Applied Languages Books

I live, study and work in the New York Tri-State region and this book is pretty great because the author also lived, worked and studied in the same region. Whats good about that? The Human Development and Expliotation is our region is very diverse and often connects directly with other prominent regions around the globe. The author basically covers alot of legalities, origins, design principles, and field work analysis really well.
This was one of the easier to read text in my classes, not because it is written in laymans terms, but he writes the ideas in a clear concise manner and covers alot of material with great efficiency using (the best I've seen in any enviro-engineering text) superb diaghrams, pictures and charts.
As a whole I felt the text demystifies alot of what this field is about so I usually recommend it to other non-environmental engineers, planners and designers that I come across in my school and work.

The book is expensive but I felt it was one of those few (if any) books you'll ever buy in college that is worth every penny.

This one is a keeper!

GREAT!!!!!

This text is one of the most definitive AND USEFUL shelf references for the environmental health sciences. Detailed, accurate, wide-ranging on topics of immediate interest to the practicing sanitarian, engineer or the very interested non-practitioner. Support from the publisher has been poor. For two years after the announcement of the current addendum, the publisher "disavowed knowledge" of an addendum. When published, the addendum had the same ISBN number as the complete text -- creating the unture appearance of a "reduced" price complete addition. Salvato, could for the price of this text, be on a more current update of information contained in some chapters (2-3 year cycle). The scope of this work would justify numerous consulting authors. While it is one of the best shelf references and "learning texts" it could still be improved and be better supported by a publisher that sometimes seems to have insulated itself from the buying public.

I have just reviewed the ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING AND SANITATION 1994 SUPPLEMENT, by Joseph A. Salvato and Joe E. Beck. It's a great resource for professionals seeking a broader vision of environmental health practice areas and where we are heading. Prof. Beck obviously put a lot of work into conceptualizing this volume and working with the distinguished contributors. It shows. In particular, I found the first chapter, Stakeholder Focused Interactive Planning (SFIP)by Joe Beck and Steven Ison to be a brilliant piece on the desirability of (indeed, the imperative for our profession to) include the public in problem-solving and planning. I have used this process and mediated disputes ranging from siting controversies (haz. waste facility siting in Massachusetts) to determining future land use options at Hanford in the nuclear weapons complex. I commend both Beck and Ison for their clear portrayal of the paradigm as well as the steps one undertakes in conducting such planning. Federal government engineers and planners have been learning the hard way about what happens when decisions are made without public input and without regard to the values, interests, and expectations of so-called stakeholders. At Hanford, more than $20 billion in appropriations has yielded preciously little in terms of actual cleanup: one may wonder if Congress will continue to appropriate the substantial $6 billion a year for the Dept. of Energy's Environmental Management Program without consensus of the public on #1) the benefits or #2) the ameliorated risks from present expenditures. Current stakeholders come from a wide range of public interest groups and they do not get along particularly well. They do not have current programs or projects that reflect the use of the SFIP and researchers should be asking themselves, "Why not?" (Resources for the Future [RFF] has an on-going research project that tackles public participation in environmental decision making).

I would also like to comment on Ch. 6 "The Institutional Environment: Biosafety" by Darly Rowe. The importance of Dr. Rowe's conclusion that we must rely on consultation and working with the client on biosafety issues cannot be overstated. I also like the typology which places biosafety issues in proper perspective. We seem to be deluged with risks and risk information, and his approach is clear, concise and elegant. In sum, I believe that environmental health professionals can apply the insights in this series of articles in a way that will help supplant the "command-and-control" mentatlity that has battered so many of our colleagues and public health/environment inspectors, and baffled decision makers in the past two decades. Asst. Prof. R. Steven Konkel, Ph.D., EKU

If you have any interest in understanding how language develops you should read this book. It's been fun to apply what I learned here as I listen to my four year-old daughter struggle with how to pronounce certain words and come up with the proper conjugations of irregular English verbs. Dr. Black makes an otherwise dry subject interesting.

For any serious NT Greek student, this book is very insightful to the many phonemic changes in the language. It is not a definitive book on lingustics, which the author himself claims, but, it does get you started in the area of linguistics that might give you some insight into the English language. Black writes in a way that doesn't overwhelm the student with his scholarship, which he definitely has, but he writes in a way that even someone who is a beginner in the study of the language can understand. I recommend it for any beginner or intermedeate student who would like to get a better handle on why some things change in the Greek language that may have confused you before.

