Book Description
Artificial life, or a-life, is an interdisciplinary science focused on artificial systems that mimic the properties of living systems. In the 1990s, new media artists began appropriating and adapting the techniques of a-life science to create a-life art; Mitchell Whitelaw's Metacreation is the first detailed critical account of this new field of creative practice.
A-life art responds to the increasing technologization of living matter by creating works that seem to mutate, evolve, and respond with a life of their own. Pursuing a-life's promise of emergence, these artists produce not only artworks, but generative and creative processes: here creation becomes metacreation.
Whitelaw presents a-life art practice through four of its characteristic techniques and tendencies. "Breeders" use artificial evolution to generate images and forms, in the process altering the artist's creative agency. "Cybernatures" form complex, interactive systems, drawing the audience into artificial ecosystems. Other artists work in "Hardware," adapting Rodney Brooks's "bottom-up" robotics to create embodied autonomous agencies. The "Abstract Machines" of a-life art de-emphasize the biological analogy, using techniques such as cellular automata to investigate pattern, form and morphogenesis.
In the book's concluding chapters, Whitelaw surveys the theoretical discourses around a-life art, before finally examining emergence, a concept central to a-life, and key, it is argued, to a-life art.
Customer Reviews:
a-life or alive?.......2005-10-19
From Conway's Game of Life and efforts by other people, artificial life has been a fascinating field. Whitelaw shows how this has been extended by artists, into fabricating creations that blend computing into art.
Some of you may have known about such things as cellular automata and how structures might propagate, and well as the use of fractals for renderings of irregular objects. The book shows how this is taken further, with some lovely results. There is certainly an undercurrent that something seems to be alive in these works.
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Parachute: Contemporary Art Magazine, published by Parachute Contemporary Art on July 1, 2005. The length of the article is 460 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Mitchell Whitelaw, Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life.(Book Review)
Author: Philippe Pasquier
Publication:
Parachute: Contemporary Art Magazine (Magazine/Journal)
Date: July 1, 2005
Publisher: Parachute Contemporary Art
Issue: 119
Page: 170(1)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
A valuable primer on the fashion industry for the 21st century! Fashion Design is the definitive reference for anyone who is considering a career in the fashion industry. It describes the qualities and skills needed to become a fashion designer; examines the wide range of career opportunities available; and gives an authoritative, balanced overview of the fashion business today. Using an approach that unites history, theory, and practice, Fashion Design aims to inform and inspire. Packed with over 300 illustrations, here is practical guidance and proven advice on such topics as the uses and language of clothing; patterns and fabrics; measuring, cutting, draping, and sewing; building a collection; researching and sketching; portfolios and self-presentation; plus much more. It equips aspiring designers and other fashion professionals with a valuable road map to this competitive, cutthroat industry. It also serves as an excellent reference and career guide for professionals interested in retail buying, marketing and sales, and other areas of the fashion business.
Customer Reviews:
Fashion Design.......2007-09-04
I wish I had read this in High School before going to college. A very thourough overview of the Fashion industry as well as what to expect in college as a Fashion student. She is British so many of her references are UK based but she does cover the US as well as France in most of her references and additional sources so a good place to start. I reccommend this for anyone looking to go into Fashion.
Interested in Fashion Design? .......2006-08-07
Then read this book first!
Sue Jenkyn Jones provides a good end-to-end overview of the Fashion Design Business. From this book, you will get an good idea of what talents and requirements are needed to be a Fashion Designer. Covered in this book are the business aspects, fashion cycles, textiles, manufacturing, sketching, patternmaking, CAD for designers, colors, sewing, and much MUCH more.
Each topic is explored enough to get slughtly further than the basic concept but not thoroughly covered. I do not think it is possible to completely explore everything on Fashion Design in one book. It is a great introduction to see if it something suitable for yourself or if you are seeking out an overview of the design business. The book is generously packed with graphical examples, sketches, charts, and runway photos.
