Cohen Books

This is just a very fine biography of a virtually forgotten New Deal giant, Benjamin V. Cohen. Cohen was one-half of the famed New Deal drafting team along with Thomas Corcoran. Among their handiwork are such epic statutes as the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and the Public Utility Holding Company Act--monuments of the New Deal to say the least. Perhaps Cohen's slide into obscurity stemmed from his desire to avoid the limelight--just the opposite of Tommy the Cork. While his New Deal contributions are immense, the book explains that Cohen was more more than just a major architect of the New Deal. He was involved in Zionist activities; helped draft the Lend Lease legislation; served in the State Department after the Second War; and slipped into the role of "elder statesman" during his retirement. But above all, and always, Cohen was a superb and brilliantly-gifted lawyer. All of the many dimensions of Ben Cohen are in this extraordinary biography. Perhaps his slide into obscruity will be reversed and Cohen recognized for his significant accomplishments.

I anxiously await the publication of this annual edition and the 2008 version does not disappoint. The guest editor this year (Sylvia Nasar - "A Beautiful Mind") picks which articles she thinks are the best and the selections reflect her interests. Whether you consider it good or bad, there is not a single hard science article. The selections are heavy on medicine, psychiatry, psychology, and the pharmaceutical industry. For a guaranteed good time, grab a copy, curl up, and enjoy yourself.

Amy Harmon - *one of my favorites - Would you want to know if you had the gene that led to a debilitating disease that was both physically and mentally crippling? The subject of this essay is a young woman whose grandfather died of Huntington's chorea.

Richard Preston - Lesch-Nyhan syndrome - so rare that one of the researchers knows almost every individual on earth that has been diagnosed. Those afflicted show dramatically the link between a single genetic mutation and aberrant behavior.

Thomas Goetz - Start-up companies that evaluate and interpret your DNA.

Carl Zimmer - Women in the US have a 39% chance of being diagnosed with cancer. Men have a 45% chance, and evolutionary biologists assure us they are not about to find a cure.

Tara Parker-Pope - NIH misread the hormone study of 2002. Women who use hormones to treat menopausal symptoms are not increasing their risk of heart attack and strokes, and may be improving their long-term health outlook.

Gardiner Harris, Benedict Carey, & Janet Roberts (two articles)- *another of my favorites - Pharmaceutical companies have figured out a legal way to influence psychiatrists to recommend their drugs for off-label use in pediatric patients with supposed bi-polar disease. They pay them. Having been a drug representative and subsequently a doctor, this article rings true to my experience.

Daniel Carlet - *another of my favorites - A psychiatrist recounts his year-long experience hawking drugs part-time for Wyeth - making an easy $30,000.

Tina Rosenberg - *another of my favorites - Doctors who deal with chronic pain patients may be putting their own futures at risk. The nature of the work attracts the attention of medical boards and even district attorneys. This well-meaning (but disorganized) doctor is serving 30 years in the pokey.

Jerome Groupman - The diagnosis of bi-polar disorder in children has increased since 1990 more than fourfold, to the delight of - and with the help of - the pharmaceutical industry. Is it real or a fad? Are the benefits of treatment worth the risk of serious side effects?

Sally Satel - Who is going to get that coveted organ? Choosing "is not playing God; that is playing man - the all-too-human affair of people deliberating strenuously and in good faith to determine what is right." Maybe - just maybe - we should rescind that law against paying kidney donors.

Oliver Sacks - Clive had encephalitis is his mid-forties. He lost his ability to remember anything from one minute to the next. Everything happens to him as if it had never happened before - with two exceptions. He can still play and conduct beautiful music (which requires memory) and he still knows he loves his wife.

Ben McGrath - People used to feel luck if they got a peg leg after an amputation. Today's artificial limbs, however, are things bordering on science fiction.

Margaret Talbot - *another of my favorites - How do you spot a liar? Jurors certainly can't figure it out, and polygraph "lie detectors" are only in the 90% range of accuracy. Not good enough for court use, but better than juries. What about fMRI - brain scanning? The kinks have certainly not been worked out, as this fascinating article points out.

Stephen Hall - *another of my favorites - What makes a person wise? It's not just age, although that might help, to a point.

Al Gore - A short inspirational essay with recommendations as to where we go from here.

Jim Yardley - One of two essays about China's burgeoning self-induced environmental nightmare. This one is the overall view.

Joseph Kahn - The other essay about China's capitalistic excess at the expense of it's environment. Kahn profiles one man who crusaded against pollution of the area lake. He is now in jail. If you think US corporations are bad, take a look at this!

John Seabrook - *another of my favorites - The planet's ultimate safeguard against global famine is a seed bank containing unaltered seeds from all over the world. This comprehensive article covers facts about seeds, agriculture, genetically modified foods, seed-banks, and the politics thereof - that you wouldn't think you would be so interested in. I'll bet you won't be able to put this one down.

