Long-Term Factors in American Economic Growth (National Bureau of Economic Research Studies in Income and Wealth)

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These classic studies of the history of economic change in 19th- and 20th-century United States, Canada, and British West Indies examine national product; capital stock and wealth; and fertility, health, and mortality. "A 'must have' in the library of the serious economic historian."—Samuel Bostaph, Southern Economic Journal

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This volume offers, to the greatest extent possible, definitive instructions on the law; presents balanced instructions that are intended to be acceptable to plaintiffs and defendants alike; and provides instructions written in a way that juries would find helpful and informative.

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Fruit flies are "little people with wings" goes the saying in the scientific community, ever since the completion of the Human Genome Project and its revelations about the similarity amongst the genomes of different organisms. It is humbling that most signalling pathways which "define" humans are conserved in Drosophila, the common fruit fly.

Feed a fruit fly caffeine and it has trouble falling asleep; feed it antihistamines and it cannot stay awake. A C. elegans worm placed on the antidepressant flouxetine has increased serotonin levels in its tiny brain. Yeast treated with chemotherapeutics stop their cell division. Removal of a single gene from a mouse or zebrafish can cause the animals to develop Alzheimer’s disease or heart disease. These organisms are utilized as surrogates to investigate the function and design of complex human biological systems.

Advances in bioinformatics, proteomics, automation technologies and their application to model organism systems now occur on an industrial scale. The integration of model systems into the drug discovery process, the speed of the tools, and the in vivo validation data that these models can provide, will clearly help definition of disease biology and high-quality target validation. Enhanced target selection will lead to the more efficacious and less toxic therapeutic compounds of the future.

Leading experts in the field provide detailed accounts of model organism research that have impacted on specific therapeutic areas and they examine state-of-the-art applications of model systems, describing real life applications and their possible impact in the future.

This book will be of interest to geneticists, bioinformaticians, pharmacologists, molecular biologists and people working in the pharmaceutical industry, particularly genomics.

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This book will be of interest to geneticists, bioinformaticians, pharmacologists, molecular biologists and people working in the pharmaceutical industry, particularly genomics.

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Model Organisms in Drug Discovery
CARROLL
Manufacturer: NY
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000N5GR5E

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Some of the more interesting elements in the chemistry of life are less commonly occuring ones such as nickel and molybdenum. This volume elucidates the chemistry of these elements in important enzymes and also explores the chemistry of elements that do not normally occur in biological molecules, but are useful in probing their structure and function. Topics include: Acquisition and transport of Ni. Mechanistic action of Ni in a wide variety of enzymes. Multielectron redox systems involving pterins in proteins. Chemistry of the pterin and flavin complexes of Mo, Fe, Cu and Ru ions. Replacement of iron in transferrin by a number of other metal ions. Use of polypyridyl complexes of ruthenium and other transition metals as probes of nucleic acid structure through photochemical reactions.

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This edition has been revised to introduce the basic concepts of physics using examples of common occurrences. Beginning students will benefit from the large number of student aids and the reduced math content. Professors will appreciate the organization of the material and the wealth of pedagogical tools.

Customer Reviews:

An Everyday Physics Textbook.......2006-03-19

This book is fairly standard treatment of physics in which the math, though still present, has been toned way down. The "everyday" examples are nothing special and can be found in nearly every high school physics book. The writing and explanations are adequate, without distinction. Readers (and homeschoolers) looking for a creative, original approach to the ordinary physics textbook, packed with real-life examples, should check out "Conceptual Physics" by Paul Hewitt.

What a great physics primer!.......2004-09-03

I used this text book in my intro level physics course in college - physics for the rest of us. What a fantastic - truly fantastic - and gifted author/teacher Griffith is. This book explains seemingly complex subject matter on an intuitive level, using examples pulled right out of one's personal experience. It's completely non-intimidating and worth every dime (and I paid $100 for it at the time!). You will not be disappointed and you will learn the physics you were always needlessly afraid of.

Great Physics Book.......2000-05-09

I used this book in my college Physics I class. It's great. I am planning on becoming a physics teacher and I definatly want to use this book to teach from!

The Physics of Everyday Phenomena: A Conceptual Introduction to Physics

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The Physics of Everyday Phenomena: A Conceptual Introduction to Physics
W. Thomas Griffith
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill Higher Education
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Physics | Science | Subjects | Books

ASIN: 0072828625

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The Physics of Everyday Phenomena: A Conceptual Introduction to Physics
Griffith
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill Science/Engineering/Math
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OGHJP4

Selected Chapters From the Physics of Everyday Phenomena. A Conceptual Introduction to Physics, 2e.

