Michael Potter has given us a wonderful new book. The mathematics are extremely clearly presented, it's an easy book to learn from. Potter is very good at explaining the motivations-both philosophical and technical-for various bits of mathematics, so one never has the feeling of wading through long pages of pointless technical minutiae. It is a rewarding read even for those who don't intend to follow all the technical details. Potter's book provides a great introduction to set theory and its philosophy, he has written the best philosophical introduction on the market.

In this text, a variety of modal logics at the sentential, first-order, and second-order levels are developed with clarity, precision and philosophical insight. All of the S1-S5 modal logics of Lewis and Langford, among others, are constructed. A matrix, or many-valued semantics, for sentential modal logic is formalized, and an important result that no finite matrix can characterize any of the standard modal logics is proven. Exercises, some of which show independence results, help to develop logical skills.

The influence of light on the lives of living organisms is all-pervasive, affecting movement, vision, behavior, and physiological activity. This book is a biophysically grounded comparative survey of how animals detect light and perceive their surroundings. Included are discussions of photoreceptors, light emitters, and eyes. The book focuses in particular on the kinds of optical systems that have evolved, beginning with unicellular organisms that detect and respond to light through to more advanced and complex designs for imaging. The relevance of these studies extends beyond biology, since these findings can be used to help develop photoreceptor energy conversion and information systems, and optical imaging devices with a wide range of everyday applications. The book will appeal to biophysicists, photobiologists, bioengineers, neuroscientists, and all researchers working in the area of vision and visual optics. visual optics.

'When, why, and how did language evolve?' 'Why do only humans have language?' This book looks at these and other questions about the origins and evolution of language. It does so via a rich diversity of perspectives, including social, cultural, archaeological, palaeoanthropological, musicological, anatomical, neurobiological, primatological, and linguistic. Among the subjects it considers are: how far sociality is a prerequisite for language; the evolutionary links between language and music; the relation between natural selection and niche construction; the origins of the lexicon; the role of social play in language development; the use of signs by great apes; the evolution of syntax; the evolutionary biology of language; the insights offered by Chomsky's biolinguistic approach to mind and language; the emergence of recursive language; the selectional advantages of the human vocal tract; and why women speak better than men.

Nine leading scholars of ancient philosophy from Europe, the UK, and North America offer a systematic study of Book Beta of Aristotle's Metaphysics. The work takes the form of a series of aporiai or "difficulties" which Aristotle presents as necessary points of engagement for those who wish to attain wisdom. The topics include causation, substance, constitution, properties, predicates, and generally the ontology of both the perishable and the imperishable world. Each contributor discusses one or two of these aporiai in sequence: the result is a discursive commentary on this seminal text of Western philosophy.

For many deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals, sign language and voice interpreting is essential to their participation in educational programs and their access to public and private services. However, there is less than half the number of interpreters needed to meet the demand, interpreting quality is often variable, and there is a considerable lack of knowledge of factors that contribute to successful interpreting. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that a study by the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) found that 70% of the deaf individuals are dissatisfied with interpreting quality.

As more and more equipment incorporates advanced technologies, usability - the ability of equipment to take advantage of users' skills and thereby to function effectively in the broad range of real work situations - is becoming an essential component of equipment design. Usability: Turning Technologies into Tools collects six essays that herald a fundamental shift in the way industry and researchers think about usability. In this new, broader definition, usability no longer means safeguarding against human error, but rather enabling human beings to learn, to use, and to adapt the equipment to satisfy better the demands and contingencies of their work.

This book provides an informative, cogent examination of how various social factors-such as organizational structure, workplace relations, and market conditions-together shape software developers' technical design decisions. Through a survey of major software companies and in-depth case studies of the banking, hospital, and equipment field service industries, the authors identify factors that influence specific design strategies and examine the significant consequences that engineering decisions have on users' work, workplace quality of life, and opportunities for autonomy and skill development. The book concludes with a chapter devoted to exploring how a progressive design approach can improve both the performance and working conditions of an organization. By providing an important empirical study of the social construction of technology, the authors offer an insightful understanding of the challenges inherent in effective software design. The book will appeal to professionals and students in software design, information systems management, computer science, and the sociology of work and technology.

Throughout history almost all traditional indigenous societies have used psychoactive substances derived from plants in religious and healing rituals. Once such plants are adopted by outsiders for profane use, the often impoverished peasant farmers who grow them are faced with a life of extreme poverty or are lured by the prospect of a very lucrative cash crop with a steady market. Before long, their cultural and physical landscape is drastically altered. The purpose of this book is to explore this issue from a variety of perspectives, ranging from opium production in Afghanistan and Pakistan to peyote gardens in south Texas.

We hold these truths to be self-evident... So begins the U.S. Declaration of Independence. What follows those words is a ringing endorsement of universal rights, but it is far from self-evident. Why did the authors claim that it was? William Talbott suggests that they were trapped by a presupposition of Enlightenment philosophy: That there was only one way to rationally justify universal truths, by proving them from self-evident premises.

This book has been written with the intention of opening up the field of language and communication to people who are involved in computer application and documentation design, who are concerned about making their systems understandable to users. It shows how important concepts from this field can be applied in practice to improve design, so that users do not have to experience the frustration and bewilderment that is all too common when interacting with existing applications, "help" facilities, and manuals. No previous knowledge of language-related terminology is assumed on the part of the reader.

This book considers how languages have traditionally been divided into families, and asks how they should classified in the future. It describes and applies computer programs from biology and evolutionary genetics to data about languages and shows how the power of the computer can be harnessed to throw light on long-standing problems in historical linguistics.

This book brings together the two disparate worlds of computational text analysis and biology and presents some of the latest methods and applications to proteomics, sequence analysis and gene expression data. Modern genomics generates large and comprehensive data sets but their interpretation requires an understanding of a vast number of genes, their complex functions, and interactions. Keeping up with the literature on a single gene is a challenge itself-for thousands of genes it is simply impossible. Here, Soumya Raychaudhuri presents the techniques and algorithms needed to access and utilize the vast scientific text, i.e. methods that automatically "read" the literature on all the genes. Including background chapters on the necessary biology, statistics and genomics, in addition to practical examples of interpreting many different types of modern experiments, this book is ideal for students and researchers in computational biology, bioinformatics, genomics, statistics and computer science.

This Second Edition incorporates all the most recent developments in the field of neuropsychology, as well as research findings about brain-behavior relations, cognitive psychology, and psychological assessment. It has been considerably expanded and contains several new chapters on test selection administration, preparation of the client, report-writing and informing interview, executive functions, occupational interest and aptitude, and malingering and symptom validity testing.

The purpose of this book is to present research examining expressive content in speech with a view to simulating expression in computer speech. Human beings communicate expressively with each other in conversation: now in the computer age there is a perceived need for machines to communicate expressively with humans in dialogue.