Applied Languages Books

great text book like new condiction for less than 5 dollars, this is beyond crazy. I couldn't believe when I saw it online, so I was hoping to get some ragged, page missing book in the mail, but didnt...like they said("Like brand NEW").

If you live and breathe math, you may enjoy this book. I'm good at math, but I like to have a verbal explanation before examining a dense proof. This text fails me. I can't tell you how many times the authors could have saved me hours of struggling if they had just included a few more words of English. They skips steps and assume, assume, assume.

This book contains lots of examples...most explained as poorly as possible.

Also, I have the most recent version and their posted errata. We continue to find errors weekly. This is maddening. How can one learn these skills when the standards for comparison are often faulty?

Also, there are only a few answers for each section offered in the back. Rather than having all of the odds to check your work against, you only get 1, 3, 9, 15, 25. You can download all of the odd answers, but you have to have a special code that only comes with a new copy. So, if you bought this second hand, you're screwed.

Neither Mathematics nor the laws of nature are boring, but this book sure makes them seem so. I would be afraid of students wanting to commit suicide or to at least take up cutting in order to simply releave their monotony while reading it. (the actual table of contents seems good, but don't be fooled.)

Reading this book is not so much an unholy act as it is an unbearable spiritual void (a blackhole in the cosmos of one's sense of being). By the way, the review by the author (if that's what it really is) shows a lack of taste. If someone is going to attempt something this tasteless, then they should at a minimum try and be a little funny or a wEE bIT iRONIC. (these last comments of mine about a lack of taste and being tasteless were intended as humourous extensions of my comments on the ungodly sense of boredom imparted through a reading of this book.)

As for the Marines and Mt. Fuji, don't get me started. I'll just say I have an awe of authority and an awe of nature. These deep, near religious (though not pagan...I do what I can to follow the Bible), feelings of mine can be and are kept in check (every once in a while) by acts of outspokenness, e.g., like this review. And let's leave it at that.

This amazing book engages the reader in the discoveries, theories, and experiments that led to the seemingly universal concepts that we call natural laws. The author, John Tabak, shows how natural laws evolve with our ability to accurately observe, measure, and understand the universe. After reading this book, I am totally pumped with anticipation about what the natural laws will be 50 years from now. Natural laws are to science what the US Marines are to warfare - universally applicable and unforgiving when disobeyed.
Semper Fidelis,
James Tabak USMC

The book contains the numerical tools needed to fit the solution of a dynamical system to experimental data by varying some design parameters. These are optimization techniques, solvers for ordinary and partial differential equations, steady-state systems etc. A whole chapter is devoted to the question "what happens if somnething goes wrong" and gives recommendations how to avoid pitfalls. There is a collection of 12 realistic case studies with practical background and a collection of a large number of test problems coming with a CD and demonstration software.

As a practitioner, I enjoyed very much reading the book. I got an impression how the mathematical routines work and understood some of my own difficulties when fitting experimental data.

This book has the very very brief introductions to various topics and it almost feels like reading a bibliography on the topic of numerical data fitting ... could not find anything worthwhile in it .... I found more useful and comprehensive information on this topic through google search on the internet ... I regret spending all that money on this book.

This text utilizes as a springboard, two very incorrect assumptions.

First, the author assumes that it is the conscious intent of ESL curricula designers, that the culture of their native nations be subversively spread by the use of those materials in EFL situations abroad in minority "Periphery" areas which have differing ideologies.

Additionally, the author assumes that it is the responsibility of those same Western (or "Center") curricula designers to accommodate the needs of Periphery English as a Foreign Language learning communities when constructing their materials.

The author, an associate professor at Barruch College, City University of New York, and a Sri Lankan Tamil, utilizes as the basis for his histrionic text, an example classroom EFL experience in Jaffna, at the Northern tip of Sri Lanka. The example illustrates a Sri Lankan Tamil EFL teacher utilizing a text created in the West with the express purpose of being used as an ESL text. As such, the narrative of that text deals with Western experiences and values. Canagarajah posits that the material is inherently ideologically subversive, by suggesting that one of the students in the class, having been exposed to these values and ideas in his English classes, is now chasing a Western lifestyle. The author tells us that another student in the class is resisting those values as they clash with the war-torn agrarian reality of Northern Sri Lanka, and as a result he will fail his class, and leave behind his intent to acquire English. The author therefore calls for ESL/EFL materials to be carefully scoured of any ideological content, or that these materials be loaded with Periphery-relevant ideology and culture.

