Bradford Books

This is 2 Volume 2000pg Tome on Vision. It's comprehensive and covers most of the topics. The physiology, neuroanatomy, psychology, and imaging (i.e. fMRI, EEG, VEPs) of Vision are covered. There is a large section of 200 pages devoted exclusively to Visual Psychophysics. Very well respected authors contribute to these to volumes, giving it an international flavor. The book is meant as a reference text. There is a very extensive bibliography at the end of each chapter. It is a reference work so you can look up the chapter on MST (heading perception), V1 (primary visual cortex), MT (motion perception), ganglion cell recordings, retinal dark current & ion channels, illusions, and others. It will go into good depth in most areas. If you're in Vision Research, it is not enough, you will need more specialized books and journals (i.e. Machine Vision, Vision Research, Eye Movements). The format reminds me of the journal format for Nature Reviews Neuroscience. You better believe I am going to keep it in my library. The weakness of this set of books is that it does not cover Machine Vision, robotics, electronics, new technologies in vision, and it does not have an experimental methods section. Once reading, it can overwhelm you, so write down a list of 2 topics to look up each time you set-up to read it. This will easily be a standard reference for 7-10 years.

A great idea and a somewhat disappointing result. This book is missing one more volume that should have covered the anatomy of the vertebrate visual system. For some reason the editors have chosen to ignore a wealth of information on the anatomy of the amphibian, avian and mammalian vertebrate visual systems, without which visual neurophysiology cannot be fully understood or appreciated. Less specialized books, such as "Comparative Vertebrate Neuroanatomy" by Butler and Hodos, cover visual neuroanatomy much better than this two-volume set. As a comprehensive reference book on visual neurophysiology, "The Visual Neurosciences" (which should have been called "Visual Neurophysiology") may well deserve a place in the neuroscientist's library.

Dealing with large families creates many characters. The story had a good plot. Near the end of the book, there was a feeling of dropped or unexplained issues.~Affaire de Coeur

I couldn't put this book down. I thought it was well written, and was very said at the ending only because the story was over with. Barbara made her main character totally believable and I was rooting for him throught out the book. I had no trouble keeping people straight and understood completely why sometimes the main character was called Ned and sometimes Edward. This is a great book and I look forward to reading more from this author.

Barbara Taylor Bradford at her best once again. No one seems to write family dynasty stories like she does! Bravo. I hope this continues to be a series of books of at least four or five.

How did this book get published? I am angry that I actually spent money to buy it. If BTB wanted to write about King Edward IV, why didn't she? This book was a total misfire. The characters are wooden (she tells...doesn't show). The hero has few redeeming features. The reader really doesn't care about or relate to him. The plot went nowhere. The author added historical events throughout the book. It seemed she was writing a "preachy" history lesson for a class.
One star is too generous for this book. I doubt that I will ever buy another BTB book, if this is an indication of her writing.

First of all, I only gave this book one star because no stars wasn't an option. This is one of the most badly-written books I've ever had the misfortune to waste money on! I nearly slipped into a coma trudging through it. I got sick and tired of reading about how tall, handsome, irrestible and perfect Edward was and the gushing descriptions of his daughters weren't much better. I think BTB had about a hundred ideas for this book and couldn't decide which one to use so she just went with all of them. It was a mess. I was glad when it was over. Unfortunately I had bought the sequel at the same time so felt obliged to read it just in case it was an improvement - sadly, it wasn't. But that's another review. Don't waste your money.

I found this book very interesting and could not put it down. It is amazing what women had to endure and how they were used as political pawns without any concern for their feelings. Overall Lucrezia's life was quite sad but she certainly was not the ruthless person most people think she is. Some of her other family members certainly were and therefore tarnished her name as well.

I think the main thing I came away with after reading this is that Lucrezia Borgia, she of rampant rumors of poisoning, incest and other sins, was not nearly as interesting as historians have generally made her out to be! That's actually a compliment to the author, in a way, thanks to her de-construction of the Borgia mythos. The legend around Lucrezia is that she went through three husbands, had incestuous relations with both her father, Pope Alexander VI, and her brother Cesare, and engaged in enough sexual exploits to earn her the tag of Rome's `greatest whore', but this has been mostly exaggerated dramatics typical of Renaissance Italy's colorful and competitive historians.

Exaggerations are always tipped with truth, of course, which is what makes them so believable. Lucrezia did go through three husbands in a scandalously fast-paced fashion, but it was due more to her father's and brother's ambitions than her own. Her first husband was forced to falsely claim impotence in order to have their marriage annulled when Alexander felt he was no longer politically useful. The second husband, also once favored and then deemed to be a hindrance, was rather spectacularly murdered at the behest of Lucrezia's brother Cesare. Her third husband, Alfonso d' Este, lasted the longest, knocked her up quite a bit, and even managed to outlive her. As for the incest speculations that have long swirled around the Borgias, most legitimate Renaissance scholars put no stock in them whatsoever. While it's true that Alexander was close to his daughter and very carefully orchestrated her personal life, he did so purely out of personal ambition. Unpleasant, perhaps, but certainly the norm of that period. Daughters were little more than political tools and pawns. Turns out that accusing someone of incest in those days was one of the worst insults one could deliver about another, so Alexander's and Cesare's many enemies enjoyed flinging that one out there, much like a modern "yo momma!" epithet.

Bradford is meticulous in her description of this time of enormous upheaval in the region, with Venetians fighting Florentines and the French taking sides, and nobles and politicians rubbing each other out on a regular basis (hey, there's a reason Italy is the birthplace of the Mafia!). Lucrezia's life story is told primarily through her correspondence - to family, children, friends, and lovers - and while it's a valuable and fascinating firsthand glimpse into her life, it tends to come off a little dry and dull. Still, for any collector of Renaissance history it's a solid addition and I would recommend it for that reason.

Although I am a lover of history (especially medieval and renaissance) and am also a medieval reenactor I found this book to be beyond even my tolerance for detail and minutia and I abandoned it without finishing. Perhaps the title should have been Lucrezia's household inventory or Lucrezia and Giuliana's tedious hair washing routine. Please do yourself a favor, save your money, and find some other book on the lady and her life and times.

