Bradford Books

Overall Opinion:
Although Simon LeVay brings up many interesting points in his novel, The Sexual Brain, he fails to delve deeper into these ideas. Therefore, the book is well suited for the general reader with a curiosity into the biological aspects associated with human sexuality, but may be simplistic for those who already have neuroscience knowledge. Although I enjoyed reading the book, I finished most of the chapters wanting more. LeVay brushed over most of his thoughts and ideas and I wished he'd gone more in depth. At some points, the language he wrote in came off as almost childish. All of the experiments he used to support his ideas only had brief summaries instead of a more complex discussion of the results and what they might mean. LeVay does include his sources listed by chapter so the more interested readers can pursue the scientific literature that discusses his ideas and the research in the area. Despite these shortcomings, it was still an interesting book and would certainly be a pleasurable read for the general reader with an interest in human sexuality.

Synopsis and Style:
The Sexual Brain looks at how individuals develop into males and females, both in the womb and during growth and puberty, and the effects of many hormones in this process. It also looks at the differences in male and female brains, especially the hypothalamus, as well as courting and maternal behavior. Lastly, LeVay looks at a few theories behind sexual orientation and gender identity. The book is written for the general reader, one with no background knowledge in biology or neuroscience. All discussion has been brought more into laymen's terms and anything readers need to know to understand it is given to them. Each individual chapter can be read and understood independently from the others and the chapters each have summary paragraphs at the end for those readers who don't wish to read the entire section. There is also a glossary of important terms in the back of the book although these terms are also defined as they appear in the text. LeVay also refers readers back to other chapters if he brings up an idea that he's discussed previously, allowing readers to refresh their memory of what he's discussed before.

Specifics Aspects of Review:
Brain Organization and Background (Ch. 1, 2, 4, and 5)
LeVay begins his book with a few chapters covering the background on how we define sex and sexual behavior, why we're sexual creatures as opposed to asexual, and how the brain is organized and studied. This is one of the strongest aspects of the book as LeVay does a very good job making a lot of complex topics accessible to general readers. The background chapters were easy to understand yet still would allow readers to feel they are getting a good overview of the subjects. The argument for the success of sexual reproduction is really interesting and is something I'd never thought of before in terms of its help in the survival of a species. The background on the brain touches on a few of the major structures but focuses on the hypothalamus, the subject of many of LeVay's discussions in later chapters.

Differences Between Males and Females (Ch. 3, 9, 10, and 11)
LeVay looks at many differences between males and females including fetal development, actions of various hormones, and the sizes of multiple brain regions. He examines how the presence or lack of hormones can alter development and also looks at when these hormones are at their peak levels. He also looks at the sexually dimorphic medial preoptic region. Some of the most interesting studies look at how exposure to various levels of hormones during prenatal life or the mother having a difficult pregnancy can lead to more male or female typical behaviors. He also goes into sex differences beyond sex, such as performance level differences between males and females in certain tests. I would have liked to see more discussion on what structurally or hormonally could be behind these differences.

Human Behavior (Ch. 6, 7, and 8)
LeVay includes chapters in The Sexual Brain on human behavior in sexual intercourse, courtship, and maternal behavior towards offspring. In the chapter on intercourse, LeVay discusses the hormones and neuronal pathways that are in action during sex, leading to erection, ejaculation, and orgasm as well as lordosis in rats. Although interesting, I felt this chapter didn't fit as well with the other chapters of the book as it was less about sexuality and more about the pure act of sex. In the chapter on courtship, LeVay looks only at studies of birds and monkeys and the parts of their courtship such as birdsongs and eye contact. This isn't tied back very well to courtship in humans. The hormonal changes during pregnancy that affect maternal behavior are very interesting and LeVay looks at multiple studies involving hormone injections into non-pregnant rats and the resultant behaviors. He also touches on the evolutionary split of the hormone vasotocin into the two hormones vasopressin and oxytocin since oxytocin plays a role in orgasm, giving birth, and suckling.

Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (Ch. 12 and 13)
The Sexual Brain concludes with two chapters that address what might be the biological roots behind homosexuality and transsexuality. This was the section of the book where I most wished LeVay had created a more in depth discussion. There is much controversy surrounding these two ideas and what leads to them yet the book just skims the surface behind some potential biological roots. There are some interesting studies involving twins, including some who were separated shortly after birth, but some of these are still inconclusive. He spends a lot of time on studies looking at the regions of the brain that differ in size between men and women and how the brains of homosexuals compare. I wish LeVay had looked more at the observation that lesbians and gay men tend to be less consistently right handed than the general population and what that could mean in regards to developmental differences. Also, LeVay informs readers in his introduction that he himself is a homosexual and it would have been interesting to hear more on his own opinions behind homosexuality. There is currently no strong evidence for a genetic component for transsexuality but LeVay does mention a disorder known as 5-alpha-reductase deficiency in which individuals experience an apparent sex change at puberty, appearing to change from female to male. Only a short discussion is devoted to what the gender identities of these individuals could tell us about the roots of transsexuality.

Recommendation:
As I've said, I did enjoy reading The Sexual Brain despite the fact that I wanted more details and depth because I am not a general reader when it comes to topics of biology and neuroscience. That being said, this would be a really good book for general readers wishing to learn a little more about the roots of sexual behavior and feelings. LeVay is very successful in appealing to the needs of this type of audience and book gives a good first taste of these ideas. More knowledgeable readers can enjoy LeVay's discussion but need to be prepared for the fact that it is much more general than what they may be used to or expecting.

Levay has a wonderful handle on sexuality as it relates to the brain. A well documented discussion on what is known about sex, sexuality, and the brain. I referenced it in my own book, "The Care and Feeding of your Brain" Giuffre, DiGeronimo, Career Press 1999. Ken Giuffre MD

This book summarizes research on sexual behavior and the brain for general readers. Topics covered include: why most organisms use sex for reproduction, pre- and post-natal hormones and sexual development, brain structure, hormones and sexual behavior, instinct and courtship behaviors, hormones and behavior during pregnancy, sexual dimorphism in behavior and brain structures, sexual orientation and genetics, and gender identity and hormones. Research cited in the book involves a variety of organisms, from yeasts to birds, from rats to humans. End material includes sources and suggestions for further reading, a glossary and an index.

LeVay's style is informal to the point of being flippant. For example, in a discussion pointing out the importance of a mothering practice amongst rats for future sexual behavior (licking the anogenital region to promote urination), LeVay launches into a discussion of whether the practice is uncouth, contributing to our feelings of revulsion towards rats. He goes on to point out that even attractive animals can have unattractive behaviors, such as koala mothers who feed their offspring feces. In a book of this nature, considering a normal animal behavior in a subjective light such as this is inappropriate, and emphasizing it by going off the topic to an unrelated behavior in another animal, that isn't even related to the main topic at hand (sexual behaviors) is going way overboard. LeVay may consider such an approach humorous, but it takes away from the credibility of the remaining material.

Rather than present a simple collection of facts about hormones, behaviors, and the brain, there is a central, underlying argument, and each chapter builds toward this argument, that there is a hormonal, if not genetic explanation for homosexual behaviors in humans. The evidence of hormonal effects on animal behavior is very clear, and the examples that LeVay provides are quite interesting. I still come away from the book with the feeling however, that I would have preferred LeVay to present his argument more explicitly from the beginning of the book rather than taking such an implicit (and almost sneaky) approach.

I think it is a little bit outdated, I didn't find much of innovation inside

Like most powerful theories this one is simple. It describes a mathematical model that mimics some aspects of human memory. The book is also refreshingly concise for an academic work.

I'm biased since I have worked with Pentti on his Sparse Distributed Memories at NASA Ames. I would highly recommend you reading his book since he is very careful and general in his use of statistics of large bit vectors. I am continually amazed at how much can be extracted from such vectors and the richness of their properities. SDM is similar to associative memories but simpler in form but just as general. Work is continuing at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) on Dr. Kanerva's ideas.

I liked this book because it not only gives a conceptual tour d'horizon on the new field of embodied cognitive science/New AI, but also provides tons of concrete (programming) problems to work with. The companion web site contains additional programming examples for download. Overall, this book gave me the much needed realistic perspective on this new field.

