Springer US

Since their inception, fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic became popular. The reason is that the very idea of fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic attacks an old tradition in science, namely bivalent (black-or-white, all-or-none) judg­ ment and reasoning and the thus resulting approach to formation of scientific theories and models of reality. The idea of fuzzy logic, briefly speaking, is just the opposite of this tradition: instead of full truth and falsity, our judgment and reasoning also involve intermediate truth values. Application of this idea to various fields has become known under the term fuzzy approach (or graded truth approach). Both prac­ tice (many successful engineering applications) and theory (interesting nontrivial contributions and broad interest of mathematicians, logicians, and engineers) have proven the usefulness of fuzzy approach. One of the most successful areas of fuzzy methods is the application of fuzzy relational modeling. Fuzzy relations represent formal means for modeling of rather nontrivial phenomena (reasoning, decision, control, knowledge extraction, systems analysis and design, etc. ) in the pres­ ence of a particular kind of indeterminacy called vagueness. Models and methods based on fuzzy relations are often described by logical formulas (or by natural language statements that can be translated into logical formulas). Therefore, in order to approach these models and methods in an appropriate formal way, it is desirable to have a general theory of fuzzy relational systems with basic connections to (formal) language which enables us to describe relationships in these systems.

Applied probability is a broad research area that is of interest to scientists in diverse disciplines in science and technology, including: anthropology, biology, communication theory, economics, epidemiology, finance, geography, linguistics, medicine, meteorology, operations research, psychology, quality control, sociology, and statistics. Recent Advances in Applied Probability is a collection of survey articles that bring together the work of leading researchers in applied probability to present current research advances in this important area.

This volume will be of interest to graduate students and researchers whose research is closely connected to probability modelling and their applications. It is suitable for one semester graduate level research seminar in applied probability.

Current rates of autism diagnoses have been cause for concern and research as well as rumor and misinformation. Important questions surround the condition: how early can an accurate diagnosis be made? At what age should intervention start? How can parents recognize warning signs? And what causes autism in the first place?

There are no easy answers, but the Handbook of Early Intervention for Autism Spectrum Disorders gives researchers, practitioners, and academics the science and guidance to better understand and intervene. Background chapters survey the history of professional understanding of the disorders and the ongoing debate over autism as a single entity or a continuum. Chapters on best methods in screening, assessment, and diagnosis reflect the transition between the DSM-V and older diagnostic criteria. And at the heart of the book, the intervention section ranges from evidence-based strategies for developing core skills to ethical concerns, cultural considerations, and controversial treatments.

Included in the Handbook's broad-based coverage:

• Designing curriculum programs for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD).
• Mainstream education for children with ASD.
• Teaching independent living skills to children with ASD.
• Social skills and play.
• Behavioral and mental health disorders in children with ASD.
• Training and supporting caregivers in evidence-based practices.
• Teaching cognitive skills to children with ASD.

The Handbook of Early Intervention for Autism Spectrum Disorders is a comprehensive reference for researchers, professors, and graduate students as well as clinicians and other scientist-practitioners in clinical childand school psychology, child and adolescent psychiatry, social work, rehabilitation, special education, and pediatric medicine.

The death penalty has long played a central role in jurisprudence, in terms of identifying the most serious offenses and the most culpable offenders, as well as understanding the mental conditions that may exclude an offender from such a sentence. More recently, the debate has intensified on competency to face [execution], the effects of psychological impairment on that competency, and the role of expert witnesses in establishing criminal culpability. The edited volume, Mental Disorder and Criminal Law authoritatively blends empirical findings and legal expertise with sophisticated reasoning and ethical analysis to promote a deeper understanding of these complex issues at the interface of legal and psychological domains. In short, it explores the concept of (as termed by one chapter author) "protecting well-being while pursuing justice."

Contributors to this important volume:

• Examine the effects of depression at different stages of legal procedure.
• Offer proposed criteria for [prohibiting] capital punishment [of] the severely mentally ill
• Identify moral and procedural concerns in the use of child victims as witnesses.
• Analyze the balance between present responsibility and future risk.
• Untangle clinical and ethical issues for clinicians involved in capital sentencing.
• Clarify the process of psychological evaluation of competence to be executed.
• Review degrees of psychopathy in the context of criminal culpability.

