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If one accepts the premise that there is no wealth without production, whether at the individual or national level, one is immediately led to the conclusion that the study of productive systems lies at the forefront of subjects that should be intensively, as well as rationally and extensively, studied to achieve the desired'sustainable growth'of society, where the latter is defined as growth in the quality of life that does not waste the available resources in the long run. Since the end of World War II there has been a remarkable evolution in thinking about production, abetted to a large measure by the nascent field of informatics: the computer technology and the edifices that have been built around it, such as information gathering and dissemination worldwide through communication networks, software products, peripheral interfaces, etc. Additionally, the very thought processes that guide and motivate studies in production have undergone fundamental changes which verge on being revolutionary, thanks to developments in operations research and cybernetics.

Proceedings of the International Seminar organized by the Commission of the European Communities, held in Brussels, 21-25 October 1979

Digital computers have been used more and more to control different industrial processes during the last decade. As of today, many sy­ stems are designed to include a process control computer as a vital part. The use of computers has created a need for sophisticated me­ thods for the operation and supervision of complex industrial proces­ ses. To summarize the state of the art from the practical as well as from the theoretical point of view, the 4th IFAC/IFIP International Conference on'Digital Computer Applications to Process Control'will be held at Zurich from March 19 to 22, 1974. The first two vo­ lumes of the proceedings contain the accepted papers submitted to the conference mentioned above. The papers are arranged according to the topics of the conference. A third volume will include the six follow­ ing survey papers: 1. Digital Control Algorithms Prof. A. P. Sage, Dallas Texas / USA 2. Interface Problems for Process Control Prof. T. J. Williams, Lafayette Indiana / USA 3. Software for Process Computers Dr. J. Gertler, Budapest / Hungary Dr. J. Sedlak, Prague / CSSR 4. Digital Computer Applications in Metallurgical Processes Mr. W. E. Miller, Salem / USA Mr. W. G. Wright, Schenectady / USA 5. Digital Computer Applications in Power Systems Mr. D. Ernst, Erlangen / FRG 6. Digital Computer Applications in Chemical and Oil Industries Dr. H. Amrehn, Marl / FRG We hope, that the publication of these papers from specialists.

Masters Theses in the Pure and Applied Sciences was first conceived, published, and disseminated by the Center for Information and Numerical Data Analysis and Synthesis (CINDAS) • at Purdue University in 1 957, starting its coverage of theses with the academic year 1955. Beginning with Volume 13, the printing and dissemination phases of the activity were transferred to University Microfilms/Xerox of Ann Arbor, Michigan, with the thought that such an arrangement would be more beneficial to the academic and general scientific and technical community. After five years of this joint undertaking we had concluded that it was in the interest of all con­ cerned if the printing and distribution of the volumes were handled by an interna­ tional publishing house to assure improved service and broader dissemination. Hence, starting with Volume 18, Masters Theses in the Pure and Applied Sciences has been disseminated on a worldwide basis by Plenum Publishing Cor­ poration of New York, and in the same year the coverage was broadened to include Canadian universities. All back issues can also be ordered from Plenum. We have reported in Volume 36 (thesis year 1991) a total of 11,024 thesis titles from 23 Canadian and 161 United States universities. We are sure that this broader base for these titles reported will greatly enhance the value of this important annual reference work. While Volume 36 reports theses submitted in 1991, on occasion, certain univer­ sities do report theses submitted in previous years but not reported at the time.

Can a continuous growth of agriculture be achieved in the sub-Sahara region without inducing irreversible damage to the ecosystem? Until now, doubts have been expressed as to the actual capacity of the soils to sustain a desirable increase of production which can match the requirements of a fast-growing population. Thirty years of investigation and a renewed comprehensive interpretation of research data on soil fertility show that a sustainable agriculture growth could be a practical possibility in a savannah region.

