1 comments about Brain Dynamics: An Introduction to Models and Simulations (Springer Series in Synergetics).

1. Clear, readable, interesting topics, mathematical tools are introduced nicely. Great book and a great introduction to simple (but useful) neural modeling.

No comments about Bioenergetics.

1 comments about Structural and Contractile Proteins, Part E: Extracellular Matrix, Volume 145: Volume 145: Structural and Contractile Proteins Part E (Methods in Enzymology).

1. if you work in the field of the cytoskeleton this book is very helpful. i have found many books in this series to be useful for finding techniques and methodology. although i must say that their methods are not always as specific as i would like.

No comments about Artificial Sight: Basic Research, Biomedical Engineering, and Clinical Advances (Biological and Medical Physics, Biomedical Engineering).

5 comments about Essays on Life Itself.

1. Dr. Rosen was a great man and this collection of essays follows on a number of foundational and classic works. The essays expand on, and clarify, a number of key issues that are present throughout Rosen's work. These include the Church-Pythagoras thesis, the mind-body problem, reductionism, syntatics and semantics, and biology and technology.

   My main contribution to what has already been said in other reviews is to note that this work might be best viewed as a complement to Rosen's earlier work, Life Itself. Or, said differently, it might be best to read Life Itself first (if you haven't already). These are very complex topics that are explained from the standpoint of biology and mathematics and those without a previous foundation in Rosen's work--as I was when I bought this book--may find they have to establish that foundation first.




2. Robert Rosen died in December of 1998 after a long bout with diabetes and its complications. He left a significant quantity of unpublished notes and had this book in the publication process. His last "writings" were hand done on paper with great effort due to extensive peripheral neuropathy. It was a mixed blessing to be among the first to read his last works both this manuscript and the next, unfinished one. I am saddened by our loss even as I feel his presence through his writings.

   Bob was an eloquent speaker and reading this set of essays is almost as good as hearing him in person. The essays were written to be published in a number of places, usually as invited talks, yet they may as well have been set down to be a book from the start. There is a thread of continuity that makes this the case. In addition, even though I had read many of the essays as they appeared earlier, their juxtaposition in this volume proves that "the whole is more than the sum of its parts"!

   His stated purpose of this collection is to, in a sense, "flesh out" arguments in Life Itself (LI) that had to be short or even omitted for what might be called "logistic" reasons. In my opinion the essays do that at least. In LI he began with a caveat with which I am totally sympathetic. He warned the reader that he was weaving a very intricate cloth with a single linear thread and therefore much was being laid upon the reader's shoulders. My own experience is that it took numerous readings to begin to see how the weave was manifest. Once there, things fell into place more and more quickly, yet still a lot more was required because the design is so highly interconnected and rich in levels of meaning. I hope this book of essays will spare others that struggle. It will never be my place to evaluate that possibility since I can never go back.

   The first part deals with the relationship of biology and physics within science, which can sound like an innocent enough topic until one understands that it is a revolutionary view.

   Underlying it all is the common notion that physics is the source of all scientific laws and that chemistry and biology somehow must utilize physics to be scientific. Rosen rejects this notion and thereby opens a Pandora's Box. He uses the now more than fifty year old essay by Schrödinger, What is Life? as a springboard to the revealing argument about biology's more generic character in comparison to physics. As he does this he develops his notion of complexity as a description of this more generic view promoted by biology in contrast to the kind of "simple systems" which are the subject matter of physics. None of this should sound new to anyone who has read his earlier work, especially Life Itself, except for the new connections and new depths to which the arguments are taken. The result is a more solid whole than ever before

   His introduction to this part of the book is worth having here to get a flavor for where he is going: "I claim that Gödelian noncomputability results are a symptom, arising within mathematics itself, indicating that we are trying to solve problems in too limited a universe of discourse." This is a nice capsule version of Rosen's message. If nothing else comes from his writings, this alone should change everyone who understands the message.

   The book develops this theme along with the idea that science has limited itself unnecessarily. It created a surrogate world and then insisted that any observations about the real world not compatible with this model were "unscientific". The consequences are many and he explores them systematically. Whether you agree or disagree, an honest reading will require you to re-examine your beliefs.




3. This collection of papers and presentations, published posthumously, is a companion to Rosen's earlier books "Life Itself" and "Anticipatory Systems: Philosophical, Mathematical and Methodological Foundations". This is probably the most accessible of his work to those without a fairly solid mathematical background. Not that this should prevent people from reading the earlier work since there are many sections that will be quite clear; I just feel that unfortuntely the crucial points of "Life Itself" might be lost due to the seeming technical nature of the explanation.

   This is truly paradigm-shifting, moreso than anything else you are likely to read about in science. The Sante Fe crowd such as Stuart Kauffman obviously did not even grasp what Rosen was talking about when they met back in 1994 and that is even more tragic. So much time has been wasted with such money-wasters like the genome mapping fiasco when it could have been going into exploring new axioms for science.

