The interconnectedness of the global environment and finiteness of the earth's natural resources require an increased understanding of environmental and natural-resource policy and politics in countries around the world. This is especially true of industrializing countries where widespread ecological disturbances and rapid exploitation of natural resources are taking place. Ecological Policy and Politics in Developing Countries provides an in-depth study of ecological problems, policies, and politics in ten major industrializing countries. Each chapter discusses the increasingly international context of domestic environmental policies and explores some of the powerful interests and institutional forces that contribute to ecological problems and shape the policies to deal with them in each country. The authors identify some of the major impediments to both welldesigned environmental policies and their effective implementation. The ten countries included here -- the Czech Republic, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Taiwan, Thailand, Slovakia, and Venezuela -- cover five continents, over half of the world's population and most of the major industrializing countries.

The focus of the Asian Applied Computing Conference (AACC) is primarily to bring the research in computer science closer to practical applications. The conference is aimed primarily at topics that have immediate practical bene?ts. By hosting the conf- ence in the developingnations in Asia we aim to provide a forum for engagingboth the academic and the commercial sectors in that region. The ?rst conference "Information Technology Prospects and Challenges" was held in May 2003 in Kathmandu, Nepal. Thisyear theconferencenamewas changedto "Asian AppliedComputingConference" to re?ect both the regional- and the application-oriented nature of the conference. AACC is planned to be a themed conference with a primary focus on a small set of topics although other relevant applied topics will be considered. The theme in AACC 2004 was on the following topics: systems and architectures, mobile and ubiquitous computing, soft computing, man machine interfaces, and innovative applications for the developing world. AACC 2004 attracted 184 paper submissions from around the world, making the reviewing and the selection process tough and time consuming. The selected papers covered a wide range of topics: genetic algorithms and soft computing; scheduling, - timization andconstraintsolving; neuralnetworksandsupportvectormachines;natural language processing and information retrieval; speech and signal processing; networks and mobile computing; parallel, grid and high-performance computing; innovative - plications for the developing world; cryptography and security; and machine lea- ing. Papers were primarily judged on originality, presentation, relevance and quality of work. Papers that had clearly demonstrated results were given preference.

Eleven contributions look at the environmental problems, politics, and policies of key industrializing countries in terms of their historical, economic, and public policy contexts. Recurring themes in these studies of India, China, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Taiwan, Thailand, Venezuela, and the Cze