This is the first book I have so far encountered on interface growth to treat the subject in a simple, intuitive and entertaining manner. All the basic mathematical concepts are explained, the book is easy to read and contains plenty of illustrations and examples from real life. Barabasi and Stanley show how processes ranging from accumulation of snow on car windows, to bacterial colony growth on agar surfacees, are governed by similiar mathematical laws. Exercises are conceptual as well as mathematical, with many questions asking for discussion or further research. This book is essential for novices and experts alike.

This book does not deseves critics in completelly perfect

These great compilations need to have the volume number in the title and in the description. When I wanted to find volume 52, I had to search through every book after November 1996, because I knew that the "CLINTON ELECTED" puzzle was in volume 52.

Here's the pointer for #52, by the way. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0812931645/recommendations

If you look at the clues, you'll see that the puzzle also predicted "BOB DOLE ELECTED" so it's a historic puzzle.

If you love crosswords, get these books.

I do suggest, though, that Amazon include the volume number in each title, so that a person who wants to find volume 52, for example, doesn't have to read every page.

By the way, I had a reason for mentioning volume 52 ... The #1 puzzle in that volume predicted Clinton's Win over Gore in the Election Day 1996 puzzle.

You can find #52 ...

Be sure to get that one, then buy the rest of the books for the puzzle lover in your family.

John

"Introduction to phase transitions and critical phenomena" can be considered a classic in the subject, and, despite its first edition is now nearly thirty years old, and some of the results presented have been worked out in more detail along these years, I highly recommend it as an introduction to the subject. One fundamental advantage of the book that makes it different from newer teatrises like "The Theory of Critical Phenomena" by Binney et al (1992), is that it allows a

"softer" interface with "classical" thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, which is very convenient for beginners. Another important feature is the systematic "compromise" with the experiment, quite rare in theoretically-oriented books: it covers from the classic experiment of the critical point in the cyclohexane-aniline system, to the description of various spectrometers. Of course, "modern" topics in critical phenomena such as percolation are not examined and should be consulted in newer books. I might also criticize some lacks in the subject index; for example, the excellent survey of critical exponents in Binney's index is not matched in this book.

Like the first volume, this is excellent. Once a crossword puzzler gets the hang of diagramless puzzles, regular puzzles will seem ho-hum. A one page essay is included that nicely explains techniques and strategies for solving this type of puzzle.

According to Fish, "Paradise Lost" operates according to a mechanism of rhetorical indirection that works on all rhetorical levels, from depiction of character to deployment of tropes. Milton wants to show us how our fallen state corrupts and distorts our responses to poetry and instruction; the poem is constructed as a series of interlocking traps for the reader, who is lured into reacting in tempting but "wrong" ways to tropes ("with serpent error wandering") and characters (the apparently admirable Satan and his cohorts, the apparently tyrannical and odious God). The chapter on the poetics of prelapsarian Eden ("In Wandering Mazes Lost," I think it's called) is a masterpiece. Fish backs this all up with plenty of solid research into the theological doctrines Milton was known to endorse or was likely to have been familiar with.

This approach to Milton was regarded as radical when the book first came out, rather oddly, since Milton's tactics of indirection had already been noted by several critics, though not foregrounded as here. What's new is the thoroughness and clarity of the treatment, and Fish's sheer intelligence as a reader. This is criticism at its best: lucid, engaging, responsible, illuminating.

Fish's approach to texts, including statutes and the US Constitution (he is perhaps better known for jurisprudence than for lit crit) moves the text off the page, and into the class -- the interpretive community. But this is always a tricky move, and the way Fish executes it leaves us with no glue to prevent the fissioning of "interpretive community" into factions of one, just so many obstreperous individuals with nothing more to say to each other, because each has his own (mutually contradictory) inward disposition, a self-reinforcing dogmatism in the light of which all evidence is interpreted.

This is not law nor is it literature. This is the chaos of competing autisms.

