This book covers all aspects of physics and science, excellent for anyone who needs basic information without going into the mathematical details.

I have read a lot of "vanilla" books on the Internet and technology. This is the first book with some excitement to it and some very interesting issues addressed by these CTOs. A great book for both techies and business executives....

A truly excellent book-these exec's know what they are talking about. It is amazing the way deals are done in the Internet space-yet they are still based on all the same common principles as old world deals. This book highlights both and gives great insights into the ways these exec's handle their deals.

This is a very detailed book on the Southern Coast of North Carolina. It has everything from restaurants, shopping,lodging and more. If you are planning a trip to the Southern Coast of North Carolina it is a must have. Great book at a great price!

After combing the major bookstores in the Metro Detroit area, there are no travel guides to be found on Taiwan, until I found this one, and it is fantastic!

Why not, it is from the Discovery Channel people!

I did find only one other guide on Taiwan, but nowhere near the quality of this one.

I had bought a guide on St. Petersburg, Russia from the DK company, and I loved it. But most of the well known companies like DK, Fodor, Knoff, I don't believe publish one on Taiwan.

I am glad that the Insight people did, I am thourougly impressed. I will check them out from now on, when looking for travel guides for other countries!

YA!

This play, the first I've seen of Daniel Sullivan's, is possibly the funniest holiday script that I have ever read, and the production was the funniest I've seen in years. It is a perceptive satire on the theater business that is thankfully short on the inside jokes and theatrical allusions that often make this sort of material dry for a wide audience.

Everyone who has ever procrastinated can relate to the drastic situation that the fictional Soapbox Playhouse finds itself in with only four days to put together a show.

Meanwhile, the struggling company has reached only half it's goal of sighning new subscribers, and the National Endowment for the Arts is withholding it's annual grant, pending inspection by a caseworker who is scheduled to observe the worst show in the company's nine-year history.

To say any more would spoil the rest of the show. I could not recommend this show enough!!!

For a fictionalized re-creation of the "splendid little war" described by turn-of-the-century military pundits, Daniel Williams' Insurrection is filled with believable dialogue and plot twists.

The pages bring the reader to map illustrations of sites occupied by American soldiers shipped all the way from the United States to claim America's first colonial stake in Asia. Chapters unfold like scenes in a movie delineating the landscape and the strange aliens that peopled the land.

We take for granted from our current vantage point what impact the islands in Asia must have had on the arriving American infantry soldiers. Only years separate the end of the wars with the Indian nations. Soldiers called volunteers were eager to prove their patriotism and their mettle. How more when their mission was to assist a people in their fight for freedom against Spanish oppression! American soldiers were eager for action, and in the month following the Treaty of Paris, in the stifling heat of an unchristian, alien land, they were restless playing "wet nurse to a bunch of savages." The stalemate ended with the first shot fired against the "niggers".

Richmond, Virginia author, Daniel Williams trots out the military strategists from both sides in this "historical fiction", paying particular attention to the motivations and strategies of the young president of the new republic, Emilio Aguinaldo and parallelling his movements with those of the American colonel, Frederick Funston, promoted while in command in the Philippines to Brigadier General. The procession of names are familiar to history buffs, Dewey, MacArthur, Luna, Gregorio del Pilar, Otis, Merritt, Anderson, Greene etc.

Insurrection as fiction offers readers an introduction to experience a war that Americans know nothing about. Who is to say that if perhaps the annals of this war were as documented for the public as World War II has been, the records of that "insurrection" from the War Department may have foreshadowed America's similar involvement in another insurrection in Asia 60 years hence: Vietnam!

This is a must read for all interested in quality of healthcare.

The rare psychology tome that doesn't mistake psychology's history for history in general! The learned Robinson can stand back enough to place the nascent "science" of psychology within the field of human meta-thought that started at least amongst the Greek philosophers. The book provides a cogent survey of developments in theories that are psychological in nature. The author demonstrates how many of the big deals amongst today's academic psychological concepts were anticipated long ago but forgottten when, I assume, liberal arts education and philosophy became passe. In so doing, he is able to distill from the fractured, specialized field of the current psychology scene what is vital, relevant, and productive. By using a historical context, he allows us to see the real progress of ideas instead of being distracted by the yipping of scientism's mutts. I have read earlier editions of this book twice, and plan to continue re-reading it periodically.

INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS AND INTERFACES Edited by

HORIA-NICOLAI TEODORESCU University of South Florida (USF)

DANIEL MLYNEK Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL)

ABRAHAM KANDEL University of South Florida

And H.-J. ZIMMERMANN RWTH

Published by KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS /BOSTON / DORDRECHT / LONDON P.O. Box 17,3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands 2000, ISBN 0-7923-7763-X, pp. 451

Sold and distributed: in North, Central and South America by Kluwer Academic Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Norwell, MA 02061, U.S.A. and in all other countries by Kluwer Academic Publishers, P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, The Netherlands.

"Intelligent interfaces and systems" constitute important topics in the last decade artificial intelligence conferences. The field is developing both by the increasing number of applications and by their complex capabilities as intelligent agents, speech and image understanding, environment decision making, bio-inspired sensor and neuro-fuzzy systems.

The volume is addressing a very wide range of scientists, employing both theoretical and practical aspects, experienced knowledge in building and using intelligent systems.

The Editors (well-known personalities in the artificial intelligence field, with a prodigious scientific activity authors of many books, tutorials and papers) selected fundamental aspects, software-, sensors-, and hardware-related issues, in order to realize a comprehensive coverage of the field.

The volume is organized in four sections each of them being structured in more chapters.

The first two chapters of the section "Intelligent agents and bio-inspired systems" deal with aspects of building and using various types of "intelligent agents". Chapter 1: "A tutoring based approach to the development of intelligent agents" particularly presents "Disciple", an apprenticeship, multistrategy learning system mend to develop intelligent agents (supervised learning - through examples, explanations and corrections - for specific tasks). Machine learning and knowledge acquisition techniques (inductive, explanation-based, analogy, experimentation) are employed. Chapter 2: "An object-oriented framework for building collaborative network agents" is developed on the design of software agents supporting interoperability in a heterogeneous computing system with a dynamically creating agents mechanism. In the third chapter "Navigation: Animals as Autonomous Robots" - animats (intelligent systems that mimic animal behavior) carry out complex spatial-navigation tasks (multiple target finding, barrier detour and maze learning) in a discrete (in time and space) diffusion surface. The system has been proposed as a guidance schema for the efficient identification of suspected land mines. The fourth chapter "From configurable circuits to bio-inspired systems" describes six applications in the domain of configurable computing, considering both static systems (SPYDER - REconfigurable Processor Development System, RENCO - REconfigurable Network Computer, FPGA - based backpropagation neural network), and dynamic systems (The Firefly machine, The Bio Watch and The FAST Neural Network -Flexible, Adaptable-Size Topology).

The second section of the volume is devoted to "Intelligent data processing". In chapter 5, "Fuzzy Data Mining", fuzzy inference procedures are used to process the extraction of useful information from databases. Chapters 6 and 7 "Feature-oriented hybrid neural adaptive systems and applications" and, respectively, "Algebraic neuro-fuzzy systems and applications", describes feature-space, neuro, neuro-fuzzy and hybrid methods in intelligent data processing, and demonstrates different applications ranging from feature extraction and pattern recognition, to human-like signal and image processing, to decision making.

"Interfaces", the third part of the book deals with aspects related to intelligent interfaces. In "Neuro-fuzzy approach to natural language understanding and processing" - chapters 8 (part I) and 9 (part II), a generic, dynamically-configurable neuro-fuzzy device (NFD), having interactive communication capabilities, with an environment dependent evolution and behavior, is designed. New algorithms of progressive learning are presented. In chapter 10" Graph matching and similarity" the focus is on the fundamental aspects of graph manipulation in view of increasing the intelligence of graphical interfaces.

The fourth section of the volume "Applications and High-tech Management" comprises interesting, well developed "Diagnosis systems and strategies" (chapter 11), "intelligent non-destructive testing and evaluation" methods - industrial applications (chapter 12), in uncertainty, fuzzy and neural approaches. Finally, the last two chapters "Managing high-tech projects", part I and II, emphasize the importance of an integrative perspective on intelligent systems playing an essential part in the success of such projects.

The volume also contains an index of terms, which facilitate a very quick and direct access to new technical, domain-specific, terms. Extensive references are included, offering the reader a perspective on the currently existing literature and trends.

The contributors joint together in this volume to offer a valuable systematic overview of the "Intelligent interfaces and systems" domain and a deep practical knowledge in building and using these intelligent tools in a very wide range of applications. This book is conceived to be an important reference on intelligent systems for a large audience and is highly recommended for graduate and postgraduate students, engineers from high-tech industries and researchers, teachers - to be used as supplementary readings in graduate and post-graduate courses.

Costin Mihaela, scientific researcher, Computer Science Institute, Romanian Academy, Associated professor AI discipline, Automatics and Computer Science University, Technical University, Gh. Asachi, Iasi, Romania.