The institution of the family is by far the most important of all the societal networks in which the lives of men, women and children are involved. Nowhere is this more true than in the less developed countries of Asia. Originally published in 1979, The Family in Asia aimed to provide a series of comprehensive survey chapters which described traditional family patterns in a selection of Asian countries at different stages of economic development. These range from a rapidly expanding and highly developed industrial nation, Japan, through modernising and developing countries, India, Pakistan, Iran, China, South Korea and the Philippines, to more underdeveloped countries, such as Thailand and Afghanistan. Each chapter is written by a senior country specialist and covers an integrated series of topics within a uniform framework in order to facilitate inter-country comparisons. Valuable description and statistical material is provided on the literature and on the effects of industrialisation, urbanisation and modernisation, but perhaps more important is a theoretical framework and the editors’ review of some basic characteristics of social modernisation. These include the degree of equalitarian family relations and sexual divisions in society; emphasis on individualism and independence; the differentiation and specialised functioning of social institutions; urban life; birth control and family planning; social mobility; marital disruption and divorce; neglect and care of the elderly; formal education for children; and government intervention and influence on family activities. Read in its historical context, this title will interest specialists in development and Asian studies, in demography, sociology and in anthropology. Students in particular, will value the tight analytical framework in which the book has been written.

This book presents the survismeter, a new invention that widely covers and determines PCPs of various molecules and experimentally measures the thermodynamic and kinetic stabilities of nanoemulsions. It unveils how a survismeter can measure surface tension, interfacial tension, wettability, viscosity, friccohesity, tentropy, rheology, density, activation energy, and particle size. It discusses novel models of molecular science that can be applied in the formulation and study of activities of functional molecules through their PCPs. It also introduces the new concept of friccohesity, which has emerged as an excellent substitute of viscosity and surface tension in experimental measurements as it does not require density measurements. It shows that the science and technology of the survismeter and friccohesity have become an inevitable part of scientific research, substantially integrating the domain of perfect industrial and academic formulations.

Although serious interest in studying the role of central cho linergic processes in psychopathology is just beginning to emerge, experimental literature on the part played by cholinergic mechanisms in brain behavior. reiations is quite extensive. During the past thirty years, cholinergic research has contributed significantly to the characterization and differentiation of adaptive mechanisms in volved in input selection, perception, cortical, autonomic and behav ioral activation, learning, memory, and inhibitory control of behav ioral outputs. To say that dysfunction of one or more of these mech anisms may be at the root of neuropsychiatric illnesses such as schiz ophrenia would be stating the obvious. This book examines the part cholinergic processes might play in dysfunctions of the adaptive processes involved in higher brain func tions and their significance for the pathogenesis, classification, etiology, and treatment of psychopathological conditions. In a series of wide ranging reviews of the available information, the subject is discussed from a variety of perspectives, using data derived from both experimental and clinical research. The purpose is not so much to determine whether cholinergic excess or deficiency is causal in this or that neuropsychiatric syndrome, but rather to try to understand the disease mechanisms in terms of adaptive processes in which cholinergic systems seem to play an important part."