The prose in this book drags itself from page to page with all the appeal of a wet blanket. I received it as a present - very much looking forward to a 'good read'. Instead, I found the prose dull, the story disappointingly assembled and the insights into the gusto of the Borgia's lives were meagre. The stage is littered with characters with few attempts made to sift them for the reader into categories of importance.

One of the most peculiar experiences, was my difficulty remembering what I had read the previous day when beginning a new section. Too dull and narratively undifferentiated to be worth bothering with in my opinion.

ok, I admit it, the book is kind of dry. There is a lot of dates, names and references to archives and documentation. It does not read like a novel, nor does it conjure images of a renaissance play...It is not, at least superficially, an entertaining read.

However, if you are into this sort of thing, and somewhat addicted to the history channel, so be it. Knowing the myths and rumor surrounding Lucrezia, this book provides a candid look that is base on solid research. It makes her seem human, although less exotic than we would like. For people who are interested in the "truth" of Lucrezia (at least what we can confirm or speculate from the research), this is worth a read.

From a Mothers point of view this story was a heartbreaking time in the life of someone who had so much going for her. The realism displayed during the grief, depression and months of trying to go on could only be written by someone who was close to the trials Mal went through. I don't think I'll ever forget the song that still rings in my mind that was part of the story. I felt the closure came when the children and her husband appeared in her dream and she was finally able to bury the ashes. I thought this was a good book and movie!

I read A Woman of Substance, and liked the book, so when I came across Everything to Gain, by the same author, I expected a good read.

I was extremely disappointed. The book was not worth the time. There is nothing to hold your interest - no strong characters or character development, no interesting plot, no sharp writing or snappy dialogue.

In short, a waste of time...

The Hamish Macbeth books on tape weren't available yet at the library, so I took out this book on tape, since I loved Woman of Substance (movie and book) and found Sudden Change of Heart good enough on tape to entertain me during physical exercise and menial labor. I made it almost all the way to the end of cassette 1 out of 11.

Oh my dog, this book is so bad. The adverbs are reminiscent of an old bodice ripper, where you will find such overused and misused gems as irretrievably and irrevocably. This book's first section uses my personal trash-novel favorite: imperceptibly. If the story is told in the first person by Mal, how would she know that the man on the other end of the phone sighed imperceptibly?

This was my first Barbara Taylor Bradford Book and it will be my my last.

What an absolutely boring book! My grandmother could tell a better story than this. What was Harper Collins thinking about when they published this book? This book was made into a Movie? Good Grief!

I thought this book was so badly written that
a)I couldn't read anymore than the first half
b)I kept laughing outloud
What a load of tosh. I have only ever read one other Barbara Taylor Bradford and the was about 20 years ago, the well known 'Woman Of Substance' and I remember absolutely loving it. I can't say I even liked this one.
The characters are so one dimensional and frankly BORING. The description and the dialogue are saccharine sweet. The way Mal talks about her husband and her marriage and her life in general is so idealistic it made me want to puke.Anyone who thinks this is a good read must have a brain the size of a gnat and haved the mental age of 12.I've written more interesting shopping lists.

Beats around the bush. Very wordy. Extremely politically bias. No answers in back of book for problems. This book does not teach what is, but what should be. Normative Economics at its worst.

I don't normally bother to review books, but the comments on this book are so bizarre I feel the need to respond. This is a textbook for the intermediate macroeconomics level. Someone coming to this book with no economics background at all might find the book hard going in places, but that is to be expected; it is not intended as a piece of popular writing on economics.

I am very familiar with intermediate macroeconomic textbooks -- indeed, I wrote ancillary material for one of the leading textbooks currently on the market -- and I think DeLong's textbook is one of the best books around. For many topics it is *the* best book.

When I first read the reviews of this book I (also) was puzzled by the great divergence of opinion expressed among some reviewers. After purchasing it (on the recommendation of a professor of economics at UCSC)I found it to be quite a good and relatively clear introduction to macroeconomics. This is from someone who finds many of the economic explanations on Wikipedia quite baffling.

However I have a theory about the cause of the difference of opinion expressed by the reviewers: Although the book claims to only require algebra for understanding the math, I believe that a good familiarity with calculus is very helpful in interpreting much of the mathematical explanation of macroeconomics. This is NOT because the book uses the obvious language of calculus ("derivatives" and "integrals"), but rather because it extensively uses the language of functions--and calculus is generally the first math course that more extensively exercises one's thinking about functions. Macroeconomics is not just about "solving equations", it is about understanding functions and how they interact with each other. Although you could grope through this book without familiarity with calculus I think that my background of calculus helped a lot in making it easier to digest many of the mathematical explanations.

Nevertheless many of his other non mathematical explanations in the earlier part of the book should reward even those without such a background. I thought that is explanations on many topics was quite clear and complete.

This intermediate level textbook does an excellent job of covering the subject. DeLong writes well. The book requires the requisite introductory macroeconomics background and some facility with algebra and mathematical functions. Those not possessing that background will most likely find themselves frustrated because of their lack of preparation. Anyone who wants to take their knowledge of macroeconomics to the next level should take a look at the book as a potential guide and source.

I took Professor Olney's Intermediate Macro class in Berkeley. We used the 1/e of the textbook along with her study guide. Despite the fact that the first edition was filled with typos and mathematical errors (which have been fixed in the 2/e), the intuition, the explanations, and the graphs were clear.

But what truly separates this textbook from every other intermediate macro textbook is the MPRF-PC model that replaces the AD-AS model that you find in most textbooks.

There are several major flaws in the AD-AS model. First, it uses the price level as the adjustment mechanism to equilibrium output. Second, the AD curve assumes a money supply target.

In the United States and in industrialized world, the key variable to emphasize is the inflation rate and NOT the price level. In addition, the Fed uses an interest rate target and NOT a money supply target.

Delong and Olney's book eliminates the silly assumptions that made sense to use 20 years ago, and uses more realistic assumptions to model a complex economy like the United States. There is no other intermediate macro textbook in the market that teaches the Monetary Policy Reaction Function and Phillips Curve model as clearly as Delong and Olney. Period.

