Measuring the Benefits of Clean Air and Water (RFF Press)

Book Description

Let Spain surprise you: colorful fiestas, ancestral traditions, historical towns and picturesque villages, seaside resorts and immensely varied landscapes. THE GREEN GUIDE, the perfect travel companion: a discerning and up-to-date source of information. Practical and comprehensive, it offers suggestions on what to see and what to do, background on history and cultural heritage and a selection of hotels and restaurants. Ideal guides for the independent tourist, THE GREEN GUIDE explores destinations both near and far. Sights are rated - 3 stars "worth a journey", 2 stars "worth a detour" and 1 star "interesting". Map itineraries make planning easy, whether visiting the highlights or venturing off the beaten path. Travel with THE GREEN GUIDE for an exciting and memorable experience.

Customer Reviews:

Spain--in alphabetical order.......2007-07-05

I used this book in 2005 to visit Madrid/Toledo/Segovia/Seville/Granada and Cordoba and then again in 2007 on a 10 day trip through Galicia. The book's main advantage is that towns/cities are in alphabetical order, so info is easy to find.

However, I find the text lacking in sparkle--a bit too dull.........It was my #3 choice for information. (I also had the DK guide and the Rough Guide)

The size and shape of this book make it easy to carry during the day, but most of the time, I carried the DK guide!!

Fantastic travel guide.......2006-03-24

As expected from the Michelin Green Guides series, this one too is a wonderful travel companion. Accurate and up to date, covers all important milestones and goes past the shallow surface barely scratched by other travel guides.
This Michelin Green Guides is the best available, if you're going to travel to Spain don't leave home without it.

Michelin the Green Guide Spain, Balearic and Canary Islands

Average customer rating:

Excellent Guide
Save your money and don't buy this horrible guide

Michelin the Green Guide Spain, Balearic and Canary Islands
Michelin Travel Publications
Manufacturer: Michelin Travel Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Europe | Travel | Subjects | Books

Guidebooks | Reference & Tips | Travel | Subjects | Books

General | Travel | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 2060000688

Book Description

Discover the rich cultural and artistic heritage behind the sun, sea and sand traditionally associated with Spain. This captivating land of contrasts has something to offer everyone, whether skiing in the Pyrenees, museum-hopping in Madrid, sun-worshipping in the Canary Islands or dancing the flamenco in Andalusia.

Customer Reviews:

Excellent Guide.......2003-02-11

If you use this guide for what it was intended (a sightseeing guide for people with relatively limited time in Spain), it is excellent. On my last trip to Spain I used it as my main tool for deciding what to see (the star ratings really help you to prioritize), but I didn't even consult it when deciding where to sleep or eat. My recommendation is to use this guide along with another one that is loaded with painfully detailed hotel, restaurant, and price information, but doesn't really help you decide what to see with your limited time (e.g. Lonely Planet).

My only real complaint was that I thought that, generally speaking, the guide's star system for rating sights/attractions underrates Spanish attractions relative to those in other countries. For example, cities like Caceres, Ronda, and Cuenca would surely get 3-star ratings if they were located in France or especially the United States, instead of Spain. Overall, I guess I felt that the raters were relatively "harsh" when assigning stars to attractions in Spain, when I compare this guide to some of Michelin's other guides for other countries I have visited. The nice thing is that when you visit "two-star" sights in Spain, expecting to see what you would normally see in a Green Guide two-star sight elsewhere, you'll be pleasantly surprised!

Save your money and don't buy this horrible guide.......2002-05-29

I bought this book but didn't have time to read it until I was on the plane -- my mistake in buying it in the first place -- there are so many other great guides that do such a better job than this ridiculous guide -- the maps are horrible, the entire book is superficial in it's descriptions and the restaurants it recommends were all recommended by other guides -- as if they had plagarized the lists of places to go. Save your money!

Book Description

Early in Canales' collection, the young narrator gives her beloved grandmother the perfect Christmas present; she gives her the gift of the world. Through her descriptions, we see that world as she sees it, through the eyes of a child that is slowly moving into adolescence. In this twilight world, the author offers a shimmering picture of a family confronted with the issues that divide lives and love.

In this collection of coming of age stories, Canales introduces the reader to the cultural traditions and activities of a community: homage to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the celebration of the day of the Three Magi, a carousel of unique saints, and a flock of very special pink plastic flamingoes. And through it all, with the passage of time the narrator discovers changes within herself and the community around her.

