Cellular Physiology of Nerve and Muscle

Book Description

Cellular Physiology of Nerve and Muscle offers a state of the art introduction to the basic physical, electrical, and chemical principles central to the function of nerve and muscle cells. The text begins with an overview of the origin of electrical membrane potential, then clearly illustrates the cellular physiology of nerve cells and muscle cells. Throughout, this new edition simplifies difficult concepts with accessible models and straightforward descriptions of experimental results.

Customer Reviews:

available science to undergraduates.......2001-06-27

Easy to read, easy to understand, easy to follow. 3 main aspects of this wonderfull book yet very rich in its contents. My appreciation goes to the fact that Gary Matthews is able to turn deep information about nerves and muscle cells in a way that we feel a pHD. about the subject. Very clever the way he starts every chapter making us feel we already knew all that stuff anyway it is not so.

An introductory text deserved to be mentioned.......2001-05-23

What could be worse than sitting in a lecture room without understanding the lecture material and desparately looking for a reference book that will lead you through the topics carefully? Sounds familiar, isn'it? Well, here is a book deserved to be mentioned.

As a medical student, I have come across at least ten textbooks in cell physiology. Many of them are written without bearing in mind who their audiences are. However,"Gary Matthews';Cellular Physiology of Nerve and Muscle" has approached the topics in the student's shoes and talked OUR LANGUAGE. Instead of throwing you the formulae, he would try to take you through the idea behind it such as how they are dereived and answers your "WHYS". For instance, he takes his reader step by step to how the membrane potential is determined - really impressive.

A little bit of understanding in basic biology, chemistry and physics would allow you read through the book comfortably. It is true that this book is aiming at a beginner group; it is however, a fantasic teaching tool for all lecturers (to draw examples) and those who would like to fully understand the fundamental science about synapses and neurotransmission.

Book Description

Critically acclaimed and resoundingly popular in its first edition, Modelling Survival Data in Medical Research has been thoroughly revised and updated to reflect the many developments and advances--particularly in software--made in the field over the last 10 years. Now, more than ever, it provides an outstanding text for upper-level and graduate courses in survival analysis, biostatistics, and time-to-event analysis. The treatment begins with an introduction to survival analysis and a description of four studies that lead to survival data. Subsequent chapters then use those data sets and others to illustrate the various analytical techniques applicable to such data, including the Cox regression model, the Weibull proportional hazards model, and others. This edition features a more detailed treatment of topics such as parametric models, accelerated failure time models, and analysis of interval-censored data. The author also focuses the software section on the use of SAS, summarising the methods used by the software to generate its output and examining that output in detail. All of the data sets used in the book are available for download from www.crcpress.com/e_products/downloads. Profusely illustrated with examples and written in the author's trademark, easy-to-follow style, Modelling Survival Data in Medical Research, Second Edition is a thorough, practical guide to survival analysis that reflects current statistical practices.

Customer Reviews:

Good introduction.......2000-03-30

A well-written introductory book. Broad range of material make it a good reference for new comers in survival analysis.

Modeling Survival Data: Extending the Cox Model (Statistics for Biology and Health)

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One of the best statistics texts available today!
Anderson et al for the common man
Great coverage of extensions to important models

Modeling Survival Data: Extending the Cox Model (Statistics for Biology and Health)
Terry M. Therneau , and Patricia M. Grambsch
Manufacturer: Springer
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0387987843

Book Description

This is a book for statistical practitioners, particularly those who design and analyze studies for survival and event history data. Its goal is to extend the toolkit beyond the basic triad provided by most statistical packages: the Kaplan-Meier estimator, log-rank test, and Cox regression model. Building on recent developments motivated by counting process and martingale theory, it shows the reader how to extend the Cox model to analyse multiple/correlated event data using marginal and random effects (frailty) models. It covers the use of residuals and diagnostic plots to identify influential or outlying observations, assess proportional hazards and examine other aspects of goodness of fit. Other topics include time-dependent covariates and strata, discontinuous intervals of risk, multiple time scales, smoothing and regression splines, and the computation of expected survival curves. A knowledge of counting processes and martingales is not assumed as the early chapters provide an introduction to this area. The focus of the book is on actual data examples, the analysis and interpretation of the results, and computation. The methods are now readily available in SAS and S-Plus and this book gives a hands-on introduction, showing how to implement them in both packages, with worked examples for many data sets. The authors call on their extensive experience and give practical advice, including pitfalls to be avoided. Terry Therneau is Head of the Section of Biostatistics, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota. He is actively involved in medical consulting, with emphasis in the areas of chronic liver disease, physical medicine, hematology, and laboratory medicine, and is an author on numerous papers in medical and statistical journals. He wrote two of the original SAS procedures for survival analysis (coxregr and survtest), as well as the majority of the S-Plus survival functions. Patricia Grambsch is Associate Professor in the Division of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, University of Minnesota. She has collaborated extensively with physicians and public health researchers in chronic liver disease, cancer prevention, hypertension clinical trials and psychiatric research. She is a fellow the American Statistical Association and the author of many papers in medical and statistical journals.

