springer nov 1995 (310 risultati)

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Members of the gastropod family Littorinidae are common throughout the world. They form a very abundant component of many intertidal and shallow subtidal ecosystems and, by their grazing, often play a central role in shaping these communities. They also display a wide range of life history strategies and many are polymorphic, making them attractive model organisms for ecologists, evolutionary biologists and physiologists alike. Areas of particular interest include ecological interactions with other animals and with algae, the effects of pollutants and the use of littorinids as sentinel species for monitoring pollution, the effects of parasites on growth and ecology, taxonomy, and the study of genotypic/phenotypic responses to environmental factors. There is still much to be done, and the littorinids are proving to be an ideal group on which to work. Audience: Primarily targeted at the research level. Will also provide useful information for advanced first-degree students conducting research projects.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Glycoprotein Analysis: A Review of the Biological Significance of Carbohydrates on Glycoproteins and Methods for Their Analysis; R. Dennis The Different FACES of Diseases; J. Klock, C.M. Starr The Glycosyltransferases: Control and Function of Complextype Oligosaccharide Synthesis: Novel Variants of the LAcNAc Pathway; D.H. van den Eijnden, et al. The Regulation of Cell and Tissuespecific Expression of Glycans by Glycosyltransferases; A. Dinter, E.G. Berger Oligosaccharides and Biological Function: Olinked Nacetylglucosamine: The 'YinYang' of Ser/Thr Phosphorylation G.W. Hart, et al. Heparan Sulphate and Protein Recognition: Binding Specificies and Activation Mechanisms; J.T. Gallagher Glycosylation and Disease: An Introduction to Glycosylation and Rheumatic Disease: What Is the Current State of Play J.S. Axford, A. Alavi Abnormalities in the Glycosylation of IgG-Its Clinical Utility; D.A. Isenberg Carbohydrates and Therapeutics: Synthesis and Biological Activity of Oligosaccharide Libraries; Y. Ding, et al. In vivo Targeting Function of Nlinked Oligosaccharides; K.G. Rice, et al. 23 additional articles. Index.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Silicone Gels as Adjuvants: Effects on Humoral and Cellmediated Immune Responses; J.O. Naim, C.J. van Oss The Effect of Molecular Weight and Gel Preparation on Humoral Adjuvancy of Silicone Oils and Silicone Gels; J.O. Naim, C.J. van Oss Glucans as Immunological Adjuvants; N. Mohagheghpour, et al. Copolymer Adjuvants; R.N. Brey Regulation of Il4 and Il5 Secretion by Histamine and PGE2; M.M. Khan Immunoglobulin Isotype Modulation after Administration of Il12; V. Van Cleave, et al. Substance P Mediated Stimulation of Cytokine Levels in Cultured Murine Bone Marrow Stromal Cells; J.M. Manske, et al. Malaria Transmissionblocking Immunity: Identification of Epitopes and Evaluation of Immunogenicity; N. Kumar, et al. Experimental Feline Lyme Borreliosis As a Model for Testing Borrelia burgdorferi Vaccines; M.D. Gibson, et al. Liposoma Vaccines; S. Green, et al. Protection Strategies against Botulinum Toxin; L. Middlebrook Collagen Arthritis in T Cell Receptor Congenic Mice: A Unique Approach to Study the Role of T Cell Receptor Genotypes in Autoimmune Arthritis; G.H.H. Nabozny, C.S. David The Blood-Brain Barrier in Virusinduced Demyelination; C.J.R. Welsh, et al. 14 additional articles. Index.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Introduction to Avionic Systems, Second Edition explains the principles and theory of modern avionic systems and how they are implemented with current technology for both civil and military aircraft. The systems are analysed mathematically, where appropriate, so that the design and performance can be understood. The book covers displays and man-machine interaction, aerodynamics and aircraft control, fly-by-wire flight control, inertial sensors and attitude derivation, navigation systems, air data and air data systems, autopilots and flight management systems, avionic systems integration and unmanned air vehicles.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - A logic view of 0-1 integer programming problems, providing new insights into the structure of problems that can lead the researcher to more effective solution techniques depending on the problem class. Operations research techniques are integrated into a logic programming environment. The first monographic treatment that begins to unify these two methodological approaches. Logic-based methods for modelling and solving combinatorial problems have recently started to play a significant role in both theory and practice. The application of logic to combinatorial problems has a dual aspect. On one hand, constraint logic programming allows one to declaratively model combinatorial problems over an appropriate constraint domain, the problems then being solved by a corresponding constraint solver. Besides being a high-level declarative interface to the constraint solver, the logic programming language allows one also to implement those subproblems that cannot be naturally expressed with constraints. On the other hand, logic-based methods can be used as a constraint solving technique within a constraint solver for combinatorial problems modelled as 0-1 integer programs.