Learn How to Solve Problems from the Process of Solving Problems

The common denominator of a growing number of hard decisions facing modern societies is the need to determine 'how safe is safe enough?'. The authors begin by defining acceptable-risk problems and analysing why they are so difficult to resolve, considering such issues as uncertainty about their definition, lack of relevant facts, conflicting and conflicted social values, and disagreements between technical experts and the lay public. Drawing on their own experience in risk management as well as the relevant research literatures, they identify and characterise the variety of methods that have been proposed for resolving acceptable-risk problems. They subject these methods to a rigorous critique in terms of philosophical presuppositions, technical feasibility, political acceptability, and validity of underlying assumptions about human behaviour. The authors construct a framework for deciding how to make decisions about risks, and offer recommendations for research, public policy, and pra

How can the drag coefficient of a car be reduced? What factors govern the variation in the shape of the Earth's magnetosphere? What is the basis of weather prediction? These are examples of problems that can only be tackled with a sound knowledge of the principles and methods of fluid dynamics. This important discipline has applications which range from the study of the large-scale properties of the galaxies to the design of high precision engineering components. This book introduces the subject of fluid dynamics from the first principles. The first eleven chapters cover all the basic ideas of fluid mechanics, explaining carefully the modelling and mathematics needed. The last six chapters illustrate applications of this material to linearised sound and water waves, to high speed flow of air, to non-linear water waves on channels, and to aerofoil theory. Over 350 diagrams have been used to illustrate key points. Exercises are included to help develop and reinforce the reader's understa

This book comprises five expository articles and two research papers on topics of current interest in set theory and the foundations of mathematics. Articles by Baumgartner and Devlin introduce the reader to proper forcing. This is a development by Saharon Shelah of Cohen's method which has led to solutions of problems that resisted attack by forcing methods as originally developed in the 1960s. The article by Guaspari is an introduction to descriptive set theory, a subject that has developed dramatically in the last few years. Articles by Kanamori and Stanley discuss one of the most difficult concepts in contemporary set theory, that of the morass, first created by Ronald Jensen in 1971 to solve the gap-two conjecture in model theory, assuming Gödel's axiom of constructibility. The papers by Prikry and Shelah complete the volume by giving the reader the flavour of contemporary research in set theory. This book will be of interest to graduate students and research workers in set theory

Interest in theoretical biology is rapidly growing and this 1981 book attempts to make the theory more accessible to experimentalists. Its primary purpose is to demonstrate to experimental molecular and cellular biologists the possible usefulness of mathematical models. Biologists with a basic command of calculus should be able to learn from the book what assumptions are implied by various types of equations, to understand in broad outline a number of major theoretical concepts, and to be aware of some of the difficulties connected with analytical and numerical solutions of mathematical problems. Thus they should be able to appreciate the significance of theoretical papers in their fields and to communicate usefully with theoreticians in the course of their work.

This 1983 book is a lively and clearly written introduction to the philosophy of natural science, organized around the central theme of scientific realism. It has two parts. 'Representing' deals with the different philosophical accounts of scientific objectivity and the reality of scientific entities. The views of Kuhn, Feyerabend, Lakatos, Putnam, van Fraassen, and others, are all considered. 'Intervening' presents the first sustained treatment of experimental science for many years and uses it to give a new direction to debates about realism. Hacking illustrates how experimentation often has a life independent of theory. He argues that although the philosophical problems of scientific realism can not be resolved when put in terms of theory alone, a sound philosophy of experiment provides compelling grounds for a realistic attitude. A great many scientific examples are described in both parts of the book, which also includes lucid expositions of recent high energy physics and a remark

This book opens with a description of the human reproductive system followed by accounts of fertilisation and development from puberty through to menopause. Information on pregnancy, birth control, infertility, twins and other aspects of reproductive study is included. Ageing and the problems arising from the process are considered. This is followed by demographic methods and population changes both in the UK and in other countries. Some comparisons are made with animal populations and the problems of population growth are discussed.

