The colleagues and former students of John Staddon, the last of the Skinnerian behavourists, discuss topics that have been important in his work: behavourial ability and choice, memory, time and models, and behaviourism. Contributor R.H.I. Dale from Macquarie University.

Current estimates suggest that between one and three percent of people living in the United States will receive a diagnosis of mental retardation. Mental retardation, a condition characterized by deficits in intellectual capabilities and adaptive behavior, can be particularly hard to diagnose in the mild range of the disability. The U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) provides income support and medical benefits to individuals with cognitive limitations who experience significant problems in their ability to perform work and may therefore be in need of governmental support. Addressing the concern that SSA's current procedures are consistent with current scientific and professional practices, this book evaluates the process used by SSA to determine eligibility for these benefits. It examines the adequacy of the SSA definition of mental retardation and its current procedures for assessing intellectual capabilities, discusses adaptive behavior and its assessment, advises on ways to combine intellectual and adaptive assessment to provide a complete profile of an individual's capabilities, and clarifies ways to differentiate mental retardation from other conditions.

"Lively and fascinating. . . . [Gould] writes beautifully about science and the wonders of nature."—Tracy Kidder Over a century after Darwin published the Origin of Species, Darwinian theory is in a "vibrantly healthy state," writes Stephen Jay Gould, its most engaging and illuminating exponent. Exploring the "peculiar and mysterious particulars of nature," Gould introduces the reader to some of the many and wonderful manifestations of evolutionary biology.

A state-of-the-art guide to middleware technologies, and their pivotal role in communications networks. Middleware is about integration and interoperability of applications and services running on heterogeneous computing and communications devices. The services it provides - including identification, authentication, authorization, soft-switching, certification and security - are used in a vast range of global appliances and systems, from smart cards and wireless devices to mobile services and e-Commerce. Qusay H. Mahmoud has created an invaluable reference tool that explores the origins and current uses of middleware (highlighting the importance of such technologies as CORBA, J2EE and JMS) and has thus compiled the roadmap to future research in this area. Middleware for Communications: discusses the emerging fields of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) and grid middleware detailing middleware platforms such as JXTA and the Globus middleware toolkit. shows how Middleware will play a significant role in mobile computing. presents a Platform Supporting Mobile Applications (PLASMA) - a middleware platform that consists of components for location, event, and profile handling of Location-Based Services. introduces middleware security focusing on the appropriate aspects of CORBA, J2EE, and .NET and demonstrates how to realize complex security capabilities such as role-based access control (RBAC) and mandatory access control (MAC). discusses how Quality of Service (QoS) component middleware can be combined with Model Driven Architecture (MDA) technologies to rapidly develop, generate, assemble and deploy flexible communications applications. This incomparable overview of middleware for communications is suitable for graduate students and researchers in communications and computing departments. It is also an authoritative guide for engineers and developers working on distributed systems, mobile computing and networked appliances.

This handbook is the first comprehensive text on positive psychology and disability. Emphasizing paradigmatic changes in understanding disability, the text covers traditional disciplines in positive psychology; and applications of positive psychology to domains like education or work.

Where do new ideas come from? What is social intelligence? Why do social scientists perform mindless statistical rituals? This vital book is about rethinking rationality as adaptive thinking: to understand how minds cope with their environments, both ecological and social.Gerd Gigerenzer proposes and illustrates a bold new research program that investigates the psychology of rationality, introducing the concepts of ecological, bounded, and social rationality. His path-breaking collection takes research on thinking, social intelligence, creativity, and decision-making out of an ethereal world where the laws of logic and probability reign, and places it into our real world of human behavior and interaction. Adaptive Thinking is accessibly written for general readers with an interest in psychology, cognitive science, economics, sociology, philosophy, artificial intelligence, and animal behavior. It also teaches a practical audience, such as physicians, AIDS counselors, and experts in criminal law, how to understand and communicate uncertainties and risks.