The way out of this chaos would take us through history. It would involve the realization that history is not simply a collection of texts. The execution of King Charles I was not a sentence in a book, "King Charles was beheaded today," but was a real fleshy neck on a real block, as an axe swung through its downward arc. As a literary theorist, literary critic, and legal theorist, Fish has consistently dismissed the importance of such physical extra-textual events. It is no wonder that the texts become insubstantial if the world in which they are written is rendered insubstantial, too, so all we have is a group of graduate students sitting around in our own day gabbing about their own gabbling.

Stanley Fish takes an extremely hard line in this at-least-twenty-years-in-the-making study. Besides the terrific close readings, what's most amazing here is Fish's suggestion that Milton (as either the most or at least the second-most important writer in the English language) might actually have known what he was doing. The fact that this is today a radical stance is a comment on the bizarre orthodoxy of current critical thinking. One of the most hillarious set pieces of this book is a too-true list of "What Liberals Believe," after which Fish points out that Milton believes exactly none of these things. By the end of the book I was ready -- despite being a committed atheist -- to join the Creator's angelic hordes in a rousing chorus of "Amen!"

The outline of Fish's acerbic standing often eclipses his critical innovations (nearly 35 years ago now) in the invention of reader-response theory in his reputation setting initial study of Milton in Surprised by Sin. Now he returns to study of Milton in this magisterial book. Fish is popularly known for inadvertently setting off the most embarrassing scandal in the science wars when Alan Sokal's hoaxing contribution to Fish's journal, Social Text was denounced by Sokal as a paradoy of postmodernist cant. Fish's own pathetic comeback dampened the brief hegemony of postmodernist political trends. Fish is also a controversial legal theorist (The Trouble with Principle) and a glib combatant in the culture wars (There's No Such Thing as Free Speech and It's a Good Thing, Too), but it is as a reader of John Milton that he first made his most enduring mark, with 1967's Surprised by Sin.In the wake of the Sokal disaster, Fish has left the demoralized English department of Duke University for the University of Illinois, Chicago where he has returned his attentions to his once-revolutionary reader-response criticism in this surprisingly jargon free study, How Milton Works. This book concentrates on the whole range of Milton's oeuvre in prose and poetry. Fish asserts that the core of Milton's significance is richly theologically, in that "there is only one choice to be or not to be allied with divinity." In various chapters Fish reworks the rich mythic structure of Paradise Lost to show how the Fall that separated Satan from Heaven parallels Adam and Eve loss Eden. So the meaning of human existence is the attempt to find restoration in the Divine image. This is perhaps ironically the single foundation of meaningful action, politics, individuality, and poetry, including Milton's own. It is obvious that not all readers of Milton will so easily agree with Fish's premises or conclusions but it is likely to quicken Milton study as his earlier study did. Also his painstaking close readings and carefully wrought arguments, enough so that perhaps many will be encouraged to return and read anew this most British of our poets. The rich architecture of Milton's epics, it abstract phrasing and taut moral reach and ambivalence that is at once immobile in its traditionalism and radical in it modernism makes Fish's readings and argument another milestone in Milton studies.