A practice-enhancing reference for forensic psychiatrists and psychologists, and legal professionals, Mental Disorder and Criminal Law challenges readers to reexamine the life-and-death questions at the core of their work.

This monograph is concerned with the determination of the allowed rate ofreturn in rate cases which, in part, determines the rates ofcharge to customers of public utilities. Rate of return determination has been a central topic in utility regulation for a century. Recent changes in the traditionally regulated markets - electricity, gas, and telephone - have shoved discussion of rate of return determination into the background, replacing it by technology changes, competition, downsizing, deregulation, and reg'ulatory incentive systems. These new issues have made the regula­ tory sector, which had the reputation of being stodgy and uninteresting, an exciting field ofstudy. But rate ofreturn is not dead. It will playa key role in whatever the new structure ofthe regulated sector. Separating generation from transmis­ sion and distribution will not eliminate the need for rate of return analysis in the electric utility industry. Rather, it may well increase the number of companies for which the rate of return needs to be determined. It will playa fundamental role in the new regulatory environment. Incentive systems in the regulated sector may be the wave of the future but they will use the required rate ofreturn as a benchmark. Rate case will persist. Most rate cases include opposing testimony as to the "fair" rate of return or even the cost ofcapital for a public utility whose rates are at issue.

Traditional service sectors encompass a wide variety of industries ranging from transportation, retail and healthcare to entertainment, banking, and insurance. As the service sector expands into the global economy, a new science of service is emerging, one that is dedicated to encouraging service innovation by applying scientific understanding, engineering discipline, and management practice to designing, improving, and scaling service systems.

This seminal reference considers Service Science to be the study of value co-creation, and finds abundant common elements and themes, common concerns and approaches that converge on this central, real-world phenomena. Handbook of Service Science takes the first major steps to clarifying the definition, role, and future of this nascent field. Incorporating work by scholars from across the spectrum of service research, the volume presents multidisciplinary perspectives on the nature and theory of service, on current research and practice in design, operations, delivery, and innovation of service, and on future opportunities and potential of service research.

Handbook of Service Science provides a comprehensive reference suitable for a wide-reaching audience including researchers, practitioners, managers, and students who aspire to learn about or to create a deeper scientific foundation for service design and engineering, service experience and marketing, and service management and innovation.

List of contributors includes:

Melissa A. Akaka.- John Bailey.- Guruduth Banavar.- Rahul C. Basole.- William J. Baumol.- Gaurav Bhalla.- Mary Jo Bitner.- Jeannette Blomberg.- David E. Bowen.- John R. Bryson.- Richard B. Chase.- Henry Chesbrough.- Eng K. Chew.- Daniel Connors.- Peter W. Daniel.- Andrew Davies.- Faridah Djellal.- Bo Edvardsson.- Shelley Evenson.- Ray P. Fisk.- Faïz Gallouj.- Susanne Glissmann.- Robert J. Glushko.- Michael Gorma.- MichaelGregory.- Dwayne D. Gremler.- Steve J. Grove.- Gerhard, Gudergan.- Evert Gummesson.- Anders Gustafsson.- Alan Hartman.- James L. Heskett.- Kazuyoshi Hidaka.- Barbara Jones.- Uday S. Karmarkar.- Per Kristensson.- Robert F. Lusch.- Linda Macaulay.- Richard Metters.- Ian Miles.- Aleksandra Mojsilovic.- Claire Moxham.- Rogelio Oliva.- Lakshmish Ramaswamy.- Guangjie Ren.- William B. Rouse.- Roland T. Rust.- Scott E. Sampson.- Pamela Samuelson.- Jorge Sanz.- W. Earl Sasser Jr.- Benjamin Schneider.- Carl J. Schramm.- John D. Sterman.- Stephen L. Vargo.- Lars Witell.- Valarie Zeithaml.- Anatoly Zherebtsov

