Bücher veröffentlicht von Springer London

Imagine algebra class meets The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy...Meet JJ, an unusual character with a unique vantage position from which he can measure and monitor humanity's progress. Armed with a device that compels all around it to tell the truth, JJ offers a satirical evaluation of our attitudes to numeracy and logic, touching upon several aspects of life on Earth along the way, from the criminal justice system and people's use of language to highway driving and modern art.A collection of mathematically-flavored stories and jokes, interlaced with puzzles, paradoxes and problems, fuse together in an entertaining, free-flowing narrative that will engage and amuse anyone with an interest in the issues confronting society today. JJ demonstrates how a lack of elementary mathematical knowledge can taint our work and general thinking and reflects upon the importance of what is arguably our most valuable weapon against ignorance: a sound mathematical education.What is JJ's prognosis for our future? There's only one way to find out..."e;Numbers, logic, human behavior and aliens: this unique book blends them all into a captivating narrative of serious talk and satire, where wit and scholarly details are counterpointed by instructive puzzles and mathematical fun. A 'must read' for anybody who appreciates humor and culture."e;Stanislav Potapenko, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Waterloo, Canada"e;... a real delight. Constanda has managed to intertwine stories, puzzles, logic and some very rich mathematics concepts into a very readable, enjoyable novel... I believe this book should be in the personal library of every high school mathematics teacher."e;Tom Becvar, St Louis University High School, USA"e;a highly readable, unique and fascinating combination of humor, mathematics and social commentary that is factual, educational and, more importantly, understandable. Given what is taking place in today's society, J.J. Moon brings mathematics back to earth! I'll never go through the car buying process again without thinking about SCAM 16!"e;Jerry Hoopert, VP / Chief Administrative Officer, Tulsa Teachers Credit Union, USA

Sepsis is a serious medical condition, resulting from the immune response to a severe infection. Septicaemia is sepsis of the bloodstream caused by bactemeria, which is the presence of bacteria in the bloodstream. The term septecaemia is also used to refer to sepsis in general. In the US, sepsis is the leading cause of death in non-coronary ICU patients, and the tenth most common form of death overall. Sepsis is common and also more dangerous in the elderly, immunocompromised, and critically ill patients. It occurs in 1-2% of all hospitilizations and accounts for as much as 25% of all ICU bed utilization. It is a major cause of death in intensive care units worldwide, with mortality rates that range from 20% for sepsis to 40% for severe sepsis to more than 60% for septic shock. The book brings together a group of experts to consider how the various pathways implicated in early and late sepsis interact. It addresses the frequent, but under-recognised condition of sepsis and discusses new ways to prevent and treat it. It describes numerous pharmocological approaches to therapy for early and late sepsis. It includes detailed discussion of the various physiological systems implicated in sepsis. This is an invaluable resource for all critical care physicians and researchers. It is also informative reading for immunologists, endocrinologists, neuroendocrinologists, phsysiologists and pharmacologistsDrawing on multi-professional editors and authors brings in the variety of perspectives and knowledge seen within the critical care team to produce a text that is both inclusive of and targeted to the individual needs of its intended audience. The nature of the material, written and edited by experienced practitioners in the field will provide an invaluable source of reference and training material for specialists and those already trained in their field.

Arterial disease and inflammation are fundamental causes of many medical conditions. Recently, there have been several major advances in our understanding of the causes of diseases affecting the heart, lungs, kidneys, skin and blood vessels. The role of endothelium derived growth factors, nitric oxide and other messengers in vascular disease has been more clearly defined. New treatments targeting these molecular disorders are being used with beneficial effects. Further progress depends on a combined approach embracing basic and clinical research so that treatments of common, important diseases can be designed intelligently and logically. "e;Vascular Complications in Human Disease"e; presents our understanding of vascular disease, in reviews of the main strands of basic and clinical research written by leading international experts. It also identifies routes for further fruitful research and development. This concise and carefully edited book, avoiding repetition, includes the full spectrum of basic research which is not covered in other textbooks.

