Elliott Books

This book touches on many topics yet motivates one to aspire to do their best in their own life. Mr. Elliott shares many personal experiences regarding business, education, family and community. This is a must have!!

An excellent review of flap (local and regional) surgery.

Good for the senior resident and junior attending level.

The authors struggle with one of the hardest problems in science. How to understand the thought process? A significant portion of the text describes contributions from philosophers, who have played their role in looking at this problem.

There has been some understanding. As in being able to classify different types of thinking. Eg. inductive and deductive reasoning. The issue of metacognition also arises. A feedback loop that may be vital for developing ideas and self awareness.

However, the book has essentially no contributions from brain research. Perhaps this reflects the still early stages of understanding in that field.

I really like this book. BUT... this is NOT the book that you see when you click on the "See Inside The Book" option above. This book is 44 pages long, and is the catalogue from a gallery show in NY. The book they show in "Look Inside..." is a translation of a german book of 129 pages published by Hatje Cantz. This book has only 9 Richter plates (and a couple of Caspar David Friedrich plates) while the german one has at least twenty, and there maybe a second page of plates listed that isn't accessible through Amazon. Now I really like small gallery publications; the essays are different (but maybe no less obfuscating in their tangential onanism) and the focus is narrower, and I don't want to give the impression that I am disappointed in this book - it's just not the book that I thought I was ordering. Therefore, 4 not 5 stars.

This was a very thoughtful book of poetry. The translation causes the lines to be more prosaic than poetic, but that's something that can't be helped (especially since I wouldn't be able to read the original Japanese were it included). The formatting choice bothered me slightly; all of the lines are center-justified, which makes finding actual line breaks difficult to determine at times. Also, there are pictures that accompany some of the poems, and that's a bit unusual (but does not take anything away from the poems themselves).

Other than that, the poems are introspective and wide-ranging. They are also short, for the most part. Again, I can't really tell if there's a particular rhyme scheme or meter due to the book being a translation, but a couple of the poems have a specific and identifiable structure. Overall, I'm glad I finally got around to reading this.

When I look at southwestern Amerindian ruins, I always wonder how they must have appeared to the first archeologists and what their reactions and approaches might have been. Many of the ruins have been cleaned up and partially rebuilt so it is hard to imagine the thrill that might have filled the minds of those who found many of these sites as only mounds barely standing above the surface of the terrain. Elliot introduces us to the personalities and techniques of the men and women who were captivated by desert discoveries in the 19th and early 20th centuries. There's plenty of human interest as we learn of rivalries, pride and adversity under the primitive conditions early excavators faced. Background is always provided so that the reader can understand why each ruin had a particular attraction for archeologists. You'll also find out how attitudes toward ancient ruins have changed as have the physical techniques used to reveal them. Plenty of black and white historical photos illuminate the text. I'd highly recommend reading this book before going on your own exploration of the southwestern ruins as it will help you appreciate them even more.

This is the only volume of the Handbook series I have so far, but based on it I would seriously consider investing money (and bookshelf space) in the entire set. For hummingbirds at least, this is the first modern treatment of all the world's known species, with illustrations and range maps as well as text, plus a detailed overview of current knowledge on biology, behavior, ecology, taxonomy, evolution, etc. Each species is illustrated field guide-style, with good representation of sexes and geographic variation. The species accounts are short but pithy and include conservation status.

The only real areas of concern, again in reference to the hummingbird section, were in the lack of consistency in the plates, sweeping taxonomic revisions, and editorial bias. Most of the plates are wonderful, but a few are so stylized as to scarcely resemble a real hummingbird, much less the one being portrayed (among the owl plates, too, are some exquisite portraits and some that are cartoonish). Some fairly major revisions of taxonomy - including lumping and splitting of species plus generic reassignments - provide food for thought, but many are controversial and may ultimately be rejected by the ornithological community.

More distressing are the expressed and implied prejudices of the section editor. When published observations disagreed with his unsubstantiated opinion on one issue, he repeatedly insisted that these observations must be wrong. As the editor is European, his opinions are no doubt influenced by his limited field experience with hummingbirds, but it is an abuse of editorial privilege (not to mention unscientific) to use such a forum to arrogantly dismiss the findings of one's colleagues. Moreover, among the 18 authors of hummingbird species accounts I found only a single Latino name and none I recognized as belonging to women, though there are many highly qualified and experienced Latin American and/or female researchers in the field. These are idiosyncracies of this particular editor, and I would not expect these issues to rear their ugly heads throughout the series.

My daughter enjoyed reading this book. The professor creates many silly monster creatures. To the delight and dismay of the local villiagers. Some of the words are difficult for younger readers, but the story is so fun children will enjoy hearing the story even if they can't read it.

Hidden Markov Models have come into vogue in recent years in various fields. Notably automatic speech recognition. An HMM is useful in a Bayesian context, where you have to work back from some observations to discern an underlying probability model that is supposedly generating those observations. Often in the presence of noise. Well, it turns out that this general description can also be applied to financial models, which is the book's subject.

Various specific models are tackled. Including the seminal Black-Scholes, where the security market is modelled as a Markov modulated Brownian. Typically, the maths in the book uses sophisticated probabilistic analysis and often assuming Markov processes. As an aside, if your field is electrical engineering or information theory, where you might have used Markov processes, then your background should suffice if you want to migrate to finance. It's not that different, at a certain conceptual level.

The book could be improved by the addition of an index.

Roselyne Rey's History of Pain is probably the most comprehensive academic history of all things related to physical pain. Still, Rey's work, originally published in French, is thorough but uses almost exclusively French language resources. Rey is one of the few historians who examined the work going on at the Pneumatic Institution and rightly concluded that these early experiments and treatments with gases were fundamentally different from explorations into the character and problems of pain. Rey also points out that some of the reasons generally presented by the clinician historians for the so-called delayed adoption of anesthesia (purification, dosage, and duration of administration) were not in any way historically causing the delay. She emphases the idea that these technical issues were resolved not just when medical practitioners viewed them as problems to be remedied, but when society as a whole was able to resolve the issue of problematic invasive surgical procedures. Rey's work is extensive, covering antiquity to the 20th century and examining anesthesia, opiates and other drugs, and ways of communicating pain.