Central Saint Martins wants you to go to college. . . .......2006-05-02
preferably theirs. This book reveals very little about fashion design or the buisness. It is full of a lot of general information much like you would find in one of those late night tv, or print ads, telling you that you may have what it takes to "become a serious artist." Because of course then you are interested and will pay them money. This book works in much the same way. It is a teaser published by Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. Now had they given me this book, say. . . at my orientation, i probably would have appreciated it. However I was rather disappointed when I realized that I had just paid $30 at SFMOMA for an advertisement from CSM.
A must for fashion design students and fashion lovers.......2006-04-30
After a serious college business education and a few years in the workforce, I made a courageous decision to enter fashion school. The best decision I've made, but like everyone else I sometimes stress out over what I've gotten myself into. Sue Jenkyn's book is always on my cofee table because it calms me down by clarifying in simple terms what I'm studying and why. This book offers an opportunity to step back and look at the big picture of fashion today.
This book offers a taste of everything - she has a wonderful chart of the fashion calendar and another of the fashion cycle. The info in this book incorporates vital lessons from maybe 10 expensive textbooks I own and have studied. The pictures taken of students in fashion school and sectors of the industry are my favorite. Until you are in fashion school or the industry, this book is the best way for you to see what happens behind closed doors. The more I learn in fashion school, the more familiar and enlightening this book becomes.
For people interested in Fashion Design .......2004-12-19
I purchased this book on amazon.com at a very reasonable price and was very pleased with my purchase. For under $20 this book provided me with the information I was looking for. I recommend it to anyone, especially students interested in majoring in Fashion Design in college. This book explains the basics of what majoring in Fashion Design requires, and goes into describing the what, when, where, and why of what being a Fashion student involves. I really enjoyed reading this book and learned a lot!
Average customer rating:
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Diseno de moda
Sue Jenkyn Jones
Manufacturer: Blume
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 849801056X |
Book Description
A valuable primer on the fashion industry for the 21st century, this is for anyone who is considering a career in this competitive field. It describes the qualities and skills needed to become a fashion designer; examines the wide range of career opportunities available; and gives an authoritative, balanced overview of the fashion business today. By combining history, theory, and practice, practical guidance and proven advice on such topics as the uses and language of clothing; patterns and fabrics; measuring, cutting, draping, and sewing; building a collection; researching and sketching; portfolios and self-presentation.
Cubriendo las bases importantes de la industria de diseño de modas del siglo 21, esta obra sirve como una referencia definitiva para cualquiera que está considerando entrar a la industria. Describe las cualidades y habilidades necesarias para convertirse en diseñador de moda, examina las opciones de trabajo que existen y da un recorrido general y actual de la industria. Combinando historia, teoría y práctica, esta guía práctica contiene consejos sobre el uso de ropa, telas, pautas, medidas, cortes, cortinas y ayuda para coser, dibujar y presentar.
Average customer rating:
- Almost the opposite of Clowes' strengths
- pretty good
- A great laugh
- Pretentious curmudgeonry best left under wraps
- The Product of a Sick and Warped Mind
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Twentieth Century Eightball (20th Century Eightball)
Daniel Clowes
Manufacturer: Fantagraphics Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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Clowes, Daniel
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Caricature
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Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron
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Pussey!
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David Boring
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Ghost World
ASIN: 1560974362 |
Book Description
The creator of Ghost World eviscerates American culture.
Before the Ghost World graphic novel and film propelled Daniel Clowes to international superstardom as the preeminent cartoonist of his generation, his ongoing comic book Eightball was already the most talked-about series of the 1990s. Renowned for its gleefully incisive social satire and riotous absurdity, Entertainment Weekly proclaimed it "the year's best regularly published comic book" upon its debut in 1989. The Village Voice proclaimed it "brilliant," and Art Spiegelman called it "curdlingly good." Simpsons creator Matt Groening has repeatedly called it his favorite comic book.
