Coastal Exposure & Community Protection: Hurricane Andrew's Legacy

Book Description

The emerging markets have attained prominence of late as the recent troubles in the principal emerging markets in Asia, Russia and Latin America have threatened global stability. This book is the first detailed study of emerging markets debt and offers a unique insight into one of the world's more significant, and less understood, financial markets. It offers a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of the market in emerging markets debt from 1983 to date. In the aftermath of the debt crisis of the 1980s the banking community discovered the first disposal technique for the sovereign debt of less developed countries -- a secondary market in that debt. This market played a major role in the history and amelioration of the debt crisis, the Mexican problems in the mid-1990s, and the recent Asian economic crisis. The market focus of this study is on the indebtedness of Latin American nations, which has fanned the backbone of secondary market activity, and the recent developments in Asia. The regulatory focus is on U.S. banks and banking regulation. This book is essential reading for anyone involved with emerging markets debt: bankers, traders, investors, corporate and sovereign issuers, finance lawyers and banking regulators.

Book Description

Are young American families finding it harder to get ahead economically than their parents did? This major study addresses the important issue of widening inequality both between generations and among families within the younger generation. The combination of slowing income and wealth growth has hit young families harder than families with at least some college education, black families harder than white families. These trends are projected to continue. Must reading for people interested in economic inequality and the well-being of American families.

Book Description

How many dumb questions can you get into a little book? Ever wondered why kamikaze pilots wore helmets, or why if we werent meant to eat animals are they made of meat? Ever stop to think and forget to start again? The Little Book of Dumb Questions is a hilarious collection of sillinesss. It wont give you any answers, but it sure as hell asks a whole heap of dumb questions: How does the guy who drives the snowplough get to work in the morning? If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular?

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Little Book of Dumb Questions
Michael Powell
Manufacturer: BOXTREE (MACM)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000JZ60F0

Book Description

Out of the core of experience, these essays began as obsessions. Whether founded in some strongly lived moment, deeply held conviction, long-term interest, or persistent and unanswered question, these essays reveal the writer’s voice—personal, often passionate, full of conviction, certainly unmistakable. Marianna Torgovnick has drawn together writings by leading contemporary scholars in the humanities, representing fields of literary criticism, American and Romance studies, anthropology, and art history. Eloquent Obsessions presents cultural criticism at its thoughtful and writerly best.
This collection explores a wide range of issues at the intersection of personal and social history—from growing up in the South to exploring a love for France or Japan, from coming of age as a feminist to mapping the history of National Geographic, from examining the cultural "we" to diagnosing class structures in Israel or showing how photography deals with AIDS. The authors here bring writerly genres—autobiography, memoir, or travel narrative—to intellectual tasks such as textual readings or investigating the histories of institutions. Continuing a tradition of cultural criticism established by writers such as Samuel Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Edmund Wilson, Hannah Arendt, or Raymond Williams, these essays seek to make a difference, to have an impact, and are based on the fundamental premise that writers have something to say about society. Simply put, this collection offers models for writing eloquently about culture—models that are intellectually and socially responsible, but attuned to the critic’s voice and the reader’s ear.
Aimed not just at academics but also at a more general audience alive to the concerns and interests of society today, Eloquent Obsessions, a revised and expanded version of a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly (Winter 1992), will extend beyond the academy contemporary ways of writing about culture.

Contributors. Jane Collins, Cathy N. Davidson, Virginia R. Dominguez, Mark Edmundson, Gerald Graff, Richard Inglis, Aldona Jonaitis, Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Catherine Lutz, Nancy K. Miller, Linda Orr, Andrew Ross, Henry M. Sayre, Jane Tompkins, Marianna Torgovnick

Customer Reviews:

amazing.......1999-12-22

This is a great book, funny as hell, about the early days of TV. Covers all aspects -- the technology, the first TV sets, the programs, advertising. The hilarious anecdotes from forgotten old timers are useful to anybody working on "new media" today. You read about early video being blurry on a tiny screen, about programs trying to concoct different advertising models, and you realize that the Internet is only the current new medium. A lot of similar stuff has been done before.

Howard Stern hated this ! (must be good).......1998-12-09

I've heard Howard Stern did not like this book. This is not suprising that he wouldn't like something of excellent quality. What is suprising about this is that it reveals that Howard Stern might actually be capable of reading.

Hmmm...

I've seen more television that any human probably should (this happens when you've worked in a museum dedicated to the stuff...) and I can safely say that this book is the real thing. BUY IT !

