Neuroscience is progressing so rapidly that even expressions such as "by leaps and bounds" fail to capture the pace of its growth. Questions that once were thought to be unanswerable - perhaps even unaskable - have now been both asked and answered, and new questions once unthinkable, are routine. Topics in Integrative Neuroscience has singled out four of the most important problems in neuroscience: higher order perception; language; memory systems; and sensory processes. The volume presents original contributions by many of the leading researchers in those fields, and with an initial chapter covering neuroethics. It is impossible to capture fully the sweep of discoveries that emerged from the 'Decade of the Brain' within the covers of a single volume. It is possible, however, to provide a sample, both in recognition of what has been accomplished and as a harbinger of what is surely to come.

Gender and Health is the first book to examine how men's and women's lives and their physiology contribute to differences in their health. In a thoughtful synthesis of diverse literatures, the authors demonstrate that modern societies' health problems ultimately involve a combination of policies, personal behavior, and choice. The book is designed for researchers, policymakers, and others who seek to understand how the choices of individuals, families, communities, and governments contribute to health. It can inform men and women at each of these levels how to better integrate health implications into their everyday decisions and actions.

This book exclusively surveys the active on-going research of the current maturity of fuzzy logic over the last four decades. Many world leaders of fuzzy logic have enthusiastically contributed their best research results into five theoretical, philosophical and fundamental sub areas and nine distinctive applications, including two PhD dissertations from two world class universities dealing with cutting-edge research areas of bioinformatics and geological science. Beyond the scope of survey and collection of the book, one important spin off is the emerging and recognition of a major scientific paradigm shift from the conventional mathematics to the mathematics of uncertainty, which arguably holds the key to solving very difficult and complex problems in biological and social sciences alike. The book, loaded with historical perspective, creative thinking, critical reviewing, and uniquely constructed strategy for future growth of this dynamic research area, is an invaluable resource for active researchers at all levels, university administrators, foundation directors, funding agency program chiefs, research & development planners and technological assessors.

The foundations of revealed preference theory for a competitive consumer were laid by Samuelson in 1938. Later this theory was axiomatically developed by Arrow, Sen, Suzumura and other economists into the theory of choice functions.

In the last thirty years, combinatorial mathematics has found itself at the heart of many technological applications. The aims of the conference on which this book is based were to stimulate combinatorial mathematicians to pursue new lines of research of potential and practical importance, and to uncover the breadth of applications to the subject. Topics covered include neural networks, cryptography, radio frequency assignment for mobile telecommunications, coding theory, sequences for communications applications, interconnection networks, data types, knot theory, radar, parallel processing, network reliability, formal specification of programs and protocols, and combinatorial optimization.

In 1965 Lotfi Zadeh, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California in Berkeley, published the first of his papers on his new Fuzzy Set Theory. Since the 1980s this mathematical theory of "unsharp amounts" has been applied in many different fields with great success. The word "fuzzy" has also become very well-known among non-scientists thanks to extensive advertising campaigns for fuzzy-controlled household appliances and to their prominent presence in the media, first in Japan and then in other countries. On the other hand, the story of how Fuzzy Set Theory and its earliest applications originated remains largely unknown.

This book describes new methods for building intelligent systems using type-2 fuzzy logic and soft computing techniques. Soft Computing (SC) consists of several computing paradigms, including type-1 fuzzy logic, neural networks, and genetic algorithms, which can be used to create powerful hybrid intelligent systems. The authors extends the use of fuzzy logic to a higher order, which is called type-2 fuzzy logic. Combining type-2 fuzzy logic with traditional SC techniques, we can build powerful hybrid intelligent systems that can use the advantages that each technique offers. We consider in this book the use of type-2 fuzzy logic and traditional SC techniques to solve pattern recognition problems in realworld applications.

The book describes the major physical theories of comets in the past two millennia. It demonstrates the evolution of ideas about the nature, position, motion and physical constitution of comets from Aristotle to Whipple. Unlike the available works on the history of comets, which either illustrate relatively short periods in the history of physical cometology or portray a landscape view without adequate details, the present study focuses on details of each theory. It also investigates the interaction between observational and mathematical astronomy, and the physical sciences in defining the properties of comets.