Black invites the reader to apply the techniques of modern linguistics to the analysis of New Testament Greek. This excellent general introduction covers the phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and historical linguistics of koine Greek. It assumes no Greek or linguistics background.

I give the chapter headings and some subheadings:

1. Introducing Linguistics: The Landscape and the Quest
2. Phonology: The Sound of Greek (Phonetics and Phonemics)
3. Morphology: The Anatomy of Greek Words
4. Syntax: The Architecture of the Greek Sentence
5. Semantics: Determining Meaning (The real jewel in this work--Word and Concept, Semantic Classes, Ambiguity, Denotation/Connotation, Idioms, Rhetorical Language, Semantic Change, Discourse Analysis!)
6. Historial and Comparative Linguistics: The Biography of Greek

In a Greek course I taught 2004/2005 based upon the Gospel of John (Beginning Greek: A Functional Approach) the class at one point wrestled with the disambiguation of a problemmatic participial phrase in John 1:9. ["He (Christ) was the true light that enlightens every man 'coming into the world.'"]. Should the phrase "coming into the word" go with "man" or "light"? Both are grammatically possible: the participal could be (1) accusative masculine singular or (2) nominative neuter singular. Black explains that the larger context with its emphasis upon the incarnation of Christ (see 1:14) settles the issue (2).

Highly recommended. Although it covers alot of ground, the explanations are short and to the point and examples abound. A delightful 172 pages that would lay a great foundation for someone contemplating linguistics as a major or who wants to conscientously apply a knowledge of koine to NT interpretation.

New Testament (Koine) Greek has long been taught as just another dead language. Black, an experienced teacher of Greek, changes the paradigm. Applying modern linguistic theory, Black shows how many of the so-called irregularities of Greek are actually normal and regular. The book covers the gamut: phonetics, morphology, syntax, semantics, etc. each section concludes with a short bibliography which can help students and teachers learn even more about linguistics and Koine Greek. An important text for newcomers and a useful review of Greek to sharpen rusty skills.

It is often the case that a new area of inquiry, comprised of elements from seemingly disparate disciplines, yields surprising insights. Zeigler's and Hammonds's effort is no exception. While linguistics has from time to time informed mathematics and computer science, to my knowledge little has been done to date towards the application of semantics and pragmatics to this type of data exchange.

The prose is concise, clear, and conversational. Given the complexity of the two topics and the more or less mutual exclusivity of their lexicons, readers whose experience has been acquired only in the one or the other of these two disciplines will nevertheless quickly become comfortable in this discussion. The authors provide many examples to illustrate their line of reasoning, all drawn from a wide variety of sources.

As an IT professional with 15 years' experience and an advanced degree in a foreign language, I found this book satisfying, illuminating, and provocative. While it is intended to address a specific engineering problem, its implications extend well beyond its stated purview. Heartily recommended for those who would like to think about the synergies of data engineering and pragmatics, and also for those who want to think about what might be beyond the horizon.

This book offers to the reader a thick and consistent theoretical background for dealing with ontologies (i.e., languages for describing "a state of the world".) Both authors merged very carefully their knowledge and disciplines [social and computer (engineering) sciences] in a complete and homogeneous framework.

In the new research area of computer-based problems, dealing with complex systems induces increasing efforts for building unifying modifiable ontologies describing the systems, data and communications. Large digital data are described and abstracted through more and more complex software. Computer-based problems need to have strong theories to map very quickly evolving technical evolutions. Developing such theories allows to build a common field for discussions and specifications to participate all together bringing tools and incremental concepts (concepts of concepts of concepts...) Always thinking of knowledge of knowledge (or metaknowledge) models can be constructed. Using such a philosophy, ideas become program-independent and right issues and perspectives are more easily identified. Knowledge can be organized to cognitively map real systems to computer-based models. This is what offers us this new book. But that's not all!

More than neutral/specifiable mathematical structures, this book provides precise mappings and discusses usual notations and current orientations (XML, HTML, UML, MDA, etc.) Actual generic large applications (geospatial sensor data, natural languages, hierarchical constructions, WWW, etc.) and a plethora of didactical examples are presented. Lastly, a web-based interface allows the reader to experiment his understandings.

Even researchers from the modelling and simulation field will find here a way to deal with digital input data.

