Young Workers: Varieties of Experience

Book Description

Statistical physics concepts such as stochastic dynamics, short- and long-range correlations, self-similarity and scaling, permit an understanding of the global behavior of economic systems without first having to work out a detailed microscopic description of the system. This pioneering text explores the use of these concepts in the description of financial systems, the dynamic new specialty of econophysics. The authors illustrate the scaling concepts used in probability theory, critical phenomena, and fully-developed turbulent fluids and apply them to financial time series. They also present a new stochastic model that displays several of the statistical properties observed in empirical data. Physicists will find the application of statistical physics concepts to economic systems fascinating. Economists and other financial professionals will benefit from the book's empirical analysis methods and well-formulated theoretical tools that will allow them to describe systems composed of a huge number of interacting subsystems.

Customer Reviews:

Excellent Introduction.......2004-12-01

This book is an excellent introduction to financial analitics for Physicists and also for others. Though a little out dated, but what can you expect from such a fast changing subject?
This is not the first book I have read in this subject, but it is my favorite right now. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble if this would have been the first.

Nevertheless, it should be considered as an intial reference point and not as to expect it to contain all the details. After all it only has 148 pages.

target audience not defined.......2003-09-22

I find the book rather poorly written in the aspect of providing links between statistical physics and its application in economics. As a physicist with a background in stochastic processes, I was looking for an introduction to their applications to economic analysis, complete with examples and discussion of the methods' limitations. The book was somewhat disappointing in this respect. Quite often, in many chapters, the necessary math is explained, then some aspects of how it is manefest in economical data are presented and then the chapter ends, leaving the reader wonder what the specific cases may be and if it is practical to use those methods at all. Above all, there is very little discussion as to what the results actually mean, in economical terms.
I believe the book may be helpful for reseachers active in this field but I would not recommend it as a first introduction to econophysics. For economists, the math may be rather difficult to go through as some of the fundamental concepts are not defined consistently. For physicists with no previous exposure to econophysics, I would prefer to see more economics.

Not bad, considering..........2002-08-13

The book is not bad considering the total lack of existence of intelligible literature in this supposedly vast field.

The content is really a collection of quickie crib-sheets on a sundry of topics with nominally common theme: Finance.

A lot of the actually useful stuff is the author's previously published papers on price-return distributions.

Aside from his own previously published work, he has a good tutorial on the GARCH scheme though with precious little follow up reading resources for delving in deeper (or even sideways).

This book is priced far too high given its content and depth.
Look for a used copy, and do not count on the author to answer questions by email.

First in the new field.......2002-06-05

I found several parts of this book useful while preparing lectures for an introductory econophysics course in Fall, 2001. The discussions of convolutions of distributions, Levy distributions and scaling are well-written and easy to follow. In the brief discussion of the St. Petersburg Paradox I missed a critical discussion of expected utility, which was invented by Bernoullli to 'resolve' that paradox. Spurred by von Neumann and Morgenstern, neo-classical economics relies on the idea of expected utility, which seems empirically to be wrong. The chapter on time correlations is also very readable (although Wiener processes are not 1/f^2 noise!). ARCH and GARCH methods are discussed, saving the student from the pain of reading badly-written papers by mathematically-minded economists, but the chapters on options are too brief with nothing new. The best introduction to options is still the original Black-Scholes paper (excepting their erroneous claim that CAPM and the delta-hedge strategy produce option pricing pdes that agree with each other). Also, it would have been nice to have seen a discussion of CAPM. The discussion of algorithmic complexity left me cold (see my earlier books and papers on nonlinear dynamics), and I would like to have seen a critical discussion of the EMH. These criticisms are ok, though, the gaps leave something for the rest of us to work on.

Physicists Land On Planet Economics.......2001-06-11

SINCE the last decade, physicists have been trying to cope with the issues traditionally approached by economics using their own tools and methodologies. This research has been dubbed 'econophysics'. One reason why this incursion should be welcomed is the failure of mainstream economics to recognise financial systems as complex systems. Take mainstream international finance, for instance. In the most respectable workhorse model--so-called 'new open economy macroeconomics model'--foreign exchange rates always reach some sort of stable equilibrium. To put it bluntly, this means that currencies do not exhibit complex behaviour.

