Conferences Books

This is a simple, straight-forward explanation of the Suzuki method for those unfamiliar with it. The purpose seems not to persuade the reader but simply to explain how and why it works, as well as sharing the history of Dr. Suzuki and how his "method" came to be. It is interesting and quick reading; it can be read in one sitting.

According to Edward Idris Cardinal Cassidy, the President of the Pontifical Council for promoting Christian Unity (the branch of the Holy See that promotes discussions and ecumenical work with other Christian churches) "this is the first encyclical letter ever written on the subject of ecumenism." (cf. "Church Unity and the Papal Office" book, pg. 10). Shame, that it took the church almost a millenium (since the great Schism in 1054) to write an encyclical on Christian unity and an ecumenical view on the petrine office. And shame to the Orthodox for not engaging the rest of Christianity in a more constructive way. And shame to us, Protestants, for not taking ecclesiology, church history, and church unity more serious. Enough rantings for now, let's get to the book review.

The former pope's, John Paul II, devotion to ecumenism is based "on Jesus' high-priestly prayer in Chapter 17 of Saint John's Gospel." The pope expresses his confidence that if we would take Christ's call to unity " to heart, "that all may be one," "every factor of division can be transcended and overcome in the total gift of self for the sake of the Gospel."

This beautiful encyclical, has been much studied since it was released back in 1995, and has generated a lot of much awaited discussion across the four main branches of Christiniaty: Eastern-Orthodoxy, Roman-Catholicism, Protestantism, Pentecostalism/Charismatics.

I have rated this book with four stars due to the difficulty I had in obtaining the printed edition from its publishers. After one month of ordering this book, Amazon told me that they CANNOT get this paperback for me. Then I ordered the book from a Catholic bookstore and they assured me they would be able to obtain it. After a few weeks I get a call and get the same negative news - cannot order it. It might be out of print.

But luckily, this encyclical is available on the Vatican's website. Just Google the name "Ut Unum Sint" and look for the search result that comes from teh Vatican. The publisher or Amazon keeps deleting the URL that I posted, so I will give up proving that to you.

For an okay read on the theological responses written on this first ecumenical encyclical from Rome's See, there is "Church Unity and the Papal Office - an ecumenical dialogue on John Paul II's encyclical Ut Unum Sint" edited by Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson. For some serious thought on the Protestant side, I would recommend Karl Barth's "The Church and the Churches" and "In One Body through the Cross: the Priceton Proposal for Christian Unity." For some serious and relevant writings on the Orthodox side, I would recommend Meyendorff's "The Primacy of Peter: essays in Ecclesiology and the Early Church," and also "You are Peter: an Orthodox reflection on the exercise of Petrine Primacy."

Lawson's "The Theory of Gauge Fields in Four Dimensions" is somewhat of a forgotten book. Though it treats almost exactly the same material as Freed & Uhlenbeck's Instantons and Four-Manifolds (F&U), is almost as easy to understand, and is still in print, it no longer is cited much in the gauge theory literature. But considering that F&U is OOP and consequently sometimes expensive, it is a worthwile substitute with even a few advantages over its more famous rival.

You can see an introduction to Donaldson gauge theory under my review of F&U, but essentially, Donaldson's theorem was the first major topological result in gauge theory that really put the subject on the (mathematical) map and won Simon Donaldson a Fields Medal. The theorem is based on the result that characteristic-1 solutions modulo gauge equivalence to the self-dual Yang-Mills equation over a closed smooth 4-manifold themselves form a manifold with various properties (nonempty, 5-dimensional, orientable, with a noncompact end that is diffeomorphic to the underlying 4-manifold, smooth except at singularities that are homeomorphic to cones on complex projective space). The proof, as is typical in gauge theory, involves a mixture of hard nonlinear analysis, differential geometry, index theory, and spin geometry, and is very technical, long (practically the whole 100-page book is a single proof, and incomplete at that), and difficult for the beginner to wade through. Lawson breaks it down stepwise, introducing the necessary geometry and analysis (quarternion line bundles, connections, curvature, Sobolev spaces, Fredholm operators, the Sard-Smale theorem, the Atiyah-Singer index theorem, etc.) along the way. The proof is largely complete, with a proof of Uhlenbeck's gauge fixing lemma and some concluding details from one of Donaldson's papers being the most notable omissions.

