World Scientific
Banking and capital markets; new international perspectives.
In this time of global economic crisis, several central precepts of finance and asset pricing are in question. Blenman (finance, U. of North Carolina-Charlotte) and US co-editors introduce 14 papers that were presented at a meeting of the Midwest Finance Association. Contributors focus on research on international financial markets, some of which can be applied in national and regional settings. A major focus is on the central role that banks and their regulation play in averting crises. Analyses also treat other financial institutions and safety nets, international investment, the role of asymmetrical information on market volatility, risk management, and corporate governance. The volume includes policy prescriptions for crisis avoidance and statistical tables. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The birth of numerical analysis.
A symposium was held in Leuven, the Netherlands in October 2007 to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the paper that many consider to mark the origin of numerical analysis. Ranging in age from 57 to 68, the presenters experienced and contributed to different stages in the early development of the field. The 13 papers discuss such aspects as the early days of numerical methods for ordinary differential equations, memoirs on building a general purpose numerical algorithms library, non-negative constraints in numerical analysis, a personal perspective on the history and development of numerical analysis in Scotland, and applications of Chebyshev polynomials from theoretical kinematics to practical computations. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Business group management in Japan.
With Japanese companies now emphasizing integration and/or separation of businesses to gain competitive advantage, the competition between business groups has become more important than between individual companies, so interest has risen in strategies for managing numerous firms. Here researchers in business and economics explore and elucidate business group management in Japanese companies theoretically and practically through case studies, survey research, and other methods. They cover accounting information for group management and management control systems; merger and acquisition, including management buyouts, and outsourcing for group reformation; analyzing accounting information for consolidated business groups and segmental business units; managing inter-firm relations; and inter-organization learning and autonomous organizations. The insights might interest both practitioners and academicians. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
China's reform in global perspective.
Social scientists chart the three decades of economic reform in China, identifying where and how the country learned its lessons of reforms, and projecting how it will confront challenges of further economic and political reforms. Among their topics are social reforms in the city, Singapore's economic involvement in China's reform, the evolving economic relations between Hong Kong and Guangdong, China and the heterogeneous European welfare state, and China's unfinished business in economic reform. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Collective excitations in unconventional superconductors and superfluids.
Peter (Financial Academy, Moscow, Russia) and Pavel (physics, South Federal U.) summarize their 33 years of theoretical investigation of the collective excitations in superfluid quantum liquids and superconductors with non-trivial pairing. They use the path (functional) integral technique throughout, which is described in the first chapter. Their topics include sound propagation in superfluid 3He and superconductors, collective excitations in the polar-phase, high temperature superconductors and the physical properties, and collective modes in the heavy-fermion superconductors. There is no index. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Comparative advantage, growth, and the gains from trade and globalization; a festschrift in honor of Alan V. Deardorff.
When Deardorff (economics and public policy, U. of Michigan) turned 65 in 2009, colleagues and former students celebrated by presenting papers they were working on at the time. Those 18 papers are published here, along with facsimiles of 25 of his published papers. The overall themes are comparative advantage in a changing global economy, international trade and economic growth, the gains from trade and globalization, and computational modeling and trade policy analysis. The Citigroup Foundation Special Lecture is by Paul Krugman. Other topics include in defense of cones, international trade and economic growth, some aspects of globalization, and applied general-equilibrium modeling as a complement to analytical theory and econometrics. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Edward Teller Centennial Symposium; modern physics and the scientific legacy of Edward Teller; proceedings. (DVDs included)
Fellow physicists, many of them at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, celebrate the work of Hungarian-born American theoretical physicist and advocate of the atomic bomb Teller (1908-2003) in 10 papers. Among the topics are his return to Los Alamos, along the trail to the neutrino, surprises in high energy density physics, Monte Carlo methods in the physical sciences, and Teller and higher education. A 2000 message from him to the next generation is also included. There is no index. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Emerging topics in physical virology.
Physical virology — "the analysis and modeling of virus structure, function and dynamics," as stated in the preface — involves interdisciplinary efforts; and contributors to this account of recent developments include biologists, physicists, and mathematicians. In 11 chapters coverage encompasses what it takes to make a virus, new insights into viral architecture via affine extended symmetry groups, mechanical properties, mass spectrometry investigations, what determines the size of an RNA virus, genome length and capsid size, and the use of viruses in biomedical nanotechnology, among other topics. Editors Stockley and Twarock are affiliated, respectively, with the U. of Leeds and the U. of York, UK. The volume is distributed by World Scientific. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Hedging derivatives.
