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This book provides the first clear, comprehensive, and accessible account of complex adaptive social systems, by two of the field's leading authorities. Such systems--whether political parties, stock markets, or ant colonies--present some of the most intriguing theoretical and practical challenges confronting the social sciences. Engagingly written, and balancing technical detail with intuitive explanations,Complex Adaptive Systemsfocuses on the key tools and ideas that have emerged in the field since the mid-1990s, as well as the techniques needed to investigate such systems. It provides a detailed introduction to concepts such as emergence, self-organized criticality, automata, networks, diversity, adaptation, and feedback. It also demonstrates how complex adaptive systems can be explored using methods ranging from mathematics to computational models of adaptive agents. John Miller and Scott Page show how to combine ideas from economics, political science, biology, physics, and computer science to illuminate topics in organization, adaptation, decentralization, and robustness. They also demonstrate how the usual extremes used in modeling can be fruitfully transcended.

Background: The Gyr breed is widely used in Colombian low tropic dairy production systems. During the last 10 years, the Asociación Colombiana de Criadores de Ganado Cebú† - ASOCEBU, has been leading a dairy milk control program which led to the creation of a dataset that permits to carry out the first analysis of milk yield in Gyr cattle in the country using records from several herds. Objectives: To study milk production dynamics of Gyr cattle in the Colombian low tropic through the estimation of lactation curves and four derived production parameters: total milk yield between 5 and 305 days (TMY305), peak milk yield (PMY), days at peak (DP) and persistency (P). Methods: 13,798 daily milk yield records from 1,510 cows performing in 103 herds were used; the total number of lactations was 2,480. Four models were considered: Wood, Wiltmink, Papajcsik & Bordero, and a second-degree polynomial. Mean square error, mean absolute error, mean square error of prediction, Akaike and Bayesian information criteria were used to select the model better describing each lactation using the majority rule, that is, the model selected by most criteria was the chosen one. The shape of each fitted lactation curve was checked using basic results from calculus which permitted the classification of the estimated curves into two groups: typical and atypical; only typical functions were used to compute the four aforementioned production parameters. Results: The second-order polynomial was the model most frequently selected, while the Papajcsik & Bordero model had the lowest frequency. Average TMY305, PMY, DP and P were 3,489.86 kg, 17.28 kg, 57.17 days, and 0.83, respectively, with coefficients of variation: 0.27, 0.21, 0.41, and 0.16. Conclusions: This study permitted to identify individuals with outstanding phenotypic performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of this kind involving thousands of lactations from Gyr cows performing in several regions of Colombian low tropic.

The field of multiphase flows has grown by leaps and bounds in the last thirty years and is now regarded as a major discipline. Engineering applications, products and processes with particles, bubbles and drops have consistently grown in number and importance. An increasing number of conferences, scientific fora and archived journals are dedicated to the dissemination of information on flow, heat and mass transfer of fluids with particles, bubbles and drops. Numerical computations and “thought experiments” have supplemented most physical experiments and a great deal of the product design and testing processes. The literature on computational fluid dynamics with particles, bubbles and drops has grown at an exponential rate, giving rise to new results, theories and better understanding of the transport processes with particles, bubbles and drops. This book captures and summarizes all these advances in a unified, succinct and pedagogical way.

Students and professionals intending to work in any area of finance must master not only advanced concepts and mathematical models but also learn how to implement these models computationally. This comprehensive text, first published in 2002, combines the theory and mathematics behind financial engineering with an emphasis on computation, in keeping with the way financial engineering is practised in capital markets. Unlike most books on investments, financial engineering, or derivative securities, the book starts from very basic ideas in finance and gradually builds up the theory. It offers a thorough grounding in the subject for MBAs in finance, students of engineering and sciences who are pursuing a career in finance, researchers in computational finance, system analysts, and financial engineers. Along with the theory, the author presents numerous algorithms for pricing, risk management, and portfolio management. The emphasis is on pricing financial and derivative securities: bonds, options, futures, forwards, interest rate derivatives, mortgage-backed securities, bonds with embedded options, and more.

Do the movements of animals, including humans, follow patterns that can be described quantitatively by simple laws of motion? If so, then why? These questions have attracted the attention of scientists in many disciplines, and stimulated debates ranging from ecological matters to queries such as 'how can there be free will if one follows a law of motion?' This is the first book on this rapidly evolving subject, introducing random searches and foraging in a way that can be understood by readers without a previous background on the subject. It reviews theory as well as experiment, addresses open problems and perspectives, and discusses applications ranging from the colonization of Madagascar by Austronesians to the diffusion of genetically modified crops. The book will interest physicists working in the field of anomalous diffusion and movement ecology as well as ecologists already familiar with the concepts and methods of statistical physics.

Time series econometrics is a rapidly evolving field. Particularly, the cointegration revolution has had a substantial impact on applied analysis. Hence, no textbook has managed to cover the full range of methods in current use and explain how to proceed in applied domains. This gap in the literature motivates the present volume. The methods are sketched out, reminding the reader of the ideas underlying them and giving sufficient background for empirical work. The treatment can also be used as a textbook for a course on applied time series econometrics. Topics include: unit root and cointegration analysis, structural vector autoregressions, conditional heteroskedasticity and nonlinear and nonparametric time series models. Crucial to empirical work is the software that is available for analysis. New methodology is typically only gradually incorporated into existing software packages. Therefore a flexible Java interface has been created, allowing readers to replicate the applications and conduct their own analyses.

This book provides a comprehensive and systematic approach to understanding GARCH time series models and their applications whilst presenting the most advanced results concerning the theory and practical aspects of GARCH. The probability structure of standard GARCH models is studied in detail as well as statistical inference such as identification, estimation and tests. The book also provides coverage of several extensions such as asymmetric and multivariate models and looks at financial applications. Key features: Provides up-to-date coverage of the current research in the probability, statistics and econometric theory of GARCH models. Numerous illustrations and applications to real financial series are provided. Supporting website featuring R codes, Fortran programs and data sets. Presents a large collection of problems and exercises. This authoritative, state-of-the-art reference is ideal for graduate students, researchers and practitioners in business and finance seeking to broaden their skills of understanding of econometric time series models.

Auction Theory is the standard reference on auctions and the first source of authoritative information about multi-unit auctions.The book develops the main concepts of auction theory from scratch in a self-contained and theoretically rigorous manner.