No comments about Troubleshooting the Extrusion Process: A Systematic Approach to Solving Plastic Extrusion Problems.

3 comments about General Principles of Systems Design.

1. An outstanding follow up to the first book Weinberg wrote(An Introduction to General Systems Thinking, 1975). Anyone who considers themseleves a systems thinker must read this book! Whereas the first book attempts to answer the first question in the systems triumvirate, "Why do we see what we see?", this books tackles the next question, namely "Why do things stay the same?" As a marriage and family therapist, understanding systems is crucial to my work. This book is clearly written, and provides real world examples of sometimes difficult topics. I have read this book cover to cover 3 times in the last 2 years, and continue to get something new from it every time. One of the best books around to think about the organization of systems, regardless of the context.



2. One of the wonderful things about the Weinbergs' early series of books -- and this one in particular -- is that the ideas and the examples really make you think. With examples chosen from many fields, the book illustrates its central ideas with a cross-fertilization that helps one think outside ones box.

   It starts with a very simple idea -- stability. Things change so little most of the time we hardly notice. And yet stability usually requires active forces to sustain it. As an information systems designer, Weinberg helped me see why this simple idea, and a few simple ideas that follow, turn out to explain a great deal about why projects information technology projects fail, and how they can be made more successful.




3. Perhaps I bought this book with expecting too much. The books does talk about general system thinking, but:
   - I find the book itself rather unsystematic and jumpy
   - The style really annoying
   - Most of the material is primitive
   On the positive side, if you do want to get a feel of system thinking, this might be one of the books. I would also recommend to check out popular books on Complexity (such as Complexity by Mitchell Walldrop).

4 comments about Random Signals: Detection, Estimation and Data Analysis.

1. The authors have unleashed the subject of Stochastic Processes using a carefully paced and proven approach of introducing the material using a number of elegant examples where emphasis is to generalize specific results. This quality text will certainly not dissapoint readers who have come to expect high quality from K. Sam Shanmugam and Authur .M.Breipohl .It can be recommended for first course and also for gaduate level courses on the fascinating and challenging subject of Random Processes



2. This is one of the best books around for studying Random Processes ! The author has also provided a very good introduction to Detection, Estimation and Modelling of Stochastic Processes. I found this book very useful and I'd strongly suggest this book for an introductionary level graduate course. If you want to build a strong foundation in Random Signal Theory, this book is the way to go.. Other advanced texts like Simon Haykin's "Adaptive Filter Theory" will be a lot easier to understand once you study this book thoroughly and work out the exercise problems.



3. I agree with the other reviews that this is one of the best books for studying random processes, especially in the context of DSP. I used the book in a graduate level "statistical signal processing" course at the University of London and I found it extremely useful.
   It covers everything from the definition of a sample space, AR and MA processes, periodograms to optimal Wiener filter theory. The examples are very clear and they accompany each of the chapters. One point to notice is that you do need to know something about Fourier transforms and also have basic familiarity with probability.
   
   Highly recommended to anyone in the DSP field.



4. I've read the statistical signal processing and stochastic processes books by Kay, Papoulis, Srinath and Stark & Woods, and this is by far the best book that covers both subject areas in a logical fashion. The text is very clearly written, mathematical notation is easy to follow, and example problems are very worthwhile. I'm currently a PhD student using this book to prepare for my qualification exams, and it's really helping me master the difficult subject of estimation and detection theory.
   
   Though the book does not get much into measure spaces and some of the abstract theoretical fundamentals, it's an excellent engineering reference that's ideal for an introductory class in the subject. My only complaint is that the book is not hardcover.

No comments about The Ecosystem Approach: Complexity, Uncertainty, and Managing for Sustainability (Complexity in Ecological Systems).

5 comments about Ubiquity: The Science of History . . . or Why the World Is Simpler Than We Think.

1. It is a matter of degree. If I, with my degrees in Chinese Lit, were to hurl a hundred frozen potatoes at a wall, I would probably end up in a stait-jacket. If someone with degrees in Physics does that, it's research.

   Mark Buchanan, however, does away with degrees. As the title of this book implies, all or nothing: Ubiquity is a sole authority. Only my knife cuts potatoes, no knife but mine can cut potatoes. While I agree that the existence of power laws is fascinating, I would not perhaps extend them as far as Buchanan does; I would be more interested in probing why distribution is so regular, rather than insisting that all phenomena must be explained by this, and only this, rule. A power law may signify that a country can be bled, or a forest burned, so far before you run out of fuel. This is more interesting than assuming that because the numbers resemble each other, the conditions necessarily illuminate each other. (As to the power law, please note the comments in Dennis Littrell's review of this book).