7. 2 The Pilot Zone of the FerIo................................... 157 7. 2. 1 Geographical Zoning and Administrative Setup............. 157 7. 2. 2 Climate............................................... 158 7. 2. 3 The Substratum........................................ 161 7. 2. 4 Surface Water.......................................... 166 7. 2. 5 Vegetation and Rangelands.............................. 166 7. 2. 6 Wildlife............................................... 168 7. 2. 7 Livestock.............................................. 168 7. 2. 8 Evolution of Land Use and History of Development........ 170 7. 3 Monitoring.................................................. 181 7. 3. 1 Principles, Problems and Methods........................ 181 7. 3. 2 Evaluation of Green Herbaceous Biomass by Orbital Remote Sensing............................................... 188 7. 3. 3 Evaluation of Range Production from Ground Sampling.... 207 7. 3. 4 Low Altitude Systematic Reconnaissance Flights (SRF)...... 211 7. 3. 5 Practical Results....................................... 215 7. 4 Conclusions on Monitoring.................................... 233 8 General Conclusions: Towards an Ecological Management of the Sahelian Ecosystems.......................................... 237 References...................................................... 241 Subject Index................................................... 269 of Scientific Names............................. 275............ Index Animals..................................................... 275 Plants...................................................... 277 VII Abbreviations and Acronyms AVHRR Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer CILSS Comite Inter-Etats de Lutte contre la Secheresse au Sahel CIPEA Centre International pour l'Elevage en Afrique CNRS Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique CP Crude Protein (N x 6.

ICEIMT'97 is the second International Conference on Enterprise Integration and Modeling Technology. Like the first, it is the main event of a European-US initiative on building consensus in enterprise engineering and integration - supported in Europe by Esprit and in the USA by DOC/NIST. These proceedings contain papers presented at the conference and at five international workshops preceding the conference. The workshops addressed integration issues related to people and organization, metrics and standardization, applications, fundamentals and principles, and users and vendors. The conference papers present points of view of users, vendors, and researchers, the current state of research and development worldwide, and the needs to be identified and summarized in project proposals.

In the past decades several researchers have developed statistical models for the prediction of corporate bankruptcy, e. g. Altman (1968) and Bilderbeek (1983). A model for predicting corporate bankruptcy aims to describe the relation between bankruptcy and a number of explanatory financial ratios. These ratios can be calculated from the information contained in a company's annual report. The is to obtain a method for timely prediction of bankruptcy, a so­ ultimate purpose called'early warning'system. More recently, this subject has attracted the attention of researchers in the area of machine learning, e. g. Shaw and Gentry (1990), Fletcher and Goss (1993), and Tam and Kiang (1992). This research is usually directed at the comparison of machine learning methods, such as induction of classification trees and neural networks, with the'standard'statistical methods of linear discriminant analysis and logistic regression. In earlier research, Feelders et al. (1994) performed a similar comparative analysis. The methods used were linear discriminant analysis, decision trees and neural networks. We used a data set which contained 139 annual reports of Dutch industrial and trading companies. The experiments showed that the estimated prediction error of both the decision tree and neural network were below the estimated error of the linear discriminant. Thus it seems that we can gain by replacing the'traditionally'used linear discriminant by a more flexible classification method to predict corporate bankruptcy. The data set used in these experiments was very small however.

SCIENCE AND EMPIRES: FROM THE INTERNATIONAL COLLOQUIUM TO THE BOOK Patrick PETITJEAN, Catherine JAMI and Anne Marie MOULIN The International Colloquium'Science and Empires - Historical Studies about Scientific De­ velopment and European Expansion'is the product of an International Colloquium,'Sciences and Empires - A Comparative History of Scien­ tific Exchanges: European Expansion and Scientific Development in Asian, African, American and Oceanian Countries'. Organized by the REHSEIS group (Research on Epistemology and History of Exact Sciences and Scientific Institutions) of CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research), the colloquium was held from 3 to 6 April 1990 in the UNESCO building in Paris. This colloquium was an idea of Professor Roshdi Rashed who initiated this field of studies in France some years ago, and proposed'Sciences and Empires'as one of the main research programmes for the The project to organize such a colloquium was a bit REHSEIS group. of a gamble. Its subject, reflected in the title'Sciences and Empires', is not a currently-accepted sub-discipline of the history of science; rather, it refers to a set of questions which found autonomy only recently. The terminology was strongly debated by the participants and, as is frequently suggested in this book, awaits fuller clarification.

