This immensely readable book by Patrick François provides an original insight into the increasingly fashionable topic that is social capital. In a unique, original study, the author emphasises trustworthiness as a vital feature of social capital and argues that standard economic treatments of this phenomenon are inadequate. The book's richer evolutionary treatment of this is embedded in a neoclassical model and will prove to be essential reading for economic development scholars as well as those interested in development studies and economic thought in general.
Pattern recognition and computer vision and their applications have experienced enormous progress in research and development over the last two decades. This comprehensive handbook, with chapters by leading experts in their fields, documents both the basics and new and advanced results.The book gives the most total treatment of basic methods in pattern recognition including statistical, neurocomputing, syntactic/structural/grammatical approaches, feature selection and cluster analysis; and an extensive presentation of basic methods in computer vision including texture analysis and models, color, geometrical tools, image sequence analysis, etc. Major and unique applications are also covered, such as food handling using computer vision, non-destructive evaluation of materials, applications in economics and business, medical image recognition and understanding, etc. Broader system aspects are also examined, including optical pattern recognition and architectures for computer vision.Researchers, students and users of pattern recognition and computer vision will find the book an essential reference tool. The volume is also an invaluable collection of basic techniques and principles, which would otherwise be hard to assemble, in one convenient volume.
Canadian federalism, as a particular form of political organization for a complex society—with multiple economic, political, geographic, cultural, and national divides—faces important challenges. The political realignment that brought the Conservative Party to power in the last quinquennium has set in motion a significant transformation of the Canadian state and its federal system of governance. The contributors in this collection focus on three recurrent themes: the issues arising from the management of ethno-cultural diversity; the existence of internal nations in Canada (the First Nations and the Quebec nation in Quebec), the presence of linguistic minorities (French and English), and the questions of identity linked to citizenship in a federal context that allows for the presence of multiple loyalties; and the specific challenges raised by globalization and the extension of economic integration, particularly between the United States and Canada. This collection of studies on the role of the state reveals that our understanding of the evolution of the Canadian state, and of the ensuing impact on federalism and federal-provincial relations, is not as complete as it should be.
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