   I got to the point where I dreaded having to read about yet another game that, amazingly enough, proves the power law (do any games disprove it?). Games seem to go to Buchanan's head, where they practically replace reality, which, needless to say, is far more complex. There are games and there are games, though. On page 126 (paperback version), Newton is praised for simplifying for ease of reasoning; then on page 142, economists are excoriated for simplifying for ease of reasoning. I never thought I would see the day that I stood up for economics, but isn't this a double standard? By the same token, after he so thoroughly debunked the efficient market hypothesis, I was surprised to read on page 188 that after war releases stress, 'each nation is brought back into rough balance with its true economic strength.' But as he says on the next page, 'None of this is meant to be fully convincing.' It's not.

   Buchanan at times seems to forget that there is more to human history than wars and revolution, and that great people can change the course of history; where would we be today if George Washington Carver had not saved southern agriculture? Buchanan's total belief in the ubiquity of his games leads him to say something as ridiculous as "the mark of the great scientist lies not so much in having profound ideas that revolutionize science, but in taking ideas ... and making that potential real"(p183). ...limits our reviews to 1,000 words, so I will leave it this sentence for you to explode .

   Even if we discount the role anybody but scientists and soldiers play in history, there should be some difference between incipient wars. Consider World War II, in which Germany and Japan geared for widespread conquest, planning meticulously years in advance. The German army would not have rolled through the center of Europe so irresistibly if the Hitler Youth had not trained the young so well; Japanese school children were primed to attack China before the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. Then compare this to the American Revolution, a beef far across the oceans between some (not all) ill-prepared colonists and a Great Britain preoccupied with India. Is it any surprise that WWII spread far and wide, while the American Revolution was fought locally?

   I think the author has intriguing ideas, but he has overextended them. Nonetheless, Buchanan's doctrines have a familiar ring. Buddhism long has taught that any event is the result of an infinite number of causes, and the cause of an infinite number of results. The ideas in this book are well worth pondering, but with a grain of salt. One grain. Now, if you have a whole pile of grains of salt, one more might avalanche....




2. Buchanan's book Ubiquity is a fascinating volume on self organizing criticality. It bears a striking resemblance to Per Bak's book How Nature Works, and Bak's research is cited a number of times throughout the text. As with the Bak work, Buchanan's covers a wide variety of subjects from wars to stock market fluctuations. Of particular interest to me was the discussion of evolution and the episodic character of mass extinctions, since I've read a number of books on the subject of the K-T boundary extinction.

   Like Bak, Buchanan points out that much that appears to have historical significance and specific causation, while it makes for good story telling, has little predictive value about it. He uses Bak's sandpile experiments to illustrate the futility of such efforts by creating a "Sandman's view" of catastrophe (pp. 179-180). He imagines a catastrophic sand slide from the point of view of a tiny survivor to whom events seem to have been "due" to negligence on the part of the individuals responsible for a steep area. From the point of view of the sandpile, though, the information required for such control would have to be staggeringly large and nearly perfect in order to have predicted the slide and its effects. Had some minute change to the pile been possible at the putative disaster site, a similar slide could have occurred elsewhere. Then the caretakers of the sandpile would have been blamed for causing a disaster rather than preventing one. One can see in this parable why politicians in the real world tend to seek their own ultimate good rather than that of their constituents or of the environment itself. The vagaries of prediction caused by the intertwining of particulars and the vastness of the data involved put such individuals in impossible positions. They are either guilty of not preventing or of causing various negative outcomes if they are unfortunate or praised for positive outcomes if fortunate. As the author points out in a quote of John Galbraith, "Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable (p. 1)."

   The key point of the book seems to be that many systems are organized on the critical edge between instability and stability. Life itself may owe its very existence to that fact. Because of this poised-on-the-edge characteristic, small events may cascade in such a way as to produce major changes: a new value for stocks, a massive extinction that creates new opportunities for remaining species, a redistribution of power among nations, etc. Which outcomes occur and when, however, are not subject to predictive formulae, even though they may seem ideally suited to it. If even extreme events are the results of myriads of small, seemingly unimportant events-sort of the butterfly in Japan fluttering its wings concept-then there are no means by which catastrophic events can be predicted any more than smaller ones can be. According to the author, while there seems to be a mathematical frequency with which incidents of different magnitudes occur, there is no way of divining when a specific outcome of a given magnitude will actually occur, nor are the consequences should such an event be forestalled. This has implications for events meaningful to human beings: wars, the stock market peaks and valleys, even extinction events. For Buchanan, history itself may arise by virtue of natural resolutions of unstable systems of whatever kind.

