Bringing Life to Ethics: Global Bioethics for a Humane Society

Book Description

Bringing Life to Ethics continues in the tradition of Michael W. Fox's lifelong inquiry into values, social and personal relationships, and the treatment of animals, the environment, and each other. Fox, the popular nationally syndicated columnist of "Ask the Animal Doctor", uses the compass of global bioethics in this book--humility, responsibility, interdisciplinary and intercultural competence, and compassion--to counter technological, ecological, and value threats by pointing in the direction of a humane and sustainable society. Not intended to further the scholarly debate over what constitutes ethics, Fox brings ethics into our personal and professional lives. He shows how bioethics has immediate relevance and applicability to a wide range of public and private enterprises.

Customer Reviews:

A Classic.......1997-04-04

Pilkey argues that barrier islands move, whether we like it or not, and that attempts to stabilize them nearly always make things worse. A wonderful read, especially for your next beach vacation. Pilkey is regarded as something close to the devil incarnate by coastal developers and their allies

Coastal Problems: Geomorphology, Ecology and Society at the Coast

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Coastal Problems: Geomorphology, Ecology and Society at the Coast
Heather Viles
Manufacturer: Arnold Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0340531975

Book Description

As coastal populations burgeon, problems of erosion, pollution and coastal change are becoming ever more serious and necessitate scientifically informed management strategies. This authoritative new study discusses the casues of, and possible solutions to, some of the more pressing problems, against a background of the natural geomorphological and ecological workings of coastal environments. Drawing on their wide experience of temperate and tropical coasts the authors consider all types of coastal problems, ranging from those produced entirely naturally to those where the human impact dominates. A holistic approach to the understanding of coastal problems is suggested, which integrates geomorphology, ecology, and society through a consideration of the basic processes at work. Extensive use is made of case studies drawn from around the world, from beach erosion along the Nigerian coast to the recovery of the Vietnamese mangroves from war damage. Coastal Problems brings together material vital to any attempts to understand and manage our coasts and will be of interest to all those concerned with the environment and its management.

Living with the Coast of Maine (Living with the Shore)

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Living with the Coast of Maine (Living with the Shore)
Joseph T. & Alice R. Kelley
Manufacturer: Duke University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0822308649

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Applied Coastal Geomorphology

Manufacturer: The MIT Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Beach Nourishment and Protection

Manufacturer: National Academy Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0309052904

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Applied Coastal Geomorphology
J. A. (edited by) Steers
Manufacturer: Macmillan
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000NXIVJ6

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Applied Coastal Geomorphology
J. A. (Editor) Steers
Manufacturer: M.I.T. Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000OM4DCU

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Applied Coastal Geomorphology
J.A. Steers (ed.)
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OQFUTQ

Coastal processes and resulting forms of sediment accumulations, Currituck Spit, Virginia-North Carolina: Field trip guidebook (Special report in applied marine science and ocean engineering)

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Coastal processes and resulting forms of sediment accumulations, Currituck Spit, Virginia-North Carolina: Field trip guidebook (Special report in applied marine science and ocean engineering)
Victor Goldsmith
Manufacturer: The Institute
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

Book Description

This book provides the first lucid and accessible account to the modern study of the geometry of four-manifolds. It has become required reading for postgraduates and research workers whose research touches on this topic. Pre-requisites are a firm grounding in differential topology, and geometry as may be gained from the first year of a graduate course. The subject matter of this book is the most significant breakthrough in mathematics of the last fifty years, and Professor Donaldson won a Fields medal for his work in the area. The authors start from the standpoint that the fundamental group and intersection form of a four-manifold provides information about its homology and characteristic classes, but little of its differential topology. It turns out that the classification up to diffeomorphism of four-manifolds is very different from the classification of unimodular forms and that the study of this question leads naturally to the new Donaldson invariants of four-manifolds. A central theme of this book is that the appropriate geometrical tools for investigating these questions come from mathematical physics: the Yang-Mills theory and anti-self dual connections over four-manifolds. One of the many consquences of this theory is that 'exotic' smooth manifolds exist which are homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to (4, and that large classes of forms cannot be realized as intersection forms whereas distinct manifolds may share the same form. These result have had far-reaching consequences in algebraic geometry, topology, and mathematical physics, and will continue to be a mainspring of mathematical research for years to come.