Canales' robust tales inhabit the mysterious and secret land that lies between the United States and Mexico, between child and adulthood, reality and imagination, and between life and death. These haunting stories not only reveal, layer by layer, the fantastic in the ordinary, but, most importantly, the powerful and healing magic inside all of us. Long after the tales are finished, the reader will be left with the taste of orange candy slices.

Customer Reviews:

Have Another Orange Candy Slice!.......2004-03-08

Orange Candy Slices and Other Secret Tales is a collection of short vinettes gathered from the innocent and selective viewpoint of a child. It is an exploration of events, folklore and idiosyncracies of the border town hispanic culture. One of the tales, for example, reveals the belief in a curandera with an egg who takes an "evil eye curse" away from a girl. Another explores the miraculous healings and miricles of the Vigin. Each story is interesting in its own right. Together, they make up a patchwork quilt of the culture. Viola Canales is an inspiration for others to keep their heritage by writing. I highly recommend this book for teenagers to adults.

Exploring and Celebrating a Different Way of Life.......2002-02-12

What a great book! It paints Hispanic life in the Rio Grande Valley from the viewpoint of a child. What would ordinarily appear strange to an outsider becomes natural and mystical through the narrator's eyes. This doubleness of vision makes the stories remarkable indeed. They led me into a culture very different from my own--one where everyday life is governed by different rhythms and different values. Family and community anchor all. And in the simple rituals of food and of death, joy and reaffirmation of life is found.

crackles with wit.......2002-02-02

These stories crackle with wit. Written cleanly, with no excess verbiage, this book grabbed me and led me to a place I'd like to know. The skill of the author impresses me, suggesting as it does an intelligent perspective on spirituality, America, individuality, and social alienation. The flavor of a Texas I have not seen stirred my curiosity, while references to the Virgin Mary resonated with my own sense of wonder. As a worthwhile distraction from life's little blisters, I have already recommended these stories to friends.

Orange Candy Slices and Other Secret Tales.......2001-12-08

A superb collection of short stories that capture the essence of the Hispanic culture. The author does an exceptional job in bringing these traditions to all your senses. One can taste the bread in The Panaderia, feel the prickly thorns in Nopalitos, see the vibrant colored houses in The Bubble Gum Pink House, smell the aroma of cafe de olla in The Carousel and hear the girl's dancing feet in The Polka Dot Dress. I can't wait for her next book!

Magical, Strange, Everyday Reality.......2001-12-02

I really enjoyed Orange Candy Slices. The stories all take place in what was an exotic location to me -- the Rio Grande Valley of Texas -- but they have that rare blend of acute detail that makes you feel you know a faraway place and universal appeal. For example, "The Tiny Bubble," about a girl finding out about puberty, combines the mysticism of a very different culture with details from the movies our elementary school showed us in fifth grade. Perhaps my favorite stories are "The Flamingoes," "The Magi," and "The Cafe" because of the way they show the relationship between the narrators and their grandparents. They remind us of how magical the everyday relationship between grandparents and grandchildren can be. If you've had that sort of bond, these stories will make you remember episodes of your own; if you haven't, they'll teach you something wonderful and new.

Book Description

This book brings together most of the information available concerning two species that diverged 2-3 million years ago. The objective was to try to understand why two sibling species so similar in several characteristics can be so different in others. To this end, it was crucial to confront all data from their ecology and biogeography with their behavior and DNA polymorphism. Drosophila melanogaster and Drosophila simulans are among the two sibling species for which a large set of data is available. In this book, ecologists, physiologists, geneticists, behaviorists share their data on the two sibling species, and several scenarios of evolution are put forward to explain their similarities and divergences. This is the first collection of essays of its kind. It is not the final point of the analyses of these two species since several areas remain obscure. However, the recent publication of the complete genome of D. melanogaster opens new fields for research. This will probably help us explain why D. melanogaster and D. simulans are sibling species but false friends.