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The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1929-1961
Jeff Kisseloff
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OJ8NII

Book Description

Everything You'll Need to Create Thousands of Fractals! Fractals are the name given to certain types of iterated equations that produce very strange results and are capable of creating unusual and beautiful patterns. Creating Fractals describes the characteristics and mathematical background of fractals and shows the reader how the accompanying fractal-generating program is used to produce thousands of different kinds of fractals, to enlarge them, to color them, and to save them-- without any knowledge of computers or programming. The program works with any computer using Windows. In addition to producing artistic effects, the reader can gain an understanding of how each type of fractal is created and how it might be used to treat natural phenomena, e.g., the turbulence of liquids, the behavior of the stock market, and the compression of graphic images. Mathematical terminology is explained in elementary terms.

Customer Reviews:

Creating Fractals.......2006-01-24

The software included inthis book is retro 20 century, lame.
Images are strictly low-res (600x400); interface pedantic: no retrace, wouldn't save bmp images on XP. wasted money!

Disappointing book creates but does not teach fractals.......2006-01-21

I really expected better from Roger Stevens. In the past he has written some truly excellent books on computer graphics that included working code. This particular book is very elementary with only the bare bones of the mathematics of fractals being given. Most of the book just shows a picture of each type of fractal covered, a screenshot of the included application and what you should type into the application to get the resulting fractal, and some text without equations on each fractal. If you really want to learn the mathematics behind fractals you should read "Chaos and Fractals" by Peitgen, and the older "Science of Fractal Images" by the same author. Both books are accessible yet go into sufficient mathematic detail that you could write working code. The authors even offer up code examples of their own. The second book I mentioned on fractal imaging has some great code samples and mathematics for creating beautiful realistic natural scenes of forests and lakes that are completely computer generated. I notice Amazon does not show the table of contents so I do that here:
1. Introduction
2. What are Fractals?
3. The Lorenz and Other Strange Attractors
4. What you can do with L-System Fractals
5. The Snow Flake and other Von Koch Curves
6. Peano Curve
7. Generators with Different Sized Line Segments
8. The Hilbert Curve
9. FASS Curves
10. Trees
11. Creating your own L-System Fractals
12. Newton's Method
13. What you can do with Mandelbrot-Like and Julia-Like Fractals
14. The Mandelbrot and Julia Sets
15. Working With Colors
16. Fractals with the Logistic Equation
17. Fractals using Transcendental Functions
18. Fractals using Orthogonal Polynomials
19. Creating your own 2nd-order to 7th-order Equations
20. Phoenix Curves
21. The Mandela and Pokorny Fractals
22. Fractals Using Circles
23. Barnsley Fractals
24. Iterated Function Systems
25. Midpoint Displacement Fractals

Dissaponted.......2005-12-16

I got this book to learn how to generate fractals and use the included programm to generate large images for printing. While the programm is very flexible in terms of what it generates, maximum resolution is something like 600x400. There are better books that bescribe what fractals are. This book will not help you to set up calculations on you own and it's fractal generation programm is useless for anything other that on screen display.

Introducing the Mathematics of Fractals.......2005-09-22

Fractals were originally considered to be a rather messy offshoot of conventional mathematics. They required entirely too much arithmetic to be useful before the age of computers. But with computers the whole concept of fractals became something that could indeed be studied.

A bit of time goes by and all of a sudden the people doing fractals begin to discover that using the right kind of mathematics can be used to produce a lot of images that begin to look like things in nature. These drawings began to look like things such as trees, mountains, clouds, explosions. And all of a sudden there was an interest beyond those of the mathematician just drawing cute geometric patterns, it's called game development.

This book is not on gaming, it's on the basics of fracticals. It includes software to generate fractals, and it gives the mathematics of how these fractals are created. It's a basic, beginners book to computer graphics at the mathematical level.

Strange Attractors: Creating Patterns in Chaos/Book and Disk

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Fascinating book on computer generated art and music

Strange Attractors: Creating Patterns in Chaos/Book and Disk
Julien Clinton Sprott
Manufacturer: M & T Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Programming | Computers & Internet | Subjects | Books

General | Graphic Design | Computers & Internet | Subjects | Books

General | Computers & Internet | Subjects | Books

Customer Reviews:

Fascinating book on computer generated art and music.......2007-03-12

In many ways, people largely stopped writing interesting programming books about ten years ago, once so much software became available to do so many jobs without us needing to be aware of the painful yet interesting details. This is a long out-of-print book on fractals that merges math, programming, music, and art into one interesting volume. And the kicker is that it cost me a tiny fraction of books that I have from the last couple of years that deliver little insight and page after page of application screen shots.