According to me, this book is the starting point (and foundation) for those who intend to build soundly ontologies through computers in a modular, generic and hierarchical way: government agencies, developers, standards organizations, researchers, etc. They will find here the precise technical solutions they are searching for, as well as a common evolutive language to model data for dynamic systems. If all problems could not be grasped in one book, the latter will pinpoint major issues in such an abstract way that people are able to identify easily them and to find further solutions.

This book is definitely for those who intend to increase their knowledge on ontology, develop mental models and want to talk and search together in a controlled and original perspective!

Addressing the compatibility issues raised in sharing data between collaborative organizations that employ different approaches to representing data becomes a major concern in today's net-centric computing environment. Effective information exchange requires not only an agreement on the syntax and semantics to be established between data producers and consumers, but also a common understanding of the pragmatics, namely the intended use of the data in specific situational contexts. It is the development of a generic ontology framework called System Entity Structure (SES) to describe both static and dynamic world states and a set of openly available tools to support automated creating and testing of the data model, then, that is at the center of Bernard Zeigler and Phillip Hammonds's new book Modeling & Simulation-based Data Engineering.

By delineating the critical relationships that best structure a data engineer's domain of interest with the extra expressive power, the proposed pragmatic framework captures the exact intent of the data producers and consumers, which, in turn, allows for effective conversation and appropriate downstream processing. The SES framework is formulated as a labeled tree comprising basic elements and relations that satisfy a set of formation rules or axioms. With the supporting tools, it can be defined in a restricted form of natural language and subsequently be mapped into various computational forms, including eXtensible Markup Language (XML), Document Object Models (DOM), XML Document Type Definition (DTD), and XML Schema. A standard way of restructuring and pruning different SES representations is provided to improve representation utility and harmonization. The Pruned Entity Structure (PES) provides the basis for static and dynamic world state descriptions, efficient extraction of data, and more advanced form of information exchange. As the authors put it, "the SES together with the Discrete Event Systems Specification (DEVS) formalism offers a powerful system-theoretic framework for specifying families of dynamic services that can execute in simulated or real-time and interact with other services in a net-centric environment."

Throughout the book, a broad range of easy-to-follow examples, case studies, and exercises is provided to consolidate the concepts and methodologies presented in the text and to give readers significant hands-on experience. This book is addressed to all those who are concerned either with data engineering in general or with interoperability in multi-institutional collaboration. Any reader with a general knowledge of ontology and discrete-event modeling and simulation will be able to benefit from the authors' insights.

For those who are working on complex problems of data interoperability and reuse of data sources in distributed environment, especially GIG/SOA, this book provides rigorous and novel methods and framework approach to solve data harmonization and ontology integration problems effectively. The authors present the pragmatic frame concepts, ontologies, System Entity Structure (SES) framework, and modeling and simulation based data engineering, all of which are useful methodologies to achieve automated interoperability testing at syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic levels in a net-centric environment. The book identifies complex problems encountered in harmonization and testing and illustrates framework and approach to implement such solutions in software tools and services. The concept of SES is being implemented in a commercial software with some online support. It is a truly fine resource for data and system engineers who look for solid approach to solve complex real-world problems!

I am not a statistician or programmer but was able to do some really good analysis using this book as my guide. I think this book would be good for college students or professionals looking to learn to utilize R, a powerful and free statistical software.

I find this book helpful as a beginner's supplement to regressions in R. It explains in an easy way the basics of regression analysis in R. Thereby, it is generally understandable and easy to follow even for beginners. The book takes a focus on application and is logically structured, making easy steps first and adding one step to the other in a natural sequence (going from easy to more advanced models and techniques). The book does not cover more intricate regression models like multivariate regression.

Overall, this book is recommended for beginners in R who want to get started with regressions. Although R as an open-source software also allows you to find such information free on the web, I find this book a helpful companion.

This text is a fantastic introduction to most regression techniques as well as a wonderful reference to the R and SPlus languages. Although there are many regression texts out there, you will be hard pressed to find one that is as comprehensive and pithy as John Fox's. Not only that, if you want to take advantage of the very powerful (and free) R language, do not buy a manual. Buy this book instead. It's what I use.

I found this book to be a good basic regression book that covers the basics and gives liberal examples with code, and points out differences between R, S-Plus, S3 and S4. The book does give some general background material on the basic systems, like working with arrays, matrices, writing programs and other basic details. Book also covers data transformation, linear models, generalized linear models, model diagnostics and graphing.

Fox is a sociologist and the examples come from his line of work, however this does not degrade the books ability to show regression modelling using R or S. Except for the specific examples the book plus the extra chapters available on the books website more or less covered what was covered in my graduate engineering regression class.

Topics such as nonlinear, robust, resampling, time series, nonparametric, while not covered in the book, chapters are however provided on the books website and appear to the same quality as what is in the rest of the book. Scripts for all the chapters, including the online-only chapters, are also available on the website.

This book is a must read for any person interested in philosophy or ethics.
I had the pleasure of taking his course and so far it has been my favorite up to date. His writing style will keep you awake and interested, he writes to an average audience, meaning you don't have to be a philosophy scholar to understand. His book covers everything from animal rights, war, sexuality, liberty, drugs, pornography, speech, justice/equality, etc. He applies the views of major classical philosophers-such as Locke, Aristotle, Mill, Kant- as well as new views from modern intellectuals. (Most importantly he provides opposing or contrasting views on every subject). The chapters are conveniently broken down into essays that only require a few minutes to read and understand, you will walk away from each chapter and easily be able to apply the theories.
In real life, this professor is very witty and articulate, having a conversation with him is simply wonderful, having said that I feel that his book gets the best of his personality. I have kept this book and continue to go over and re-read it, amazing every time.

I am again amazed at Dr. Bonevac prose...they are brilliant!! I am sure this text is difficult to understand for some (see previous review), but to those with the ability to think for themselves, this is one of the best books EVER written.

I would have to say that this author has done a fine job creating this book. I am using this book in a Philosopy course and Bonevac has done a good job getting the main idea's of these famous philosophers across. I would highly recomend this book to anyone who is studying Philosopy or is just interested in learning something new.

This book is fantastic!! Unlike my fellow southern counter part, I could actually understand what was written - and I loved it. I am not a philosophy major, but this book is easy to understand and makes the topic come alive. I will read more of Bonevac's titles. This is a great read!! Thank you Dr. Bonevac for enlightening me!!

I've found the book to be invaluable in the classroom. I have only used the creative writing section and the poetry writing section thus far, but both sections have saved me countless hours of research and preparation. The book was recommended by our department chair who uses it in the upper grades -- I teach 9th and 10th grade English. The book is definitely one I would recommend and one I will turn to time and time again for ideas.

I cannot say enough about this book! Last summer, I was asked to teach a creative writing class for incoming high school freshmen. I panicked--until I found this manual. What a lifesaver! Filled with fabulous ideas and neatly organized into 75 lessons (I use 3 per day during 2 hour classes), this book is easy to use, and my students love it. It is challenging enough for gifted writers, but it encourages reluctant writers as well. All of them have fun. Students move through journaling, freewriting, revisions, even publishing booklets of their own poetry and prose. Solid learning; encouragement of peer editing; great progression of difficulty levels. You will not be disappointed in this book. A lot of hard work went into it--thanks to Ms. Brandvik.

A great kit for beginers in the process of writing very meaningful for EFL teachers

As an English teacher, I had tried to institute peer review into my classes but was never successful until I read this book. Brandvik provides 75 sequential writing lesson plans that built a writing community in my classroom. My students now know how to serve as peer editiors for their fellow students.

A good portion of the book's assignments focus on narrative type writing though some space is devoted to poetry writing and word play. I was wishing for some of the lessons to focus on other modes--persuasive, expository, etc. However, after teaching a couple of units from Brandvik's book, I was able to apply her techniques to my own units. Her modeling was a good teacher!

Software development has grown from a hobby/research level to a vast industry that the modern civilized world depends on. Who cared about quality assurance back 20 years ago? A few. Then in 80-90s the QA boom changed the market. Now, no commercial software development company can exist without QA department.

Every 3-5 year period brings a new aspect to the software development: documentation, security, migration. You name it...

I call this book a 'bible' because it covers almost every aspect of software development. It's big a help for ones who don't want to sink in the ocean of the buzz words.

I picked up this book coz I have read Saran's other work too. Having been in the software field for over 20 years, this book was a refreshing change. It is definitely more practical... the writings on systems and System Thinkers is refreshing. The attention on Quality had some good tips. I also like the way they have started with Failure upfront, and then tried to show ways to eliminate it.

Overall, a book that definitely opens one to think differently.