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - The approach to many problems in economic analysis has changed drastically with the development and dissemination of new and more efficient computational techniques. Computational Economic Systems: Models, Methods & Econometrics presents a selection of papers illustrating the use of new computational methods and computing techniques to solve economic problems. Part I of the volume consists of papers which focus on modelling economic systems, presenting computational methods to investigate the evolution of behavior of economic agents, techniques to solve complex inventory models on a parallel computer and an original approach for the construction and solution of multicriteria models involving logical conditions. Contributions to Part II concern new computational approaches to economic problems. We find an application of wavelets to outlier detection. New estimation algorithms are presented, one concerning seemingly related regression models, a second one on nonlinear rational expectation models and a third one dealing with switching GARCH estimation. Three contributions contain original approaches for the solution of nonlinear rational expectation models.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Advances in sensing, signal processing, and computer technology during the past half century have stimulated numerous attempts to design general-purpose ma chines that see. These attempts have met with at best modest success and more typically outright failure. The difficulties encountered in building working com puter vision systems based on state-of-the-art techniques came as a surprise. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the problem is that machine vision sys tems cannot deal with numerous visual tasks that humans perform rapidly and effortlessly. In reaction to this perceived discrepancy in performance, various researchers (notably Marr, 1982) suggested that the design of machine-vision systems should be based on principles drawn from the study of biological systems. This 'neuro morphic' or 'anthropomorphic' approach has proven fruitful: the use of pyramid (multiresolution) image representation methods in image compression is one ex ample of a successful application based on principles primarily derived from the study of biological vision systems. It is still the case, however, that the perfor of computer vision systems falls far short of that of the natural systems mance they are intended to mimic, suggesting that it is time to look even more closely at the remaining differences between artificial and biological vision systems.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - The unusual ambition of this volume is to engage scientists, historians, and philosophers in a common quest to delineate the structure of the creative thinking responsible for major advances in physical theory. The topic does not fit anyone discipline's proprietary interests, and can only be pursued cooperatively. This volume was conceived in the hope that the importance of learning something general about how theories are developed and what makes the difference between productive and abortive directions of theo retical inquiry could overcome well-known barriers to such cooperation. The volume originated in a conference held at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro in 1988, as an installment of the annual Greensboro Symposium in Philosophy. Most of the papers descend from papers pre sented on that occasion. The authors are well known in their own disciplines, but should be identified to the wider audience for interdisciplinary work in science studies. Rafael Sorkin, of Syracuse University, and Don Page, of the University of Alberta, are theoretical physicists who have done research in quantum gravity and cosmology. John Stachel, a physicist at Boston University, is widely known as the Director of the Einstein Project and editor of Einstein's papers. William Harper, a historian of science and philosopher at the University of Western Ontario, is a Newton scholar and specialist in decision theory.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - For a North American seeking to know the Mexican mind, and especially the sciences today and in their recent development, a great light of genius is to be found in Mexico City in the late 17th century. Tbe genius is that of one who surely may be counted as the first Mexican philosopher of nature, a nun of the Order of Saint Jerome: Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. Sor Juana must speak for herself, from her penetrating exercise of an independent mind within a political and religious formation which denigrated women and circumscribed reason itself. To understand this world of ours, to join in an enlightenment which would be both natural and inspired, Sor Juana clearly understood the requirements of leaming, observing, logic and reasoning. In darkness foundering Words fail the troubled mind. For who, I ask, can light me When Reason is blind Even now, after the great steps toward liberation of women, and the substantial scientific contributions toward sheer empirical awareness of both the multiple orders ofNature and the subtle aesthetics ofindividual art and social harmony, we too in the earthly world of the 20th century must affirm what she affirmed.