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Selected Chapters From the Physics of Everyday Phenomena. A Conceptual Introduction to Physics, 2e.

ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 007244763X

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enthusiasts should read this, too know of brownsville's hist.......2001-08-24

i have to say that milo kearney does a great job in documenting the history of brownsville, and matamoros. everything has a beginning, and this Professor of Historical sciences at the University of Texas at Brownsville does a fantastic job. The only thing that is really not good are the illustrations by petr Gawendra. they are really non enthusiastic, and super cheezy. i dont care what any one else says,a lousy effort. any way the book is worth it, for any one who wants to find out the history of this city [brownsville]this book is for you. Antonio Knopp also contributed to this literature work.

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history as page turner.......2002-10-02

Hair's deeply insightful story of one man driven to take the most desperate of measures in New Orleans at the turn of the Century (1900) will keep you home and the TV off.

Sit back, fasten your seatbelt and go back to Mississippi after the Civil War. It's a tough place to visit, you sure would not want to live there. Eianr E. Kvaran

The Heroic and Mysterious Mr. Charles.......2002-02-21

This is a big little book well worth reading and well worth owning with a place of honor in the personal library.

Hair does a remarkable job of pulling together the obscure and little-known facts about "Robert Charles", an obscure and little-known historical figure who would have quickly made himself perfectly at home in 1960s America. More importantly, Hair's research and narrative provide a brilliant portrait of a period of American history, approaching the mystery of Robert Charles through a necessarily oblique but dead-on examination of turn of the century racial etiquette in the South; Afro-American attitudes regarding racism, self-defense, identity, militancy, and politics; state and regional economic issues; and the pathological behavior of the white victims of supremacist theories and beliefs. Although the question of who, exactly, was Robert Charles cannot be completely answered---if it could, Hair would have done it---the question of WHY did Robert Charles exist and die as he did is effectively answered through a compelling narrative that proves that history and its writing can be as exciting as any modern story of injustice, oppression, personal dignity in the face of ultimate destruction, and right beaten to ground by actual numerical, and assumed racial, superiority. Hair deserves to be honored for his detective work and meticulous research as well as his ability to make about two hundred pages do the work of some who would have said the same thing, and less eloquently, in six hundred. He should also be commended for refusing to let anything but historical facts and sound reasoning fill in the blank spaces in his history because the temptation to make assumptions in order to flesh out Charles' story must have been a consideration during the writing of the book. This is a small, well-written, rewarding examination of a historical figure and the times that he lived and died in. It's surprising to me that no one has made a movie based upon the book since it has all the drama, suspense, tension, tragedy, and action anyone could possibly hope for regarding a historical figure whose pledge to live and die like a man was a sacred vow and, perhaps, a moral lesson. For those who are aware of Robert F. Williams' place in Afro-American history, Robert Charles will be recognized both as of his time and ahead of it, helping to lay a foundation for the future struggles of others.

Considering the fact that Hair first published this book in the late 1970s or very early 1980s, I am amazed that there are so few reviewers of it. I fervently hope that the lack of reviews is not an indication of a lack of readers for this important historical work.

a fantasic examination of one slice of race history.......1998-09-23

William Ivy Hair in this fast-paced, readable book accomplishes more in a couple of hundred pages than many of our more ponderous historians have aimed to achieve in far-bulkier works. If future historians learn to write and marshall their facts as well as Hair does here, the tales of our past will remain vivid and important to young readers of the future.

Book Description

Featuring Original Contributions from Dr. Stephen Hawking

Unfold the mysteries that vex the greatest minds in science

Gain extensive knowledge of the most challenging scientific problems and learn from more than 60 of the world's foremost scientists—among them, 40 Nobel laureates! Expand your horizons with a wide range of advanced scientific theories and techniques on problems concerning:

Permanently storing nuclear waste or eliminating it altogether
Harvesting energy from a reaction similar to that of the sun
Earthquake prediction
The creation of the universe
Comprehension of free will
The mystery of dark matter
The cosmological constant problem
The construction of a consistent quantum theory of gravity
And much more

Science has reached dazzling heights of discovery, transforming civilization in the process. And yet, some of the most fundamental questions remain unsolved! In The World's 20 Greatest Unsolved Problems, John Vacca—together with more than 60 of the world's most highly respected scientists—explains these problems in detail and describes the intellectual and technological hurdles to be overcome in order to solve them.

