A field guide to the familiar

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Robert G. Wetzel, Gene E. Likens

"Limnological Analyses covers the physical, chemical, and biological characteristics of standing and running waters, and provides students with a solid foundation in this complex multidisciplinary field of ecology. The book illustrates accepted standard methods as well as modern metabolic and experimental approaches and their research applications.". "Instructors and students of limnology will value Limnological Analyses for its highly structured, concise presentation and its research-oriented approach that invites active participation. The methodology presented here will also be useful to aquatic resource managers, pollution and water-quality researchers, and all biologists studying the response of aquatic organisms to environmental changes."--BOOK JACKET.

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Rein Taagepera

"In his challenging new book Rein Taagepera argues that society needs more from social sciences than they have delivered. One reason for falling short is that social sciences have depended excessively on regression and other statistical approaches, neglecting logical model building. Science is not only about the empirical 'What is?' but also very much about the conceptual 'How should it be on logical grounds?' Statistical approaches are essentially descriptive, while quantitatively formulated logical models are predictive in an explanatory way. Making Social Sciences More Scientific contrasts the predominance of statistics in today's social sciences and predominance of quantitatively predictive logical models in physics. It shows how to construct predictive models and gives social science examples. Making Social Sciences More Scientific is useful to students who wish to learn the basics of the scientific method and to all those researchers who look for ways to do better social science."--Jacket.

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Kunihiko Kaneko, Ichiro Tsuda

Chaos in science has always been a fascinating realm since it challenges the usual scientific approach of reductionism. While carefully distinguishing between complexity, holism, randomness, incompleteness, nondeterminism and stochastic behaviour the authors show that, although many aspects of chaos have been phenomenologically understood, most of its defining principles are still difficult to grasp and formulate. Demonstrating that chaos escapes all traditional methods of description, the authors set out to find new methods to deal with this phenomenon and illustrate their constructive approach with many examples from physics, biology and information technology. While maintaining a high level of rigour, an overly complicated mathematical apparatus is avoided in order to make this book accessible, beyond the specialist level, to a wider interdisciplinary readership.

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Eleonora Bilotta and Pietro Pantano

"The theme of this book is the use of Cellular Automatas (CAs) to model biological systems, describing 2-D CAs to create populations of "life-like agents" with their own genomes"--Provided by publisher.