Pattern Classification Using Ensemble Methods

Structured methodologies are a popular and powerful tool in information systems development. Many different ones exist, each employing a number of models and so a specification must be converted from one form to another during the development process. To solve this problem, Dr Tse proposes in this 1991 book a unifying framework behind popular structured models. He approaches the problem from the viewpoints of algebra and category theory. He not only develops the frameworks but also illustrates their practical and theoretical usefulness. Thus this book will provide insight for software engineers into how methodologies can be formalised and will open up a range of applications and problems for theoretical computer scientists.

In this book David Bachman examines the origins of the Great Leap Forward (GLF), a programme of economic reform that must be considered one of the great tragedies of Communist China, estimated to have caused the death of between 14 and 28 million Chinese. While standard accounts interpret the GLF as chiefly the brainchild of Mao Zedong and as a radical rejection of a set of more moderate reform proposals put forward in the period 1956 to 1957, Bachman proposes a provocative reinterpretation of the origins of the GLF that stresses the role of the bureaucracy. Using a neo-institutionalist approach to analyse economic policy-making leading up to the GLF, he argues that the GLF must be seen as the produce of an institutional process of policy-making. This book offers a reinterpretation of one of the most important episodes in the history of the People's Republic as well as a framework with which to analyse the role of institutions more generally in the political economy of the PRC.

As Europe proceeds towards economic and monetary union, fiscal convergence and the prospect of a common money are at the centre of discussion. This volume from the Centre for Economic Policy Research brings together theoretical, applied and historical research on the management of public debt and its implications for financial stability. Gale fills a gap in the literature, using a consistent framework to investigate the welfare economics of public debt, while Calvo and Guidotti analyse the trade-off between indexation and maturity when it comes to minimizing debt service. Confidence crises have become relevant again in view of the high debt ratios in countries such as Belgium, Italy and Ireland. Alesina, Prati and Tabellini develop a formal model of the propagation of a debt run and use it to interpret Italian debt panics. Giavazzi and Pagano concentrate on how inappropriate debt management can precipitate a run on the currency while Makinen and Woodward review a broad sweep of histori

This book gives a rigorous and practical treatment of integral equations. These are significant because they occur in many problems in mathematics, physics and engineering and they offer a powerful (sometimes the only) technique for solving these problems. The book aims to tackle the solution of integral equations using a blend of abstract 'structural' results and more direct, down-to-earth mathematics. The interplay between these two approaches is a central feature of the text and it allows a thorough account to be given of many of the types of integral equation which arise in application areas. Since it is not always possible to find explicit solutions of the problems posed, much attention is devoted to obtaining qualitative information and approximations to the solutions, with the associated error estimates. This treatment is intended for final year mathematics undergraduates, postgraduates and research workers in application areas such as numerical analysis and fluid mechanics.

Drawing upon their joint fieldwork, the authors cast this book as a conversation involving themselves, a Colombian rural people, and the writings of past economists. In their view, the material practices of the rural folk constitute a house model of the economy, and the Colombian voices provide a window on prior European fold conversations about the house. The house and the corporation have been the principal modes of material organization in Western life: the former is older, but the latter now predominates. The authors suggest, through use of the Colombian conversations, that textualists of the past transformed and inscribed similar folk voices for their emerging theories of the corporation and the market. They argue that economic knowledge is not simply the product of a scientific community but is often appropriated from folk practices. By situating the knowledge gained from fieldwork within their own traditions, and by using that knowledge to reflect upon the origins of contemporar

The first edition of this very successful book was one winner of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 'Astronomy Book of the Year' awards in 1986. There are a further seven subroutines in the new edition which can be linked in any combination with the existing twenty-six. Written in a portable version of BASIC, it enables the amateur astronomer to make calculations using a personal computer. The routines are not specific to any make of machine and are user friendly in that they require only a broad understanding of any particular problem. Since the programs themselves take care of details, they can be used for example to calculate the time of rising of any of the planets in any part of the world at any time in the future or past, or they may be used to find the circumstances of the next solar eclipse visible from a particular place. In fact, almost every problem likely to be encountered by the amateur astronomer can be solved by a suitable combination of the routines given in the bo