20th Century Eightball collects the very best humor strips from Eightball, written and drawn between 1988 and 1996. Included within are such seminal strips/rants as "I Hate You Deeply," "Sexual Frustration," "Ugly Girls," "Why I Hate Christians," "Message to the People of the Future," "Paranoid," "My Suicide," "Chicago," and over three dozen more. Other favorites include "Art School Confidential," one of Clowes' most popular strips of all-time: it was recently optioned as a major motion picture by Drew Barrymore, with a screenplay by Ghost World's Clowes and Terry Zwigoff. Also included is Clowes' hilariously Freudian deconstruction of professional athletes, "On Sports," which caused a stir in San Antonio last year when reprinted in the city's most popular weekly paper, prompting an advertising boycott and demands for the paper to be destroyed by local sports fans. Noted comics historian Roger Sabin, author of Phaidon's Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels, calls 20th Century Eightball a "corrosively satirical vision of an America cracking apart, and confirms Clowes as a worthy successor to the underground greats of the 1960s." 40 pages in color, fully illustrated.
Customer Reviews:
Almost the opposite of Clowes' strengths.......2007-06-22
Clowes' strengths are his sublime pacing, wonderful atmosphere, and realistic characters - none of which he displays in his short stories. He is just, as Spiegelman says, a "wiseass." Some people like the early Eightballs because they're more comic than his later works, but Clowes cannot compete with the classic humor comics like Howard the Duck and Cerebus: High Society. His longer works, on the other hand, are top rate stuff.
These stories aren't bad, but they're not good either. Certainly not worth buying.
pretty good.......2006-04-27
pretty funny - I think it's better than Ice Haven
manic, quick, collection works together well
A great laugh.......2005-06-17
I think I laughed more out loud while I read this than I have with my previous Clowes. While the Clowes I've read in the past is dark and haunting themes (Ghost World and Like a Velvet Glove), this is a filling dose of dark humor and venting of frustrations.
I might have given it five stars, but I'm not such a scraps-o-stories kinda gal. Lots of the stories had good starts, and either no endings or abrupt drop-offs.
And also, if I was fiendish about the way that my TPB's look, as in for resale value and such, I might have had a heart attack the way Amazon sent it. It looked like it might have been lying on a garage floor for a couple of years before they tossed it in the carton. The other comic I ordered arrived in mint condition and plastic-wrapped, so I dunno what the deal is.
I love Clowes more every time I read a new one, and this is no exception!
Pretentious curmudgeonry best left under wraps.......2003-07-27
Clowes admits in his introduction that Art Spiegelman called Clowes' early work his "total wiseass period." He should've taken the hint.
As a fan of Daniel Clowes' "David Boring" and "Ghost World," as well as his screenplay based on the latter, I was disappointed to discover how much of a jerk he'd been early on. The rants remind me of my adolescence, but as Clowes was college-age and up when he first published these comics, immaturity is not an excuse. While this book will interest hardcore Clowes fans, I do not recommend it to the casual Clowes enjoyer.
The Product of a Sick and Warped Mind.......2003-01-07
But, so was Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" and Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum." Only time will tell if his work will be included amongst such august company, but for the time being, Daniel Clowes stands at the top of the heap of today's comic book artists.
Twentieth Century Eightball is an omnibus, "best of" collection of his comic panels from his Fantagraphic comic book series "Eightball" which was issued semiannually from the late 1980s through the 1990s.
Clowes' rapist (pun intended) wit is in overdrive here, as he expounds on his endless lists of things he hates, often in the guise of such stand-ins as the now-classic Lloyd Llewellyn. "I Hate You Deeply" and "I Love You Tenderly" will have you howling like a banshee, as you follow Lloyd through one of his ranting diatribes against sports figures, corporate greed, hippy sellouts and lowest-common-denominators.
And that's basically the whole book: Thinly-veiled attacks on all the things that bother the idosyncratic Daniel Clowes. But, so what: They deserve bashing! My favourite targets of his ire were post-modernist talentless art school poseurs, violently agressive hippy burnout peaceniks, "hip" people, Chicagoan "Jim Belushi" types, dumb jocks and pretentious Americans such as I who use the British spelling of words (e.g., "colour" instead of "color"; "kerb" rather than "curb").
Some of the material is just too bizarre to describe here -- I don't want to give away the weirdness, so find out for yourself about "On Sports," "Pogeybait," "The Happy Fisherman" and other such sundry freakishness.
