Books by National Research Council

Advances in guidance and control, communications, sensors, and other technologies for undersea vehicles provide an opportunity to understand the oceans' influence on the energy and chemical balance. This book provides guidance about vehicle subsystem development priorities, and describes how national research can be focused effectively.

The United States faces the challenge of maintaining the vitality of its system for supporting science and technology despite fiscal stringency. This book provides 13 recommendations that propose a budgeting process and formulates a series of questions to address during that process.

Describes the Conference on Fire and Smoke-Resistant Materials. This work identifies trends in aircraft fire safety and research directions for the FAA program. It contains 15 papers and summaries of the workshop sessions concerning toxicity issues, fire performance parameters, drivers for materials development, and materials technology.

Surveys three wide bandgap materials (silicon carbide, nitrides, and diamond), assesses the national and international efforts to develop these materials, identifies the technical barriers to development and manufacture, determines the criteria for packaging and integrating these devices into existing systems, and recommends research priorities.

Describes the Live Fire Test law that mandates realistic survivability and lethality testing of covered systems or programs. This book discusses the origin of testing requirements, evaluates the practicality, affordability, and cost-benefit of live fire tests, and examines the role of testing, modeling, and data bases in vulnerability assessment.

Aiming to offer a coherent vision of what it means to be scientifically literate, this book describes what all students should understand and be able to do at different grade levels in various science categories. It is useful for education policymakers, school system administrators, teacher educators, individual teachers, and parents.

Offers guidelines for planning and implementing an inquiry-based science program in various school districts. This book presents a rationale for inquiry-based science and describes how teaching through inquiry supports the way children naturally learn. It offers basic guidelines for planning a program.

Reviews the legislative history of the land grant system from its establishment in 1862 to the 1994 act conferring land grant status on Native American colleges. This book describes trends that have shaped agriculture - the shift of labour from farm to factory, reasons for and effects of increased productivity and specialization, and more.

Maintaining the United States' lead in information technology requires federal support of research in this area, most of which is funded under the High Performance Computing and Communications Initiative (HPCCI). This book provides 13 major recommendations for refining both HPCCI and support of information technology research in general.

Addresses the technical, health, regulatory, and social aspects of ground water withdrawals, water use, and water quality in the metropolitan area of Mexico City, and makes recommendations to improve the balance of water supply, water demand, and water conservation. This book also contains a Spanish-language translation of the English text.

Reviews the structural design process and determines the elements, and capabilities required for a materials selection expert system to assist design engineers. This book also recommends the areas of expert system and materials modeling research and development required to devise a materials-specific design system.

Examines the state of the art in airborne geophysics as integrated with precise global positioning systems. This book outlines the scientific goals of focused effort in airborne geophysics, including advances in our understanding of solid earth processes, global climate change, the environment, and resources.

Examines the traditional US census. This book evaluates several radical proposals that have been made for changing the census, as well as other proposals for redesigning the year 2000 census. It also considers in the much-criticized long form, the role of race and ethnic data, and the need for and ways to obtain small-area data between censuses.

Explores what earth scientists are learning about the impact of large-scale environmental changes on ancient life - and how these findings may help us resolve several environmental controversies. This book is of interest to professionals in the earth sciences and the environmental community, as well as concerned policymakers.

Public concern about releases of radiation into the environment has focused attention on the measurement of exposure of people living near nuclear weapons production facilities or in areas affected by accidental releases of radiation. This book provides an overview of the basic requirements and technical aspects of dose reconstruction.

Develops a framework for guiding attempts at measuring the performance of infrastructure systems and grapples with the concept of defining good performance. This book focuses on urban regions, within a context of national policy. It also provides the basis for analysis and application at the local, regional, state, and national levels.

Explores the research interface between computational chemistry and the mathematical sciences. Useful for non-specialists, this book documents some prominent examples of successful cross-fertilizations between the fields and explores the mathematical research opportunities in a cross-section of chemical research frontiers.

Evaluates data related to the risk associated with human exposure to radon and radon progeny.

Highlights what we can learn from Internet and how the research, education, and library communities can take full advantage of the information highway's promised reach through time and space. This book includes a discussion of costs, pricing, and federal funding for network development.

Reviews research on the Loma Prieta quake and draws from it's practical lessons that can be applied to other earthquake-prone areas of the country. This work contains papers presented at a symposium on the earthquake and includes an overview written by the committee offering recommendations to improve seismic safety and earthquake awareness.

Animal scientists have learned that administering recombinantly derived somatotropin to cows improves milk production and that giving beta-adrenergic agonists to meat animals improves productivity. This text reports on how these substances work in animals' metabolism, and what effects they might have on nutrient requirements of domestic livestock.

Addresses issues in learning and performance. This book presents theories and findings from a range of research settings: from pilots learning to fly to children learning about physics by throwing beanbags. It also explores common folklore and identifies promising research directions. It evaluates the effects of subjective experience on learning.

Focuses on native cereals in Africa, including African rice, finger millet, fonio, pearl millet, sorghum, tef, and other cultivated and wild grains. This book dispels myths, often based on Western bias, about the nutritional value, flavor, and yield of these African grains.

Provides highlights of the main volume in the context of implications for educational policy.

Examines how to translate workers' productivity increases into gains for the organization, and discusses why huge investments in automation and other innovations have failed to boost productivity. This book examines problems in productivity measurement and presents solutions.

Offers four strategies that serve as the basis for a national policy to protect soil and water quality, while maintaining US agricultural productivity and competitiveness. This volume is of interest to federal, state, and local policymakers; environmental and agricultural officials; scientists involved in soil and water issues; and more.

Offers explanations of: the processes involved in in situ bioremediation, circumstances in which it is best used, and methods of measurement, field testing, and modeling to evaluate the results of bioremediation projects. This book is useful to policymakers, regulators, bioremediation practitioners and purchasers, environmental groups, and more.

Evaluates the safety, oversight, and management functions that are implemented in the Space Shuttle program to ensure that the software is of the highest quality possible. This work makes numerous recommendations regarding safety and management procedures and offers a rationale for continuing the Independent Verification and Validation effort.

Based on workshops held in Benin, Ethiopia, and Namibia to better understand the dynamics of contemporary democratic movements in Africa. Key issues in the democratization process range from its institutional and political requirements to specific problems, such as ethnic conflict, corruption, and role of donors in promoting democracy.