Discusses the significance of dreams and describes techniques for using dreams to increase creativity, gain psychological insights, and solve personal problems

The myth of fire stolen from the gods appears in many pre-industrial societies. In Greek culture Prometheus the fire-stealer figures prominently in the poems of Hesiod, but in Prometheus Bound Hesiod's morality tale has been transformed into a drama of tragic tone and proportions. In the introduction, Mark Griffith examines how the dramatist has achieved this transformation, looking at the play from all angles - plot and characters, dramatic technique, style and metre. He includes a short section on the production of the play and on the questions of authenticity and date. The commentary guides the reader through problems of language, metre and content. An important feature of this volume is the appendix, which gathers together the existing fragments of the other two plays in the supposed Prometheus trilogy, quoting them in full in the original language and in translation, with short accompanying commentary. This is suitable for undergraduates and students in the upper forms of schools.

In The Observing Self, noted psychiatrist Arthur J. Deikman lucidly relates how the mystical tradition can enable Western psychology to come to terms with the essential problems of meaning, self, and

The relations between reason, motivation and value present problems which, though ancient, remain intractable. If values are objective and rational how can they move us and if they are dependent on our contingent desires how can they be rational? E. J. Bond makes a bold attack on this dilemma. The widespread view among philosophers today is that judgements contain an irreducible element of personal commitment. To this Professor Bond proposes an account of values as objective and value judgements as true or false, employing a distinction between grounding and motivating reasons to establish their connection with action. He defines and tests his position against a number of recent theories, providing in the process forceful criticism of Williams, Wiggins, Foot, Narveson and Nagel, among others. A distinctive contribution to the subject, it will stimulate interest and worthwhile debate among philosophers, while also serving as an introduction to this vital topic.

First published in 1981 this book presents an original theoretical treatment of the problems of maintaining full employment in a multisector economic system with a growing population and different rates of technical progress in different sectors. The conditions for full employment and full capacity utilisation are examined when prices are stable and when there is inflation. This approach is carried out, not in terms of input-output relations, as has become customary in multisector models, but rather in terms of vertically integrated sectors. This makes it possible to analyse the economic growth process in terms of the structural dynamics of production, of prices and of employment. Remarkable implications are drawn for a surprisingly large number of theoretical problems, which have been under discussion since Adam Smith: from price theory to the theory of rates of profit and the rates of interest; from production theory to the theories of fluctuating growth, ever-changing composition of

Anthropologists have always been concerned with the difference between traditional (or 'primitive') and scientific modes of thought and with the relationships between magic, religion and science. John Skorupski distinguishes two broadly opposed approaches to these problems: the 'intellectualist' regards primitive systems of thought and actions as cosmologies, comparable to scientific theory, which emerge and persist as attempts to control the natural world; the 'symbolist' regards them as essentially representative or expressive of the pattern of social relations in the culture in which they exist. Dr Skorupski considers in particular the notions of ritual, ceremony and symbol. He shows how their understanding involves and suggests more general philosophical problems of relativism, interpretation, translation, and the connections between belief and action. These are difficult and important problems and require an unusual combination of imagination and interdisciplinary exercise. This b

For the second edition of this very successful text, Professor Binmore has written two chapters on analysis in vector spaces. The discussion extends to the notion of the derivative of a vector function as a matrix and the use of second derivatives in classifying stationary points. Some necessary concepts from linear algebra are included where appropriate. The first edition contained numerous worked examples and an ample collection of exercises for all of which solutions were provided at the end of the book. The second edition retains this feature but in addition offers a set of problems for which no solutions are given. Teachers may find this a helpful innovation.

Economists have long treated technological phenomena as events transpiring inside a black box and, on the whole, have adhered rather strictly to a self-imposed ordinance not to inquire too seriously into what transpires inside that box. The purpose of Professor Rosenberg's work is to break open and examine the contents of the black box. In so doing, a number of important economic problems be powerfully illuminated. The author clearly shows how specific features of individual technologies have shaped a number of variables of great concern to economists: the rate of productivity improvement, the nature of learning processes underlying technological change itself, the speed of technology transfer, and the effectiveness of government policies that are intended to influence technologies in particular ways. The separate chapters of this book reflect a primary concern with some of the distinctive aspects of industrial technologies in the twentieth century, such as the increasing reliance upon