But this book also reveals a soft-spot in Clowes' heart, particularly in the short "Ugly Girls," in which he questions society's norms of "beauty." Though he doesn't use the name "Enid," the reader can tell that Clowes has long been entranced and obsessed with the raven-haired, bookish, bespectacled wallflower type. I agree: She *is* much more stunning than those trophy blondes.
Book Description
Delightfully witty and richly informative, The Alarming History of Medicine is a collection of anecdotes describing how the historical breakthroughs in medicine were really made. Using hilarious stories, based on actual facts, Richard Gordon shows that most of the monumental discoveries were originally accidents.
A must-read for hypochondriacs, doctors, medical students, and anyone fascinated by the world of medicine, The Alarming History of Medicine is clever, revealing--and all true.
Customer Reviews:
To fall out laughing is the best medicine.......2006-07-24
I read this book here in Ceará, a state of Brazil.I'm an agronomist and I like to read books.This book isn't for doctors, but for the general public.
If you like to read comic books about doctors and patients, this a good choice.This book is also concise, easy to read and had a cheap price, when I bought it, here in Brazil.
Sloppy Writing - and Publishing - From Start to Finish.......2005-10-11
This book is not really a history of medicine. It is, rather, a sloppy garage sale of anecdotes, florid sentences, misspellings, poor grammar, and errors of fact (Leeuwenhoek did NOT, as Mr. Gordon states, invent the microscope). The only unifying theme is the author's rampant "humor," but it rarely elucidates the history of medicine. How could St. Martin's Press send this manuscript to the printer without copy editing or proof reading? Beats me.
Ok book if you are already in the medical field.......2005-08-19
This was an ok survey of the history of Medicine. I found that the author, (who is from great Britain), uses too many terms more familiar to other physicians. The average reader would probably not enjoy this book, as some of the language can get quite lofty, and encumbered by latin medical terms. If you want an easier read of the history of medicine this is not the book for you.
Riveting yet discombobulated (literally) text.......2005-01-06
Thumbs up to Gordon for taking the reader of a mesmeric stroll through the oft-unusual characters and events that shaped the history of modern medicine as we know it. My sentiment wasn't initially thus. Half way through the first chapter I slapped the price sticker back on the rear cover, prepared to return it to the bookstore. Luckily (for me), I'm always up for a challenge, and something deep inside urged me to press on. Ah, woe is me; I couldn't put this book down (and this is certainly a text I look forward to rereading!). Perhaps the biggest qualm that I have with this text (and the reason I referred to it as literally discombobulating) is that 30 pages (or 12% of the book) were out of order! After discovering that the "The Gold-headed Cane" wasn't a mere page and a half chapter, but a full 27-pages; I actually had to read backwards! Bad move St. Martin's Press. In short, this is a terrific text for ANYONE interested in learning more about the history of medicine. Gordon's tone is vivid and funny; the pace is fast; the language rich (if your vocabulary/verbal reasoning is slightly above average or below- be prepare to have a dictionary near by). The text also features a couple dozen resourceful illustrations. There are NO misspellings in this text, only differences in British and American Standard English usage (i.e. using an "s" instead of a "z"- organisation vs, organization). - Great book for the mature-minded, well-versed reader. Enjoy!
Horrible.......2004-05-31
Richard Gordon is very witty. However, this book is poorly written and badly organized. There were also a lot of misspellings and other errors which should of been caught in editing. He wanders all over the place and assumes that you are familiar with the history of medicine. I am not, which is why I bought the book. Don't read this book unless you already know the history of medicine or you enjoy being frustrated.
Average customer rating:
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Seventy Light Years: An Autobiography
Freddie Young , and
Peter Busby
Manufacturer: Faber & Faber
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
Entertainers
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ASIN: 0571197930 |
Book Description
The autobiography of Freddie Young, the Academy Award-winning cinematographer of Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago.