Mundy's book is very useful. It does list the many name reactions and their mechanisms. It has more examples of the use of those reactions and literature citations than Jie Jack Li's Name Reactions: A Collection of Detailed Reaction Mechanisms. However, it is very limited and not very detailed when compared to Kurti's and Czako's Strategic Applications of Named Reactions in Organic Synthesis, in my opinion, the best book of this kind available.

However, there is one factor that keeps Mundy's book close to my hands: the name reagents section. In this section, the name reagents are shown with common names and the reactions that are most associated with those reagents. The mechanisms for those reactions is also shown. I find this is very useful.

It you intend to buy only name reactions book, I can't recommend this one be it. But, if you intend to get two, I think this one will find its uses.

When I wrote an editorial review for Mundy's book I really thought it was the best one on the market. At about the same time "Strategic Applications of named reactions in organic synthesis" by Kurti and Czako (forward by Corey and Intro by Nicolaou) came out, and that book is AWESOME. Go check it out. We even use it as a text book in upper division organic synthesis courses.

It is good, with lot of examples and references. However, I did find some of the reactions and reagents have been ommitted. besides there is very little explanations for certain reaction mechanisms. But I would recommend this book to all synthetic organic chemists.

I bought this book as required for my organic synthesis course. I am dissapointed with how little detail is given for each mechanism. Also the examples given are also very difficult to work out and no solution is given for each example.

Tetris move over Mundy's got a new game. How do you make science fun? You make a game of it. This is exactly what we do in our lab, we use this book as a game. We open up to a random page to see if there is an error, and most times (the guy shouting behind is saying every time) we are not dissapointed. This book is useful in that it has contemporary examples, where March does not, however, the number of errors makes this book useless for somebody who is trying to learn the material for the first time. Zero stars for accuracy, five stars for entertainment.
Here is the Gauntlet!!!
Page 425 (meta photoaddition) TL 44 2011. product- wrong structure
Page 365 (Knoevenagel condensation)TL,45, 3999. Ugi-Knoevenagel Rxn starting material aniline derivative does not have a NITROGEN.
Page 428 (Michael addition) JACS, 125, 15837. Not a Dicobalt product. It is a ester. Page 429 Robinson annulation Not a Michael addition
Page 487 (pauson-khand)OL, 5,3491. SM is an allene so the product is missing an alkene in the seven membered ring.
Page 176 (Corey-Fuchs reaction) Seyferth protocol: reasonance structures are wrong. They are missing a hydrogen atom. Thus the rest of the mechanism is wrong.
Page 235 (Evans chiral Auxillaries) Typos of Me and Et
Page 44 (Arndt-Eistert homologation) It is supposed to be a carbene so why is there two lone pairs. The Kowalski Ester Homologation: Should be LiCHBr2 not LiCHBR2 and after the rxn arrow the addition component should be CHBr2 addition not CH2Br.
Page 459 (Nenitzescu indole synthesis) If it is a indole synthesis they all should have indole products. One product is drawn as an indene. Also in the solid phase example the intermediate is wrong. The solid phase linker is connected to the amide not the aromatic ring.
Page 47 (Aza-cope) It's supposed to be formic acid quenching the rxn not peroxyformic acid.
Page 445 (Myers-Saito cyclization) Jacs 118, 10783. Starting material has 17 carbons - product has 18 carbons. One of them is wrong
peace
craig stamp

While the title is a bit misleading (this is not a history per se, so much as a collection of papers of historical interest), this book contains a wealth of good material for those researching behavior-based robotics. As the book is a collection of Brooks' papers on the subject, it gives good insights into his approach -- although it does include a significant amount of redundant text (as you'd expect, many of the papers share "boilerplate" treatments of some subject matter).

Still, "Cambrian Intelligence" is both thought-provoking (to those primarily acquainted with "classical" AI approaches), and well worth the price tag -- if only for the convenience factor (vs. rounding up and printing out all the included papers).

This book is a collection of the "best" / most cited Brooks papers. Basically it covers what is considered the core of papers that got behaviour based robotics rolling. Almost all papers have appeared as journal papers earlier and this is merely a convenient collection of these.

For anyone working on mobile robotics these papers are a must. I.e. everyone ought to know these papers, both because they are thought provoking and widely referenced. For anyone with access to a library it might be an overkill to pay for this book. Go to the library and read the papers.

The real disappointment here is the lack of a historical perspective. These papers are all 5-15 years old. They strongly influenced the robotics world when they were published. The examples are interesting, but for REAL everyday robot systems the world is more complex than indicated by Brooks. It would have been interesting to see a final chapter that discussed lessons and limitations of the approach when seen in a historical perspective. Brooks is now building a humanoid system (Cog) and one wonders how many of the behaviour based ideas made it into Cog? Probably not as many as this book might indicate.

If you have a library, use you money on an upto date book! If not, you ought to acquire it for a view of the history.

This book is essentially a collection of several "classic" papers by Brooks on behavior-based AI/robotics. He has added some nice historical commentary to the papers, which helps bind the book together. If you have been following Brooks' research, you may find that you already have most of this material, but this book is still a nice compilation, and is also a good introduction to behavior-based AI.

This book presents a series of papers (technical and philosophical) on an approach to AI (specifically, robotics), that basically denies the need for the existence of a 'cognition' system. I like this approach because of it's simplicity, and it's philosophical implications. To the reader that was expecting a book on the history of AI: Yes, the title could be read like that, but I think the intent was to say "This is the history of a new way of looking at things", not "This is the early history of the entire field of AI"

This book is absolutely misleading! It is not a 'book' in the first place, but only a compendium of papers. The subtitle "an early history of the new AI" is ridiculous, for there is no history, not even a personal account of it! Even if Brooks is doing good science, I still think that most intelligent readers should go for the papers instead of paying for the very same thing in book form, because that is exactly why papers exist in the first place.

Anyway, these are the references that form such "early history of AI":

Chapter 1. A robust layered control system for a mobile robot, IEEE Journal of Robotics and Automation 2, 1986, 14-23.