This l:::ook comes as part of a new series on Solar Energy R+D, includlng Biomass which is carried out by the Euro:pean Community.. The commission of the European Comrmmities'Directorate General (XII) for Science, Research and Developnent is currently implementing, on a cost-sharing basis, a solar energy R+D pro;Jranune through contracts with European industry, research institutions and uni versi ties. This prcgrarrrrne includes a very strong acti vi ty on Biomass. Besides general R+D work on all aspects of Biomass growth and utilization which is reported elsewhere in this series, the Canmission is currently starting a new activity on Pilot Plants based on the use of Biomass for energy purp:Jses, and in particular on methanol prcx:luction from wood. The commission considers that the subject of methanol prcxiuction from wood offers llnp:Jrtant prospects for application wi thin the European Canmilllity and in other parts of the world, in particular some of the developing countries & The state of art in Europe In this field is still considered to be very high as a result of related work which was performed in Europe during ~vorld War II and the time before.

Computer Science Workbench is a monograph series which will provide you with an in-depth working knowledge of current developments in computer technology. Every volume in this series will deal with a topic of importance in computer science and elaborate on how you yourself can build systems related to the main theme. You will be able to develop a variety of systems, including computer software tools, computer gra­ phics, computer animation, database management systems, and compu­ ter-aided design and manufacturing systems. Computer Science Work­ bench represents an important new contribution in the field of practical computer technology. TOSIYASU L. KUNII Preface to the Second Edition Computer graphics is growing very rapidly; only computer animation grows faster. The first edition of the book Computer Animation: Theory and Practice was released in 1985. Four years later, computer animation has exploded. Conferences on computer animation have appeared and the topic is recognized in well-known journals as a leading theme. Computer-generated film festivals now exist in each country and several thousands of films are produced each year. From a commercial point of view, the computer animation market has grown considerably. TV logos are computer-made and more and more simulations use the technique of computer animation. What is the most fascinating is certainly the development of computer animation from a research point-of-view.

Proceedings of the International Conference, held at Cannes, France, October 27-31, 1980

Farming Systems Research has three core characteristics: it builds on systems thinking, it depends on the close collaboration between social and biophysical sciences, and it relies on participation to build co-learning processes. Farming Systems Research posits that to contribute towards sustainable rural development, both interdisciplinary collaborations and local actor engagement are needed. Together, they allow for changes in understanding and changes in practices. This book gives an overview of the insights generated in 20 years of Farming Systems Research. It retraces the emergence and development of Farming Systems Research in Europe, summarises the state-of-the-art for key areas, and provides an outlook on new explorations, especially those tackling the dynamic nature of farming systems and their interaction with the natural environment and the context of action.

SOIL: beneath our feet / food and fiber / ashes to ashes, dust to dust / dirt!Soil has been called the final frontier of environmental research. The critical role of soil in biogeochemical processes is tied to its properties and place—porous, structured, and spatially variable, it serves as a conduit, buffer, and transformer of water, solutes and gases. Yet what is complex, life-giving, and sacred to some, is ordinary, even ugly, to others. This is the enigma that is soil. Soil and Culture explores the perception of soil in ancient, traditional, and modern societies. It looks at the visual arts (painting, textiles, sculpture, architecture, film, comics and stamps), prose & poetry, religion, philosophy, anthropology, archaeology, wine production, health & diet, and disease & warfare. Soil and Culture explores high culture and popular culture—from the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch to the films of Steve McQueen. It looks at ancient societies and contemporary artists. Contributors from a variety of disciplines delve into the mind of Carl Jung and the bellies of soil eaters, and explore Chinese paintings, African mud cloths, Mayan rituals, Japanese films, French comic strips, and Russian poetry.

To be able to compete successfully both at national and international levels, production systems and equipment must perform at levels not even thinkable a decade ago. Requirements for increased product quality, reduced throughput time and enhanced operating effectiveness within a rapidly changing customer demand environment continue to demand a high maintenance performance. In some cases, maintenance is required to increase operational effectiveness and revenues and customer satisfaction while reducing capital, operating and support costs. This may be the largest challenge facing production enterprises these days. For this, maintenance strategy is required to be aligned with the production logistics and also to keep updated with the current best practices. Maintenance has become a multidisciplinary activity and one may come across situations in which maintenance is the responsibility of people whose training is not engineering. This handbook aims to assist at different levels of understanding whether the manager is an engineer, a production manager, an experienced maintenance practitioner or a beginner. Topics selected to be included in this handbook cover a wide range of issues in the area of maintenance management and engineering to cater for all those interested in maintenance whether practitioners or researchers. This handbook is divided into 6 parts and contains 26 chapters covering a wide range of topics related to maintenance management and engineering.

