The core of this book is a systematic treatment of the historic transformation of the West from monarchy to democracy. Revisionist in nature, it reaches the conclusion that monarchy is a lesser evil than democracy, but outlines deficiencies in both. Its methodology is axiomatic-deductive, allowing the writer to derive economic and sociological theorems, and then apply them to interpret historical events.

A compelling chapter on time preference describes the progress of civilization as lowering time preferences as capital structure is built, and explains how the interaction between people can lower time all around, with interesting parallels to the Ricardian Law of Association. By focusing on this transformation, the author is able to interpret many historical phenomena, such as rising levels of crime, degeneration of standards of conduct and morality, and the growth of the mega-state. In underscoring the deficiencies of both monarchy and democracy, the author demonstrates how these systems are both inferior to a natural order based on private-property.

Hoppe deconstructs the classical liberal belief in the possibility of limited government and calls for an alignment of conservatism and libertarianism as natural allies with common goals. He defends the proper role of the production of defense as undertaken by insurance companies on a free market, and describes the emergence of private law among competing insurers. Having established a natural order as superior on utilitarian grounds, the author goes on to assess the prospects for achieving a natural order. Informed by his analysis of the deficiencies of social democracy, and armed with the social theory of legitimation, he forsees secession as the likely future of the US and Europe, resulting in a multitude of region and city-states. This book complements the author's previous work defending the ethics of private property and natural order. Democracy--The God that Failed will be of interest to scholars and students of history, political economy, and political philosophy.

The core of this book is a systematic treatment of the historic transformation of the West from monarchy to democracy. Revisionist in nature, it reaches the conclusion that monarchy is a lesser evil than democracy, but outlines deficiencies in both. Its methodology is axiomatic-deductive, allowing the writer to derive economic and sociological theorems, and then apply them to interpret historical events. A compelling chapter on time preference describes the progress of civilization as lowering time preferences as capital structure is built, and explains how the interaction between people can lower time all around, with interesting parallels to the Ricardian Law of Association. By focusing on this transformation, the author is able to interpret many historical phenomena, such as rising levels of crime, degeneration of standards of conduct and morality, and the growth of the mega-state. In underscoring the deficiencies of both monarchy and democracy, the author demonstrates how these systems are both inferior to a natural order based on private-property. Hoppe deconstructs the classical liberal belief in the possibility of limited government and calls for an alignment of conservatism and libertarianism as natural allies with common goals. He defends the proper role of the production of defense as undertaken by insurance companies on a free market, and describes the emergence of private law among competing insurers. Having established a natural order as superior on utilitarian grounds, the author goes on to assess the prospects for achieving a natural order. Informed by his analysis of the deficiencies of social democracy, and armed with the social theory of legitimation, he forsees secession as the likely future of the US and Europe, resulting in a multitude of region and city-states. This book complements the author's previous work defending the ethics of private property and natural order. Democracy - The God that Failed will be of interest to scholars and students of history, political economy, and political philosophy.

This book discusses the impact of traditional Russian political culture on contemporary Soviet economic thinking and behaviour and the rank of economic aims in the priority system of Soviet politics. It focuses on foreign economic relations and the USSR's foreign policy.

Die Schaffung gleichwertiger Lebensverhältnisse war ein zentrales Anliegen der Bundesregierung in der 19. Legislaturperiode. Zwei zentrale, nach wie vor gültige Ziele, die Stärkung der Fachkräftebasis und der Innovationskraft in strukturschwachen Regionen, können vor allem dann erreicht werden, wenn regionale Akteure Fördermaßnahmen selbst ausgestalten und an die Gegebenheiten vor Ort anpassen. Das ist ein Ergebnis des Projekts „Gleichwertige Lebensverhältnisse: Passgenaue Maßnahmen zur Entwicklung strukturschwacher Regionen“, das das Deutsche Forschungsinstitut für öffentliche Verwaltung und die Technische Universität Berlin im Auftrag des Bundesministeriums für Wirtschaft und Energie durchgeführt haben.

