Introduction to Python Programming And Data Structure By Liang

This 1994 book provides a fascinating account of the fast-moving field of lipase research. The contributions, written by active research workers, summarise developments in the field and give access to recent literature. It covers both the lipases proper (triglyceride lipases and the phospholipases. It gives a comprehensive picture of the state of knowledge of these enzymes, with a strong bias towards the fields that are attracting the greatest attention: their detailed molecular structure, their mechanism of action, their position in the evolution of enzymes, and their application both in the laboratory and industry. The book will continue to be of interest to those working in universities, in research institutes and in companies specialising in biotechnology. The book will also be a useful reference book for postgraduate students entering this field of research.

To the new student of international law, the subject can appear extremely complex: a system of laws created by states, international courts and tribunals operating at the national and global level. A clear guide to the subject is essential to ensure understanding. This handbook provides exactly that: written by an expert who both teaches and practises in the field, it focuses on what the law is; how it is created; and how it is applied to solve day-to-day problems. It offers a practical approach to the subject, giving it relevance and immediacy. The new edition retains a concise, user-friendly format allowing central principles such as jurisdiction and the law of treaties to be understood. In addition, it explores more specialised topics such as human rights, terrorism and the environment. This handbook is the ideal introduction for students new to international law.

Hailed as 'one of the most important contributions to the social and intellectual history of England which has ever been made by a Cambridge man', Robert Willis monumental architectural history of the University of Cambridge is here reprinted. Its unique collection of over three hundred plans, antique and specially commissioned engravings is alone sufficient to make this an indispensable work of reference on Cambridge architecture before the onset of the modern age. This selection from the Architectural History presents in a single volume the complete text relating to Peterhouse and features a new introduction by David Watkin, Professor Emeritus in the History of Architecture at the Department of Art History at Cambridge University.

Hailed as 'one of the most important contributions to the social and intellectual history of England which has ever been made by a Cambridge man', Robert Willis' monumental architectural history of the University of Cambridge is here reprinted. Its unique collection of over three hundred plans, antique and specially commissioned engravings is alone sufficient to make this an indispensable work of reference on Cambridge architecture before the onset of the modern age. This selection from the Architectural History presents in a single volume the complete text relating to St John's College and features a new introduction by David Watkin, Professor Emeritus in the History of Architecture at the Department of Art History at Cambridge University.

Hailed as 'one of the most important contributions to the social and intellectual history of England which has ever been made by a Cambridge man', Robert Willis' monumental architectural history of the University of Cambridge is here reprinted. Its unique collection of over three hundred plans, antique and specially commissioned engravings is alone sufficient to make this an indispensable work of reference on Cambridge architecture before the onset of the modern age. This selection from the Architectural History presents in a single volume the complete text relating to Trinity College and features a new introduction by David Watkin, Professor Emeritus in the History of Architecture at the Department of Art History at Cambridge University.

A market-leading text, Microeconomics presents economic theory in the context of real, data-driven examples, and then helps you develop your intuition through hallmark Solved Problems. The text places emphasis on modern theories, such as industrial organization theory, game theory, and transaction cost theory, which are useful in analyzing actual markets. At the same time, a step-by-step problem-based learning approach demonstrates how to use microeconomic theory to solve business problems and analyze policy. The 9th Edition, Global Edition, has been substantially updated with new or revised real-world examples, applications and problems. This gives you a practical perspective, seeing how models connect to real-world decisions being made in today's firms and policy debates.

Writing obsessively in French, English, and Portuguese, Fernando Pessoa left a prodigious body of work, much of it under "heteronyms"—fully fleshed alter egos with startlingly different styles and points of view. Offering a unique sampling of all his most famous voices, this collection features poems that have never before been translated alongside many originally composed in English. In addition to such major works as "Maritime Ode of Campos" and his Goethe-inspired Faust, written in blank verse, there are several stunning poems that have only come to light in the last five years. Selected and translated by leading Pessoa scholar Richard Zenith, this is the finest introduction available to the breadth of Pessoa’s genius.The translations are based on the most authoritative editions, verified against the original manuscriptsIncludes an Introduction discussing Pessoa, his work, and the phenomenon of "heteronymy" as well as a chronology

The dynamics of many nonlinear systems gravitate around a few common central themes: intermittency, order/coherence and disorder. These features affect scalings and lead to deviations from Gaussian behaviour. Intermittency may be the universal outcome of a large class of nonlinear systems; however the universality properties of specific nonlinear systems, that is the dependencies of the intermittent structure on initial and boundary conditions, remain open questions. This volume consists of articles by prominent figures who all participated in a workshop held at the Newton Institute in Cambridge. It reflects the aims of the workshop, namely to capture and summarise recent developments, encourage cross-fertilisation of ideas, lay out research directions for the future and provide an overview of our current understanding of the subject.

