Advance Books

The unity of combinatorics. Combinatorics advances (Tehran, 1994), 129--159, Math. Appl., 329, Kluwer Acad. Publ., Dordrecht, 1995.

This paper is an outstanding exposition on the numerous threads which weave through various areas in combinatorics, underscoring the gradual maturation of the discipline into its rightful place in mainstream mathematics. The twenty-eight examples are important, instructive and interesting. The statements are succinct and often humourous, the diagrams large and clear, and the charts informative and well-structured. Whereas grammarians shudder at sentences ending in prepositions, several here end with the titles of the following sections, and another few begin with such titles. This is one of the techniques the author employs to achieve diversity and unity simultaneously in his presentations. Reviewed by A. C. Liu \{For the entire collection see MR 96f:05001\}.

Series of articles considering the role of comets in the evolution of Earth's biosphere. For example, A. Delsemme writes about The Origin of the Atmosphere and of the Oceans. It is argued that Earth's atmosphere and its oceans, as well as much of the carbon found in its biosphere, was brought to the Earth by comets. Although present-day impacts of comets are modest, in the first billion years, and especially first half billion years, of the Earth's existence, a large bombardment of comets occurred, as reflected by the cratering record observed on the Moon, Mars and Mercury. The cometary delivery of matter would explain the siderophile metals in the Earth's crust, and would explain how an ocean and atmosphere remained despite depletion by large body impacts.

Este libro representa un una muy importante referencia sobre el estado del arte en control por estabilización de las inestabilidades aerodinamicas en turbocompresores, dando gran enfasis a la implementación de una valvula acoplada cercanamente a la descarga del compresor, haciendo que su caracteristica de funcionamiento sea fisicamente modificada y asi extender la zona de operación estable del compresor.

Now a days the earthquake engineering subject is very necessary to Civil engineers. The present book gives more light on analysis using computer which reduces the time saving in calculation. Explaination is very uasefull to all structural engineering peoples.

I don't often review books, but this sleeper needs a good review.
Most of the books on graphics for "Pascal" feature a particular
implementation of Pascal. This is a book that features
non-implementation specific examples. Starting with a simple get
and set pixel routines, the author explains how all the higher
level functions are performed, with real code examples. He then
gives several chapters of real world systems that these principles can be used on.

Formerly I have been using C graphics books and translating the
code to Pascal for use. Other Pascal graphics books are simply
cookbooks for a particular implementation.

Reviewing Confocal and Two-Photon Microscopy: Foundations, Applications, and Advances, a difficult question to answer could be: is this text a "book" or a "manual"? The best answer is probably "both". The advantages of both approaches to the subject are present in the text: it provides a clear, neat overview of the theoretical principles and basic foundations of modern laser-scanning microscopy and a large variety of advanced applications including detailed technical descriptions and practical hints.
This book takes the reader through very complex phenomena and the basic concepts of confocal and two-photon microscopy, fluorescence imaging, digital image processing and image-restoration methods are clearly explained. In addition, application chapters interestingly cover not only the great advantages of the quantitative laser-scanning microscopy in biology but also the practical complexity and the limitations of the technique.
In the end, a remarkable text of "theory and practice" of the most relevant present light microscopy techniques.

This is an amazing collection, as most collections on the science of consciousness are, for the exitement the topic arises.
It is at times a bit too technical, like in E. Jones or Steriade's chapters on thalamic neurobiology. Other chapter are too abstract or "dated" (or is it classical?). But there are also jewels, like the clearest introduction to Edelman and Tononis, Crick and Kotchs, and Jeffrey Grays theories of consicousness. This last chapter was specially interesting, as Grays model of the contents of consicousness was used to study schitzofrenia. Gazzaniga and his interpreter seem more plausible solutions to some major troubles in consicousness theorizing every time I read him. Chapters on language and development are also there and great, as well as one on vision, by no other than H.Hubel, along with T. Weasel, one of the most influential neuroscientists of vision. Philosophical introductions by Patricia Churchland and D. Chalmers and other unmentioned contributions were also quite good.
The cream is however, found on the comment sessions after each paper and the general session at the end of the book. Debates at that level are seldom recorded, and are extremely interesting and though-provoking.
A must-have for serious researchers and thinkers on consciousness.

A complete book that give to the reader the methodology
to model and understand the fuel cell dynamics and control.
The companion software allows deep insight of the modelling and control problem, and the "what-if" analysis.

This book is published 15 years ago. Since then, many articles
has been published. But most of them were carried out through
computer simulation. And there were little physics in them.
So, this book has yet its value as regard physical description
of electron-electron interaction. Especially about its
treatment of randomness of electron position. Very insightfull
book.
Alas I had given my copy to one of my younger colleague when I
retiered from firm, and now regret to depart it.
I am searching out this book to get again.

Curious Emotions by Ralph D. Ellis (John Benjamins Pub Co) Emotion drives all cognitive processes, largely determining their qualitative feel, their structure, and in part even their content. Action-initiating centers deep in the emotional brain ground our understanding of the world by enabling us to imagine how we could act relative to it, based on endogenous motivations to engage certain levels of energy and complexity. Thus understanding personality, cognition, consciousness and action requires examining the workings of dynamical systems applied to emotional processes in living organisms. If an object's meaning depends on its action affordances, then understanding intentionality in emotion or cognition requires exploring why emotion is the bridge between action and representational processes such as thought or imagery; and this requires integrating phenomenology with neurophysiology. The resulting viewpoint, "enactivism," entails specific new predictions, and suggests that emotions are about the self-initiated actions of dynamical systems, not reactive "responses" to external events; consciousness is more about motivated anticipation than reaction to inputs.
"This is an important book, a major contribution to the embodiment/self-organization paradigm in psychology/psychiatry. Ellis follows in the tradition of a set of culturally diverse thinkers ranging from Merleau-Ponty to the original Gestalt theorists to humanist psychologists such as Maslow, Rogers, and Gendlin. This work will become an inspiration for transforming many of the prevalent diminutive social policies which are based implicitly on a restricted concept of human identity. -Raymond Russ, Editor, journal of Mind and Behavior
"The key to this book is the notion of the self-organizing system, already under serious development in biology, the cognitive and affective neurosciences, psychiatry, and psychology. Ellis juxtaposes experimental results from all these sciences alongside the deepest existential and humanist concerns, thereby reconciling reductionist and non-reductionist research. Recommended for scientists, philosophers, clinicians, and anyone else with interdisciplinary interests in the emotions, cognition, consciousness, and the ways that nature has interwoven them." -John Bickle, Professor of Neuroscience and Philosophy, University of Cincinnati
Excerpt: The main purpose of this book has been to sketch out an enactive account of the emotions that makes room for the "higher" and even the "existential" human emotions, and is not derivative by its very nature from a short list of consummatory-reduction needs. In fact, I have argued that higher emotions are just as likely to be unconditioned and hardwired as are the consummatory-reductive ones. The reason is that conscious beings must be self-organizational dynamical systems, geared toward maintaining certain levels of energy and complexity as well as toward homeostasis and boundary protection. This the?ory enables us to make a meaningful distinction between self-motivated ac?tion and mere reaction. A self-organizing system is one that actively appro?priates and replaces the substratum components needed to keep the pattern going, rather than being the passive causal outcome of the interactions of the components. Of course, this is just what living organisms do (Monod 1971; Kauffman 1993).
If a dynamical systems account resolves the mental causation problem, it can also resolve the most intractable aspect of the mind-body problem, the "hard problem" (Chalmers 1995). Chalmers argues that if we can show that certain physico-chemical antecedents cause the raising of my hand, and that they operate according to the same physical and chemical principles as in non-conscious parts of nature, then giving a complete physical explanation of all such brain events would still leave out of account anything that would explain why there is consciousness. Dynamical systems theory can answer Chalmers' ob?jections to physicalism by showing why only certain types of physical systems -complex dynamical ones that include emotional motivations (which of course can sometimes be unconscious) - can have consciousness. And this view seems consistent with a concept of the self as simultaneously available to reflection within any given state, and providing causal power and directionality within the state.
To be an actor rather than a mere reactor means to be a system that read?justs its own parts in order to maintain and enhance the continuity of the functioning of the whole, i.e., to be a higher order pattern. Parts of systems can re-act, but if the system as a whole is a self-maintaining Gestalt (what Merleau-Ponty 1942, calls a "psychophysical form"), then it can act rather than just react. Of course, to "act" just means to behave in a way that is determined by the tendency of the whole to readjust its parts rather than to be pushed in partes extra parts fashion. Thus consider even a fairly complex mechanical system, i.e., one in which everything that happens to any given part can be described ex?haustively in terms of some specific other part's effect on it, without reference to a tendency of the whole to maintain its overall pattern: Such a mechanical system still cannot "act." The tendency toward self-organization is the form of inertia that counteracts the inertia that describes objects' tendency to seek a lower energy level or conserve energy; we might call it an inertia of "action" -a tendency for patterns to maintain themselves by appropriating and replacing the needed substratum elements to facilitate the continuation of the pattern.
How can there be such an "inertia of action"? Do all physical things not conform to laws describable in terms of conservation of energy? The inertia of action stems from the fact that patterns in nature show a greater or lesser tendency to maintain themselves over changes in their parts, and such systems control the background conditions under which this or that causal sequence can take place. When we have this kind of inertia on the part of a complex pattern, we say that we have "purposiveness" in nature, even where there is no consciousness involved - e.g., when the organism regulates its heartbeat and blood pressure. There is no violation of the principles of chemistry or physics in such systems. At the level of the substratum for the process, each event has sufficient causal antecedents within the substratum level. What makes self-maintaining and self-organizing systems (of which "living" organisms are examples) different from merely mechanical ones is that the self-maintaining system is organized in such a way that it controls some of the needed back?ground conditions for certain mechanical-causal relations within the system, as when cells are transplanted from the embryo of one species and are appro?priated by a completely different brain area of a completely different species, or as in stroke recovery. Systems that "act" in this sense can show purposive?ness to the extent that they can maintain their organizational continuity over disruptions of their parts.
The enactive approach suggests that not just affective states, but in fact all conscious states are driven by emotion and motivation, because our interest in looking for potentially valenced environmental conditions is a precondition for attention and perception as well as thought. I sketched a theory of the way this priority of the efferent over the afferent takes place in the neurophysiol?ogy and phenomenology of conscious processes. The notion that we must first "respond" to a stimulus, in order to direct our attention toward it, before we can even see the stimulus is paradoxical only if we assume that the parietal lobe can be activated only as a result of prior occipital activity, which in turn results from prior optic stimulation originating from the environment. But I have reviewed evidence that this is not the case. Instead, what happens is that the parietal lobe is activated by frontal, limbic, and subcortical processes as a result of emotional-motivational activity triggered by thalamic arousal by the stimulus (which in turn arouses the amygdala much more quickly than per?ceptual processing can occur) only if the stimulus is generally felt as possibly emotionally important for the organism's purposes (LeDoux 1996; Luria 1980; Posner 1990; Posner & Rothbart 2000; Damasio 1994). The needs of the or?ganism as a whole must first motivate the process of "looking for" the kinds of environmental stimuli that might be important for the organism's purposes, with the "kinds" categorized prior to perceptual processing in terms of rough and ready potential action affordances.
At this point (and prior to the completion of occipital processing), the frontal lobe becomes active in a number of ways, including the inhibition of these first rough-and-ready action commands, resulting in preconscious action imagery (Jeannerod 1997). Jeannerod's work shows that subjects form vivid mental imagery of the actions they intend to perform only when the action commands are inhibited by frontal activity. As the preconscious, sensorimotor sensing of these action affordances develops more and more precisely, with the help of the inhibitory role of the frontal lobe and also the increasingly refined thalamocortical loops, the parietal lobe then begins to entertain vague senso?rimotor images, or pragmatic concepts, of the kinds of emotionally important objects that might be present in the environment. If and when this frontal?limbic-parietal activity, once having been developed, finds itself resonating with patterns of activity in the occipital lobe (which reflects sensory stimulation) only then does perceptual consciousness of a visual image occur (Ellis 1995).