Soviet scholars have apparently stayed clear of meaningful analysis of such touchy subjects as interdependence and conflict in the relationship between economics and politics. Very little has been published on this issue-no surprise in a system that controls centrally both politics and the economy, with an emphasis on rapid economic development. The absence of meaningful Soviet research led the Federal Institute for East European and International Studies in Cologne to sponsor an international interdisciplinary conference on the subject. Contributions to the resulting book cover three main areas. The first includes the impact of traditional Russian political culture on contemporary Soviet economic thinking and behavior, the rank of economic aims in the priority system of Soviet politics, and the function of economic institutions in the implementation of political aims. The second concerns the role of political lobbies in the economy and repercussions of economic change for Soviet politics. Foreign economic relations and the USSR's foreign policy make up the third area. The concluding discussion reviews the state of international research and identifies areas for future study.

Bringing together more than thirty influential regulators, academics, and industry scientists, Ecological Models for Regulatory Risk Assessments of Pesticides: Developing a Strategy for the Future provides a coherent, science-based view on ecological modeling for regulatory risk assessments. It discusses the benefits of modeling in the context of registrations, identifies the obstacles that prevent ecological modeling being used routinely in regulatory submissions, and explores the actions needed to overcome these obstacles. The book focuses on the following issues: Uncertainties in the process of model development, such as design, analysis, documentation, and communication The availability of data and background information needed for optimal modeling The limited knowledge of modeling The lack of confidence in the outcome of ecological models and their reliability in pesticide risk assessment It also suggests future solutions to these challenges, including: A guidance document on the modeling process Case studies that show how ecological models can provide reliable ecologically relevant risk assessments Training the people who generate or evaluate results obtained by ecological models Focusing on ecological models, such as unstructured population models, stage-structured matrix models, and individual- or agent-based models, this volume helps regulatory authorities, manufacturers, and scientists assess the risk of plant protection products in nontarget organisms. Armed with this knowledge, readers will better understand the challenges of using ecological modeling in the regulatory process.

In this innovative book, international scholars investigate trust and its role in relation to the entrepreneurial behaviour of small firms across a variety of institutional and cultural settings. The contributors draw on original empirical material from a number of West European and East European countries, highlighting the role of culture and the significance of a multi-disciplinary approach in researching trust and its importance in entrepreneurship. Including detailed comparative studies, the book will appeal to researchers, students and practitioners interested in trust within and between small firms and in different environments. Those interested in issues surrounding the development of post-socialist economies will also find the book to be of great interest.

The collapse of socialism across Eastern Europe - as manifested most dramatically by the events of the forever memorable November 9, 1989, when the Germans of East and West reunited, moved and overjoyed, on top of the Berlin Wall - has added more support and urgency to the central thesis of this volume than I had ever hoped for. Whether the following studies deal with economic topics, such as employment, interest, money, banking, business cycles, taxes, public goods, or growth; with philosophical problems as the foundations of know ledge, and of economics and ethics in particular; or the reconstruction and theoretical explanation of historical and sociological phenomena such as exploitation, the rise and fall of civilizations, international politics, war, imperialism, and the role of ideas and ideological movements in the course of social evolution - each ultimately contributes to but one conclusion: The right to private property is an indisputably valid, absolute principle of ethics and the basis for continuous 'optimal' economic progress. To rise from the ruins of socialism and overcome the stagnation of the Western welfare states, nothing will suffice but the uncompromizing privatization of all socialized, that is, government, property and the establishment of a contractual society based on the recognition of the absoluteness of private property rights. *** In writing the following studies I received help from many sides. Special thanks go to my wife Margaret, who again took on the task of de Germanizing my English; to Llewellyn H."

