This book is an introduction to the mathematical description of information in science and engineering. The necessary ma- thematical theory will be treated in a more vivid way than in the usual theoretical proof structure. This enables the reader to develop an idea of the connections between diffe- rent information measures and to understand the trains of thoughts in their derivation. As there exist a great number of different possible ways to describe information, these measures are presented in a coherent manner. Some examples of the information measures examined are: Shannon informati- on, applied in coding theory; Akaike information criterion, used in system identification to determine auto-regressive models and in neural networks to identify the number of neu- rons; and Cramer-Rao bound or Fisher information, describing the minimal variances achieved by unbiased estimators.

In all advanced Western nations, policy-makers have implemented encompassing welfare state reforms in recent decades breaking with past welfare arrangements. In particular, social democracy engaged in significant policy change under the Third Way paradigm and broke with its traditional reputation on welfare that had built the ties with the core constituency in the 20th century. The Electoral Consequences of Third Way Welfare State Reforms: Social Democracy's Transformation and its Political Costs provides a comparative study of the electoral consequences of Third Way welfare state reforms. The book demonstrates that Third Way reforms went against the social policy preferences of social democracy's core voters and indeed produced an electoral setback for social democrats at the ballots. Moreover, and accounting for cross-national variation, the analysis shows that the nature of the setback is contingent on the electoral system and the party competition social democrats face when reforming the welfare state.

From the reviews: "Bioinformaticians are facing the challenge of how to handle immense amounts of raw data, [ ] and render them accessible to scientists working on a wide variety of problems. [This book] can be such a tool." IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology