Modeling

Full of tips and suggestions on how to make the world's most used browser work to your advantage.

The chapter on e-mail is extremely well written. If you are new to it, you'll become an expert; if you are an expert, you'll polish up your skills

Full of humor and very entertaining. A must.

The Oxford Guide to Financial Modeling by Thomas S.Y. Ho and Sang Bin Lee (yes, the authors of the Ho-Lee model, the first arbitrage-free interest rate model) successfully ties the thought processes and applications of the financial models together and describes them as one process which provides business solutions. The authors very ably explain all the models used in finance, take the financial theory and modeling to the next level and develop a business model framework that integrate the fields of corporate finance, fixed income, derivatives, and Asset & Liability management.

Each chapter begins by introducing a practical problem. The financial models that provide solutions to the problem are then described. The chapter concludes with how the models can be applied. Because of the nature of the material on financial models, the book presents many results as mathematical formulations, yet the text is very enjoyable as the more rigorous mathematical derivations are deferred to the appendices and to the epilogue.

What really makes The Oxford Guide to Financial Modeling a brilliant educational project and just not another excellent textbook is the companion web site that serves as an interactive workbook designed specifically for the book. The site is designed to further enhance understanding of the use and applications of the models referred to in the book and it is accessible free of charge.

The authors of this book are also the creator of Ho-Lee model. Therefore it is not surprising to find extremely detailed explanations on virtually all the interest rate and bond models. If your career aspirations is to become a bond trader or a quant in general, this book is a must read!

Also, don't forget to check out this book's website. It contains all the models discussed in the book. Everything is already coded in excel and vb, and ready to use. Best of all, it is FREE!

Ogunnaike and Ray covers subjects such as root locus methods, tunings using frequency methods, and digital control.

Dr. Ogunnaike is also an excellent lecturer, so if you would like to take the course directly from him enroll at the University of Delaware - its well worth it.

I also recommend Essentials of Process Control by William Luyben to provide a good qualitative background in process control.

The book begins by considering the development of dynamic process models. It covers practical questions such as which state variable (eg. height) should be controlled by which manipulated variable (eg. flowrate) by discussing the physical behaviour of the system, rather than the approach commonly used by control engineers of an electronics background.

The advantage of the book is that it then goes on to discuss tools such as Nyquist diagrams and Bode plots, and how they can be used to characterise a system's behaviour, in a simple and clear manner. It then addresses essential issues such as controller tuning.

Finally, the book briefly introduces advanced control topics, such as Kalman filters and Model based control, in simple terms which would give an interested reader a running start into these fields.

My only regret is that I have lost my personal copy!

The author has also developed a weeklong radar modeling course based on the book material that nicely complements the exposition in the text. I highly recommend the course, as it offers a unique opportunity to exchange ideas with a man whose experience & insight run deep.

I would particularly recommend the book as a follow-up to Toomay's "Radar Principles for the Non-Specialist" for the reader who has developed a qualitative understanding of basic radar concepts and wants to perform quantitative, concrete analysis.

Ian Ashdown, P. Eng., LC byHeart Consultants Limited 620 Ballantree Road West Vancouver, BC Canada V7S 1W3 e-mail: byheart@acm.org

Lighting Design + Application contact:

Mark Newman, Editor Lighting Design + Application Illuminating Engineering Society of North America 120 Wall Street, 17th Floor New York, NY 10005 Tel: (212) 248-5000

Rendering with Radiance Greg Ward Larson and Rob Shakespeare ISBN 1-55860-499-5, Hard Cover 664 pages; 1998; Morgan Kaufmann Publishers

Many LD+A readers know Radiance as a lighting design and analysis program that was developed by Greg Ward (Larson) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Those who have investigated Radiance know that it is freely available, but usable only if you have a UNIX workstation and the patience to master more than 50 software tools. In ten years, it has attracted a coterie of fewer than 400 dedicated users.

Rendering with Radiance will undoubtedly change this. Originally conceived as a UNIX-style technical manual, the book is much more. It offers several tutorials, numerous application examples, and detailed discussions of the program's underlying mathematical algorithms. The accompanying CD-ROM includes example images, Radiance models and material libraries, reference manuals, and fully commented C source code for Radiance 3.1.

Despite first impressions, this book is not about computer graphics. The Radiance Lighting Simulation and Rendering System was created for advanced lighting designers and academic researchers, and more than half of the book is devoted to applying Radiance to real-world lighting problems. Ward Larson, Shakespeare and three contributing experts discuss luminaire modeling and lighting analysis, daylight simulation, animation, roadway lighting, theatre lighting, and exterior lighting. Even if you have committed yourself to using architectural visualization programs such as Lightscape and RadioRay, you will find an abundance of useful information in this book.

Radiance is the only software program that faithfully models the physical behavior of light, especially specular and semispecular reflections. It has a steep learning curve, but the quality of the architectural renderings it produces is unequalled by any commercial product. With Rendering with Radiance, we now have a user's manual that fully complements the capabilities of its namesake.

This truly is a remarkable book. Unlike most computer graphics texts, it presents lengthy discussions of IES photometric data files, luminance meters and spectrophotometers, the CIE overcast sky model, roadway light metrics, veiling luminance, spectral transmission data, and much more. The major algorithms used by Radiance are fully documented, including discussions of their limitations. There is more information in this book on lighting software use and design than can be found in all other books combined.

The major disadvantage of Radiance is that it was developed for UNIX workstations. In the past, this restricted the use of the program (really a set of UNIX tools) mostly to academic researchers. However, the freely-available and popular UNIX clone Linux now allows Radiance to be run with few difficulties on Windows and Macintosh computers.

First, unlike other books that teach spreadsheet modeling, the spreadsheets that come on the CD ROM are not finished products. Instead the author has chosen spreadsheets that use dynamic charts to illustrate concepts in an interactive manner (drag a control to change the parameters and the chart changes - this is a powerful teaching tool in or out of the classroom).

Second, the book needs to be read in sequence because spreadsheets you build in one chapter are the basis for refinements and added complexity in later chapters. This leads to highly complex spreadsheets, such as the model in chapter 16 (Life-Cycle Financial Planning), which incorporates tax parameters (federal and state levels), benefits analysis and other factors.

In all there are 53 spreadsheets presented in this book, and you build them. The author calls this "active learning" (as opposed to passive learning where you are provided templates), and it is effective because you are the one who builds the models and tools while following the book. Note that this book does NOT purport to teach Excel programming, but how to build models using Excel's basic features and functions.

As a consultant and project manager the parts of this book that were immediately useful to me were: Parts I (Time Value of Money), III (Capital Budgeting) and IV (Financial Planning). In particular, project management requires a thorough understanding of time value of money and capital budgeting, and the chapters in these sections should be read by anyone who is assigned as a project manager. Financial planning, especially from the perspective of IT asset management, is another knowledge area in which IT consultants should be well versed.

The other parts of the book (II Valuation and V Options and Corporate Finance) will be more useful to finance professionals and general business managers. There is a collection of supporting material on the author's web site that augment this book, including spreadsheets that can be downloaded. Another plus for the working professional is the book is fast-paced and, dare I say, engrossing.

It does require certain math background to read this book. But the book gives reader quite deep insight of how apply wavelets to statistics.