This series focuses on population studies carried out by the United Nations, its specialized agencies and other organizations. This issue deals with the guidelines for the projection of fertility. The publication aims to increase understanding of likely fertility trends in the diverse countries of the world.

The twenty-first century will be increasingly urban.

This volume provides the first comprehensive history of the arms racing phenomenon in modern international politics, drawing both on theoretical approaches and on the latest historical research. Written by an international team of specialists, it is divided into four sections: before 1914; the inter-war years; the Cold War; and extra-European and post-Cold War arms races. Twelve case studies examine land and naval armaments before the First World War; air, land, and naval competition during the 1920s and 1930s; and nuclear as well as conventional weapons since 1945. Armaments policies are placed within the context of technological development, international politics and diplomacy, and social politics and economics. An extended general introduction and conclusion and introductions to each section provide coherence between the specialized chapters and draw out wider implications for policymakers and for political scientists. Arms Races in International Politics addresses two key questions: what causes arms races, and what is the connection between arms races and the outbreak of wars?

This book originated from several recent workshops and related activities conducted by the IFIP Working Group 7.6 on "Optimization-Based Computer Aided Modeling and Design." This group has been active for 20 years with the stated objective of developing ”high-performance computer-aided systems to support modeling, decision analysis, optimization and multi-criteria decision making.” Recently, the group has turned its attention to the application of modeling and optimization to service science, management and engineering (SSME). SSME is still a young research field searching for its theoretical underpinnings, and one which offers many opportunities for analytical modeling to not only advance the understanding, but also to help form the foundation of a new discipline. This book is the result of the group's introductory foray into the application of quantitative modeling to the nascent field of service science with special emphasis on the network aspects of services. The 11 papers presented are grouped into sections on Network Science, Comptational and Analytical Modeling, and Knowledge Science. They showcase the value of modeling in a new and timely context and provide many seeds for further exciting research.

The Dutch painter Jan Steen (1626-1679) has long enjoyed a reputation for his dissolute life, redeemed only by a keen eye for the follies of his contemporaries and an exquisite ability to capture his observations in paint. Steen's paintings of unruly households, rambunctious revels, and wily seductresses have come to define our image of the delicious and immoral excesses of the Golden Age. But rather than simply recording the illicit pleasures of Dutch burghers and peasants, Steen transformed them into ambitious genre paintings that rival the peasant epics of Bruegel the Elder and jest with the genteel idylls of Vermeer and Terborch. By placing Steen within Dutch society and culture of the seventeenth century, Mariet Westermann shows how the contradictions and parallels between his life and his art were essential to his innovative achievements. In a detailed analysis of his career and audience, she suggests how Steen became a comic painter and why his pictures appealed to prosperous urban connoisseurs. Documented throughout with seventeenth-century jokes, poems, and plays, The Amusements of Jan Steen gives the first full account of Steen's creative relationship to comic literature and performance.