The chapters in this volume feature new and groundbreaking research carried out by leading scholars and promising young researchers from around the world on recent changes in the English verb phrase. Drawing on authentic corpus data, the papers consider both spoken and written English in several genres. Each contribution pays particular attention to the methodologies used for investigating short-term patterns of change in English, with detailed discussions of controversies in this area. This cutting-edge collection is essential reading for historians of the English language, syntacticians and corpus linguists.

A Single Man is an exclusive Vintage Classic that has been made into a film starring Julianne Moore and Colin Firth and directed by Tom Ford.George is heartbroken after the death of his lover.An English professor in suburban California, George must now adjust to a tragic new solitude in the sun. Beneath George’s rigid British restraint, waves of sorrow and fury surge. He doggedly persists with the routines of his past life, heading out to work, to the gym, on again to dinner. Yet along the way, George rediscovers the unexpected pleasures of life and the soul's ability to triumph over loneliness and alienation. This short, poignant novel is a tender and wistful love story.WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY TOM FORD‘Lyrical and intensely moving’ Daily Telegraph‘Widely recognised as his supreme achievement . . . a work of compressed brilliance’ Guardian‘A virtuoso piece of work . . . powerful’ Sunday Time

This upper-level textbook offers an original and up-to-date introduction to issues in corporate social responsibility (CSR) from a global perspective. Written by an international team of experts, it guides students through key themes in CSR including strategy, communication, regulation and governance. Balancing critiques of CSR with a discussion of the opportunities it creates, it includes chapters devoted to critical issues such as human rights, anti-corruption, labour rights and the environment. Pedagogical features include customised case studies, study questions, key term highlighting, practitioner pieces and suggestions for further resources. The book is also complemented by a companion website featuring adaptable lecture slides, teaching notes for cases and links to related resources. Tailored for upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate courses on corporate social responsibility, sustainability and business ethics, it is also relevant to non-business courses in political scien

At the heart of generative phonology lies the assumption that the sounds of every language have abstract underlying representations, which undergo various changes in order to generate the 'surface' representations; that is, the sounds we actually pronounce. The existence, status and form of underlying representations have been hotly debated in phonological research since the introduction of the phoneme in the nineteenth century. This book provides a comprehensive overview of theories of the mental representation of the sounds of language. How does the mind store and process phonological representations? Krämer surveys the development of the concept of underlying representation over the last 100 years or so within the field of generative phonology. He considers phonological patterns, psycholinguistic experiments, statistical generalisations over data corpora and phenomena such as hypercorrection. The book offers a new understanding of contrastive features and proposes a modification of

This book, and its companion volume in the Econometric Society Monographs series (ESM number 33), present a collection of papers by Clive W. J. Granger. His contributions to economics and econometrics, many of them seminal, span more than four decades and touch on all aspects of time series analysis. The papers assembled in this volume explore topics in spectral analysis, seasonality, nonlinearity, methodology, and forecasting. Those in the companion volume investigate themes in causality, integration and cointegration, and long memory. The two volumes contain the original articles as well as an introduction written by the editors.

Sextus Empiricus' Against the Logicians is by far the most detailed surviving examination by any ancient Greek sceptic of the areas of epistemology and logic. It critically examines the pretensions of non-sceptical philosophers to have discovered methods for determining the truth, either through direct observation or by inference from the observed to the unobserved. It is therefore a fine example of the Pyrrhonist sceptical method at work. It also provides a mine of information about the ideas of other Greek thinkers, ideas that are in many cases poorly preserved in other sources. This volume presents Against the Logicians in a new and accurate translation, together with a detailed introduction that sets the work in its philosophical context.