In this witty and informative autobiography, written just before he died at the age of ninety-six, the British cinematographer Freddie Young takes us on a journey through the history of cinema, from his early days processing celluloid by hand for silent movies in Shepherd's Bush, London, to his adventures with David Lean in far-flung locations all over the world while filming Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, films for which Young received Academy Awards. Both entertaining and enlightening, Young includes anecdotes about the directors and stars he worked with-from George Cukor and Vincente Minnelli to Ava Gardner and Elizabeth Taylor -as well as offering an invaluable guide to how cinematography evolved from a craft into an art, providing information on how to set up shots, and explaining how a director's vision can best be fulfilled. Seventy Light Years is a book filled with one man's love for and knowledge of film-a delight for film buffs and an education in itself for film students.
Black-and-White Photographs Throughout Filmography/Index
Freddie Young was born in London, England, where he died in December 1998.
Average customer rating:
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Dudley Moore Off-Beat: My World of Music
Dudley Moore
Manufacturer: Arbor House Pub Co
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0877959145 |
Book Description
Emanuel Derman was one of the first physicists to move to Wall Street, and his career paralleled the growth of quantitative trading over the past twenty years. In My Life as a Quant, he traces his transformation from ambitious young scientist to managing director and head of the renowned Quantitative Strategies group at Goldman, Sachs & Co.
Derman’s tale recounts his adventures with quants, traders and other high fliers on Wall Street as he became the best-known quant in the business. He describes the struggles of research and his interactions with an assorted cast of famous scientists. He relates his impressions of some of the most creative minds on Wall Street, including Fischer Black, with whom he collaborated on the widely used Black-Derman-Toy model of interest rates. Throughout his story he reflects on the appropriate way to apply the refined methods of physics to the hurly-burly world of markets and the people that inhabit them.
Download Description
Emanuel Derman was one of the first physicists to move to Wall Street, and his career paralleled the growth of quantitative trading over the past twenty years. In My Life as a Quant, he traces his transformation from ambitious young scientist to managing director and head of the renowned Quantitative Strategies group at Goldman, Sachs & Co.
Derman’s tale recounts his adventures with quants, traders and other high fliers on Wall Street as he became the best-known quant in the business. He describes the struggles of research and his interactions with an assorted cast of famous scientists. He relates his impressions of some of the most creative minds on Wall Street, including Fischer Black, with whom he collaborated on the widely used Black-Derman-Toy model of interest rates. Throughout his story he reflects on the appropriate way to apply the refined methods of physics to the hurly-burly world of markets and the people that inhabit them.
Customer Reviews:
An interesting, representative look into physics, computer science, math, and finance.......2007-08-18
This book is an easily readable and interesting look into the life of a financial engineer. Derman describes his life in relation to the history of modern physics and modern finance. He describes the route he took, from a student who wanted to research physics permanently to an enthusiastic programming newbie.
This book is sort of divided into four sections. First his early and student life. Then he ventures into the world of UNIX and computer science. As a computer programmer myself, I especially felt the joy he felt when he created a program to solve a small program that was commercialized and used by many other people. The satisfaction of small victories was quite apparent and mirrored my own life in some ways.
He then ventures into the world of finance in the mid 80s - during the boom time of financial engineering. His work from a naïve physicist to a financial wizard describes both the history of his career development and the quantitave finance itself. He ventures into new topics of finance, such as implied binomial trees and the such.
Sometimes the book does get bogged down into a little too much technical detail. I understood the finance and computer programming part perfectly because I've studied and worked in those fields, but the physics stuff was quite esoteric and I had a hard time following much of it.
All in all, it's a fun book. Nothing really spectacular, but to see the history of a new field being described, told by a pioneer, is quite fascinating.
Engaging.......2007-07-05
This is an engaging book which, I suspect, will be most interesting to those of us with more than a decade of experience in the financial technology field.
The book is appealing on many levels: the story of a physicist-turned-quant, the drama of professional life amongst the players in the fin-tech field, and the discussions of the mechanics of quantitative analysis, made accessible by Mr. Derman's plain-spoken writing style.
I don't read many books for pleasure, but I couldn't put this one down.
Shorting Sidhartha to ground.......2007-03-11
After reading Derman's Platonic idea of the origin of physics on the first two pages, I was so angry that for a while I couldn't read further. When finally I did read further, I couldn't put the book down until midnight. This autobiography of a physicist turned financial engineer is more entertaining than most novels, and is informative in a way that no other book is. Derman's description of his life and times is the chronicle of an era. This is a book that should be read by physics grad students who fantacize about working for banks or trading houses.