The problem is that the author has made the assumption that ESL curricula designers are clandestinely planning a cultural colonization of Periphery areas of the world. First, the inclusion of Western culture and ideology is not covert. The ESL texts in question are designed for English Language Learners who are currently residing in the Center nations.

The second incorrect assumption is that the designers of these materials expect them to be used in EFL situations at all. Had they intended the materials to be utilized globally, perhaps they would have been ideologically neutral, or the authors may have made some attempts at broader content.

It is the responsibility of the Periphery to create Periphery-relevant curricula and materials. The author blames the decadent West for the decision of the EFL teacher in the example, to use a culturally and ideologically loaded text. That teacher had the option of creating her own locally-specific text from scratch, or altering the existing text to suit the needs of Jaffna learners. She did not. It seems the author would prefer a wider variety of material (indeed a relevant text for every minority Periphery group on Earth) to be available, but more specifically, the author would like those materials to be created by the West, which is counter to his own notion of Western inadequacies in relating to the Periphery.

The first half of the text is devoted to making the above-examined two faulty assumptions seem to be fact. The remainder of the text hypothesizes about the effect such culturally loaded material has on Periphery learners, including the emotional impact of this imagined subversive colonization. It is only in the final chapter when the Author deals with strategies for coping with alien culture and ideology imbedded in English material. In spite of the rampant anti-Center dogma to be found in his book, the author has clearly learned through personal experience (as an associate professor at a U.S. university his salary would be considerably higher than if he were teaching in Sri Lanka, he chooses to live in the decadent West, his book was written in the language of his imagined ideological adversary, and it was published by Oxford University Press, the pinnacle of the "Ivory Tower of Academia") that it is often more productive to subvert the system from within, than to bang one's head against it, in frustration from without. It is this notion he discusses in the final chapter by suggesting cultural and ideological power by retaining one's own culture and ideology, but becoming conversant with the ideals of the Center for the sake of advantage.

Unfortunately, the author spends all of his time denouncing the efforts of others, and provides no suitable alternative, as is often the case with dissidents in any system. He would like to see ideologically neutral materials, but has not created any himself. He would like to see Periphery scholars take command of creating Periphery-relevant materials; but being a Periphery scholar himself, he offers nothing. His only contribution to the struggle for the periphery is to denounce the Center. Once the nauseating rhetoric, dogma, and hypocritical whining are stripped away from Canagarajah's text, all that remains is a suggestion for the need of more suitable second language acquisition materials for disenfranchised minority people in the "Periphery", and no recognizance of the blame for the lack of these materials resting squarely on the shoulders of that Periphery.

I am not entirely happy with the title of this book which might be read as meaning that the author depends on a simply opressor-opressed dichotomy. Far from that, C. provides a fascinating glimpse at how ELT works in the "periphery" that is in third world countries. He also elaborates the working conditions of scholars in theses countires, thereby providing much needed insights to first world readers.

C. not only sensibly describes the language ecology of Sri Lanka and the role of English within this system, he also shows how textbooks convey values from the west. Furthermore, he demonstrates how exactly these textbooks can be apprropriated by locals to reflect their own values.

How did I get through Yale without this easy to read guide? Instead of lists of tables that blur into numerical randomness, this book turns areas under the curve into crisp visual images!

If you have to buy this as part of a class, ask the professor to choose another book. This book is full of typographical errors (a problem when learning and using formulas), and also computational errors (in both this book and the accompanying study guide). The language is also either confusing or oversimplified, depending on which chapter you are reading.

It gives only the VERY, VERY basest of knowledge regarding statistics; it serves best as a rarely referred to supplement to other stats books.

This book requires serious familiarity with calculus to get through. If equations filled with Greek symbols makes your head spin then stay away.

As for the Functional programming part:
"The language described is called CDS0, and should be the 'machine language' of a higher level programming lannguage CDS taking some features of ML (mostly data abstraction facilities); hence CDS should be compiled into CDS0 before execution. Only the material of sections 2 and 3 (i.e. the calculus of the expressions of CDS0, without type control), is already implemented."

This book Looks like it has a lot of good content but it's by no means an introductory text to the topics in the title. Being anything but comfortable in calculus and not even remotely interested in learning functional programming at such a low level I can't really comment on the quality of the content.

