Appearance
Minimization and control of hazardous combustion byproducts
I would really recommend this for classroom use, or perhaps to add to your school library. It begins with a few pages, organized in a separate row for each division of (first) a few hundreds of thousands of years, in the Stone Age; then every few hundred years, during the age of Sumer and Egypt; every few years, as you leaf through the days of Greece, Rome, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, and eventually it works up to having multiple entries in each category for every single year that goes by. I should note that this not nearly as eurocentric as my last few sentences might suggest -- there's plenty of material about developments in China, the empires of Songhay, Mali, etc. in Africa, the Islamic world, the Incas and Aztecs, and so on.The headings include Anthropology/Archaeology, Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Earth Science, Mathematics, Medicine, Physics, and Technology. The book is subdivided into several sections --1.) Science before there were scientists: 2,400,000-599 B.C.2.) Greek and Hellenistic science: 600 B.C. -- 529 A.D.3.) Science in many lands and medieval science: 530 -- 14524.) The Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution: 1453 -- 16595.) The Newtonian Epoch: 1660 -- 17346.) The Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution: 1735 -- 18197.) Nineteenth century science: 1820 -- 19848.) Science in the twentieth century through World War II: 1895 -- 19459.) Science after World War II: 1946 -- 198810.) The coming era: 1989 -- 2000 (Yes, 1988 is the last year that this book covers. I don't know why they haven't updated it. This is a flaw, of course, but I stand by my five star ranking, because anything that recent can be looked up on the internet, etc.)Each section is prefaced by a helpful essay, to place matters in context. Also, there are many small "boxes" interspersed throughout the text, to give more complete information on particular figures.I don't think this book has quite as much material as Bernard Grun's "Timetables of History", but it's layout is better, and more helpful. I think this book is worth having.
Minimization and control of hazardous combustion byproducts
This 656 p. compendium is the most comprehensive English-language chronology I have found in an intensive search over the past several years. Focused on science and technology, it has more than twice as many scientific events than the Grun "Timetables of History" compilation (which deals with many more fields). It divides its subject by General, anthropology/archaeology, astronomy, biology, chemistry, math, medicien, physics, and technology, each presented in separate columns, using the same style as the Grun chronology. Unfortunately, the last publication was around 1991, and we badly need an update. Though the expansion of science may complicate things, the tremendous advance in electronic communications means that editors could upgrade this volume in a fraction of the time required for the existing editors - at least from an operational point of view. So come on, publishers, take up this attractive challenge. One should mention that there is another formidable challenger in the field - the massive German Chronik der Technik. But it too is out of print.
Minimization and control of hazardous combustion byproducts
If you're into science history, and even if you're not, this is a great reference. This is my third copy; each of the first two I had got "borrowed," which has to tell you something about the value of the book. (Not so much about my choice of friends, I guess.)
John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920 (Vol. 1)
It's unexpectedly well decscibed how's Keynes in his childhood. He's in fact a well-spoken, witty gentleman with its charms inside which is mysterious. How could he become such a great economist, how he invent the theories, how he generated such a beautiful mind. It talked about Keynes' life in Eton College( a fundamental place for him to grow up and how his schoolmates affect him), and more is in King's College,Cambridge( which definitely a crucial turning point in Keynes' life) which included keynes' letter which he sent expressed his point of views, his love to Duncan. His writings were precise but in-depth. Moreover, it also includes a lot of cultural background informations which is like Cambridge traditions.It's a must-read book if you like Keynes.
EVOLUTIONARY GAME THEORY, NATURAL SELECTION, AND DARWINIAN DYNAMICS
I am not a biologist, but an engineer interested in evolution and mathematics.The mathematics of the book is very easy, the only (very) confusing issue are the indices.The G-function is introduced a bit ad-hoc, but as a definition, this might not matter much. It is very clear, that by allowing the strategy to vary, one can get optimal (at least stationary) values. The strategy dynamics are introduced in a rather confusing way, without much of an explanation.For the rest, it seems, that 80% of the book are numerical examples, which seem to prove mostly, that with nonlinear differential equations, the behaviour of (e.g.) stationary points can vary quite a bit, if the coefficients in those equations are changed.Maybe a professional biologist gets a lot out of this book, but for the interested layman it offers little (except upteen numerical examples, see above)
EVOLUTIONARY GAME THEORY, NATURAL SELECTION, AND DARWINIAN DYNAMICS