This volume makes available to a student readership one of the central texts in the utilitarian tradition, in the authoritative 1977 edition prepared by Professors Burns and Hart as part of Bentham's Collected works. A Fragment on Government is, as Ross Harrison observes in his introduction, a young man's work, and Bentham's exuberant prose reflects his own confidence that the Fragment 'was the first publication by which men at large were invited to break loose from the trammels of authority and ancestor-wisdom on the field of law'. Certain that history was on his side, Bentham sought to rid the world of the hideous mess wrought by legal obfuscation and confusion, and to transform politics into a rational scientific activity, premised on the hideous politics into a rational scientific activity, premised on the fundamental axiom that 'it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong'. In the context of a European social and political order still

Reviewers and readers have enthused over previous 'Illustrating' books from the pen of Donald Alcock; his unique formula using graphics and calligraphy to explain what else would take a thousand words is here applied to illustrate ANSI C. As usual, Alcock emphasizes learning by writing programs and working through them. Plenty of real programs are used to good effect, so that by the end of the book advanced topics have been described by means of increasingly sophisticated examples. A feature of the layout is the double-page spread: each of these covers a particular topic making the book useful as a reference manual. Moreover each spread is made as self-contained as is reasonably possible - ideal for browsing. For the programmer with a grounding in one language, such as FORTRAN, this book will give an excellent introduction to standard C - one that emphasizes the self-discipline needed to write portable programs. This revised edition has benefited from many corrections and updates, and

This book introduces Asian American literary studies by engaging the conditions, contingencies, and immediate and long-term effects of its major debates. Two rationales inform Ling’s presentation of the field in this way: first is a felt need to provide recognizable contours and trajectories for the evolution of Asian American criticism as an ethnic-specific minoritarian formation in the United States; second is an imperative to historicize its practices―including polemics, controversies, and ideological ruptures―as an ongoing negotiation undertaken by Asian American critics for a more self-conscious and more adequate representation of the field’s interests. These rationales are fully contextualized in the book’s Introduction and Conclusion. The main body of this study is organized non-chronologically into eight chapters, with each designed to reflect how the field has been energized by its demographic transformation, its growing intellectual heterogeneity, its defining moments, and it

Professor Ackroyd's introduction summarizes the place of the First Book of Samuel in the Old Testament canon, its relationship with history and its theological purpose. The main divisions of the text are those provided by the New English Bible itself, but the text is further subdivided for the purposes of the commentary, which draws out the kind of significance indicated in the introduction. As in the series of Cambridge Bible Commentaries on the New English Bible New Testament, short passages of text and the editor's commentary are interspersed so that the reader does not have to refer to another part of the book to find the commentary. A final brief section asks what is the theological message today of this account of the beginnings of the line of David, of Samuel's role as judge and of Saul's as king.

Analyzing the behavior of complex networks is an important element in the design of new man-made structures such as communication systems and biologically engineered molecules. Because any complex network can be represented by a graph, and therefore in turn by a matrix, graph theory has become a powerful tool in the investigation of network performance. This self-contained 2010 book provides a concise introduction to the theory of graph spectra and its applications to the study of complex networks. Covering a range of types of graphs and topics important to the analysis of complex systems, this guide provides the mathematical foundation needed to understand and apply spectral insight to real-world systems. In particular, the general properties of both the adjacency and Laplacian spectrum of graphs are derived and applied to complex networks. An ideal resource for researchers and students in communications networking as well as in physics and mathematics.

THE DISCWORLD CHRISTMAS NOVEL - with a new introduction by Tony Robinson''Twas the night before Hogswatch and all through the house...something was missing.The stockings are hanging ready, the sherry and pies are waiting by the fireplace - but where is the jolly fat man with his sack? It''s not right to find Death creeping down chimneys and trying to say Ho Ho Ho - but someone''s got to bring the little kiddies their presents. Or else they might stop believing. Belief is important in Discworld, particularly on the last night of the year when the time is turning. If the real man in the red suit isn''t found by morning, there won''t be a morning. Ever again...A festive feast of darkness, jolly robins and tinsel. As they say: ''You''d better watch out...''

