Forthcoming books from the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

Making a toaster, at home, from scratch.

In the West, media coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan is framed by military and political concerns, resulting in a simplistic picture of ageless barbarity, terrorist safe havens, and peoples in need of either punishment or salvation. Under the Drones looks beyond this limiting view to investigate real people on the ground, and to analyze the political, social, and economic forces that shape their lives. Understanding the complexity of life along the 1,600-mile border between Afghanistan and Pakistan can help America and its European allies realign their priorities in the region to address genuine problems, rather than fabricated ones.

This volume explodes Western misunderstandings by revealing a land that abounds with human agency, perpetual innovation, and vibrant complexity. Through the work of historians and social scientists, the thirteen essays here explore the real and imagined presence of the Taliban; the animated sociopolitical identities expressed through traditions like Pakistani truck decoration; Sufism’s ambivalent position as an alternative to militancy; the long and contradictory history of Afghan media; the simultaneous brutality and potential that heroin brings to women in the area.

Moving past shifting conceptions of security, the authors expose the West’s prevailing perspective on the region as strategic, targeted, and alarmingly dehumanizing. Under the Drones is an essential antidote to contemporary media coverage and military concerns.

"Boosting is an approach to machine learning based on the idea of creating a highly accurate predictor by combining many weak and inaccurate “rules of thumb.” A remarkably rich theory has evolved around boosting, with connections to a range of topics, including statistics, game theory, convex optimization, and information geometry. Boosting algorithms have also enjoyed practical success in such fields as biology, vision, and speech processing. At various times in its history, boosting has been perceived as mysterious, controversial, even paradoxical.

This book, written by the inventors of the method, brings together, organizes, simplifies, and substantially extends two decades of research on boosting, presenting both theory and applications in a way that is accessible to readers from diverse backgrounds while also providing an authoritative reference for advanced researchers. With its introductory treatment of all material and its inclusion of exercises in every chapter, the book is appropriate for course use as well.

The book begins with a general introduction to machine learning algorithms and their analysis; then explores the core theory of boosting, especially its ability to generalize; examines some of the myriad other theoretical viewpoints that help to explain and understand boosting; provides practical extensions of boosting for more complex learning problems; and finally presents a number of advanced theoretical topics. Numerous applications and practical illustrations are offered throughout."

"Nye investigates the role that Michael Polanyi and several of his contemporaries played in the emergence of the social turn in the philosophy of science. This turn involved seeing science as a socially based enterprise that does not rely on empiricism and reason alone but on social communities, behavioral norms, and personal commitments. Nye argues that the roots of the social turn are to be found in the scientific culture and political events of Europe in the 1930s, when scientific intellectuals struggled to defend the universal status of scientific knowledge and to justify public support for science in an era of economic catastrophe, Stalinism and Fascism, and increased demands for applications of science to industry and social welfare."

WANT

ooh...

"Applied statistics is more than data analysis, but it is easy to lose sight of the big picture. David Cox and Christl Donnelly distil decades of scientific experience into usable principles for the successful application of statistics, showing how good statistical strategy shapes every stage of an investigation. As you advance from research or policy question, to study design, through modelling and interpretation, and finally to meaningful conclusions, this book will be a valuable guide. Over a hundred illustrations from a wide variety of real applications make the conceptual points concrete, illuminating your path and deepening your understanding. This book is essential reading for anyone who makes extensive use of statistical methods in their work."

_Magistra et Mater_ in book form.  (Well, not really.)

A bargain at E4000.

Would it be wrong to put this up in the office, across from the student chair?  (Yes, probably, but oh so tempting.)

"Gentlemen and Amazons traces the nineteenth-century genesis and development of an important contemporary myth about human origins: that of an original prehistoric matriarchy. Cynthia Eller explores the intellectual history of the myth, which arose from male scholars who mostly wanted to vindicate the patriarchal family model as a higher stage of human development. Eller tells the stories these men told, analyzes the gendered assumptions they made, and provides the necessary context for understanding how feminists of the 1970s and 1980s embraced as historical “fact” a discredited nineteenth-century idea."

"accomplished scholars, humanitarian workers, politicians, and journalists—most with extended experience inside Afghanistan—examine the realities of life for women in both urban and rural settings. They address topics including food security, sex work, health, marriage, education, poetry, politics, prisoners, and community development. Eschewing stereotypes about the burqa, the contributors focus instead on women’s empowerment and agency, and their struggles for peace and justice in the face of a brutal ongoing war."

From 1981 but perhaps still worth looking at?

"What makes a place? Infinite City, Rebecca Solnit’s brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas, searches out the answer by examining the many layers of meaning in one place, the San Francisco Bay Area. Aided by artists, writers, cartographers, and twenty-two gorgeous color maps, each of which illuminates the city and its surroundings as experienced by different inhabitants, ... explores the area thematically—connecting, for example, Eadweard Muybridge’s foundation of motion-picture technology with Alfred Hitchcock’s filming of Vertigo. Across an urban grid of just seven by seven miles, she finds seemingly unlimited landmarks and treasures—butterfly habitats, queer sites, murders, World War II shipyards, blues clubs, Zen Buddhist centers. She roams the political terrain, both progressive and conservative, and details the cultural geographies of the Mission District, the culture wars of the Fillmore, the South of Market world being devoured by redevelopment, and much, much more."

Oooh. I could keep it in the basement and feed it and play with it and call it George.

Reaction-diffusion patterns on a cup!

WANT

I was quite addicted to these as a kid, and in fact I think my parents may still have all the ones my brother and I collected...

"This study discusses the history of the central limit theorem and related probabilistic limit theorems from about 1810 through 1950. In this context the book also describes the historical development of analytical probability theory and its tools, such as characteristic functions or moments. The central limit theorem was originally deduced by Laplace as a statement about approximations for the distributions of sums of independent random variables within the framework of classical probability, which focused upon specific problems and applications."