Chapter 2. A robot that walks: emergent behaviors from a carefully evolved network. Neural Computation 1, 1989, 253-262.

Chapter 3. Learning a distributed map representation based on navigation behaviors. Proceedings of the 1990 USA-Japan Symposium on Flexible Automation, Kioto, Japan, 499-506.

Chapter 4. New approaches to robotics. Science 253, 12227-1232, 1991.

Chapter 5. Intelligence without representation. Artificial Intelligence 47, 139-160, 1991.

Chapter 6. Planning is just a way of avoiding figuring out what to do next. MIT AI Lab Working Paper 303, September 1987.

Chapter 7. Elephants don't play chess. Robotics and Autonomous Systems 6, 1990, 3-15.

Chapter 8. Intelligence without reason. Proceedings of the 1991 IJCAI, 569-595.

I just thought other readers might not appreciate being deceived the way I was...

AL

Prof Wegner says that "it takes a lot of nerve" to make the proposals this book makes. I say, it takes grandiosity, ignorance, naivete, arrogance. (I guess one can't give a book zero stars.) The author ignores several centuries of criticisms of scientism by major thinkers, and all the current commentary on objectivity, absolutism, etc., by, for example, Barbara Harris, Bryan Appleyard, Ludwig Fleck, Allan Megill ("Rethinking Objectivity"); also, my own .The Unboundaried Self: Putting the Person Back Into the View from NowhereThe book is simplistic, misleading. I didn't like it.

A book that is promising a lot, but just doesn't deliver at the end.

Dark Ages is a brave and energetic polemic about a dirty little secret that is little talked about, and that is that the science of human behavior is actually nothing of the sort.

Whilst the scientific method has been applied with vigor and determination to the rest of the natural world, it has been used in a very odd way to explain social behavior. Instead of the application of falsifiable hypotheses, the explanations for human behaviors are rooted more in ideology than science. Lee McIntyre contends that the majority of philosophers and social scientists do not have the courage to make an empirical inquiry into the causes of human action. They often cite a number of reasons why the scientific method cannot be applied to understanding such tragedies as terrorism and starvation. Lee expertly demolishes each of these major objections.

Obviously tens of thousands of social scientists have not been sitting on their hands. But Lee suggest that their work needs to be sharpened, the focus changed, and above all, the assumptions of their work need to be challenged. This is always hard. However hard-nosed we may think that we are, every time that we do an experiment or responds to something in the news, we bring a lot of baggage with us. There are many practical problems with any attempt to challenge or change the status quo. Not the least of which is grant support. Stories abound of people failing to get grant support because their work flew in the face of "received wisdom."

This is a highly readable book of only 144 pages, excluding an eight-page introduction. And those 144 pages include some notes, a short bibliography and an index. I am no speed-reader, but I still finished the book in an hour or so, and thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

After the introduction, there are five chapters:
1. Diagnosing the human condition
2. A science of human behavior
3. Resistance to knowledge
4. A lesson from the history of science
5. What is to be done?

Although polemic in style, it is also an optimistic book with some highly practical suggestions for applying scientific rigor to the understanding of some of the most fundamental problems facing us today.

As he says in closing, "A science of human behavior can lead the way out of the current mess of unreason and tragedy that hangs over human affairs. The application of our highest form of reason, science, to the study of our social problems is our best hope for salvation. Even in a dark age, our reason can see us through. Our future may well be brighter that we have imagined it, for scientific inquiry is well equipped to answer the questions that have been put by human misery. The word awaits our response."

I am quite certain that science is not the only road to understanding, but it is an extraordinarily powerful one.

This is an important book that deserves a wide readership. We have to try and understand some of the apparently illogical things happening in our world, or we are all going to be submerged by them.

Highly recommended.

I obtained this book with the hope that it would build on the themes I encountered in another book I'm reading (Destructive Trends in Mental Health). As a practicing experimental psychologist, I have observed first hand the strengths and weaknesses of the field of psychology. Unfortunately, McIntyre failed to deliver.

First, the book is short on ideas and repeats them often. Having biases is bad (he scapegoats religious and political ideologies). Social scientists aren't brave enough (the author seems to idolize Galileo and Darwin). Social scientists whine too much (about how *hard* their science is - my whining is in the next paragraph). Social scientists need to look at the data instead of relying on armchair theorizing. People don't really want to understand human behavior. Yep, I think that's about it. Now, repeat this in as many ways as possible and you can stretch it into a very short book.

The author turns a good word and thus the book is an easy read (thus the two stars). As much as I might agree with some of his points, he overstates them (he caricatures social scientists as ignorant ideologues uninterested in data) and misses many important ones regarding the challenges of the field. If I had as much control over humans as physicists and chemists have over their subject matter, things would be a lot easier. So-called "hard" scientists don't have to ask the subjects of their inquiry if they want to participate in their experiments. They also have much greater control of extraneous variables (Can I *please* be allowed to raise humans in the lab??? Can I *please* be allowed to run experiments on societies, governments, races, companies, ... by changing their laws, rules, structures, income, etc. to my hearts content?).

The book would have been much less repetitious if he would have seriously considered the other challenges facing the social sciences instead of assuming that they're all easily surmountable. Hint: Think weather prediction and you'll better understand the challenges of the social sciences. The author needs to check his own biases at the door - it's obvious that he's a liberal atheist (as he was free to admit).

In sum - read the second paragraph of my review and you've gotten the gist of the author's message. Skip the book.

This timely and engaging book addresses one of the most important issues that we as a species face. Devastating social, economic, and political ills grow out of our vast ignorance of human nature, yet to date, we lack the resolve to adopt a rigorously scientific attitude toward the human animal. Can we overcome our resistance to self-knowledge, and tame the forces that threaten to undo our civilization? Can we emerge from the "dark ages" of our self-understanding in time to avoid a second millenium-long descent into ignorance and misery?

McIntyre has penned an eloquent polemic for embracing a thoroughgoing science of human behavior--one that deserves to be read by all, and reflected upon for years to come. Highly recommended!

