This edition of the Annual Review of Gerontology and Geriatrics brings together, in one convenient volume, the results of many of the studies supported by the Hartford Foundation. The first two chapters of this volume set the stage for the specific research reports that follow. In the first chapter, Burke, Jolson, Goetsch, and Ahronheim review current information on medication use and the adverse drug events in the elderly from two natioanl data bases: The National Disease and Therapeutic Index and the Food and Drug Administration's Spontaneous Reporting System. The second chapters present the recent work of Beers in development of explicit criteria defining inappropriate medication use in the elderly.

The second edition (1997) of this text was a completely rewritten version of the original text Basic Coastal Engineering published in 1978. This third edition makes several corrections, improvements and additions to the second edition. Basic Coastal Engineering is an introductory text on wave mechanics and coastal processes along with fundamentals that underline the practice of coastal engineering. This book was written for a senior or first postgraduate course in coastal engineering. It is also suitable for self study by anyone having a basic engineering or physical science background. The level of coverage does not require a math or fluid mechanics background beyond that presented in a typical undergraduate civil or mechanical engineering curriculum. The material p- sented in this text is based on the author’s lecture notes from a one-semester course at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Texas A&M University, and George Washington University, and a senior elective course at Lehigh University. The text contains examples to demonstrate the various analysis techniques that are presented and each chapter (except the first and last) has a collection of problems for the reader to solve that further demonstrate and expand upon the text material. Chapter 1 briefly describes the coastal environment and introduces the re- tively new field of coastal engineering. Chapter 2 describes the two-dimensional characteristics of surface waves and presents the small-amplitude wave theory to support this description.