Rethinking Cognitive Computation explores the hypothesis that the mind is a computer. The exploration is based on the pioneering work of Alan Turing and presents the first detailed exposition of his theory of computation intended specifically for psychologists. Turing's bold and beautiful theory provides an ideal perspective from which to evaluate current computational thinking about the mind. The book examines the strengths and weaknesses of symbol systems and connectionist theorising and proposes a new approach called ecological functionalism. Ecological functionalism is based on Turing's fundamental insights and extends them by drawing on contemporary theories of concurrent and distributed computation to cover a wide range of psychological domains. Ecological functionalism provides the basis for a powerful, unified theory of great scope which includes social as well as individual processes. The book is intended for teaching but will also be of interest to researchers in cognitive science, psychology and philosophy of mind. Andrew Wells is a lecturer in psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has qualifications in philosophy, psychology and computer science and has published papers on a range of psychological topics.

Literacy is about 5,000 years old. Since it was invented it has transformed human societies and knowledge fundamentally. Indeed, civilisation is built on literacy. What is it about the process of making marks on paper or other surfaces that gives literacy this remarkable power? 'The Literate Mind: A Study of Its Scope and Limitations' proposes that the evolved, pre-literate qualities of the human mind combined with the representational capacities of alphabets and other symbol systems provide uniquely powerful means for the generation and storage of knowledge. The creation, storage and sharing of texts augment the social and cognitive capacities of human minds and allow us to develop social institutions within which further new knowledge can be deployed and used. Taking an approach that is equally applicable to print and digital media, the book draws on evolutionary theory and the theory of computation to explain the remarkable power of literacy and its transformational effects on human society and knowledge. It demonstrates that the universe of possible texts is infinite in extent, and proposes that the combination of a reader and a text can be treated as an ecosystem of unlimited scope.

Ada is the only ISO-standard, object-oriented, concurrent, real-time programming language. It is intended for use in large, long-lived applications where reliability and efficiency are essential, particularly real-time and embedded systems. In this book, Alan Burns and Andy Wellings give a thorough, self-contained account of how the Ada tasking model can be used to construct a wide range of concurrent and real-time systems. This is the only book that focuses on an in-depth discussion of the Ada tasking model. Following on from the authors' earlier title Concurrency in Ada, this book brings the discussion up to date to include the new Ada 2005 language and the recent advances in real-time programming techniques. It will be of value to software professionals and advanced students of programming alike: indeed every Ada programmer will find it essential reading and a primary reference work that will sit alongside the language reference manual.

Started on the inspired initiative of Prof. Alfred Strohmeier back in 1996, and spawned from the annual Ada-Europe conference that had previously run for 16 consecutive years, the International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies celebrated this year its tenth anniversary by going to York, UK, where the ?rst series of technical meetings on Ada were held in the 1970s. Besides being a beautiful and historical place in itself, York also hosts the Depa- ment of Computer Science of the local university, whose Real-Time Group has been tremendously in?uential in shaping the Ada language and in the progress on real-time computing worldwide. This year's conference was therefore put together under exc- lent auspices, in a very important year for the Ada community in view of the forthc- ing completion of the revision process that is upgrading the language standard to face the challenges of the new millennium. The conference took place on June 20-24, 2005. It was as usual sponsored by Ada-Europe, the European federation of national Ada societies, in cooperation with ACM SIGAda. The conference was organized by selected staff of the University of York teamed up with collaborators from various places in Europe, in what turned out to be a very effective instance of distributed collaborative processing. The conference also enjoyed the generous support of 11 industrial sponsors.