"his introduction to some of the principal models in the theory of disordered systems leads the reader through the basics, to the very edge of contemporary research, with the minimum of technical fuss. Topics covered include random walk, percolation, self-avoiding walk, interacting particle systems, uniform spanning tree, random graphs, as well as the Ising, Potts, and random-cluster models for ferromagnetism, and the Lorentz model for motion in a random medium. Schramm–Löwner evolutions (SLE) arise in various contexts. The choice of topics is strongly motivated by modern applications and focuses on areas that merit further research. Special features include a simple account of Smirnov's proof of Cardy's formula for critical percolation, and a fairly full account of the theory of influence and sharp-thresholds. Accessible to a wide audience of mathematicians and physicists, this book can be used as a graduate course text. Each chapter ends with a range of exercises."

WANT.

"This informal introduction provides a fresh perspective on isomorphism theory, which is the branch of ergodic theory that explores the conditions under which two measure preserving systems are essentially equivalent. It contains a primer in basic measure theory, proofs of fundamental ergodic theorems, and material on entropy, martingales, Bernoulli processes, and various varieties of mixing. Original proofs of classic theorems - including the Shannon–McMillan–Breiman theorem, the Krieger finite generator theorem, and the Ornstein isomorphism theorem - are presented by degrees, together with helpful hints that encourage the reader to develop the proofs on their own. Hundreds of exercises and open problems are also included"

library has this but in off-site storage; request.
"There are many ways of introducing the concept of probability in classical, deterministic physics. This volume is concerned with one approach, known as 'the method of arbitrary functions', which was first considered by Poincare. ... proceeds by associating some uncertainty to our knowledge of both the initial conditions and the values of the physical constants that characterize the evolution of a physical system. By modeling this uncertainty by a probability density distribution ... analyze how the state of the system evolves through time. ... examples as diverse as bouncing balls, simple and coupled harmonic oscillators, integrable systems (such as spinning tops), planetary motion, and billiards. ... study the speed of convergence for solutions in order to determine the practical relevance of the method of arbitrary functions for specific examples. ... new results on convergence, and tractable upper bounds are derived"

"The Cybernetic Brain explores a largely forgotten group of British thinkers, including Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, R. D. Laing, Stafford Beer, and Gordon Pask, and their singular work in a dazzling array of fields. Psychiatry, engineering, management, politics, music, architecture, education, tantric yoga, the Beats, and the sixties counterculture all come into play as Pickering follows the history of cybernetics’ impact on the world, from contemporary robotics and complexity theory to the Chilean economy under Salvador Allende. What underpins this fascinating history, Pickering contends, is a shared but unconventional vision of the world as ultimately unknowable, a place where genuine novelty is always emerging. And thus, Pickering avers, the history of cybernetics provides us with an imaginative model of open-ended experimentation in stark opposition to the modern urge to achieve domination over nature and each other."

"The encyclopedia of extraordinary social behavior".

"entanglements of medieval elites in the regions that today comprise Afghanistan, Pakistan, and north India ... ranges in time from the early eighth to the early thirteenth centuries ... considers the role of material culture ... coins, dress, monuments, paintings, and sculptures ... The book explores modes of circulation--among them looting, gifting, and trade--through which artisans and artifacts traveled .... It analyzes the relationship between mobility and practices of cultural translation, and the role of both in the emergence of complex transcultural identities. Among the subjects discussed are the rendering of Arabic sacred texts in Sanskrit on Indian coins, the adoption of Turko-Persian dress by Buddhist rulers, the work of Indian stone masons in Afghanistan, and the incorporation of carvings from Hindu and Jain temples in early Indian mosques."

Favorable review in J. Stat. Phys. (doi: s10955-009-9712-6)

" I want Lewd vs. Prude comics. In each installment, Lewd acquires a new pornographic novel and, with child-like enthusiasm, attempts to get Prude to read it. Meanwhile, Prude is busy trying to destroy it – burn it, dynamite it, bury it, sink it beneath the waves, send it by post to Australia. But the efforts on both sides invariably cancel out. In the final panel, Prude sits down to read. Again. We could have “Lewd and Prude on Holiday”, “Lewd and Prude Go Ballooning”, “Lewd and Prude at Baffin Bay”, “Lewd and Prude in the Big City”, “Lewd and Prude at Sea”, “Lewd and Prude and the Doctor’s Orders”, “Lewd and Prude at the Opera”. ... It will be much better than “Spy vs. Spy”, because Lewd and Prude obviously have a somewhat dysfunctional, asymmetric-yet-mutual love. It’s like “Krazy Kat”, with a pornographic novel playing the role of the thrown brick."

OMG that is so good.

If I had $700k free...

If I ever have kids, they are _so_ going to have this read to them...

"A presence behind the lens"

"Laser cooling of atoms provides an ideal case study for the application of Lévy statistics in a privileged situation where the statistical model can be derived from first principles."

I don't think I knew about this book.

These almost persuade me to wear ties.

Totally implausible, yet strangely attractive, bookpr0n.

Sounds wonderfully crazy.

DARPA et al. really do want to mess with your head.

for back garden

"mad scientist sculptural glassware... gracious living for alchemists"

"with huge thorns on twisted branches, plus fragrant white blooms and sour yellow fruit." Memo to self: have one growing out front in time for next Halloween.

That is, indeed, a very cool-looking table.

Programming for artists (!?!) - looks very cool, but also hard to justify in my book budget. ---Apparently superseded by the Processing programming language/environment.

Jonathan Mirsky reviews a new book on Xinjiang

Quebecois blend of whiskey and maple syrup. I brought four bottles back with me from Montreal.

For back garden? For front garden?