Dear Could-Be Reader of "Applications of Statistical Physics": First of, I am one of the editors of the book that I am going to review. Therefore, because of clear reasons I wish to underscore that the book stands formally for an imprint of the Special Issue of Physica A 274/1-2, which means, an international and quite commonly accepted journal on statistical mechanics. This book is, in my very "privite" opinion, a collection of things that reflect at first glance: (i) quite commonly noticeable nowodays tendency of stat physics to get more and more specialized topics as well as areas of exploration, i.e. a tendency to split up into applications in different areas of interdisciplinary research done, for example, in biophysics, physical chemistry and electrochemistry, medicine, economics&finance, epidemiology, meteorology, etc. (a GLOBAL character of the 'state of the art') (ii) wishes of stat physicists to have their tools as being more and more efficient and self-contained to be capable of revealing just the germ of a certain phenomenon under study (a LOCAL character of the 'state of the art'; see, applications of the so-called scaling concept in different areas of research). This having been said, the book contains a GAP between the globality and locality just mentioned, so that it is somehow DISCONTINUOUS as probably all the physics books nowadays seem to be. But this undoubtedly means that this book stands on a real ground, reflects this way at least some of fears of modern quantitative science, and shows somehow, perhaps indirectly, how to remedy the situation that appeared also in (statistical) physics at the millennary turnover (or, at least, how to go on in a few next steps). In other words, I wish to say that the book is therefore so much interesting, because it reveals, just by its content, necked (also, promising) truth of the discipline under presentation. In my opinion, the truth sounds probably: The research must proceeds in a "complex way", which means, in inderdisciplinary, though very specialized but interactive groups of researchers. Moreover, the book contains a SELECTION of invited papers as well as contributions of very world-wide physicists, working in this area of interest, including the Nobel Price Winner'91 in Physics P.-G. De Gennes from Paris (opening paper) as well as many really prominent scientist and their possible successors. With best regards. Yours, sincerely, Adam Gadomski /editor/

Perhaps the most interesting distinction Stanley Fish makes in this book is the one between what he calls "plot-thinking" and "being-thinking," if I remember the terms well enough. The first sort is a kind of tactical thinking--what do I need to do to get my points across right now? The second is a bit slower, it is the sort of thinking that says "what do I need to do for myself, given the sort of person I am?" Essentially, what Fish is saying is a kind of lecture of the "new historicists" and the other radicalisms that have become so important in the academy. A great many of course will hate him for saying this, becauseit means a delay in the sort of confrontation with Power that so many seem to desire these days. The theory operating for these people is that our metaphors are bad, and thus we must change them, which is why we need writers. This, or so it seems to me, is a very American sort of solution, yet it does not appear to bother the new historicists, nor do they appear to care about the destruction of the liberal, reasonably well-read public that used to form the backbone of support for leftist causes--schoolteachers, social workers, etc.--that is proceeding today as those who might have entered into such careers in previous times are relentlessly told that their work simply serves to reinforce "the Anglo-Saxon warrior brotherhood" that apparently runs things around here, at least according to one of these scholars. For all anyone knows, of course, this might be true, but to give young people the choice between being English professor and being a tool of power is not, I don't think anyway, very helpful. Stanley Fish's counsel of moderation, therefore, is I think of great value, which is to say that even if inside the academy he is thought of as someone who does not respect difference, from the outside looking in he looks a lot better than some I could name. Anyway, in the days to come, which are increasingly looking like they will be made up of a vast, illiterate population ruled by an equally illiterate stockbroker class, policed by a group of "discourse specialists" whose job it will be to censor the books and declare their meanings too obscure for the public, which come to think of it is what we have now, Stanley Fish might be remembered by some few of us as, perhaps, the last man to write in English.

The book is not bad considering the total lack of existence of intelligible literature in this supposedly vast field.

The content is really a collection of quickie crib-sheets on a sundry of topics with nominally common theme: Finance.

A lot of the actually useful stuff is the author's previously published papers on price-return distributions.

Aside from his own previously published work, he has a good tutorial on the GARCH scheme though with precious little follow up reading resources for delving in deeper (or even sideways).

This book is priced far too high given its content and depth.
Look for a used copy, and do not count on the author to answer questions by email.

I found several parts of this book useful while preparing lectures for an introductory econophysics course in Fall, 2001. The discussions of convolutions of distributions, Levy distributions and scaling are well-written and easy to follow. In the brief discussion of the St. Petersburg Paradox I missed a critical discussion of expected utility, which was invented by Bernoullli to 'resolve' that paradox. Spurred by von Neumann and Morgenstern, neo-classical economics relies on the idea of expected utility, which seems empirically to be wrong. The chapter on time correlations is also very readable (although Wiener processes are not 1/f^2 noise!). ARCH and GARCH methods are discussed, saving the student from the pain of reading badly-written papers by mathematically-minded economists, but the chapters on options are too brief with nothing new. The best introduction to options is still the original Black-Scholes paper (excepting their erroneous claim that CAPM and the delta-hedge strategy produce option pricing pdes that agree with each other). Also, it would have been nice to have seen a discussion of CAPM. The discussion of algorithmic complexity left me cold (see my earlier books and papers on nonlinear dynamics), and I would like to have seen a critical discussion of the EMH. These criticisms are ok, though, the gaps leave something for the rest of us to work on.

