No comments about Cladistics: A Practical Course in Systematics (The Systematics Association Series : Volume 10).

No comments about Foundations of Complex Systems: Nonlinear Dynamic Statistical Physics Information and Prediction.

No comments about Online Stochastic Combinatorial Optimization.

5 comments about how nature works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality (Copernicus).

1. Per Bak's book How Nature Works is about the theory of self organizing criticality and its applicability to a variety of questions and problems in several sciences. It is an interesting and quick read for the most part. I have read other books on self organized criticality that were far less understandable and more limited in their scope of applicability.

   Although there were portions of Bak's work that were a little belabored-I found my interest in sand piles began to sag after the initial discussion, for instance-much of the rest of the book was enlightening. The discussion in Chapter 1 of the contrast between the clarity and simplicity of the laws of physics and the complexity and unpredictability of nature was particularly interesting as was the discussion of the difference between chaos and complexity. His explanation in Chapter 2 of the theory of self organized criticality and the history of its development is far clearer than I found Stuart Kauffman's to be. It might make a better starting place for anyone wishing to understand the theory a little better before going on to Kauffman's and other books on the subject.

   Essentially the theme of the book involves the self organization of much of the universe, from stars and volcanoes to traffic jams and economics, into critical states sustained as stable systems until they evolve through cascade events or what Bak calls avalanches (after his sand pile paradigm) or catastrophes. Bak explains that the system maintains itself along a critical line, above which chaos rules and nothing can be predicted and below which nothing happens so there is nothing to predict!

   Chapter 5 which deals with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions interested me in particular because of my own study of geology. Here Bak suggests that geophysicists' attempts at prediction of events is a lost cause. He believes it to be based upon the mistaken human habit of looking at random events for patterns and periodicity where none exists. While the history of a given event can be studied in some detail after the fact, the information derived is useless in predicting the future. In Bak's opinion, the variables involved are so legion and are interrelated in so convoluted a way as to be impossible to monitor before the fact.

   In chapters 7, 8, and 9 the author attempts to model Darwin's gradual evolution, Gould's punctuated equilibrium, and the Santa Fe Institute's fitness landscape to see which fits the facts better. In general Darwin's theories are vindicated---no real surprise there---while punctuated equilibrium is also found to have it's place in a complete theory of evolution. Chapter 11 contained a section on the unavoidability of catastrophes and fluctuations---and by their extension, one supposes, biological evolution-which casts light on the boom and bust character of economics among other things. This chapter extends the use of the theory of SOC to human activities as well as to human evolution.

   The author's style is very chatty, which makes it readable and personable. By filling in the human details of the discoverers, he makes the book more personal. In all, though I found myself occasionally losing the thread of the author's theme, I nevertheless found the content of each chapter well worth.




2. Per Bak claimed to have invented a fundamentally new way of looking at nature by ascribing an almost mystical significance to ``power-law'' distributions (for the non-technical reader, that simply means one quantity is proportional to another quantity raised to some power; the power, typically a number like 1.8, is a constant). There are two things wrong with this claim:

   1. There is no deep significance to a power law distribution. All it means is that there is no natural scale of the phenomenon. (No power law runs from zero to infinity, so at best it means that there is no natural scale in the range in which the distribution is a power law.)

   2. There is nothing new about this conclusion. It was understood in the 1940's by Kolmogorov in his theory of turbulence and Fermi in his theory of cosmic ray acceleration. The only thing Bak added was the application of these old ideas to the artificial and uninteresting problem of sandpiles.

   There is nothing wrong with taking old ideas and applying them to new problems. However, Bak never admitted where the ideas came from. He never cited this earlier work. For example, models identical to his ``Self Organized Criticality'' were published by scientists working on earthquakes (Journal of Geophysical Research 90, 1894 [1985] and 91, 10412 [1986], building on earlier ideas by Knopoff). Although Bak was aware of this work, published before he ever began working on ``SOC'', he didn't acknowledge it. To a scientist this is an unpardonable sin, equivalent to a banker cooking the books.

   There is a striking resemblence between Bak's How Nature Works and Wolfram's A New Kind of Science. Each author claimed to have made profound and original insights which explain not just one phenomenon, but almost every aspect of the world around us. In each case these supposed insights are essentially mathematical, based on models which ignore the actual physical, chemical or biological processes involved. And in each case closer examination shows that the work is almost trivial, and irrelevant to real scientific problems. You get out what you put in, and when you don't put any science in you, don't get any science out.

   Each of these authors has also claimed credit to which he is not entitled by failing to acknowledge the prior work of others. They suffer from a would-be-genius syndrome, in which someone is so infatuated with his own supposed brilliance that he both exaggerates the slight significance of his work and fails to give credit to those who actually did it earlier....




3. great book. don't buy an old used copy here for $99 when they say it's "hard to find". you can buy a brand new copy direct from the publisher - www.copernicusbooks.com - for only $18!!!



4. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding how Nature works. Nature by far is bursty, intermittent, diverse, highly inhomogeneous both in time and space. This ubiquitous non-uniformity includes natural shapes, human behavior, dynamics of macroevolution, economics, distribution of galaxies, etc. In contrast, we all are very familiar with "bell curves", describing the statistics of the homogeneous-ordered-normal-boring. No theory can account properly with the prevalence in Nature of in-homogeneity and diversity. This book it is dedicated to propose a physical mechanism to generate all of that at once!. Starting with the 1987 Per Bak work on toy models, the book conveys the idea that there is hope in finding a few (instead of one for each phenomena) common ("universal") mechanisms from which the diversity (complexity?) seen in Nature emerges out of the interaction of the parts.
   The theme of the book is: how to write the equation that generates complexity, and -importantly- without including complexity in the recipe. I usually recommend this book (long with Buchanan's "Ubiquity") to novice students eager to read the first things about this question, and the majority found my suggestion useful. The book contains a detailed bibliography helping the newcomer to check further the breadth and validity of the author' claims. The reader could disagree with some bold claims, but should be assured that there is not frivolous thinking wasting pages: all the material in the book was published in the most prestigious scientific journals and quoted by thousands of scientists who found inspiration in this perspective. That alone, set this book apart from recent ones claiming to have a theory for everything.



5. This book is a great attempt at finding some universality based on systems in a "critical" state, with departures from such state taking place in a manner that follows power laws. The sandpile is a great baby model for that.
   Some people are critical of Bak's approach, some even suggesting that we may not get power laws in these "sandpile" effects, but something less scalable in the tails. The point is :so what? The man has vision.
   I looked at the reviews of this book. Clearly a few narrow-minded scientists do not seem to like it (many did not like Per Bak's ego). But the book is remarkably intuitive and the presentation is so clear that he takes you by the hand. It is even entertaining. If you are looking to find flaws in his argument his pedagogy allows it (it is immediately obvious to us who dabble with simulations of these processes that you need an infinite sandpile to get a pure power law).
   Another problem. I have been ordering the book on Amazon for ages. Copernicus books does not respond to emails. I got my copy at the NYU library. Bak passed away 2 years ago and nobody seems to be pushing for his interest and that of us his readers (for used books to sell for 99 implies some demand). This convinces me NEVER to publish with Springer.

2 comments about Handbook of Walkthroughs, Inspections, and Technical Reviews: Evaluating Programs, Projects, and Products.

1. Having launced a comprehensive software review & inspection process for several major corporations, most recently United Airlines, I found this particular book confusing and almost impossible as a ready reference or resource. The question-answer format provides information based on the questions the author believes you should ask, and makes referencing for specific information frustrating and time-consuming, if not impossible. The examples are elementary and lack significant value. A far better resource is "Software Inspection," by Gilb and Graham; Addison-Wesley publishers.



2. Software Inspection by Gilb covers the subject a lot better. However, Freedman and Weinberg's book has a lot of good points on group dynamics and politics and such that Gilb doesn't get into. Freedman's book is a quick read too.

No comments about Controlling with SIMATIC: Practice Book for S7 and SIMATIC PCS7 Control Systems.

2 comments about Chaotic Dynamics: An Introduction.

1. The gateway to experimental chaos research comes through here! The mathematics, the examples and code that illustrates the book is here. It is somewhat narrow in it's beginning approach, but delivers after careful study a beginning of understanding with some real industry. Not for the mathemaically shy or Professors like Ruelle, but for real people wanting real answers! Your unique Associates ID is: thefractaltransl.



2. Books that take you from undergraduate physics to a nontrivial understanding of nonlinear dynamics, chaos and fractals are rare. Chaotic Dynamics does the job ellegantly. The familiar pendulum is used to illustrate the basic techniques and concepts in nonlinear dynamics. The reader is gently introduced to phase diagrams, Poincare sections, basins of attraction and bifurcation diagrams. Computer code is included in the Appendix. The interested reader can use this code to further illustrate the lessons of the text or to embark on his/her own exploration of the pendulum and other dynamical systems. Having used the pendulum to establish a firm conceptual platform, Baker and Gollub progress gracefully into the logistic map to illustrate concepts such as period doubling, Lyapunov exponent, entropy, stretching and folding, and various measures of fractal dimension. The presentation is nicely rounded off with studies of other maps and nonlinear dynamical systems from a range of fields in physics, chemistry and fluid dynamics.

5 comments about Systems Thinking, Systems Practice: Includes a 30-Year Retrospective.

1. Well, since I've been on a bit of a 'systems' binge lately, I might as well review this old gem...

   Checkland's book was the first to introduce the differentiation between 'soft' and 'hard' systems analysis. Soft analysis is much more akin to a general, somewhat philosophical approach to the methodology whereas hard analysis is the development of usable engineering models.

