A cognitive ethnography of how bioengineering scientists create innovative modeling methods.In this first full-scale, long-term cognitive ethnography by a philosopher of science, Nancy J. Nersessian offers an account of how scientists at the interdisciplinary frontiers of bioengineering create novel problem-solving methods. Bioengineering scientists model complex dynamical biological systems using concepts, methods, materials, and other resources drawn primarily from engineering. They aim to understand these systems sufficiently to control or intervene in them. What Nersessian examines here is how cutting-edge bioengineering scientists integrate the cognitive, social, material, and cultural dimensions of practice. Her findings and conclusions have broad implications for researchers in philosophy, science studies, cognitive science, and interdisciplinary studies, as well as scientists, educators, policy makers, and funding agencies. In studying the epistemic practices of scientists, Ner
Techniques for applying mathematical concepts in the real world: six rarely taught but crucial tools for analysis, research, and problem-solving.Many young graduates leave school with a solid knowledge of mathematical concepts but struggle to apply these concepts in practice. Real scientific and engineering problems are different from those found in textbooks: they are messier, take longer to solve, and standard solution recipes might not apply. This book fills the gap between what is taught in the typical college curriculum and what a practicing engineer or scientist needs to know. It presents six powerful tools for analysis, research, and problem-solving in the real world: dimensional analysis, limiting cases, symmetry, scaling, making order of magnitude estimates, and the method of successive approximations. The book does not focus on formulaic manipulations of equations, but emphasizes analysis and explores connections between the equations and the application. Each chapter introdu
In this highly-anticipated new text for courses in family therapy, key concepts and techniques of the most prominent family therapy models are presented and put into practice. Each chapter utilizes th
This book examining diagnosis was first published in 1985. Diagnosis is at the centre of medical practice and depends on skilled information processing and decision making. Medical students, who will spend their working lives gathering information from patients, making decisions and solving problems need to be taught the necessary techniques. One aim of the book is, therefore, to give teachers an account of some of the basic ideas which have been applied to the diagnostic process and to medical problem solving in general. Another aim is to make teachers more aware of the principles underlying their clinical work, for it has been shown repeatedly that clinicians' actions do not always coincide with their teaching and there is a distinct gap between what they do and what they teach. This introduction to the fundamental concepts of information processing and decision making is written at a level which makes it appropriate reading for those who have not previously read widely in these area
Acoustics of Fluid-Structure Interactions addresses an increasingly important branch of fluid mechanics - the absorption of noise and vibration by fluid flow. This subject, which offers numerous challenges to conventional areas of acoustics, is of growing concern in places where the environment is adversely affected by sound. Howe presents useful background material on fluid mechanics and the elementary concepts of classical acoustics and structural vibrations. Using examples, many of which include complete worked solutions, he vividly illustrates the theoretical concepts involved. He provides the basis for all calculations necessary for the determination of sound generation by aircraft, ships, general ventilation and combustion systems, as well as musical instruments. Both a graduate textbook and a reference for researchers, Acoustics of Fluid-Structure Interactions is an important synthesis of information in this field. It will also aid engineers in the theory and practice of noise
What is critical theory, and to what extent can it claim to exist as a free-standing entity independent of the object of enquiry? Is the much-discussed gulf between Anglo-Saxon empiricism and Continental post-structuralism more apparent than real? In The Myth of Theory William Righter explores the nature of thinking about literature and the assumed polarities between the abstract reasonings of philosophy and the concrete exploratory manoeuvres of critical practice. He goes on to examine the role of theory in critical observation, through extended case studies of the work of critics including Barthes. Bloom, Poulet, Eliot, Empson, Kristeva and Derrida. His underlying argument is that criticism uses theory but is never effectively directed or controlled by it: the inherent radicalism built into critical practice fragments and transforms general concepts in the act of applying them.
