Wang Books

Thankfully, I purchased this book at a library book sale for .50 cents instead of paying the premium "collector" price. I'm pretty hardcore about my studies of ancient Chinese art and have purchased a lot of books on the issue. This book touches on a few points that are somewhat obscure, but one would think that a book about Chinese art put out by the Chinese National Museum would be an academic trove of useful information on the topic. Just not the case here. It reads like an 8th Grade History test rather than an academic study on a very rich topic.

The authors no doubt had good intentions, but didn't execute well. There was no one on this team of writers who was fluent in English, which makes the going tough at times. While there is information here which the hardcore student will find worthwhile, be warned that it is a challenging read nonetheless. The writers also wrote from the viewpoint of the Chinese Communist government, with occasional disparagements of Western governments and their policies in China thrown in. Add to this the frequent reference to various Chinese dynasties without background explanation or approximate years, and you have a challenging book with mostly accurate information written by a committee for committees. I'm not a committee.

This book is listed on Amazon as being published in September of 2007 . Actually, the book was originally published in 1954. As the daughter of the author, I was startled to find it listed as new. I have contacted both the new publisher and Amazon, so far without results. Unless you want a 53 year old book for historical purposes, I highly recommend you avoid purchase.

This book is a collection of papers from the author plus some background information on CBIR, Wavelets, Clustering, etc. Don't waste your money on this pricey monograph, because all of the papers are available at the author's website. Here's the table of contents:

1) Introduction
2) Background
3) Wavelets
4) Statistical Clustering and Classification
5) Wavelet-based Image Indexing and Searching
6) Semantics-sensitive Integrated Matching
7) Image Classification by Image Matching
8) Evaluation
9) Conclusions and Future Work

If you're looking for a textbook on Content-Based Image Retrieval, unfortunately, you have to wait longer because there's no satisfactory textbook in this relatively immature area.

this book was suggested text for a course for security applications at GaTech (if i rem correctly). so went ahead and bought it for some self-study. it covers a great deal of mpeg-4 in the first few chapters but is very dated. mpeg-4 was not standardized when this was written and i've become familiar with mpeg-4 / h.264 since and found a lot of this material a little out of sync with the current standard.

the other chapters are also good overviews of the state-of-art in various fields, e.g. cmos sensor devices but since technology in these areas changes so fast, book seems dated there as well.

I found this book to be pretty weak and out of date...

It is disappointing that this book brings so few fresh insights to the subject. The authors seem to have nothing much to say other than repeating views that have been spelled out by other economists and academics. While it can serve as a reference, it doesn't have too much value as a piece of scholarly work.

Do not look here for anything new,unless you have never heard the Stalin era accounts of the fall of Berlin. Yes the author does add some lines here and there that are not politburo approved but that does not make it a good read. I must add I was looking for info on the last stand of the Wehrmacht from the Russian MILITARY side (read viewpiont),not the press corps. As it was I only bought an old softcover thinking I may be disappointed. I recommend doing the same. If you have plenty of time you may find a tidbit to add to your knowledge or treat it as a way of practicing "find the party line"

Do you know how clever Alan Trachtenberg is? I mean, do you really, really know?! Because if not, this book is for you. Trachtenberg's book is only superficially about Indians or Americans, it is about the obscure conections he can draw between unrelated things--because he is very clever, you know. In so far as this book has a thesis, that it is it.

What can one say but, dont judge the book buy its cover. In my case (and everyone else who buys from amazon) i did exactly this, expecting too much, i was BITTERLY disapointed in the content of the book. I love scandanavian architecture and for some stupid reason the author decided to write a book on 20th Century architecture but left out the all important 1970 - 2000 buildings. The author focussed far too much on Pre-20th leading to. overall i hated the book. (the first one mind you ever! since purchasing from amazon in 5 years) If your interested in the background of swedish architecture then fine it's probably a great book, however if it's great design your after then this is certainly not the one!.