Customer Reviews:

An excellent summary of Donaldson theory.......2000-06-16

This book brings together the brilliant work Donaldson did at Oxford during the early 1980s. The unique properties of 4-manifolds are clearly and concisely written out with concentration on explaining field theories like Yang-Mills and gauge theory with a truly firm mathematical foundation, presented in a book for the first time. A great companion for any researcher in the field of geometry and topology, or even loop quantum gravity!

Notes on Seiberg-Witten Theory (Graduate Studies in Mathematics)

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Notes on Seiberg-Witten Theory (Graduate Studies in Mathematics)
Liviu I. Nicolaescu
Manufacturer: American Mathematical Society
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0821821458

Book Description

In this volume the author presents, in great detail and with many examples, a basic collection of principles, techniques, and applications needed to conduct independent research in gauge theory and its use in geometry and topology. Complete and self-contained computations of the Seiberg-Witten invariants of most simply connected algebraic surfaces using only Witten's factorization method are included. Also given is a new approach to cutting and pasting Seiberg-Witten invariants, which is illustrated by examples such as the connected sum theorem, the blow-up formula, and a proof of a vanishing result of Fintushel and Stern. The book is a suitable textbook for advanced graduate courses in differential geometry, algebraic topology, basic PDEs and functional analysis.

The Seiberg-Witten Equations and Applications to the Topology of Smooth Four-Manifolds. (MN-44)

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Fairly good book on the subject

The Seiberg-Witten Equations and Applications to the Topology of Smooth Four-Manifolds. (MN-44)
John W. Morgan
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0691025975

Book Description

The recent introduction of the Seiberg-Witten invariants of smooth four-manifolds has revolutionized the study of those manifolds. The invariants are gauge-theoretic in nature and are close cousins of the much-studied SU(2)-invariants defined over fifteen years ago by Donaldson. On a practical level, the new invariants have proved to be more powerful and have led to a vast generalization of earlier results. This book is an introduction to the Seiberg-Witten invariants.

The work begins with a review of the classical material on Spin c structures and their associated Dirac operators. Next comes a discussion of the Seiberg-Witten equations, which is set in the context of nonlinear elliptic operators on an appropriate infinite dimensional space of configurations. It is demonstrated that the space of solutions to these equations, called the Seiberg-Witten moduli space, is finite dimensional, and its dimension is then computed. In contrast to the SU(2)-case, the Seiberg-Witten moduli spaces are shown to be compact. The Seiberg-Witten invariant is then essentially the homology class in the space of configurations represented by the Seiberg-Witten moduli space. The last chapter gives a flavor for the applications of these new invariants by computing the invariants for most Kahler surfaces and then deriving some basic toological consequences for these surfaces.

Customer Reviews:

Fairly good book on the subject.......2001-02-28

This book is a pretty good introduction to the main results that caused a flurry of excitement in the mathematical community in the mid 1990's. The mathematical constructions involved here are interesting mostly to those in the area of the differential topology of 4-manifolds. The Seiberg-Witten invariants as they are now called, have been widely discussed since then, but mostly now in the context of symplectic geometry. After a brief overview of spin geometry and Clifford algebras, the author discusses the complex spin representation. This sets up the discussion of spin bundles in the next chapter, and, even though it is really not the place for it, the author does not prove that a principal SO(V) bundle lifts to a principal Spin(V) if and only if the second Stiefel-Whitney class is equal to zero. There are many different proofs of this in the literature, but I have not discovered in any of these proofs any real, sound insight as to why this result is true. The chapter continues its very formal treatment with an overview of spin bundles and the Dirac operator. The next chapter then moves immediately to the Seiberg-Witten equations and they are viewed as nonlinear generalizations of elliptic partial differential equations in the sense that the linearization of both the Seiberg-Witten equations and the gauge group action is shown to be an ellipic complex. The next chapter shows that the moduli space of solutions to the Seiberg-Witten equations is compact. This is the most technical of the chapters and requires attentive reading. The Seiberg-Witten invariant for complex spin structures is discussed in the next chapter. Again one must pay close attention to the details of the arguments. The actual calculation of a Seiberg-Witten invariant is performed in the context of Kahler manifolds in the last chapter of the book. This sets up the reader nicely for the current work on symplectic manifolds. The book will be of interest to mathematicians wanting an understanding of this area of four-dimensional topology and to high-energy physicists who are interested in the low energy behavior and duality in SU(2) supersymmetric gauge theories. The constructions of Seiberg and Witten in quantum field theory are what led to the invariants outlined in this book. All in all a fascinating area of mathematics and its consequences are sill being worked out with diligence.