The science is: brains are like neural nets; a hidden layer with feedback gives nets the ability to detect temporal patterns; information/logic in a net is distributed. That's it, plus some rambling about Husserl that seems largely irrelevant (if you're curious it's summarised pretty well by the review above (by the "top 100 reviewer" who apparently never gives below 4 stars...))

So if you're at all interested in consciousness, you probably know the science. If you don't, then I assume you've read a bit more than the typical science nerd and expect a basic level of narrative competence - you're going to be disappointed. The fiction part is embarassingly bad. The plotting is appalling; the characterisation cartoon-like.

Some reviewers are saying this would be good for an introductory course. It would have to be very introductory.

(I see that this book is currently being offered with Papadimitriou's "Turing". That's not a great book, either, but it's stunningly good compared to this - it has warmth, wit and depth. The closest this book gets is a painful irony; the cover suggest that someone, somewhere, was hoping for a noir ambience, but the only darkness comes from a power cut).

I feel bad writing a negative review, because I guess this was a work of love. I can understand the desire to popularise ideas that you find interesting. But please, if you're going to take my money, give me something at least half-way decent. If I were the author I'd be pretty mad with the editors at MIT for letting me publish something this bad.

And finally, I note that one star is the lowest rating possible, which is rather sneaky of Amazon (doesn't their use of the arithmetic mean imply a zero-based scale?).

[Later - for a stunning treatment of similar material see Power's Galatea 2.2]

As one writer put it, this would be a good book to assign as part of an introduction to neuroscience, or as a text in a philosphy course. It does not really work as a novel. Everyone is just too overwrought over nothing. These are pretty abstract ideas to become this hysterical about.

What is it about the new neuroscience that sometimes causes uneasiness in people when it is contemplated? This has been communicated to me many times by colleagues, co-workers, and business associates with whom I have discussed neuroscience over the years. The story in this book is brilliant if viewed from the standpoint of the moods that accompany the contemplation of the conscious mind from the perspective of contemporary experimental neuroscience. It captures, through its main character, the disquieting feelings that one sometimes gets when thinking about the true nature of consciousness from a scientific viewpoint. It is very perplexing that such feelings exist when examining something that is so close to us. Do we not want to believe that our consciousness can be explained according to the conceptions of modern neuroscience, with its mathematical models of neurons and neuronal connections, all validated with the experimental tool of fMRI? Does scientific description and analysis of consciousness trivialize it so that we no longer feel unique and retain a special, integrated "I-ness", but instead a collection of neuronal impulses and a bundle of Machian sensations?

This book is unique in that the author has chosen to present his ideas on consciousness using a story, with the rigorous scientific statements of his ideas coming after the story is over, in part 2 of the book, which the author has named "The Real Firefly". His ideas, as I see them, could loosely be described as a scientific justification of Husserlian phenomenology. He is honest enough to say though that much work remains to be done. Thankfully the time when the study of consciousness was solely a philosophical affair is over. Scientific experiments are now being done to elucidate the phenomenon of human consciousness, and this hopefully will lead to a better understanding of the brain outside of what philosophy has given us so far. The armchair speculations of philosophy are being put aside in favor of a careful, scientific approach. Thought experiments, the most popular of philosophical toolboxes, have failed to give us anything substantive. True knowledge is difficult to obtain, but the patience and fortitude of the researchers in neuroscience will no doubt bring about exciting developments.

The author is clearly optimistic about the possibility of science giving a complete explanation of human behavior. One can bet on this "radical pipe dream" he says. But again, he expresses an intellectual honesty about the difficulty of this goal, and the doubts that he himself has about his research. This doubt he says, causes him and others to sometimes exaggerate the current status of research, giving it a kind of "infomercial" overtone. But the goal of this research is to show how consciousness is part of the natural world, and this is to be done however, not with the tools of current cognitive neuroscience, but with a scientific interpretation of phenomenology. The author gives his reasons for rejecting contemporary cognitive neuroscience in the early paragraphs of part 2. He criticizes in great detail for example the "Detection Theory of Consciousness", with its assumption that the detection of complexity in the environment can be done by "matching" it in consciousness.

The author's theories of consciousness are built on phenomonology, but which he calls a "subjective view of objectivity". To contrast this with ordinary phenomonology, such as Husserl's method of "bracketing", he asserts that the world outside the mind is already bracketed, that one has an "inescapable experience of the real as real". He then constructs step by step a justification of these assertions, with intentionality being the first step; superposition, which he defines as a symbiosis of object and interpretation, the second step; transcendence, which enables us to distinguish imaginary properties from real is the third; temporality, which asserts that reality is temporal and allows comparisons through time, is the fourth. The next three steps are refined notions of temporality, the first being the conscious present, which includes the awareness of temporal context, the second being an ordinal notion of temporality, which orders moments in time and is assuredly monotonic. The third is more sophisticated, and is called recursive retention, which provides a recursive nested trace of the succession of past moments.

This subjective view of objectivity is still phenomonology for the author, and so a successful scientific view of consciousness for him must then involve an "objective view of subjectivity". To do this, he brings in the tools of artificial neural networks and their validation using fMRI, and he deals with the consequent demand for reducing the dimensionality of the acquired data. Certain "multivariate tests" are used to detect the necessary conditions for consciousness in the brain. He uses three instances of what he calls "indices of temporality" to get a handle on the time series data extracted from fMRI: the temporal gradient, which measures absolute temporality, and is a monotonically increasing, the relative temporal gradient, which is a measure of the brain's sensitivity to position in a sequence of data, and the stimulus similarity gradient. which determines to what extent the distributed neural activity in the brain is sensitive to conditions that remain the same during an experiment. This index is interesting, for it has as its goal a sort of measure of "stability" in the phenomenal world. These three indices allow the author to "interpret the brain over time". He then deals with the internal temporal structures of the brain, i.e. with what the phenomonologist called protention, presence, and retention. Retention in the brain in particular, is modeled again by neural networks, and experiments are conducted to illustrate just how well they do their jobs in this regard. The author ends the book with a positive and optimistic view of future research in neuroscience, a future, which, regardless of its content, will certainly be fascinating to witness.