Saran & Krishnamurthy have managed to accomplish in this work a singularly new and valuable insight: that of bringing to the "art" of designing robust and valid software systems perspectives from the larger body of work and thought around the areas of general (not software specific) systems design, media ecology, even philosophy - that have long existed but (for reasons unknown) never till now been leveraged to add value to the software system's architect/ manager's arsenal of tools and knowledge. Particularly interesting are their inclusion of Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety and quotes from McLuhan's seminal work "Understanding Media" and their contextualization of these to the building of software systems.

In addition, another thing I greatly appreciate in this volume is the candid documentation of learning and thoughts from what is the authors' clearly hands-on experience in architecting and managing engineering lifecycles of complex software systems. They rightly point out that while failures and execution challenges have long been shared across and analyzed in industries other than software and consequently mitigated, that has not been the case for the area of software systems design. They attempt to fill this gap.

It is apparent that the authors clearly understand the challenges faced by techno management and business stakeholders that have long hampered efficiency and execution. They candidly and rightly acknowledge that "the map is not the territory". Rather than offer another complex and elaborate lifecycle management framework, they take the approach of offering a simple "SEE" model that is general enough to be implemented under business constraints. The comments are straightforward and made in context of the environment and business challenges, dynamics of the software industry today (especially applications development) - for instance there is a fairly comprehensive discussion of "insourcing" vs. "outsourcing" as strategic choices and outsourcing business models.

All in all, I recommend this volume, especially since it takes the practical approach of not offering a canned solution to building better software touted as a silver bullet - because none exists - and places emphasis instead on fostering thought and reflection through a number of insights, learning from hard experience, nuggets of wisdom and a general thought and planning model. After 15 years of building and managing the development of complex software systems, it's not often now that I come across a whole lot really "new" or "valuable" (to me) in works of such nature... But because of the observations I made above- I was pleased to discover that this book was a worthwhile exception!

This is a good book in reliability modeling of computer systems as it explicitly explains very deep knowledge in a clear way. Many technologies presented in this book are easy to be applied in practice. The examples help me clearly understand them although there are some mathematical formulas out of my current knowledge structure.

The book studies the reliability on software, hardware, network and system levels. I especially like the part about the grid reliability that can be implemented to study the reliability of large-scale systems.

This is a good book that comprehensively investigates the reliability for most advanced computer systems.

From the concrete streets to Wall Street there are signals and if we are alert to them we can hopefully avoid some unwanted close encounter with people that are sending all kinds of warnings they are bad news from body language, dress, to bosses with bad tempers like Ivan Boesky and Martha Stewart who Givens covers in his book as well.

I enjoyed this book and it is fast read like an entertaining novel but it is non-fiction.

Excellent insight into the mind and body language of today's criminal. A sorely needed work in today's world where you should be afraid to walk out to your car at the mall. The author makes it easy to spot the evildoers and the writing is presented so we can all understand it. Well done.

This book is a life saver.
While here in Australia we have the worlds most dangerous snakes, ferocious sharks and the cold blooded killer - the crocodile, nothing comes near the most dangerous creature, Homo sapiens. This book is filled with substantiated insights to the non verbal behaviours of this, the worlds most dangerous animal. As crocodile hunter, the late Steve Irwin, used to say, "Danger, danger, danger!". Humans are much more dangerous than crocs, and more emotional, too. For those who engage with humans on a regular basis, from parents, nurses, ambos, police, peace keepers and other contact professionals, this is an important book to study. By noting of the non verbal signs, and engaging your protective behaviour, you will continually stack the deck in your favour.
The author, Dr David Givens, director of the Centre of Nonverbal Studies, has set the book out in an organic structure, peppered with real life day to day examples, which gives it a strong practical edge. The format also makes it is easy to pick up read sections at a time.
After working with law enforcement and protective behaviour across the education spectrum for the past 23 years, I wish I had more of this type of insight as a rookie. And even as a street veteran I have had my eyes opened with this book. Parents, school teachers and community workers should read the section on drugs eg. meth and coke, its enlightening. And we all need a refresher on the telltale behaviours of thieves.
David Givens delivers.

This book is great for research papers and for use in your classroom. The authors of this book have done a lot of research in the field. I would definitely recommend this book to ESL teachers, school administrators, gen. ed. teachers, and spec. ed teachers.

If you are working with English Language Learners and wonder about special education services, this is the book for you. As an ESOL teacher, I can help special educators understand them better by sharing this book with them. I lent it to our school psychologist.

This book does an excellent job of compiling reasearch and best practice from the past 30 years into a complete, concise guide for determining appropriate referrals of ELLs to SpEd! Highly recommended!