Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Knowledge Discovery in Cyberspace: Statistical Analysis and Predictive Modeling

“This short collection of seven chapters explores some ways that statistical and computational analyses may be applied to law enforcement (writ large). The work is not about “cyberspace” per se. Also, the work seems largely theoretical and abstract, without much in the way of insight about either cybercrime or cybersecurity and little in the way of applied real-world cases.” READ MORE…Reviewed by Shalin Hai-Jew, instructional designer at Kansas State University, USA. Published in C2C Digital Magazine

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High-Temperature Superconductors: Occurrence, Synthesis and Applications

“The book provides information of the state of art concerning the latest developments in the field of high-Tc Superconductors. The book consists of 19 chapters summarizing the recent advances in materials science of high-Tc superconductors, including their physical properties, novel processing routes, and applications. The special emphasis was placed on recent upcoming superconducting applications, especially their importance for transport, health care, automobile etc. In addition to the primary processing for the large grain bulk RE-123 and the flux pinning properties, several different approaches on a large variety of materials like nanowire network fabrics, bulk C-doped MgB2, silver-added, bulk FeSe, and (BiPb)SrCaCuO systems showed progress towards novel applications. The book also covered the new developments concerning the large scale applications of bulk materials, including magnetic bearings, superconducting electric motors and their design layouts, hybrid-type superconducting magnetic bearings for rotating machinery, compact magnetic field generators, refrigerators, and recent developments in the application of superconducting super-magnets in the medical field etc. In this way, the book provides vignettes from a broad range of the most recent developments. So, worldwide updates to the field of superconductivity are focused in single book form, which provides very important information for the superconductivity community” – Masato Murakami, President of Shibaura Institute of Technology, Japan

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Impacting the Digital Divide on a Global Scale: Case Studies of Mobile Technology Integration in Schools around the World

“It is easy to forget to be amazed at the enablements of the WWW and Internet! After all, their integration with modern life is so seamless. Savilla I. Banister’s “Impacting the Digital Divide on a Global Scale: Case Studies of Mobile Technology Integration in Schools around the World” (2017) reminds readers of the just how potent such technologies may be, particularly in developing countries.” READ MORE…Shalin Hai-Jew, Instructional Designer, Kansas State University, USA. Published in C2C Digital Magazine

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Multifaceted Autoethnography: Theoretical Advancements, Practical Considerations and Field Illustrations

“This is essential reading for anyone wanting to find an easily accessible, yet critical and comprehensive information about autoethnographic approaches. It fills an important gap in qualitative consumer research and provides authoritative guidance that both students and seasoned scholars will find useful.” – Richard Kedzior, Bucknell University

“This book provides an important resource in the development of autoethnography within the academy. Drawing on a range of perspectives, styles and disciplinary contexts, the authors demonstrate the diversity and flexibility of autoethnography for exploring a range of complex issues. This collection will prove invaluable to those considering taking up the challenge of autoethnography.” – Katherine Dashper, Leeds Beckett University

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Creating Successful Bridges through Study Abroad: An International Social Work and Culture Competency Approach

“The book is designed to help international social work students learn and practice the basics of social work profession in reference to culture competency as espoused by the Council of Social Work Education’s most recent Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS).This is the first book of its kind focusing on international social work elements in relation to culture competency. The book, in fact, conceives ‘social work without walls.’ Modern social work values focus on universal virtues, genuine goodness and human compassion. The book demonstrates that basic pillars of social work (solidarity, equality and goodwill) are not confined within walls or cultures. The book conveys the message that international social work values embody a boundary less community where mutual differences end up in a common universal goal of peace and prosperity. I recommend that this volume which is concerned with universal culture competence be placed in every library and every school of social work must incorporate it in their curriculum.” – Jitendra Kapoor, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Social Work, Alabama A & M University, USA

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Abdul Aziz Said: The Mualim, The Inspiration

“The book Abdul Aziz Said: The Mualim, The Inspiration is, without a doubt, properly titled. Dr. Said served as an inspiration and a teacher (Mualim) for thousands of individuals in the larger American University community and beyond to the world of policy throughout his more than 50 years of association with that institution. His dedication to peaceful emphatic engagement with all humans without regard to belief, race, ethnicity, age, and gender set a high standard. This dedication is detailed with great affection by the contributions in this book, which his colleagues Abdul Karim Bangura and Mohammed Abu-Nimer have so respectfully edited.” – Louis Goodman, Professor and Emeritus Dean, School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC, USA