This volume contains the proceedings of the fourth international symposium held in November 1970 at the Texas Research Institute of Mental Sciences in Houston. Leading psychiatrists, biochemists, and pharmacologists from the United States and Great Britain presented new material and reviewed current concepts concerning schizophrenia and the affective disorders, with particular reference to the neurochemical basis of the etiology and chemotherapy of these diseases. Although the multiple mechanisms of mental disease are still not fully understood, substantial progress has definitely been made. The greatest contribution has come through the development of new therapeutic agents that not only provide invaluable help to the mentally ill but serve as chemical tools for studying the biological mechanisms associated with the disease state. Studies concerning the proposed catecholamine and indolealkylamine hypotheses for affective disorders and the possible formation of endogenous. toxins in schizophrenia have stimulated significant new research. This book presents new studies of schizophrenia and the affective disorders in one volume. It is our hope that it represents an effective integration of basic biochemical and pharmacological research with current clinical findings and that it will increase understanding of the etiology of mental disease and provide an impetus for the development of more effective therapeutic agents. We thank Drs. Gordon Farrell, Samuel Gershon, A. Horita, Irwin Kopin, and Joseph Schildkraut for their help with the organization of the meeting and for chairing the corresponding sessions.

The contents of The R Software are presented so as to be both comprehensive and easy for the reader to use. Besides its application as a self-learning text, this book can support lectures on R at any level from beginner to advanced. This book can serve as a textbook on R for beginners as well as more advanced users, working on Windows, MacOs or Linux OSes. The first part of the book deals with the heart of the R language and its fundamental concepts, including data organization, import and export, various manipulations, documentation, plots, programming and maintenance.  The last chapter in this part deals with oriented object programming as well as interfacing R with C/C++ or Fortran, and contains a section on debugging techniques. This is followed by the second part of the book, which provides detailed explanations on how to perform many standard statistical analyses, mainly in the Biostatistics field. Topics from mathematical and statistical settings that are included arematrix operations, integration, optimization, descriptive statistics, simulations, confidence intervals and hypothesis testing, simple and multiple linear regression, and analysis of variance. Each statistical chapter in the second part relies on one or more real biomedical data sets, kindly made available by the Bordeaux School of Public Health (Institut de Santé Publique, d'Épidémiologie et de Développement - ISPED) and described at the beginning of the book. Each chapter ends with an assessment section: memorandum of most important terms, followed by a section of theoretical exercises (to be done on paper), which can be used as questions for a test. Moreover, worksheets enable the reader to check his new abilities in R. Solutions to all exercises and worksheets are included in this book.

As related concepts, justice, conflict and wellbeing have a profound impact on individuals, groups, nations, and each other. Separately and in combination, they are the subjects of scientific attention, public concern, and formal policy.

Justice, Conflict and Wellbeing closely examines the many intersections of the three, combining perspectives across branches of psychology, law, and political science for a book whose scope is at once personal, local, and global. Unifying these chapters is the latest research on the psychological and physical toll resulting from forms of conflict such as inequality, objectification, and war, and possibilities for corrective measures through the legal system, arbitration, and policy. As a unit, the book models the effectiveness of interdisciplinary research in arriving at novel answers to longstanding problems. Noted contributors offer nuanced analysis of a broad range of contemporary real-world issues, including:

• The fairness of distributing resources equally.
• Hostile work environments.
• Mental illness, dangerousness, and police power interventions in pursuit of justice.
• The complexity of accountability for mass atrocity.
• Everyday opportunities for children to manage conflict.
• The public and ethical costs of alternative dispute resolution.

A volume poised to help shape future policy on multiple fronts, Justice, Conflict and Wellbeing is a path-breaking guidebook that researchers and instructors in social science and law, as well as policymakers, can learn from, expand upon, and put into practice.

Managing Change in the Postal and Delivery Industries brings together practitioners, postal administrators, the express industry, regulators, economists and lawyers to examine the important policy and regulatory issues facing the postal and delivery industries. This volume reviews such topics as international postal policy, the universal service obligation, regulation and competition, entry and the role of scale and scope economics, cost analysis in postal services, and service standards. This book provides a unique perspective on the problems facing postal and delivery networks.