Semiconductors lie at the heart of some of the most important industries and technologies of the twentieth century. The complexity of silicon integrated circuits is increasing considerably because of the continuous dimensional shrinkage to improve efficiency and functionality. This evolution in design rules poses real challenges for the materials scientists and processing engineers. Materials, defects and processing now have to be understood in their totality. World experts discuss, in this volume, the crucial issues facing lithography, ion implication and plasma processing, metallization and...

Research on the interaction between plants and microbes continues to attract increasing attention, both within the field as well as in the scientific community at large. Many of the major scientific journals have recently reviewed various aspects of the field. Several papers dealing with plant-microbe interactions have been featured on the covers of scientific publications in the past several months, and the lay press have recently presented feature articles of this field. An additional sign of the interest in this field is that the International Society of Molecular Plant-Microbe...

In this collection we finally find the philosophy of technology, a young and rapidly developing area of scholarly interest, making contact with history of science and technology, and mainstream epistemological and metaphysical issues. The sophistication of these papers indicates the maturity of the field as it moves away from the advocacy of anti-technology ideological posturing toward a deeper understanding of the options and restraints technological developments provide.
The papers presented here take us over a threshold into the real world of complicated social and technological...

On the 26th of November 1992 the organizing committee gathered together, at Luigi Salce's invitation, for the first time. The tradition of abelian groups and modules Italian conferences (Rome 77, Udine 85, Bressanone 90) needed to be kept up by one more meeting. Since that first time it was clear to us that our goal was not so easy. In fact the main intended topics of abelian groups, modules over commutative rings and non commutative rings have become so specialized in the last years that it looked really ambitious to fit them into only one meeting. Anyway, since everyone of us shared the...

Geomechanics is the basic science for many engineering fields, including oil and gas recovery, mining, civil engineering, water supply, etc., as well as for many environmental sciences, including earthquake prediction, ecology, landscape dynamics, and explosion works. Historically, the major concepts of geomechanics were founded on the methods of the elasticity theory and the static equilibrium of joints with solid friction. Underground hydrodynamics was developed quite separately and included only simple, conventional ideas of elastic pore-space deformation. Today, the situation is...

This book examines an abstract mathematical theory, placing special emphasis on results applicable to formal logic. If a theory is especially abstract, it may find a natural home within several of the more familiar branches of mathematics. This is the case with the theory of closure spaces. It might be considered part of topology, lattice theory, universal algebra or, no doubt, one of several other branches of mathematics as well. In our development we have treated it, conceptually and methodologically, as part of topology, partly because we first thought ofthe basic structure involved...

The purpose of models is not to fit the data but to sharpen the questions. S. Karlin, 11th R. A. Fisher Memorial Lecture, Royal Society, 20 April 1983 We are proud to offer this volume in honour of the remarkable career of the Father of Spatial Econometrics, Professor Jean Paelinck, presently of the Tinbergen Institute, Rotterdam. Not one to model solely for the sake of modelling, the above quotation nicely captures Professor Paelinck's unceasing quest for the best question for which an answer is needed. His FLEUR model has sharpened many spatial economics and spatial econometrics questions ...

Are foreign exchange markets efficient? Are fundamentals important for predicting exchange rate movements? What is the signal-to-ratio of high frequency exchange rate changes? Is it possible to define a measure of the equilibrium exchange rate that is useful from an assessment perspective?
The book is a selective survey of current thinking on key topics in exchange rate economics, supplemented throughout by new empirical evidence. The focus is on the use of advanced econometric tools to find answers to these and other questions which are important to practitioners, policy-makers and...

Astranger in academia cannot but be impressed by the apparent uniformity and precision of the methodology currently applied to the measurement of economic relationships. In scores of journal articles and other studies, a theoretical argument is typically presented to justify the position that a certain variable is related to certain other, possibly causal, variables. Regression or a related method is applied to a set of observations on these variables, and the conclusion often emerges that the causa, l variables are indeed "significant" at a certain "level," thereby lending support to the...

One cannot exaggerate the importance of estimating how international trade responds to changes in income and prices. But there is a tension between whether one should use models that fit the data but that contradict certain aspects of the underlying theory or models that fit the theory but contradict certain aspects of the data. The essays in Estimating Trade Elasticities book offer one practical approach to deal with this tension. The analysis starts with the practical implications of optimising behaviour for estimation and it follows with a re-examination of the puzzling...