Biometrika


Book Description

A journal of statistics emphasizing the statistical study of biological problems. Papers contain original theoretical contributions of direct or potential value in applications.










Past Imperfect


Book Description

From the creator of the Emmy Award-winning Downton Abbey... "Damian Baxter was a friend of mine at Cambridge. We met around the time when I was doing the Season at the end of the Sixties. I introduced him to some of the girls. They took him up, and we ran about together in London for a while...." Nearly forty years later, the narrator hates Damian Baxter and would gladly forget their disastrous last encounter. But if it is pleasant to hear from an old friend, it is more interesting to hear from an old enemy, and so he accepts an invitation from the rich and dying Damian, who begs him to track down the past girlfriend whose anonymous letter claimed he had fathered a child during that ruinous debutante season. The search takes the narrator back to the extraordinary world of swinging London, where aristocratic parents schemed to find suitable matches for their daughters while someone was putting hash in the brownies at a ball at Madame Tussaud's. It was a time when everything seemed to be changing—and it was, but not always quite as expected. Past Imperfect is Julian Fellowes at his best--a novel of secrets, status, and a world in upheaval.




Picture Imperfect


Book Description

Many observers judge utopians and their sympathizers as foolhardy dreamers at best and murderous totalitarians at worst. However, as noted social critic and historian Russell Jacoby argues, not only has utopianism been unfairly characterized, a return to an iconoclastic utopian spirit is vital for today's society. Jacoby reexamines the anti-utopian mindset and identifies how utopian thought came to be regarded with such suspicion. He challenges standard readings of such anti-utopian classics as 1984 and Brave New World and offers stinging critiques of the influential liberal and anti-utopian theorists Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, and Karl Popper. As Jacoby demonstrates, iconoclastic utopianism, shaped by the works of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Gustav Landauer, and other predominantly Jewish thinkers, revives society's dormant political imagination and suggests new and more imaginative ideas of the future.







The Politics of Time


Book Description

If Aristotle sought to understand time through change, might we not reverse the procedure and seek to understand change through time? Once we do this, argues Peter Osborne, it soon becomes clear that ideas such as avant-garde, modern, postmodern and tradition—which are usually only treated as markets for empirically discrete periods, movements or styles—are best understood as categories of historical totalization. More specifically, Osborne claims, such ideas involve distinct “temporalizations” of history, giving rise to conflicting politics of time. His book begins with a consideration of the main aspects of modernity and develops though a series of critical engagements with the major twentieth-century positions in the philosophy of history. He concludes with a fascinating history of the avant-garde intervention into the temporality of everyday life in surrealism, the situationists and the work of Henri Lefebvre.




Spanish-English Contrasts


Book Description

An invaluable text in language and linguistics because it has a unique scope: a one-volume description of the Spanish language and its differences from English, and ranges from pronunciation and grammar to word meaning, language use, and social and dialectical variation. Designed for survey courses in Spanish linguistics with technical concepts explained in context for beginners in the field, Spanish/English Contrasts brings out the ways in which insights into the two languages have evolved as scholars have built on the work and research of others in the field. A bilingual glossary of linguistic terms is provided to facilitate discussion in either language. This second edition is thoroughly updated to incorporate insights and issues that have come to the fore from the explosion of research in the past twenty-five years in all of the areas covered by the book. It includes an expanded bibliography and index, and adds new exercises for student application and class discussion. Its approach remains broadly based however, in order to accommodate a range of areas and data rather than focusing narrowly on one single theory or research area, and it continues to emphasize implications for language teaching, translation, and other practical applications.







Principles of Cyber-Physical Systems


Book Description

A foundational text that offers a rigorous introduction to the principles of design, specification, modeling, and analysis of cyber-physical systems. A cyber-physical system consists of a collection of computing devices communicating with one another and interacting with the physical world via sensors and actuators in a feedback loop. Increasingly, such systems are everywhere, from smart buildings to medical devices to automobiles. This textbook offers a rigorous and comprehensive introduction to the principles of design, specification, modeling, and analysis of cyber-physical systems. The book draws on a diverse set of subdisciplines, including model-based design, concurrency theory, distributed algorithms, formal methods of specification and verification, control theory, real-time systems, and hybrid systems, explaining the core ideas from each that are relevant to system design and analysis. The book explains how formal models provide mathematical abstractions to manage the complexity of a system design. It covers both synchronous and asynchronous models for concurrent computation, continuous-time models for dynamical systems, and hybrid systems for integrating discrete and continuous evolution. The role of correctness requirements in the design of reliable systems is illustrated with a range of specification formalisms and the associated techniques for formal verification. The topics include safety and liveness requirements, temporal logic, model checking, deductive verification, stability analysis of linear systems, and real-time scheduling algorithms. Principles of modeling, specification, and analysis are illustrated by constructing solutions to representative design problems from distributed algorithms, network protocols, control design, and robotics. This book provides the rapidly expanding field of cyber-physical systems with a long-needed foundational text by an established authority. It is suitable for classroom use or as a reference for professionals.