SINCE the last decade, physicists have been trying to cope with the issues traditionally approached by economics using their own tools and methodologies. This research has been dubbed 'econophysics'. One reason why this incursion should be welcomed is the failure of mainstream economics to recognise financial systems as complex systems. Take mainstream international finance, for instance. In the most respectable workhorse model--so-called 'new open economy macroeconomics model'--foreign exchange rates always reach some sort of stable equilibrium. To put it bluntly, this means that currencies do not exhibit complex behaviour.

However, financial markets do demonstrate several of the properties that characterise complex systems. What is more, they are highly complex, open systems in which many subunits interact nonlinearly in the presence of feedback and stable governing rules. Earlier attempts to find chaos in financial data, for instance, have been disappointing exactly because the phenomenon is likely to emerge in systems which are only moderately complex. Although it cannot be ruled out that financial markets follow chaotic dynamics, econophysics assumes that asset price dynamics are stochastic processes.

A fundamental commitment of the mainline model of international finance is to theory itself, and not to data. Modelling is devoted to equipping the discipline with an underlying rational behaviour at the individual level. Yet this is at odds with the fact that financial markets are prone to collective 'irrational exuberance'. Instead, econophysics attemps to build up stochastic models that encompass essential features observed in the financial data. Now that the time evolution of many financial markets is continually monitored, it is possible to test the accuracy and predictive power of the developed models using available data. One common objection to such a practice is that it is impossible to perform large-scale experiments in economics that could falsify any given theory. The authors note that this limitation is not specific to economics, but also affects such well developed areas of physics as astrophysics, atmospheric physics, and geophysics. By analogy with the activity in these more established areas, we are able to test and falsify any theories associated with the current available sets of financial data.

Complex systems can sometimes behave in remarkable simple ways. These are reflected in power law distributions and scaling. The authors illustrate these concepts and others, and apply them to the financial time series. The book is thus useful not only for physicists but also for economists and people in the financial world. Some familiarity with probability theory or statistical physics is required, though. Economists dissatisfied with the mainline approach of their discipline will find the book opportune. The others might end up welcoming econophysics as well. After all, economists implicitly see physics as nature's economics. What is then wrong with physicists thinking of economics as social physics?

Stanley Fish takes advantage of the fact that many people fail to grasp an essential aspect regarding all human communities: censorship is unavoidable and intrinsic. It is inherently impossible to do otherwise. The only legitimate question is how extensive and invasive the censorship of the society will be. We are all censors and somebody will ultimately decide if and when someone has gone too far in violating the values that the overall group considers heretical. It's only a question where one draws the line. Everybody practices censorship. All societies must select and impose the values considered non negotiable. Heretics of either religious or secular dogmas are always punished. The philosophical premises of Logical Positivism are insufficient to underpin our democratic culture. Reasonable certitude is epistemologically the best humans can achieve. "Political correctness" is actually a neutral term. The only real debate is over the situations demanding tacit or explicit prohibition. Language is intrinsically nebulous. The meanings of words mutate endlessly. So what? Deconstructionism is merely the mistaken notion that since words cannot be preserved from inevitable change that logically we cannot oppose the forces of Nihilism. We might, for example, feel yucky about the murder of innocents in a concentration camp, but this is mere sentiment and not the result of rational thinking. Fish is simply taking advantage of our society's preference to indulge in self delusion. Many feel reluctant to admit that our values are rarely absolute and there are indeed times when they must appropriately be abandoned. The occasional exception, it is mistakenly perceived, always precariously places us on the slippery slope leading to Armageddon. The late Sidney Hook was one of the few who even dared to tackle the dilemma surrounding the paradoxes of democracy. An unspoken Taboo prevents many others from even admitting a problem exists. .