The problems of class analysis and the division of labour in industrial societies are of fundamental importance in the social sciences. Designed as a testimonial volume for Ilya Neustadt, Social Class and the Division of Labour provides a comprehensive discussion of the central issues of this debate. All the essays in this volume attempt to integrate theoretical debate and empirical investigation: some focus directly on the division of labour, considering especially Marxist views of its relation to class domination, while others are more concerned with the labour process as it currently exists in capitalist productions. The volume as a whole demonstrates forcibly that class divisions and class conflict can only be properly understood in conjunction with an elaborated analysis of the division of labour. The book represents a major contribution to class theory and analysis which will attract considerable attention amongst sociologists and economists, and become a standard textbook for un

This book offers a comprehensive study of language development. The contributors, all well-known psychologists, represent a very broad range of theoretical persuasion. Each chapter summarises research on a major problem and relates results to fundamental questions about how children acquire language. Among the issues treated are the role of input in acquisition, the processes of underlying lexical and semantic development, the implications of cross-linguistic research for acquisition theory, the pros and cons of functionalist approaches to language learning and the psychological consequences of a major new formal theory of language learning. In their long and thoughtful introduction, the editors demonstrate the complementarity of studies focused on seemingly separate problems and identify apparent trends, both theoretical and methodological. Taken together, these chapters provide an entry point into an increasingly complex field for the growing number of researchers and students in psy

This book was first published in 1982. Unemployment is perhaps one of the most serious social problems. In economic terms the cost of unemployment, both to the individual and to the collective, is extremely high. But unemployment has other effects too. In this book Marie Jahoda looks beyond the obvious economic consequences, to explore the psychological meaning of employment and unemployment. The book is an accessible and nontechnical account of the contribution which social psychology can make to understanding unemployment and clearly reveals the limitations of an exclusive concentration on its economic aspects. Professor Jahoda shows that the psychological impact is hugely destructive, throwing doubt on the popular diagnosis that the work ethic is disappearing. She also analyses the experience of unemployment in the context of the experience of employment and argues that one of the socially destructive consequences of large-scale unemployment is that it detracts from the need to huma

John Buridan was a fourteenth-century philosopher who enjoyed an enormous reputation for about two hundred years, was then totally neglected, and is now being 'rediscovered' through his relevance to contemporary work in philosophical logic. The final chapter of Buridan's Sophismata deals with problems about self-reference, and in particular with the semantic paradoxes. He offers his own distinctive solution to the well-known 'Liar Paradox' and introduces a number of other paradoxes that will be unfamiliar to most logicians. Buridan also moves on from these problems to more general questions about the nature of propositions, the criteria of their truth and falsity and the concepts of validity and knowledge. This edition of that chapter is intended to make Buridan's ideas and arguments accessible to a wider range of readers. The volume should interest many philosophers, linguists and logicians, who are increasingly finding in medieval work striking anticipations of their own concerns.

This 1982 book examines the changes in hospital care in New York that occurred around the turn of the twentieth century. It represents a fundamental departure from traditional medical history, which has usually emphasised 'progress' through science and technology. Professor Rosner identifies the economic, political and demographic pressures that brought about a reshaping of the health care system, and analyses the dramatic reorganisation of hospitals that took place. He also discusses major scientific advances such as the discovery of anaesthetic properties of ether, nitrous oxide and chloroform, and the consequent increase in surgical solutions to medical problems.

The Rake's Progress is Stravinsky's biggest work and one of the few great operas written since the 1920s, rare too for the unusual quality of its libretto, by Auden and Kallman. Its importance is undisputed, but so too are the problems it raises: problems of both performance and understanding, caused by the irony with which it is so thoroughly permeated. In aspects of style and operatic convention it looks back to the eighteenth century, and in particular to the operas of Mozart and da Ponte, while making references also to other periods, to operas from Monteverdi to Verdi. Yet at the same time it is wholly a work of the twentieth-century, and indeed it is centrally concerned with the impossibility of return, artistic, psychological or actual, as well as with the nature and limitation of human free will. The Rake's Progress is not one of unbridled dissipation but rather, more interestingly, one of attachment to naive notions of freedom and choice, and his tragedy is that he can never g

