Sharon N. Covington, Linda Hammer Burns, "Infertility Counseling: A Comprehensive Handbook for Clinicians"

English | 2006-10-16 | ISBN: 052185363X | 680 pages | PDF | 7.7 mb
Infertility Counseling: A Comprehensive Handbook for Clinicians, second edition, is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary textbook for all health professionals providing care for individuals facing reproductive health issues. It is the most thorough and extensive book currently available for clinicians in the field of infertility counseling, providing an exhaustive and comprehensive review of topics. It addresses both the medical and psychological aspects of infertility, reviewing assessment approaches, treatment strategies, medical counseling issues, third-party reproduction, alternative family building and post infertility counseling issues. Each chapter follows the same format: introduction, historical overview, literature review, theoretical framework, identification of clinical issues, suggestions for therapeutic interventions, and future implication. This edition also includes extensive appendixes of clinical tools useful to the clinician, including an Internet database of resources and an extensive glossary of terminology.

A Practical Handbook of Speech Coders (Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications) by Randy Goldberg (Repost)

Publisher: CRC Press; 1 edition (April 21, 2000) | ISBN: 0849385253 | Pages: 256 | PDF | 4.52 MB
The demand for digital speech coding algorithms grows every day, fueled by applications such as streaming speech over the Internet, Internet telephone, digital cellular telephony, wireless teleconferencing, and various multimedia applications. Until now, most of the books available on audio coding have been collections of individually authored papers. Others have discussed the fundamental coders, but neglected many of the innovations currently in use. Unlike these books, A Practical Handbook of Speech Coders offers in-depth treatment of the basics of speech coding plus the innovations to the basic methods that make the coders useful and efficient.The authors designed this work for engineers, scientists, and manager who need to understand the emerging speech coding techniques and telecommunication standards. However, it will prove useful to people at all levels of speech coder experience:oIf you want to simply the code for an existing algorithm, this book helps you evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of all publicly available codes and choose the right one, then points you to the Internet location where the code is available for . oFor experts who want to improve on existing coders, this book provides the parameters of current coders and the techniques to improve upon them. You can an existing algorithm or code it using the algorithmic descriptions in the book, make your innovations, and then test the code with the procedures given.oIf you want to become an expert and have some basic knowledge of digital signal processing, you can learn the innovative steps taken by the inventor of each coder, explore the rigorous research techniques needed to develop your own coder, and become proficient in existing vocoder technology.

"Infinity: Beyond the Beyond the Beyond"
Lillian R. Lieber, Hugh Gray Lieber, Barry Mazur

English | 2007-11-01 | ISBN: 1589880366 | 370 pages | DJVU | 2 mb
“Another excellent book for the lay reader of mathematics. In explaining [infinity], the author introduces the reader to a good many other mathematical terms and concepts that seem unintelligible in a formal text but are much less formidable when presented in the author’s individual and very readable style.” - Library Journal
“The interpolations tying mathematics into human life and thought are brilliantly clear.” - Booklist
“Mrs. Lieber, in this text illustrated by her husband, Hugh Gray Lieber, has tackled the formidable task of explaining infinity in simple terms, in short line, short sentence technique popularized by her in The Education of T.C. MITS.” - Chicago Sunday Tribune
Infinity, another delightful mathematics book from the creators of The Education of T.C. MITS, offers an entertaining, yet thorough, explanation of the concept of, yes, infinity. Accessible to non-mathematicians, this book also cleverly connects mathematical reasoning to larger issues in society. The new foreword by Harvard mathematics professor Barry Mazur is a tribute to the Liebers’ influence on generations of mathematicians.

Douglas Walton, "Informal Logic: A Pragmatic Approach"

English | 2008-06-02 | ISBN: 0521886171 | 367 pages | PDF | 1.8 mb
Informal Logic is an introductory guidebook to the basic principles of constructing sound arguments and criticizing bad ones. Non-technical in approach, it is based on 186 examples, which Douglas Walton, a leading authority in the field of informal logic, discusses and evaluates in clear, illustrative detail. Walton explains how errors, fallacies, and other key failures of argument occur. He shows how correct uses of argument are based on sound strategies for reasoned persuasion and critical responses. Among the many subjects covered are: forms of valid argument, defeasible arguments, relevance, appeals to emotion, personal attack, straw man argument, jumping to a conclusion, uses and abuses of expert opinion, problems in drawing conclusions from polls and statistics, loaded terms, equivocation, arguments from analogy, and techniques of posing, replying to, and criticizing questions. This new edition takes into account many new developments in the field of argumentation study that have occurred since 1989, many created by the author. Drawing on these developments, Walton includes and analyzes 36 new topical examples and also brings in recent work on argumentation schemes. Ideally suited for use in courses in informal logic and introduction to philosophy, this book will also be valuable to students of pragmatics, rhetoric, and speech communication.