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - In science, engineering and economics, decision problems are frequently modelled by optimizing the value of a (primary) objective function under stated feasibility constraints. In many cases of practical relevance, the optimization problem structure does not warrant the global optimality of local solutions; hence, it is natural to search for the globally best solution(s). Global Optimization in Action provides a comprehensive discussion of adaptive partition strategies to solve global optimization problems under very general structural requirements. A unified approach to numerous known algorithms makes possible straightforward generalizations and extensions, leading to efficient computer-based implementations. A considerable part of the book is devoted to applications, including some generic problems from numerical analysis, and several case studies in environmental systems analysis and management. The book is essentially self-contained and is based on theauthor's research, in cooperation (on applications) with a number of colleagues. Audience: Professors, students, researchers and other professionals in the fields of operations research, management science, industrial and applied mathematics, computer science, engineering, economics and the environmental sciences.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Software is difficult to develop, maintain, and reuse. Two factors that contribute to this difficulty are the lack of modular design and good program documentation. The first makes software changes more difficult to implement. The second makes programs more difficult to understand and to maintain. Formal Specification Techniques for Engineering Modular C Programs describes a novel approach to promoting program modularity. The book presents a formal specification language that promotes software modularity through the use of abstract data types, even though the underlying programming language may not have such support. This language is structured to allow useful information to be extracted from a specification, which is then used to perform consistency checks between the specification and its implementation. Formal Specification Techniques for Engineering Modular C Programs also describes a specification-driven, software re-engineering process model for improving existing programs. The aim of this process is to make existing programs easier to maintain and reuse while keeping their essential functionalities unchanged. Audience: Suitable as a secondary text for graduate level courses in software engineering, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Falk Symposium No. 82, held in Halle, Germany, November 1994, focuses on the advances made in understanding the aetiology and pathogenesis of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Sections of this book, the Proceedings of the conference, are devoted to extraintestinal manifestations, cancer development, IBD in the context of pregnancy, and the assessment of disease activity, prognosis and quality of life. The second half of the book is devoted to the discussion of standards and new developments in diagnosis, conservative management and surgery. Audience: All clinicians and basic scientists working in the field of IBD.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - In Linear Programming: A Modern Integrated Analysis, both boundary (simplex) and interior point methods are derived from the complementary slackness theorem and, unlike most books, the duality theorem is derived from Farkas's Lemma, which is proved as a convex separation theorem. The tedium of the simplex method is thus avoided. A new and inductive proof of Kantorovich's Theorem is offered, related to the convergence of Newton's method. Of the boundary methods, the book presents the (revised) primal and the dual simplex methods. An extensive discussion is given of the primal, dual and primal-dual affine scaling methods. In addition, the proof of the convergence under degeneracy, a bounded variable variant, and a super-linearly convergent variant of the primal affine scaling method are covered in one chapter. Polynomial barrier or path-following homotopy methods, and the projective transformation method are also covered in the interior point chapter. Besides the popular sparse Cholesky factorization and the conjugate gradient method, new methods are presented in a separate chapter on implementation. These methods use LQ factorization and iterative techniques.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - The family Trichodoridae was established by Thorne in 1935 but it remained of limited taxonomie interest until 1951 when Christie and Perry associated Trichodorus christie (now Paratrichodorus minor) with a 'stubby root disease' that affected certain crops in Florida, USA and interest further increased from 1960 when P. pachydermus was implicated as a vector of the economically important tobacco raule virus. Such discoveries gave an impetus to studies on many aspects of the biology of trichodorid nematodes with a consequent proliferation of new species described from different parts of the world. The number of species increased from twelve in 1957 to a present day total exceeding eighty. This rapid expansion in the number of species was accompanied by several reappraisals of the taxonomy and systematies of the family, the most notable changes being the creation of the genus Paratrichodorus by Siddiqi in 1974 and the recognition of the monodelphic genera Monotrichodorus and Allotrichodorus respectively by Andrassy in 1976 and Rodriguez-M, Sher and Siddiqi in 1978. Reliable and unambiguous identification of taxa is dependent on the known reliability of a range of characters, whieh remains of paramount importance in taxonomy even when biochemical and molecular methodology is available. In this book each of the species, including synonyms and species inquirenda, that comprise the family Trichodoridae is re-described from meticulous mieroscopie examination of type specimens, material from official nematode collections and populations in the field.