As usual, a brilliant collection.

"Beyond Mysticism: The Rise Of Homo Sapiens" by independent scholar Max Cohen is a fascinating and iconoclastic study of how the mystical thinking originated out of humankind's neolithic past when knowledge of the world and the forces that comprise it were thought to be revealed by supernatural sources to a chosen few for the management of humans in their family, tribal, clan, and eventually cosmopolitan lives. The hallmarks of mystical knowledge based belief systems include specifically organized institutions supervised by a priestly class, sacred prayer, ritual and sacrifice as means of manipulating the attitude and behavior of the gods, and reinforcement of a public attitude of subservience to the will of the gods as expressed by the pronouncements of the priests. With the coming of science with its role of explaining phenomena in natural terms, humanities' dependence upon ancient mystic ideas and revelatory explanations was compromised and diminished. A highly recommended and deftly written treatise,"Beyond Mysticism" is an informed and informative read which is both thoughtful and thought-provoking, making it an especially welcome addition to personal, community and academic library Philosophy collections.

To explain to a child the many miraculous and wonderful stories of the Bible is not always easy. This book does a great job at not only explaining the Bible, but does it in a fun way. The pictures are colorful to look at and help the reader tell the story. I highly recommend this book to parents and caregivers who wish to share the true Word of God to their children.

In regard to these "inspired intelligent robots" one has to
wonder if there is compelling empirical evidence for the origin of the tiny motors driving biological processes at the cellular level. In other words, has there ever been a series of genetic mistakes that have been traced out, mapped out or otherwise hypothesized showing how these motors came from nonmotors?
Johnson & O'Donnell said the sliding clamps & clamp loaders involved with DNA replication have "evolved clever strategies to perform their function" (Annual Rev. of Biochemistry, 2005, p. 283), but is this not a veiled tautology?