   For you see, this is what Rosen so eloquently points out in his work: the present axioms of science are much too limiting to explain anything we really would like to know about the universe. It is very interesting to see that Rosen grasped the implications of what also caught Einstein and Schrodinger's attention: the problem of inertial and gravitational mass. Rosen also points out the myriad of other areas where science has been busy putting band-aid after band-aid on the present set of theories to try to make them predict real phenomena.

   For this is the problem with the present-day paradigms: they are only useful for predicting the N+1 state for some dead (and therefore uninteresting) mechanistic universe. The evidence has been staring us in the face for quite a while and I am not sure why Rosen should have been the first to analyze where the problems lie; it is even more surprising why his work appears to be so little known.

   I also like the fact that this book is much more polished than his previous work. The index is mostly complete and there is also a list of references. I didn't note very many editorial erros and the language is quite friendly. This is a very high-quality science book and I suspect the first editions will be going for large prices in about 20 years when the "establishment" finally figures out where they went wrong.

   Buy this and read it. And read it again. Then wonder why we are rushing pell-mell to "engineer" the world when we don't understand it at all.




4. This collection of essays, along with Rosen's other book _Life Itself_, are mandatory reading for any scientist or any astute layperson interested in biology, physics or philosophy of science.

   Rosen was a very insightful and technically capable theoretical biologist. His work - first as a student of physicist and theoretical biologist Nicholas Rashevsky, and later as professor emeritus at Dalhousie - is unquestionably of the level of importance of Einstein's Special/General Theory of Relativity, or Godel's Incompleteness Theorems. This is a grand claim to make, but once you read Rosen's work, you will see for yourself.

   These are not the easiest books to read, despite Rosen's excellent writing skills. The difficulty is two-fold. First and foremost, the new concepts and paradigms presented are of such breadth and profundity that it can take several readings to begin to fully grasp them adequately. Secondly, Rosen is mathematically (and otherwise) quite astute. The reader will encounter to some degree: category theory, topology, catastrophe theory (Rosen dedicates a chapter on genericity in _Essays_ to Rene Thom), differential equations, dynamical systems, Godel, Church-Turing, as well as philosophical topics of epistemology, ontology, and foundations of biology, mathematics and physics.

   This should not, however, deter even the non-professional. Particularly in _Life Itself_, Rosen progresses carefully and patiently, even including a short intro to Category Theory. One can gloss over some of the math and still garner most of the insights from the text alone. _Essays_ utilizes a wider range of math skills, since that book covers a broader range of topics, but it is still quite accessible to the careful and astute reader.

   In _Life Itself_, Rosen was investigating the question posed by Erwin Shrodinger originally in his 1943 lecture "What is Life?". Rosen's search led him to peel back in careful detail the foundations of Newtonian mechanics and reveal the underlying tacit assumptions of a state/phase-based physics and the repercussions for science in general, and biology in particular.

   By setting aside state/phase-based physics, Rosen then proceeded to layout the groundwork for an atemporal relational biology based on functional organization and to methodically investigate the theoretical limits of mechanistic systems, including along the way: simulation, Turing machines, and the epistemology and ontology of such systems. The distinction eventually becomes clear that any such algorithmic mechanisms cannot embody the kinds of impredicative complexity that are characteristic of an organism. Because the syntax of Newtonian physics can express no such closed loops of entailment, "life" cannot even be described in that model of physics, much less modeled in any complete way. Thus it is that biological organisms are not a mere subset of current physics, but are representative of complexities that require physics to be enlarged.

   In _Essays on Life Itself_, Rosen uses his considerable abilities across a broad spectrum of topics to continue the ideas from _Life Itself_. It is difficult to describe how topics as diverse as the assumptions of Pythagoras, the Turing test, universal unfoldings, morphogenesis, mind-brain problem, and more can be in the same book. Mostly, they all in one way or another accomplish one task: to look beyond the limits of how a problem is currently being viewed, and to see it from a larger perspective. Often, these perspectives take Rosen into terrain others would avoid, since they sometimes lead into the non-algorithmic / noncomputable, or the breakdown of the presumed subject-object division, or other kinds of "messy" scenarios.

   Often they lead into "complex systems", where Rosen uses the word "complex" to define a certain class of systems - those systems have symptoms of being: impredicative, non-algorithmic, context-dependent, semantic, nonformalizable. This classification is not a desire for obfuscation or ineffability, but is as rigorous as the nonformalizability of Number Theory or the unsolvability in closed form of the n-body problem. It is a complexity akin to the size of a transfinite number: it is not simply a matter of merely being hugely complicated, it is rather an entirely different order of system structure.

   However, guided by Rosen, one does not feel uneasy following his path. Rather one feels enriched both in knowledge and in paradigm. Distinguishing the broader generic case from the degenerate or special is a characteristic theme in Rosen. The unfamiliar terrain he argues to is thus not some void, but a grander scale that subsumes the orthodox view.