Scientists don't necessarily make good novelists; Ian Stewart's Flatterland is a case in point. Dan Lloyd has a wicked sense of humor, however, and captures his protagonist, a sardonic philosophy graduate student, perfectly. I'm less enthusiastic about the so-called theory of consciousness the novel is supposed to set forth, which attempts to merge brain scans with Husserl. And readers should be forewarned that a working knowledge of neural networks and multi-dimensional scaling is very helpful.

It has been my experience that many students in introductory undergraduate philosophy, cognitive science, and neuroscience courses have a difficult time wrapping their heads around some of the more complicated issues relating to how consciousness is represented in brain, what tasks it may be performing, and what techniques are available for investigation. While Dan Lloyd may be pursuing lofty goals by mixing novel science with fiction, I found that he has managed to strike a good balance here, and may have produced a text well fit to supplement a primary text and lecture material for some of these introductory courses. By being placed in the shoes of a philosophy graduate student coming across some of the pertinent issues of brain study for the first time, the reader is exposed to a beautifully rich existential conscious experience, and is forced to question the nature of his\her own consciousness, an essential part of any encounter with brain study. Thought provoking and fun.

Schools for Thought presents some interesting ideas on the learning process. It explores how we learn and uses some classroom experiences to show that the current ways that teachers teach some of the main subjects does not benefit students who are in need of help. Some of the programs presented in this book had some great results for all type of students. Both students in need and those are at grade level or beyond benefited from the programs. Besides the great results claims in this book, some of those programs are not currently used in schools today in the United States.
Overall, Schools for Thought was an interesting look at how to address some the problems that we face in education today. I agree with some of his programs like have better mathematics and science teachers at the lower grades and the process in which we learn but I have some problems with teaching science and mathematics by using computer programs. I think most students need a teacher to explain the material for them in the language that best suit that student learning style. The author needs to conduct better studies of his programs and if those studies prove that those programs are beneficial to all students, then he need to find a way to increment his program in all schools.

This book exposes the current inadequacy of teaching methodologies in classrooms and advocates for cognitive science as a direct and satisfactory answer to better education. The author, however, while explicating the essence of cognitive science, also makes constant reference to studies that are not documented, nor does he provide any criteria used for the studies that he uses to support his emphatic support for cognitive science. In the end, he also does not offer more than a generic alternative rather than a strategically outlined methodology.

Cognitive science parallels the human mind to computers in that they both use similar system in processing information. That is what is known as the theory of computation. Based on this premise, cognitive science studies how our mind works, how we think, remember and learn; alas the process by which one decodes, stores and remembers knowledge. The premise here is that that knowledge in a domain can help the learning process of a related one. In other words, we transfer knowledge; however, while some children naturally transfer knowledge, others need to learn how to do it. This is part of how cognitive science can improve teaching and learning. The cognitive science theoretical frameset is built upon the principle that learning occurs when we are presented with a problem: something for which we do not already have a schema that we can apply towards its understanding. We solve the problem by modifying existing memory structures (schemas) and implementing it with new information. In order to acquire new information our brain chooses operators that create a chain of stages of learning, which ultimately links the initial problem to its solution. These stages are called methods and are categorized in two types: weak methods and strong methods. The former require little or no knowledge of a specific domain, while the latter are knowledge-specific or domain-specific. Cognitive theorists determined that domain-specific methods were essential to expert performance and intelligence, yet they were not sufficient. In the `80s a new concept was introduced, that of metacognition. Metacognition is the ability to monitor one's metal processing, be consciously aware of the problem solving procedure in all its stages of performance. It was found that expert learner monitor their schematic association. It was also observed that some people naturally develop this skill, while others do not. Those who naturally make use of this advance learning practice are called intelligent novices: they are the students that we witness learning quickly and seemingly without efforts. It was consequently observed that there is one further step that distinguished intelligent novices. That is the ability to extrapolate from acquired knowledge and apply it to new information in an effort to formulate new problems and find new solutions for such problems. A practical example would be that of "scientists, scholars, artists and skilled mangers who all have to take what they know and stretch it to pose an answer novel problems. They have to transfer prior learning to new situations." According to cognitive science the most important implication of these discoveries is that for teachers and educators at large what is taught is equally important to how a subject is taught.

The research of cognitive science was conducted primarily in the field of mathematics, science, reading and writing. The general principles outlined previously were applied to each of these domains each of which is extensive covered in the book.

While the frameset of cognitive science is exposed in a manner that appears to be convincing, in my opinion in part because most of it seems to be merely common sense more than science; it must be noticed that no concrete date pertaining the conducted research is provided. The book has a considerable bibliography but no notes whatsoever. No researchable reference, or proper citation is provided for any of the reported observations, nor any background information is offered in terms of what kind of observations had been conducted and what level of reliability such observations carry. We do not know how large the sampling where, or what variable were exactly taken in consideration. In other words, we have absolutely no data to back the credibility of cognitive science from this book. There is no introductory remarks that generally state the sources for this book, nor is there an introduction to the book in which general guidelines as to how the research was compiled could have been outlined. While it has been noted during the presentation of this book that to an educated reader might be familiar with the most of the research referenced throughout the book, I believe it is unacceptable to assume that everybody reading the book is completely familiar with it. Furthermore, if this book was written a specifically target community, than it should not be assigned to an uneducated reader; yet, this book is used in classrooms throughout the States. This leads me to believe it was written for the general public consumption. Consequently, I stress the fact that the absence of proper footnoting is inadmissible. Additionally, proper citation is what makes a book reliable and gives the author credibility; while the contrary is exactly what debunks an author's research. If a scholar would rely only on School for Thought to make an educated assessment with regard to the viability of cognitive science, they would find them unable to make a dependable statement.

In addition to the lack of citations, I found this book poorly organized, redundant at best in its expository tactic and less than interesting. The author repeats himself numerous times stating what already stated over and over, and in an unorganized manner. His thoughts do not appear to be clearly translated on paper in a homogeneous discourse. School for Thought was difficult to read because there was not a fluid process linking the concepts exposed and what I found most ironic is the fact that the author uses himself as an example to exemplify the use of metacognintio in writing when he clearly has not done a good job at all at it.