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Software quality is a generalised statement difficult to agree or disagree with until a precise definition of the concept of 'Software Quality' is reached in terms of measurable quantities. Unfortunately, for the software technology the basic question of: - what to measure; - how to measure; - when to measure; - how to deal with the data obtained are still unanswered and are also closely dependant on the field of application. In the past twenty years or more there have been a number of conferences and debates focusing on the concept of Software Quality, which produced no real industrial impact. Recently, however, the implementation of a few generic standards (ISO 9000, IEEE etc.) has produced and improved application of good practice principles at the industrial level. As a graduate in PhYSiCS, I still believe it is a long way before the concept of Software Quality can be defined exactly and measured, if ever. This is way I think the AQuIS series of conferences is important, its object begin to provide a platform for the transfer of technology and know how between Academic, Industrial and Research Institutions, in the field of Software Quality. Their objects are: - to provide a forum for the introduction and discussion of new research breakthroughs in Software Quality; - to provide professional Software Quality engineers with the necessary exposure to the results of current research; - to expose the research community to the problems of practical application of new results.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - This book is concerned with wafer fabrication and the factories that manufacture microprocessors and other integrated circuits. With the invention of the transistor in 1947, the world as we knew it changed. The transistor led to the microprocessor, and the microprocessor, the guts of the modern computer, has created an epoch of virtually unlimited information processing. The electronics and computer revolution has brought about, for better or worse, a new way of life. This revolution could not have occurred without wafer fabrication, and its associated processing technologies. A microprocessor is fabricated via a lengthy, highly-complex sequence of chemical processes. The success of modern chip manufacturing is a miracle of technology and a tribute to the hundreds of engineers who have contributed to its development. This book will delineate the magnitude of the accomplishment, and present methods to analyze and predict the performance of the factories that make the chips. The set of topics covered juxtaposes several disciplines of engineering. A primary subject is the chemical engineering aspects of the electronics industry, an industry typically thought to be strictly an electrical engineer's playground. The book also delves into issues of manufacturing, operations performance, economics, and the dynamics of material movement, topics often considered the domain of industrial engineering and operations research. Hopefully, we have provided in this work a comprehensive treatment of both the technology and the factories of wafer fabrication. Novel features of these factories include long process flows and a dominance of processing over operational issues.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - This proceedings volume, 'Plastic Deformation of Ceramics,' constitutes the papers of an international symposium held at Snowbird, Utah from August 7-12, 1994. It was attended by nearly 100 scientists and engineers from more than a dozen countries representing academia, national laboratories, and industry. Two previous conferences on this topic were held at The Pennsylvania State University in 1974 and 1983. Therefore, the last major international conference focusing on the deformation of ceramic materials was held more than a decade ago. Since the early 1980s, ceramic materials have progressed through an evolutionary period of development and advancement. They are now under consideration for applications in engineering structures. The contents of the previous conferences indicate that considerable effort was directed towards a basic understanding of deformation processes in covalently bonded or simple oxide ceramics. However, now, more than a decade later, the focus has completely shifted. In particular, the drive for more efficient heat engines has resulted in the development of silicon-based ceramics and composite ceramics. The discovery of high-temperature cupric oxide-based superconductors has created a plethora of interesting perovskite-Iike structured ceramics. Additionally, nanophase ceramics, ceramic thin films, and various forms of toughened ceramics have potential applications and, hence, their deformation has been investigated. Finally, new and exciting areas of research have attracted interest since 1983, including fatigue, nanoindentation techniques, and superplasticity.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - This volume presents the latest research worldwide on communications protocols, emphasizing specification and compliance testing. It presents the complete proceedings of the fifteenth meeting on `Protocol Specification, Testing and Verification' arranged by the International Federation for Information Processing.