Cry "Good for history, Cambridge and Saint George"? Essay Review of Mary Jo Nye (Ed.); The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 5. The Modern Physical and Mathematical Sciences, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)

FIRST PARAGRAPH This volume is the third thus far published of The Cambridge history of science, planned in eight parts over the last decade by Cambridge University Press. Noting the incompleteness of George Sarton’s heroic solo endeavour on a comparably magisterial scale (Sarton, 1953–1959), Cambridge general editors David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers adopted a more pragmatic multiple author approach in devising this new series. They devote the four latter volumes to that fertile wonder ‘modern science’, its modernity construed chronologically as the post-1800 era. While Volume 6 encompasses the biological and earth sciences ( Bowler & Pickstone, forthcoming), Volume 7 deals with the social sciences ( Porter & Ross, 2003), and Volume 8 examines the sciences in national and international setting ( Livingstone & Numbers, forthcoming). Lindberg and Numbers thus circumscribe the territory of Volume 5 to be the history of physics, chemistry, astronomy and mathematics in the Euro-American world. Although this might seem a fairly conventional—even conservative—subject clustering, few historians would have felt undaunted by the heterogeneity of such material, the narrowness of the brief and the long two-century period of coverage. This volume must therefore be judged with sensitivity to the difficulties of leading thirty-seven scholars in diverse specialisms to produce a coherent product, and the sheer impracticability of Sarton’s near-Shakespearean ambitions for unitary drama. Useful comparisons can thus be made with recent works that offer a multi-perspectival view over comparably broad terrain: John Krige and Dominic Pestre’s stimulating and uncomplacent Science in the twentieth century (1997), and the more radically inclusive bibliographical essays in Arne Hessenbruch (Ed.), The reader’s guide to the history of science (Hessenbruch, 2000)

Reason, causation and compatibility with the phenomena

'Reason, Causation and Compatibility with the Phenomena' strives to give answers to the philosophical problem of the interplay between realism, explanation and experience. This book is a compilation of essays that recollect significant conceptions of rival terms such as determinism and freedom, reason and appearance, power and knowledge. This title discusses the progress made in epistemology and natural philosophy, especially the steps that led from the ancient theory of atomism to the modern quantum theory, and from mathematization to analytic philosophy. Moreover, it provides possible gateways from modern deadlocks of theory either through approaches to consciousness or through historical critique of intellectual authorities. This work will be of interest to those either researching or studying in colleges and universities, especially in the departments of philosophy, history of science, philosophy of science, philosophy of physics and quantum mechanics, history of ideas and culture. Greek and Latin Literature students and instructors may also find this book to be both a fascinating and valuable point of reference

Multiangle social network recommendation algorithms and similarity network evaluation

Multiangle social network recommendation algorithms (MSN) and a new assessmentmethod, called similarity network evaluation (SNE), are both proposed. From the viewpoint of six dimensions, the MSN are classified into six algorithms, including user-based algorithmfromresource point (UBR), user-based algorithmfromtag point (UBT), resource-based algorithm fromtag point (RBT), resource-based algorithm from user point (RBU), tag-based algorithm from resource point (TBR), and tag-based algorithm from user point (TBU). Compared with the traditional recall/precision (RP) method, the SNE is more simple, effective, and visualized. The simulation results show that TBR and UBR are the best algorithms, RBU and TBU are the worst ones, and UBT and RBT are in the medium levels

Auditing scholarly journals published in Malaysia and assessing their visibility

The problem with the identification of Malaysian scholarly journals lies in the lack of a current and complete listing of journals published in Malaysia. As a result, librarians are deprived of a tool that can be used for journal selection and identification of gaps in their serials collection. This study describes the audit carried out on scholarly journals, with the objectives (a) to trace and characterized scholarly journal titles published in Malaysia, and (b) to determine their visibility in international and national indexing databases. A total of 464 titles were traced and their yearly trends, publisher and publishing characteristics, bibliometrics and indexation in national, international and subject-based indexes were described

The Last Scientific Revolution

Critically growing problems of fundamental science organisation and content are analysed with examples from physics and emerging interdisciplinary fields. Their origin is specified and new science structure (organisation and content) is proposed as a unified solution

A survey of statistical network models

Networks are ubiquitous in science and have become a focal point for discussion in everyday life. Formal statistical models for the analysis of network data have emerged as a major topic of interest in diverse areas of study, and most of these involve a form of graphical representation. Probability models on graphs date back to 1959. Along with empirical studies in social psychology and sociology from the 1960s, these early works generated an active network community and a substantial literature in the 1970s. This effort moved into the statistical literature in the late 1970s and 1980s, and the past decade has seen a burgeoning network literature in statistical physics and computer science. The growth of the World Wide Web and the emergence of online networking communities such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, and a host of more specialized professional network communities has intensified interest in the study of networks and network data. Our goal in this review is to provide the reader with an entry point to this burgeoning literature. We begin with an overview of the historical development of statistical network modeling and then we introduce a number of examples that have been studied in the network literature. Our subsequent discussion focuses on a number of prominent static and dynamic network models and their interconnections. We emphasize formal model descriptions, and pay special attention to the interpretation of parameters and their estimation. We end with a description of some open problems and challenges for machine learning and statistics.Comment: 96 pages, 14 figures, 333 reference

Determination the different categories of buyers based on the Jaynes’ information principle

Purpose: The article aims to reduce the volume of statistical data, necessary for determination the buyer’s structure. The correct clustering of clients is important for successful activity for both commercial and non-profit organizations. This issue is devoted to a large number of studies. Their main mathematical apparatus is statistical methods. Input data are results of buyer polls. Polls are labor-consuming and quite often annoying buyers. The problem of determination of structure (various categories) of buyers by the mathematical methods demanding a small amount of these polls is relevant. Design/Methodology/Approach: The approach offered in this report based on the Jaynes' information principle (principle of maximum entropy). Jaynes idea is as follows. Let us consider a system in which the conditions cannot be calculated or measured by an experiment. However, each state of the system has a certain measured implication, the average value of which is known (or can be defined), and the average result of these implications is known from the statistical data. Then the most objective are probabilities of states maximizing Shannon’s entropy under restrictions imposed by information about average implications of states. Findings: In this work the task of determination of percentage of buyers for computer shop by the average check is set and solved provided that average checks for each concrete category of buyers are known. Input data for calculation are their average checks. Determination of these values requires much less statistical data, than to directly determine relative number of buyers of various categories. Practical Implications: The results are of particular interest to marketing experts. Originality/Value: The article deals with practical situation when initially there are only three different groups of customers. For this case, the problem of maximizing entropy under given constraints reduced to the problem of finding a solution to a system of three equations, of which only one is nonlinear. This is a completely new result.peer-reviewe