Close followers of the evolution of the Series on Industry and Health Care will recognize in this fourth volume some continuity and some change. The essential concept behind the series remains: here, as before, we are looking to private industry as a potential agent of change in the American health care delivery system. We have made some structural accommodations, however, to comments received from readers in industry and in health services. The original concept of a topical monograph supplemented by a separate hardbound volume of background papers has yielded to the present formula in which...

This fifth issue in the Industry and Health Care series takes a quick turn through unpredictable and only partially charted waters. The series as a whole has set out to explore the role of industry as a potential agent of change in the health care system, and to map the courses that may lead toward control of costs. One that looks possible is the effort now being made to infuse some competition into the health care industry through organized systems of care, known as HMOs. Health maintenance organizations, especially the fee-for-service variety known as IPAs (individual practice...

The reception of the original volume by students, pedagogues, and reviewers has been most gratifying. It appears to have both satisfied a need and served a useful educational purpose. Hence, some ten years later it has been deemed advisable to bring it up to date, if only in a slightly expanded form. The purpose for writing this book and its level remain the same. Many new polymers have been synthesized in the last decade that have found meaningful and novel uses. Examples of these applications are included in this new edition. Major advances have also been made in biophysics and in molecular...

This book represents the interests and attitudes, the information, and the philosophy that define my work and career as it has evolved over the years. Not written as a substitute for any of the many textbooks on ecology, it is meant to present the simplest and most direct approach to a complex field as distilled out of my work as an applied ecologist, who deals with concrete daily problems in the real-world context of economics, politics, and logis tics. I hope that it is useful to the reader who seeks an overview of applied ecology, including sufficient specific detail to make that reader...

THE idea of collecting these essays occurred to me when, in the leisure of retire- ment, I scanned some of my own books and found that two of the more widely read show a startling change of attitude to some of the fundamental concepts of science. These are Einstein's Theory of Relativity of 1921 and the American edition of The Restless Universe of 1951. I have taken the introduction of as the former the first item of this collection, the postscript to the latter as its last. These books agree in the relativistic concept of space and time, but differ in many other funda- mental notions. In...

This textbook is designed for the intermediate-level course on ordinary differential equations offered at many universities and colleges. It treats, as standard topics of such a course: existence and uniqueness theory, linear s- terns, stability theory, and introductory phase-plane analysis of autonomous second order systems. The unique feature of the book is its further inc- sion of a substantial introduction to delay differential eq- tions. Such equations are motivated by problems in control theory, physics, biology, ecology, economics, inventory c- trol, and the theory of nuclear reactors....

This text deals with three basic techniques for constructing models of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory: relative constructibility, Cohen's forcing, and Scott-Solovay's method of Boolean valued models. Our main concern will be the development of a unified theory that encompasses these techniques in one comprehensive framework. Consequently we will focus on certain funda- mental and intrinsic relations between these methods of model construction. Extensive applications will not be treated here. This text is a continuation of our book, "I ntroduction to Axiomatic Set Theory," Springer-Verlag, 1971;...

The German edition of this book, first published in 1966, has been quite popular; we did not, however, consider publishing an English edition because a number of excellent textbooks in this field already exist. In recent years, how- ever, the wish was frequently expressed that, especially, the description of the relationships between optimization and other subfields of mathematics, which is not to be found in this form in other texts, might be made available to a wider readership; so it was with this in mind that, be- latedly, a translation was undertaken after all. Since the appearance of...

The book deals mainly with three problems involving Gaussian stationary processes. The first problem consists of clarifying the conditions for mutual absolute continuity (equivalence) of probability distributions of a "random process segment" and of finding effective formulas for densities of the equiva- lent distributions. Our second problem is to describe the classes of spectral measures corresponding in some sense to regular stationary processes (in par- ticular, satisfying the well-known "strong mixing condition") as well as to describe the subclasses associated with "mixing rate." The...

We shall limit our observations to the conditions in natural ecosystems, since it would be beyond the scope of this book to embark upon a consideration of secondary, man-made ecosystems. 2. Classification of the Geo-biosphere into Zonobiomes The biosphere is the thin layer of the earth's surface to which the phenomena connected with living matter are confined. On land, this comprises the lowest layer of the atmosphere permanently inhabited by living organisms and into which plants extend, as well as the root-containing portion of the lithosphere, which we term the soil. Living organisms are...