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Rural areas need to fulfil a large variety of functions and to accommodate many activities. The complexity of the problems, limited funds, and the almost irreversible character of some interventions result in a compelling need to evaluate ex ante the effects of alternative solutions for designation of land, for measures to develop infrastructure, and for soil and water management. Scenario studies are undertaken to help manage the complexity, to place bounds on uncertainties, and to create new visions. After an overview of the nature, variety and scope of scenario studies, the book illuminates various European examples and reviews, under the following headings: regional soil and water management; nature development and landscape quality; rural planning and the future of regions.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Proceedings volume contains carefully selected papers presented during the 17th IFIP Conference on System Modelling and Optimization. Optimization theory and practice, optimal control, system modelling, stochastic optimization, and technical and non-technical applications of the existing theory are among areas mostly addressed in the included papers. Main directions are treated in addition to several survey papers based on invited presentations of leading specialists in the respective fields. Publication provides state-of-the-art in the area of system theory and optimization and points out several new areas (e.g fuzzy set, neural nets), where classical optimization topics intersects with computer science methodology.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Due to increasing practical needs, software support of environmental protection and research tasks is growing in importance and scope. Software systems help to monitor basic data, to maintain and process relevant environmental information, to analyze gathered information and to carry out decision processes, which often have to take into account complex alternatives with various side effects. Therefore software is an important tool for the environmental domain. When the first software systems in the environmental domain grew - 10 to 15 years ag- users and developers were not really aware of the complexity these systems are carrying with themselves: complexity with respect to entities, tasks and procedures. I guess nobody may have figured out at that time that the environmental domain would ask for solutions which information science would not be able to provide and - in several cases - can not provide until today. Therefore environmental informatics - as we call it today - is also an important domain of computer science itself, because practical solutions need to deal with very complex, interdisciplinary, distributed, integrated, sometimes badly defined, user-centered decision processes. I doubt somebody will state that we are already capable of building such integrated systems for end users for reasonable cost on a broad range. The development of the first scientific community for environmental informatics started around 1985 in Germany, becoming a technical committee and working group of the German Computer Society in 1987.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Pressurized fluidized bed combustion (PFBC) is one of the newest of the coal-based generation technologies available commercially. This authoritative volume contains an excellent balance of the theoretical and practical aspects of PFBC technology, including economics, the fundamental theory of plant design and sorbent characterization, using the results obtained from a wide range of pilot-scale and full-scale demonstration units.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -Die aktuellen diagnostischen Standards für die Praxis - Aussagekraft, Fehlermöglichkeiten, Therapiemodalitäten. 152 pp. Deutsch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This book describes and gives applications of an important new tool in the study of complex analytic hypersurface singularities: the Lê cycles of the hypersurface. The Lê cycles and their multiplicities - the Lê numbers - provide effectively calculable data which generalizes the Milnor number of an isolated singularity to the case of singularities of arbitrary dimension. The Lê numbers control many topological and geometric properties of such non-isolated hypersurface singularities. This book is intended for graduate students and researchers interested in complex analytic singularities. 148 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -The aim of this work is the definition of the polyhedral compactification of the Bruhat-Tits building of a reductive group over a local field. In addition, an explicit description of the boundary is given. In order to make this work as self-contained as possible and also accessible to non-experts in Bruhat-Tits theory, the construction of the Bruhat-Tits building itself is given completely. 168 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Surveys the methods currently applied to study sums of infinite-dimensional independent random vectors in situations where their distributions resemble Gaussian laws. Covers probabilities of large deviations, Chebyshev-type inequalities for seminorms of sums, a method of constructing Edgeworth-type expansions, estimates of characteristic functions for random vectors obtained by smooth mappings of infinite-dimensional sums to Euclidean spaces. A self-contained exposition of the modern research apparatus around CLT, the book is accessible to new graduate students, and can be a useful reference for researchers and teachers of the subject. 