I'm a masters student in general CS doing a semester of school at the University of Sussex in England. One of the courses that I took used Understanding Intelligence as a reccomended text. The book covers in detail a lot of aspects of embodied artificial intelligence and of some of the conflicts between embodied AI and traditional symbolic AI. The book is easy to read and, at least for me, quite worth it. The only problem that I found was that the books website is obscurely documented in the book and is quite low budget. Other than that it's a great introduction to the field; I found it much easier to assimilate than the lectures from my class.

The new book UNDERSTANDING INTELLIGENCE by Pfeifer and Scheier contains many interesting ideas and is well worth reading though rather long (at nearly 700 pages). In many ways it is similar to the claim that "intelligence is a kludge" but this time more of a hardware kludge. There is also a substantial return to behaviorism though the references are missing. Perhaps the core belief of the book is that "intelligence is...a large number of parallel loosely coupled processes" (page 303). But it seems to me that if the modules are too loosely coupled the system can not be successful as a universal approximator and therefore will not be Turing equivalent. It might be possible to decompose the performance system of an agent into such loosely coupled modules (like Norvig and Russell, AI a Modern Approach, page 202) but for it to learn there must be extensive coupling to most if not all modules. While I agree that sensory motor contact with the world is what grounds symbols there is no need for every agent to perform its own grounding of every symbol. In fact there are modules (agents) in a typical subsumption architecture that are not, themselves, connected to either sensors or actuators. I do like the idea that intelligence is related to some niche. Humans and AIs may not occupy the same niche. Machines are better at statistics than humans while humans are better at emotion. The criticism of GOFAI in UNDERSTANDING INTELLIGENCE is often unfounded.

As advertised this book has "AFV Plans" and not much else -- but this is its strength. It is a straight forward book of line drawings of German armored vechicles from the 1930s into the early years of the war. It has the well known and the obscure; tanks, armored cars, self-propelled guns, etc. Also of note is that all are drawn to scale (either 1:35 or 1:48) and the book includes a chart for how much to reduce or enlarge the drawings for other scales.

This is a niche book for the specialist. There is very little in the way of explanation for the vechicles in the book. In fact, most of the drawn vechicles don't have any kind of written explanation or history; and the book doesn't list the technical specs. You'll need other books on German armored vehicles to flesh out the information presented here.

Why do I recommend the book? It is probably the most complete book available on the many and varied armored vehicles used by the Germans in the early part of the war especially for the price. Many times when I'm reading WWII histories, or playing WWII wargames, I find references to various armored vehicles and I was looking for a simple to use, yet complete reference, so I could visualize what I was reading about. The vast majority of books out there address the famous and common vehicles (Panther, Tiger, PZIII, PZIV, etc) but this book has drawings of the more obscure to include French tanks pressed into German service and others.

While the four views themselves are outstanding the organization of their presentation just didn't seem to make sense though it does seem to be vaguely chronological. It would have been much more helpful to group them into tanks, SP's, armored cars, etc. and then to have grouped all marks of a specific vehicle together. I found myself continually backtracking to compare, for example, late model Panzer II's with the earlier models. To do this I basically had to flip through the whole book over and over again.

And I was expecting a lot. George Bradford is one of the best technical artists that I know of, and he didn't disappoint me in the least. I have really been looking for some good reference drawings of WWII vehicles. Most books have only a handful, and don't always include 4 views. This series of books really delivers on excellent accurate drawings. There are very few comments or photographs in it, just high quality line drawing goodness.

These are really indispensable for the serious WWII modeler. Whether you build plastic kits or create them digitally, these reference drawings are a Godsend. I use line drawings like these to create vehicles with a 3D modeling program for an online game.

There were a few models I would have liked to see that weren't included, but overall there are plenty of useful drawings for me in this book. I guess that not everybody will be 100 percent happy with the selections the author made, but who could really complain for the price?

I checked out a free example of a Pz IVE on the authors website, and I was getting ready to order some of these drawings online from him, but this series of books will save me a lot of money. Though I am planning on buying some of the other drawings that aren't in this series.

If you're not sure about purchasing, just search the book and examine the quality of the drawings. I'm sure you will be more than satisfied. As for me, I'm ordering the rest of the books in this series now!