Sustainability rests on the principle that we must meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Starving people in poor nations, obesity in rich nations, increasing food prices, on-going climate changes, increasing fuel and transportation costs, flaws of the global market, worldwide pesticide pollution, pest adaptation and resistance, loss of soil fertility and organic carbon, soil erosion, decreasing biodiversity, desertification, and so on. Despite unprecedented advances in sciences allowing to visit planets and disclose subatomic particles, serious terrestrial issues about food show clearly that conventional agriculture is not suited any longer to feed humans and to preserve ecosystems. Sustainable agriculture is an alternative for solving fundamental and applied issues related to food production in an ecological way. While conventional agriculture is driven almost solely by productivity and profit, sustainable agriculture integrates biological, chemical, physical, ecological, economic and social sciences in a comprehensive way to develop new farming practices that are safe and do not degrade our environment. In that respect, sustainable agriculture is not a classical and narrow science. Instead of solving problems using the classical painkiller approach that treats only negative impacts, sustainable agriculture treats problem sources. As most actual society issues are now intertwined, global, and fast-developing, sustainable agriculture will bring solutions to build a safer world. This book gathers review articles that analyze current agricultural issues and knowledge, then propose alternative solutions. It will therefore help all scientists, decision-makers, professors, farmers and politicians who wish to build a safe agriculture, energy and food system for future generations.

Processes of knowledge production and dissemination are increasingly set in an international context. In research and higher education the links between local actors and the international environments are both proliferating and intensifying. Individual level self-organised international collaboration is increasingly supplemented by national and supranational organised activities, and by market oriented activity with a global scope. Starting from these observations, this book analyses patterns of internationalisation comprising the national and supranational level, the level of higher education institutions and private companies, as well as the level of individual researchers and graduates. As a laboratory for studying internationalisation the book uses the case of Norway, a small knowledge system set in an open society, political system and economy. The case offers exceptionally good data on the developments in its research and higher education system that record changes over time and across the different parts and levels of a national knowledge system

This book is a critical account of tropical agricultural science in the twentieth century, with its successes as well as its fads and failures. Its coverage reaches back into the beginning of the twentieth c- tury, but the second half of the century takes place of choice. Which means that the story is closely linked with that of post-co- nial development and scrutinises the role agricultural science has played (or failed to play) in the advancement of the tropical sma- holder, in particular in Africa. The book was written from the perspective of a practitioner, with the inevitable result that the treatment is skewed by this prac- tioner's own experience. That is an obvious drawback of a pers- alised account, but not a serious one I think, provided the author manages to make up for that disadvantage by getting across to the reader the thrill of his direct involvement. A wide range of topics are covered, including interesting early science from the beginning of the last century (sugarcane breeding and shifting cultivation in Indonesia, anthropological studies in German West Africa), fascinating indigenous farming practices in Africa, the history of Farming Systems Research and its offshoots, computer modelling of crop growth, and the role of development projects, donors and consultants.

Emmanuel Lévinas est le philosophe de la non-indifférence; il n'est en aucune sorte un philosophe indifférent. Son inquiétude personnelle et engagement politique ont trouvé une expression philosophique dans une quête à deux versants. Dans le versant ontologique, il cherche à montrer que même si l'homme est l'événement de compréhension de l'être, tout l'homme et toute signification ne se réduisent pas à la compréhension de l'être seul. Dans le versant politique, il s'interroge sur la possibilité de soumettre la tendance totalitaire de toute politique à une recherche de justice qui ne dépend pas finalement de la politique même. Mais ces deux versants n'en font qu'un. La découverte d'une signification qui excède la compréhension de l'être – l'éthique – fournit en même temps la source de renouvellement de la justice. Ainsi, par cette double question, Lévinas nous présente les fils conducteurs de notre enquête: une signification au-delà de la compréhension de l'être et sa portée éthique, que nous appelons «langage» et que nous explorons dans la perspective de son importance politique. Les études analytiques dans lesquelles les notions de politique et de langage fonctionnent comme clef d'interprétation mutuelle débouchent sur une critique centrée sur deux problèmes: l'impossibilité d'interpréter la signifiance de l'autre et le danger inhérent à la conception d'une justice dépassant l'Etat.