To understand the role of language in public life and the social process in general, we need first a closer understanding of how linguistic knowledge and social factors interact in discourse interpretation. This volume is a major advance towards that understanding. Professor Gumperz here synthesizes fundamental research on communication from a wide variety of disciplines - linguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropology and non-verbal communication - and develops an original and broadly based theory of conversational inference which shows how verbal communication can serve either between individuals of different social and ethnic backgrounds. The urgent need to overcome such barriers to effective communication is also a central concern of the book. Examples of conversational exchanges as well as of longer encounters, recorded in the urban United States, village Austria, South Asia and Britain, and analyzed to illustrate all aspects of the analytical approach, and to show how subconscious c

West Africa's agriculture has, for 150 years, been heavily geared toward export, yet the region is one of the world's poorest. Keith Hart examines this question, focusing particularly on how this situation has affected the indigenous peoples of West Africa. Commerce has grown impressively, but productivity remains low and capital accumulation is retarded. The reasons exist primarily in internal conditions shaping social institutions. Before, during, and since colonialism, the particular problems of these preindustrial states have shaped agricultural development more than the pressure supposedly emanating from the 'world system' of international capitalism. This book, following the classical economists as well as Marx and Lenin, argues for the necessity of rapid capitalist penetration into West African agriculture. The book is also a readable introduction to the history and ethnography of the region as a whole.

A concise, easy to understand introduction that emphasizes the relevance of statistics to real world problems. Describes traditional statistical methods, their uses and limitations, and explains how t

The twenty-fourth book of the Iliad - the account of Priam's ransoming of Hector's body from Achilles - is one of the masterpieces of world literature, a work of interest to a far wider audience than scholars of ancient Greek. In this edition Colin Macleod tries to reach both scholars and Greekless readers alike. In his commentary he gives help to readers unfamiliar with the language of Homer and discusses problems of content and expression, never treating this book in isolation but drawing attention to Homer's artistry and thought in the context of the whole of the Iliad. In his introduction Mr Macleod examines Homer's notion of poetry, his style and language and the architecture and meaning of his work. He tries to show why Book XXIV is a proper conclusion to the Iliad. This is an edition for classical scholars, undergraduates and students in the upper forms of schools. The introduction and substantial parts of the commentary require no knowledge of Greek and should find readers amon

In a society where race is a significant component of social identity and exerts an important influence on social relationships, the problems faced by couples who enter into 'mixed' marriages are especially difficult. The book is a study of the personal histories and everyday lives of a small number of interracial families living in and around Brixton, south London, in the early 1970s. Dr Benson sets the circumstances that confront these families within the context of wider British attitudes about race, colour and miscegenation as they developed over time. She argues that couples are obliged to make a continual series of choices between 'black' and 'white' in the course of their everyday lives. Through a discussion of these choices and of the factors which lead individuals to enter into a marriage which could be regarded with some disapproval, the book explores how people in London thought and felt about race, colour and social identity. It will be of interest to all teachers and stude

Ecologists are making increasing use of computer methods in analyzing ecological data on plant and animal communities. Ecological problems naturally involve numerous variables and numerous individuals or samples. Multivariate techniques permit the summary of large, complex sets of data and provide the means to tackle many problems that cannot be investigated experimentally because of practical restraints. Ecologists are thus enabled to group similar species and similar sample sites together, and to generate hypotheses about environmental and historical factors that affect the communities. This timely book presents a full critical description of three methodologies - direct gradient analysis, ordination, and classification - from both theoretical and practical viewpoints. Both traditional and new methods are presented. Using a wide range of illustrative examples, Hugh Gauch provides an up-to-date synthesis of this field, which will be of interest to advanced students and ecologists. The

This book is a reappraisal of English politics in the first decade of George III's reign. It sets out to explain how party politics changed, and what problems that created for the parliamentary elite. The issues of party, of patriotism as it manifested itself in the elder Pitt's political career, and of the relations between the notions of ministerial responsibility and the powers of the Crown are all used to illuminate the nature of political conflict. Special emphasis is placed on Burke's notions of party. The schisms created by this reconfiguration of party politics, Dr Brewer argues, had effects beyond Westminster. He discusses extra-parliamentary forms of political expression, notably the press, and goes on to show how the career of John Wilkes and the critique of British politics developed by American radicals gave focus to a variety of political discontents, and produced new arguments in favour of parliamentary reform. Throughout his study he emphasises the interplay between pop