This is an updated, expanded version of the classic political history originally authored solely by William Willcox. Though more comprehensive and improved, the original stands better as a concise, well-written account of the period. Numerous language changes, presumably to make the book more appealing to college-age textbook readers abound. For example: "Thus Frederick was saved from the ring of his enemies and saw the chance to triumph over Austria, while Spain and France were surfeited with defeats." is changed in the updated version to the ungainly: "Thus in Europe Frederick was saved from the ring of his enemies and won a chance to triumph over Austria, while overseas the Bourbon powers suffered one defeat after another." Get the original and save yourself 100 or so pages, unless you have to read it for college, in which case you'll need the one authored by both Willcox and Arnstein.

I am a student at the University that Prof. Arnstein, the co-author of this book and the author of the next book, teaches at. I used both this and it's follow up, "Britain: Yesterday and Today," for classes here at the university as well as my own knowledge and background reasearch. The book is well written with an excellent comedic edge that captivates even the most light-hearted historical reader. While it covers a long period of history is a relativly short number of pages, it does it well. I would suggest this to any one looking for a little knowledge of the time period without having to get a Ph.D. in history to do so!

One nice feature of the book is that it features full color photos which many other books lack. I've used many text books here at the University for English history and I keep comming back to this one anytime I need to check a fact or brush up on an event.

Wish there were more in the book about design professionals who consult with other professionals--how to manage your prime? I wish there was a similar book for landscape architect.

Starting your own design firm is a scary proposition. Having a trusted advisor can help make the transition from employee to being your own boss a little less intimidating. Piven and Perkins do just that in this well written book, which covers the essentials--hey, that's what they called it--of starting a firm without getting bogged down in minutiae.
You'll get some solid advice on planning, financing, and how to handle some of the more delicate issues of starting your own firm--such as how to represent work you did for others when marketing your new business. The book also includes model business plans and a basic (very basic) overview of accounting principles that even an architect can understand. Worth reading if you're entertaining any notions about starting your own shop.

My 7 year old loves the Library of Doom series. He was struggling to find books that interested him, and with the great typsetting and illustrations, LOD has caught his attention. He reads them quick and I am so glad to see that he can read when he finds something to interest him!! These are not literary greats, but they are great for getting attention, and keeping a child hooked on reading! Great Series!!!

The mysterious Librarian, the sworn enemy of dangerous books, must come to the rescue of those threatened by ancient curses. This entry is extremely fast paced, with edgy artwork and clever text structure which should highly appeal to the struggling reader or those reluctant readers who want a fast-paced quick read. Not great literature, for sure, but a book that will gather no dust on library shelves.

This book presents the current and mor well-known models of cognition in the area cognitive science. This includes descriptions of both symbolic and connectionist models (e.g. ACT-R, SOAR, ART-MAP, MAC/FAC, etc.), written by the authors who developed them. However, each chapter presents a somewhat condensed version of each model, so some (but not all) of the technical details are ommitted. Overall, the book can function as an extensive introduction to contemporary methods and issues in cognitive modelling, or as a reference book for those more familiar with the field.

This book could be considered to be a collection of articles on the `computational theory of mind.' Although the articles are somewhat out of date, due to the advances in neuroscience and cognitive science that have occurred since the time of publication of the book, it does serve as a good motivation for the understanding of more recent developments. I did not read all of the articles in the book, and so my review will be confined to the ones that I did.

The article on ACT in chapter 2 is basically a theory of cognition that is based on recursion. Referring to ACT as a "simple theory of complex cognition", John Anderson, the author of the article, wants to simulate the manner in which humans develop recursive programs. The machine that is to simulate this makes use of `production rules,' in its knowledge base, which the author claims is exhaustive enough to produce complex cognition. To produce true machine intelligence, all one has to do is to tune these production rules and make use of them as needed. As the author describes it, the original ACT theory was based on human associative memory, but the one described in this article is called ACT-R, and can simulate adaptive behavior in the presence of a noisy environment. The author describes various simulations using ACT-R, and concludes that it is sensitive to prior information and to information about what is appropriate response to the situation it finds itself in. The author stresses more than once the simplicity of the ACT-R system: it is able to encode data from the environment as declarative knowledge, encode the changes in the environment as procedural knowledge, and encode the statistics of this knowledge use in the environment.