Graphic Design: Learn It, Do IT is an introduction to the fundamentals of graphic design and the Adobe Creative Cloud applications used to put these concepts into practice. This book is intended for p
Presents the main facts of human physiology in a concise, straightforward style, covering concepts required for the study and practice of medicine. Material is oriented to the tropical environment and
This is the engaging and accessible intellectual memoir of a leading jurist. It tells the story of the development of his thoughts and writings over sixty years in the context of three continents and addresses the complexities of decolonisation, the troubles in Belfast, the contextual turn in legal studies, rethinking evidence and the implications of globalisation which have been central to his life and research. In propounding his original views as an enthusiastic self-styled 'legal nationalist', Twining maps his ideas of law as a unique discipline, which pervades all spheres of social and political life while combining theory and practice, concepts and values, facts and rules in uniquely fascinating ways. Addressed to academic lawyers generally and to other non-specialists, this story brings out the importance and fascinations of a discipline that has changed, expanded and diversified in the post-War years, with an eye to its future development and potential.
Previous scholarship on classical pseudepigrapha has generally aimed at proving issues of attribution and dating of individual works, with little or no attention paid to the texts as literary artefacts. Instead, this book looks at Latin fakes as sophisticated products of a literary culture in which collaborative practices of supplementation, recasting and role-play were the absolute cornerstones of rhetorical education and literary practice. Texts such as the Catalepton, the Consolatio ad Liviam and the Panegyricus Messallae thus illuminate the strategies whereby Imperial audiences received and interrogated canonical texts and are here explored as key moments in the Imperial reception of Augustan authors such as Virgil, Ovid and Tibullus. The study of the rhetoric of these creative supplements irreverently mingling truth and fiction reveals much not only about the neighbouring concepts of fiction, authenticity and reality, but also about the tacit assumptions by which the latter are em
Designing algorithms to recommend items such as news articles and movies to users is a challenging task in numerous web applications. The crux of the problem is to rank items based on users' responses to different items to optimize for multiple objectives. Major technical challenges are high dimensional prediction with sparse data and constructing high dimensional sequential designs to collect data for user modeling and system design. This comprehensive treatment of the statistical issues that arise in recommender systems includes detailed, in-depth discussions of current state-of-the-art methods such as adaptive sequential designs (multi-armed bandit methods), bilinear random-effects models (matrix factorization) and scalable model fitting using modern computing paradigms like MapReduce. The authors draw upon their vast experience working with such large-scale systems at Yahoo! and LinkedIn, and bridge the gap between theory and practice by illustrating complex concepts with examples
Over the last two decades, Routine Dynamics has emerged as an international research community that shares a particular approach to organizational phenomena. At the heart of this approach is an interest in examining the emergence, reproduction, replication and change of routines as recognizable patterns of actions. In contrast to other research communities interested in those phenomena, Routine Dynamics studies are informed by a distinctive set of theories (especially practice theory and related process-informed theories). This Handbook offers both an accessible introduction to core concepts and approaches in Routine Dynamics as well as a comprehensive and authoritative overview of research in different areas of Routine Dynamics. The chapters of this Handbook are structured around four core themes: 1) Theoretical resources for research on the dynamics of routines, 2) Methodological issues in studying the dynamics routines, 3) Themes in Routine Dynamics research and 4) Relation of Routi
String matching is one of the oldest algorithmic techniques, yet still one of the most pervasive in computer science. The past 20 years have seen technological leaps in applications as diverse as information retrieval and compression. This copiously illustrated collection of puzzles and exercises in key areas of text algorithms and combinatorics on words offers graduate students and researchers a pleasant and direct way to learn and practice with advanced concepts. The problems are drawn from a large range of scientific publications, both classic and new. Building up from the basics, the book goes on to showcase problems in combinatorics on words (including Fibonacci or Thue-Morse words), pattern matching (including Knuth-Morris-Pratt and Boyer-Moore like algorithms), efficient text data structures (including suffix trees and suffix arrays), regularities in words (including periods and runs) and text compression (including Huffman, Lempel-Ziv and Burrows-Wheeler based methods).
