Simulation Books

I teach a simulation course using this book. It is one of the best textbooks I have ever used in any discipline. It is extremely well designed for an undergraduate audience. For more emphasis on the statistical fundamentals of simulation, I recommend Law and Kelton's graduate book, but if your goal is to complete a project for a company, or to prepare a comprehensive undergraduate simulation course with plenty of modeling examples and useful exercises, then this is the book that will take you from zero to hero.

This book has been co-authored by a university professor and two Rockwell people. It neither serves its purpose as a "theory" book nor an "applied" book.
It leads you through the process of creating a simulation by using examples.
I would have preferred this to be more of a reference book answering questions such as "If I want to do this what modules should I use?". Instead, when faced with a minor question (e.g. how to count exiting entities with different attributes?) I end up reading half the book and still not find a suitable answer.
The occasionnal jokes are quite funny though!

Lilly was a generation(or more) ahead of his time. He is almost single-handedly responsible for the great interest in dolphins(which led to the Marine Mammal Protection Act and helped to found the animal rights movement). In 1958 he noted that the brains of elephants and cetaceans were larger than ours, that we should not abuse them and that it was one our most important projects to communicate with them. He invented isolation tanks(at NIMH in 1954) and used them extensively with and without powerful psychoactive drugs at a time when it was thought that either the brain would shut down or one would go insane. He created methods for implanting electrodes in mammal brains and was planning to do it to himself. He was one of the first to make serious use of computers in bioscience research and created the hardware and software to make the first attempts to communicate with dolphins. He self experimented with dangerous physiological investigations in high altitude medicine for the military during WW2, took LSD with dolphins and movie stars, submitted himself to the rigors of Arica training, and taught classes at Esalen. He was the first one to investigate the bizarre psychedelic ketamine and his results(published in the two last chapters of this book `The Scientist`) are still the best data on the dose/effect relation of any psychedelic on one person. And all this happened before most of us were born!
He had courage, honesty and integrity that is rare anywhere and almost nonexistent in science. His goal was to find the ultimate truth about everything and he went about as far as anyone ever has. He had little patience with the stupid and hypocritical games one has to play to fit into monkey society. Of course the reaction of the establishment was predictable. He left the NIMH and was never given any government or academic support for the last 35 years of his life. His paper and comments at a conference on sensory deprivation were removed from the published version. He was not invited to government sponsored symposia on dolphins(he had refused to help develop them as weapons), though he clearly knew more about them than anyone in the world.
He liked to live and work on the edge and few could keep up with him, as this books makes clear. If you have read some of his other books it will be much easier going. He was a pioneer in consciousness research and pushed the boundaries of our understanding of who we are and what we might become. Among other things he catalogs here the various states reached by drugs, meditation, and isolation, tries to determine their significance and suggests how to use them.
As a result of all his research, especially his months of continuous hourly injections of ketamine, he became convinced that our ordinary reality was not the only one. During his trips he was often in communication with members of a civilization a 1000 years in the future. We all allow ourselves such experiences every time we watch a sci fi movie and sometimes it leaves us more than just amused, but when anyone meditates or takes a drug to do it we tend to discount the results. Lilly however, took it all seriously, and parts of this book explain why. Whatever our mind produces --by any means --only happens because our brains are programmed by our genes to make it possible. So it's at least plausible that any of these routes inward reveal fundamental aspects of what's possible for us in the future, or even for some other species elsewhere in the universe. If you find his scientifically based viewpoints irrational, consider that most people believe without evidence(really with abundant evidence to the contrary) in good and bad luck, in super beings living in space who rule the earth, in a place in spacetime where dead people go, in stars millions of light years away influencing their lives, and in ghosts, angels, witches, and gods that come to earth to inhabit statues that read our thoughts and violate all the laws of physics, chemisty and biology in order to help us personally.
He describes his tank work(and lots more) in The Dyadic Cyclone, The Center of the Cyclone, and in Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer(1967) and other books, and his work with dolphins in Lilly on Dolphins and in Dolphins(CK TITLES).
This book is a plea to examine your beliefs with an open mind.
He defines metabeliefs as those about belief systems. He says that our simulations of reality(with meditaion, isolation, drugs, computers) can provide access to other realities which may include the future, the past, or extraterrestrial. He refers to metaprograms as learning tools(symbols, programs, languages, ideas, models) which our central programs(mind or part of it) runs all the time. Cognitive psychology did not really exist then and now we would likely call the central programs cognitive templates.
He refers to self-metaprograms(or essences) as parts of the mind that program our experiences.
Though he carried out an exhausting and dangerous program of self experimentation with psychedelics(what many now call entheogens), he does not believe they are a final or complete path to higher consciousness. Yes as I reflect on this, I note that tens of millions have successfully explored their cognitive templates with psychedelics while meditation alone may have generated a few hundred thousand satoris and probably less than 100 living mystics. It is also clear that psychedelics have led millions to meditation. He mentions the very psychedelic Revelations of St. John and understands that Jesus taught revelation from within--ie the same sort of self transcendence at Taoism and Buddhism. He discusses how we use drugs, sex, money, groups, war etc as substitutes for God. God as compassion, science, consciousness or superspace(the current concepts of cosmology are explained and he imagines the universe collpasing and being reborn--very contemporary!). He discusses god in here vs god out there but notes that if its out there then its a puzzle where math comes from. His experiences make him doubt that death is the end.
He was very open to all ideas and his desire to consider all points of view makes some parts of the book rambling and a bit incoherent. He crams so many ideas on each page that there is easily enough here to form the core of ten books. He is mentions ideas such as: war is the result of a future civilization using us for war games; we are god simulating himself, our interstellar rockets finding intelligent machines that follow us back to earth and take over; government sponsored meditation classes, computers that control and monitor all communication and take control of civilization, our genes generate the illusion that we live in a certain and determinate universe; we are simulated by God or vice versa.
Though he must have crossed paths countless time with Indian mystics and Buddhists, strangely, he was most influenced by an obscure American mystic named Franklin Merrell-Wolff.
Lilly was an extremely bright and highly rational person yet he became convinced of the reality of his extraterrestrial membership in a future civilization and he went into a 6 week depression after a ketamine trip in which they showed him the collapse of the universe.
It was clear to him that the phenomena of the mind were capable of scientific study but this was quite heretical 40 years ago.
The book ends with reprints of some of his papers and poems.