324 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -The last couple of years, financial conglomerates have been established all over Europe. This horizontal diversification has not only attracted a great deal of attention in the banking and insurance sector but has also alarmed the supervisory authorities and the European Commission. Although the benefits of financial conglomerates are straightforward, it is clear that quite a number of potential risks can not be ignored. Since the phenomenon of 'financial conglomeration' is rather new, the regulators do not possess a great deal of objective, scientific reference bases on which to construct the necessary regulations. Moreover the complexities and specific char acteristics of the financial conglomerates do not permit a simple extrapolation of the rules for industrial conglomerates. Even the extrapolation of banking regula tions to insurance groups and vice versa poses a lot of difficult questions. These observations lie at the origin of the research carried out at the Erasmus Finance and Insurance Centre (EPIC at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam), in collaboration with the Impulse Centre for Financial Services and Insurance (ALEA at the Vlerick School of Management of the University of Ghent). To confront the research results with the expertise of the business world and the supervisory authorities a workshop was organised in Rotterdam (1994). This publication is partly based on these research results and the workshop discussions. Three main blocs can be distinguished: the definition of financial conglomerates; the potential risks and the regulatory aspects; the strategic issues. 200 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -The history of astronomy is, like most history, a multidimensional story, and when writing about a specific period, the author has to decide how to handle all the developments of earlier times in order to set the scene. I have done this by starting most chapters of the book with a summary of astronomical knowledge at the beginning of our chosen period, together with a brief review of how such knowledge had been gained. This story is not only interesting in itself, but it will also assist those readers that would appreciate a brief reminder of some of the basic elements of astronomy. It is also necessary to decide when to start our history. Should it be the year 1900 or 1890, or should it be linked to some key development or investigation, e. g. the discovery of the electron by J. J. Thomson in 1897, or the discovery of spectroscopic binary stars by Pickering and Vogel (independently) in 1889, or maybe the year 1890 in which Thomas Edison tried unsuccessfully to detect radio waves from the Sun and Johannes Rydberg published his formula for atomic spectra I have, in fact, decided to start this history at about 1890, as it was the year of publication of the Draper Memorial Catalogue of stellar spectra which, together with its updates, provided essential data for the understanding of stellar spectra until well into the twentieth century. This date also gives a clear hundred years up to the present. 400 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This book constitutes the final report of the work carried out in the project KORSO ('Korrekte Software') funded by the German Federal Ministry for Research and Technology. KORSO is an evolutionary, prototype-oriented project aimed at improving the theoretical foundations of quality-driven software engineering and at implementing known techniques for applications of practical relevance.The 21 strictly refereed papers presented are organized in five sections on methods for correctness, languages, development systems and logical frameworks, tools, and case studies. In addition, the preface and introductory paper give valuable background information and a concise state-of-the-art overview. 468 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -The systematic study of the planets has experienced a slow but steady progress from the efforts of a single individual (Galileo Galilei, 1564-1642) to nations that individually and collectively create whole agencies and complex infrastructures devoted to the exploration and understanding of our solar system. This quest for knowledge continues in earnest today as we attempt to understand Earth's unique place among its closest neighbors. Known diversities emphasize fractionation processes that may have occurred in the nebula during early solar system formation, and the vastly different evolutionary paths taken by the planets and their satellites. The discovery of similarities and differences among the planets has given rise to a discipline of 'Comparative Planetology. ' Here terrestrial properties and giant planet atmospheres are viewed and probed, surface geologies are related to atmospheres and oceans, interior structures are envisioned, magnetic fields mapped, and bizarre differences in satellites and ring systems continue to enlighten, amaze and confound the detectives of planetary science. A science organizing committee with international participation was formed to develop a conference program to address the basic issues and the fundamental processes that are common among the planets. The goals of the meeting were twofold: first the production of a reference source on comparative planetology for academia, and second, the provision of an impetus for NASA to begin a program devoted to this emerging science discipline. The conference program accommodated seventeen invited papers and nineteen poster presentations. 244 pp. Englisch.