The Second European Turbulence Conference was held at the Technische Univer sitat Berlin, Federal Republic of Germany, from August 30th to September 2nd 1988 under the auspices of the European Mechanics Committee. It was primar ily devoted to fundamental aspects of turbulence, and aimed at bringing together engineers, physicists, and mathematicians. The scientific committee - serving also as Sub-committee of the European Turbulence Conference - consisted of the following members: G. Comte-Bellot (Lyon), H.-H. Fernholz and H.E. Fiedler (both from Berlin) as co-chairmen of the conference, U. Frisch (Nice), J.C.R. Hunt (Cambridge), E. Krause (Aachen), M. Landahl (Stockholm), A.M. Obukhov (Moscow), and G. Ooms (Amsterdam). The conference programme comprised 6 invited lectures and 94 contributions, presented either orally or at poster sessions. There were 165 participants from 18 countries. All papers published in these conference proceedings were, with the exception of the invited ones, again refereed by the members of the scientific committee. The main research topics discussed at this meeting were stability and gener ation of turbulence, effects of rotation, stratification and buoyancy forces, novel instrumentation, manipulation and control, boundary layers with separation and reattachment, computer simulation, turbulent diffusion, image analysis and flow visualization, vorticity dynamics and turbulence, and large-scale structures. We have taken the liberty of regrouping some papers following the submitted final versions for this volume. Authors may therefore find their paper under a different heading from that in the conference programme."

It is not uncommon in science that following a period of turbulent growth, a skeptical mood builds up and doubts begin to be expressed as to the rationale of progress achieved and the extent to which the position reached coincides with the original goals. This kind of discomfort is felt today by linguists and their close companions, the psycholinguists. Despite its growing intensity, this discomfort is not readily verbalizable. Still, we will try to characterize it tentatively with a few angry assertions, each of which taken separately is perhaps untenable in its extreme form, but which together convey a sense of the malaise that seems to afflict the area in question, For one thing, the models and theories current in linguistics tend to approach a level of complexity at which extreme sophistication borders on folly. Further, the present inflation of macro- and microsystems testifies to the growing arbitrariness of theorizing - in spite of the abundance of publications specifying the criteria by which to evaluate these systems against a meta theory of science; thus we are made aware of the widening gulf between linguistic theory and the realities of language.

Hans-Michael Heitmuller The financing of public funds has become a strongly competitive business. Within the EU, national boundaries for this sphere have been formally removed as well as important hindrances to the trade of goods and services. Deregulation and technological innovations have decreased the economic distance between the regions of the EU. With the transition to the Euro, a weighty step has been made in the direction towards a home market. It has become simpler and worthwhile for public borrowers to obtain comparative offers from over and beyond country borders. For the supplier, this field of business is marked by relatively low risks, a correspondingly modest personal capital requirement, but narrow margins as well. On the other hand, as well as language and social differences, there exist in actuality still many-sided market access thresholds on the basis of different institutional and instrumental framework data within the individual countries, especially inthe area of public funds. This will only change slightly in the foreseeable future. Reliable information about these special framework conditions is still in demand. It is an important factor of success in business politics.

Data Science and Classification provides new methodological developments in data analysis and classification. The broad and comprehensive coverage includes the measurement of similarity and dissimilarity, methods for classification and clustering, network and graph analyses, analysis of symbolic data, and web mining. Beyond structural and theoretical results, the book offers application advice for a variety of problems, in medicine, microarray analysis, social network structures, and music.

The book presents a range of new developments in the theory and practice of multivariate statistical data analysis. Several contributions illustrate the use of multivariate methods in application fields such as economics, medicine, environment, and biology.

This book deals with recent developments in classification and data analysis and presents new topics which are of central interest to modern statistics. In particular, these include: classification models and clustering methods, multivariate data analysis, symbolic data, neural networks and learning devices, phylogeny and bioinformatics, new software systems for classification and data analysis, as well as applications in social, economic, biological, medical and other sciences. The book presents a long list of useful methods for classification, clustering and data analysis. By combining theoretical aspects with practical problems it is designed for researchers as well as for applied statisticians and will support the fast transfer of new methodological advances to a wide range of applications.

