The purpose of the science of complexity is to provide, if not a unified approach, at least useful tools to tackling complex problems in various scientific domains. Generally, complexity is considered a fundamental challenge to the reductionist approach in science as a whole and to its ideas of certainty and randomness.

The overall behaviour of a complex system is different from and more than the sum of its parts. The behaviour of non-linear complex systems depends on the interaction (often with retroactive effects) among its constituent parts and not so much (or not only) on the characteristics of these parts themselves; the sum of the behaviour of single parts does not necessarily provide us with an explanation of the aggregate behaviour of a system.

All this is true for economic systems. These are based on the activities of single economic agents. Each individual can obtain only partial knowledge that is focussed around its "world" (local information) and react to external shocks in different ways (local rationality).

The aim of this book is to provide an overview to recent developments in theory and empirical research that view economic systems as complex phenomena whose aggregate dynamics can often not be inferred from its microscopic (microeconomic) building blocks. The collection of papers represented in this volume is dedicated to the memory of Massimo Salzano, who has been a fervent and eloquent advocate of the complexity approach.

The contributions have been presented at a conference held to celebrate Massimo's 60th birthday (Ecople -Economics: From Tradition of Complexity, Capri, 2-4 June, 2006), one year before he unexpectedly passed away in 2007.

Throughout the history of economics, a variety of analytical tools have been borrowed from the so-called exact sciences. As Schoe?er (1955) puts it: "They have taken their mathematics and their ded- tive techniques from physics, their statistics from genetics and agr- omy, their systems of classi?cation from taxonomy and chemistry, their model-construction techniques from astronomy and mechanics, and their methods of analysis of the consequences of actions from en- neering". The possibility of similarities of structure in mathematical models of economic and physical systems has been an important f- tor in the development of neoclassical theory. To treat the state of an economy as an equilibrium, analogous to the equilibrium of a mech- ical system has been a key concept in economics ever since it became a mathematically formalized science. Adopting a Newtonian paradigm neoclassical economics often is based on three fundamental concepts. Firstly, the representative agent who is a scale model of the whole society with extraordinary capacities, particularly concerning her - pability of information processing and computation. Of course, this is a problematic reduction as agents are both heterogeneous and bou- edly rational and limited in their cognitive capabilities. Secondly, it often con?ned itself to study systems in a state of equilibrium. But this concept is not adequate to describe and to support phenomena in perpetual motion.

Economic application of nonlinear dynamics, microscopic agent-based modelling, and the use of artificial intelligence techniques as learning devices of boundedly rational actors are among the most exciting interdisciplinary ventures of economic theory over the past decade. This volume provides us with a most fascinating series of examples on "complexity in action" exemplifying the scope and explanatory power of these innovative approaches.

After starting out as a neo-surrealist American poet in the 1970s, Thomas Lux 'drifted away from surrealism and the arbitrariness of all that. I got more interested in subjects, identifiable subjects other than my own angst or ennui.' The later Lux writes more directly in response to more familiar but no less strange human experience, creating a body of work that is at once simple and complex, wildly imaginative and totally relevant. He uses humour or satire 'to help combat the darkness - to make the reader laugh - and then steal that laugh, right out of the throat. Because I think life is like that, tragedy right alongside humour.' Each of Lux's multi-faceted poems is self-contained, whether it is musing or ranting, lamenting or lambasting, first person personal or first person universal. 'Usually, the speaker of my poems is a little agitated,' says Lux, 'a little smart-ass, a little angry, satirical, despairing. Or, sometimes he's goofy, somewhat elegiac, full of praise and gratitude.'

Thomas Lux selected this debut collection as winner of BOA's A. Poulin, Jr., Poetry Prize. In his foreword he writes, "I was immediately struck by the boldness of imagination, the strange cadences, and wild music of these poems. We should be glad that young poets like Keetje Kuipers are making their voices heard not by tearing up the old language but by making the old language new."

Keetje Kuipers, a native of the Northwest, earned her BA at Swarthmore College and MFA at the University of Oregon. A Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she divides her time between Stanford and Missoula, Montana.
From Devils Lake Journal:
"Keetje Kuipers' "Beautiful in the Mouth" is at once lovely, frank, and haunting. The poems move easily between landscapes, inhabiting the American west, Paris, and New York City with equal ease and yet, they never exploit sympathies of locale for their power. Instead, they rely on nothing but the speaker's own candor, who is able to speak through such disparate poems as "Bondage Play as Substitue for Prayer" alongside "Waltz of the Midnight Miscarriage," "Reading Sappho in a Wine Bar," and "Barn Elegy" with a good spattering of honest-to-goodness sonnets."
From ForeWord Reviews:
"The poems move like ghosts themselves: disappearing into walls, circling back, appearing for a moment to be captured, then evaporating into thin air. Kuipers pins moments onto the page with the care of an etymologist collecting rare specimens. Her poems are at once visceral and cosmic, "a wave as well as a particle.""

