Bradford Books

This is a highly inspirational book and I'm very glad the stories that Brad Washburn first wrote as a teenager have been reprinted. How great it was that Brad's parents took him to the Alps and let him climb. I can only imagine that today too many would worry about lawsuits, insurance and scheduled activities.

Its about character development. One can see why Brad Washburn achieved so much in later life. I'd highly recommend giving it to adventurous teens!

I've had the pleasure of working with Brad Washburn at the Museum of Science in Boston and have listened to him talk of his experiences many times. This book is a glimpse of the adventurer as a young man. His enthusiasm is infectious and even after 96 years, it's still there.

Brad is one of the last of a breed that the world will not see again.

After you have read this book be sure to read this book to your kids, they'll want to hike Mt Washington next summer!

Washburn: Extraordinary Adventures Of A Young Mountaineer is the true story of a young climber's daring early adventures. Black-and-white photographs sparsely illustrate this captivating, firsthand description of what it is like to brave snow, ice, high altitudes, and the risk of death all for the sake of exhilaration and achievement. An exciting read especially for armchair travelers, and the next best thing to daring to climb a peak oneself.

Noted armor historian and illustrator George Bradford casts a pretty wide net in this entry in his 'World War II AFV Plans' series, providing 69 well-done drawings of some very interesting examples of American 'heavy metal.' Armor buffs, modellers and wargamers will definitely want to pick up AMERICAN ARMORED FIGHTING VEHICLES.

Despite the WWII title, Bradford's coverage of starts in the early 1930s with M1 Armored Cars, M1A1 Light Tanks, M3A1 White Scout Cars and other pre-war AFVs. World War vehicles include basic and modified versions of the Stuart, Sherman, Lee, Pershing and Chaffee along with assorted scout cars, half-tracks, gun motor carriages like the M36, LVTs, 'Weasel' cargo carriers, etc.

My fascination with Bradford's AFV series lies not only with the drawings of mainstay AFVs but also his coverage of more obscure models. For instance, how many are familiar with the 1940 Marmon-Herrington CTMS-1TB1 tank? That was built for the Dutch but used by the U.S. Army for training when Holland fell to the Nazis. Then there is the M31 ARV, Sherman 'Calliope,' T1E3 'Aunt Jemima' mine exploder, M6A1 Heavy tank, T28 Superheavy tank and so on.

A good read for all fans of AFVs.

Mr. Bradford's name is very familiar to old hands in combat vehicle research. In this volume he has collected some of his fine plan drawings. The US military entered WW2 playing "catch up" in combat vehicles, but produced a huge variety of tanks vehicles. Mr. Bradford has helped sort some of the many styles and designs by presenting them in multi-view scale plan drawings. The drawings cover American combat vehicles such as tanks, armored cars, halftracks, Amtracs and self-propelled artillery from before WW2 to the war's end. A limited number of photos are included to support the drawings, but the plans are the essence of the book. Shading of the drawings helps make them easier to read. The plans are presented in popular model building scales. There is even a page of conversion percentages to allow the drawings to be enlarged or reduced to meet the needs of the purchaser. This volume is highly recommended for model manufacturers, model builders, historians and anyone with an interest in the technical development of vehicles.

YOU WON'T BE SORRY THAT YOU PICKED UP THIS BOOK... VERY WELL DONE AND VERY HELPFUL FOR DETAILING AND SCALE..... WOULD LIKE TO SEE A BOOK ON THE SHERMAN DUPLEX-DRIVE ALONG WITH OTHER VARIATIONS USED FOR THE SHEMAN.. BULDOZER,,MINESWEEPER,,ETC..PLUS HOBARTS FUNNIES....

This book has some excellent accounts, and is more then it appears upon first time picking up the book. The author's attitude is witty, straight forward, and surprisingly light hearted.

This book is unique - A must read you have to experience for yourself...

Open Your Minds And This Book...

This is a great book... like Michael Moore, we need more people out there voicing in opinion - Sex, politics and religion seem to be hard topics for American's to discuss... WHY? What are we afraid of? Perhaps it's because we're afraid that what we have been told is not true!!!

Great books to get hooked on reading

I found this entire series to be very powerful and motivating. It is a continuing saga about a woman who rises from nothingness to be a great power and overcomes many obstacles laid before her throughout her life. I cheered for Emma and Paula throughout the stories and I cried for them both also. I don't usually read this style of book but I loved these and have become and great BTB fan!

Cognitive development has been the issue of research and debate for years. Many theories have been proposed in order to effectively describe and explain cognitive development. Two of those theories are Fodor's nativism and Piaget's constructivism.

In the specific book, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, a student of Piaget, is proposing a model of child cognitive development. The author's effort is concentrated on connecting Fodor's nativism (existance of modules,predispostitions in a neonate's mind) and Piaget's theory of constructivism (all aspects of knowledge are part of a domain-general cognitive development and occur during the interaction with the environment).