In August 1974 most of the inhabitants of Argaki, a prosperous Cypriot village, fled from their homes in the face of an advancing army. In a matter of days they had become war refugees. This book is an account of their experiences before, during and after their flight from their village. Peter Loizos had made an anthropological study of Argaki before 1974 and is also related to some of its families. This has enabled him to combine the methods and approaches of an anthropologist with the personal insight of a family member and his account of the villagers' experiences is moving, vivid and sympathetic. No anthropologist has ever previously recorded so poignantly the experiences of the victims of war; this compassionate and sensitive book will be of compelling interest to all readers concerned about the aftermath of war and the problems of refugees.

What constitutes a scientific discovery? How do discoveries happen and how are they recognised as such? These are questions of central concern to scientists and philosophers. In this book, Augustine Brannigan provides a critical examination of the major theories which have been devised to account for discoveries and innovations in science, and develops a fresh alternative. Dr Brannigan begins by arguing that most theories fall into one of two classes: mentalistic theories, which describe how ideas come into the mind, and cultural theories, which describe how they 'mature' in a particular culture. His account reveals a series of empirical and methodological problems that make these existing models untenable and he proposes as an alternative a sociological approach, which draws attention not to what makes discoveries happen, but to the processes whereby certain achievements are recognised and labelled as discoveries. This approach is illustrated in detail with a number of important scien

The ideas of mathematics can be understood through the techniques needed to solve problems which crop up in everyday life. Conversely, these problems can illustrate how mathematics develops 'naturally'. The essence of this informal book is to motivate mathematics by examining mathematical models of situations and problems that occur in the real world. Each chapter deals with a specific mathematical topic and each topic is introduced at different levels to provide motivation for students of varying mathematical maturity. The authors emphasize that although applications provide motivation, they are not trying to supply aids for teaching applied mathematics. It is mathematical notions and how they can be developed that are important. We thus have an interesting inversion of aims: physics, biology, linguistics, etc., are here applied to the teaching of mathematics. The bank of ideas in this practical manual will be valuable to teachers of mathematics at schools, colleges and, to a certain

Offers the first definitive discussion of the problems, pleasures, and pitfalls of being a parent for the second time, with practical guidelines on sibling rivalry, scheduling, how to avoid comparison

Complemented by photographs of individual productions, Mr David's book comprises studies of major English productions of Shakespeare during the 1970s, often detailing how radically some performances have altered in the course of a run. His first concern has been to record, as accurately and comprehensively as possible, those moments in actual performance that have seemed most strikingly to recreate or impair the dramatic effects intended by Shakespeare. Mr David also draws wider conclusions about Shakespeare's art and the art of the theatre in general. He attempts to answer such questions as: what are the main trends and priorities in contemporary Shakespearean production? What conditions are imposed on plays by the nature of theatre and the art of acting? How is performance moulded by dramatic form? What special problems affect the 'translation', for modern spectators, of a classical play written in accordance with forgotten conventions? This book fuses academic and practical approach

How are different cultures to be described and compared? This book provides a clear and concise discussion of the theoretical issues involved in ethnographic description and comparative study. Taking up the classic problems in the study of of social organisation, Professor Goodenough describes the major issues in the cross-cultural study of kinship and the family, revealing the kinds of constants, both formal and functional, on which such study must be based. The result is new definitions of marriage, family and parenthood for use in cross-cultural analysis and a greater understanding of this form of analysis itself. The statement on the interdependence of description and comparison in cultural anthropology and its implications for a science of culture, provides fresh insights into cross-cultural analysis for both the theoretical and the practical anthropologist.