Rheinländer (London School of Economics and Political Science) and Sexton (U. of Manchester) describe some of the unique and challenging features of incomplete markets as well as the techniques used to derive optimal hedging strategies. Among their topics are stochastic calculus, mean-variance hedging, and optimal Martingale measures. The material can serve as background for early-stage researchers, or as a textbook for a two-term graduate course for students of mathematical finance who have a basic understanding of stochastic integration with respect to Brownian motion and the Black & Scholes theory of option pricing. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Human oncogenic viruses.
Seven contributions offer a concise, up-to-date review of viruses that cause cancer (and are the cause of about 25 percent of all cancers). Editors Jing-Hsiung James Ou and T.S. Benedict Yen (affiliated, respectively, with the U. of Southern California, and the U. of California, San Francisco) point out in their preface: "Perhaps the most striking similarity is that each virus appears to have multiple independent mechanisms that can contribute to oncogenesis....Thus, it is unlikely that a single `magic bullet' can block malignant transformation of an infected cell...." They stress that vaccines to prevent infection are the most efficacious solutions, but until such vaccines are developed and widely available, "...the importance of understanding these viruses and their pathogenesis cannot be overstated." Coverage encompasses hepatitis B and C viruses, human papilloma viruses, Epstein-Barr virus, Kaposi's sarcoma virus, and human T-cell leukemia virus Type I. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Interpreting China's economy.
In 44 succinct essays, Chow (emeritus, economics, Princeton U.) presents analyses of issues important to the economy of China, and consequently, to that of the US. Among the topics discussed are factors in China's rapid economic development since 1989, the relevance of its economic policies to current American politics, misunderstanding of China in the Western press, and Milton Friedman's economic theories applied to China. A Chinese version was published by CITIC Press. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Introduction to the theory of the early universe; cosmological perturbations and inflationary theory.
Based on an undergraduate lecture course taught at the Lomonosov Moscow State University, this text is accessible to undergraduates yet goes beyond that course with the addition of some advanced chapters. It is a companion to another book, Introduction to the Theory of the Early Universe: Hot Big Bang Theory, and is written from the perspective, as stated in the preface, that "[m]odern cosmology is deeply connected to microphysics which studies elementary particles and their interactions at the most fundamental level." Knowledge of material taught in general physics courses is prerequisite. The two authors are affiliated with the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
New dynamics between China and Japan in Asia; how to build the future from the past?
In 13 papers from a June 2007 international symposium in Tokyo, economists, political scholars, and related researchers examine relations between the second and third biggest economies in the world, which are also next-door neighbors. Their topics include anchoring the right pattern of interdependence under new leadership, foreign direct investments in Southeast Asia and Sino-Japanese rivalry, The Asian Development Bank and Chinese and Japanese power plays, Thailand's economic relations with China and Japan, and Vietnam's view of China as an intimidating partner. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The nonlinear workbook; chaos, fractals, cellular automata, neural networks, genetic algorithms, gene expression programming, support vector machine, wavelets, hidden Markov models, Fuzzy logic..., 5th ed.
Steeb (scientific computing, U. of Johannesburg, South Africa) sets out all the basic concepts in the closely connected fields, together with the definitions, theorems, and algorithms, which are implemented using C++ Java and Symbolic C++. Students early in a science curriculum should be able to follow the material, he says. Practical computation is balanced with the underlying mathematical theory. Among his topics are time series analysis, nonlinear dissipative systems, controlling chaos, solving differential equations, and fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic. No dates are cited for earlier editions. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The nucleon-nucleon interaction and the nuclear many-body problem; selected papers of Gerald E. Brown and T.T.S. Kuo.
Nuclear physicists Brown and Kuo (both Stony Brook U., US) reproduce 28 papers by either or both, sometimes with others, published between 1967 and 2009 on nuclear many-body problems and the Brueckner G-matrix; low-momentum nucleon-nucleon interactions in a renormalization group approach; and Brown-Rho scaling in nuclei, nuclear matter, and neutron stars. Among the topics are the nuclear reaction matrix, a theory of energy-independent nuclear optical-model potentials, low-momentum nucleon-nucleon potential and shell model effective interactions, a family of hermitian low-momentum nuclear interactions with phase shift equivalence, shell model calculations and realistic effective interaction, and nuclear matter with Brown-Rho-scaled Fermi liquid interactions. There is no index. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Problems and solutions in mathematics, 2d ed.