Finally, the author fails to provide more concrete solutions to a "better teaching" than stating general and intuitive directions that are for the most part common knowledge. John Bruer states from the first pages of the book that a system to enhance teaching and to greatly improve learning performance is the aim of this book but the closest to it he comes is in saying that we still have a lot to learn and we have not quite yet figured out who to systematically apply cognitive science to the classroom.

I am sorry to say that my review of this book is highly negative and I would not recommend it to anybody: nor a novice like myself who would find themselves at a loss reading it, neither an educated reader of the subject who would probably want to have access to the sources in an effort to further their knowledge in any of the researches or facts stated throughout the book.

Schools for Thought
Book Review
Joshua Wickline
3/29/06

Schools For Thought: A Science of Learning in the Classroom. There is a lot in this title about the meaning of the book itself. The first chapter of this book addresses the revolution which is still shaping the changing face of education today. In the last half century, the US Department of Education began taking reliable longitudinal data on a sample of students in the United States and their achievement in different subject areas. The sample, statistically, can be used for extrapolation to the entire nation's population of students. What they have found has been interesting. In the 1980's, the nation's youth were showing considerably less achievement than they had a decade before, and a nationwide concern resulted in sweeping changes in education policy. Stricter standards and higher expectations became the norm, and in the 1990's, United States students had reached a level of achievement equal to their level of achievement in the 1970's. Education reform had improved our schools, but seemed to only be capable of preserving a flat-line effect.
Outside the school system, the nation and the world continued to change and progress. The people, our systems of government, our technology, industries, and culture were becoming more complex and technical. If something weren't done, there could be no guarantee that our nation's youth would be able to meet the demands of an advancing society. Dramatic changes in the way we educated our young people were needed.
This dramatic shift in pedagogical thought actually was started in 1956 at a meeting of minds at MIT, when cognitive science itself was introduced as a vital alternative to behaviorism. In 1972, Newell and Simon released their book, Human Problem Solving, and brought forth the idea that to understanding learning relies on our ability to understand the way humans solve problems. In the end, the development of cognitive science as a discipline became the framework of current research in education policy, largely because it provides "a scientific basis for the improvement of instruction" because "it will tell us not just whether an instructional program succeeds, but why" (Resnick 1984, p. 37).
The meat of this book is organized into sections which address specific areas of education. The first of these sections is about the research on the fundamentals of thought and learning. The research demonstrates the existence of long term memory, short term memory, and working memory. It also delineates their constraints and elucidates ways of making them work to the advantage of the classroom. This section also references research which makes strong implications that human thought is related to computer thought. In solving any problem, there is an initial analysis of the task at hand, a need to operate within a set of rules, and an output which is usually logical relative to the set of rules under which it was generated.
The second section is Intelligent Novices: Knowing How to Learn, address our conceptions of what we believe intelligence and expertise actually are. The philosophical question is posed about whether or not an expert chess player would be suitable for the defense of a nation against invasion. The authors state, "If the goal of education is to develop our children into intelligent subject-matter experts, our predictions about the chess champion, based on what we believe about intelligence and expertise, have implications for what we should do in our schools." (Bruer 1993, p. 51). Research is analyzed and synthesized into models which represent the process of learning, and result in some practical advice for educators to help children learn better. Some of the most useful information has been a result of designing computer software which can solve problems and simulate human thought. There is also a discussion of weak methods and strong methods, two classifications for methods which result in learning. In short, weak methods are the skills that need to be mastered in order to learn new domain knowledge. Metacognition is another idea which is raised in this chapter, and simply states that awareness of a problem and control of a learning situation is needed for students to learn best.
The sections on mathematics spends much time on computer models for solving geometric problems, and computer programs for teaching geometry to students. There has been much success with these programs in their ability to educated students in the field of mathematics, and this is probably a result of the foundations of mathematics itself. Many of the problems associated with learning geometry are associated with "bugs" in our human software, or rules and logic tests that we have missed in our educational careers. Computer programs can identify these bugs in our human software easily because, as it turns out, the bugs we have are predictable. What would take a human teacher a large amount of effort to do for an entire classroom (the debugging) can be done relatively easily by a bank of computers. Another positive point for the computer programs is that they allow students to work at their own pace, allowing all students to progress as quickly as they wish.
In the following section, science is addressed through the lens of cognitive science. It is no coincidence that computer programs have been developed to aid in the learning of high school physics. It is a result of the largely mathematical and logical base of physics and a computer's ability to identify and rectify the bugs in human software which may lead to an inability to learn the subject of physics. Where computers may fail to aid in science instruction is outside the realm of physics, but there is research to guide us there as well. Many frustrations in learning science are encountered because of deeply held misconceptions students acquire as they go along their daily lives. Everyone observes different phenomena throughout their days, and we all find ways of justifying and explaining them to ourselves. When we have satisfied ourselves with an answer, we often stop probing, and upon further exposure to the phenomenon we remember our (misguided) explanation, and it becomes deeper and deeper ingrained. Therefore, when a science teacher explains a concept to you which does not conform to the misconception which you already hold, often you forget the science teachers correct interpretation because you were not truly challenging your own misconceptions. Cognitive science has shown that only by challenging our misconceptions can we really change them and advance in science learning.
Bruer continues to discuss reading, writing, and teacher assessment, all the while using cognitive science as his backbone for argument and suggestions in how to improve teaching and learning in America's schools. I believe that the strengths of this book are its comprehensive approach to the use of cognitive science in education reform, and its well-structured format. Bruer uses plenty of sound research to back up his claims, and behaves himself as both a scientist and a writer.




Bibliography:
Bruer, John T. Schools for Thought: A Science of Learning in the Classroom. 1st ed. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1993.

