Contains alphabetically arranged entries that describe the physical geography of 207 countries or dependencies, each with a relief map, a collection of key facts, an overview of geography and geology, discussion of specific geographic features, a look at human population, and a list of further readings.

Lists citations with abstracts for aerospace related reports obtained from world wide sources and announces documents that have recently been entered into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information Database.

This report provides an assessment of spatial inequalities and segregation in cities and metropolitan areas from multiple perspectives. The chapters in the report focus on a subset of OECD countries and non-member economies, and provide new insights on cross-cutting issues for city neighbourhooods.

Car Safety Wars is a gripping history of the hundred-year struggle to improve the safety of American automobiles and save lives on the highways. Described as the “equivalent of war” by the Supreme Court, the battle involved the automobile industry, unsung and long-forgotten safety heroes, at least six US Presidents, a reluctant Congress, new auto technologies, and, most of all, the mindset of the American public: would they demand and be willing to pay for safer cars? The “Car Safety Wars” were at first won by consumers and safety advocates. The major victory was the enactment in 1966 of a ground breaking federal safety law. The safety act was pushed through Congress over the bitter objections of car manufacturers by a major scandal involving General Motors, its private detectives, Ralph Nader, and a gutty cigar-chomping old politician. The act is a success story for government safety regulation. It has cut highway death and injury rates by over seventy percent in the years since its enactment, saving more than two million lives and billions of taxpayer dollars. But the car safety wars have never ended. GM has recently been charged with covering up deadly defects resulting in multiple ignition switch shut offs. Toyota has been fined for not reporting fatal unintended acceleration in many models. Honda and other companies have—for years—sold cars incorporating defective air bags. These current events, suggesting a failure of safety regulation, may serve to warn us that safety laws and agencies created with good intentions can be corrupted and strangled over time. This book suggests ways to avoid this result, but shows that safer cars and highways are a hard road to travel. We are only part of the way home.

Important practical implications are established by case reports and specific examples. The present book is the ideal complement to the practitioner’s manual Techniques in Molecular Systematics and Evolution, recently published by the same editors in the Birkhäuser MTBM book series. The first part of this book deals with important applications of evolutionary and systematic analysis at different taxonomic levels. The second part discusses DNA multiple sequence alignment, species designations using molecular data, evo-devo and other topics that are problematic or controversial. In the last part, novel topics in molecular evolution and systematics, like genomics, comparative methods in molecular evolution and the use of large data bases are described. The final chapter deals with problems in bacterial evolution, considering the increasing access to large numbers of complete genome sequences.