Customer Reviews:

One of the best statistics texts available today!.......2002-05-02

As a biostatistics PhD student I've had to endure many very poorly written textbooks (though there are many good one's too). Not only is this book a great text on applied survival analysis, it's a great piece of statistical writing and should be used as an example for all applied texts. The general approach of introducing the theory followed by examples with SAS/SPlus code makes learning the material easy and fun. I wish all statistics texts were even half this good!

Anderson et al for the common man.......2002-01-10

This text is one of the few to make the work of Andersen et al. (Statistical Models Based on Counting Processes, Springer, 1993) accessible to the average statistician. It has three limitations:
1) fails to mention the use of permutation tests for hypotheses regarding the Nelson-Aalen estimator,
2) fails to cite Good PI, Globally almost most powerful tests for censored data,Nonpar Statist 1992, 1:253-262.
3) fails to deal with multiple dependent events (the most common case).
The text also fails to be prescriptive; one is often left feeling that all tests are equal which simply isn't the case.

Great coverage of extensions to important models.......2000-09-08

Terry Therneau is a research statistician at the Mayo Clinic and Patricia Grambsch is a Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Minnesota. The Cox proportional hazards model has been one of the key methods for analyzing survival data with covariates for the last 25 years. Proportionality is a key assumption that limits its use. There has long been a need to find methods which diagnose when the hazard rates are not proportional and provide alternative methods in such situations. Using the theory of counting processes the authors are able to extend the Cox model to more general situations including multiple/correlated event data using either marginal models or random effects (frailty) models. Time dependent covariates are also covered. Some of the theory of martigales and counting processes is included to make the book self-contained. Generalized residuals are used to identify outlying and influential observations (analogous to ordinary regression) and also to assess the proportional hazards assumption.

Although the topics are advanced and the mathematical level is high the book is designed for practitioners, emphasizing applications and providing numerous examples, many from the authors' experience. Statistical analyses are done in SAS and SPlus. The authors tend to use SAS for data management and analysis and SPlus for diagnostics and other plots. Therneau is an expert programmer who has written much of the necessary software in both systems.

Therneau gave an excellent short course that I attended a couple of years ago at the Joint Statistical Meetings based on a draft of the text. The finished product is as good as I expected.

The appendices include SAS and S-Plus tutorials on survival analysis and provide SAS Macros and S functions to apply the new methodology.

Book Description

THE BIG MONEY completes John Dos Passos's three-volume "fable of America's materialistic success and moral decline" (American Heritage) and marks the end of "one of the most ambitious projects that an American novelist has ever undertaken" (Time). Here we come back to America after the war and find a nation on the upswing. Industrialism booms. The stock market surges. Lindbergh takes his solo flight. Henry Ford makes automobiles. From New York to Hollywood, love affairs to business deals, it is a country taking the turns too fast, speeding toward the crash of 1929. Ultimately, whether the novels are read together or separately, they paint a sweeping portrait of collective America and showcase the brilliance and bravery of one of its most enduring and admired writers.

Customer Reviews:

All right, we are two nations.......2006-05-21

So says John Dos Passos in `The Big Money", Volume III of his USA Trilogy. Just as Benjamin Disraeli saw two nations in mid-19th century Britain ("who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws...the rich and the poor"), John Dos Passos saw two nations in the United States in the roaring 1920s.