The subject matter of this text is conference based and deals with the physiology, ecology and management of orchid conservation. It offers information not only to the orchid research scientist, but also to the orchid enthusiast curious about the scientific background to this topic. Interest and support for plant conservation has increased considerably and a great deal of attention has been focused on the plight of members of the orchid family. The development makes it desirable to collect existing information and to consider areas of research.

This 1989 book is about chaos, fractals and complex dynamics, and is addressed to all people who have some familiarity with computers and enjoy using them. The mathematics has been kept simple, with few formulae, yet the reader is introduced to and can learn about an area of current scientific research which was scarcely possible before the availability of computers. The introduction is achieved through the extensive use of computer graphics. The book is divided into two main parts: in the first the most interesting problems are described, with, in each case, a solution in the form of a computer program. A large number of exercises enable the reader to undertake his or her own experimental work. In the second part, example programs are given for specific machines and operating systems; details refer to MS-DOC and Turbo-Pascal, UNIX 4.2 BSD with Berkley Pascal and C. Other implementations of the graphics routines are given for Apple Macintosh, Apple IIE and IIGS and Atari ST.

This 1989 book is about chaos, fractals and complex dynamics, and is addressed to all people who have some familiarity with computers and enjoy using them. The mathematics has been kept simple, with few formulae, yet the reader is introduced to and can learn about an area of current scientific research which was scarcely possible before the availability of computers. The introduction is achieved through the extensive use of computer graphics. The book is divided into two main parts: in the first the most interesting problems are described, with, in each case, a solution in the form of a computer program. A large number of exercises enable the reader to undertake his or her own experimental work. In the second part, example programs are given for specific machines and operating systems; details refer to MS-DOC and Turbo-Pascal, UNIX 4.2 BSD with Berkley Pascal and C. Other implementations of the graphics routines are given for Apple Macintosh, Apple IIE and IIGS and Atari ST.

Law has often been seen as a relatively autonomous domain, one in which a professional elite sharply control the impact of broader social relations and cultural concepts. By contrast this study asserts that the analysis of legal systems, like the analysis of social systems generally, requires an understanding of the concepts and relationships encountered in everyday social life. Using as its substantive base the Islamic law courts of Morocco, the study explores the cultural basis of judicial discretion. From the proposition that in Arabic culture relationships are subject to considerable negotiation the idea is developed that the shaping of facts in a court of law, the use of local experts, and the organization of the judicial structure all contribute to the reliance on local concepts and personnel to inform the range of judicial discretion. By drawing comparisons with the exercise of judicial discretion in America the study demonstrates that cultural concepts deeply inform the evaluat

For the rural societies of Germany the early sixteenth century was a time of massive upheavals. In this probing study of village life, based upon rich manuscript sources from the old County of Hohenlohe, Thomas Robisheaux seeks to understand how petty German princes, Lutheran pastors, and villagers struggled to create order out of their confusing world. The Hohenlohe region experienced all of the turmoil associated with the sixteenth century, including a peasant near-rising in 1600, the brutal effects of the wage-price scissors, chronic shortages of land, famines, impoverishment, and the destructive cycles of war. By using concepts borrowed from anthropology, Professor Robisheaux looks for the way social hierarchy and discipline countered the disruptive changes of the age. The years between 1550 and 1620 saw new sources of stability and order created in the family; through systematized customs of inheritance; through market relationships; and in the practice of state power within the v

This is the first full treatment of Harley Granville Barker's active work in the theatre. It sheds new light on the actor, director, manager, playwright and critic who was one of the most fascinating and versatile men of the twentieth-century stage, and provides vivid accounts of the crucial productions of the time. Granville Barker was the chief force in establishing a place in Edwardian London for the 'New Drama' of Shaw and the European playwrights, and he also became known for his revolutionary productions of Shakespeare and Euripides. By 1915 he was generally regarded as the most important theatre artist in England. Using original documents and contemporary press reports, Dennis Kennedy recreates the excitement of Granville Barker's accomplishment in the context of an era that proved a turning-point for the arts in general. The book is supported by more than forty photographs from his theatre productions, most of them published here for the first time since the Edwardian years.

