I loved this account of Aviators. Rock On

A clearly-written, logically-organized overview of aircraft jet engine design including thermodynamics, cycle analysis, and component design and evaluation. Includes an overview of how jet engine design fits into the overall process of aircraft design.

Excellent sea adventure in the vane of Dana and Jack London's Sea Wolf. Light reading (some archaic terms). lots of action/adventure. Good kids book. Not PC at all. Lots of blood and gore. You know, real life stuff.

Oh my God...this is simply the best book I have ever read. Thank you Dr. Bonevac. You have made me realize I can be more than I am. Thanks for showing me the light!!

The Blues in Gray is a very readable account of the Republican Blues service in coastal Georgia with exciting battles taking place on the Ogeechee River at Fort McAllister south of Savannah, Georgia. William Daniel Dixon was 23 when he began his private journal which he kept throughout his Confederate Service. He was a native of Savannah and lived his entire life there. The editor, Roger Durham, has done an excellent job making Dixon's voice heard. I am Dixon's great granddaugher and am delighted that this primary material is available to readers and scholars.

George Box is one of the statistical giants of the 20th Century. He started his career in chemical engineering in England where he learned the importance of experimental design and statistical methods. He came to the US in 1953 and spent time at North Carolina State College and later came back to be part of the statistics group at Princeton. After that he founded the Department fo Statistics at the University of Wisconsin. This history and other important career decisions icluding the founding of Technometrics are detailed in the brief section "My Professional Life" that he wrote for this volume.

Box's contributions to statistics are diverse and large. He developed many practical statistical designs including the central composite design. He is responsible for evolutionary operation and wrote a book on it with Norman Draper. He has also made major contributions to response surface methodology.

With Gwilym Jenkins he systematized the application of the ARIMA models and led the development of software for easy application of these model building techniques. He championed the concept of parsimonious models and insisted that model building should be an iterative and continually evolving technique. He contributed to the area of control through his stochastic time series models and found ways to incorporate it in manufacturing process control.

With David Cox he developed the Box-Cox family of transformations. These simple power transformation can be used to make the data have an approximate normal shape. he gave a prescription for how to estimate or pick the power to use based on the data.

These enormous contributions can be found in the volumes of collected works that Tiao and others have edited. His contributions can also be seen from his books on evolutionary operation, time series analysis, automated process control, empirical model building and response surfaces, and practical experimental designs ("Statistics for Experimenters").

However in the decades of the 80s and 90s from age 60 to 80, instead of retiring, George Box took on the challenge of developing a center for quality and productivity at the University of Wisconsin. This volme, edited by Tiao, Bisgaard, Hill, Pena and Stigler provides a collection of articles by Box. These are mostly articles written in the 1990s covering the subjects of A) continuous process improvement, B) designing experiments to gain quality information, C) sequential investigation and discovery (including response surface methods), D) quality control and E) learning how to identify and reduce variation or be less sensitive to it by constructing robust processes (i.e. processes not sensitive to minor changes in process parameters). The articles are mostly directed toward quality issues and are mostly articles that were published in the 1990s or 2000 with a few from the 80s. Some are important technical contributions but many are also very philosophical.

George Box is one of the great thinkers of the 20th century and his philosophy on statistics and scientific inference is as important as his many technical contributions. There are 46 articles in total 4 on topic A, 12 on B, 10 on C, 11 on D and 9 on E. Each topic area has a brief introduction identifying a unifying theme in the papers in that section.

Box has a terrific sense of humor that often comes out in his lectures and sometimes in his writings. One gets a good appreciation of it by reading the three songs on statistics that are included in Part F of the book. This is only a sample of several that he has written that are parodies of familiar tunes. Of these three my favorite is "There's no theorem like Bayes theorem" to the tune of "There's no business like show business."

There is a nice bibliography in the back of the book that is followed by a biography on Box and a list of his books and articles published between 1982 and 1999. This includes 3 books and 91 articles! Believe it or not he published even more in his earlier years.

The flyleaf of the book features the following quote by Polly Williams: "We've got to break these chains before the system turns our children into slaves." If you haven't heard of her, Polly Williams is the African American mother and state legislator in Milwaukee that took on the failing urban public school system and has succeeded in improving the lives of her children, constituents, and maybe all of America. The school district in Milwaukee mandated where kids were allowed to go to school, and many were forced to be bused across town. Many parents applied, appealed, and reapplied to stay in their own neighborhoods, but were refused. Schools in their neighborhoods were poor, but bussing provided no advantage. "They sold us desegragation as a panacea, a placebo," Mikel Holt, the editor of the local newspaper declared. "For fifteen years we've been on a bus ride to nowhere." Daniel McGroarty describes just how bad the situation was--one student secretly took a hidden video camera into the urban school and recorded teachers reading magazines during class, students throwing spit wads, playing dice games and bragging about flunking, among other problems. But he also tells what can be done. Polly Williams wanted her children to attend the private school near to her home, and saw no reason that she shouldn't be able to somehow, even though she could not afford tuition. She formed a parents group, got articles published in the newspaper, began lobbying the legislature, and before she knew it she was arguing before the State legislature as an elected member of that body. She had to battle entrenched groups, supposedly advocates for the disadvantaged, who did everything they could to stop her from succeeding, for their own self-serving reasons. But she managed to join with conservatives and business people who wanted to see her improve education in Milwaukee, and got a limited voucher program started her district. The program started out with a proposal for 3,000 students to attend private schools. I read recently that it has now been expanded for 15,000 students. Scores are up, parents are much happier, and the Milwaukee program promises to be a successful model for choice programs all over the country. If this program can bring substantial improvements, in spite of its limited nature and many restrictions placed on it by the establishment, then there's real hope for solving education problems and lifting people out of poverty. It cannot be done by continually trying the same old reforms in the same old system though, like Grey Davis is trying to do in California. Citizens have to take hold, start having parent's meetings in their basements, and start pressuring legislators. Daniel MacGroarty tells us how Polly Williams and her friends did exactly that. I also recommend "School Choice:Why you Need It, How You Get It", by David Harmer, the author and promoter of Prop 174, the School Choice Initiative in California.

I have purchaed a 16 volume set written by Daniel Dafoe. the titles are "The Romances and Narratives by Daniel Dafoe" Edited by George A Aitkens. The first vol. is entitled " The Suprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe"

Please give me some information as to the rareness and the value of these antique books.

An excellent reference for the keystone and umbrella endangered species of the San Joaquin Valley. Any biologist that works in California should have this fine collection of papers. The species are in peril and it's up to us to do something about it.

As a coach, it's very important to know what to do in the event an athlete gets hurt. Since there aren't enough Trainers to go around, I decided to learn as much as I could about acute athletic care. Several Physical Therapists and Athletic Trainers recommended this book to me, and I must say, it's every bit as helpful as they said it would be. It gives step-by-step instructions, excellent diagrams, and great prevention tips since it is, technically, a textbook. The only thing more helpful than this book on the sidelines or in the dugouts is MAYBE an ice-pack. Every coach should read this book, study this book, and keep this book close by during practice and game-time. I highly recommend it.