The Element discusses the structure, content, and evaluation of cosmological arguments. The introductory section investigates features essential to cosmological arguments. Traditionally, cosmological arguments are distinguished by their appeal to change, causation, contingency or objective becoming in the world. But none of these is in fact essential to the formulation of cosmological arguments. Sections 1-3 present a critical discussion of traditional Thomistic, Kalam, and Leibnizian cosmological arguments, noting various advantages and disadvantages of these approaches. Section 4 offers an entirely new approach to the cosmological argument - the approach of theistic modal realism. The proper explananda of cosmological arguments on this approach is not change, causation, contingency or objective becoming in the world. The proper explananda is the totality of metaphysical reality - all actualia and all possibilia. The result is the most compelling and least objectionable version of the

Certain constrained combinatorial optimization problems have a natural analogue in the continuous setting of the classical isoperimetric problem. The study of so called combinatorial isoperimetric problems exploits similarities between these two, seemingly disparate, settings. This text focuses on global methods. This means that morphisms, typically arising from symmetry or direct product decomposition, are employed to transform new problems into more restricted and easily solvable settings whilst preserving essential structure. This book is based on Professor Harper's many years' experience in teaching this subject and is ideal for graduate students entering the field. The author has increased the utility of the text for teaching by including worked examples, exercises and material about applications to computer science. Applied systematically, the global point of view can lead to surprising insights and results, and established researchers will find this to be a valuable reference wo

Passive acoustic monitoring is increasingly used by the scientific community to study, survey and census marine mammals, especially cetaceans, many of which are easier to hear than to see. PAM is also used to support efforts to mitigate potential negative effects of human activities such as ship traffic, military and civilian sonar and offshore exploration. Walter Zimmer provides an integrated approach to PAM, combining physical principles, discussion of technical tools and application-oriented concepts of operations. Additionally, relevant information and tools necessary to assess existing and future PAM systems are presented, with Matlab code used to generate figures and results so readers can reproduce data and modify code to analyse the impact of changes. This allows the principles to be studied whilst discovering potential difficulties and side effects. Aimed at graduate students and researchers, the book provides all information and tools necessary to gain a comprehensive underst

On-line learning is one of the most powerful and commonly used techniques for training large layered networks and has been used successfully in many real-world applications. Traditional analytical methods have been recently complemented by ones from statistical physics and Bayesian statistics. This powerful combination of analytical methods provides more insight and deeper understanding of existing algorithms and leads to novel and principled proposals for their improvement. This book presents a coherent picture of the state-of-the-art in the theoretical analysis of on-line learning. An introduction relates the subject to other developments in neural networks and explains the overall picture. Surveys by leading experts in the field combine new and established material and enable non-experts to learn more about the techniques and methods used. This book, the first in the area, provides a comprehensive view of the subject and will be welcomed by mathematicians, scientists and engineers,

Astrometry encompasses all that is necessary to provide the positions and motions of celestial bodies. This includes observational techniques, instrumentation, processing and analysis of observational data, reference systems and frames, and the resulting astronomical phenomena. Astrometry is fundamental to all other fields of astronomy, from the pointing of telescopes, to navigation and guidance systems, to distance and motion determinations for astrophysics. In the last few decades, new observational techniques have enabled improvements in accuracy by orders of magnitude. Starting from basic principles, this book provides the fundamentals for this new astrometry at milli- and micro-arcsecond accuracies. Topics include: basics of general relativity; co-ordinate systems; vectors, tensors, quaternions, and observational uncertainties; determination and use of the celestial and terrestrial reference systems and frames; applications of new observational techniques; present and future star

ONE OF THE BBC'S '100 NOVELS THAT CHANGED OUR WORLD''Exciting, relevant and thought provoking.' STEPHEN KING'One of my favourite books.' SUZANNE COLLINS'Exemplary.' IAN MCEWANWith an Introduction by Executive Producer Joel Wilson, Director Marc Munden and Writer Jack Thorne'There aren't any grown-ups anywhere.'A plane crashes on a desert island. The only survivors are a group of schoolboys. By day, they explore the dazzling beaches, gorging fruit, seeking shelter, and ripping off their uniforms to swim in the lagoon.At night, in the darkness of the jungle, they are haunted by nightmares of a primitive beast. Orphaned by society, they must forge their own; but it isn't long before their innocent games devolve into something far more dangerous . .

From its beginnings, the American film industry has profited from bringing popular and acclaimed dramatic works to the screen. This is the first book to offer a comprehensive account, focusing on key texts, of how Hollywood has given a second and enduring life to such classics of the American theater as Long Day's Journey into Night, A Streetcar Named Desire and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Each chapter is written by a leading scholar and focuses on Broadway's most admired and popular productions. The book is ideally suited for classroom use and offers an otherwise unavailable introduction to a subject which is of great interest to students and scholars alike.