The more than 500 problems with solutions presented here are based on the PhD qualifying test papers of influential universities in North America. The problems are kept within the parameters of graduate textbooks, but the solutions require a deep understanding of the mathematical principles as well as skills in analysis and computation. They can, of course, be used by students and instructors for other purposes than studying for the exam. The arrangement is by area of mathematics: algebra, topology, differential geometry, real analysis, complex analysis, and partial differential equations. The second edition adjusts the selection of problems to match changes in the tests over the 12 years since the first was published. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Ray and wave chaos in ocean acoustics; chaos in waveguides.
Makarov, Sergey Prants (both Pacific Oceanological Institute, Vladivostok, Russia), Anatoly Virovlyansky (Institute of Applied Physics, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia) and George Zaslavsky (1935-2008, New York U. since 1991) explain how sound can travel in the ocean over hundreds and thousands of kilometers along a natural refractive waveguide called the underwater sound channel. It had been analyzed using standard wave models since World War II, but in the early 1980s, a new factor was discovered that to a significant extent determines the structure of the wave field at long ranges. It is this phenomenon of ray chaos that they explore here. The topics include range-dependent environments, the manifestation of regular and chaotic ray motion in distributions of ray travel times, the influence of fine-scale inhomogeneities on wave dynamics, and wave beam in an ocean acoustic waveguide. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The release of thermonuclear energy by inertial confinement; ways towards ignition.
Winterberg (U. of Nevada) explores ways small thermonuclear explosives could be ignited besides the standard critical mass approach, which is only possible in massive operations. These small releases — down to a millionth of a Hiroshima-class bomb — could have many applications; his own long-term interest is rocket propulsion. He covers nuclear fission and fusion reactions, the thermonuclear plasma, collision processes in thermonuclear plasmas, shock and compression waves, thermonuclear ignition and burn, ignition by fission explosives, non-fission ignition, thermonuclear lenses and shaped charges, the significance of thermonuclear micro-explosions for fundamental research, recent developments, and the future. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Sustainable economy; corporate, social and environmental responsibility.
This collection edited by Kao (Ryerson U. and McMaster U., Canada) contains a diverse set of 14 chapters exploring issues of environmental sustainability and social responsibility from within a capitalist framework. Topics include fostering sustainability in family firms, approaches to poverty reduction, sustainability and health care, development of sustainable lighting from gaseous discharge, sustainable dispersed combined micro power and heat generation, sustainability and entrepreneurship education at the university level, innovation and enterprise sustainability, and a case study in landscape entrepreneurship. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Waves and rays in elastic continua, 2d ed.
Emphasizing the interdependence of mathematical formulation and physical meaning in describing seismic phenomena, Slawinski (earth sciences, Memorial U., St. John's, Newfoundland) draws on aspects of continuum mechanics, wave theory, and ray theory to explain phenomena resulting from the propagation of seismic waves. The overarching themes are elastic continua, waves and rays, and variational formulation of waves. The text is for senior undergraduate and graduate students and scientists who are interested in quantitative seismology and are familiar with linear algebra, differential and integral calculus, vector calculus, tensor analysis, and ordinary and partial differential equations. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
When cancer crosses disciplines; a physician's handbook.
Supporting the team approach to treating cancer, this volume contains 48 contributed chapters arranged in thematic sections. The title indicates that this is a "physician's handbook," but certainly health care professionals at any level will find the broad scope of topics and up-to-date information useful. The first section, on cancer prevention, addresses smoking cessation interventions, diet and physical activity, sun exposure and vitamin D, and oral contraceptives and hormone replacement therapy. The following section is devoted to treatment management issues, with chapters on chemotherapy treatment, pregnancy, nutritional needs of patients undergoing treatment, complementary therapies, issues connected with various surgeries, and issues of concern to physicians and geneticists. The final section treats survivorship, palliative care, and end of life issues. The three editors are affiliated as follows: Monica Robotin (U. of Sydney, Australia, and Cancer Council NSW), Ian Olver (Cancer Council Australia), and Afaf Girgis (U. of Newcastle, Australia). Most but not all of the contributors are also based in Australia. The volume is distributed by World Scientific. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
