Felix Müller Book order

The thesis explores the pervasive issue of violence and crime across various countries, highlighting its detrimental impact on social stability and development. It emphasizes the staggering financial costs associated with crime, estimated between $160 billion and $3,500 billion annually in the U.S. The work underscores the importance of understanding the factors that drive criminal behavior, which can aid in significantly reducing societal costs. Additionally, it discusses the influence of the business cycle on economic activity and its broader social implications.

Exploring the complexities of nonlinear dynamics, this book delves into systems exhibiting excitable, oscillatory, and bistable behaviors. It examines how stochastic fluctuations lead to intricate patterns, including moving clusters and inverted waves. The study includes bifurcations and nucleation of spatial structures, alongside methods for determining front velocities in bounded systems. An abstract two-state model illustrates excitable dynamics, with insights into instantaneous and delayed responses. Additionally, it discusses the transport of Brownian particles in oscillating potentials, highlighting synchronization mechanisms for nearly dispersion-less transport.

This volume comprises the proceedings of the International Workshop on Eco logical Goal Functions, held at the Schleswig-Holstein Cultural Center of Salzau, August 30 -September 4, 1996. The conference - first in a series - intended to be convened at Salzau at 1 -2 year intervals to address various aspects of theo retical and application-oriented ecology, was initiated, organized and carried out under the auspices of the Ecology Center of the Kiel University. It featured key note addresses, invited lectures, submitted papers, and posters. 32 contributions written by authors from eight countries, were selected to be presented in this book. From the very rich discussions of the workshop, some general characteristics emerged which might become important for a deeper understanding of the nature of evolving systems or, in other words, systems with a history, described by variables with a high degree of interdependence. These characteristics include the following: Speaking of 'goal functions' is a convenient 'fa~on de parler', since a logical analysis of the formal structure of teleological and causal explanations shows that both are analogous with regard to the inherent structural typology and the basic mode of explanation. Teleological interpretations introduce motives or objectives of actors into the set of 'antecedens' conditions relevant for system evolution, and are consequently a subset of causal interpretations.