Interoperability: the ability of a system or a product to work with other systems or products without special effort from the user is a key issue in manufacturing and industrial enterprise generally. It is fundamental to the production of goods and services quickly and at low cost at the same time as maintaining levels of quality and customisation. Composed of over 50 papers,'Enterprise Interoperability'ranges from academic research through case studies to industrial and administrative experience of interoperability. The international nature of the authorship continues to broaden. Many of the papers have examples and illustrations calculated to deepen understanding and generate new ideas. A concise reference to the state of the art in software interoperability,'Enterprise Interoperability'will be of great value to engineers and computer scientists working in manufacturing and other process industries and to software engineers and electronic and manufacturing engineers working in the academic environment.

Food insecurity is a central concern and a fundamental challenge for human welfare and economic growth in Africa. Low agricultural production, results in low incomes, poor nutrition, vulnerability to risks and lack of empowerment. Land degradation and soil fertility depletion are considered the major threats to food security and natural resource conservation in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Investments in technology, policy and institutional reforms are needed to increase agricultural productivity to ensure food security and sustained national economies. Past research has generated numerous soil fertility management technologies which if adopted could propel the African continent out of the poverty trap. However, these technologies have had little, if any, impact due to low adoption by the smallholder farmers.

Geo-information technology offers an opportunity to support disaster management: industrial accidents, road collisions, complex emergencies, earthquakes, fires, floods and similar catastrophes (for example the recent huge disaster with the Tsunami in South-East Asia on 26 December 2004). Access to needed information, facilitation of the interoperability of emergency services, and provision of high-quality care to the public are a number of the key requirements. Such requirements pose significant challenges for data management, discovery, translation, integration, visualization and communication based on the semantics of the heterogeneous (geo-) information sources with differences in many aspects: scale/resolution, dimension (2D or 3D), classification and attribute schemes, temporal aspects (up-to-date-ness, history, predictions of the future), spatial reference system used, etc. The book provides a broad overview of the (geo-information) technology, software, systems needed, used and to be developed for disaster management. The book provokes a wide discussion on systems and requirements for use of geo-information under time and stress constraints and unfamiliar situations, environments and circumstances.

In today's increasingly complex and uncertain business environment, financial analysis is yet more critical to business managers who tackle problems of an economic or business nature. Knowledge based on formal logic and even experience becomes less sufficient. This volume systematically sets out the basic elements on which to base financial analysis for business in the new century. It incorporates a previous work that can serve as the basis and foundation for the new contributions that are now being made in the field of financial economy and intend to provide business with instruments and models suitable for dealing with the new economic context. In dealing with rapid and unpredictable changes in technological and business conditions, it postulates a growing reliance on the opinions of experts instead of past data or probabilistic forecasts, which is a radical change but may yield fruitful results. For this reason, much emphasis is devoted to the problem of aggregation of the opinion of experts in the financial field, with the object of limiting, wherever possible, the subjective component of the opinions and making sure that the decisions have the best guarantee of reaching the desired objectives.

In any edited volume most credit is due to the individual authors. The present case is no exception and we as editors have done little apart from serving as coordinators for a group of friends and colleagues. For once, the responsi­ bilities are shared. We feel that the collection gives a fair representation of the activities at the frontier of human geography in North America. Whether these premonitions will be further substantiated is of course to be seen. In the meantime, we take refuge in Vico's saying that'doctrines must take their beginning from that of the matter of which they treat'. And yet we also know that new treatments never lead to fmal ends, but rather to new doctrines and to new beginnings. It is also a pleasure to acknowledge those publishers and authors who have given permission to reprint copyrighted materials: Association of American Geographers for Leslie J. King's'Alternatives to a Positive Economic Geography', Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 66,1976; Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd. for Yi-Fu Tuan's'Space and Place: Human­ istic Perspective', in Christopher Board et al. (eds.), Progress in Geography, Vol. 6, 1974; Economic Geography for David Harvey's'Population, Resources, and the Ideology of Science',Economic Geography, Vol. SO, 1974; Institute of British Geographers for David Ley's'Social Geography and the Taken-for-Granted World', Transactions of the Institute of British Geogra­ phers, Vol. 2, 1977; and North-Holland Publishing Company for Allen J.