However, financial markets do demonstrate several of the properties that characterise complex systems. What is more, they are highly complex, open systems in which many subunits interact nonlinearly in the presence of feedback and stable governing rules. Earlier attempts to find chaos in financial data, for instance, have been disappointing exactly because the phenomenon is likely to emerge in systems which are only moderately complex. Although it cannot be ruled out that financial markets follow chaotic dynamics, econophysics assumes that asset price dynamics are stochastic processes.

A fundamental commitment of the mainline model of international finance is to theory itself, and not to data. Modelling is devoted to equipping the discipline with an underlying rational behaviour at the individual level. Yet this is at odds with the fact that financial markets are prone to collective 'irrational exuberance'. Instead, econophysics attemps to build up stochastic models that encompass essential features observed in the financial data. Now that the time evolution of many financial markets is continually monitored, it is possible to test the accuracy and predictive power of the developed models using available data. One common objection to such a practice is that it is impossible to perform large-scale experiments in economics that could falsify any given theory. The authors note that this limitation is not specific to economics, but also affects such well developed areas of physics as astrophysics, atmospheric physics, and geophysics. By analogy with the activity in these more established areas, we are able to test and falsify any theories associated with the current available sets of financial data.

Complex systems can sometimes behave in remarkable simple ways. These are reflected in power law distributions and scaling. The authors illustrate these concepts and others, and apply them to the financial time series. The book is thus useful not only for physicists but also for economists and people in the financial world. Some familiarity with probability theory or statistical physics is required, though. Economists dissatisfied with the mainline approach of their discipline will find the book opportune. The others might end up welcoming econophysics as well. After all, economists implicitly see physics as nature's economics. What is then wrong with physicists thinking of economics as social physics?

Book Description

This textbook is intended for use in introductory biostatistics courses for health science, nursing, and biology students. It deals with research designs used for collecting data, methods for summarizing data, and testing hypotheses in health and related fields. The emphasis is on illustrating how statistics are generated and used by practitioners in health fields and interpreting crucial aspects of journal articles. Concepts are stressed rather than the usual computational methods. Every major concept is accompanied by an exercise and correct answers, and these form an integral part of the text.

Book Description

Clusters as mesoscopic particles represent an intermediate state of matter between single atoms and solid material. The tendency to miniaturise technical objects requires knowledge about systems which contain a "small" number of atoms or molecules only. This is all the more true for dynamical aspects, particularly in relation to the qick development of laser technology and femtosecond spectroscopy.
Here, for the first time is a highly qualitative introduction to cluster physics. With its emphasis on cluster dynamics, this will be vital to everyone involved in this interdisciplinary subject. The authors cover the dynamics of clusters on a broad level, including recent developments of femtosecond laser spectroscopy on the one hand and time-dependent density functional theory calculations on the other.

Optical Methods of Analysis (Treatise on Analytical Chemistry: Theory and Practice, Part I, Volume 5)

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Optical Methods of Analysis (Treatise on Analytical Chemistry: Theory and Practice, Part I, Volume 5)

Manufacturer: Interscience Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000C7GZ6O

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TREATISE ON ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY
Kolthoff; Elving; Stross (editors)
Manufacturer: John Wiley & Sons
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000LCC3W0

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Treatise on Analytical Chemistry
i kolthoff
Manufacturer: Interscience Encyclopedia
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: 0470499583

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Treatise on Analytical Chemistry

Manufacturer: John Wiley & Sons Inc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Analytic | Chemistry | Science | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0471500054

Average customer rating:

Treatise on Analytical Chemistry

Manufacturer: John Wiley & Sons Inc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Analytic | Chemistry | Science | Subjects | Books

Average customer rating:

Treatise on Analytical Chemistry

Manufacturer: John Wiley & Sons Inc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Analytic | Chemistry | Science | Subjects | Books

General & Reference | Chemistry | Science | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0471499692

Average customer rating:

Treatise on Analytical Chemistry

Manufacturer: John Wiley & Sons Inc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General & Reference | Chemistry | Science | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 047149965X

Average customer rating:

Good Repository, Terrible Book

Open Source Physics: A User's Guide with Examples (3rd Edition)
Wolfgang Christian
Manufacturer: Addison Wesley
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Science | Subjects | Books
General | Physics | Science | Subjects | Books
General | Physics | Professional Science | Professional & Technical | Subjects | Books
All Titles | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books
Professional | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books
Science | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books
Similar Items:

An Introduction to Computer Simulation Methods: Applications to Physical Systems (3rd Edition)

