In 1966, Vittorio Erspamer, the editor of the first monograph within the Handbook of Experimental Pharmacology series that dealt with 5-hydroxy- tryptamine (Vol. XIX) wrote in the Preface: "In a decade of intense and dedicated work, an immense amount of experimental data has been collected, the significance of which ...has spread into all fields of biology and medi- cine ...". Three decades later, a dramatic further increase in our knowledge of all neuroscientific aspects of the serotoninergic system in the CNS has been achieved, and we are witnessing persisting interest in the biology of...

Initially a subfield of solid state physics, the study of mesoscopic systems has evolved over the years into a vast field of research in its own right. Keeping track its rapid progress, this book provides a broad survey of the latest developments in the field. The focus is on statistics and dynamics of mesoscopic systems with special emphasis on topics like quantum chaos, localization, noise and fluctuations, mesoscopic optics and quantum transport in nanostructures. Written with nonspecialists in mind, this book will also be useful to graduate students wishing to familiarize themselves with...

This volume examines three critical debates of post-industrial society: culture and technology, information society, and postmodernism. It aims to provide theoretical and methodological underpinnings for the analysis and design of information, communication and multimedia technologies.

This book surveys recent advances related to the application of single molecule techniques in various fields of science. The topics, each described by leading experts in the field, range from single molecule experiments in quantum optics and solid-state physics to analogous investigations in physical chemistry and biophysics. A unifying theme of all chapters is the power of single molecule techniques to unravel fluctuations and heterogeneities usually hidden in the ensemble average of complex systems. The concept for the book originated from a gathering of some of the world's leading...

The NE Pacific Ocean is considered the birthplace of many fundamental ideas for modern plate tectonics theory. In this book the orogenic belts of this region are discussed in a single, internally consistent tectonic concept. Geological information is considered the most reliable. Geophysical models are tested for compatibility with observable geological data. The new concept avoids force-fitting interpretations to preconceived assumptions regarding accreted far-traveled terranes in the Cordillera and continental-oceanic plate interactions in the entire region.

This book contains selected papers from the Colloquium in Honor of Alain Lecomte, held in Pauillac, France, in November 2007. The event was part of the ANR project "Prelude" (Towards Theoretical Pragmatics Based on Ludics and Continuation Theory), the proceedings of which were published in another FoLLI-LNAI volume (LNAI 6505) edited by Alain Lecomte and Samuel Troncon. The selected papers of this Festschrift volume focus on the scientific areas in which Alain Lecomte has worked and to which he has contributed: formal linguistics, computational linguistics, logic, and cognition.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning, held in London, UK, in September 2011.
The 32 contributions presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewd and selected from 67 submissions. The presentations and posters covered a wide range of CBR topics of interest both to practitioners and researchers, including CBR methodology covering case representation, similarity, retrieval, and adaptation; provenance and maintenance; recommender systems; multi-agent collaborative systems; data mining; time series analysis;...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Brain Informatics, BI 2011, held in Lanzhou, China, in September 2011. The 27 revised full papers and 6 keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. They are grouped in topcial sections on thinking and perception-centric investigations of human information processing systems; information technologies for the management, analysis and use of brain data; cognition-inspired applications. Furthermore, there is a section with 8 papers from the workshop on meta-synthesis and complex...

Constitutes the refereed proceedings of the European conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases: ECML PKDD 2011, held in Athens, Greece, in September 2011. This title presents the papers that address areas related to machine learning and knowledge discovery in databases as well as other innovative application domains.