edited volume, is the first to discuss software visualization in the perspective of software engineering. It is a collection of 14 chapters on software visualization, covering the topics from theory to practical systems. The chapters are divided into four Parts: Visual Formalisms, Human Factors, Architectural Visualization, and Visualization in Practice. They cover a comprehensive range of software visualization topics, including \*Visual programming theory and techniques for rapid software prototyping and graph visualization, including distributed programming; \*Visual formalisms such as Flowchart, Event Graph, and Process Communication Graph; \*Graph-oriented distributed programming; \*Program visualization for software understanding, testing/debugging and maintenance; \*Object-oriented re-design based on legacy procedural software; \*Cognitive models for designing software exploration tools; \*Human comprehensibility of visual modeling diagrams in UML; \*UML extended with pattern compositions for software reuse; \*Visualization of software architecture and Web architecture for better understanding; \*Visual programming and program visualization for music synthesizers; \*Drawing diagrams nicely using clustering techniques for software engineering.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - This is the first volume ever published to examine the objective and subjective qualities of Korean life from both comparative and dynamic perspectives. It presents non-Western policy alternatives to enhancing the quality of citizens' lives, distinguishing Korea as an Asian model of economic prosperity and political democracy. The book is intended for academics, policy makers and the general public interested in recent developments in Korea.