   After reading the author's discussion of the Gutenberg-Richter power law and the scale invariance of some systems, it occurred to me that the end of the world scenario presented by Carl Sagan in his book Cosmos-and credited to an earlier researcher-may fall into this category. In that volume, a chart had been created that plotted murder (private war) to the total destruction of mankind against a time line, finding that total annihilation should occur a few years after the year 2000. (It was expected closer to mid 21st century, but the original author had not factored in the destructive power of nuclear war. Later individuals did and produced a chart that suggested armageddon would be around 2010). While the ultimate war may well occur, if Bak and Buchanan are correct, it might not be due to either predictable or controllable factors, and it will probably not occur on any clear cut timetable like that suggested in Cosmos.

   An amazingly interesting book full of concepts that, however theoretical, are certainly plausible and explain a lot about our world.




3. This is not one of my favourite reads. In some ways I found it a labour as it went over the same material again and again, albeit in very diverse areas. I understand the power law that Mr Buchanan describes and its implications, but it seems to be such an after-the-event view that can have little material impact on modern endeavours. It proves futility. It is as if what is ubiquitous is our necessary failure to achieve. But I'm sure we do do better than that.

   On the other hand there was one revelation in this book that truly fascinated me. I have always been interested in the dinosaurs and their extinction. Books like 'The Dinosaur Heresies' by Bakker and 'Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs' by Desmond developed a genuine need-to-know-more. But the matter of extinction is so challenging. There are strong suggestions that an impact of an asteroid caused such havoc that the dinosaurs became extinct - all of them, the small ones, the large ones, the carnivores, the herbivores, the pterosaurs (flying dinosaurs) and the plesiosaurs (sea-going dinosaurs). And yet, for all that, other animals - notably mammals - did survive. What allowed them through the window of extinction? In my reading I have encountered this debate many times and most writers do have a preference for one theory or another. But even those who do support the impact theory do not have evidence of an impact associated with each of the great periods of extinction that have occured through time. So, the thesis of 'Ubiquity' does provide an alternative - that sometimes the effect of even a small change will cause monumental alterations to the world according to the ubiquitous power law. What was the small change that extinguished the dinosaur SPECIES but allowed others to survive, and in the absence of the dinosurs, thrive? It seems to me that knowing what this small change was would fundamentally advance our knowledge of what the dinosaurs really were.

   The most powerful voice in the campaign for popularising the impact theory of dinosaur extinction is Alvarez who discovered the site of the impact that occured 65 million years ago just about the time the last dinosaur walked on the Earth. What Buchanan points out, that so few other writers do is this ....

   '...the bulk of the long 1980 paper by Alvarez and his colleagues was 'confined to the geological and physical evidence for an impact, and the physical results of the impact. The discussion of the biological results of the impact occupies only half a page. (quoted from M. Benton) The reason is simple: no one really has much of a clue about what an impact would really do to life all over the planet.'

   This is perhaps the strongest argument I have read against the impact causing the extinction of the dinsoaurs. Not that it couldn't have, but that the opinionated science community is so set on Alvarez' findings that they have taken the most tenuous suggestions from Alvarez' paper to support their theories.




4. There is no physical theory that explains history, economics, etc. The wary reader should beware that wishful thinking has won over scientific criticism in this book. To be more specific, sandpile models do not explain earthquakes, turbulence, economics, and so on. Sandpile models are an interesting way of trying something new and stimulating in statistical physics but certainly cannot be elevated to the level of explaining the world. Fluid turbulence is not like dynamically an earthquake, financial markets are not like sandpiles, and Hitler is not explained by any model of statistical physics (need one really say this!?). The historians and biologists need not pack their bags and go home...