First, full disclosure: I am a colleague and friend of the authors, Thomas L. Vincent and Joel S. Brown, and I reviewed the entire book during its writing.Game theory is a fairly recent development in mathematics, having been introduced in the 1940's. Evolutionary Game Theory is more recent yet - Maynard Smith and Price put it on the map with their publication in Nature in 1973 on the Logic of Animal Conflict. Maynard Smith then more fully elaborated the application of matrix games to evolution with his 1982 volume, Evolution and the Theory of Games. Vincent and Brown trace their contribution to the pioneering developments of Maynard Smith, but in this volume, they go much further. As I reviewed the eleven chapters as they were first written, I felt the privilege of observing, first hand, the construction of a great edifice. In this edifice, the dynamics of ecology is dovetailed with the dynamics of heritable strategies. The tool that accomplishes this is the fitness generating function, known as the G-function. Particularly brilliant is the invention of the virtual strategy, a scalar or vector "place holder" in the G-function. The great virtue of the virtual strategy is that it represents any focal individual taking on any strategy within the entire strategy set of the species. The fitness generating function then determines the fitness for that virtual strategy within the biotic and abiotic environment defined by the set of arguments (e.g., resident strategies, their population sizes, abundance of resources, etc.) defining the G-function. With G-function in hand, Evolutionary Game Theorists now have a mathematical Darwinism - a formal mathematical expression of Darwin's three postulates: a) like begets like; b) organisms struggle for existence; c) heritable traits help determine the outcome of the struggle. With the G-function, we can predict both the dynamics of heritable strategies and the adaptive outcome of natural selection.Vincent and Brown begin, in Chapter 1, with an historical and philosophical overview of Evolutionary Game Theory and its relationship to the more traditional approach of Evolutionary Genetics. They then proceed to lay the mathematical foundations (Chapters 2 - 7), constructing the theory of Evolutionary Games and the G-function. These chapters each contain useful examples, teaching the student of evolutionary games how to apply the G-function. Noteworthy is that most all of the examples in these chapters represent continuous, as opposed to matrix games. In matrix games, which constitute the bulk of early development of Evolutionary Game Theory, and with which most readers are probably most familiar, strategies are discrete rather than continuous. However, the continuous games elaborated by Vincent and Brown (and now, many others) are of far more useful application in Evolutionary Ecology. Key contributions here are the precise mathematical definition of Maynard Smith's seminal Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (ESS) in Chapter 6, and the formulation of the ESS Maximum Principle in Chapter 7. This principle establishes the well-recognized properties of the ESS of invasion resistance and convergent stability, but also the fit of form and function - the ESS strategy is an adaptation - it maximizes individual fitness given the circumstances.Chapter 8, which treats species concepts, speciation, and extinction, is particularly enlightening. Here the G-function shines! Under traditional approaches, a huge chasm, conceptual and methodological, separates microevolution and macroevolution. Vincent and Brown, armed with the G-function, unify the two: Microevolution is repeatable and reversible evolutionary dynamics within a G-function. Macroevolution is the production of novel G-functions. They demonstrate the versatility of the G-function approach to Evolutionary Game Theory in their discussion of three contexts for extinction (which is as integral to evolution as is speciation). Vincent and Brown introduce many key concepts in Chapter 8. Perhaps most important is their strategy species concept, which relies on their definition of the species archetype. They provide a particularly cogent definition of a species that is ecologically keystone (its presence promotes the persistence, in ecological time, of other species in the community), but they also point out that a species can by evolutionarily keystone - when its presence increases the numbers of species at an ESS. Using these developments, Vincent and Brown investigate mechanisms of speciation, including sympatric speciation, allopatric speciation, adaptive radiations, coevolution, Wright's shifting balance theory, and incumbent replacement. They conclude with a tour de force: a concise and brilliant discussion of the Procession of Life. As they aptly demonstrate, with the G-function approach to the Game of Life, theories such as Punctuated Equilibrium, oft cited as a contradiction of Darwinian Evolution, instead result naturally from Darwin's three postulates!Chapter 9 is perhaps the least exciting chapter, but it serves the utilitarian purpose of melding the matrix approach to Evolutionary Game Theory with the G-function approach. This is, indeed, required reading for those who think matrix games are the only game in town.Chapters 10 and 11 are well worth the wait and development. In these chapters, Vincent and Brown apply the G-function to an impressive diversity of problems arising in the beautiful metaphor of Hutchinson, the Ecological Theater and Evolutionary Play. Though the diversity of topics covered in these two chapters is impressive, as Vincent and Brown state, it represents only a subset of the problems that can be investigated with G-functions. Chapter 10 addresses "basic" issues of Evolutionary Ecology - a who's who of fundamental subjects. These include: Habitat selection and the ideal free distribution; Consumer-resource games, with examples on plant competition and root-shoot ratio; Carcinogenesis (a must read for all interested in Darwinian Medicine); Flowering time for annual plants; Root competition; and Foraging games.Chapter 11 turns to the G-function as a fundamental tool for Applied Evolutionary Ecology. Here Vincent and Brown examine: Evolutionary responses to harvesting; Resource management and conservation; and Chemotherapy-driven evolution. They contrast management based on ecological enlightenment with that based on evolutionary enlightenment (prescriptions based on each emphasis are not always identical!). They point out the resemblance of control of a cancer with chemotherapy with control of a population through hunting. The analysis is striking, with the main message that if all cancer cells are not destroyed by a chemotherapy session, the survivors will evolve as the first step of what they call chemotherapy-driven evolution. If ever Evolutionary Ecologists were looking for a raison d'tre, here they have it!