Do you want to know what a parametric test is and when not to perform one? Do you get confused between odds ratios and relative risks? Want to understand the difference between sensitivity and specificity? Would like to find out what the fuss is about Bayes' theorem? Then this book is for you! Physicians need to understand the principles behind medical statistics. They don't need to learn the formula. The software knows it already! This book explains the fundamental concepts of medical statistics so that the learner will become confident in performing the most commonly used statistical tests. Each chapter is rich in anecdotes, illustrations, questions, and answers. Not enough? There is more material online with links to free statistical software, webpages, multimedia content, a practice dataset to get hands-on with data analysis, and a Single Best Answer questionnaire for the exam.
The Short Introduction to Corporate Finance provides an accessibly written guide to contemporary financial institutional practice. Rau deploys both his professional expertise and experience of teaching MBA and graduate-level courses to produce a lively discussion of the key concepts of finance, liberally illustrated with real-world examples. Built around six essential paradigms, he builds an integrated framework covering all the major ideas in finance over the past half-century. Ideal for students and practitioners alike, it will become core reading for anyone aspiring to become an effective manager.
Areas of professional practice, such as law, psychiatry, and the behavioural and social sciences, overlap at numerous points in terms of underlying concepts and basic research. They also intersect at
The renowned communications theorist Robert Gallager brings his lucid writing style to the study of the fundamental system aspects of digital communication for a one-semester course for graduate students. With the clarity and insight that have characterized his teaching and earlier textbooks, he develops a simple framework and then combines this with careful proofs to help the reader understand modern systems and simplified models in an intuitive yet precise way. A strong narrative and links between theory and practice reinforce this concise, practical presentation. The book begins with data compression for arbitrary sources. Gallager then describes how to modulate the resulting binary data for transmission over wires, cables, optical fibers, and wireless channels. Analysis and intuitive interpretations are developed for channel noise models, followed by coverage of the principles of detection, coding, and decoding. The various concepts covered are brought together in a description of
In this volume, the author covers the mathematical methods appropriate to both linear-systems theory and signal processing. The text deals with a number of topics usually found in introductory linear-systems courses, such as complex numbers and Laplace transforms, and addresses additional topics such as complex variable theory and Fourier series and transforms. Although the discussion is mathematically self-contained, it assumes that the reader has a firm background in calculus and differential equations. Each chapter contains a number of worked examples plus exercises designed to allow the student to put concepts into practice. The author writes in a mathematically elegant yet relaxed and readable style, and provides interesting historical notes along the way. Undergraduate students of electrical engineering, applied mathematics, and related disciplines - and their teachers - will welcome this book.
Problem-solving is an art central to understanding and ability in mathematics. With this series of books, the authors have provided a selection of worked examples, problems with complete solutions and test papers designed to be used with or instead of standard textbooks on algebra. For the convenience of the reader, a key explaining how the present books may be used in conjunction with some of the major textbooks is included. Each volume is divided into sections that begin with some notes on notation and prerequisites. The majority of the material is aimed at the students of average ability but some sections contain more challenging problems. By working through the books, the student will gain a deeper understanding of the fundamental concepts involved, and practice in the formulation, and so solution, of other problems. Books later in the series cover material at a more advanced level than the earlier titles, although each is, within its own limits, self-contained.
Problem-solving is an art central to understanding and ability in mathematics. With this series of books, the authors have provided a selection of worked examples, problems with complete solutions and test papers designed to be used with or instead of standard textbooks on algebra. For the convenience of the reader, a key explaining how the present books may be used in conjunction with some of the major textbooks is included. Each volume is divided into sections that begin with some notes on notation and prerequisites. The majority of the material is aimed at the students of average ability but some sections contain more challenging problems. By working through the books, the student will gain a deeper understanding of the fundamental concepts involved, and practice in the formulation, and so solution, of other problems. Books later in the series cover material at a more advanced level than the earlier titles, although each is, within its own limits, self-contained.