I read this book a few times. It provides a good explanantion for the behavior of people and it provides an excellent map to of the human psyche. If you read this book over and over you will learn to see through the human tendency to fantastical thought and language.

This book has just about everthing you want to know about spice from it's history in early 60's, to solving convergance in array of circuits,which are difficult to simulate.I found the book to be useful for it's tables to construct better and more models than I had ever imagined possible.The author does use alot of mathematical expressions to explain the spice syntax, but the format is great, and well thought out.This book is the "toolbox" for spice. Others fall short, but this book I'm gald to have on my shelf.

This book incloses most of the mathematical equations of the models used by SPICE and helps good by solving problems with the convergence, written by one of the designer of SPICE A. Vladimirescu

I have been using SPICE in its various forms since I was an undergraduate. I have found that this 3rd version, as well as all the other versions (all of which I own), are essential reference works for use of the simulation engine and have found a prominent place in both my home and work libraries. No matter what version of SPICE you use (I use TopSPICE), this work usually provides immediate answers to both common and advanced simulation questions. The author has also written the book in an easy readable style.

Through my career at various organizations such as Hughes, Bellcore, ArryaComm, Booz Allen Hamilton, Tel-Instruments, and US Technologies, not only have I referred to this small text over and over again for simulation purposes, but I have also recommended it to other colleagues and have purchased it for members of my staff.

I use this book mostly for referencing command syntax. Most people don't hand enter Spice netlists anymore, but this book is still very useful if you want to no why and how things work behind the scenes. I would have liked more information about advanced device modeling.

There is much new in the latest edition of Ralph Stacey's management text. Of special merit is his challenge to those interested in understanding human organizations as complex adaptive systems to remember that these organizations are comprised of humans, not computer agents or ants. He asks us to be wary of simplistic transfers of complexity principles into the management domain. He then offers the theory of "relationship psychology" as an alternative and explores its implications for understanding the mind and healthy, creative organizational dynamics, putting the human back in the complex adaptive, or as he suggests, responsive, system.

Ralph Stacey has done more than any other management theorist to examine the intersection of complexity science and organizational thinking. He has been intelligently, provocative and challenging all along and has helped this intersection advance. You'll always want to stay in touch with what he is saying.

Can the author and editor really have mis-spelled Organizational?

I reviewed this book for the American Statistician in 1994. The book provides extensive coverage of time series methodology without being overly theoretical. The authors are well versed on the topic as they have published on it in the statistical literature. They avoid delving into the difficult theory by sketching out the mathematics, present the key theorems and refer the reader to other sources for rigorous details. They provide a broad treatment of both the time and frequency domain approaches to time series analysis. It is at the level of an advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate level course. Still there is more coverage of the time domain.
Traditional time domain models including exponential smoothing and moving averages are introduced first. The ARMA models and Harvey's structural models are treated as special cases of the state space models. They introduce many parameter estimation procedures but make the key point that many of them are simply useful approximations to the maximum likelihood estimates. They discuss applications with reference to the software packages MINITAB and SYSTAT (now owned by SPSS Inc.).

My criticism of it is with regard to omissions. They talk about the NAG libraries but neglect IMSL. The routines in SPlus that were available at the time of publication of the book were also overlooked. They also overlooked the recent advances on detecting outliers in time series as was covered in the 1984 2nd edition of "Outliers in Statistical Data" by Barnett and Lewis. Further work can now be found in the 3rd edition of the Barnett and Lewis book that came out in 1995. Although forecasting (or prediction) is perhaps the most important application of time series methodology, it is also worthwhile in a book like this intended for engineers and other practitioners that other applications be discussed. Discrimination is one such topic. Certain time series (e.g. radar signals) must be detected and discriminated from noise and then further identified by type. In biomedical applications a patient's electroencephalogram or electrocardiagram are routinely studied to look for abnormalities that could indicate neurological or heart diseases respectively. Shumway covers this well in his book "Applied Statistical Time Series" published in 1988 and more examples can be found in his 2000 book "Time Series and Its Applications" coauthored with David Stoffer. There they look at the interesting problem of discriminating between earthquake activity and nuclear explosions. New methods involving wavelet transforms are now used. This is discussed in the Shumway and Stoffer book and in detail in the new book on Wavelets by Percival and Walden.