This book is indispensable for science buffs, teachers, students, and scientists who want to keep pace with the latest developments. The World's 20 Greatest Unsolved Problems delves deep into mysteries such as the creation of the universe, dark matter, the quantum theory of gravity, protein folding, free will, consciousness, earthquake prediction, Fullerenes, the quantum mechanical vacuum, storing or eliminating nuclear waste, and more. No other resource explains science's most compelling dilemmas with such clarity and authority, and nowhere else can you share the expertise of so many brilliant minds! You'll find

Complex topics made intelligible, as only experts in their fields can
Coverage of the key problems expected to dominate the next 40 years of scientific research
The World's 20 Greatest Unsolved Problems is must reading for anyone teaching science or performing scientific research. It also will fascinate the moderately technical reader or scientific novice.

Customer Reviews:

Wide Range of Topics/Wide range of explanations.......2007-02-05

I really enjoyed reading this book. I am not very proficient in some of the areas covered. I thought the book did a great job of explaining the topics and then giving me some of the explanations that are possible and then finally coming to a conclusion. The book will definitely make you think and understand how little human beings really know about the universe they reside in. I feel after reading this book I know what questions should be asked and I now I have a better grasp of some of the world's greatest mysteries.

Error prone, biased and uninteresting.......2006-03-20

This book was a very disappointing gift.

I found Vacca's explanations of science's current puzzles to be tedious and frustrating. Most of the topics are explained in tedious detail, yet not enough detail to permit real understanding. As an example, it is perhaps impossible to explain the first few milliseconds after the Big Bang without heavy use of mathematics - yet Vacca tries, using extensive, vague and (to me) uninteresting prose. He repeats this performance, attempting to deal with issues ranging from quantum gravity to protein folding to free will.

The frustration is made worse by the inclusion of many grammatical and technical errors. There were more of these errors than I've seen in any comparable volume. He also makes excessive use of boldly-highlighted mid-page "Notes" boxes - which really should be relegated to footnotes.

Finally, Vacca's self-conferred mantle of scientific objectivity is destroyed in the chapter on "Free Energy." He seems to believe it's possible to suck all the energy the earth needs from the cosmic ether. So much for the laws of thermodynamics! His "Notes" in this chapter consist of jabs at the "naysayers and skeptics" with little clue that these "naysayers" comprise over 99% of the world's scientists.

If a layman wants a technical, yet non-mathematical explanation of cosmology and quantum physics, Hawking is much, much better. If a layman wants a well written and wide-ranging overview of science, Bill Bryson's _A Short History of Nearly Everything_ is much more engaging.

Fascinating despite some repetition and some fuzziness.......2006-01-26

The problems range from dark matter and dark energy through attempts to reconcile gravity and quantum mechanics to problems associated with DNA and proteins, to neuroscientific concerns about free will and consciousness to what to do about nuclear fusion and its waste.

There are other books on cutting edge problems in science that I have read, e.g., John Malone's Unsolved Mysteries of Science: A Mind-Expanding Journey through a Universe of Big Bangs, Particle Waves, and Other Perplexing Concepts (2001) or The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century (2002) edited by John Brockman; but there is only one other that is anywhere near as ambitious as this work. That book would be Magic Universe: The Oxford Guide to Modern Science (2003) by Nigel Calder.

To compare these two books for the reader I would say that Calder's book is not only longer but covers more ground, is better edited and relies on a greater range of scientific authority. But Vacca's book has the virtue of narrowing in on just where the scientific action is while he does a good job of presenting the various opinions. That is, insofar as I, personally, can tell. To be honest, much of the material in all these books is above my level of expertise. Consequently I take most of what I read at face value. Clearly I cannot choose between cosmological models of inflation and quintessence. Nor do I have any firsthand experience with the complications of protein folding, etc. But neither will most readers. However we needn't be critical readers. It is enough to read appreciably about the wonders of science and how such wonders inform our beliefs and enrich our lives.

As for the repetition in the book and the typos and the other errors pointed out by other readers, it is good to understand that Vacca wrote this book by himself (although he interviewed and relied on the work of many scientists) and probably did so in a first draft/correct it mode (judging again from the repetition and some of the unpolished prose). Let's face it, life is short and a book like this needs to be written fast or it will become outdated before it hits the book stores. Furthermore, although he had editors to check for technical errors, editors to check his spelling and such, and had the benefit of the professionals at Prentice Hall, it is in the nature of a book like this that no single person with the exception of the author can really be close enough to the content to adequately edit it.