Featuring extensive illustrations, including a 32-page full-color insert, Biomimetics: Biologically Inspired Technologies provides unmatched breadth of scope as well as lucid illumination of this promising field.
Imagine a smart microchip that is buried in the ground for a long time. Upon certain triggering conditions this chip begins to grow and consume materials from its surroundings, converting them into energy and structural cells. As the chip grows further, it reconfigures its shape to become a mobile robot. Using its recently created mobility, the chip becomes capable of searching and locating critical resources consuming them to grow even more. The type and function of the specific cells that are formed depend on each cell's role within the growing structure. This science-fiction scenario is inspired by true-life biology such as the growth of chicks from an egg or plants from a seed. Yet given all our technological advances, it is still impossible to engineer such a reality.
Bionics as the term for the field of study involving copying, imitating, and learning from biology was coined by Jack Steele of the US Air Force in 1960 at a meeting at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio (Vincent, 2001). Otto H. Schmitt coined the term Biominietics in 1969 (Schmitt, 1969) and this field is increasingly involved with emerging subjects of science and engineering. The term itself is derived from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate. This new science represents the study and imitation of nature's methods, designs, and processes. While some of its basic configurations and designs can be copied, many ideas from nature arc best adapted when they serve as inspiration for human-made capabilities. In this book, both biologically inspired and biologically mimicked technologies are discussed, and the terms biology, creatures, and nature are used synonymously.
Nature has always served as a model for mimicking and inspiration for humans in their desire to improve their life. By adapting mechanisms and capabilities from nature, scientific approaches have helped humans understand related phenomena and associated principles in order to engineer novel devices and improve their capability. The cell-based structure, which makes up the majority of biological creatures, offers the ability to grow with fault-tolerance and self-repair, while doing
all of the things that characterize biological systems. Biomimetic structures that are made of multiple cells would allow for the design of devices and mechanisms that are impossible with today's capabilities. Emerging nano-technologies are increasingly enabling the potential of such capabilities.
The beak of birds may have served as an inspiring model for the development of the tweezers and the tong. While it is difficult to find evidence that it had inspired early humans, one can argue that since nature invented this device first it was a widely known concept way before humans began making tweezers and tongs. The mimicking of the beak is illustrated graphically on the cover page, of this book, where a virtual mirror is drawn to represent the inspiration of adapting nature's capabilities. Although enormous advances have been made in the field of biomimetics, nature is still far superior to what we are capable of making or adapting. Given the limitation of today's technology, copying nature may not be the most effective approach. Many examples exist where humans using nature as inspiration have used its principles to invent far more effective solutions; flying is one such example. This book focuses on the technologies that resulted from both mimicking and being inspired by biology.
Nature evolves by responding to its needs and finding solutions that work, and most importantly, that last through innumerable generations while passing the test of survival to reach its next generation. Geological studies suggest the presence of life on Earth as early as 3.8 billion years ago (Lowman, 2002). Specifically, in Greenland, a series of ancient metamorphosed sediments were found with carbon isotope signatures that appear to have been produced by organisms that lived when the sediments were deposited. Furthermore, fossil evidence indicates that ancient bacteria, Archea (Archaebacteria), have existed on the Earth for at least 3.5 billion years (Schopf, 1993; Petr, 1996). After billions of years of trial and error experiments, which turn failures to fossils, nature has created an enormous pool of effective solutions. It is important to note however that the extinction of a species is not necessarily the result of a failed solution; it can be the result of outside influences, such as significant changes in climate, the impact of asteroids, volcanic activity, and other conditions that seriously affect the ability of specific creatures to survive. The adaptations of nature have led to the evolution of millions of species each with its own way of meeting its needs in harmony with the environment (Research Report, 1992).
Through evolution, nature has "experimented" with various solutions to challenges and has improved upon successful solutions. Organisms that nature created, which are capable of surviving, are not necessarily optimal for their technical performance. Effectively, all they need to do is to survive long enough to reproduce. Living systems archive the evolved and accumulated information by coding it into the species' genes and passing the information from generation to generation through self-replication. Thus, through evolution, nature or biology has experimented with the principles of physics, chemistry, mechanical engineering, materials science, mobility, control, sensors, and many other fields that we recognize as science and engineering. The process has also involved scaling from nano and macro, as in the case of bacteria and virus, to the macro and mega, including our life scale and the dinosaurs, respectively. Although there is still doubt regarding the reason for the extinction of creatures such as the mammoth, it may be argued that the experiment in the evolution of mega-scale terrestrial biology failed. While marine creatures such as the whales survived, nature's experiment with large size terrestrial biology ended with the extinction of the prehistoric mega-creatures (e.g., dinosaurs and mammoths). Such creatures can now he found only in excavation sites and natural history museums.
As the evolution process continues, biology has created and continues to create effective solutions that offer great models for copying or as inspiration for novel engineering methods, processes, materials, algorithms, etc. Adapting biology can involve copying the complete appearance and function of specific creatures like the many toys found in toy stores, which are increasingly full of simplistic imitations of electro-mechanized toys such as dogs that walk and bark, frogs that swim, and such others. However, while we have copied or adapted many of nature's solutions
an enormous number of mysteries remain unravelled. Humans have learned a lot from nature and the results help surviving generations and continue to secure a sustainable future.
Biology offers a great model for imitation, copying and learning, and also as inspiration for new technologies. Flying was inspired by birds using human developed capabilities, whereas the design and function of fins, which divers use, was copied from the legs of water creatures such as the seal, goose, and frog. But the distinction between technologies resulting from the various adaptive approaches is not always clear. For instance, studying photosynthesis in a leaf may lead some to argue that the invention of the solar cell is an imitation, while others may see it as a biologically inspired technology. While both photosynthesis and solar cell use sunlight as a source of energy, they neither perform the same process nor create the same output.
Biologically inspired terms such as male and female connectors, as well as teeth of a saw are common, and it is very clear to us what they mean. Other terms derived from biology the usage of which are clearly understood include the heart to suggest the center, the head to indicate the beginning, the tot or tail to imply the end, the brain to describe a computing system. Likewise, the use of the terms intelligent or smart suggests the emulation of biological capabilities with a certain degree of feedback and decision making. Other terms include aging, fatigue, death, digestion, life cycle, and even "high on the food chain" (referring to a high management level). In the world of computers and software many biological terms are used to describe aspects of technology including virus, worm, infection, quarantine, replicate, and hibernate. Other forms of imitating nature comprise virtual reality, simulations and copying of structures and materials. Shapes are also used as recognizable terms where the dog-bone provides a clear description of the shape of test coupons that are used to measure the tensile module and strength of materials. Structures are also widely copied, for example the honeycomb. Used for its efficient packing structure by bees (which is different from its use in aerospace - for low weight and high strength), the honeycomb has the same overall shape in both biological and aerospace structures. It could be reasoned that the honeycomb structures, which are used in many of the aircraft structures of today's airplanes, were not copied from the bees (Gordon, 1976). However, since it is a commonly known structure invented by nature many years before humans arrived, no patent can be granted in the "patent court" of nature to the first human who produced this configuration. Generally, biological materials (Chapter 14), including silk and wool that are widely used in clothing, have capabilities that surpass those made by humans. This superb capability of biological materials, structures, and processes has been the subject of imitation in artificial versions of materials.
Plants can also offer a model for imitation (Chapter 19). Besides their familiar characteristics, some plants exhibit actuation capabilities that are expected of biological creatures. Such plants include the mimosa and the Sensitive Fern (Onoclea sensibilis) that fold or close their leaves when touched. There are also bug-eating plants with a leaf derived trap "door" that closes and traps unsuspecting bugs that enter to become prey. Examples of such plants include the Venus Flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) and the Pitcher plant (Sarracenia purpurea). The sunflower tracks the sun's direction throughout the day to maximize exposure to its light. Plants have evolved in various ways, and some have produced uncommon solutions to their special needs. For example, some desert plants have flowers that produce the malodor of rotten meat, and some even have a brown color that appears very much like decomposing meat. Such characteristics are critical for these plants to attract flies, rather than bees, to pollinate their flowers.
This book reviews the various aspects of biomimetics from modeling to applications as well as various scales of the field from cell to macro-structures. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the field of biomimetics addressing technologies that mimic biology versus those that adapt its principles using biology as an inspiring model. Chapter 2 describes biological mechanisms as models for mimicking. Chapter 3 examines the mechanization of cognition and the creation of knowledge, and the various aspects of processing by the brain as a basis for autonomous operation. Another angle of this issue is covered in Chapter 4, where evolutionary robotics and open-ended design automation are described. One of the widely used biologically inspired algorithms, the genetic algorithm, is described in Chapter 5 using a mathematical imitation of evolution and natural selection. Robotics is increasingly inspired by biology and robots that are close imitation of animals and humans are emerging with incredible capability as described in Chapter 6. The details of making a biological system as a model are discussed in the following chapters where biologically inspired molecular machines are described in Chapter 7 and molecular design of biological and nano-materials in Chapter 8. The next two chapters deal with biological and artificial muscles with Chapter 9 describing engineered muscle actuators and Chapter 10 covering the topic of artificial muscles using electroactive polymers (EAP). An important aspect of biology and systems is the use of sensors and Chapter 11 covers the topic of vision as an example of bio-sensors. One of the unique characteristics of biological materials and structures is their multifunctionality and these materials are covered in Chapter 12. Other aspects of biological systems that offer important models for imitation are described in the chapters that follow. Chapter 13 covers defense and attack strategies and mechanisms in biology; Chapter 14 covers biological materials in engineering mechanisms: Chapter 15 describes mechanisms and applications of functional surfaces in biology. One of the critical issues of operating systems is that of control and Chapter 16 examines the issue of biomimetic and biologically inspired control. Interfacing the body with artificial devices is covered in the next two chapters with Chapter 17 describing interfacing microelectronics and the human body and Chapter 18 covering artificial support and replacement of human organs. Plants also serve as a model for inspiration and Chapter 19 describes the topic of nastic structures, which are active materials that enact and mimic plant movements. Chapter 20 of this hook includes an overview, description, challenges, and outlook for the field of biomimetics.
This chapter provides an overview of some of the key biology areas that inspired humans to produce an imitation. This includes making artificial, synthesized, inspired, and copied mechanisms, as well as processes, techniques, and other biomimetic aspects.