This first systematic and self-contained monograph on "Symbolic Data Analysis" presents the most recent methods for analyzing and visualizing symbolic data. It generalizes classical methods of exploratory, statistical and graphical data analysis to the case of complex data where the entries of a data table are, e. g., sets of categories or of numbers, intervals or probability distributions. Typical methods include: graphical displays using Zoom Stars, visualization and feature extraction by symbolic factor analysis, decision trees, discrimination, classification and clustering methods. Several benchmark examples from National Statistical Offices illustrate the usefulness of the methods. The book contains an extensive bibliography and a subject index.

International Federation of Classification Societies The International Federation of Classification Societies (lFCS) is an agency for the dissemination of technical and scientific information concerning classification and multivariate data analysis in the broad sense and in as wide a range of applications as possible; founded in 1985 in Cambridge (UK) by the following Scientific Societies and Groups: - British Classification Society - BCS - Classification Society of North America - CSNA - Gesellschaft fUr Klassification - GfKI - Japanese Classification Society - JCS - Classification Group ofItalian Statistical Society - CGSIS - Societe Francophone de Classification - SFC Now the IFCS includes also the following Societies: - Dutch-Belgian Classification Society - VOC - Polish Classification Section - SKAD - Portuguese Classification Association - CLAD - Group at Large - Korean Classification Society - KCS IFCS-98, the Sixth Conference of the International Federation of Classification Societies, was held in Rome, from July 21 to 24, 1998. Five preceding conferences were held in Aachen (Germany), Charlottesville (USA), Edinburgh (UK), Paris (France), Kobe (Japan).

This volume presents 45 articles dealing with theoretical aspects, methodo logical advances and practical applications in domains relating to classifica tion and clustering, statistical and computational data analysis, conceptual or terminological approaches for information systems, and knowledge struc tures for databases. These articles were selected from about 140 papers presented at the 19th Annual Conference of the Gesellschaft fur Klassifika tion, the German Classification Society. The conference was hosted by W. Polasek at the Institute of Statistics and Econometry of the University of 1 Basel (Switzerland) March 8-10, 1995 . The papers are grouped as follows, where the number in parentheses is the number of papers in the chapter. 1. Classification and clustering (8) 2. Uncertainty and fuzziness (5) 3. Methods of data analysis and applications (7) 4. Statistical models and methods (4) 5. Bayesian learning (5) 6. Conceptual classification, knowledge ordering and information systems (12) 7. Linguistics and dialectometry (4). These chapters are interrelated in many respects. The reader may recogni ze, for example, the analogies and distinctions existing among classification principles developed in such different domains as statistics and information sciences, the benefit to be gained by the comparison of conceptual and ma thematical approaches for structuring data and knowledge, and, finally, the wealth of practical applications described in many of the papers. For convenience of the reader, the content of this volume is briefly reviewed.

This volume presents a selection of 42 refereed and revised contributions (includ- ing some invited lectures) which were presented at the 17th Annual Conference of the "Gesellschaft fur Klassifikation e. V." (GfKl), the German Classification Society. This conference was held at the University of Kaiserslautern from March 3 - 5, 1993 and jointly hosted by the Research Center for Mathematical Logic of the Heidelberg Academy for the Humanities and Sciences, the University of Kaiserslautern, and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH). The local orga- nization was performed by Michael M. Richter, Wolfgang Lenski, Sabine Friedrich, Annette Klein, and Elisabeth Wette-Roch of the Computer Science Department of the University of Kaiserslautern and the Research Center for Mathematical Logic of the Heidelberg Academy for the Humanities and Sciences, respectively. The mem- bers of the Scientific Program Committee were Hans-Hermann Bock, PaulO. Degens, Matthias Herfurth, Hans-Joachim Hermes, Rudiger Klar, Rudolf Mathar, Michael M. Richter, and Rudolf Wille.

