Bookbeat: January 2000
A
Cognitive-Functional Grammar of Mandarin Chinese
by Chauncey
C. Chu, African and Asian
Languages and Literatures,
and Tsung-Jen
Chi
(Crane Publishing, 2000)
The product of the author's 1998-99 sabbatical leave in Taiwan, A Cognitive-Functional Grammar of Mandarin Chinese incorporates the current functional theory of Western linguistics in the analysis of the Chinese language while endeavoring to highlight its unique characteristics.
—Publisher
Solar System Dynamics
C.D. Murray and Stan Dermott, Astronomy
(Cambridge University Press, 2000)
Available
through Amazon
Clearly written and well illustrated, Solar System Dynamics provides students with a complete introduction to understanding the intricate and often beautiful resonant structure of the Solar System. Step-by-step, it show how a basic knowledge of the two-and three- body problems and perturbation theory can be combined to understand features as diverse as the tidal heating of Jupiter's moon Io, the unusual rotation of Saturn's moon Hyperion, the origin of the Kirkwood gaps in the asteroid belt, the radial structure of Saturn's A ring, and the long-term stability of the Solar System. Problems at the end of each chapter and a free Internet Mathematica(R) software packages (that includes animations and computational tools) are provided to help students to test and develop their understanding.
—Publisher
Excerpt
The Newtonian universe was a deterministic system. The Voyager missions increased our knowledge of the outer solar system by several orders of magnitude, and yet they would not have been possible without knowledge of Newton's laws and their consequences. However, advances in mathematics and computer technology have now revealed that, even though our system is deterministic, it is not necessarily predictable. The study of nonlinear dynamics has revealed a solar system even more intricately structured than Newton could have imagined.
Vector Integration and Stochastic Integration in Banach
Spaces
Nicolae Dinculeanu, Mathematics
(Wiley-Interscience, 2000)
Available through Wiley Interscience
The theory of stochastic integration has become an intensely studied topic in recent years, owing to its extraordinarily successful application to financial mathematics, stochastic differential equations, and more. This book features a new measure theoretic approach to stochastic integration, opening up the field for researches in measure and integration theory, functional analysis, probability theory, and stochastic processes.
World-famous expert on vector and stochastic integration in Banach spaces Nicolae Dinculeanu compiles and consolidates information form disparate journal articles—including his own results—presenting a comprehensive, up-to-date treatment of the theory in two major parts. He first develops a general integration theory, discussing vector integration with respect to measures with finite semivariation, then applies the theory to stochastic integration in Banach spaces.
—Publisher
The End of Books—Or Books Without End? Reading Interactive Narratives
Jane
Yellowlees Douglas, Dial Center for Written and Oral Communication
(University of Michigan Press, 2000)
Available
through Amazon
Of all developments surrounding hypermedia, none has been as hotly or frequently debated as the conjunction of fiction and digital technology. In this book, J. Yellowlees Douglas considers the implications of this union. She looks at the new light that interactive narratives may shed on theories of reading and interpretation and the possibilities for hypertext novels, World Wide Web-based short stories, and cinematic, interactive narratives on CD-ROM. She confronts questions that are at the center of the current debate: Does an interactive story demand too much from readers? Does the concept of readerly choice destroy the author's vision? Does interactivity turn reading fiction from "play" into "work"—too much work? Will hypertext fiction overtake the novel as a form of art or entertainment? And what might future interactive books look like?
—Publisher
Excerpt
By examining in detail both the similarities and differences between interactive and print stories, we can begin to understand the satisfactions we derive from being drawn into fictional worlds not of our inventing—one of the opportunities afforded us when we encounter reading, stories, plots, and characters outside a print environment so familiar to us that we are scarcely aware of print as both medium and technology. By bringing together disparate studies in the fields of psychology, narratology, artificial intelligence, and literary theory, we can begin to understand which elements of storytelling are changeable, open to further development and invention in interactive narratives, and which are changeless and immutable across media and millennia alike.