Hundreds of books tout psychic phenomena and UFOs, but only a handful try to explain why the New Age seems a bit silly. Most of those are painfully dull. But Bizarre Beliefs breaks from the pack, looking at everything from alien abductions to spiritualism with good humor and British charm. Although the authors are skeptics, they are always sensitive to the views of others. For those who wonder whether there is really anything to astrology, or fire walking, or the curse of Tutankhamun, this book will make you think while it makes you chuckle.

As Julius Lester tells his granddaughter and us, too, in the introduction, "...the blues are like having the flu in your feelings. But instead of your nose being stuffed up, it's your heart that feels like it needs blowing... The words of a blues song might be sad, but the music and the beat wrap around your heart like one of your grandmother's hugs." Meet ten artists who "rocked the world" with their music. From the legendary Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters, Billie Holiday, Ray Charles, and B.B. King, to Mahalia Jackson, Little Richard, and James Brown, whose music was inspired and influenced by the blues, Mr Lester profiles their lives, times and careers, and passes on the love of the blues to a whole new generation. His captivating text, written in an easy to read, conversational style, is evocative, and full of historical information, fun facts, quotes from other musicians, and personal anecdotes, and along with Lisa Cohen's marvelously bright, bold, and expressive portraits really brings each artist to life on the page. With a bibliography and suggested reading and listening lists at the end, The Blues Singers, Ten Who Rocked The World, is a terrific and informative introduction that's just perfect for young music lovers 9 and older. "Honey, if it wasn't for the blues, we probably wouldn't have anything to listen to except our toenails growing."

`Book' is a beautiful fairytale full of mystery and delight. The author successfully inhabits the mind of a child, and in doing so transports us into an enchanted world. The vivid and imaginative writing makes for a magical read! I warmly recommend it.

This is a beautiful book. Albert Cohen writes a long love letter to his late mother. Like in his other books, death is an obsession or rather the discontinuity between life that is everything and death that is nothing. It is a moving masterpiece.