This book is based on a substantial collection of video recordings of everyday medical consultations in the UK, and offers a micro-analysis of the visual and vocal aspects of the interaction between doctors and patients. Using actual examples, accompanied by numerous illustrations, Christian Heath explores the moment-by-moment coordination of body movement and speech by and between doctor and patient. He discusses various aspects of medical examination, leave-taking, and the ways in which the participants sustain each other's attention. He also raises certain practical issues of medical work, such as the use of records and computers during the consultation, and the impact of 'bureaucratic' demands on the flow of information between doctor and patient. The book reveals the delicacy and precision which enter into the articulation and synchrony of visual behaviour and speech, and throws light on the systematics - the social organization - underlying the seeming minutiae of everyday life.

The word holor is a term coined by the authors to describe a mathematical entity that is made up of one or more independent quantities, and includes complex numbers, scalars, vectors, matrices, tensors, quaternions, and other hypernumbers. Holors, thus defined, have been known for centuries but each has been developed more or less independently, accompanied by separate nomenclature and theory. This book demonstrates how these complicated subjects can be made simple by using a single notation that applies to all holors, both tensor and nontensor. The authors consider all possible types of holors and develop holor algebra and holor calculus in the most general sense. Thus the reader will learn to develop a new holor that fits the application, rather than forcing an application onto a holor representation that is known but that does not perfectly describe the application. The discussion includes nontensors having no transformation and holors that transform in more complicated ways than al

Randall Collins convincingly argues that much of Max Weber's work has been misunderstood, and that many of his most striking and sophisticated theories have been overlooked. By analysing hitherto little known aspects of Weber's writings, Professor Collins is able both to offer a new interpretation of Weberian sociology and to show how the more fruitful lines of the Weberian approach can be projected to an analysis of current world issues. Professor Collins begins with Weber's theory of the rise of capitalism, examining it in the light of Weber's later writings on the subject and extending the Weberian line of reasoning to suggest a 'Weberian revolution' in both medieval Europe and China. He also offers a new interpretation of Weber's theory of politics, showing it to be a 'world-system' model; and he expands this into a theory of geopolitics, using as a particular illustration the prediction of the future decline of Russian world power. Another 'buried treasure' in the corpus is Weber'

This is a textbook designed for senior undergraduate courses in monetary economics, advanced macroeconomics, or macroeconomic policy. Students will feel comfortable with this material if they have completed an intermediate course in macroeconomics, relying on one of the more demanding texts in this field. The prime focus of the book is on the role of money in the macroeconomy and on the place of monetary policy as an instrument for controlling inflation and unemployment. There are only three important macrovariables that are features: the rate of inflation, the interest rate, and output or income. Behavioural relationships in the goods, money, and labor markets determine these variables, using only the now common IS-LM-AS model. The model is not ideological, but opposing views of the efficiacy of stabilization policy are allowed to confront each other. There is a great deal of emphasis on relating the theoretical propositions to recent Canadian and U.S. macroeconomic performance. To ex

In this comprehensive study of the early development of the Soviet propaganda system, Peter Kenez describes how the Bolshevik Party went about reaching the Russian people. Throughout this book, Kenez is more concerned with the experience of the Soviet people than with high-level politics. The book is both a major contribution to our understanding of the genius of the Soviet state, and of the nature of propaganda in the modern world.