Chapters 6-12 are somewhat lacking in exercises while chapters 1-5 provide enough exercises for class homework. A course based on this text would benefit from additional exercises and some case studies provided by the instructor. Also new material developed in the last 8 years should be covered in such a course.

Some mention of Bayesian methods is given in chapter 6 with particular reference to the book by West and Harrison. Additional developments have been published in the last 8 years including additional articles and books by Mike West and his coauthors.

I reviewed this book for the American Statistician in 1994. The book provides extensive coverage of time series methodology without being overly theoretical. The authors are well versed on the topic as they have published on it in the statistical literature. They avoid delving into the difficult theory by sketching out the mathematics, present the key theorems and refer the reader to other sources for rigorous details. They provide a broad treatment of both the time and frequency domain approaches to time series analysis. It is at the level of an advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate level course. Still there is more coverage of the time domain.

Traditional time domain models including exponential smoothing and moving averages are introduced first. The ARMA models and Harvey's structural models are treated as special cases of the state space models. They introduce many parameter estimation procedures but make the key point that many of them are simply useful approximations to the maximum likelihood estimates. They discuss applications with reference to the software packages MINITAB and SYSTAT (now owned by SPSS Inc.).

My criticism of it is with regard to omissions. They talk about the NAG libraries but neglect IMSL. The routines in SPlus that were available at the time of publication of the book were also overlooked. They also overlooked the recent advances on detecting outliers in time series as was covered in the 1984 2nd edition of "Outliers in Statistical Data" by Barnett and Lewis. Further work can now be found in the 3rd edition of the Barnett and Lewis book that came out in 1995. Although forecasting (or prediction) is perhaps the most important application of time series methodology, it is also worthwhile in a book like this intended for engineers and other practitioners that other applications be discussed. Discrimination is one such topic. Certain time series (e.g. radar signals) must be detected and discriminated from noise and then further identified by type. In biomedical applications a patient's electroencephalogram or electrocardiagram are routinely studied to look for abnormalities that could indicate neurological or heart diseases respectively. Shumway covers this well in his book "Applied Statistical Time Series" published in 1988 and more examples can be found in his 2000 book "Time Series and Its Applications" coauthored with David Stoffer. There they look at the interesting problem of discriminating between earthquake activity and nuclear explosions. New methods involving wavelet transforms are now used. This is discussed in the Shumway and Stoffer book and in detail in the new book on Wavelets by Percival and Walden.

Chapters 6-12 are somewhat lacking in exercises while chapters 1-5 provide enough exercises for class homework. A course based on this text would benefit from additional exercises and some case studies provided by the instructor. Also new material developed in the last 8 years should be covered in such a course.

Some mention of Bayesian methods is given in chapter 6 with particular reference to the book by West and Harrison. Additional developments have been published in the last 8 years including additional articles and books by Mike West and his coauthors.

An excellent narrative style guide through the first two Wing Commander games, and the expansion pack for the first. For those of you that like behind-the-scenes, there is an interview with series creator Chris Roberts, and a look at how the storyline and game were made together. I still refer to it while replaying! :)

This is an excellent book for those still playing the first two Wing Commanders and their add-ons. Chock-full of hints and tips, with a narrative, it helps you utilize the best strategy to fully complete every mission.

I think it is a very good book for beginners like me and the author is a very nice guy. I grasped this complex software more quickly than I originally thought with the help of this book. I hope he will publish a deeper book on ACIS in the future.

This is my dissertation as a technical report from NASA Ames where I was working while finishing it. The key elements were a view of motor skill learning that integrated learning by both observing and practicing. Although it was intended as a model of human skill learning, the motor control component was clearly wrong. But the uniform treatment of the two types of learning I still think are interesting.

It appears to be out of print, but if you want a copy, I think I still have several sitting around that I'd be happy to send your way if you ask me.

Korn offers a recent view of Monte Carlo simulations. These have been performed since the 1950s. But Korn's approach emphasises what is feasible to you, on a standard personal computer. Buttressed by the enclosed CD, that has code readily modifiable to many applications. It is also nice that linux is supported, in addition to Microsoft Windows. Perhaps this is an acknowledgement that scientists and engineers might be more heavily represented amongst linux users, than compared to Microsoft users.

The dynamical systems covered in the book vary impressively. Though a discerning reader might consider that there's nothing qualitatively different from when Nick Metropolis and others at Los Alamos first started doing Monte Carlo simulations. Hardware is now much faster, and combined with vastly cheaper memory, makes the current book feasible. Also, granted, most of the differential equations studied in the text as examples might not have been done at Los Alamos. But these are differences of detail. The basic key inspiration remains unchanged.