Computational Physics (2nd Edition)

Physlets: Teaching Physics with Interactive Curricular Material (With CD-ROM)

An Introduction to Computational Physics

Physlet(R) Quantum Physics: An Interactive Introduction (Educational Innovation- Physics)

ASIN: 080537759X

Book Description

KEY BENEFIT: The Open Source Physics project provides a comprehensive collection of Java applications, smaller ready-to-run simulations, and computer-based interactive curricular material. This book provides all the background required to make best use of this material and is designed for scientists and students wishing to learn object-oriented programming using Java in order to write their own simulations and develop their own curricular material. The book provides a convenient overview of the Open Source Physics library and gives many examples of how the material can be used in a wide range of teaching and learning scenarios. Both source code and compiled ready-to-run examples are conveniently included on the accompanying CD-ROM. The book also explains how to use the Open Source Physics library to develop and distribute new curricular material. Introduction to Open Source Physics, A Tour of Open Source Physics, Frames Package, Drawing, Controls and Threads, Plotting, Animation, Images, and Buffering, Two-Dimensional Scalar and Vector Fields, Differential Equations and Dynamics, Numerics, XML Documents, Visualization in Three Dimensions, Video, Utilities, Launching Physics Curricular Material, Tracker Video Analysis, Easy Java Simulations Modeling, The BQ Database For all readers interested in learning object-oriented programming using Java in order to write their own simulations and develop their own curricular material.

Customer Reviews:

Good Repository, Terrible Book.......2007-09-06

While I understand it is nigh impossible for a physics text to be completely without typos, and I have never been a huge fan of the Addison-Wesley editorial department, but they have outdone themselves with the utter lack of proof-reading for a supposedly mature third edition text.
Moving on, this book is essentially about implementing computational methods in the Java environment. This is fine and there are lots of nice routines available in the open source physics repository. (I do question the use of java as a high performance platform, however). Unfortunately, this book presents very few examples for implementing the aforementioned routines and the most of the few examples have critical typos (You cannot even complete the steps for his hello world! example as there are typos in the directory structure presented!).
Possibly the only saving grace of the book is the brief mention of Easy Java Simulations (EJS) - A visual platform for generating applets making actual use of the open source physics repositiores. However, the author cannot spare the breath to walk you through an EJS project with any depth, which would give this book an actual reason for taking up space on your book shelf.

Bottom Line- Stay away unless you absolutely need a Java implementation of your physics models, and even then Easy Java Simulations is a more tractable place to begin.

Average customer rating:

WWI: New York to Paris

Best War Novel

Novels, 1920-1925: One Man's Initiation: 1917, Three Soldiers, Manhattan Transfer (The Library of America)
John Dos Passos
Manufacturer: Library of America
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Classics | United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Collections & Readers | United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Classics | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Dos Passos, John | ( D ) | Authors, A-Z | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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Similar Items:

John Dos Passos: Travel Books and Other Writings 1916-1941 (Library of America)

U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel / 1919 / The Big Money (Library of America)

Richard Henry Dana Jr.: Two Years Before the Mast and Other Voyages (Library of America)

Philip Roth: Novels and Stories 1959-1962: Goodbye, Columbus & Five Short Stories / Letting Go (Library of America)

Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977, The Great American Novel, My Life as a Man, The Professor of Desire (Library of America)

ASIN: 1931082391
Release Date: 2003-09-11

Book Description

Before he began the U.S.A. trilogy, John Dos Passos prefigured his groundbreaking epic through three novels that provide a fascinating glimpse into his stunning achievement as an avant-garde prose stylist while they incisively chronicle early twentieth century Europe and America. Manhattan Transfer (1925), a kaleidoscopic portrait of New York City, is universally acknowledged as a modernist masterpiece. This lyrical, exuberantly experimental novel orchestrates the rising and falling fortunes of more than a dozen characters: Wall Street speculators, theatrical celebrities, impoverished immigrants, bootleggers, and anarchist rebels move through a maze of tenements and skyscrapers. The impressionistic One Man's Initiation: 1917 (1920) draws upon Dos Passos' experiences driving ambulances in France to portray the fear, uncertainty, and camaraderie of war. This Library of America edition includes passages censored by the book's original publisher. Three Soldiers (1921), here with the author's own introduction, delves deeply into the spiritual toll of war, dramatizing American servicemen fighting in battle, struggling against dehumanizing military regimentation, and experiencing the chaotic pleasures of Paris.