This book aims to introduce the work of Hellenistic Jewish writers of the period 200 BC to AD 200. Four in particular are studied. The authors of the Letter of Aristeas and the Sibylline Oracles came from second-century BC Egypt. Eupolemus wrote probably in Jerusalem at the same time. Josephus, a priest from Judaea, wrote in Rome in the late first century AD. Using Greek, not Hebrew or Aramaic, and conscious of the position of Jews in the Graeco-Roman world, they wished to demonstrate that their cultural and religious heritage stood comparison with the Graeco-Roman tradition and that Jews were neither so philosophically naive nor so politically troublesome as they were often supposed to be. An opening chapter describing the position of Jews in the Hellenistic world is followed by selected passages, all newly translated, with introductory essays and commentary. The collection makes available to students much material hitherto not easily accessible.

The four private speeches contained in this collection were functional artefacts whose object was to persuade a jury numbered in hundreds by manipulating both the facts of the case and the prejudices, beliefs and attitudes of the Athenian man-in-the-street. It is as vehicles of persuasion that Dr Carey and Dr Reid seek primarily to treat the speeches, using their commentary to shed light on how well the speeches perform their function. The speeches have also been chosen for their value as documents of Athenian law, commerce and private life. The commentary explains as far as possible any obscurities in these fields and also deals with matters of linguistic interest. While intended mainly for undergraduates and students in the upper forms of schools, the book will be of interest to all classical scholars. The introduction, which provides a brief survey of the Athenian legal system and the trade of the speechwriter, requires no knowledge of Greek and should interest students of classical

This third volume of Short Reports from the International Council of Scientific Unions comprises the proceedings of the conference on bioenergetics held at Hannover in September 1984. The reports are divided into two sections. Those in the first section come from the symposia and colloquia lectures and are grouped under ten topics in microbial bioenergetics and the relation between protein structure and function. Those in the second section come from the poster sessions, covering a further ten topics ranging from electron transport and proton motive forces to metabolic regulation and energy transducing membrane components. The format of the short report makes it possible to present a great deal of information in compact and easily accessible form, which can be followed up in greater depth using the bibliographies included in each report. The comprehensiveness and convenience of this book makes it most useful to researchers interested in historical developments across the range of bioen

This new edition of Ahmed and Spreadbury's excellent textbook Electronics for Engineers provides, like the first edition, an introduction to electronic circuits covering the early part of degree level courses in electronics and electrical engineering. The text of the first edition has been entensively revised and supplemented to bring it up to date; two entirely new chapters have been added on the subject of digital electronics. A first chapter on the general principles of signal handling in electronic circuits is followed by descriptions of amplifiers using field-effect and bipolar transistors and integrated circuit op-amps, written from the point of view of the engineering student building up a system. Subsequent chapters discuss the principles of applying negative and positive feedback in amplifiers, leading the reader to the final two chapters covering digital circuits and their applications. All chapters conclude with a solved problem followed by a number of practice questions fro

This paperback edition consists of the first three parts of Allen and Kenen's major book, Asset Markets, Exchange Rates, and Economic Integration. These three parts stand alone, as the authors intended and as reviewers have commented. In parts four and five of that volume they extend their model to two countries trading with the outside world and analyze questions of economic integration. The authors synthesize and extend recent developments in international monetary theory using a general model of an open economy that trades goods and assets with the outside world. The model embodies the asset market or portfolio approach to analyzing balance-of-payments adjustment. Exchange rates are determined in the short run by conditions in the asset markets and in the long run by conditions in the goods markets. The goods markets include an export good, and import good, and a nontradeable good. Allen and Kenen show that different assumptions about the substitutability between goods or between as

