The Algorithmic Beauty of Sea Shells (The Virtual Laboratory) Review

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(More customer reviews)I came across this book at the Rhode Island School of Design library. As an artist I found it surprising that what I had considered to be just a beautiful pattern was actually an imprint of the pressure and movement of the waves upon the seashell. This insight was very thought provoking for me. Perhaps to biologists this is a normal and natural thing - but for an artist this kind of scientific approach with beautifully illustrated pages is a deeply moving experience. This book will definitely make you think twice about the objects that you take for granted - whether it's visually or scientifically. I strongly recommend this book for those who like intellectual challenges and who like to look at the world with fresh new eyes.

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The patterns on the shells of tropical sea snails are not only compellingly beautiful but also tell a tale of biological development. The decorative patterns are records of their own genesis, which follows laws like those of dune formation or the spread of a flu epidemic. Hans Meinhardt has analyzed the dynamical processes that form these patterns and retraced them faithfully in computer simulations. His book is exciting not only for the astonishing scientific knowledge it reveals but also for its fascinating pictures. An accompanying CD-ROM with the corresponding algorithms offers wide scope to those who wish to try their hand at simulating and varying the patterns.

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The Algorithmic Beauty of Seaweeds, Sponges and Corals (The Virtual Laboratory) Review

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(More customer reviews)I really like things in the ocean. They are thinking about drilling in the Artic Ocean. Then they are fighting about who should own the Artic Circle.Its really stupid. I wish it would stop.

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This book gives a state-of-the-art overview of modeling growth and form of marine sessile organisms - such as stromatolites, algae, and metazoans including stony corals, hydrocorals, octocorals, and sponges -, using large-scale computing techniques, scientific visualization, methods for analyzing 2D and 3D forms, and particle-based modeling techniques. It originates from the workshop on Modeling Growth and Form of Marine Sessile Organisms, held at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, Santa Barbara, California, August 1999. Experts from various disciplines including developmental biology, ecology, computer science, physics and mathematics, who have research interests in modeling the development of these organisms have been invited to contribute. The book describes all the steps required to develop and experimentally validate morphological models including collecting biological information and methods for specifying and comparing forms. Examples are given of how models are currently being applied to simulate growth and form of marine sessile organisms. Potential applications of growth models and morphological analyses in modern and paleo-bio-monitoring, the detection of environmental change, and the conservation and restoration of marine ecosystems and aquaculture are addressed. The combination of simulation models with laboratory and field experiments provides a powerful tool to obtain insights on how the growth forms of marine organisms emerge from physical, genetic and environmental influences.

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Modelling and Quantitative Methods in Fisheries, Second Edition Review

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(More customer reviews)In my opinion, Malcolm Haddon has managed a "tour de force" with this book. He not only covered most of the modern methods of quantitative analysis and modelling in fisheries science but he did so in a clear and relatively simple language. His book is approachable to all biologists with a basic understanding of mathematics and statistics. Yet, he managed to cover both the theoretical underpinnings of the methods and the practical aspects of their use (options, pitfalls ... etc.). In addition, the book gives MS Excel examples of the methods which should allow those of us who are not programmers to fully appreciate the methods by using them interactively. The Excel spreadsheets are also available for download on two web sites.

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With numerous real-world examples, Modelling and Quantitative Methods in Fisheries, Second Edition provides an introduction to the analytical methods used by fisheries' scientists and ecologists. By following the examples using Excel, readers see the nuts and bolts of how the methods work and better understand the underlying principles. Excel workbooks are available for download from CRC Press Online.In this second edition, the author has revised all chapters and improved a number of the examples. This edition also includes two entirely new chapters:Characterization of Uncertainty covers asymptotic errors and likelihood profiles and develops a generalized Gibbs sampler to run a Markov chain Monte Carlo analysis that can be used to generate Bayesian posteriorsSized-Based Models implements a fully functional size-based stock assessment model using abalone as an exampleThis book continues to cover a broad range of topics related to quantitative methods and modelling. It offers a solid foundation in the skills required for the quantitative study of marine populations. Explaining important and relatively complex ideas and methods in a clear manner, the author presents full, step-by-step derivations of equations as much as possible to enable a thorough understanding of the models and methods.

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The Frailty Model (Statistics for Biology and Health) Review

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(More customer reviews)The authors are academics who have done serious research in survival analysis and are very familiar with frailty models. The topic comes up when time to event data for one event is correlated with the time to event data for another or other events. This topic is sometimes referred to a subject in multivariate survival analysis or the analysis of clustered survival data.
As a professional biostatistician with a keen interest in survival models I have attended professional meetings in recent years and heard the term Frailty Model mentioned but I didn't know what it was. There of course is the natural connotation of weakness as in a feeble or frail person. But the actual formal dtatisticial meaning was a mystery. Other books that I am very familar with deal in part with frailty models but this is to my knowledge the first serious text dedicated to this topic. It also covers related methods to accomplish the same goal such as copulas (another term common in recent books and literature but one I was not familiar with either). For example Philip Hougaard wrote the first advanced text on multivariate survival models and covers parametric forms of frailty models. Klein and Moeschberger wrote a generaal survival analysis book that includes a chapter on semi-parameric fraility models. It showa how the EM algorithm is used to estimate parameters of the models. Ibrahim and colleague wrote a book on Bayesian methods in survival analysis and cover the Bayesian approach to both semi-parametric and parametric fraility models. Therneau and Grambsch wrote a recent book on the Cox proportional hazard model and its extensions. It included information on semi-parametric frailty models using the penalized partial likelihood approach to estimation.
This book is a well-written introduction to fraility models that includes all these methods provides real world examples and good explanations on how to interpret the results. The examples are illustrated using the freeware language R. This book could serve as either an undergraduate or graduate text in statistical methods and is a great reference for biostatisticians.

