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North Holland

History of CERN, II
Volume II - Building and Running the Laboratory, 1954-1965
1st Edition
A. Hermann + 4 more
English
The first volume of the History of CERN (published in 1987) dealt with the launching of the European Organization for Nuclear Research covering the period 1949 to 1954. Volume II continues the history through to the mid-1960's, when it was decided to equip the laboratory with a second generation of accelerators and a new Director-General was nominated. It covers the building and the running of the laboratory during these dozen years, it studies the construction and exploitation of the 600 MeV Synchro-cyclotron and the 28 GeV Proton Synchrotron, it considers the setting up of the material and organizational infrastructure which made this possible, and it covers the reigns of four Director-Generals, Felix Bloch, Cornelis Bakker, John Adams and Victor Weisskopf.Three considerations are relevant to the treatment of the material in this volume. Firstly the political dimension, in the broad sense of the term, was no longer omnipresent as during the process of creation. Alongside it scientific and technical determinations were at work. The second consideration is that the institutional dimension was also inescapably present. Finally, there was no longer one dominant process in the organisation's life but several and it was no longer possible to tell just one story. The authors therefore decided to focus attention on various aspects of CERN's life.Part I attempts to describe the various aspects which together constitute the history of CERN and aims to offer a synchronic panorama year by year account of CERN's many activities. Part II deals primarily with technological achievements and scientific results and it includes the most technical chapters in the volume, chapters using as main sources publications in the open literature, internal reports, and minutes of specialized committees or of divisional meetings. Part III aims to define how the CERN ``system'' functioned, how this science-based organization worked, how it chose, planned and concretely realized its experimental programme on the shop-floor and how it identified the equipment it would need in the long term and organized its relations with the outside world, notably the political world. The concluding Part IV aims to bring out the specificity of CERN, to identify the ways in which it differed from other big science laboratories in the 1950's and 1960's, and to try to understand where its uniqueness and originality lay.
Aging and Cognition
Knowledge Organization and Utilization
1st Edition
Volume 71
T.M. Hess
English
During the past two decades, there has been a dramatic increase in interest in the study of aging-related changes in cognitive abilities. In this volume researchers from a variety of theoretical perspectives discuss adult age differences in a wide range of cognitive skills. Of special interest is the extent to which aging effects on performance are related to variations in the representation, organization, and utilization of knowledge, broadly defined. Recent research and theory in the field of aging has emphasized the need to examine such processes more closely in order to provide a more complete understanding of aging effects on cognitive behavior.
Encyclopedia of Tribology
1st Edition
C. Kajdas + 2 more
English
The multidisciplinary nature of tribology, the conflicting theories and approaches to it found in the literature, plus the fact that definitions of the same phenomenon often differ widely, prompted the authors to compile this work. The aim of this encyclopedia is to provide information on specific tribological terms. The entire field of tribology encompassing lubrication, friction and wear, i.e. the science and technology of interacting surfaces in relative motion, is covered. An extensive description of the chemical and biological aspects of tribology is given, including a wide range of current references and authors. The reader is also referred to relevant literature for most of the terms listed. The information presented has been made as up-to-date as possible, taking into account both the theoretical and practical nature of the subject.The encyclopedia will be an indispensable reference source in the work of engineers, chemists, physicists, metallurgists, materials and surface scientists, biotechnologists, as well as research workers in these fields.
Handbook of Convex Geometry
1st Edition
Bozzano G Luisa
English
Handbook of Convex Geometry, Volume A offers a survey of convex geometry and its many ramifications and relations with other areas of mathematics, including convexity, geometric inequalities, and convex sets. The selection first offers information on the history of convexity, characterizations of convex sets, and mixed volumes. Topics include elementary convexity, equality in the Aleksandrov-Fenchel inequality, mixed surface area measures, characteristic properties of convex sets in analysis and differential geometry, and extensions of the notion of a convex set. The text then reviews the standard isoperimetric theorem and stability of geometric inequalities. The manuscript takes a look at selected affine isoperimetric inequalities, extremum problems for convex discs and polyhedra, and rigidity. Discussions focus on include infinitesimal and static rigidity related to surfaces, isoperimetric problem for convex polyhedral, bounds for the volume of a convex polyhedron, curvature image inequality, Busemann intersection inequality and its relatives, and Petty projection inequality. The book then tackles geometric algorithms, convexity and discrete optimization, mathematical programming and convex geometry, and the combinatorial aspects of convex polytopes. The selection is a valuable source of data for mathematicians and researchers interested in convex geometry.