Karmiloff-Smith supports the existance of innately specified attention biases and predispositions of the human mind which develop through a sequence of subsequent changes.

According to Karmiloff-Smith the child must be born with a set of pre-wired modules that account a variety of cognitive skills. Unlike Fodor, Karmiloff-Smith supports that during development the modules start interacting and working together. Initially, children learn by instinct, or at least "implicitly". Then their thinking develops, and consists of redescribing the world from an implicit form to more and more explicit forms, to more and more verbal knowledge.

The author's model contains a key-idea called "representational redescription". Representational redescription occurs through three stages: first the child learns to become a master of some activity (phase 1); then she analyzes introspectively what she has learned (phase 2); and, finally, she reconciles her performance with her introspection (phase 3). This process involves re-coding information from one representational format to another. The same "redescription" process operates within each module, but not necessarily at the same pace. In each domain, children acquire domain-specific principles that augment the general-purpose principles (such as representational redescription) that guide their cognitive life. Finally, mapping across domains and the innate predespositions is a fundamental achievement by the child's mind.

The book consists of five chapters which describe how cognitive development occurs in five different spheres of mental activity. Karmiloff shows how children start with innate dispositions for language, achieve linguistic mastery and then develop metalinguistic knowledge through representational redescription. Analogously, the child masters the physical objects and later develops a naive Physics of her own (a theory of object behavior). Same applies to Mathematics and to Psychology (children develop a theory of mind that explains the behavior of other individuals).

The main idea of this book lies in the fact that to account for development it is necessary to invoke an integration of aspects of nativism and constructivism, along with a cognitive architecture that enables representational redescription.

Cognitive development has been the issue of research and debate for years. Many theories have been proposed in order to effectively describe and explain cognitive development. Two of those theories are Fodor's nativism and Piaget's constructivism.

In the specific book, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, a student of Piaget, is proposing a model of child cognitive development. The author's effort is concentrated on connecting Fodor's nativism (existance of modules,predispostitions in a neonate's mind) and Piaget's theory of constructivism (all aspects of knowledge are part of a domain-general cognitive development and occur during the interaction with the environment).

Karmiloff-Smith supports the existance of innately specified attention biases and predispositions of the human mind which develop through a sequence of subsequent changes.

According to Karmiloff-Smith the child must be born with a set of pre-wired modules that account a variety of cognitive skills. Unlike Fodor, Karmiloff-Smith supports that during development the modules start interacting and working together. Initially, children learn by instinct, or at least "implicitly". Then their thinking develops, and consists of redescribing the world from an implicit form to more and more explicit forms, to more and more verbal knowledge.

The author's model contains a key-idea called "representational redescription". Representational redescription occurs through three stages: first the child learns to become a master of some activity (phase 1); then she analyzes introspectively what she has learned (phase 2); and, finally, she reconciles her performance with her introspection (phase 3). This process involves re-coding information from one representational format to another. The same "redescription" process operates within each module, but not necessarily at the same pace. In each domain, children acquire domain-specific principles that augment the general-purpose principles (such as representational redescription) that guide their cognitive life. Finally, mapping across domains and the innate predespositions is a fundamental achievement by the child's mind.

The book consists of five chapters which describe how cognitive development occurs in five different spheres of mental activity. Karmiloff shows how children start with innate dispositions for language, achieve linguistic mastery and then develop metalinguistic knowledge through representational redescription. Analogously, the child masters the physical objects and later develops a naive Physics of her own (a theory of object behavior). Same applies to Mathematics and to Psychology (children develop a theory of mind that explains the behavior of other individuals).

The main idea of this book lies in the fact that to account for development it is necessary to invoke an integration of aspects of nativism and constructivism, along with a cognitive architecture that enables representational redescription.

I purchased Wexler's new book to further my understanding of the process thru which a person sheds obsolete religious beliefs -- such as those that were inculcated in childhood -- and then adapts present-day, non-theistic beliefs such as those described in my book "Concepts: A ProtoTheist Quest for Science-Minded Skeptics." I was hoping for a neurobiological elaboration of MD Faber's "The Psychological Roots of Religious Belief" (see my Amazon review of it) but I was only partially gratified.

After a brief description of the human brain, Wexler distinguishes two phases in the development of a person's brain (in my words, not his): In childhood the `seedling' neurons are searching out stimuli that `feed' their growth; what they obtain is how their brain gets `wired' ("our brain is what it eats"). As adults, this `wiring' not only influences what their brain looks for (gestalt) but how it interprets what it finds (projection); we try to reinforce what we learned as children and to adapt our environment to conform to our expectations. What doesn't conform to our mindset is routinely ignored or rejected. So as adults, one has to very deliberately maintain an open-mind to consider ideas that don't conform to one's early mindset, and the more the ideas stretch our mindset, the greater our tendency to reject them. Wexler elaborates extensively on this process citing research to back-up his contentions and examples of the consequences.