Book Description

A unified approach is proposed for applied mechanics and optimal control theory. The Hamilton system methodology in analytical mechanics is used for eigenvalue problems, vibration theory, gyroscopic systems, structural mechanics, wave-guide, LQ control, Kalman filter, robust control etc. All aspects are described in the same unified methodology. Numerical methods for all these problems are provided and given in meta-language, which can be implemented easily on the computer. Precise integration methods both for initial value problems and for two-point boundary value problems are proposed, which result in the numerical solutions of computer precision.
Key Features of the text include:
-Unified approach based on Hamilton duality system theory and symplectic mathematics. -Gyroscopic system vibration, eigenvalue problems.
-Canonical transformation applied to non-linear systems.
-Pseudo-excitation method for structural random vibrations.
-Precise integration of two-point boundary value problems.
-Wave propagation along wave-guides, scattering.
-Precise solution of Riccati differential equations.
-Kalman filtering.
-HINFINITY theory of control and filter.

Customer Reviews:

Toward a Unifed Framework for Control and Mechanics.......2004-11-15

Control and Mechanics have a deep and historical relationship ever since the birth of classical and modern control theory. Many great mathematicians had pioneered in both areas over the last two centuries. In early 1920s, von Karman, a giant in both applied mathematics and mechanics, had made a significant contribution in bring in rigorous mathematics into engineering and opened the era of engineering science that still impacts our engineering education and research today. In my opinion, the very idea of engineering science is responsible at least partly for the birth of modern control theory, and it is not a coincident that exact 50 years ago it was von Karman's protege, H.S. Tsien (or X. S. Qian), the father of China's Space Program, especially its Rocketry, also an giant in mechanics and late in both control and systems engineering, wrote the first milestone book in modern control engineering and application, Engineering Cybernetics (McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1954), when Tsian was a professor at California Institute of Technology. One can see the obvious trace of mechanics and applied mathematics in Tsien's control book. However, for many years, it seems that this historic and deep tie between mechanics and control has been overlooked and almost lost today. For many, control is more of an EE-orientated than a ME disciplinary today. For the benefit of both areas, especially with the new development of modern computational methods and tools, we must re-establish a close and strong tie between control and mechanics.

Duality System in Applied Mechanics and Optimal Control represents one of successful and valuable attempts along this direction by a leading expert in both applied mechanics and control theory. The book strives to connect and integrate concepts, methods, and algorithms in mechanics and control so that a unified framework can be established for both analytical and computational purposes. The state space approach has been used as the mathematical basis for building the analogy and one to one correspondence between mechanics and control, especially structural mechanics and optimal control. From the aspect of mechanics, this enables us to reformulate basic equations for elasticity theory using Hamiltonian dual variables and transfer the corresponding mathematics from the traditional Euclidean geometric into symplectic geometric one. As a result, the symplectic eigen-function expansion approach can be used to solve analytically many problems in elasticity that are hard or impossible to solve using the traditional solution methodology by the try-and-error technique, called semi-inverse method. Likewise, from the aspect of control, the analogy leads to new understanding and insight of key control problems in terms of well-studied classical problems in mechanics, especially vibration problems in structural mechanics, so that many effective algorithms and computational methods in mechanics can be applied to solve the corresponding control problems. Clearly, the book has demonstrated that the duality system method can be used as a mathematical and systematic foundation to deal with many important concepts and problems in both mechanics and control. It must be pointed out that this is not only very useful for research and applications, but also extremely helpful for multidisciplinary curriculum development when students from one field are trying to learning and applying concepts and methods from the other field.

The book is organized into 6 chapters, starting with a brief historical, mathematical, and somewhat philosophical introduction to developments in mechanics and control and the precise integration method, a key computational method in structural mechanics developed by the author and his research group. Roughly speaking, the first 4 chapters constitute the mathematical and mechanics foundation for the entire book, Chapter 5 focuses on the application of state space method in elasticity, specifically elastic systems with single continuous coordinates or one-dimensional systems, while Chapter 6 concentrates on the utilization of computational methods and algorithms for solving control problems, especially the use of the precise integration method for predication, filtering, smoothing, optimal control and robust control.

Chapter 1 presents the concepts and methods involving analytical dynamics, Lagrange and Hamilton systems, Legendre transformation, dual variables, canonical transformation, symplectic systems, Poisson bracket, action, the Hamilton-Jacobi equation and separation of variables. The theme of this chapter is that the importance of Hamiltonian formulation goes well beyond analytical dynamics: it also provides a foundation for dealing with key problems in optimal control, robust control, elasticity, vibration, wave propagation, multi-body dynamics, and so on. One of the important objectives here is to establish a unified methodology under the sympletic frame for various disciplines based on the use of duality variables and reformulation of governing equations of dynamic systems into Hamiltonian forms.

