swollen with deutschemarks and yen newly created to purchase unwanted dollars from the markets. When the Bundesbank and the Bank of Japan began to raise their interest rates to slow domestic monetary expansion, the fabric of international monetary cooperation began to unravel. Amid charge and counter-charge by disgruntled fmance ministers, the dollar dropped further and interest rates jumped upward, leading to panic in the stock market on Black Monday. Fortunately, a steady hand and generous supply of credit from the Federal Reserve System prevented massive bankruptcies among Wall Street...

The era of the personal computer has, without doubt, permanently altered our life style in a myriad of ways. The "brain" of the personal computer is the microprocessor (together with RAM and ROM) which makes the decisions needed for the computer to perform in the desired manner. The microprocessor continues to evolve as increasingly complex tasks are required. While not sharing the limelight of the microprocessor, the "heart" of the personal computer, namely the power supply, is equally important since without the necessary source of power the microprocessor would be a useless piece of...

1 Warren J. Samuels The study of economics as discourse requires a perspective that focuses on the relationships among knowledge (or truth), discourse (or lan guage), and meaning. Central to this task is the recognition that the con duct of economic analysis uses words and that words embody meanings that are applied to the object of study, but do not necessarily derive from that object although they define that object for us. Knowledge Economists are engaged in efforts to understand and explain the econ omy. In the pursuit of this knowledge they have attempted to make coherent the respect(s)...

This book is about the role of expert systems in marketing, particularly in the consumer goods industry. Section I describes the changing nature of consumer marketing and presents the rationale and need for expert systems. The remainder of the book combines a tutorial on expert systems with a series of expert system prototypes. The tutorial material is presented in three places. First, section II is devoted to introducing expert systems in general. Chapter 3 provides a general introduction to the topic, which is continued in chapter 4 where a small expert system (the Promotion Advisor) is...

Large computational resources are of ever increasing importance for the simulation of semiconductor processes, devices and integrated circuits. The Workshop on Computational Electronics was intended to be a forum for the dis- cussion of the state-of-the-art of device simulation. Three major research areas were covered: conventional simulations, based on the drift-diffusion and the hydrodynamic models; Monte Carlo methods and other techniques for the solution of the Boltzmann transport equation; and computational approaches to quantum transport which are relevant to novel devices based on...

One of the aims of Natural Language Processing is to facilitate .the use of computers by allowing their users to communicate in natural language. There are two important aspects to person-machine communication: understanding and generating. While natural language understanding has been a major focus of research, natural language generation is a relatively new and increasingly active field of research. This book presents an overview of the state of the art in natural language generation, describing both new results and directions for new research. The principal emphasis of natural language...

If you have ever hiked up a steep hill to reach a viewpoint, you will know that sensing can involve the expenditure of effort. More generally, the choice of which movement an intelligent system chooses to make is usually based on information gleaned from sensors. But the information required to make the motion decision may not be immediately to hand, so the system . first has to plan a motion whose purpose is to acquire the needed sensor information. Again, this conforms to our everyday experience: I am in the woods and don't know which direction to go, so I climb up to the ridge to get my...

Growth of the electric industry Electric generating stations and the associated transmission and distribu tion systems are high ticket items as are the costs of fuel and of operating the industry. The country presently spends about $150 billion annually on electricity. It is the country's largest industry, with assets of over $400 billion (Edison Electric Institute Statistical Year book, 1985). The country's electric generating capacity and the end use of electricity grew exponentially for about 70 years, starting at the beginning of the century, with a doubling period of roughly seven years...

It is my ambition in writing this book to bring tribology to the study of control of machines with friction. Tribology, from the greek for study of rubbing, is the discipline that concerns itself with friction, wear and lubrication. Tribology spans a great range of disciplines, from surface physics to lubrication chemistry and engineering, and comprises investigators in diverse specialities. The English language tribology literature now grows at a rate of some 700 articles per year. But for all of this activity, in the three years that I have been concerned with the control of machines with...