Now I want to look at a couple of the problems that Vacca discusses.

He talks about traveling back into the past and asserts that the usual paradoxes relating to killing your grandfather before your parents were born, etc. can be overcome by having you go back to a past in a parallel universe. Relying on the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (which he seems to favor), Vacca finds this reasonable. The problem, however, is that Vacca has already in a previous chapter made it clear that there is no interaction between postulated parallel universes, so he ends up justifying travel to the past by making it doubly difficult: not only do you have to violate causality but you have to go to a parallel universe to do so! I imagine he would say in response that by going to another universe you actually avoid the violation of causality since you do not in any way affect the universe you are in. However to go back in time in the other universe you have to be in that universe.

Vacca suggests that the dark matter that cosmologists are now utterly convinced exists because of its gravitation presence is perhaps an example of a parallel universe. Actually he takes the opposite perspective and asks if a parallel universe exists (parallel to the dark matter) and answers that it does. It is us. (p.115)

Since gravity that makes us aware of the existence of that dark universe (and remember there is no evidence of any information about the dark matter via the electromagnetic force or the weak or strong nuclear forces) could it not make them aware of us? (Assuming there is somebody there to be aware.) Perhaps some day we will communicate with other universes through some type of gravitational mechanism. (Huh?--Well, maybe.)

On free will Vacca uses basically three authorities, Timothy O'Connor, Miroslav Backonja, and Paul J. Bertics, and from them constructs what he sees as the current understanding by neuroscience. I wasn't even aware that neuroscientists had a position on free will. I thought it was a purely philosophic or religious question. The opposing camps of naturalism (no such thing as free will) and libertarians (humans have free will) are reconciled in the neuroscientific community through the idea of "compatibilism," a word I encountered here for the first time. What it means is that the lack of free will (which most neuroscientists, Buddhists and myself, among others see as obvious) is made compatible with the societal and human psychological need to believe in free will (for punishment and criminal deterrence) by realizing that in an Orwellian way we can say that free will does not exist, but in order for society to run smoothly we must pretend that it does. Vacca discusses the ramifications from this doublethink and concludes that whether free will is an illusion or not depends on your point of view. Your free will is obvious, but that of others has to be taken on their say so.

Here's an example of Vacca's sometimes strikingly expressive prose: "As much as free will exposes humans to the threat of unlimited retaliation for wrong-doing, it nevertheless compensates them by making them the lords of their little domains, the micro-gods of their minds." (p. 394)

The worst science book that I have read recently.......2005-12-22

The book coveres big topics, e.g., free energy (Chapter 19) and nuclear fusion (Chapter 20). The author, however, did not even get simple facts correct. W (watt) is incorrectly identified as "Tungsten" on p.623 and 625. JET is said to be "Joint European Toms" (p.626). It should be "Torus" instead of "Toms". I wonder how many Toms are there in Europe under this scheme. It is a waste of tree to print this book.

The World's 20 Greatest Unsolved Problems.......2005-10-08

This textbook is a comprehensive treaty on the 20 unsolved problems of this century. The unsolved problems are well laid out in a logical sequence. The style and the presentation of the text makes it easy reading for non-technical readers.

The 20 unsloved problems are thought provoking, and reminds us that we are far from understanding this world we live in.

Astronomy: The mystery of dark matter - is there any other state of matter!!! The creation of this universe - a puzzle?

Physics: A very concise and an excellent discussion on the nature of fundamental elementary particles and can there be a consistent theory of Quantum Gravity? If so, then we would know the mind of GOD.

Biology: DNA and multi-celluar life. Is there a computer program hidden in the DNA!

Paleontology: How present day microbiological information can be used to construct the ancient tree of life.

Neuroscience: Are we responsible for out actions? Lawyers would have a field day on this topic. Now for the ultimate mystery of all the mysteries - Consciouness.

Geology: This should make an interesting reading for those of us who live in California.

Chemistry: It is the essnece of formation of chemical bonds, without which there would be no DNA, hence no life as we understand.

Free Energy: Is there a such a thing as Free Lunch, I put it?

John has done an excellent work in presenting the most fascinating problems of this century. This should make an interesting reading for any inquiring mind.
Highly recommend.

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The World's 20 Greatest Unsolved Problems
John R. Vacca
Manufacturer: Prentice Hall PTR
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OIM196

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