The book's main topic is producing art and music through that class of fractals known as strange attractors. Thus this book isn't your typical book on fractals that goes into the usual well-known fractal patterns. At the end of the day, you should know enough to produce an unlimited variety of patterns that in turn produce both visual and musical art. There is sufficient math in this book to understand the subject, but there is nothing beyond algebra. Although the book has many programs in it, the author is not assuming that you are an expert programmer. Because this book is 14 years old, the programs are in the BASIC programming language. However, the author has thoughtfully provided equivalent programs in C in one of the appendices. He has still another appendix that gathers together all of the mathematical equations discussed in the book. The book has numerous programming exercises, and so the appendix also has all of the programs that should result if you have done your work correctly. I'd recommend this book to anybody interested in computer generated art and music. The following is the table of contents:

CHAPTER 1: ORDER AND CHAOS
Predictability and Uncertainty; Bucks and Bugs; The Butterfly Effect; The Computer Artist;

CHAPTER 2: WIGGLY LINES
More Knobs to Twiddle; Randomness and Pseudo-randomness; What's in a Name?; The Computer Search; Wiggles on Wiggles; Making Music;

CHAPTER 3: PIECES OF PLANES
Quadratic Maps in Two Dimensions; The Butterfly Effect Revisited; Searching the Plane; The Fractal Dimension; Higher Order Disorder; Strange Attractor Planets; Designer Plaids; Strange Attractors that Don't; A New Dimension in Sound;

CHAPTER 4: ATTRACTORS OF DEPTH
Projections; Shadows; Bands; Colors; Characters; Anaglyphs; Stereo Pairs; Slices;

CHAPTER 5: THE FOURTH DIMENSION
Hyperspace; Projections; Other Display Techniques; Writing on the Wall; Murals and Movies; Search and Destroy;

CHAPTER 6: FIELDS AND FLOWS
Beam Me up Scotty!; Professor Lorenz and Dr. Rössler; Finite Differences; Flows in Four Dimensions; Strange Attractors that Aren't; Doughnuts and Coffee Cups;

CHAPTER 7: FURTHER FASCINATING FUNCTIONS
Steps and Tents; ANDs and ORs; Roots and Powers; Sines and Cosines; Webs and Wreaths; Swings and Springs; Roll Your Own;

CHAPTER 8: EPILOG
How Common is Chaos?; But is it Art?; Can Computers Critique Art?; What's Left to Do?; What Good is it?;

APPENDIXES
A. Annotated Bibliography
B. BASIC Program Listing
C. Other Computers and BASIC Versions
D. C Program Listing
E. Summary of Equations
F. Dictionaries of Strange Attractors

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Creating Fractals

Manufacturer: CHARLES RIVER MEDIA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Book Description

“[I]n a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our power to add or detract.”
—President Abraham Lincoln

James M. McPherson, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom, and arguably the finest Civil War historian in the world, walks us through the site of the bloodiest and perhaps most consequential battle ever fought by Americans.

The events that occurred at Gettysburg are etched into our collective memory, as they served to change the course of the Civil War and with it the course of history. More than any other place in the United States, Gettysburg is indeed hallowed ground. It’s no surprise that it is one of the nation’s most visited sites (nearly two million annual visitors), attracting tourists, military buffs, and students of American history.

McPherson, who has led countless tours of Gettysburg over the years, makes stops at Seminary Ridge, the Peach Orchard, Cemetery Hill, and Little Round Top, among other key locations. He reflects on the meaning of the battle, describes the events of those terrible three days in July 1863, and places the struggle in the greater context of American and world history. Along the way, he intersperses stories of his own encounters with the place over several decades, as well as debunking several popular myths about the battle itself.

What brought those 165,000 soldiers—75,000 Confederate, 90,000 Union—to Gettysburg? Why did they lock themselves in such a death grip across these once bucolic fields until 11,000 of them were killed or mortally wounded, another 29,000 were wounded and survived, and about 10,000 were “missing”—mostly captured? What was accomplished by all of this carnage? Join James M. McPherson on a walk across this hallowed ground as he be encompasses the depth of meaning and historical impact of a place that helped define the nation’s character.