I remember how in 1957 we and our neighbors went out at night to watch Sputnik pass overhead as a pale, visibly moving light. This was the same year that Mercury had produced the 6 cyl. 60 h.p. outboard motor, Chevy produced its classic model, Elvis sang 'Loving You', and my youngest brother was born. Then, each morning before school, we would turn on the Today Show and often watch as a rocket from Redstone Arsenal (Huntsville) or Cape Canaveral went up a few meters, then fell over and crashed. Finally, von Braun (who'd escaped from Penemünde via Thüringen to North Tirol (where I mainly live) and then engineered his capture by the U.S. rather than the Russians or the French) eventually got it right and launched too, but not before Americans were treated to huge, Life Magazine photos of Chicago teenagers jitterbugging their lives away, and of Russian teenagers intensely studying math and physics. The US reaction to Sputnik was in part the NDEA loans that got me and a lot of other science majors through the university, and produced a very large excess supply of physics Ph.D.s by about 1970. In the seventies, academic jobs in physics in the US were so few, and the competition so great, that it was the kiss of death to take a postdoctoral fellowship in Europe. Going there put you outside the loop. One could generalize a British postdoc's experience after his arrival at Cal Tech in the following way: the US was the center of the universe in physics, and to a first approximation Europe did not exist. In the early eighties I noticed that a former physics grad student in nonlinear dynamics had been hired by a trading house. I didn't understand the significance then. Eventually, one of my later to be closest collaborators (and is Feigenbaum's only grad student to boot) worked for a year in 1990 at a Chicago trading house before coming to the University of Houston. In 1999, the same year that I heard of the Physics and finance meeting in Dublin where Gene Stanley coined the awful but effective term 'Econophysics', I read that Mitch Feigenbaum and Nigel Goldenfeld had opened a derivatives-related business in New York. Derman was one of the first physicists to go to work as a modeler on Wall Street. Derman's book, written humorously, self-deprecatingly and introspectively, yet objectively, is a chronicle of that era, a chronicle of physics and job hunting by physics grads in the post-Vietman war era, the era that began with Nixon's deregulation of the dollar (tied to gold at $35/oz. from 1935-1971, gold that Americans were not permitted to own for reasons of attempted currency stability). I'll stop here with my introduction and recommend that anyone who really wants to understand something about the world financial system read Eichengreen's `Globalizing Capital'. Here are some comments about parts of the book that I liked particularly well, or particularly disliked. The book can be read as a useful complement to `The Predictors', Liar's Poker', and `Inventing Money'.
The platonic view of the origin of mathematical laws of nature expressed on the first two pages is wrong. One can understand how a theorist with a focus on gauge theories might get on that track, but it is not true that Einstein thought that way in his early discoveries. For a better picture of why mathematics is unreasonably effective in physics, read Wigner's `Symmetries and Reflections', and read Barbour's `Absolute or Relative Motion' for the history of the discoveries.
The difference between physics (academic research) and financial engineering (on the Street) is described pretty well. In the latter, a good graphics interface is more important for business than is a good model. The description of the difference is generally true of physics and engineering per se, and is not peculiar to the financial brand.
The description of reductionism is the extreme brand believed uncritically by people like Steven Weinberg. Any correct mathematical description of nature, any isolation of cause and effect, is a form of reductionism. Attempts to understand markets empirically is a form of reductionism.
The description of Lee and Yang's quarrels is revealing (both visited the University of Houston Physics Dept. at various times in the seventies and eighties). The description of Cvitanovic rings too true! I was not aware (!?) that Feigenbaum and Libchaber (name misspelled) like Steiner's writings, although it's fairly well known that Feigenbaum reads Goethe.
Derman describes vividly how no one can get past T.D. Lee in a colloquium, then with British understatement writes that his own thesis defense, with Lee on the committee, was no problem. And his advice to students about blind alleys and perseverance is correct. The race is often won not by the quickest but rather by the one who doesn't quit in the face of adversity.