The easiest way to evaluate this book is to compare it to F&U. First of all, it is written at a little higher level, assuming the reader to be more confortable with, e.g., principal bundles or K-theory. The Sobolev inequalities and multiplication theorems are given, but not much time is spent explaining them. Lawson's proof of orientability is a bit different, more abstract but maybe a little easier, while the Sard-Smale theorem is here applied to perturbations of the equations rather than the metrics, as Uhlenbeck's generic metrics theorem had only just been announced when this book was written. (The generic metrics theorem of Uhlenbeck is one of the unique features in the SU(2) YM theory that is lacking in, say, Seiberg-Witten theory, but Lawson's perturbation method is more generally applicable.) The proofs of Taubes's existence theorem are similar, but Lawson makes fewer mistakes, although he messes up the inequalities and choices of constants sometimes, too. (Everyone who writes these sorts of proofs seems to do this - F&U, Lawson, Donaldson, even Taubes himself; they're very tedious.)

Both books begin with the classification of simply connected 4-manifolds and symmetric bilinear forms, as well as a construction of a fake R^4, i.e., a manifold that is homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to R^4, but I prefer Lawson's treatment, which for the classification emphasizes the similarities with the 2-dimensional case. F&U, however, also include a chapter on Fintushel & Stern's SO(3) theory, which Lawson doesn't, but which is found in Petrie & Randall's Connections, Definite Forms, and Four-manifolds. Neither Lawson nor F&U (or P&R) treat Donaldson invariants, since they were discovered several years later, and both still work with self-dual rather than anti-self dual connections, but in the 2nd edition of F&U, released in 1991, these developments were at least mentioned.

There are a number of mistakes with signs, factors of 2, missing or reversed subscripts and superscripts, C instead of H in eqn. II.8.6, "=" instead of "+" in eqn. III.2.3, etc., which seems about par for gauge theory books. The most serious errors are in the description of instantons on the 4-sphere on pp. 13 and 45 (cf. AHS's paper), the omission of the word "reducible" from Prop. IV.3.3, the word "minimum" instead of "maximum" twice on p. 70, and, as already noted, a number of errors in the choice of constants, order of fixing parameters, and inequalities in Chapter VI, especially the statement of Lemma 1.8. Fortunately, all of these problems are surmountable, and in fact F&U is probably worse in this regard.

All in all, this book could serve as a good introduction to Donaldson theory if F&U is unavailable or to be read concurrently and if the reader has a good background in spin geometry and nonlinear analysis. But it is only an introduction, since it doesn't cover the invariants themselves, probably the most important part of the theory (cf. Donaldson & Kronheimer's The Geometry of Four-Manifolds, the seminal work in the field). Moreover, Donaldson theory itself has fallen out of favor since Seiberg-Witten gauge theory can reproduce the same results much more easily (cf. Morgan's The Seiberg-Witten Equations and Applications to the Topology of Smooth Four-Manifolds. or Nicolaescu's Notes on Seiberg-Witten Theory).

This is a typical document outlining standards. Not particularly easy reading, but the information is there. This document provides condense information regarding exposure limits for various chemical, physical and biological agents and substances. It only receives four stars because it of its highly technical explanations and techniques.

This collection of papers came out in 2000, shortly before the 2001 terrorist attacks. Seen from subsequent years, the text makes interesting reading. It speculates about possible forms of new attacks. Like ballistic and cruise missiles. But these realistically could only be done by adversaries who are nations. Whereas another section of the book looks at terrorism via chemical or biological means. Still something which is a real possibility. Last week's US News and World Report contained a lead article on the parlous security of chemical refineries.

One article mentions Osama bin Laden, in the context of a supposed chemical factory in Sudan which the US bombed. Even before 2001, he was considered a major threat.