In science, industry, public administration and documentation centers large amounts of data and information are collected which must be analyzed, ordered, visualized, classified and stored efficiently in order to be useful for practical applications. This volume contains 50 selected theoretical and applied papers presenting a wealth of new and innovative ideas, methods, models and systems which can be used for this purpose. It combines papers and strategies from two main streams of research in an interdisciplinary, dynamic and exciting way: On the one hand, mathematical and statistical methods are described which allow a quantitative analysis of data, provide strategies for classifying objects or making exploratory searches for interesting structures, and give ways to make comprehensive graphical displays of large arrays of data. On the other hand, papers related to information sciences, informatics and data bank systems provide powerful tools for representing, modelling, storing and retrieving facts, data and knowledge characterized by qualitative descriptors, semantic relations, or linguistic concepts. The integration of both fields and a special part on applied problems from biology, medicine, archeology, industry and administration assure that this volume will be informative and useful for theory and practice.

At the time of his death Hans Hormann, then Professor of Psy- chology at the Ruhr University, Bochum, West Germany, was pre- paring an English language version of his Eirifilhrung in die Psycholinguistik. The goal of this book, in both the German and English editions, was to present in compact and readily accessi- ble form the essentials of his approach to the psychology of lan- guage. Basing his work upon the materials treated at length and in depth in two previous comprehensive and more technical works, Psycholinguistics: An Introduction to Research and Theo- ry and To Mean-To Understand, Hormann had made a selection of themes and problems suitable for beginners and for those who wanted a convenient introduction to the specific framework with- in which Hormann thought psycholinguistics was to be pursued. The result is a remarkably clear, succinct, and provocative account of central issues and options of the psychology of lan- guage, that broad and not strictly delimited part of psychology that takes as its domain the multiform conditions, processes, and structures involved in the acqUisition, development, production, and grasp of linguistic meaning. Hormann's approach is admit- tedly contentious and goes directly against a great deal of Anglo- American psycholinguistics. In particular, it radically devalues the relevance of certain types of theoretical linguistics, prin- Cipally, though not exclusively, Chomskyan, for the psychology of vii viii PREFACE language.

At the time of his death Hans Hormann, then Professor of Psy- chology at the Ruhr University, Bochum, West Germany, was pre- paring an English language version of his Eirifilhrung in die Psycholinguistik. The goal of this book, in both the German and English editions, was to present in compact and readily accessi- ble form the essentials of his approach to the psychology of lan- guage. Basing his work upon the materials treated at length and in depth in two previous comprehensive and more technical works, Psycholinguistics: An Introduction to Research and Theo- ry and To Mean-To Understand, Hormann had made a selection of themes and problems suitable for beginners and for those who wanted a convenient introduction to the specific framework with- in which Hormann thought psycholinguistics was to be pursued. The result is a remarkably clear, succinct, and provocative account of central issues and options of the psychology of lan- guage, that broad and not strictly delimited part of psychology that takes as its domain the multiform conditions, processes, and structures involved in the acqUisition, development, production, and grasp of linguistic meaning. Hormann's approach is admit- tedly contentious and goes directly against a great deal of Anglo- American psycholinguistics. In particular, it radically devalues the relevance of certain types of theoretical linguistics, prin- Cipally, though not exclusively, Chomskyan, for the psychology of vii viii PREFACE language.

In recent years, libertarian impulses have increasingly influenced national and economic debates, from welfare reform to efforts to curtail affirmative action. Murray N. Rothbard's classic The Ethics of Liberty stands as one of the most rigorous and philosophically sophisticated expositions of the libertarian political position.

What distinguishes Rothbard's book is the manner in which it roots the case for freedom in the concept of natural rights and applies it to a host of practical problems. An economist by profession, Rothbard here proves himself equally at home with philosophy. And while his conclusions are radical--that a social order that strictly adheres to the rights of private property must exclude the institutionalized violence inherent in the state--his applications of libertarian principles prove surprisingly practical for a host of social dilemmas, solutions to which have eluded alternative traditions.

The Ethics of Liberty authoritatively established the anarcho-capitalist economic system as the most viable and the only principled option for a social order based on freedom. This edition is newly indexed and includes a new introduction that takes special note of the Robert Nozick-Rothbard controversies.