Professor P.S.R.S. Rao provides a concise and well-written treatment of the estimation of variance components for one-way and two-way ANOVA with fixed, random and mixed effects models each considered separately and in detail.
Emphasis is placed on maximum likelihood, restricted maximum likelihood (REML) and the MINQUE (invention of C. R. Rao) and MIVQUE to estimate variance components under nonnegativity constraints. P.S.R.S Rao has himself contributed significantly to this research and his work and a lot of the early pioneering work on this problem is covered in this short monograph.

The only difficulty with the monograph is its conciseness. This makes it difficult to use as a course text. It covers some interesting examples and provides exercises and examples at the end of the chapters but not enough for a course text. The subject of variance component estimation in survey sampling is not covered. Kirk Wolter's text is still the classic for that and provides the kind of detail needed for an advanced text on the subject.

This monograph is very useful to researchers and practitioners as a reference on variance component estimation and is not too advanced.

When God is a Customer is a delightful journey to another time and culture and while reading, makes you wish you could be part of that period. Readers and lovers of western poetry will be enthralled by the use of language and device however; consciousness of these become lost in the humour, passion, colour, tenderness and eroticism of life expressed by the 'women' (the poems infact are written by males taking on the female voice). I loved this book and carry it with me. The editors have provided an invaluable treasure to cross-cultural literature and the everyday poetry reader and I thank them for their insight and trust that this work will be valued by westerners. More please.

This is really a great book for an in depth architetural and archeoligical review of the Vijayanagara site... It does a great job reviewing and descriping some of the pertinent buildings to this study. A little light on pictures, though, and probably pretty heavy for the casual student.

Maybe I should have the first chapters of my novel be a dictionary of all the words I use with more than four syllables. Then I can add content to my novel without having to be creative!

I was so excited to see a Java book on DSP. I was terribly disappointed with this book however. Firstly, it uses Java 1.0.x, not Java 1.1.x. This startled me since the book was published in 1998. The 4 chapter 'intro to java' programming tutorial is pointless since anyone pursuing a topic as advanced as DSP should know the language they are going to work in! The rest of the book reads like Javadoc output interspersed with comments from the author. I really wanted to love this book but ultimately I've grown to hate it.

It is hard to find Java specific information on DSP and this book does the job admirably. Plenty of code examples and a rather monolithic Java application (that's a good thing!) are included. Update at authors website highly reccomended.

Unlike other CRCpress titles, this one has little coverage of the subject. Neither transforms nor data compression issue has been comprehensively addressed. One can easily fand better chapters on transforms in many image processing and coding books, including the non-sinusoidal ones - which are missing in the book. Editors seem to contact with authors who apparently did not want to write tutorial-type texts, but who had some rather specific things to say (Eg. Comparametric transfomrs for transmitting eye tap video with PTP). That might be OK, however there are so many basic things which are not here. If transforms and compression is considered together, the book still fails to serve since many issues such as coding gain and other analytical analysis, as well as many popular methods have been superficial. As a whole, the book seem a bit inconsistent to me.

This is a nice single-source overview of different image compression algorithms, with a decent amount of theory but mostly focused on practical use. It's well organized, with lots of illustrations, examples and sample code that makes it nice for those who are mostly interested in implementation and aren't as concerned about the proofs. It is way overpriced, but possibly justified in that it would take several other $50 books to get the same breadth of info.

This seems to be a published thesis. Not very informative

This book is a general, essentially non-mathematical overview of the author's work and speculations in applying the theory of chaotic dynamics to psychological modeling. After a brief introduction, which mainly focusses on the author's belief that psychological modeling needs new paradigms and must move away from reductionism, she moves on to a literature review in the next chapter. The author argues that a new theoretical framework is needed, which is not shy of metaphysical considerations, and one one that employs a "systems approach" to theory and model building. A few mathematical considerations are employed in the discussion, mainly to set up the discussion of chaos later. The author is not convincing in her arguments against reductionism, for no examples are given as to why this approach is weak. Her discussion of Jungian psychodynamics though is interesting, and motivates the reader to consult the literature for additional insight. And, even though I agree with her stance against operationalism, she does not substantiate her position with any sound arguments. The author spends chapter four on chaotic dynamics in physical systems, but the treatment is purely qualitative, and there are a few instances of undefined terms, for example "chaotic phase". The definition of chaos given in the glossary is not the standard one as it omits any reference to sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Also, in the definition of equilibrium the author refers to the state as one where molecules are "paralyzed", but does not elaborate on this strange terminology.