In this book Dr Walker brings together Dr William Jaffé's essays on the important and interesting work of Léon Walras, the founder of general equilibrium analysis. The essays were selected on the basis of their importance to the Walrasian literature, in that they provide information on Walras's intellectual biography with which we would otherwise be unfamiliar or they make a contribution to the interpretation and analysis of his ideas. One of Jaffé's main interests was to explain the genesis of Walras's work, which he did by examining Walras's biography. Using a wide variety of sources, Jaffé pieced together an account of these matters in the belief that biography is essential for understanding the origins and development of a scientist's work. Jaffé corrected what he regarded as errors of interpretation of Walras by other writers, evaluated Walras's contributions, and indicated his significance for modern economics. The essays are informative, illuminating, and - as a result of Jaffé'

This volume presents Professor Cohen's original interpretation of the revolution that marked the beginnings of modern science and set Newtonian science as the model for the highest level of achievement in other branches of science. It shows that Newton developed a special kind of relation between abstract mathematical constructs and the physical systems that we observe in the world around us by means of experiment and critical observation. The heart of the radical Newtonian style is the construction on the mind of a mathematical system that has some features in common with the physical world; this system s then modified when the deductions and conclusions drawn from it are tested against the physical universe. Using this system Newton was able to make his revolutionary innovations in celestial mechanics and, ultimately, create a new physics of central forces and the law of universal gravitation. Building on his analysis of Newton's methodology, Professor Cohen explores the fine structu

Professor McKenzie proposes and formulates a method composed of operational procedures designed to facilitate the evaluation of economic projects and policies. This method is discussed fully, illustrated by simple examples, and compared with alternative procedures. An outline of a computer program that enables readers to undertake their own calculations is included. In order to present the approach clearly, the author provides an exposition of the fundamental ideas and the main alternative approaches to the problem. These rely on various forms of index numbers and consumer surplus. However, as is well known, such measures are not capable of correctly ordering the various alternatives under consideration, except under highly unrealist assumptions. In this book the author suggests the abandonment of this traditional approach based on the concept of 'willingness-to-pay' or the conpensating variation. Instead, the measure that Samuelson has called the 'money-metric' should become the corne

In this book, Professor Peggy Sanday provides a ground-breaking examination of power and dominance in male-female relationships. How does the culturally approved interaction between the sexes originate? Why are women viewed as a necessary part of political, economic, and religious affairs in some societies but not in others? Why do some societies clothe sacred symbols of creative power in the guise of one sex and not of the other? Professor Sanday offers solutions to these cultural puzzles by using cross-cultural research on over 150 tribal societies. She systematically establishes the full range of variation in male and female power roles and then suggests a theoretical framework for explaining this variation. Rejecting the argument of universal female subordination, Professor Sanday argues that male dominance is not inherent in human relations but is a solution to various kinds of cultural strain. Those who are thought to embody, be in touch with, or control the creative forces of na

This book traces the central developments in American literature between and 1919. It opens with an account of the consolidation of realism as the dominant standard of critical value and brings the reader forward to the moment, at the end of World War I, when American writers began to take a recognized place among the masters of literary modernism. The ascendancy of the novel as the principal genre of the realists is presented against a broader cultural and historical background. Professor Berthoff reviews and evaluates American fiction from the time when Howells, Twain, and Henry James were still under attack by old-school idealizers, to the emergence of a new critical and testamentary realism with Crane, Dreiser, and Gertrude Stein. He shows how the writers under discussion reacted to the work of their predecessors and contemporaries, to foreign literary currents, innovations in journalism, contemporary events, and to changing mores. Using specific examples and direct quotations, Pro

This 1973 book was the first comprehensive collection of techniques for culturing algae. Twenty-eight clearly written chapters by 30 outstanding algologists utilize the work of more than 600 investigators. On its initial publication, the book became a standard reference in the field.