For the reader well-versed in Mathematica and in economic theory, this book gives a fairly good overview of how Mathematica can be used to study mathematical economics and finance. It is also assumed in the articles in the book that the reader has a strong background in mathematics. Since the book was published in 1993, Mathematica has considerably expanded, with many new features that make some of the accompanying code in the book somewhat dated, but the notebooks can still be used beneficially.In addition, economic theory is currently making more use of symbolic programming, and financial analysis has exploded as an area which is now making heavy use of high-performance computing. Although Mathematica cannot compete from a performance standpoint with the needs of financial engineering, it still has an advantage from a didactic standpoint. I did not read all of the articles in the book, so my comments will be limited to the ones that I did.

The article on "Mathematica and Diffusions" is an overview of how to use Mathematica to do stochastic calculus. The Ito calculus is reviewed briefly, and the authors begin with constructing a Weiner process. The Mathematica package they employ and on the disk accompanying the book is not discussed in detail, but is merely used to simulate realizations of the process. Readers who want a more in-depth view will have to go over the code themselves. The authors use the package to generate realizations of Weiner processes that are correlated with each other, and show this correlation via Mathematica graphics. The Black-Scholes formula is derived using the standard self-financing trading strategy and ignoring transaction costs and dividends. The algebraic manipulations are done with Mathematica, and this obscures (a little) the underlying concepts behind the derivation of this important formula. Since data structures in Mathematica are essentially lists, the authors outline the construction of the data structure that could be used to represent a diffusion, namely a list consisting of five terms: the diffusion, Weiner process name, expression for the drift and dispersion, and the initial value. For the reader familiar with OO-programming, accessor functions are used to extract the components of this data structure. This is a nice move by the authors, for it is an example of how Mathematica can be used to emulate OO-programming.

The article "Itovsn3: Doing Stochastic Calculus with Mathematica" is an overview of how to use the Itovsn3 package that is on the disk to implement Ito calculus. It is assumed that the reader has a background in stochastic calculus, since the author does not give a review. However, semimartingales, so important to those working in financial engineering, are discussed and their statistical behavior described using Mathematica. The Ito formula is presented as a semimartingale-type decomposition for smooth function of Brownian motion and the author shows using Mathematica plots how the higher order terms in the second-order Taylor expansion vanish asymptotically. This article is not merely Mathematica code for Ito calculus, for the author gives an example of how to use the package in a hedging problem.

The article "Option Valuation" is a more detailed overview of how to use Mathematica in the context of the Black-Scholes model to perform options valuation and risk management. Heavy use is made of the graphics capability of Mathematica to illustrate how option values change as a function of stock price and time of expiration. The author also shows how Mathematica can be used as a OO-language to treat options as self-contained objects with accessor functions. He does however state that Mathematica does not live up to the OO toolkits available elsewhere, contrary to my experience. He closes the article with a consideration of how to use Mathematica to value options that can be exercised before expiry, the binomial model playing the central role in the discussion. It is here in particular that the performance of Mathematica is readily felt. The numerical number-crunching needed to do the calculations in these types of models cannot be done in Mathematica efficiently and profitably.

The article "Time Series Models and Mathematica" gives a general treatment on how Mathematica can be used to study ARIMA models for time series. Mathematica is used more interactively than the other articles and the visualization obtained is quite nice in giving the reader insight into such concepts as the moving average and the spectral density function. The author shows how to estimate the spectral density function and why periodogram techniques fall short in this estimation. I would have liked to see other techniques for studying time series discussed, such as neural networks and hidden Markov models, but the author does do a fairly good job with the ARIMA models.

This book is not a comedy but you will laugh. There are so many typos it isn't even funny. Getting past that, this book is full of good info to help you write a Phase I Site Assessment.

I enjoyed reading this book, and found the way in which the author explained the exploitation of her visuals extremely useful. I have since used other visuals, inspired by the author, as a way of providing language 'hooks' for my pupils. The "future" and "conditional" fish are excellent, and went down very well! I would say, though, that some of the ideas looked difficult to put into practice, and that most of the visuals are for the Spanish teacher.

I got this book for the last class I took for my Masters Degree. I must admit it was somewhat disapointing. Most of the reading material in the book lacks enthusiasm. It was unable to grab my attention and it seemed to go on forever over-explaining things as if trying to write for the sake of writing. If you want to read on the topic there are better choices out there.