Along with its companion volumes Travel Books and Other Writings (see opposite page) and U.S.A. (Library of America, 1996), Novels 1920-1925 enriches our understanding of Dos Passos as a writer, thinker, and witness to history.

Customer Reviews:

WWI: New York to Paris.......2007-01-27

In this Library of America edition, there are three Dos Passos novels of varying length and subject matter. The first, One Man's Initiation: 1917, is a brief, semi-autobiographical account of the author's tour of duty in the ambulance corps of WWI. One thing holds true for all Dos Passos novels and this is his devotion to linear narrative at the expense of plot development. Dos Passos writes phenomenally well, his imagery exquisite, but one may often wonder to what point it is directed. In longer novels, character formation may be such that the lack of plot is less evident, but One Man's Intiation isn't long enough to create a diversion. Instead, it appears an arbitrary stream of events with little or no objective.

Three Soldiers, the next offering, is an extended example of the first. Again, it takes place during WWI and recounts the US Army experiences of, to no surprise, three soldiers. Here, once more, is a linear narrative devoid of plot, but Dos Passos' character formation and imagery are powerful enough to divert attention. Dos Passos can certainly evoke a time and place and expertly contrasts the desperate, chaotic trenches with the metropolitan flair and relative ease of Paris.

The best of the lot is saved for last in Manhattan Transfer, a novel of early 20th-century New York. The city and it's inhabitants are fertile ground for Dos Passos' talents and he presents here what I consider his finest effort. Still largely plotless, the author nevertheless admirably narrates the pre-war lives of twelve people interconnected in various ways. One readily experiences the sights and sounds of New York and retains a notion of city life as it must have been 90 years ago. Manhattan Transfer alone merits 5 stars, but the inclusion of the first two books lower the rating of this collection to 4. Regardless, I strongly recommend this reading experience to anyone interested in WWI-era American literature. Dos Passos may be different, may be a taste acquired, but he is undoubtedly worthy of our attention.

Best War Novel.......2003-10-10

Final Draft

Three Soldiers: Best War Novel

"How soons it take a feller to git out o'this camp", This quote in John Dos Passos Three Soldiers is typical for the soldiers for the soldiers of that time because, most of the men couldn't wait to charge into battle on the other side of the Atlantic. The authors main goal in the Three Soldiers is to show you what a soldier really goes through. John Dos Passos captures you in this novel how he shows you a soldier's life on the base and off. Also the different characteristics of the three soldiers, each one with a different back ground and each one going through the same struggles the brings to them. Even down to the languages the character uses told us the lifestyles for every day soldier.

Three Soldiers is about 3 men trapped in the world of war, Fuselli, Andrews, and Chrisfield. Each soldier took their own direction into the war. Each Soldier has their own purposes in the war whether it was to become a colonel or to be a war hero. John Dos Passos grabs the readers heart in this epic adventure each character faces.

Three Soldiers gets four stars due to the fact that the story is a bit confusing, as he jumps from the slang talk of the soldiers to the formal language of the colonels. The story takes place at a camp and moves on to the battlegrounds over sea. Each character had their own plot, Which is a great way to keep your attention, because three stories in one is always more interesting.

The setting jumps from the boring base to the treacherous battlefield. The setting is great because it emphasis's on the life of soldiers in that period. The blood and gore that is spread in the battlefield is such good imagery you thing your actually there. The sickness and the smell aboard the boat makes you gag by the use of diction John Dos Passos uses. John Dos Passos is no doubt one of the best with his words.

Also, the way the men speak to each other you could tell they weren't very educated, "you mean do I speak eyetalian, naw sir". The lieutenants speak the opposite with a more formal language, "Italian parentage, I presume? ". The language in this novel is somewhat confusing, because it's hard to read and try to understand what the soldiers are saying and get the story all in one.

The goal in this story for the characters is to get out of the war alive and to get the information back to the people in America about the brutality that goes on overseas. The goal they have to accomplish seems so impossible it grabs the reader's interest so strongly they won't be able to let go. The goals the characters face and defeat, make the novel unforgettable.

All in all, this novel is a great way to show how a soldier lives through a war. John Dos Passos is a great author of imagery and will capture the reader with the fear, love, and hatred these three soldiers go through. This novel could be by far the most realistic fiction novel written.

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