Customer Reviews:

A very good tour guide...not a detailed history book.......2007-08-01

It is important not to mistake this book as a detailed history of the battle. It is not intended as such. If you want a detailed history see the series of books by Harry W. Pfanz. Rather, this is a guide for visitors to the battlefield that is clearly written and directs readers to the major points of interest while injecting a series of interesting anecdotes and thought provoking observations. To this end, it is very well done.

A Short Guide with Substance.......2007-07-24

I read James McPherson's "Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg" on my recent trip to Gettysburg. Although my visit was only for a day, the book provided a nice overview of the events of the battle. Although not designed to be a an in depth narrative of the entire three days of battle, it provided details for several events and battlefield sites that left me with a good sense of the important features of the battle. This is certainly a useful book for a first time visitor with a limited amount of visiting time.

Informative, moving, and worthwhile.......2007-05-13

HALLOWED GROUND operates on several levels. First, it is a concise history of the Battle of Gettysburg, describing the strategic and tactical decisions of soldiers during this bloody three-day fight, which claimed 50,000 soldiers dead, wounded, or missing. Second, this is a guidebook, which a reader can use to walk the battlefield, using its hundreds of monuments to identify where units fought and the outcomes of their encounters. Finally, the book offers its explanations for such lasting controversies and legends as Pickett's Charge, the forward movement of the Third Corps to the Emmitsburg Road, and the desperate charge of the 20th Maine.

HALLOWED GROUND also has clear maps and many humanizing anecdotes about ordinary soldiers. It ends with Lincoln's Address at the Dedication of the Soldiers Cemetery, which, while eloquent, seemed like a mere footnote to this terrible event. Highly recommended.

More than just a walk . . . .......2007-03-18

Every time I read McPherson I think the same two things: he is a national treasure as his research and knowledge of all aspects of the Civil War, military and non-military alike (political, social, economic et. al.) is unsurpassed by any historian, past or present. I also realize what amazing writing skills he possesses as his ability to communicate facts, ideas, theories is apparent in all of his works. If Professor McPherson takes the time to write something, I will always take the time to read it.

Hallowed Ground is no exception to the above. It follows a different format, still enjoyable and informative, in "walks" from the Crown Journeys Series. I was initially reticent about this short read as, while I have read much of the period, my interests do not lie in the military campaigns of the time but in the political and constitutional questions and theory of this period. McPherson quickly dispelled any of my hesitancy as he walked the reader through Gettysburg. His stories of this epic battle are insightful and highly informative. He dispels myths with dispatch and shortchanges no heroics that some of the more modern and commercially successful writings, novels and documentaries seem to have missed. He places the battle in terrific context. He does not get into speculative writing but does ask the questions rhetorically. The reader is left wondering what McPherson's own beliefs are on the many "what if" of that 4 day period in July 1863. But this book is not about answering the questions, it is about a pivotal event in American history and he handles it with excellence.

As others have commented, not only does it leave one wanting to (re)visit the Gettysbury site but also makes one envy his Priceton students who get the finest guide one can imagine for this trip. Another outstanding work, and a wonderfully easy read, by America's Civil War Historian.

Inspiring and Informative.......2006-11-10

Whether you are a "history geek" like I am, and read every historical marker or you want something to loosely refer to while visiting Gettysburg, "Hallowed ground" is very much like having your very own history professor serve as a travel companion. Beautifully written, James Mcpherson's prose is the perfect travel accompaniment. He shares with you what you need to know to imagine the people and events, but doesn't interrupt your experience with needless "chatter". On more than one occaision, his commentary coupled with what I was seeing, moved me to tears. I toured the battlefield by bike, which worked particularly well with his recommended tour.

Customer Reviews:

One of the best.......2002-04-15

This is a great appraisal of a difficult period faced by the Papacy--the modern period. Coppa steers clear of following a "liberal" or a "conservative" approach (all too common in works of this kind) to the role of the Papacy in the modern world. He sticks to the facts and presents the questions and controversies in an unbiased style, for which he should be commended. And he does so in a very readable "I couldn't put it down" style.

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Journal of Church and State, published by J.M. Dawson Studies in Church and State on January 1, 2000. The length of the article is 534 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The Modern Papacy Since 1789.(Review)(Brief Article)
Author: Bill S. Mikhail
Publication: Journal of Church and State (Refereed)
Date: January 1, 2000
Publisher: J.M. Dawson Studies in Church and State
Volume: 42 Issue: 1 Page: 181

Article Type: Book Review, Brief Article

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