Heart failure is the biggest killer in the western world, and the prevalence is expected to increase due to aging of the population. Over the past decade there has been an increasing awareness of left ventricular (LV) diastolic dysfunction as a mechanism of congestive heart failure, and it appears that more than 30-40 % of all heart failure patients have dominantly diastolic heart failure, with preserved or only mildly reduced systolic function. Recent clinical studies suggest that patients with congestive heart failure and preserved LV function may benefit from specific medical treatment. Furthermore, in patients with hypertension the presence of diastolic dysfunction is a sign that the myocardium has reacted to the elevated blood pressure, and might indicate the need for intensified antihypertensive therapy. In spite of all this there are very few textbooks that provides the knowledge that would be needed in cardiology practice to approach and deal with patients with diastolic heart failure.There is, however, significant disagreement regarding the clinical value of assessing diastolic function, and the practising cardiologist is confused by the non-invasive methodology which includes a myriad of Doppler-based indices, and most of these are strongly dependant on age and cardiac loading conditions. Recent advances in non-invasive cardiac diagnostics, and in particular tissue Doppler echocardiography provides better and simpler diagnostic algorithm. However, in order to interpret the diagnostic methods the cardiologist should understand some fundamental concepts which relate to the physiology of cardiac filling. Current literature suggests that assessment of diastolic function may be clinically useful to make the diagnosis diastolic heart failure in patients who present with congestive heart failure and normal LV ejection fraction, and to provide a non-invasive estimate of LV diastolic pressure. Quantification of diastolic function also provides prognostic information that may be important. Furthermore, assessment of diastolic filling is very useful in the evaluation of patients suspected of constrictive pericarditis and in differentiating between constriction and restriction.

An Introduction to Knowledge Engineering presents a simple but detailed exp- ration of current and established work in the ?eld of knowledge-based systems and related technologies. Its treatment of the increasing variety of such systems is designed to provide the reader with a substantial grounding in such techno- gies as expert systems, neural networks, genetic algorithms, case-based reasoning systems, data mining, intelligent agents and the associated techniques and meth- ologies. The material is reinforced by the inclusion of numerous activities that provide opportunities for the reader to engage in their own research and re?ection as they progress through the book. In addition, self-assessment questions allow the student to check their own understanding of the concepts covered. The book will be suitable for both undergraduate and postgraduate students in computing science and related disciplines such as knowledge engineering, arti?cial intelligence, intelligent systems, cognitive neuroscience, robotics and cybernetics. vii Contents Foreword vii 1 An Introduction to Knowledge Engineering. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Section 1: Data, Information and Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Section 2: Skills of a Knowledge Engineer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Section 3: An Introduction to Knowledge-Based Systems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 2 Types of Knowledge-Based Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Section 1: Expert Systems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Section 2: Neural Networks. . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Section 3: Case-Based Reasoning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Section 4: Genetic Algorithms. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Section 5: Intelligent Agents. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Section 6: Data Mining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 3 Knowledge Acquisition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 4 Knowledge Representation and Reasoning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 Section 1: Using Knowledge. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Section 2: Logic, Rules and Representation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 Section 3: Developing Rule-Based Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 Section 4: Semantic Networks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Imagine the plight of a young woman, some time during the thousands of years before th the mid-18 century, who, soon after a dif? cult childbirth, ? nds she can no longer keep from leaking urine. She is standing in the chill winter wind, her urine-soaked clothes clinging wet against her thighs as she comforts her crying baby knowing that she faces a life of misery, shame and social ostracism. Or imagine the middle-aged wife of a tenant farmer on the remote central Illinois plain, straining with her husband to lift a heavy log that has fallen on their only milk cow only to feel a deep tearing sensation and discover a large mass protruding between her legs. Gripped by fear, she cannot know what has happened to her or how she will care for her family if she can no longer help with the dif? cult tasks needed to live. We must be grateful to the generations of physicians before us who have pioneered treatments and developed preventions for the pelvic ? oor disorders that have affected women throughout time. Each decade during the last 150 years has brought new insights, new operations, and new medicines to help women who suffer from these debilitating conditions. At ? rst, surgical treatments were so dangerous that they could only be s- gested for the most severe of cases, but advances in anesthetic and surgical safety now make them available to the majority of women.

The development of the di?erential calculus was one of the major achievements of seventeenth century European mathematics, originating in the work of N- ton, Leibniz and others. Integral calculus can be traced back to the work of Archimedes in the third century B. C. Since its inception, calculus has dev- oped in two main directions. One is the growth of applications and associated techniques,indiverse?eldssuchasphysics,engineering,economics,probability and biology. The other direction is that of analytical foundations, where the intuitive and largely geometrical approach is replaced by an emphasis on logic and the development of an axiomatic basis for the real number system whose properties underpin many of the results of calculus. This approach occupied many mathematicians through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, c- minating in the work of Dedekind and Cantor, leading into twentieth century developments in Analysis and Topology. We can learn much about calculus by studying its history, and a good starting point is the St Andrews¿ History of Mathematics website www-history. mcs. st-and. ac. uk/history/ Thisbookisdesignedforbeginninguniversitystudents,boththosestudying mathematics as a major subject, and those whose main specialism requires the use and understanding of calculus. In the latter case we would expect that lecturers would customise the treatment with applications from the relevant subject area. Thepre-universityschoolmathematicscurriculaofmostEuropeancountries all include some calculus, and this book is intended to provide, among other things, a transition between school and university calculus. In some countries suchastheU. K.