As the number, complexity, and scope of large engineering projects (LEPs) increase worldwide, the huge stakes may endanger the survival of corporations and threaten the stability of countries that approach these projects unprepared. According to the authors, the "front-end" engineering of institutional arrangements and strategic systems is a far greater determinant of an LEP's success than are the more tangible aspects of project engineering and management. The book is based on an international research project that analyzed sixty LEPs, among them the Boston Harbor cleanup; the first phase...

Modeling and implementing dynamical systems is a central problem in artificial intelligence, robotics, software agents, simulation, decision and control theory, and many other disciplines. In recent years, a new approach to representing such systems, grounded in mathematical logic, has been developed within the AI knowledge-representation community.

This book presents a comprehensive treatment of these ideas, basing its theoretical and implementation foundations on the situation calculus, a dialect of first-order logic. Within this framework, it develops many features of dynamical...

Error-Correcting Codes, by Professor Peterson, was originally published in 1961. Now, with E. J. Weldon, Jr., as his coauthor, Professor Peterson has extensively rewritten his material. The book contains essentially all of the material of the first edition; however, the authors state that because there has been so much new work published in error-correcting codes, the preparation of this second edition proved to be a much greater task than writing the original book. The major additions are the chapters on majority-logic codes, synchronization, and convolutional codes. Much new...

The Microelectronics Revolution is a comprehensive guide to the silicon chip revolution and its impact on society. The distinguished contributors to this volume explain in turn the origins and nature of microelectronics, the characteristics of the burgeoning microchip industry and the increasing use of microprocessors in everyday products.The book details the impact of this new technology on society in separate chapters which take up automation on the factory floor, the word-processing revolution in the office, the consequences for employment, and the implications for industrial relations....

In this book, two psychologists apply principles of cognitive psychology to understanding reading. Unlike most other books on the subject, this one presents a consistent theoretical point of view and applies it to the acquisition of reading and what the skilled reader does.The first part of The Psychology of Reading covers perceptual learning, the development of cognitive strategies, the development of language, the nature of writing systems, and an extensive review of the research on word recognition.In the second part of the book, the authors look closely at abilities that children bring...

Dramatic advances in life expectancy mean that today's retirees must plan on living into their eighties, their nineties, and even beyond. Longer life expectancies are the symbol of a prosperous society, but this progress also means that some retirees will need to plan conservatively and cut back substantially on their living standards or risk living so long that they exhaust their resources. This book examines the role that life annuities can play in helping people protect themselves against such outcomes.

A life annuity is an insurance product that pays out a periodic amount for as...