.,."in these poems, (there is) a family of 12 with the mother, father, and speaker as the prime characters....In a brilliant crown of sonnets, its most important character, the speaker's brother, who died a suicide, by drowning, fully emerges. The strictness of the form is never obtrusive--it just does its job...to give a frame, a tension, something for the powerful emotion to work off of or against, thus increasing its powerful sentiment...By writing this book...Teresa Carson has rescued her family and her brother. That a book of poems can do this is a miracle." --Thomas Lux
"These poems...convey with beauty and power the emotions that pour from loss, love, trauma, reconciliation and healing. It is difficult in an academic article or a clinical process to capture the full measure of what it is we seek to heal. But in these powerful poems...one can connect to a fragment of the pain, and hope, of Teresa Carson. Her words can teach. Teresa Carson is wise. She shares her wisdom in this remarkable book."
--Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D. Senior Fellow, The Child Trauma Academy

Reader's familiar with Thomas Lux's quick-witted images ("Language without simile is like a lung/ without air") and his rambunctious, Cirque-Du-Soleil-like imagination ("The Under-Appreciated Pontooniers") will find in his new collection, "Child Made of Sand," not only the signature funny, provocative, and poignant super-surrealism that has made him, along with Charles Simic, James Tate, and Dean Young, one of America's most inventive and humane poets, but they will also find in a surprising series of homages, elegies, rants, and autobiographical poems a new register of language in which time and mortality echo and reverberate in quieter notes. In "West Shining Tree," we can hear this shift in register when he asks: "I'll head dead West and ask of all I see: / Which is the way, the long or the short way, / to the West Shining Tree?"

Literary Nonfiction. FROM THE SOUTHLAND is the nonfiction debut from award-winning poet, Thomas Lux, author of more than eleven books of poetry. Lux turns that same unique lens he uses to make those immensely satisfying and well-wrought poems on the most unlikely subjects: the heroic mundane, the awful--as in full of awe, and the tragic. He reveals to each of us, through that lens, through his praise of the absurdly beautiful, the space we inhabit and those travelling with us. Set in the San Diego area his subjects range: Even the San Diego-Coronado Bay Bridge is a character itself. His investigations are presented in painstaking detail--stories so fantastic, they have to be true.

"[Lux is] sui generis, his own kind of poet, unlike any of the fashions of his time." - Stanley Kunitz
Thomas Lux is humorous, edgy, and ever surprising in The Cradle Place, his tenth collection of verse. These fifty-two poems question language and intention and the sometimes untidy connections between the human and natural worlds. Lux has long been an outspoken advocate for the relevance of poetry in American culture, and his voice is urgent and unrelentingly evocative. As Sven Birkerts has noted, "Lux may be one of the poets on whom the future of the genre depends."
"A book full of arresting images . . . The natural world, as it appears here, is at first lovely . . . but turns out dangerously vanquished . . . Not since Plath has hysteria looked this kissable." - San Francisco Chronicle
"Lux has a gift for the swiftly turned expression . . . Such immediacy and quirkiness will hold a reader." - Poetry
"Readers will be mesmerized." - Poetry Book of the Year, Library Journal
THOMAS LUX holds the Bourne Chair in Poetry and is director of the McEver Visiting Writers Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has been awarded three NEA grants and the Kingsley Tufts Award, and is a former Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in Atlanta.

One of the New York Public Library's 25 "Books to Remember" in 1997 Lux comments on the absurd, the pathetic, and the commonplace in our culture, writing with compassion as well as satire. He is "singular among his peers in his ability to convey with a deceptive lightness the paradoxes of human emotion," says Publishers Weekly, and Robert Hass, in the Washington Post Book World, takes special note of Lux's "bitter wit, the kind of irony that comes with a quick, impatient intelligence."

Thomas Lux is the author of such books as Sunday, Half Promised Land, and The Drowned River. His poetry has been fulfilling every expectation by penetrating deeper into the plain-spoken, saturnine, witty language that he virtually invented. In his latest work, Lux's level gaze, cool talk, weird rhythms, and quirky humor place him in a special territory - entirely original - of contemporary American poetry. These new poems, like Split Horizon itself, have unusual titles (Loudmouth Soup, Virgule, Each Startled Touch Returns the Touch Unstartled) and circle around their subjects in strange ways, most often dealing with the lonely oddity of the individual in a society that inflexibly ignores individuality.