Chapter 2 summaries key topics and problems in the structural vibration theory, especially the symplectic eigen-problem for gyrosocopic systems and the corresponding algorithms. Issues related to the eigen-value count are also addressed.

Chapters 3 and 4 provide the preliminaries for probability, stochastic processes, and random vibration of structures. Most of the materials in those two chapters are standard but the introduction and discussion of Lin's Pseudo Excitation Method (PEM) for solving linear response problems are quite new and interesting. Compared with the traditional approach, the PEM has significantly improved the computational efficiency and enables us to solve more practical and complicated problems in non-stationary random vibrations of real-world structural systems.

Chapter 5 deals with elastic systems with single continuous coordinate or one-dimensional elastic systems. The key idea in this chapter is the establishment of the analogy between structural mechanics and optimal control by considering the single spatial coordinate as "time" coordinate and then transferring the original higher order spatial differential equations into a set of first-order "state space" equations. In this way, the traditional semi-analytical method and wave propagation problems in elasticity can now be solved analytically and systematically using the duality system theory. However, the original initial value problems for analytical dynamics become the two point boundary value problems for structural mechanics, which can be easily solved numerically with the precise integration algorithm Detailed discussions and procedures for solving matrix Riccati differential equations with precise integration as well as eigenvector based solutions of Riccati and Hamilton equations are illustrated.

Finally, Chapter 6 addresses issues of applying methods in mechanics for linear optimal control systems and corresponding computational problems. Actually, many methods used in this chapter has been discussed in the previous chapter since the same analogy between control and mechanics is still valid and applied here. For example, the precise integration algorithms are extensively used for solving various matrix differential equations in smoothing, filtering, and predicating operations, as well as in LQG optimal control and H-inf robust control, with specific consideration for combing on-line light iterative calculation with off-line intensive one-time computation so that the real-time computational work can be reduced to minimum. Clearly, the use of internal mixed energy concept is essential for applying methods in mechanics to control problems. The physical interpretation of the solution of Riccati equation, i.e., the solution matrix corresponds to the end flexibility matrix, offers useful information for its precise integration and analytical solution based on state eigen-vectors, as well as the observation that the eigen-solution based analytical method should be combined with the precise integration to solve Riccati differential equation and the filter equation. More interesting, it is found that critical sub-optimal parameters in H-inf robust control and filtering correspond to the extended Rayleigh quotients, thus many effective variational and numerical methods in structural mechanics, such as the W-W algorithm can be applied for robust control problems.

This book only represents part of Professor Zhong's effort to bring control and mechanics together under a unified mathematical and computational framework, as one can see from his recent papers and two previous Chinese books: Symplectic Elasticity (co-authored with Weian Yao, Higher Education Press, 2002) and Computational Structural Mechanics and Optimal Control (Dalian University of Technology Press, 1993). Overall, this book is a very successful initial effort but more works are needed towards a completed and unified framework. In addition, there are still many open research topics involved, especially for problems in distributed parameter systems in both control and mechanics. As for the improvement of this book, I hope in its new version the English will be checked more carefully since sometimes one can see obvious traces of direct translation of Chinese into English.

More than 20 years ago, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to be Professor Zhong's teaching assistant for his summer seminar course on Computational Structural Mechanics in Hangzhou, China. Today as a senior scientist in China, Prof. Zhong is still extremely active and engaged himself in exploring new topics and disciplinary. I must say that I deeply admire and respect his academic spirit, tireless effort, and endless energy in pursuing new knowledge and conducting solid research works.

Book Description

Athens in the fifth century B.C. offers a striking picture: the first democracy in history; the first empire created and ruled by a Greek city; and a flourishing of learning, philosophical thought, and visual and performing arts so rich as to leave a remarkable heritage for Western civilization. To what extent were these three parallel developments interrelated? An international group of fourteen scholars expert in different fields explores here the ways in which the fifth-century "cultural revolution" depended on Athenian democracy and the ways it was influenced by the fact that Athens was an imperial city.

The authors bring to this analysis their individual areas of expertise--in the visual arts, poetry and drama, philosophy, archaeology, religion, and social, economic, and political history--and a variety of theoretical approaches. The product of a colloquium at Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C., Democracy, Empire, and the Arts in Fifth-Century Athens sheds new light on a much debated question that has wide implications. The book is illustrated and enriched by a comprehensive bibliography on the subject.

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