This book is part of the Towards the New Millennium Series, featuring the works of thoughtful Canadians who are profoundly interested in the future of Canada and the world.

Global Spin reveals the sophisticated techniques being used around the world by powerful conservative forces to try to change the way the public and politicians think about the environment. Large corporations are using their influence to reshape public opinion, to weaken gains made by environmentalists, and to turn politicians against increased environmental regulation. The corporations’ techniques include employing specialized PR?firms to set up front groups that promote the corporate agenda whilst posing as public-interest groups; creating ‘astroturf’—artificially created grassroots support for corporate causes; deterring public involvement by imposing SLAPPS—strategic lawsuits against public participation; getting corporate-based ‘environmental educational’ materials into schools; and funding conservative think-tanks, which have persistently tried to cast doubt on the existence of environmental problems and to oppose stricter environmental regulations. In the media, corporate advertising and sponsorship are influencing news content, and industry-funded scientists are often treated as independent experts. This updated edition includes new chapters about the business campaign to prevent action on global warming, and whether Greenpeace’s ideals are being compromised by ‘greenwash’.

The SPIN workshop is a forum for researchers interested in the subject of automata-based, explicit-state model checking technologies for the analysis and veri?cation of asynchronous concurrent and distributed systems. The SPIN - del checker (http://netlib.bell-labs.com/netlib/spin/whatispin.html), developed by Gerard Holzmann, is one of the best known systems of this kind, and has attracted a large user community. This can likely be attributed to its e?cient state exploration algorithms. The fact that SPIN’s modeling language, Promela, resembles a programming language has probably also contributed to its success. Traditionally, the SPIN workshops present papers on extensions and uses of SPIN. As an experiment, this year’s workshop was broadened to have a slightly wider focus than previous workshops in that papers on software veri?cation were encouraged. Consequently, a small collection of papers describe attempts to analyze and verify programs written in conventional programming languages. Solutions include translations from source code to Promela, as well as specially designed model checkers that accept source code. We believe that this is an - teresting research direction for the formal methods community, and that it will result in a new set of challenges and solutions. Of course, abstraction becomes the key solution to deal with very large state spaces. However, we also see - tential for integrating model checking with techniques such as static program analysis and testing. Papers on these issues have therefore been included in the proceedings.

This primer builds the theory of spin glasses, starting with the real physical systems and experiments that inspired the theory.

This book presents the proceedings of an International Conference on Advances in Engineering Structures, Mechanics & Construction, held in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, May 14-17, 2006. The contents include contains the texts of all three plenary presentations and all seventy-three technical papers by more than 153 authors, presenting the latest advances in engineering structures, mechanics and construction research and practice.

Increasing the designer’s con dence that a piece of software or hardwareis c- pliant with its speci cation has become a key objective in the design process for software and hardware systems. Many approaches to reaching this goal have been developed, including rigorous speci cation, formal veri cation, automated validation, and testing. Finite-state model checking, as it is supported by the explicit-state model checkerSPIN,is enjoying a constantly increasingpopularity in automated property validation of concurrent, message based systems. SPIN has been in large parts implemented and is being maintained by Gerard Ho- mann, and is freely available via ftp fromnetlib.bell-labs.comor from URL http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/what/spin/Man/README.html. The beauty of nite-state model checking lies in the possibility of building \push-button" validation tools. When the state space is nite, the state-space traversal will eventually terminate with a de nite verdict on the property that is being validated. Equally helpful is the fact that in case the property is inv- idated the model checker will return a counterexample, a feature that greatly facilitates fault identi cation. On the downside, the time it takes to obtain a verdict may be very long if the state space is large and the type of properties that can be validated is restricted to a logic of rather limited expressiveness.

Providing a comprehensive introduction to operating systems, this book emphasizes the fundamentals of the key mechanisms of modern operating systems, and the types of design tradeoffs and decisions involved in operating system design. It presents recent developments in operating system design, and uses three running examples of operating systems to illustrate the material--Windows NT, UNIX, and IBM MVS.