Stanley Fish admittedly has half a point to make when claiming that hiring practices are rarely an exercise in total objectivity and meritocracy. Such decisions made by flesh and blood human beings will indeed be flawed. Subconsciously, if not even consciously, factors such as class, race, gender, etc. may play a disturbing and invalid role. Nonetheless, Fish seemingly pushes his argument to the point of absurdity. The real answer, of course, is that human beings must learn to confront their prejudices and develop the virtuous habits to overcome them. Stanley Fish is merely building a career around the fact that prudential judgment, and not a hard-science absolutism, underpins our decision making. He is something of a con man who exaggerates his main points to deceive us regarding their ultimate value. Perhaps others can perceive the debate over Fish as merely an abstract intellectual exercise of no real importance to the real world. I am not one of these people. Deconstructionism asserts that human beings cannot achieve reasonable certitude in their decision making. The underpinnings of this epistemology destroy any hope of building a democratic society. The result is that we must ultimately rely on pure brute force. One possesses power not because of the ability to persuade others---but you can kick the crap out of them!

Free speech does not exist. American democracy is a sham. Our feeling that the holocaust was wrong is merely an irrational emotional reaction. The U.S. constitution allows churches to persecute nonbelievers - and that would be just fine. These - and many other controvertial opinions - are expressed by Stanley Fish, one of the leading postmodernists of today, in this book.

The core of Fish's argument is that *any* discussion, by the mere fact of *being* a discussion that uses words in a certain languages, involves "censorship", because the words, terms, and expressions used in the language have hidden biases in them. Therefore, we are better of without preserving the "illusion" that there is an objective right or wrong, or that democracy is objectively better than fascism, or that the first amendment means anything.

Fish, I think, is pulling an "Andy Kaufman" on us. It is highly unlikely that he actually believes any of this nonsense, despite his articulate defense of it. (Fish is, one must admit, a compelling writer, who can get you convinced - momentarily - of the most absurd nonsense. You only notice the logical lapses, non-sequitors, and stretching of anaolgies *way* past their breaking point - if at all - when you finish the reading.) I think it is much more probably that he just wants to get people angry by taking up a "provocative" position with a seemingly straight face - hence the book's title.

The question is what is Fish's purpose in all this. If his purpose is to get an apathetic public to question and defend their beliefs in freedom of speech and democracy, that is good. But it seems to me more likely that Fish is simply being meritricious for personal gain: he is using his considerable rhetorical and pedagogical talents to defend nonsense, not because he believes it or wants others to object to him, but in order to make a name for himself as academia's "bad boy".

Now, sitting comfortably? Are you a liberal or a conservative? Do you think your views, sane, rational, fair, unbiased or generally decent? Well what if I told you that you are a biased, interested, often irrational and double-dealing individual who rigs debates, fixes the meanings of discourses (and things) and generally configures things to your own advantage and your opponent's disadvantage? OK, you would disagree with me: BUT THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT STANLEY FISH IS SAYING ABOUT YOU!! He does this in a series of extraordinary essays attacking conservatives and liberals alike (though under the post-Enlightenment rubric of "liberalism" in general, that belief system shared by most modern, Western thinkers) for their slipperiness in debate and their use of fake and polemical principles, actually the products of politics (a noble because unavoidable category for Fish). Fish's aim in all this seems to be to drag everyone back to their contextual and historical time and place(s) and to do away with the notion that we can avoid this or retreat into our various cognitive, abstract and universalising hiding places. What is left is what we had before Fish started writing and what, according to Fish, we will always have: political debate, the opportunity to convince your peers that this way is better than that, that this conclusion is better than that one. But, after Fish, we won't be able to do this by appealing to principles anymore since he has exposed them all as partisan and political. So "hoorah" for Stanley Fish's eye opening book, let's build a better world, and watch out, Stanley Fish is after you!

PoSTmodERnFoOL