Dos Passos is one of the (sadly lesser known literary giants of the 20th-century. At the height of his fame in the 1930s he found himself on the same pedestal as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. The first two volumes of the USA Trilogy (42nd Parallel and 1919) were enormous successes. By the time "The Big Money" was released in 1936, Jean-Paul Sartre hailed him as "the greatest writer of our time". Edmund Wilson's review went so far as to claim that Dos Passos was "the first of our writers, with the possible exception of Mark Twain, who has successfully used colloquial American for a novel of the highest artistic seriousness." Dos Passos' literary reputation began to change during the Spanish Civil War. Dos Passos, along with Hemingway and many other literary figures including George Orwell made his way to Spain to assist in the Republican cause. Like Orwell, Dos Passos was deeply affected by the brutal infighting amongst Republican supporters. In the case of Dos Passos he was deeply distressed by murder of a friend (anarchist and Johns Hopkins Professor Jose Robles) apparently executed by Stalinist cadres for his nonconforming radicalism. Hemingway mocked Dos Passos for his unmanly concern for his friend. Hemingway's friends and most of the hard left literary community joined in. It is no surprise that Dos Passos' next book was criticized severely. The New Masses magazine referred to it as a "crude piece of Trotskyist agit-prop". Dos Passos never reclaimed the popularity he had achieved with the USA Trilogy. Unlike Orwell, whose fame and reputation survived and grew after his Spanish Civil War experience, Dos Passos slowly fell out of the public eye. That fate is a shame when one considers the enormous energy and creativity that went into the USA Trilogy.

The idea of two paralel nations, one for the rich and their minions and one for the huddled masses, provides substance to Dos Passos' unique multi-media structure. In addition to the stories of these fictional characters, The Big Money is interspersed with mini-biographies of real people, newsreel clippings that place the story in a social a political context, and a series of autobiographical sketches (The Camera Eye) in which Dos Passos steps out from the story and provides his own personal context to the times.

The key fictional characters in "The Big Money" are Charley Anderson, Mary French, Margo Dowling, and Richard Ellsworth Savage. The "Great War" is over and the USA has, in the words of Warren G. Harding, returned to normalcy. The roaring 20s is in full swing". In one America the characters experience the world of prohibition and speakeasies; stock speculation by millions of Americans are buy and selling shares on profit and margins that are as ephemeral as they are risky. In the `other' America the characters see labor at war with management. Union busting and red baiting is the rule not the exception and urban workers; particularly immigrants are seen as Bolshevik threats. Charley Anderson crashes and burns after a meteoric rise. Mary French is absorbed in the workers' battles of the 1920s and Margo Dowling sleeps her way to fame and fortune in Hollywood.

The biographies cover the same two nation ground with min-biographies of Henry Ford, the Wright Brothers, Thorstein Veblen, Isadora Duncan, Rudolf Valentino, and William Randolph Hearst amongst them. Dos Passos' personal Camera Eye observations reach their emotional climax as the story reaches the execution of anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. It is here where Dos Passos makes his two nations observation.

The Big Money is a worthy finale to The USA Trilogy. After re-reading the entire trilogy, thirty years or so after my first exposure to it in High School, I think it safe to say that it has still holds up under perhaps more mature observation.

The USA Trilogy remains one of the major literary works of the (U.S.) twentieth century and remains a work that should be read and read again. Highly recommended.

Show Me the Money.......2005-12-06

Stacked up against other Lost Generation contemporaries like Hemingway or Fitzgerald, Dos Passos strikes a more minor key. His characters are unmemorable, his prose flat to the point of journalese, and his stabs at experiment, like the "Newsreels" interleafed between chapters, are so much chrome on some otherwise pretty conventional novelistic fenders.

But I think that limited scope is also a strength in his masterpiece, the USA Trilogy. With singleminded determination Dos Passos hammers together, scene by scene and newsreel by newsreel, a stark portrait of the Twenties as an era of greed, confusion, and above all a kind of free floating moral emptiness, a big, powerful, rudderless America cruising blithely on the froth of events. He shows you how the small guys get crushed without wallowing in a lot of sentiment about it, and how the fat cats alternately sleeken or decline into a sea of booze and betrayed ideals without resorting to cartoon stereotypes of `the Man'. You feel sorry for almost everyone on some level in this story, though Dos Passos keeps his lens distant enough to avoid pity, or the tragic glamour of a Jay Gatsby, in order to focus on the larger outlines of the postwar, post-Puritan world his specimens move in.

You don't need to read the preceding books in the Trilogy to enjoy The Big Money. It picks up the characters from the other two volumes, but the novel isn't really so much about these people as it is about the busts and bubbles that push them through history. It'll be hard to look at the Twenties as the colorful era of flappers, speakeasies, and the Charleston again after reading The Big Money; Dos Passos exposes the postwar malaise behind the excess in a way that brought to mind parallels with our own post 9/11 USA. I wonder who's our Dos Passos today? Maybe a filmmaker?

"Fellers, This Ain't A Novel, It's A Gosh-Darned Soapbox!".......2005-02-25

This is probably the most amusing book of the USA trilogy, with a lot of sex and a certain amount of playfulness in the writing. Dos Passos is the kind of writer, however, who is often funnier when he is being scathing than when he trying to amuse. His politics are so badly dated that he often comes across as a reactionary pig just when he wants to be a revolutionary.

