This collection of essays investigates the obligations we have in respect of future persons, from our own future offspring to distant future generations. Can we harm them? Can we wrong them? Can the fact that our choice brings a worse off person into existence in place of a better off but "nonidentical" person make...

Object-Oriented Behavioral Specifications encourages builders of complex information systems to accelerate their move to using the approach of a scientific discipline in analysis rather than the approach of a craft. The focus is on understanding customers' needs and on precise specification of understanding gained through analysis....

The southern coast of the North Sea is mainly protected by a single line of defence against flooding. The traditional means for heightening and strengthening the existing coastal barriers are limited due to the increased enormous resource costs, i.e. building materials, funding and space. On the other hand, further interests and needs such as...

The articles in this book present advanced soft methods related to genetic and evolutionary algorithms, immune systems, formulation of deterministic neural networks and Bayesian NN. Many attention is paid to hybrid systems for inverse analysis fusing soft methods and the finite element method. Numerical efficiency of these soft methods is...

The purpose of this book is to collect contributions that deal with the use of nature inspired metaheuristics for solving multi-objective combinatorial optimization problems. Such a collection intends to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art developments in this field, with the aim of motivating more researchers in operations research,...

Substate nationalism, especially in the past fifteen years, has noticeably affected the political and territorial stability of many countries, both democratic and democratizing. Norms exist to limit the behavior of collective agents in relation to individuals; the set of universally accepted human rights provides a basic framework. There is a...

This book covers topics at the intersection of algorithms and networking. It builds a complete picture of the current state...

There are already several excellent books on Malliavin calculus. However, most of them deal only with the theory of Malliavin calculus for Brownian motion, with [35] as an honorable exception. Moreover, most of them discuss only the application to regularity results for solutions of SDEs, as this was the original motivation when Paul Malliavin...

Wilfried Martens has devoted his entire life to politics: as student leader, youth activist, President of the Flemish Christian Democrats, Prime Minister of Belgium, President of the European People's Party and European statesman. In his autobiography...

This book groups together overviews and original research papers dealing with South American climate variability from the Last Glacial Maximum to the Holocene. The contributions deal with tropical, temperate and high latitudes climate variability in South America and in surrounding regions (including Pacific and Atlantic Oceans and Antarctica)....

Production Grids in Asia: Applications, Developments and Global Ties, an edited volume, is based on ISGC (International Symposium on Grid Computing), one of the most prestigious annual events in Asia. It brings together scientists and engineers worldwide to exchange ideas, present challenges/solutions, and introduce future...

In a dynamic computing environment, such as the Grid, resource management plays a crucial role for making distributed resources available on-demand to anyone from anywhere at any time without undermining the resource autonomy; this becomes an art when dealing with heterogeneous resources distributed under multiple trust domains spanning across...