When this book was first published in 1978, it was only recently that researchers had begun to focus on children's peer relationships and the impact of these relationships on their development. The contributors to this volume view friendship as an important context for the study of a variety of cognitive and affective processes - from the perspectives of a wide range of disciplines. The volume poses an array of fascinating theoretical questions, and offers varied methodological tools for answering them. Some contributors present and review applied research addressed to conceptualizing and ameliorating peer relationship problems, whilst others reflect applied or policy-orientated concerns in chapters on racial integration and the integration of mentally retarded children into regular classrooms. A chapter on the scientific, political and social history of the interest in children's friendships and two summary chapters add to the usefulness of the book for students.

Originally published in 1981, this collection of 33 research papers follows from a conference on the interwoven themes of finite Desarguesian spaces, Steiner systems, coding theory, group theory, block designs, generalized quadrangles, and projective planes. There is a comprehensive introduction, which aims to interest the non-specialist in the subject and which indicates how the contributions fit together. This is a field of research pursued both for its intrinsic interest and its applications. These papers include a number of open problems whose statement requires very little mathematical sophistication.

The issue of practising anthropology in one's own society is the focus of this volume of seventeen essays, originally published in 1981. The contributions, written by US and Canadian anthropologists, deal with methods, theories and styles of doing research in North America. Rich and sometimes candid descriptions of the strategies and orienting concepts employed to order the data and the research experience made this book a contribution to both theory and method. Traditionally, the research domains of anthropologists have been societies and cultures other than their own. Research by anthropologists in their own societies received renewed emphasis partly because of a heightened awareness of social problems. This book examines how innovative scholars applied anthropology to non-traditional research questions in urban and rural society, in health and education systems, and in the field of contract anthropology.

Using data drawn primarily from the American Southwest, Stephen Plog shows that there are basic problems with the methods archaeologists traditionally use to classify and analyse prehistoric pottery. Archaeologists have studied the painted designs and other stylistic (that is, non-functional) characteristics on different types of prehistoric artifacts in order to infer information about prehistoric social organization and cultural change. Such studies usually argue that the degree of similarity between the designs found on ceramic vessels at different prehistoric sites were occupied or from the amount of interaction between the people who occupied them. In Stylistic Variation in Prehistoric Ceramics, the author proposes that many factors, rather than just two, cause design or stylistic variation on artifacts. He demonstrates flaws in the logic and method of previous studies and suggests that the ways in which designs have been classified and understood are often inappropriate. Employin

Originally published in 1979, this book is a history of American nuclear weapons policy that tells how the United States learned to live with the bomb. Little of what has been written about nuclear weapons is historical. Most people concerned with the problems of nuclear armaments have asked 'what is to be done?' rather than 'what has happened and why?' But The Nuclear Question is more than a chronology. It offers original and provocative arguments about the development of military strategy and arms limitations with the Soviet Union, and focuses in particular on the Kennedy administration. During that period the innovations of Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Limited Test Ban Treaty combined to establish the main lines of nuclear policy that the United States follows today. This book will have great appeal to specialists who follow the technical developments of armaments and the political responses to those developments and to the general read

Originally published in 1980, the essays in this volume analyse a family of phenomena in advanced industrial societies for which neither liberal nor Marxist theories provide a systematic explanation. Berger and Piore argue that these phenomena represent a structural solution to the economic and political problems of distributing economic uncertainty and preserving political stability. The discontinuities in industrial societies are not the product of incomplete modernisation but of political and economic choices that perpetuate and recreate segmentation to protect critical political and economic mechanisms. Studies by Piore examine the labour market and its relationship to technological innovation and capital investment, whilst those by Berger explore the social foundation of political parties and the formation of state policy as it emerges from competitive political forces.

The nature of the solid-liquid interface, the mechanism associated with its movement, and its preferential morphologies, impose important boundary conditions on the technology of crystal growth from the melt. This 1973 book sets out to describe these basic physical changes which underlie all of the important range of melt growth techniques irrespective of the special problems of individual materials and particular experimental techniques. It will be of particular value to senior undergraduates and graduate students of the science of materials. Dr Woodruff begins by considering Gibbs's 1878 work on the basic thermodynamics of an interface, and moves on to examine experimental aspects of the solid-liquid interfacial free energy. The theory of the morphological stability of the interface is also studied, along with the kinetics of crystal growth, and there is a useful chapter on eutectic growth. Throughout, the macroscopic properties of the materials under discussion are linked to relevan