The main premise behind the book is that the human mind works much like a computer. When a person is given a problem, whether the problem is which side of a scale will tip or what to have for dinner, Bruer suggests that the person will go through a prescribed set of binary steps, each step having one of two answers. When all of the steps taken in solving a problem are put together, they comprise a production system, which is likened to the processor in a computer. One of the studies that was evaluated in the book was done by Robert Siegler, and employed a specific balance-scale problem, where subjects had to predict which side of a scale would fall based on the weights and distances on each side. Siegler used this problem to evaluate the subjects' problem solving skills, asking them to solve a series of similar problems and talk their way through how they approached solving the problem. What was found in this study was that there exists a series of different production systems, and that the production system differed based on whether the subject was a novice or an expert. This lead to the conclusion that students must to be taught in a way that they see the errors in their production system so that they are able to modify it to produce the correct solution. The expert's production system produces the correct solution with 100% accuracy.

The theory presented in this section of the book is very interesting. It explains why many students make the similar mistakes on the same problems, and makes a good argument for evaluating problems similar to this using a cognitive science approach. However, it does not extend far beyond that. Bruer presents and interprets the research, and then simply tells the reader that "instruction . . . has to include teaching an effective strategy for encoding and remembering." Throughout this section he continues to tell the reader that teachers simply have to help students advance to the next cognitive level. Cognitive science shows that students need to be enabled to reach more thorough production systems, but Bruer does little to reveal exactly what teachers should do in their classrooms to encourage this.

In subsequent chapters of the book, Bruer tackles the specific subjects of math, science, reading, and writing, and how cognitive science research fits into each of these domains. The chapter dedicated to science focuses around seeing into the "mental black box", or figuring out what is going on in the brain of a student when they are learning science. A series of tricky problems were used to explore students' understanding of matter and Newton's laws. What was discovered, which is corroborated by the idea of scaffolding in science education, is that beginning at a very young age, children form science schemas in their mind to explain the world around them. Theses schemas may or may not be completely accurate. As a science teacher, one must determine what the students' preconceived notions are, and either build upon them or disprove them so that the students can formulate new schemas.

In the study of how children develop an understanding of matter, Smith, Carey, and Wiser went into schools and implemented a computer program to teach the students the concept of density. While the program proved to be wildly successful (scores from the pretest to the posttest increased by about 40%), the program has both pros and cons. One of the positive aspects of the computer program is that it appeared to make the concept very visual for the students, which can be difficult with vague concepts such as matter and density. The computer aspect of the learning also has its benefits. Most of the studies discussed in the book use various computer programs to teach concepts to the students, and in 1994, this was a novel idea. However, computers cannot replace some of the important benefits of an actual teacher. Where a book or a computer program can explain a concept one way, a teacher with a broad knowledge of his or her subject can explain a concept in many different ways, illuminating it to students who cannot learn from more traditional methods. Another problem with the study is that the program that was implemented spanned six weeks, which was admittedly longer than the classroom teacher had planned to spend on this topic. In the current culture of standards-based assessment, any science teacher would be hard-pressed to find six weeks in the curriculum to devote to the single concept of density. Finally, as before, Bruer fails to expound on exactly what about the program caused it to be so successful. If the reader knew how to recreate the cognitive approach to science learning that was used in the computer program, he or she may be able to produce the same success in the classroom, but the book is not explicit about how to use the information it is passing on.

Bruer reaches similar conclusions in many other studies, both in science and the other subjects. In a physics-based study, Barbara White and Paul Horwitz used a computer program call ThinkerTools to teach Newton's laws to sixth graders. The aim of the program was to target children's na?ve representations of the world around them, and address and mold these ideas. Once again, the program is successful, but Bruer does not give a sufficient analysis of why the program was successful and how teachers can mirror this in their own classrooms.

Overall the book brings up many good points about how the field of cognitive science can be applied to education to understand not only what the students are learning, but also what their entire thought processes are when they are solving problems. Theoretically, this can help teachers to target exactly what the difficulty is with certain subjects, and therefore more effectively educate their students. However, Schools for Thought is little more than a textbook for cognitive science in education, reiterating many successful studies in this field but rarely telling the reading the why and how. In the conclusion to the book, Bruer does bring up an interesting point. He suggests that much of a student's difficulty with certain problems is not in the solving of the problem, but in how it is approached in the first place. He states "poor initial representation makes it impossible to solve a problem," and goes on to say that "the initial representation can influence not only how we solve the problem, but also what we take to be a satisfactory answer." While most of the book focuses around how students approach and solve different kinds of problems, he applies this to educational reform, and suggests that society may be approaching the problem of education reform from the wrong direction. No matter what the problem, cognitive science is a logical way of looking at it that can provide definite answers.

John Bruer wrote Schools for Thought as an overview of cognitive science demonstrated through select educational programs that incorporate research from the cognitive sciences into classroom practice. His argument is that "cognitive science can help us think about our educational problem...[and]...expand our educational problem space...[to]...help us see new possibilities and search for solutions in new ways." (p 290).

The book is well organized. Both the overall structure of the book as well as each individual section reiterate the belief that "if we understand the mental processes that underlie expert performance in school subjects, we can ask and answer other questions that are important for education. How do students acquire these processes? Do certain instructional methods help students acquire these processes more quickly or more easily? Can we help students learn better?" (p. 14)

Content specific sections in science, math, reading, writing, assessment, and teacher preparation provide evidence into the problems of current teaching practice, theory from cognitive science, and select examples that demonstrate what a restructured curriculum could resemble. "Knowing why" is a recurring theme in each of the sections that not only ties the concepts together, but motivates the reader to transfer the concepts into their professional practice. The organization gives those new to cognitive science a thorough overview while allowing experienced readers to quickly center in on their topic of interest. Schools for Thought is a valuable resource for anyone concerned about education and open to changing their views -- administrators, teachers, parents, legislators, etc.

However, just as Newton provides an accurate overview of the formulas for motion until the scientist needs the more precise formulas of Einstein, Bruer should be considered an accurate but limited overview. Other works expand on Bruer's concepts. For example, according to Bruer, "cognitive scientists claim that the human mind can be described as a computing device..." (p. 21) In 'Dynamic Memory Revisited', Schank points to subtle differences between human thinking and computing devices that should affect our approach to education. Similarly, Bruer states that "expert teachers incorpo