This volume of the Cambridge Fitzgerald Edition includes the original nine stories selected by Fitzgerald for All the Sad Young Men, together with eleven additional stories, published between 1925 and 1928, which were not collected by Fitzgerald during his lifetime. This edition is based on extensive surviving manuscripts and typescripts. The volume contains a scholarly introduction, historical notes, a textual apparatus, illustrations, and appendices. The complex history of composition for 'The Rich Boy' is untangled, and Fitzgerald's thorough revision of 'Winter Dreams' is described. Important passages of sexual innuendo and tabloid-style scandal in 'Jacob's Ladder', 'The Love Boat', and 'Magnetism' - removed by editors at the Saturday Evening Post - are restored to the Cambridge texts.

The history of political events is made by people. From wars to elections to political protests, the choices we make, our actions, how we behave, dictate events. Not all individuals have the same impact on our world and our lives. Some peoples' choices alter the pathways that history takes. In particular, national chief executives play a large role in forging the destinies of the countries they lead. Why Leaders Fight is about those world leaders and how their beliefs, world views, and tolerance for risk and military conflict are shaped by their life experiences before they enter office - military, family, occupation, and more. Using in-depth research on important leaders and the largest set of data on leader backgrounds ever gathered, the authors of Why Leaders Fight show that - within the constraints of domestic political institutions and the international system - who ends up in office plays a critical role in determining when and why countries go to war.

This pathbreaking study presents a new perspective on the role of derivation, the series of operations by which sentences are formed. Working within the Minimalist Program and focusing on English, the authors develop an original theory of generative syntax, providing illuminating new analyses of some central syntactic constructions. Two key questions are explored: first, can the Extended Projection Principle (EPP) be eliminated from Minimalist analysis without loss, and perhaps with a gain in empirical coverage; and second, is the construct 'A-Chain' similarly eliminable? The authors argue that neither EPP nor the A-chain is in fact a property of Universal Grammar, but rather their descriptive content can be deduced from independently motivated properties of lexical items, in accordance with overarching principles governing derivation. In investigating these questions, a range of new data is introduced, and existing data re-analyzed, presenting a pioneering challenge to fundamental ass

This book discusses the 'marginal' people of late medieval Paris, the large and shifting group of men and women who existed on the margins of conventional organized society. Professor Geremek examines the various groups which made up the marginal world - beggars, prostitutes, procuresses and pimps, petty criminals, casual workers and the unemployed - their haunts in and around Paris, their way of life, and their relation to 'normal' society. Professor Geremek has made with this book a major contribution to the study of late medieval society which illuminates the little-known area of the medieval underworld in a fascinating and very accessible manner. Translated by Jean Birrell from the French edition of 1976, this edition includes a new introduction by Jean-Claude Schmitt, which offers a frank appraisal of the author's life and career to date.

Originally published in 1952, as part of the Cambridge Plain Texts series, this volume contains the full text of Penthesilea by German Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811). The play is presented in German with a short editorial introduction in English. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Kleist and German literature.

The B-minor Mass has always represented a fascinating challenge to musical scholarship. Composed over the course of Johann Sebastian Bach's life, it is considered by many to be the composer's greatest and most complex work. The fourteen essays assembled in this volume originate from the International Symposium 'Understanding Bach's B-minor mass' at which scholars from eighteen countries gathered to debate the latest topics in the field. In revised and updated form, they comprise a thorough and systematic study of Bach's Opus Ultimum, including a wide range of discussions relating to the Mass's historical background and contexts, structure and proportion, sources and editions, and the reception of the work in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the light of important new developments in the study of the piece, this collection demonstrates the innovation and rigour for which Bach scholarship has become known.

Significantly streamlined and updated, the second edition of Andrews' Contract Law now provides a clear and succinct examination of all of the topics in the contract law curriculum. Chapters direct students to the most important decisions in case law and employ a two-level structure to integrate short judicial excerpts into detailed discussion and analysis. Exploration of the law's 'loose ends' strengthens students' ability to effectively analyse case law, and new end-of-chapter questions, which focus on both core aspects of the law and interesting legal loopholes, assist students in preparing for exams. Students are guided through chapter material by concise chapter overviews and a two-colour text design that highlights important chapter elements. Suggestions for further reading and a rich bibliography, which point readers to important pieces of contemporary literature and provide a springboard for deeper investigation of particular topics, lend further support for student learning.