In chapter 5, the author discusses the application of chaos to psychological modeling. The approach of Jennings/Ward is advocated as the appropriate methodology for psychological modeling. A model of moral behavior is given in terms of the logistic map, with the parameter in that map taken to be a measure of personal self-centeredness. This is modified later to include a contribution of a person's family measuring that self-centeredness. The new difference equation models how the person's family measure of self-centeredness affects the rate of change in the person's moral behavior. These models are then solved numerically with the "erratic" behavior of the solution interpreted as moral behavior in highly volatile situations. Unfortunately, the author does not give any empirical justification or attempt at validation for these models. More detailed in-depth research needs to be done when applying dynamical systems to psychological modeling, and such a goal is worthwhile and very important if successful.

The Application of Chaos Theory to Psychological Models is innovative and provocative. Dr. Rae F. Blackerby's comprehensive analysis of the role of the mind within Chaos Theory is a must read for the layman and the scientist. Her application of Chaos Theory to modern day psychology has implications we should all explore. The presence of Chaos Theory within a number of traditional psychological models is explored with penetrating insight. From a holistic perspective the book covers many bases such as brain physiology and recent theories regarding psychological complexes. A complete review of Chaos Theory's terminology is given enabling the laymen to apply the terms accordingly. The research of many outstanding scientists is presented and integrated into this new and exciting field. The book is easily understood by the laymen yet has many remarkable insights that even a devoted scientist would appreciate. I recommend Dr. Blackerby's book for all.

I ordered this thinking it would be a good collection of Japanese design elements and ideas. I have no problem with mixing different cultural elements and using traditional elements creatively. However, most of what is featured is a sort of faux-Japanese design for yuppies. Items are completely out of place (i.e. a footwarmer used to keep flowrs; clothes hung on walls as decor) and rooms often cluttered. Further, many rooms were cluttered or not very Japanese at all. That said, a few featured houses were nice, and one in particular -- built in rustic Japanese fashion with dark wood -- was beautiful. Overall, unless this is your type of thing, I'd say look elsewhere for design ideas ...

The technique we use to audit softwar

The author's preface says, "A strong background in relational databases and the C++ programming language would be a prerequisite for the reader." Well, I have a strong background in C++, but not in relational databases, and I got almost nothing out of this book. I suggest that this book is best suited for readers strong in relational databases, and maybe for those currently working with object oriented databases.

This book in my opinion is not the one to enjoy the beauty of the subject and mechanics in general. There is a vast amount of material amassed but the structure of the book is poor.
It seems being overburden with details and particulars and lacking unified clear consistent approach. In addition some mistakes are just plain annoying. If one wants to be serious about vibrations - do not sweat over this book. It can be just another somewhat usefull reference book to find some particular solution to for some particular problem.
Instead one can study mechanics with beautifully written classical L.Meirovitch, "Fundamentals of Vibrations" which is much more original, rigorous, clear, usefull and serious book to have.

I used this textbook for my Mechanical Vibrations course and was very displeased with it. My biggest gripe is the lack of examples in each chapter. There are an abundance of homework problems at the end of each chapter, but the vast majority of them are not illustrated at all in example problems. I noticed this immediately in Chapter 1 when attempting to solve several of the problems. The text also develops equations and formulas without detail and explanation. Luckily my teacher developed the eqations in class lecture and provided the majority of information for the course. While working out homework and test problems that were assigned, the book was of little use for me. I think the clarity of writing could be better, as well. By the way, I got an A in the course and still found the book to be poor.

I recently used this as a text to teach Vibrations to Mechanical Engineering seniors after Vibration Analysis by Vierck went out of print. I was attracted to Rao's book because much of the presentation is similar to Vierck. After using this text for one semester, I was not satisfied. I was particularly concerned by Chapter 2 where the fundamentals of damped single degree of freedom systems are covered. This Chapter is critical to building the foundation of Vibration Theory and I was disturbed to find that two critical plots, the time history comparison of responses with various damping levels and the phase plane plot for the same cases were seriously incorrect. While errors always can be found in texts, these plots were so obviously wrong at first glance that I wondered how a book with 29 reviewers (as listed in the Acknowledgements) has such glaring errors. As I progressed through the text I found a number of other errors including incorrect equations in some places. I also found that some material, emphasized in Vierck, that I consider important was buried in the worked examples rather than being emphasized as part of the book's text. While the book does present a lot of material and gives some interesting problems, I found that I was not comfortable with the text at the end of the course. I have since decided to drop this book from consideration as our text.