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Readers will find in the pages of this book a treatment of the statistical analysis of clustered survival data. Such data are encountered in many scientific disciplines including human and veterinary medicine, biology, epidemiology, public health and demography. A typical example is the time to death in cancer patients, with patients clustered in hospitals. Frailty models provide a powerful tool to analyze clustered survival data. In this book different methods based on the frailty model are described and it is demonstrated how they can be used to analyze clustered survival data. All programs used for these examples are available on the Springer website.

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Modeling and Role-Modeling: A Theory and Paradigm for Nurses Review

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(More customer reviews)Text books used to be, well, boring. This book has all the features of a well-planned historical novel, pictures and all. If a student, or average interested reader, does't learn biology after reading this book, then they should throw away their brain and apply for a new one.---JFR

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Modeling and Role-Modeling is a holistic nursing theory that helps healthcare providers step into the world of their clients, understand them as people with mind-body-spirit interactions, and plan care to facilitate their well-being. Based on Milton Erickson's concepts of Modeling and Role-modeling.

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Methods in Neuronal Modeling - 2nd Edition: From Ions to Networks (Computational Neuroscience) Review

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(More customer reviews)Great book for the theorist and experimentalist! I used the section on Epilepsy and the Neural Code for a grant I wrote. This book is a great reference and time spent reading it is very well rewarded. I bought the 1st & 2nd editions which are very different. Both editions are worth buying if one is involved with computer modeling, computation, mathematics, and plain old fashion recording neurophysiology.

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Much research focuses on the question of how information is processed innervous systems, from the level of individual ionic channels to large-scale neuronalnetworks, and from "simple" animals such as sea slugs and flies to cats andprimates. New interdisciplinary methodologies combine a bottom-up experimentalmethodology with the more top-down-driven computational and modeling approach. Thisbook serves as a handbook of computational methods and techniques for modeling thefunctional properties of single and groups of nerve cells.The contributors highlightseveral key trends: (1) the tightening link between analytical/numerical models andthe associated experimental data, (2) the broadening of modeling methods, at boththe subcellular level and the level of large neuronal networks that incorporate realbiophysical properties of neurons as well as the statistical properties of spiketrains, and (3) the organization of the data gained by physical emulation of thenervous system components through the use of very large scale circuit integration(VLSI) technology.The field of neuroscience has grown dramatically since the firstedition of this book was published nine years ago. Half of the chapters of thesecond edition are completely new; the remaining ones have all been thoroughlyrevised. Many chapters provide an opportunity for interactive tutorials andsimulation programs. They can be accessed via Christof Koch's Website.Contributors :Larry F. Abbott, Paul R. Adams, Hagai Agmon-Snir, James M. Bower, Robert E. Burke,Erik de Schutter, Alain Destexhe, Rodney Douglas, Bard Ermentrout, FabrizioGabbiani, David Hansel, Michael Hines, Christof Koch, Misha Mahowald, Zachary F.Mainen, Eve Marder, Michael V. Mascagni, Alexander D. Protopapas, Wilfrid Rall, JohnRinzel, Idan Segev, Terrence J. Sejnowski, Shihab Shamma, Arthur S. Sherman, PaulSmolen, Haim Sompolinsky, Michael Vanier, Walter M. Yamada.

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Modeling Biological Systems:: Principles and Applications Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is a complete dissapointment.
It does not offer any real scientific physical models which then can be transformed in an algorithm and being simulated but is is merely a conglomerate of several statistical procedures commonly used in Biology for interpreting data (maybe copied by the author and collected from other books, as nothing that he presents is new!). This book does not offer any scientific, fundamental insight in how to really model and simulate properly complex biological systems, it is also written in a very unscientific, popular style. The mathematical level corresponds to High-School and as the author says in the preface: "The process of modeling biological systems is certainly not a science, but neither is it as unconstrained as the creation of a work of pure art that is evaluated solely on its esthetic content". I think that nonsense speaks for itself. This author should rather write novels instead of cobbling something together that gets the label "scientific" on the cover.
The book is not trash, the author does have collected some of the simplest "models" there are to describe collections of data in statistical terms, but this has NOTHING to do with proper scientific numerical and mathematical modeling and even less with scientific Computing in the field of biological complex systems, e.g. how to simulate membranes, proteins using Quantum Chemistry or Molecular dynamics techniques.
All in all I judge this book as a complete waste of money and as completely superfluous.

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This is the second edition of a textbook currently published by Springer for a course in mathematical modeling and computer simulation for biologists at the advanced undergraduate and introductory graduate level. The audience for this edition is similar to that of the previous one: advanced level courses in computational biology, as well as researchers retooling themselves. This new edition includes a CD-ROM with real examples of models as teaching tools.

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Mathematics in Nature: Modeling Patterns in the Natural World Review

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(More customer reviews)For those of us who admire nature and see it as a product of processes both beautiful and rational, Adam's book is the perfect bedside long-termer for anyone more than casually interested in math or the intricate patterns in nature.
This book is chock full of ponderous examples of mathematical simplicity and complexity in nature, and reading it I was constantly reading only one topic and then putting the book down for days to think about and tinker with the question myself.
Good pictures, solid math (I prefer clean, modelistic equations to numerical approximations anyday), and a charming, conversational writing style make this book highly readable and highly inspiring in the way it makes you reexamine your perception of nature as unintegrated or inelegant. The very repetition of mathematical themes throughout nature - such as the omnipresent Golden Ration - proves otherwise.
For me, this is staying on my "constantly referenced" shelf.

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