   In that grander view, it may become more clear that some problems are based on incorrect assumptions, while some are more difficult or complex than in the more limited original view. However, it is apparent that Rosen is uninterested in making problems appear simpler by ignoring those difficulties - he is interested in where the science leads. It is an immensely richer, complex view of the physical world that one comes away with. As such, it presents some difficult challanges, but it also opens up vast opportunities - opportunities not visible in the neat and tidy fantasy model of science that generally prevails where it is assumed that with enough effort everything can be reduced or calculated.

   Rosen writes deliberately and with precision, and is both a critical and a profound thinker. I hope that he one day receives the recognition and admiration he rightfully deserves.




5. This book is a powerfil critique of reductionist and/or simulation (modeling) approach to mind/body problem, and "what is life" question. Rosen builds his case against Church Thesis, arguing that contemporary mathematical and, more generally, scientific rigor, which bans impredicative loops from scientific discource, would not allow us to build what he calls "new science", which is needed to account for life and consciousness.
   
   More than once he mentiones Goedel Theorem, as well as various paradoxes, encountered by science over the centuries, emphasizing the fact, that they all are directly related to the impossibility to draw definite border between an observer and her object (not just in quantum physics).
   
   Although the book was very interesting for me, i felt that some essays essentially repeated the material, already covered in other parts of the same book. Also, this "new science", which Rosen thought is needed to deal with open systems, is never really described in any way, so we are left with critique only.
   
   I am not sure i fully agree with Rosen's view of the Turing Test, which he only sees as a simulation approach to the mind (intelligence) problem. My understanding is that Turing Test should be rather understood in the "observer/object" context, meaning that the participant makes a judgement, being, at the same time, fully incorporated into the system.
   
   In one of the essays Rosen says: "If somebody wants to call this 'vitalism' - then ... so be it." With no constructive theory in site it's a bit like this, to my understanding.

1 comments about Cell Culture, Volume 58: Volume 58: Cell Culture (Methods in Enzymology).

1. This book contains all the information that a beginner would need yet is advanced enough for the professional. This book's usefullness will never go out of date.

No comments about Aqueous Two-Phase Systems (Methods in Enzymology).

1 comments about DNA Structure and Function.

1. I never took a formal class in nucleic acid stucture, but I do research in this field. Its a great book and very easy to understand. You can teach yourself the subject without the aid of a professor. The author carefully reviews each topic and describes critical experiments that lead up to the present knowledge. The language is not too technical but the author introduces jargon where appropriate. I would recommend this book to anyone doing research in nucleic acids or anyone taking a course in nucleic acid structure. Its a very well written and informative book. Don't miss out!

3 comments about NMR Probeheads: For Biophysical and Biomedical Experiments.

1. This book might be useful as an introduction to the subject of NMR Probeheads for junior-level electrical engineering students (as a supplement to Hoult's book), but it is not likely to be the first choice for many researchers. The professional, published literature is much better, even if it's rather scattered and thus much more expensive (if copyright laws are respected).
   The biggest problem with this book is that it is extremely wordy, and it repeats too many simple and obvious observations. Of course, the simple observations, consequences, and solutions are appropriate in the early sections, but they quickly become tiring. It could easily be half as long - perhaps even shorter. Secondly, while the title leads the reader to believe that the scope might be fairly comprehensive, it is actually extremely limited. There is virtually nothing on high resolution liquids or solids probes, and there is nothing of substance on phased arrays, high field coils for large samples, full-wave 3D EM simulations, or linear circuit simulations. The subject of suppressing cable modes is poorly treated, as is the all-important subject of S/N optimization - the E field is basically ignored throughout the book. Thirdly, the treatments of the various coils all spend far too much time on theoretical approximations of the tuning and matching problems under idealized conditions and too little time on the practical details that often make the theoretical approximations of limited value.
   If the book is used by its authors (and perhaps some other professors) in the classroom over the next few years, it is certainly conceivable that a second edition could evolve that would be useful to more researchers. Much better introductions to the subject of NMR Probes, by FD Doty, have just appeared on-line in the Encyclopedia of MR, Wiley, 2007. Very useful and current lists of references may be found there. http://mrw.interscience.wiley.com/emrw/9780470034590/home/
   -F. David Doty, PhD



2. The is a very good book for those wanting to learn how to use and make NMR/MRI probeheads. It assumes a minimum knowledge of electronics and provide numerous illustrations. Since it is directed specifically towards NMR applications, it is immediately applicable. A CD is included with additional programs, but for Windows, Linus and Unix only. I've not yet tried to see what is applicable for OSX.
   
   I'm very satisfied with this book and expect to constantly refer to it in the near future.



3. I mostly agree with F. David Doty's review. The book is very limited in scope, teaches primitive concepts, and does not offer much practical information. For example, why is the S-parameter so different for actual components used in the lab, than what is predicted theoretically. The topic is well known to engineers. Why isn't this in the book? The book should teach what is practical, what is likely to be observed in the laboratory. Not just a bunch of equations in a vacuum.

No comments about Oxygen Radicals in Biological Systems, Part B, Oxygen Radicals and Antioxidants, Volume 186: Volume 186: Oxygen Radicals in Biological Systems Part B (Methods in Enzymology).