“Professor Abdul Aziz Said’s intellectual and spiritual contributions to peace studies and conflict resolution extend beyond academic circles into the actual practice of peace. His passion for and commitment to peace-making is extraordinary and has touched many people in the United States and abroad. His many published papers and books are a testament not only to his dedication but also to his unique knowledge of and effectiveness in peace-making and conflict resolution. We are proud and honored that Professor Said is a trustee of the El-Hibri Foundation. He certainly is a fountain of information on this subject and his guidance is always wise and balanced.” – Fuad El-Hibri, Trustee of the El-Hibri Foundation, Washington, DC, USA

“Professor Abdul Aziz Said, through scholarly articles, conferences and courses, developed the need for the dominant paradigms of International Relations to embrace non-Western approaches that include Islamic and Traditional paradigms. He cultivated through policy advocacy a new generation of scholars who would pursue peace by exploring the links among culture, ethnicity, identity and international conflicts. According to the maxim bonum diffusifum sui i.e. “goodness diffuses itself,” this scholarly multi-disciplinary festschrift by former students and colleagues of Said celebrates the inclusion of those concerns in the contemporary paradigms of International Relations.” – Emmanuel Babatunde, Professor and Chair of Sociology & Criminal Justice, Lincoln University, Pennsylvania, USA

“Wherever I travel I encounter Professor Abdul Aziz Said’s former students whose life work has been influenced by his teaching. Each student was a testament to Professor Said’s ability to see the best in everyone and to recognize and nurture each person’s gift in promoting peace-principles seen in his writing and in this book. The book shows the constant light of Said’s life as a professor and as Mualim (teacher) in a world of constant changes. Each chapter adds to his ideas of promoting a culture of peace. For those who know Professor Said, this book will remind them of his wealth of knowledge, and for those who will be introduced to him by this book, it will be an inspiration.” – Mubarak Awad, Professor and Founder and National President of the Youth Advocate Program, Washington, DC, USA

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Five Scarves: Doing the Impossible – If We Can Reverse Cell Fate, Why Can’t We Redefine Success?

“Despite the noteworthy accomplishments of feminist theory and practice, it’s easy to see how much still has to change. Reminders of structural sexism, implicit bias, and outright abuse abound, from the Everyday Sexism project to #MeToo. In her new book Five Scarves: Doing the Impossible, Rana Dajani interrogates how our conceptions of success and gender equality relate to each other.” READ MORE…Reviewed by Sedeer el-Showk, M.Sc., PhD., full-time freelance writer. Published on the website: Nature Middle East

“An absolutely wonderful read about the aspirations and achievements of a modern woman scientist in contemporary Islam. Dajani uses her own experience to try to forge a cosmopolitan and global approach to the problems of inequality that women everywhere continue to face.” – Evelyn Fox Keller, Professor Emeritus, MIT, Program in Science, Technology and Society, author of Reflections on Gender and Science

“This snapshot of the life, work and thoughts of a remarkable scientist and social advocate at once challenges the reader to rethink basic assumptions and accompanies him or her in revisiting familiar tropes in new settings. With simple prose and confident strides, Dajani introduces topics as different as the challenge of creating world class scientific discovery in the Middle East, the egalitarian organization of domestic responsibilities between parents and children in quotidian family life, the long history of female scientific brilliance in the Arab world, and the extraordinary creation of a global social movement to promote the love of reading among all children. For inspiring millennials to take the world in their hands and insist on realizing their dreams, this book is a must.” – Jacqueline Bhabha, Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Director of Research François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, Harvard University; Jeremiah Smith Jr. Lecturer, Harvard Law School

“This is a wonderful book, the personal story of a warm and brilliant Jordanian cell biologist. She is passionate about her pioneering scientific work and her vision of how science should be taught to inspire young people and promote new ideas – innovation happens on the margins in all fields. She describes how she gets her students to bring art into thinking about and communicating science. She challenges many stereotypes that Westerners tend to have about Islam, the history of science, and the role of women in the Muslim professional world. She advocates for wide-ranging, worldwide policy and practice that will undermine sexism and enhance women’s opportunities – issues on which the USA is remarkably backward compared to many other countries. She is also founder of We Love Reading, an extremely successful program to involve children in community experiences of reading and listening, a culture-changing experience that is personally empowering. This vivid book is a beautifully written inspiration to women, to scientists, to educators and to social activists everywhere.” – Helen Haste, Emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Bath, England; Visiting professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education