   (A physics professor)




5. In the book Ubiquity by Mark Buchanan, processes as diverse as forest fire size, stacking rice grains, market fluctuation, scientific paper citations, species extinction history, epidemiology, sizes of wars and earthquake severity are said to generate occasional catastrophic behavior following similar statistical behavior. Buchanan presents these arguments in a very readable style at a level that can be grasped by the layman. I found the physical descriptions of the processes fascinating. The phenomena is, indeed, ubiquitous. Repeatedly, we find that, if X measures severity and f is the frequency histogram of occurrence, then numerous processes containing a catastrophic component adhere to a linear log-log plot with negative slope. Although unsaid in the book, probably to allow access to a wider audience, the underlying probability density function of the ubiquitous process is a Pareto random variable with probability density function f(x)=(a/b)*(b/x)^(a+1) for x>b and zero otherwise. The enormously fat tails of this distribution allow the outlier-like catastrophic events described in the book. Taking the log of both sides of the density function gives log[f(x)] = -(a+1)*log(x) + constant which is a line of negative slope on a log-log plot. If U is a uniform random variable on (0,1), then X=b*U^(-1/a) is a Pareto RV. Using this, plots similar to the time series and log-log plots in Ubiquity can be straightforwardly simulated. Googling "Pareto distribution" gives a plurality of interesting web accounts, many mathematically deeper, of this remarkable phenomena made wonderfully accessible by Buchanan.

3 comments about Chaos Under Control: The Art and Science of Complexity.

1. As a teacher attempting to introduce chaos theory into high school physics and mathematics classes, the book gave many examples of practical activities. It also gave many examples of how chaos could and would become useful. There are currently so many false methods being used to integrate subject matter in education; chaos theory has great potential to demonstrate clear connections between arts, sciences, and social sciences, and Peak and Frame in a simple manner bring this to light.



2. CHAOS UNDER CONTROL lies somewhere between a standard textbook on chaos and fractals and the more popular works on the subject. There are suggested experiments to be performed by the reader, but no sets of exercises at the end of sections or chapters. I chiefly want to warn potential buyers that the paperback edition contains 16 "color plates" that are unfortunately reproduced in black and white. The discussion of the plates by the authors refers repeatedly to the colors, which are indeed significant. Many of the other black and white figures scattered throughout the text would provide the reader with more information (and enjoyment) if reproduced in color. If you wish to purchase this book, at least try to find a hard cover edition with true color plates.



3. Chaotic dynamics is one of the most fascinating areas of mathematics and one that every mathematician should have some knowledge of. This book is an excellent primer on the geometry of fractals, chaotic dynamics and cellular automata. It is written for a popular audience, although the authors were not afraid to include the appropriate equations when they were needed for a full explanation. Many examples of how fractals and chaos can be used to describe the physical world are included. A large number of figures are used to demonstrate the consequences of the equations.
   If your background in mathematics is limited to basic algebra, then there are areas of this book that you will struggle with. However, if you are determined to learn, you will be able to do so. It is one of the best introductions to fractals and chaos that is available.

No comments about Coping with Chaos: Analysis of Chaotic Data and The Exploitation of Chaotic Systems.

No comments about Automating with PROFINET: Industrial communication based on Industrial Ethernet.

2 comments about Engineering Design Methods: Strategies for Product Design.

1. If you are an engineering undergrad, this book will be fuzzier than most of your texts. It doesn't deal directly with the hard, quantitative issues like finding the load on suspension bridge, or laying out the control systems of a satellite. Instead, the book's subject is far more subjective. But no less essential. Product design is a skill you need to master, and the book tries to help you along.
   
   Of the methodologies discussed, you might find the objectives tree and the evaluation chart to be especially useful. These can help you narrow down the design choices.



2. I bought this book for an introductory engineering class and only opened it when I needed buzz phrases from it. All the useful information was covered easily in class by the professor (who was a graduate student who had no desire to teach at all.) The ideas in the book only warrant a few pages to be fully explained.
   
   The book is very thin and most of its content is examples to illustrate the use of techniques it teaches. The examples have lots of unnecessary detail, which seem only to serve to thicken the book. You will either loathe needing to read through these or develop a habit of only reading the beginning pages of a chapter when studying.
   
   If you are looking into buying this book chances are it is for a class. There are no problems in the book to be worked out (which would be much better practice than these examples.) If you expect to be quizzed over the book, you can probably fake it if your professor also discusses the ideas in class, if not I sympathize with you and hope you try to persuade your school to drop this book from the curriculum.

No comments about Connectionism and the Mind: Parallel Processing, Dynamics, and Evolution in Networks.