Long before Peter Drucker and his ilk made their fortunes counseling others in the science of Supply Chain Management, there was "Transforming The Supply Chain". For half a dozen years, it stood like a lone Gibraltar -- the product of Polisar and Powell, two relatively unknown consultants brought in by a Boston educational publisher to knock off a quickie academic text -- who instead ended up transforming the modern business world.

So the story goes, it was Powell's stubborn thoroughness that accelerated the effort from manuscript to Magna Carta. Polisar, the visionary of the two, promptly coined such industry buzzwords as 'best practice' and 'benchmarking'. She was also the first (at least in print) to recognize that only by systematically reviewing and evaluating a process one is able to determine if change is necessary. Viewed from an operations science point of view, Polisar uttered such shockers as "optimal is not always the best". It was the kind of revolutionary thinking that begat the now standard practice of sub optimizing each process to gain an optimal process for the enterprise.

Unfortunately this book disappeared from retailer and distributor's shelves late in 2001, never to reappear. I discovered my copy almost by accident, misfiled among an obscure stack of used textbooks in the bowels of a used bookstore adjacent to Harvard Business School. Is this a book - as some pundits say - worth obtaining at any price? If you want to know how business process integration evolved, or even if you just want to own a piece of business management theory history, the answer is most certainly yes.

This is an excellent overview of the rocks which are found along the Appalachian Trail for the general public. Chew has an excellent grasp of the history of the Appalachian mountains, highlighting the major "orogenies" or mountain building periods. Some of the details of bedrock structure and tectonics are no doubt inaccurate as these are hotly debated among scientific experts. The maps and drawings are quite good but the book might be improved by more photographs. That would undoubtedly raise the price, however.

First written in 1923, this edition promotes the ideas and ideals of an American Judaism facing unions, women's rights, world war and a fast changing world. In its time it was used by what is now the largest organized identified Jewish population in existence. It is NOT modern, hip, or relative to the 21st century. but reflects the best efforts of a group of rabbis coming to grips with modernity. It provides an understandable ritual for English speakers who want to lean about Passover.

Maraget Hope Bacon, a leading authority on the Quakers, has done a most impressive job with this biography of Lucretia Mott, a notable Quaker social activist of the nineteenth century.
The book, on the whole, can be described as most impressive in terms of its sheer readability and clarity: we clearly see the contradictions inherent in Quakerism during the time and how she had to face them. Lucretia Mott is shown to be a woman who was exceptionally capable of dealing with criticisms from the Quaker leadership of her childhood and to take up the initiative herself when she believed she was forced to by sheer injustice. All parts of her life are described quite thoroughly but lightly: there is a notable absence of over-dense writing to clutter the book.

Whilst none of the writing is remarkably insightful because Bacon does not go into great detail (as, say, Jean McMahon-Humez does) about the realities of life in a Quaker society, the book still comes across as a good biography. If you want to know where the modern-day women's and peace movements came from, this book should be read.

The first part of the book is on "Birds as socio-economic resources" based on an International Council for Bird Preservation (ICBP) symposium. The authors are almost apologetic in discussing economic values, emphasizing that birds are also important ethically and culturally. Fern Filion goes as far as listing Abraham Maslow's 5 level hierarchy of human needs. The articles are diverse, from the marketing of a 100,000 bird swallow roost in Canada (estimated to have a social value of 1/2 million dollars), to the use of seabird eggs and young in Tasmania and Jamaica. Hussein Isack presented a fascinating paper on the use of birds by the pastoral Boran nomads in Northern Kenya, which included birds as source of information. Honeyguides may guide them to bee hives, and other species indicate coming rain or danger. Although the Boran, currently avoid birds as food, the tendency to a more sedentary life may change this.

The second part of the book is base on an ICBP workshop of birds as bio-indicators of environmental conditions. These papers emphasize that birds can be bioindicators since they may be higher in the food change and easier to monitor. This seems particularly true of colonial waterbirds and seabirds, where diet or eggshell thickness may detect changes in prey fish populations or presence of toxins in the environment. There is a series of papers also on waterfowls as indicator of pesticides and acidification. I thought Welsh's use of woodpecker numbers and diversity as indication of forest stand condition was intriguing. In Florida, birds are used as sentinels for detecting West Nile Virus.