“Rana Dajani rightly rejects the label of “Islamic feminist.” She is a global feminist with a tale to tell that will be surprising to many. Reading her story is like a warm embrace from a close friend.” – Anne-Marie Slaughter, President & CEO, New America

“Account of an incredible and inspiring life journey – how a Jordanian biologist navigated her many worlds deftly, a role model for women with big dreams that transcends geography.” – Priyamvada Natarajan, Professor, Departments of Astronomy & Physics, Yale, author of Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos

“This book provides a to-be-cherished insight into the complicated life of a wonderful person as a scientist and a woman, a life that is bursting with intellect, humanity and humility in equal measures. Indeed, Rana Dajani shows that doing the impossible is possible.” – Co-founder, 2011 Global Coordinator of Gender Summit.

“Can a breakthrough in stem-cell research revolutionize feminism? Can a scientist apply the scientific method to her own life to find solutions to social problems? In Five Scarves, Jordanian molecular biologist Rana Dajani reveals with passion and cogency how she has explored those possibilities.” READ MORE…Reviewed by Malak Abedalthagafi, physician-scientist, chair of genomics research at King Fahad Medical City and assistant research professor in molecular genetics and neuropathology King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology. Published in the Nature International Journal of Science

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Modeling Social Behavior and Its Applications

“In this book the editors have compiled a wide variety of models in the social sciences and economics. The social sciences and economy cover a large number of study areas and topics that are very diverse. The topics covered in this book are, of course, not comprehensive and closely related to the research interests of the editors. The word model is also used in its most general sense which is a simplified vision of reality. The chapters in the book give a good introduction to the topics they covered and show to how use modeling techniques to further the understanding of the subject. In some cases, the models can be used to make predictions. I will only mention some of the subjects covered:
Study of the perceived factors affecting happiness, a population based model of bullying, how to rank universities, modeling social behavior in organizations, a constructive capitalization model, and an analysis of data of twitter use.

The models covered go from mathematical models with equations used to represent the simplified reality to statistical models with correlation and data analysis and fitting to others which reduce all the possible factors involved to a few considered the most relevant.

All the chapters used real data to validate the model, have a description of the methods used and have a good set of references. The book is a very useful introduction to a wide range of topics and the interested reader can then use the references provided to get a deeper insight into the topic and adapt the methods and ideas presented to other subjects.”
Benito Chen-Charpentier, Ph.D., Professor of Mathematics, Department of Mathematics, University of Texas at Arlington, USA

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Properties of Fluorite Structure Materials

“Calcium fluoride, CaF2, occurs naturally as the mineral fluorite which lends its name to the deceptively simple cubic structure of four FCC Ca atoms and eight tetrahedrally coordinated F atoms. In simplicity often lies rich diversity, this is certainly the case with materials with the fluorite structure. The book “Properties of Fluorite Structure Materials” Edited by Peter Vajda and Jean-Marc Costantini demonstrates how such diversity in fluorite materials arrives from small changes in stoichiometry.” READ MORE…Dr. Clark S. Snow, Principal Member of the Technical Staff, Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM

“There are not many books dedicated to materials properties of a specific crystal structure type. “Properties of Fluorite Structure Materials” edited by Peter Vajda and Jean­‐Marc Costantini, is one of them.” READ MORE…Professor Klaus Yvon, Physics Department, University of Geneva, Switzerland

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Quark Matter: From Subquarks to the Universe

“Needless to say, the author is one of the founders and world leaders of the subquark model and the pregeometry. This book offers an excellent introduction to the theories with his comprehensive insights into the Universe, including ideas of strange stars and inconstancy of fundamental constants. The episodes on the famous Nobel Laureates, Abdus Salam and Andrei Sakharov with him are also interesting.” – Keiichi Akama, Co-recipient of the Gravity Research Foundation Award in 1982

