Issues Unresolved

Of the more than 400 studies presented at the 18th International Congress on Education of the Deaf, the 20 most incisive papers were selected, rewritten, and edited to construct the trenchant volume Issues Unresolved: New Perspectives on Language and Deaf Education. The resulting book provocatively challenges the invested reader in four critical areas of deaf education worldwide. Part 1, Communication: Signed and Spoken Languages, addresses matters that range from considering critical periods for language acquisition, researched by Susan D. Fischer, to assessing the impact of immigration policies on the ethnic composition of Australia's deaf community, intriguing work by Jan Branson and Don Miller. Part 2, Communication: Accessibility to Speech, continues the debate with works on the perception of speech by deaf and hard of hearing children, contributed by Arthur Boothroyd, and automatic speech recognition and its applications, delineated by Harry Levitt. Educational issues are brought to the forefront in Part 3 in such engrossing studies as Lea Lurie and Alex Kozulin's discourse on the application of an instrumental-enrichment cognitive intervention program with deaf immigrant children from Ethiopia. Stephen Powers offers another perspective in this section with his retrospective evaluation of a distance education training course for teachers of the deaf. Part 4, Psychological and Social Adjustment reviews progress in this area, with Anne de Klerk's exposition on the Rotterdam Deaf Awareness Program, and Corinne J. Lewkowitz and Lynn S. Liben's research on the development of deaf and hearing children's sex-role attitudes and self-endorsements. These and the many other contributions by renowned international scholars in the field make Issues Unresolved a compelling new standard for all involved in deaf education.

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The field of astrophysics is in the midst of a technologically driven renaissance, as fundamental discoveries are being made with astonishing frequency. In the last decade, new detectors in space, on earth, and deep underground have, when coupled with the computational power of modern computers, revolutionized our knowledge and understanding of the astronomical world. This is a great time for a student of any age to become acquainted with the remarkable universe in which we live. This volume is a collection of essays, originally presented orally to a diverse group of students and professionals, which reveal the most fertile areas for future study of astronomy and astrophysics. The emphasis of this work is on the clear description of the current state of our knowledge as a preparation for the future unraveling of the mysteries of the universe that appear today as most fundamental and most amenable to solution. A stellar group of astronomers and astrophysicists describes the directions and styles of work that they think are most likely to lead to progress. Bibliographical notes at the end of each presentation provide guidance for the reader who wishes to go more deeply into a given subject. Unsolved Problems in Astrophysics is a uniquely stimulating introduction to some of the most important topics in modern astrophysics.

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Solved and Unsolved Problems of Structural Chemistry introduces new methods and approaches for solving problems related to molecular structure. It includes numerous subjects such as aromaticity—one of the central themes of chemistry—and topics from bioinformatics such as graphical and numerical characterization of DNA, proteins, and proteomes. It also outlines the construction of novel tools using techniques from discrete mathematics, particularly graph theory, which allowed problems to be solved that many had considered unsolvable. The book discusses a number of important problems in chemistry that have not been fully understood or fully appreciated, such as the notion of aromaticity and conjugated circuits, the generalized Hückel 4n + 2 Rule, and the nature of quantitative structure–property–activity relationships (QSARs), which have resulted in only partially solved problems and approximated solutions that are inadequate. It also describes advantages of mathematical descriptors in QSAR, including their use in screening combinatorial libraries to search for structures with high similarity to the target compounds. Selected problems that this book addresses include: Multiple regression analysis (MRA) Insufficient use of partial ordering in chemistry The role of Kekulé valence structures The problem of protein and DNA alignment Solved and Unsolved Problems of Structural Chemistry collects results that were once scattered in scientific literature into a thoughtful and compact volume. It sheds light on numerous problems in chemistry, including ones that appeared to have been solved but were actually only partially solved. Most importantly, it shows more complete solutions as well as methods and approaches that can lead to actualization of further solutions to problems in chemistry.

Much has been learned about the subject of noise and random fluctuations over the last 170 years (some old milestones: Brownian motion, 1826; Einstein's diffusion theory, 1905; Johnson-Nyquist thermal noise, 1926), but much remains to be known. This volume will be interesting reading for physicists, engineers, mathematicians, biologists and PhD students. The invited papers in the volume survey classical unsolved problems while the regular papers present new problems and paradoxes.