What Wexler doesn't elaborate to my satisfaction is how one overcomes the beliefs inculcated in childhood to achieve an unbiased understanding of today's world -- how one `rewires' their brain which can be an arduous process. Better yet would be ways of perpetuating the youthful growth of neurons into adult years to the extent possible (he alludes briefly to this on pages 242-3). He aptly describes immigrants' disorientation even as their children have an easier time adapting. And he describes how the loss of a spouse takes a year or so to accommodate. But he doesn't go into how today's media are affecting our openness to new ideas and other cultures. So I can recommend Wexler's book as a good introduction to the process but I'll have to keep looking for ways folks can let go of obsolete religious beliefs and replace them with an up-to-date ideology.

In Wexler's final chapter he discusses how indigenous and national cultures are being overwhelmed and extinguished by the global reach of the US's culture. But the rapid advances in today's technology are not entirely the doings of the US -- Europe, Japan, Australia and even India and China are encouraging this inevitable juggernaut (as he calls it) while Islamic cultures are resisting, often violently. To avoid violent confrontations he envisions a campus-like model (he's at Yale) where individuals can be exposed to unfamiliar cultures in least threatening ways. Wexler's book is well worth while but its overprice will discourage sales.

The study of psychology has traveled down some interesting roads during the last century. After the long flirtation with the fascinating but flawed theories of psychoanalysis, a dominant theme became the idea that humans were no more than programmable robots. By way of a dozen detours, we then arrived at a new type of robot, one that was pre-programmed by his or her genes with environment contributing a little or a lot, depending upon our own beliefs about human nature. For that was always one of the problems: beliefs, biases and politics all played with the findings of psychology and neurology. For the totalitarian state, the idea that all people are born biologically equal and that, with the right prodding, they could be guided to be good citizens, became an article of faith in some parts of the world. Research, often only half understood, lead to grotesque attempts at social engineering.

Now the pendulum has swung again. Genes do not so much determine our behavior but influence our responses to the environment. During childhood our brains are incredibly plastic. The developing brain requires the right mix of nutrients, sensory, emotional and intellectual stimulation to realize its potential. The lion's share of higher cortical functions are dedicated to social functioning, and children first learn to develop in order to learn the social rules that help them to conform. During adolescence and early adulthood, this conformity is usually replaced by increasing individuality and drives to leave the parental nest. This leads to gradual attempts to shape the environment to fit with the structure of his or her brain and mind. Yet some plasticity remains throughout life, and we are likely able to create new neural connections and even new neurons into old age. And these new neurons and connections develop not only in response to the external environment, but also in response to our thoughts and emotions.

To these three findings - that genes predispose but do not determine; that our brains are malleable and plastic throughout life and third, the impact of our thoughts and beliefs on our brains - we can now add a fourth: the interplay of culture and society on our minds and genes, and the effects of our minds and genes on society.

This is one of a number of recent books that has begun to explore these important themes. Our genes lead - but do not force - us to create our world, and the world that we create has a powerful impact on the development of the next generation, who in turn create the world in their image.

Bruce Wexler is a Professor of Psychiatry at Yale and also directs the Neurocognitive Research Laboratory at the Connecticut Mental Health Center. He has been known for years as one of the most original and creative thinkers in his field. It shows in this book. It is just over 300 small pages and is crammed full of interesting ideas. The book is divided into two sections and five chapters:

Section I: Background: Some Basic Facts about the Human Brain
I. Transgenerational Shaping of Human Brain Function
2. Effects of Sensory Deprivation and Sensory Enrichment on Brain Structure and Function
3. Effects of the Social Environment on Brain Structure and Function

Section II. The Neurobiology of Ideology
4. Self-Preservation and the Difficulty of Change in Adulthood
5. The Meeting of Cultures
After which there is an Epilogue, References and an Index.

Bruce offers a neurologically based hypothesis that may go some way toward explaining some of the sectarian strife that has plagued so much of the world throughout history. He talks about the "neurobiology of ideology," to capture the process by which the human brain molds itself to its environment. Input from the world around us helps fashion our brains, and we in turn shape the world around us, which again shapes and changes the brain, leading to an endless dance between the brain, the mind and society.

This model helps to explain why it is that early life experiences can make it difficult to deal with unfamiliar events, emotions and situations later in life. But the argument also has a small hole in it. The author is an expert in human pathology, so he is interested in the way in which, say, "programming" in childhood may create problems later in life, as the individual encounters new challenges for which he or she is not prepared. As an example, if we think about an individual who was abused in childhood, he or she may have problems accepting and trusting a loving relationship as an adult. The disparity between the new environment and the developed brain may become a potent cause of distress and dysfunction. But that fails to answer another question: why do some people and some societies become distressed by novelty, while others delight in it?