“This is an interesting book written from a lofty view by Dr. Hidezumi Terazawa who makes his efforts to avoid complicated mathematics so much that other than specialists can follow whole things without any troubles. The author aims ambitiously to show the way of grasping our universe and peculiar phenomena in it from the standpoint of model of subquarks where every entity in the standard model of elementary particles as well as in the Einstein gravity should be composite state of subquarks, in contrast to the mainstream of the present way of thinking. Besides physics, the author includes valuable stories about Dr. Salam and Dr. Sakharov with him, for he was a rare and precious Japanese friend of them. Even only of these parts would be worth reading to those laypersons unfamiliar with physics.” – Yuichi Chikashige, Seikei University, Tokyo, Japan

“This book, Quark Matter: From Subquarks to the Universe, is written by Hidezumi Terazawa who is a theoretical physicist, one of the founders of composite models of quarks and leptons, where a hypothetical point-like particle, supposed to be a subcomponent of quarks and leptons, is called a subquark. The aim of this book is to offer a comprehensive summary of subquark physics to every physicist. I appreciate the author’s effort to avoid complicated mathematics so that this book also appeals to anyone who is not an expert in physics but interested in physics. Especially, two episodes, respectively, focusing on personal relationships with the greatest physicists, Abdus Salam and Andrei Sakharov, known as Nobelists are easy to read and readers can imagine vivid circumstances surrounding the author including private communications. Their brilliant physics perspectives have been succeeded by the author who has indeed provided a theoretically as well as mathematically firm foundation of their physics. Furthermore, specific physics terms are concisely explained to get their meanings listed in the Dictionary sections. For physicists, this book presents a simple paradigm change in physics, which answers its often-raised many questions such as “Why cannot the standard model predict a particle’s mass?” and “How does gravity interact with quarks and leptons?” under a single new hypothetical principle, compositeness of not only quarks and leptons but also gauge bosons and graviton. Various predictions cover those on the weak and Higgs boson masses in the elementary particle physics to a time-varying cosmological constant in the cosmology. Detailed derivation processes of these predictions are not shown but basic mathematical expressions are displayed so that active readers can derive these predictions by manipulating their mathematical skills with the help of useful related references listed in the end of chapters. This book consists of three chapters. The first chapter, Quark Matter and Strange Stars, offers a definition of quark matter, following the Bodmer-Terazawa-Witten hypothesis, which differs from already confirmed forms of matter such as nuclei, quarks and leptons. Illustrated in this chapter are three major forms: strange quark matter containing strange quarks, technibaryonic nuclei containing techniquarks and color-balled nuclei containing colored subquarks. The remaining two chapters contain various useful predictions derived from dynamics of subquarks. The second chapter, Composites of Subquarks as Quark Matter, offers how to calculate free parameters in the standard model. Some of results are beautiful mass-relations satisfied by quarks and leptons and the correctly predicted Higgs boson mass by the weak boson mass from a simple fact that both are composites of the same subquarks but of the different spin states. The last chapter, Dark Energy, Dark Matter, and Strange Stars, deals with the gravity, which is mediated by the graviton. The compositeness of the graviton predicts that the gravitational constant determines the fine structure constant. This gravity is induced by a pregeometry, which is extended into the notion of special inconstancy. The special inconstancy can manage time variations of the two correlated constants, the fine structure and gravitational constants. You will find a more ambitious proposal of general inconstancy, which predicts the cosmological constant inversely proportional to the gravitational constant and results in a time-varying cosmological constant. This time-varying cosmological constant may be a key ingredient to solve the puzzle in the dark energy. This book rich in personal anecdotes and self-contained dictionaries is recommended to any physicists and students who are interested in theoretical scenarios of subquarks and in interactions with great scientists. I enjoyed reading it as a comprehensive and unique introduction to subquark physics. Most interesting questions in the current particle physics and cosmology may not be scientifically answerable now but may need varieties of insights in physical phenomena to reach answers. Today’s main stream of such insights seems the way along superstrings for quarks and leptons, but epoch-making progress may not come by looking along a single line of sight. Subquark physics comes along another line of sight and you have seen the beautiful answers to some of the questions. You may develop scenarios equipped with more sophisticated and advanced mathematics to describe the compositeness of “elementary particles” even along superstrings of subquarks.” – Masaki Yasue, Tokai University

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