Handbook on the Physics and Chemistry of Rare Earths
1st Edition
Volume 13
English
The justification for combining reports of studies of the rare earths from the disciplines of physics and chemistry can be found in the historical reliance each has had upon the other in the apprehension of these mysterious substances. This was stated in the preface to the first four volumes of the series and is even more true today. For a time, specializations thrived more or less independently but as theory has become more comprehensive it has become possible to progress towards unification of these specializations. Nowhere has this need for a unified approach been more evident than in the study of the rare earths where the insights won in one area become a vision to another resulting in the illumination of the whole. The lanthanides are particularly suited to multidisciplinary study because of the unity derived from the progressive filling of the 4f orbitals by electrons. This introduces many profound physical phenomena such as magnetism as well as the frequently subtle chemical variation that affords fine-tuning of our understanding of nature.Volume 13 of the Handbook continues to promote this interactive approach to the science of the rare earths. Insights won from focused study of some aspect of the field are presented in critical and authoritative reviews. Some of these add important archival material of general and lasting interest. Others on topical subjects will promote new understanding of active areas.
Cognitive Biases
1st Edition
Volume 68
J.-P. Caverni + 2 more
English
Many studies in cognitive psychology have provided evidence of systematic deviations in cognitive task performance relative to that dictated by optimality, rationality, or coherency. The texts in this volume present an account of research into the cognitive biases observed on various tasks: reasoning, categorization, evaluation, and probabilistic and confidence judgments. The authors have attempted to discern the contribution of the study of bias to our understanding of the cognitive processes involved in each case, rather than proposing an inventory of the different types of biases. A special section has been devoted to studies on the correction of biases and cognitive aids.
The Development of Attention
Research and Theory
1st Edition
Volume 69
J.T. Enns
English
This volume presents an up-to-date review of developmental aspects of human attention by leading researchers and theorists. The papers included in the first section consider the ways in which newborns are pretuned to visual, auditory, linguistic, and social features of their environment, as well as how selectivity to these features changes in the first year of life. The following section examines properties of the visual and auditory world that are attention-getting for children. Developmental increases in capacity and strategy are also examined in this section through the study of perception, memory, problem-solving and language. Section III explores several ways in which selective processing can fail in development (e.g. autism, hyperactivity, and psychopathy) while Section IV reports on those aspects of selectivity that are lost (and preserved) in the aging process.
Singular Perturbations I
Spaces and Singular Perturbations on Manifolds Without Boundary
1st Edition
Volume 23
L.S. Frank
English
Singular perturbations, one of the central topics in asymptotic analysis, also play a special role in describing physical phenomena such as the propagation of waves in media in the presence of small energy dissipations or dispersions, the appearance of boundary or interior layers in fluid and gas dynamics, as well as in elasticity theory, semi-classical asymptotic approximations in quantum mechanics etc. Elliptic and coercive singular perturbations are of special interest for the asymptotic solution of problems which are characterized by boundary layer phenomena, e.g. the theory of thin buckling plates, elastic rods and beams. This first volume deals with linear singular perturbations (on smooth manifolds without boundary) considered as equicontinuous linear mappings between corresponding families of Sobolev-Slobodetski'... type spaces of vectorial order.
Progress in Optics
1st Edition
Volume 28
English
Volume XXVIII contains five review articles covering the following areas - digital holography, a field that has found useful applications in connection with data processing and data storage, for 3-d displays and in providing new types of optical components, for example, holographic gratings; - basic investigations concerned with new technologies that may lead to better optical communication systems and improved limits of measurement than are expected from the traditional interpretation of quantum-mechanical measurement theory; - a review of our current understanding of quantum coherence properties of stimulated Raman scattering; - an account of techniques developed in recent years in the field of interferometry, for improvements of high precision measurements; - the fascinating phenomenon of quantum jumps, which were introduced in the theory of atomic spectra by Niels Bohr in 1913.
Stochastic Models
1st Edition
Volume 2
English
One of the central problems in operations research and management science is how to quantify the effects of uncertainty about the future. This, the second volume in a series of handbooks, is devoted to models where chance events play a major role. The thirteen chapters survey topics in applied probability that have been particularly useful in operations research and management science. Each chapter was written by an expert, both in subject matter and in its exposition. The chapters fall into four groups. The first four cover the fundamentals of stochastic processes, and lay the foundation for the following chapters. The next three chapters are concerned with methods of getting numbers. This includes numerical solution of models, parameter estimation for models, and simulation of models. Chapters 8 and 9 describe the fundamentals of dynamic optimization. The last four chapters are concerned with the most important structured models in operations research and management science; queues, queueing networks, inventories, and reliability.

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