This book focuses on the observability of hybrid systems. It enables the reader to determine whether and how a hybrid system’s state can be reconstructed from sometimes necessarily partial information. By explaining how available measurements can be used to deduce past and future behaviours of a system, the authors extend this study of observability to embrace the properties of diagnosability and predictability. H-systems shows how continuous and discrete dynamics and their interaction affect the observability of this general class of hybrid systems and demonstrates that hybrid characteristics are not simply generalizations of well-known aspects of traditional dynamics. The authors identify conditions for state reconstruction, prediction and diagnosis of the occurrence of possibly faulty states. The formal approach to proving those properties for hybrid systems is accompanied by simple illustrative examples. For readers who are interested in the use of state estimation for controller design, the book also provides design methods for hybrid state observers and covers their application in some industrial cases. The book’s tutorial approach to the various forms of observability of hybrid systems helps to make H-systems of interest to academic researchers and graduate students working in control and to practitioners using control in an industrial environment.

I think it is expedient here to clearly specify the readership for whom this book is intended. Some readers might infer from the title that this is a data book convenient for occasional reference purposes. Most of the data on the bulk properties and a comprehensive list of publications are indeed compiled here, will be found useful as they are. The primary purpose of the book is, however, and rather to provide a coherent and consistent description of the basic bulk properties of the metal-hydrogen system, ranging from macroscopic properties such as solubilities and phase diagrams to microscopic properties such as atomistic states and diffusion. The emphasis has been placed on the physics of how these properties actually come about. This structure of the book is considered to be useful, and even necessary, not only for physicists but also for researchers interested in the materials-science aspects of the system. Who could have anticipated that the solubility of hydrogen in iron reaches a level as high as [H]/[Fe] ~ 1 under a hydrogen pressure of 10 GPa; who could have anticip ated that the diffusivity of hydrogen in metals increases at low temperatures; who could unravel the mechanism of "cold" fusion (if this indeed exists), without a basic understanding of the metal-hydrogen system? Obviously, these prob lems are not only of academic interest but also have profound technical implications.

"..., the 11th International Meeting on DNA Computing was held June 6–9, 2005 at the University ofWestern Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada.

This is the first book on DNA computing, a molecular approach that may revolutionize computing-replacing silicon with carbon and microchips with DNA molecules. The book starts with an introduction to DNA computing, exploring the power of complementarity, the basics of biochemistry, and language and computation theory. It then brings the reader to the most advanced theories develop thus far in this emerging research area.

Professor Pandit, working among the admirable group of philosophers at the University of Delhi, has written a fundamental criticism and a constructive re-interpretation of all that has been preserved as serious epistemological and methodological reflections on the sciences in modern Western philosoph- from the times of Galileo, Newton, Descartes and Leibniz to those of Russell and Wittgenstein, Carnap and Popper, and, we need hardly add, onward to the troubling relativisms and reconstructions of historical epistemologies in the works of Hanson, Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend. His themes are intrigu ing, set forth as they are with masterly case studies of physics and the life sciences, and within an original conceptual framework for philosophical analysis of the processes, functions, and structures of scientific knowing. Pandit's contributions deserve thoughtful examination. For our part, we wish to point to some among them: (1) an interactive articulation of subjective and objective factors of both problems and theories in the course of scientific development; (2) a striking contrast between the explanatory power of a scientific theory and its 'resolving power', i. e.

Surprisingly, modified versions of the confirmation theory (Carnap and Hempel) and truth approximation theory (Popper) turn out to be smoothly sythesizable. The glue between the two appears to be the instrumentalist methodology, rather than that of the falsificationalist. The instrumentalist methodology, used in the separate, comparative evaluation of theories in terms of their successes and problems (hence, even if already falsified), provides in theory and practice the straight road to short-term empirical progress in science ( à la Laudan). It is also argued that such progress is also functional for all kinds of truth approximation: observational, referential, and theoretical. This sheds new light on the long-term dynamics of science and hence on the relation between the main epistemological positions, viz., instrumentalism (Toulmin, Laudan), constructive empiricism (Van Fraassen), referential realism (Hacking, Cartwright), and theory realism of a non-essentialist nature (constructive realism à la Popper). Readership: Open minded philosophers and scientists. The book explains and justifies the scientist's intuition that the debate among philosophers about instrumentalism and realism has almost no practical consequences.