On 9 thermidor Year 2, Robespierre fell; on18 brumaire Year 8, a coup d'état brought Bonaparte to power. This book demonstrates that the interval between these two momentous events was also of crucial importance. Using the findings of recent research, it presents a balanced appraisal of the thermidorean and directorial regimes to the English student. For Jacobin sympathizers thermidor and the Directory represented the betrayal of the revolutionary idea; for Bonapartist propagandists it represented chaos and corruption, and the darker the Directory could be painted, the more Bonaparte's reputation would be flattered. Dr Lyons attempts to dispose of these myths. He stresses the Directory's successes as well as its failures, and emphasizes elements of continuity which link it both with the Jacobin regime and with the Consulate. The regime inherited a heavy burden of war, inflation and food shortages, yet it remained revolutionary in its Republicanism, its anticlericalism, and its desire t

Exploiting powerful techniques from physics and mathematics, this book studies animal movement in ecology, with a focus on epidemic spread. Pulmonary syndrome is not only feared in epidemics of recent times, such as COVID-19, but is also characteristic of epidemics studied earlier such as Hantavirus. The Hantavirus is one of the book's central topics. Correlations between epidemic outbreaks and precipitation events like El Niño are analyzed and spatial reservoirs of infection in off-period of the epidemic, known as refugia, are studied. Predicted traveling waves of infection are successfully compared to field observations. Territoriality in scent-marking animals is presented, with parallels drawn with the theory of melting. The flocking and herding of birds and mammals are described in terms of collective excitations. For scientists interested in movement ecology and epidemic spread, this book provides effective solutions to long-standing problems.

The 1771 sixth edition of the abridged version of an influential horticultural text, ranging widely from agriculture to winemaking.

First published in 1793, this concise monograph is a valuable early manual for the computation of cometary movement.

This two-volume (1880-6) teaching aid for the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos greatly influenced the education of Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920).

After an outline of the continental background of the British neolithic cultures the book contains two subdivisions. Professor Piggott first describes those cultures that he classes as primary: that is those bought to Britain by colonists who bought a knowledge of agriculture. He then shows how there arose derivative secondary neolithic cultures showing a resurgence of earlier characteristics. Finally all the British neolithic cultures are considered in relation to one another and to their continental setting, and an outline of relative and absolute chronology is made.

This collection of papers by leading researchers in their respective fields contains contributions showing the use of the maximum entropy method in many of the fields in which it finds application. In the physical, mathematical and biological sciences it is often necessary to make inferences based on insufficient data. The problem of choosing one among the many possible conclusions or models which are compatible with the data may be resolved in a variety of ways. A particularly appealing method is to choose the solution which maximizes entropy in the sense that the conclusion or model honours the observed data but implies no further assumptions not warranted by the data. The maximum entropy principle has been growing in importance and acceptance in many fields, perhaps most notably statistical physics, astronomy, geophysics, signal processing, image analysis and physical chemistry. The papers included in this volume touch on most of the current areas of research activity and applicatio

Management Research Methods is a comprehensive guide to the design and conduct of research in management-related disciplines such as organisational behaviour, human resource management, industrial rel

The central theme of this book is the changing spatial pattern of human activities during the last 2,500 years of Europe's history.

This wide ranging but self-contained account of the spectral theory of non-self-adjoint linear operators is ideal for postgraduate students and researchers, and contains many illustrative examples and exercises. Fredholm theory, Hilbert-Schmidt and trace class operators are discussed, as are one-parameter semigroups and perturbations of their generators. Two chapters are devoted to using these tools to analyze Markov semigroups. The text also provides a thorough account of the new theory of pseudospectra, and presents the recent analysis by the author and Barry Simon of the form of the pseudospectra at the boundary of the numerical range. This was a key ingredient in the determination of properties of the zeros of certain orthogonal polynomials on the unit circle. Finally, two methods, both very recent, for obtaining bounds on the eigenvalues of non-self-adjoint Schrodinger operators are described. The text concludes with a description of the surprising spectral properties of the non-s

This is a new, thoroughly revised edition of the acclaimed Using French. It provides guidance for those who have already acquired the basics of French and wish to extend their knowledge of the languag

A new binding of the New Living Translation, using the classic Pitt Minion format, in blue calf split leather.