Another highly interesting article is the one by Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky on the application of optimization theory to linguistics. Called `optimality theory' by the authors in their extensive research on the topic, in the article they discuss the relations between optimality in grammar and optimization in neural networks. The authors discuss with great clarity the role that constraints play in the construction of linguistic structures, and the fact that these constraints typically conflict with each other. This conflict between grammatical constraints must thus be managed by a successful grammatical architecture. Optimality theory asserts that these constraints are universal in the sense that they are present in every language. The connection of optimality theory with neural networks arises when one is interested in finding out if the properties of optimality theory can be explained in terms of fundamental principles of cognition. The computational theory of neural networks the authors believe holds some clues on these properties. In order to make the connection with grammatical issues, as abstract as they are, and because neural networks are highly nonlinear dynamical systems, one must find a way of encapsulating the complicated behavior of neural networks. The authors accomplish this by the use of Lyapunov functions, which for reasons of consistency of terminology they call `harmony functions.' For those neural networks admitting a harmony function, the initial activation pattern flows through the network to construct a pattern of activity that maximizes "harmony." Most interestingly, the harmony function for a neural network performs the same function as does the mechanisms needed for well-formed grammar. The patterns of activation are thus a mathematical analog of the structure of linguistic representations. However, the authors are careful to note that not every weighting scheme for the neural network will give a possible human language. It is here where the constraints play an essential role in limiting the possible linguistic patterns and relations.

The article by Keith Holyoak and Paul Thagard discusses the construction of a correspondence between a source analog and of a target. This is the so-called analogical mapping, which is constructed using a collection of structural, semantic, and pragmatic constraints. In the view of the authors, the concept of analogy can be broken down into four components, namely the selection of a source analog, the actual mapping, an analogical inference (transfer), and the actual learning that takes place. The authors omit discussion of the last component in this article. The finding of the correspondences between the two analogs can result in a combinatorial explosion, and so use is made of appropriate constraints. These constraints consist of those that exemplify structural consistency, those of semantic similarity, and lastly of pragmatic centrality. The theory of analogical mapping that the authors propose is governed by these constraints. They discuss the ACME (Analogical Constraint Mapping Engine) algorithm as one that constructs a network of units representing mapping hypotheses and eventually converges to a state that represents the best mapping. They list several applications of ACME, such as radiation problems, attribute mappings, chemical analogies, and the classical `farmer's dilemma' problem. ACME was also able to simulate a number of empirical results related to human analogical reasoning. The analogical mapping they discuss is most powerful in a specific domain however. This domain-specificity is a typical restriction for most of the efforts in learning theory and artificial intelligence.

Brad's book is strong on concepts and illustrations. The book is well-written and reads like Aesop's fables, i.e. Brad tells you a story and you walk away with the idea. I wish Prof. Cornell could add an audio version of this book. Very few people can explain complicated financial economic concepts as well as Brad can. An audio version of this book can make more people enjoy Brad's lecturing talent, while absorbing the gist of corporate valuation sketched in this book. That's right, sketched ... :-)

A great summary on the conventional wisdom about the equity risk premium. It covers -and combine- theory and evidence in a very reasonable balance. A couple of warnings. First, it puts the same emphasis on several alternative explanations, not always comparing and weighting them. Second, the book has some typos being probably the most important that of page 103 (equation 3.2). Nevertheless, a must have for every finance practitioner.

I chose this book for my investments class because it is an easy read for my international students, but I quickly found out that the text and the problem solutions are full of careless arithmetic errors. I strongly advise any professor not to use the problem solutions provided in the instructor's manual. About 20% of them contain stupid mistakes. Also, don't plan on using the PowerPoints in the instructor's manual. The chatty writing style that works so well in the text has been cut and pasted into the PowerPoints (in some cases literally) creating a dense and over wordy presentation. Finally the authors place a high priority on giving students an early start to simulated securities trading. This is very laudable but it means they provide information on reading quotes for securities well before they explain the nature of those securities. This might work for a well known security like a common stock, but it's quite meaningless to explain quotations for options when students don't have a clue about what they are buying or selling. I'm still using this book, but continue to be frustrated by its limitations.

The book is written in a simple language. The author presented many real world examples. It is an excellent text-book!