Case in point -- lovable Charley Anderson, the flyer who wants to become a captain of industry, is ultimately destroyed by his own lust, greed, and stupidity. Along the way, however, Dos Passon represents him as a "victim" of the rapacious Senator Planet, who is meant to be some sort of predatory aristocratic homosexual. The irony is that the mild, practically gallant flirtation the senator indulges in seems positively tame today, but Dos Passos sees it as The Ultimate Horror. Who coulda thunk that gay-bashing would go stale in just sixty years? Dos Passos sure didn't see it coming.

Other interesting thing, of course, is that Charley is the easy prey of his rich, cruel grasping wife. Some of their sex scenes are sexy, and the irony is that Gladys is a lot more of a feminist heroine than Mary French. When she doesn't want sex with Charley, she says so! I guess to dumb old Dos Passos it's only working men who have the right to go on strike.

By the same token, Margo Dowling, the luscious and high-spirited movie queen who makes it big in tinsel town, is actually quite a likeable charcter. But Dos Passos can't help taking digs at her first husband, a handsome Latino hunk who is -- guess what -- a gay man. Was there some kind of Latino self-loathing here? Dos Passos was a Portuguese, and not particularly masculine. Anyway, some of Margo and her husband's adventures are funny, but Dos Passos can't let them speak for themselves. He has to keep reminding you that handsome Ramon is a sissy -- like that justifies having him murdered off stage.

Read this book if you feel like a few cheap laughs on a man who outlived all his own ideas by a good thirty years.

The bitter gaze!.......2004-12-10

With the parallel 42 and the first catastrophe -1919 - this novel constitutes a trilogy focusing the sentimental , political and economic panorama of USA.
The big money talks about the generation that bloomed after the WW1 ; the lost generation the maxim expression of a media class in advanced discomposure state The story of its pathetic failure, hidden under the veils of the apparent triumph , of many characters who walk through the harsh proof years toward an uncertain destiny .
This book will give you a vital information about the possible consequences of a war to the moral and economic factors of a nation .
Dos Passos was somehow the echo of those dark voices in the first years of the XX Century best known as the perverse poets , headed for Baudelaire and Verlaine , whose role was to expose the crude reality no matter how filthy was .

The whole is more than the sum of its parts.......2004-11-30

The first three decades of the twentieth century in the United States were pivotal in defining what, eventually, the nation would become. At the turn of the century the country was just beginning to find its feet on the world geopolitical scene, ceding power to the colonial powers of Europe but maintaining a dogged independence. A mere thirty years later the United States had not only risen to share world power but dared become a leader on the world stage as the country's wealth, ingenuity, and exportable culture transformed this former isolated nation. This transformation was not lost on John Dos Passos; neither was the importance of history in defining those qualities that became amalgamated and distilled into what is commonly known as national character.

To underscore the importance of these three decades, Dos Passos spent over six years in researching and writing what was to become his materpiece, The USA Trilogy. In these three novels, the author experimented with various narrative techniques combining traditonal story telling; stream of consciousness writing (The Camera Eye sections); biographies of important contemporary persons; clippings from newspapers; snatches of popular songs; advertisements, etc., that created a well definied historical foundation for the events and characters of his novels. Overall, the author was successful in his effort: seldom has history been so well understood by a writer of fiction. The reader not only shares the lives of Dos Passsos' characters but is fully immersed in the politics, culture and economic upheavals of those eras.

Seen as a whole, the trilogy is powerful; however, when the three novels are examined separately as individual works, weaknesses that were camouflaged by the success of the overall scheme are made manifest. The Big Money is the last and worst of the three parts. It seems that the author began to weary as he reached the end of his effort. Dos Passos spends less attention to the Camera Eye sections and biographies (by far, the best two areas of the trilogy) and spends the majority of his attention on developing and bringing to a conclusion the lives of his characters, some of whom have been present in every novel of the trilogy. His attempts at characterization were not successful and his characters come across as wooden caricatures, blindly following the plot from one episode to another, never giving any insight into what motivates them (with the possible exception of the pathetic Mary French). The reader just doesn't care for or about them. Also, perhaps Dos Passos was going through a sort of political catharsis himself and perhaps this added to the malaise and hastiness that is evident in this final novel. The darling of the American left would eventually become an avid backer of Barry Goldwater for President in 1964. Four stars for the trilogy, three stars for The Big Money.

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