"A Bradford book."A defense of the view that philosophical propositions are true in some perspectives and false in others, arguing that the rationalist, intuition-driven method of acquiring basic beliefs favored by analytic philosophy is not epistemically superior to such alternate belief-acquiring methods as religious revelation and the ritual use of hallucinogens. The grand and sweeping claim…
In this book Peter Lindert evaluates environmental concerns about soil degradation in two very large countries--China and Indonesia--where anecdotal evidence has suggested serious problems. Lindert does what no scholar before him has done: using new archival data sets, he measures changes in soil productivity over long enough periods of time to reveal the influence of human activity.China and I…
OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
Countering the current view of many environmental activists that sovereign nations cannot provide effective environmental governance, The State and the Global Ecological Crisis offers analyses and case studies that explore the prospects for "reinstating the state" as a facilitator of progressive environmental change rather than a contributor to environmental destruction. The authors recognize t…
Software has gone from obscurity to indispensability in less than fifty years. Although other industries have followed a similar trajectory, software and its supporting industry are different. In this book the authors explain, from a variety of perspectives, how software and the software industry are different--technologically, organizationally, and socially. The growing importance of software …
Failed or abandoned software development projects cost the U.S. economy alone billions of dollars a year. In Software Development Failures, Kweku Ewusi-Mensah offers an empirically grounded study that suggests why these failures happen and how they can be avoided. Case studies analyzed include the well-known Confirm travel industry reservation program, FoxMeyer's Delta, the IRS's Tax System Mod…
A collection of essays on the interrelationship of social science and software practice.Software practice--which includes software development, design, and use--needs to go beyond the traditional engineering framework. Drawing on a variety of social theory approaches, this book focuses on interdisciplinary cooperation in software practice. The topics discussed include the facilitation of collab…
"A Bradford book."Revision of the author's thesis (doctoral)--University of California, Berkeley, 1991.Much of the cognitive lies beyond articulate, discursive thought, beyond the reach of current computational notions. In Sketches of Thought, Vinod Goel argues that the cognitive computational conception of the world requires our thought processes to be precise, rigid, discrete, and unambiguous…
A comprehensive analysis of strategic information warfare waged via digital means as a distinct concern for the United States and its allies. In the "information age," information systems may serve as both weapons and targets. Although the media has paid a good deal of attention to information warfare, most treatments so far are overly broad and without analytical foundations. In this book Greg…
"The MIT Press.""This monograph addresses the problem of "real-time" curve fitting in the presence of noise, from the computational and statistical viewpoints. It examines the problem of nonlinear regression, where observations are made on a time series whose mean-value function is known except for a vector parameter. In contrast to the traditional formulation, data are imagined to arrive in te…