This is an important, fascinating and thought provoking book that may provide answers to some of the problems that we see around us. We just need two more things: proof of his hypotheses and a way of using the model. That being said this work is already changing the way in which we see ourselves, not as the victims or beneficiaries of our genes, but as participants and co-creators of society and ourselves.

Highly recommended.

Asimov does a good job describing the process of the human body's in take and use of chemicals. From the air we breath, the food we eat, the effect of sun on our skin (making Vitamin D) and many more. Step by step explaination. Some with diagram. All simplified and in a language a non-medical person can understand.

Written in 1954, some of the material and current facts in this book are dated. However, Asimov is such a good expository writer that in most cases it does not matter. He covers the basics of proteins, vitamins and enzymes in such a lucid style that it is still possible to learn a great deal of the basics from this book. Since it is designed to explain the fundamentals of the complex chemicals of life and most of the advances since the writing are in the working out of the details, there are very few places where his statements are incorrect.
Asimov starts with the structure of proteins, how they are built, their complex structure and how they act as catalysts throughout the human body. This is followed by explanations of vitamins, how they work, their structure and what happens when the body experiences a shortage. The final sections deal with hormones, where they are produced and how they interact to control the metabolism of the body.
Fifty years after it was written, I can still recommend this book as a primer on the fundamental chemistry of the mammalian body. While many things have changed since then, the quality of the writing trumps nearly all of the obsolescence.

One of my favorite books on the subject -- crisp, clear, clean, and in its way very witty.

I remember when I saw this book in the bookstore (back in the days when "bookstore" meant a physical place). I was torn -- I already owned a copy of the thesis; should I pay good money for a book that might turn out to be just a reprinting of the thesis with a nicer cover? I tried to determine how much was new, but in the end I thought "there's probably only a few hundred people in the world who are really interested in this topic; if I don't buy it, who will?" I'm glad I did buy it; ten years later I still remember the point about the boundary between syntax and semantics being a fluid one; one that computational linguists draw in a different place than programming language designers. The rest of the book is also worth reading, whether or not you've read the thesis.

This was actually a textbook for one of my classes, so right away I didn't have a very strong relationship with it. But it turned out to be one of the more entertaining textbooks I've had in my life - the articles were accessible and easy-to-read, and many issues raised within were relevant to the world around us and our (American) culture. Not your typical beach reading, but I recommend it to anyone who is interested in the way we classify the world around us.

Human Nature Review, Volume 2, 2002, 146
While there has been much talk in the cognitive science literature of "folk psychology" and "folk physics," there has been relatively little discussion of the everyday understanding that most people use to classify and reason about living things. This is surprising, since as bio-logical creatures we spend probably the most important and meaningful segments of our life-cycle interacting with other biological crea-tures-our spouses, children, pets, food, and the like. Douglas Medin and Scott Atran fill this gap in the literature in an interesting way with Folkbiology, a collection of essays featuring such luminaries as Jared Diamond (of Guns, Germs, and Steel fame), Frank Keil and David Hull. These three authors represent, respectively, the fields of anthropology, cognitive science, and philosophy of biology. This gives some indication of the interdisciplinary flavor and range of this collection of original articles. The book's introductory and capstone essays are excellent. Medin and Atran concisely discuss the several issues covered in the book in a helpful manner, and David Hull's concluding essay ("Interdisciplinary Disso-nance") is lively and provocative. All in all, the essays are linked in interesting ways and are uniformly good, with several of them being ex-cellent contributions to the literature. Douglas Medin and Scott Atran have done great service to the ethnobiological com-munity by collecting together these original pieces. Moreover, this work has the potential to more broadly impact anthropology, cognitive science, and philosophy of biology, whether it be by expanding anthropological horizons via a consideration of cross cultural folkbiological taxonomies, providing another example to in-form cognitive scientists' deliberations about cognitive development and the presence of cognitive universals, or by helping philosophers of science settle the ongoing dispute about the exact nature of the term "species." I commend this book to you if you are interested in any of these issues.

This book shows exciting paper plate folding activities that will definitely enhance the understanding of Geometry. The idea of using paper plates (a relatively inexpensive classroom resource) to gain understanding of otherwise complex and abstract figures is unique! There seems to be no age limit to the fascination of the origami-like activity. Thanks to the author, Bradford Hansen-Smith, for showing us your models in Chicago.

This book presents a new way of modeling geometric forms. The idea of using paper plates to form the Origami-like 3-d models is unique! "Children" of all ages will enjoy creating these spatial phenomena. Very Clever.