The author had a tantalizing taste early on of the life of the successful (i.e., well-connected) physicist on the conference circuit. I myself read too many biographies of German professors who took a Kur for 6 weeks on the Baltic or the North Sea.
His description of life at Oxford, and the string of postdoctoral positions is believable and hilarious. The description of the pain of having to live apart from his wife and son is painful to read, although many physicists live so.
Derman also describes what makes physicists arrogant without naming it: life in a scientific culture where the standards are set by certified geniuses. It's hard to live in the shadow of these people. One learns a certain degree of arrogance merely for survival in the culture, and that makes us hard to live with at home and in society. Advice from a bright colleague how to get along with your partner: 'grovel, grovel, grovel'. It works.
His advice about publications is absolutely right: it rarely hurts to put a collaborator's, host's or advisor's name on a paper. I contemplated publishing my thesis alone because Onsager had not really contributed to it, although he suggested the problem. Actually, I doubted that he wanted his name on such a seemingly trivial piece of work, but it turned out that he liked it and did want his name on the papers. He liked all sorts of calculations. As long as they were right ....
There is no correct analogy between economics/finance and thermodynamics, the far from equilibrium nature of markets prohibits it. Fischer Black, whom I admire enormously and have read carefully, was wrong about 'equilibrium': he swallowed the economists' notions uncritically (Derman describes Black as 'in love' with the idea of equilibrium, and one can swallow anything when one is in love). CAPM is certainly not an 'equilibrium' model, and CAPM does not lead to the Black-Scholes pde, there's an error in the 1973 paper. I prefer the Black-Scholes paper to all of Merton's useless rigmarole about utility, a nonfalsifiable notion at best, although it's true that replication is not in the Black-Scholes paper. I can't see that Merton's derivation of the backward time pde is 'more rigorous' than Black's delta-hedge condition.
Derman's description of his self-imposed exile to Bell Labs is hilarious. His loving description of UNIX is beyond me (I know how to use a word processor).
Weltanschauung is mis-spelled, there are n+1 split infinitives in the text.
Now I know where Lisa Borland's boss comes from.
The description of Fischer Black is worth the book alone, even if the rest were not good. Osborne, Black, and Mandelbrot can be counted as the ancestors of Econophysics, which differs from Financial Engineering the way that physics differs from engineering. Black was right that expected returns, seen as anticipating the future, is not an observable notion. But, then, what does Soros do when he beats the market (nonmathematically)?
Derman's description of economic theory as nonsense (my term) is absolutely correct, when applied to micro- and macro-economics texts. What one finds inside those books is useless, falsified mathematized ideology. To make matters worse, economists know that and still teach the stuff in the classroom, misleading generations of students.
All in all, this is a highly recommendable book!
An interesting career path.......2006-12-11
This book is not for those interested in learning quantitative finance. Rather, it is a memoir written by a physicist who came to finance relatively late in life.
There is some poignancy in Derman's transformation from theoretical physicist bent on a life in academia (where he hoped to make groundbreaking discoveries about elementary particles) to mid-level employee of one of the world's great financial institutions (Goldman Sachs). Although he was undoubtedly well paid for the skills he brought to the financial markets, Derman's story is tinged with sadness about the loss of an ideal.
The book is particularly valuable for the insights it provides about the inner workings of a major investment bank, and in particular about the role played by the "quants" in the development of new products and trading strategies. It also provides some perspective on the development of quantitative finance as a practical discipline; and it makes clear that quantitative skills, while important to a successful career in a major financial institution, generally take a back seat to salesmanship, practical trading skills, and internal politicking.
Those with a liking for pure mathematics will have to grin and bear Derman's critical comments about mathematical rigor and economic theory.
good source of info for those who wonder what a quant is.......2006-11-13
Mr. Derman took the reader along with his journey from theorectical physics to financial modeling. The later chapters provide simple to understand explanations of what he did at Goldman Sachs to model bond options. No knowledge of advance mathematics required. One shudders when one realizes that models are formed usually after the fact. Today trillion of dollars are traded based on imperfect models. What if ... there was a flaw in the model?
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