A Reference Grammar of Spanish is a comprehensive handbook on the structure of the Spanish language. Keeping technical terminology to a minimum, it provides a detailed yet clear point of reference on all the intricacies of Spanish grammar, covering word order, parts of speech, verb use, syntax, gender, number, alphabet, and pronunciation. Accompanied by a wealth of carefully chosen examples, it looks at Spanish in Iberia, the USA, Mexico, and Argentina, and demonstrates the differences between these varieties. It is designed specifically with English-speaking learners in mind, and contains useful tools such as a glossary of terms, an index, and a detailed examination of different registers of the language. Clearly structured and systematically organised, this volume is set to become the standard guide to the grammar of contemporary Spanish, and will be an invaluable resource for teachers and students, as well as a practical supplement to textbooks and classroom study.

Coinage played a central role in the history of the Athenian naval empire of the fifth century BC. It made possible the rise of the empire itself, which was financed through tribute in coinage collected annually from the empire's approximately 200 cities. The empire's downfall was brought about by the wealth in Persian coinage that financed its enemies. This book surveys and illustrates, with nearly 200 examples, the extraordinary variety of silver and gold coinages that were employed in the history of the period, minted by cities within the empire and by those cities and rulers that came into contact with it. It also examines how coins supplement the literary sources and even attest to developments in the monetary history of the period that would otherwise be unknown. This is an accessible introduction to both the history of the Athenian empire and to the use of coins as evidence.

First published in 1985 and strongly quantitative in flavour, Analytical Studies in Transport Economics presents work that was at the frontier of research in the field of transport economics. Written by some of the leading scholars in this field, it covers intercity freight and air passenger transport. The eight papers included cover a range of modelling approaches and address a variety of transport issues. They are all, however, concerned with the analysis of current issues - questions of industry productivity, optimal pricing and regulation, prediction of equilibrium, and the problems of competition. The collection is preceded by an invaluable 'Introduction and overview' by the editor. Provided to place the volume in context, this overview gives a brief review of the relevant literature and then endeavours to present the common results and findings which cut across the individual papers or approaches.

China, like many authoritarian regimes, struggles with the tension between the need to foster economic development by empowering local officials and the regime's imperative to control them politically. Landry explores how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) manages local officials in order to meet these goals and perpetuate an unusually decentralized authoritarian regime. Using unique data collected at the municipal, county, and village level, Landry examines in detail how the promotion mechanisms for local cadres have allowed the CCP to reward officials for the development of their localities without weakening political control. His research shows that the CCP's personnel management system is a key factor in explaining China's enduring authoritarianism and proves convincingly that decentralization and authoritarianism can work hand in hand.

An impossible locked-room mystery by a master of the genreFirst published in 1944, Till Death Do Us Part remains a pacey and deeply satisfying impossible crime story, championed by Carr connoisseurs as one of the very best examples of his mystery writing talents. This edition includes an introduction by CWA Diamond Dagger Award-winning author Martin Edwards.Crime author Dick Markham is in love again; his fiancée, the mysterious newcomer to the village, Lesley Grant. When Grant accidentally shoots the fortune teller through the side of his tent at the local fair―following a very strange reaction to his predictions―Markham is reluctantly brought into a scheme to expose his betrothed as a suspected serial husband-poisoner. That night the enigmatic fortune teller―and chief accuser―is found dead in an impossible locked-room setup, casting suspicion onto Grant and striking doubt into the heart of her lover. Lured by the scent of the impossible case, Dr. Gideon Fell arrives from London to exa

The premise of this book is that most activity in everyday life and work is based on tasks that are novel, infrequent in our experience, or variable with respect to the action to be taken. Such tasks require decisions to be made and actions taken in the face of ambiguous or incomplete information. Time pressure is frequently great and penalties for failure are severe. Examples include investing in markets, controlling industrial accidents, and detecting fraud. The environments in which such tasks occur defy a definition of optimal performance, yet the benefits of successful decision making are considerable. The authors refer to domains without criteria for optimal performance as competency-based and describe the able behaviour of individuals who work in them by the term competence. The chapters examine the propositions that metacognitive processes give structure to otherwise ill-structured tasks and are fundamental enablers of decision-making performance.