Vagelis Hristidis, "Information Discovery on Electronic Health Records (Chapman & Hall/CRC Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Series)"

English | 2009-12-10 | ISBN: 1420090380 | 334 pages | PDF | 6.3 mb
Exploiting the rich information found in electronic health records (EHRs) can facilitate better medical research and improve the quality of medical practice. Until now, a trivial amount of research has been published on the challenges of leveraging this information. Addressing these challenges, Information Discovery on Electronic Health Records explores the technology to unleash the data stored in EHRs.
Assembling a truly interdisciplinary team of experts, the book tackles medical privacy concerns, the lack of standardization for the representation of EHRs, missing or incorrect values, and the availability of multiple rich health ontologies. It looks at how to search the EHR collection given a user query and return relevant fragments from the EHRs. It also explains how to mine the EHR collection to extract interesting patterns, group entities to various classes, or decide whether an EHR satisfies a given property. Most of the book focuses on textual or numeric data of EHRs, where more searching and mining progress has occurred. A chapter on the processing of medical images is also included.
Maintaining a uniform style across chapters and minimizing technical jargon, this book presents the various ways to extract useful knowledge from EHRs. It skillfully discusses how EHR data can be effectively searched and mined.

Military and Civilian Pyrotechnics by Dr. Herbert Ellern (Repost)

Publisher: Chemical Publishing; First Edition (1968) | ASIN: B0000EG3MA | Pages: 476 | PDF | 19.91 MB
Herbert Ellern wrote this classic work in pyrotechnics for an academic audience. The coverage of fireworks per se is scanty. However, for those who want an introduction to the basic science behind a wide range of pyrotechnic processes, this book is so far without equal. Dr. Ellern provides many formulations used in commercial and military pyrotechnics at the time of writing the book. This work is a must have for any serious collection in pyrotechnics, but its focus does lie outside of the subject area of fireworks as most people understand fireworks.

Gerry T. M. Altmann, "The Ascent of Babel: An Exploration of Language, Mind, and Understanding"

O..d U..y (5-1999) | PDF | 272 pages | ISBN: 0198523777 | 1.9Mb
The brain holds some 10 billion neurons, an truly amazing number. But taken one at a time, there is nothing amazing about a nerve cell. If you stimulate one, it will stimulate other neurons to which it is connected. And that is all that a neuron does.
And yet arising from this great mass of simple cells is every one of our mental faculties, including perhaps the most marvelous of all, our use of language. How do neurons take tiny vibrations on the ear drum and somehow capture meanings about the world? How does the brain understand written words and how does it form a reply? In The Ascent of Babel, psycholinguist Gerry Altmann offers a state-of-the-art look at what we now know about the miracle of language.
Here is a wide ranging, engaging tour of how we use language. Altmann begins even before we are born, revealing that the fetus in the last trimester is already listening to the language of its parents and that, within days of birth, it can distinguish its parents' language from other languages. He discusses the incredible progress the child makes in language recognition (expanding from 100 words at age one to some 60,000 words by adulthood) and he looks at the neural activity involved in language perception, revealing for instance that the pattern of neural activity evoked by a sentence like "the bald man ate a big fish" is probably quite similar to that evoked by actually seeing a bald man eat a big fish. There is an illuminating section on spoken language, highlighting some of the differences between various tongues (English has some 12,000 syllables, for example, while Japanese uses fewer than 120, which explains why Japanese words tend to have many syllables). Altmann shows how errors we make when speaking--such as malapropisms and spoonerisms (garbled utterances such as "The lord is a shoving leopard")--can tell us much about how we plan and execute a spoken sentence, and he explores what happens when the brain misfunctions, as it does in aphasia, dyslexia, and other forms of language deficit, such as Pure Word Deafness (where patients can read, write, and speak normally, but can't understand words spoken to them). Finally, in one of the most intriguing sections of the book, the author provides a fascinating account of recent experiments in artificial neural networks, describing how scientists simulate neuronal activity on a computer, and explaining why their results seem to provide an alternative to the theories of Noam Chomsky about innate structures in the brain.
The Ascent of Babel is a journey of discovery, illuminating how, through the workings of the brain, we use language to reach out and touch each other's minds. Up to date, authoritative, and engagingly written, it will be must reading for everyone curious about the mysteries of language or of the mind.

Hallucinogenic Drugs by Fountaine Christine Brown (Repost)

Publisher: Charles C Thomas Pub Ltd (June 1972) | ISBN: 0398022496 | Pages: 154 | PDF | 5.63 MB