Today's shortages of resources make the search for wear and corrosion resistant materials one of the most important tasks of the next century. Since the surface of a material is the location where any interaction occurs, it is that there the hardest requirements on the material are imposed: to be wear resistant for tools and bearings; to be corrosion resistant for turbine blades and tubes in the petrochemical industry; to be antireflecting for solar cells; to be decorative for architectural panels and to combine several of these properties in other applications. Surface engineering is the...

The present book has been written by two mathematicians and one physicist: a pure mathematician specializing in Finsler geometry (Makoto Matsumoto), one working in mathematical biology (Peter Antonelli), and a mathematical physicist specializing in information thermodynamics (Roman Ingarden). The main purpose of this book is to present the principles and methods of sprays (path spaces) and Finsler spaces together with examples of applications to physical and life sciences. It is our aim to write an introductory book on Finsler geometry and its applications at a fairly advanced level. It is...

Happy he who could learn the causes of things (Virgil, Georgics 11) There is clearly a place for a book on the environmental aspects of trace elements in coal, especially with the increasing use of coal for power production. Our aim is to provide relevant background information and to update the situation regarding trace elements during beneficiation, combustion, .atmospheric deposition, leaching from wastes anti reclamation. The outcome is a balanced account of the overall situation. The initial chapter gives the rationale behind the planning of the book and puts the topics into the context...

Since it may seem strange for a new series to begin with volume 3, a word of explanation is in order. The series, Philosophy and Technology, inaugurated in this form with this volume, is the official publication of the Society for Philosophy & Technology. Approximately one volume each year is tobe published, alternating between proceedings volumes - taken from contributions to biennial international conferences of the Society - and miscellaneous volumes, with roughly the character of a professional society journal. The forerunners of the series in its present form were two proceedings...

This book is about the interplay of theory and experimentation on group decision making in economics. The theories that the book subjects to experimental testing mostly come from the theory of games. The decisions investigated in the book mostly concern economic interaction like strict competition. two-person bargaining. and coalition formation. The underlying philosophy of the articles collected in this book is consistent with the opinion of a growing number of economists and psychologists that economic issues cannot be understood fully just by thinking about them. Rather. the interplay...

Mathematics is the science of acts without things - and through this, of things one can define by acts. 1 Paul Valery The essays collected in this volume form a mosaik of theory, research, and practice directed at the task of spreading mathematical knowledge. They address questions raised by the recurrent observation that, all too frequently, the present ways and means of teaching mathematics generate in the student a lasting aversion against numbers, rather than an understanding of the useful and sometimes enchanting things one can do with them. Parents, teachers, and researchers in the...

This ninth volume is one of the most arnbitious in the Philosophy and Technology series. Edited by technopolitical philosopher Langdon Winner, it assembles an impressive collection of philosophers and political theorists to discuss one of the most important topics of the end of the twentieth century - the bearing of technology, in all its rarnifica tions, on the practice of democratic politics in the developed world. When set beside the previous volume in the series - Europe, America, and Teehnology - the two together open a philosophical dialogue of great significance about the ways...

Nearly everyone agrees that life has changed in our technological society, whether the contrast is with earlier stages in Western culture or with non-Western cultures. "Modernization" is just one of various terms that have been applied to the process by which we have arrived at the peculiar lifestyle typical of our age; whatever the term for the process, almost all analysts agree in finding technology to be one of its key ingredients. This is the judgment of critics of all sorts - anthropologists, historians, literary figures, sociologists, theologians. Volume 4 in the Philosophy and...

The English Franciscan philosopher and theologian, Adam of Wodeham (d. 1358), was a disciple and friend of William of Ockham; he was also a student of Walther Chatton. Nevertheless, he was an independent thinker who did not hesitate to criticize his former teachers - Ockham sporadically and benevolently, Chatton, frequently and aggressively. Since W odeham developed his own doctrinal position by a thorough critical examination of current opinions, the first part of this introduc- tion briefly outlines the positions of the chief figures in the English controversy over indivisibles. The second...

This volume grew out of the experience of the First Inter-American Congress on Philosophy of Technology, October 1988, organized by the Center for the Philosophy and History of Science and Technology of the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagiiez. The Spanish-language proceedings of that conference have been published in Carl Mitcham and Margarita M. Peiia Borrero, with Elena Lugo and James Ward, eds., El nuevo mundo de la filosofta y la tecnolog(a (University Park, PA: STS Press, 1990). This volume contains thirty-two papers, twenty-two summaries, an introduction and biographical notes, to...