   First off, this book is actually two books - the first is a fairly long paper that neatly sums up the systems approach over the 30 years it has been explored. The consensus? Things looked really promising at the beginning but unfortunately the approach simply got hung up on the very thing it was trying to escape: science's current preoccupation with reductionism. That is, the hard systems approach attracted the most attention and it quickly succumbed to the very trap it sought to escape starting with its use of rigidly-defined symbols right up to the detailed diddling with mathematical models that, similar to earlier approaches, did not model reality at all due to assumptions and oversimplification.

   Checkland is much more interested in the soft approach and he consistently laments the fact that systems methodology is not being taught even though it holds so much promise to solving many of our pressing problems. The overview presses this point home and should be required reading for anyone in management or engineering.

   The second section, the original book with a few revisions, is still very relevant. Checkland's focus, soft systems, never was given a chance given our preoccupation with reductionism. Given the recent failures of reductionism, particularly the genome-mapping fiasco, cast systems theory in new light.

   Checkland starts out with an excellent overview of the history of science from a (mostly) philosophical perspective. This very readable overview leads directly into his discussion of the history and early development of systems theory. He then focuses on systems methodology (soft systems theory) with some general applications.

   The approach is very readable and should be easily understood by anyone - in fact, Checkland stresses the importance of having a wide base of knowledge to help solve real-world problems and points out that much work has been done by people who 'migrated' from other fields. Smuts, one of the pioneers, was actually a politician and only wrote a systems book after losing an election...

   It is unfortunate that there are no references to Robert Rosen here since his work, more of a 'hard' approach to systems theory, fully supports Checkland's ideas. In fact, there is a lot of material that should be included as 'backup' for why the systems approach is important as a new direction away from reductionism. Perlovsky's work in cybernetics, Jopling's recent work on self-knowledge, Prigogine's work in thermodynamics and even Kauffman's attempts in biology now point to hypotheses that are only compatible with a systems methodology.

   This book, as mentioned above, should be required reading these days. Certainly for anyone contemplating management or engineering it is a very important reference. In fact, the book could basically be used in high-school with a bit of help from Weinberg's systems books. For those looking for more application-specific information I recommend von Bertalanffy's original, Rosen's work, and perhaps a side helping of Weinberg and Gharajedaghi for more ideas.




2. This book is a gem. The basic concepts of systems, hierarchies and emergent properties are developed from the methodologies of physical and social sciences in chapter 3, and makes for fascinating reading. I'm currently writing a master's thesis on it! =)

   If you're studying management of information systems or something similar, you are probably sick and tired of overly theoretical approaches to the subject which seem to be just excuses for academics to publish rubbish (eg. structuration, actor network theory, etc). This book may save you from a nervous breakdown.




3. When I first read this book I thought it to be revolutionary, ahead of it's time (as others have) and insightful. Despite the fact that Checkland has in large moved away from the ideas and the model of this book - to me it represents the original vision of SSM (soft systems methodology) more so than his later books. Checkland presents a history of systems thinking in the book then goes onto to discuss the need for a new approach - that of SSM. With extreme elegance of style Checkland delivers a long and stinging critique to Hard Systems thinking and presents a coherent and thoughtful argument for his own version SSM. Further he creates a platform for real world problem solving that is useful and interesting. A lot of his ideas have appeared in American texts (like the fifth discipline for example) and rarely are they credited or made use of in that regard. This book is a good place to start exploring the real world of problems with but I would highly recommended that before you go to his two other books you start here. This in my opinion has not been bettered in any systems context to date and I am not sure it ever will or could be. Having said that you really do need to read it and find out for yourself. Be warned it's not for those who want to be challenged in their thinking - especially those of you who don't like the qualitative stuff.



4. I originallay read (and wrote a paper about) Checkland's ideas in 1990 whilst I was studying for my MBA. Then his ideas seemed revolutionary, insightful and impractical. Re-visiting his book nearly 20 years on little has changed in my view of its content, but the world has moved on and what seemed impractical now appears possible.
   
   I would urge anyone involved in creating modern systems based on distributed and dynamic principles to study Checkland.



5. Although this book serves its purpose in discussing SE and soft verses hard systems, it does so from a highly male perspective. I found a lack of female influence in the citing as well as in discussions of change in organizations and management.
   
   Soft and hard systems analysis proved informative. I read three other books concerning systems along with this one.
   
   It was a dry read.

1 comments about Synchronization: A Universal Concept in Nonlinear Sciences (Cambridge Nonlinear Science Series).

1. A well-accessible and authoritative book describing all forms of synchronizations both graphically and in formulae. Includes numerous examples of synchronization in different fields of science.

1 comments about Mastering Simulink.

1. This book is very detail explain of the using SIMULINK.
   
   I recommend to the starter using SIMULINK.
   
   It's very helpful..