Thomas Lux integriert bisher isoliert betrachtete technische, anwendungsorientierte und IT-sicherheitsbezogene Fragestellungen bei der Gestaltung, Einfuhrung und Nutzung eines sicheren Intranet und fuhrt die Gestaltungsperspektiven systematisch im Intranet Engineering-Ansatz zusammen.

Wissenschaftlicher Aufsatz aus dem Jahr 2011 im Fachbereich Medizin - Zahnmedizin, Note: keine, -, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: In einer Literaturrecherche wurden die Ergebnisse bei der Versorgung des Unterkiefers mit steg-, kugelkopf- und konuskronenretinierten Suprastrukturen auf Implantaten ausgewertet. Es wurden 35 klinische Studien ausgewertet, von denen 80 % der Evidenzstufe IIb und 20 % der Evidenzstufe IIIb entsprachen. Als Zielkriterium wurde das Retentionsvermogen gewahlt. Der Reparaturaufwand ist im Mittel am geringsten bei Stegen, gefolgt von Kugelkopfen und Konuskronen. Bei Stegen stellen die Aktivierung der Stegreiter und bei Kugelkopfen der Austausch der Matrizen haufige Massnahmen dar, die unkompliziert und schnell durchgefuhrt werden konnen. Bei Konuskronen sind weniger haufig Reparaturen erforderlich. Allerdings ist eine Aktivierung bei Retentionsverlust nur durch vergleichsweise aufwandige Massnahmen bis hin zur Neuanfertigung der Krone moglich, und es kommt gelegentlich zu einem Implantatbruch. Insgesamt ist die Literaturdatenlage als nicht zufriedenstellend zu bezeichnen. Es fehlen - besonders fur Konuskronen - Langzeitstudien mit grosseren Fallzahlen und definierten Erfolgskriteri

Projektarbeit aus dem Jahr 2011 im Fachbereich Medizin - Zahnmedizin, Note: keine, -, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: In einer Literaturrecherche wurden die Ergebnisse bei der Versorgung des Unterkiefers mit steg-, kugelkopf- und konuskronenretinierten Suprastrukturen auf Implantaten ausgewertet. Es wurden 35 klinische Studien ausgewertet, von denen 80 % der Evidenzstufe IIb und 20 % der Evidenzstufe IIIb entsprachen. Als Zielkriterium wurde das Retentionsvermogen gewahlt. Bei Fragen nach der Zufriedenheit mit der Retentionsfahigkeit fallt eine geringere Zufriedenheit bei Patienten mit kugelkopfgelagerten Prothesen - vor allem in den ersten funf Jahren - auf. Bei steggetragenen Prothesen traten gelegentlich funktionelle Einschrankungen durch die Akkumulation von Speiseresten und beim Kauen harter Nahrung auf, aber auch bei kugelkopfretinierten Prothesen beklagten 17 % der Patienten eine massige Kaufahigkeit. Zwischen Stegen und Kugelkopfen ergaben sich keine Unterschiede bei der Befragung nach Problemen mit dem Kauen und mit dem Sprechen. Patienten mit Steg- und Kugelkopfverankerungen sind insgesamt gleichermassen zufrieden. Es fehlen allerdings Angaben fur Konuskronen. Insgesamt ist die Literaturdatenlage als nicht zufriedenstellend zu bezeichnen. Es fehlen - besonders fur Konuskronen - Langzeitstudien mit grosseren Fallzahlen und definierten Erfolgskriteri

Das Buch liefert einen umfassenden UEberblick uber das neue Forschungsgebiet E-Health-OEkonomie und zeigt den aktuellen Stand der Diskussion in Wissenschaft, Praxis und Politik auf. Gesundheitsoekonomie, Gesundheitswirtschaft, Gesundheitsversorgung sowie ambulante, stationare, sektorenubergreifende Versorgung und die Erstellung von Leistungen am Gesundheitsstandort der privaten Haushalte: E-Health ist heute und besonders in Zukunft, einhergehend mit weiteren technologischen Innovationen, von grosser Bedeutung. Mit dem neuen E-Health-Gesetz findet das Buch den Bezug zur aktuellen politischen Auseinandersetzung und bietet mit seinen oekonomischen Artikeln einen Beitrag fur die Diskussion um Nutzen und Mehrwert von Informationstechnologie in der Gesundheitswirtschaft. Praktiker und Wissenschaftler aus Medizin, Informatik und (Gesundheits-)OEkonomie sind genauso angesprochen wie alle weiteren Akteure, welche sich mit der OEkonomie des Einsatzes von IT in der Gesundheitswirtschaft beschaftigen. Lehrenden und Studierenden gibt das Buch einen umfassenden UEberblick. Das Buch bietet sich aufgrund seiner Struktur als Gesamtlekture genauso an wie die selektive Wahl einzelner thematischer Kapitel oder auch einzelner Beitrage der verschiedenen Autoren.