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The Wild World of 4-Manifolds
Alexandru Scorpan
Manufacturer: American Mathematical Society
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0821837494

Book Description

"The book gives an excellent overview of 4-manifolds, with many figures and historical notes. Graduate students, nonexperts, and experts alike will enjoy browsing through it."

-- Robion C. Kirby, University of California Berkeley

This is a panorama of the topology of simply-connected smooth manifolds of dimension four.

Dimension four is unlike any other dimension; it is large enough to have room for wild things to happen, but too small to have room to undo them. For example, only manifolds of dimension four can exhibit infinitely many distinct smooth structures. Indeed, their topology remains the least understood today.

The first part of the book puts things in context with a survey of higher dimensions and of topological 4-manifolds. The second part investigates the main invariant of a 4-manifold--the intersection form--and its interaction with the topology of the manifold. The third part reviews complex surfaces as an important source of examples. The fourth and final part of the book presents gauge theory. This differential-geometric method has brought to light the unwieldy nature of smooth 4-manifolds; and although the method brings new insights, it has raised more questions than answers.

Book Description

This book describes work on the characterization of closed 4-manifolds in terms of familiar invariants such as Euler characteristic, fundamental group, and Stiefel-Whitney classes. Using techniques from homological group theory, the theory of 3-manifolds and topological surgery, infrasolvmanifolds are characterized up to homeomorphism, and surface bundles are characterized up to simple homotopy equivalence. Non-orientable cases are also considered wherever possible, and in the final chapter the results obtained earlier are applied to 2-knots and complex analytic surfaces.

Connections, Definite Forms, and Four-manifolds (Oxford Mathematical Monographs)

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Connections, Definite Forms, and Four-manifolds (Oxford Mathematical Monographs)
Ted Petrie , and John Randall
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Book Description

The central theme of this book is the study of self-dual connections on four-manifolds. The author's aim is to present a lucid introduction to moduli space techniques (for vector bundles with SO (3) as structure group) and to apply them to four-manifolds. The authors have adopted a
topologists' perspective. For example, they have included some explicit calculations using the Atiyah-Singer index theorem as well as methods from equivariant topology in the study of the topology of the moduli space. Results covered include Donaldson's Theorem that the only positive definite form
which occurs as an intersection form of a smooth four-manifold is the standard positive definite form, as well as those of Fintushel and Stern which show that the integral homology cobordism group of integral homology three-spheres has elements of infinite order. Little previous knowledge of
differential geometry is assumed and so postgraduate students and research workers will find this both an accessible and complete introduction to currently one of the most active areas of mathematical research.

Four-Manifold Theory (Contemporary Mathematics)

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Four-Manifold Theory (Contemporary Mathematics)
Cameron Gordon
Manufacturer: Amer Mathematical Society
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Book Description

These are the proceedings of the Summer Research Conference on 4-manifolds held at Durham, New Hampshire, July 1982, under the auspices of the American Mathematical Society and National Science Foundation.

The conference was highlighted by the breakthroughs of Michael Freedman and S. K. Donaldson and by Frank Quinn's completion at the conference of the proof of the annulus conjecture. (We commend the AMS committee, particularly Julius Shaneson, who had the foresight in Spring 1981 to choose the subject, 4-manifolds, in which such remarkable activity was imminent.) Freedman and several others spoke on his work; some of their talks are represented by papers in this volume. Donaldson and Clifford H. Taubes gave surveys of their work on gauge theory and 4-manifolds and their papers are also included herein. There were a variety of other lectures, including Quinn's surprise, and a couple of problem sessions which led to the problem list.

Book Description

The lectures in this volume provide a perspective on how 4-manifold theory was studied before the discovery of modern-day Seiberg-Witten theory. One reason the progress using the Seiberg-Witten invariants was so spectacular was that those studying $SU(2)$-gauge theory had more than ten years' experience with the subject. The tools had been honed, the correct questions formulated, and the basic strategies well understood. The knowledge immediately bore fruit in the technically simpler environment of the Seiberg-Witten theory.

Gauge theory long predates Donaldson's applications of the subject to 4-manifold topology, where the central concern was the geometry of the moduli space. One reason for the interest in this study is the connection between the gauge theory moduli spaces of a Kähler manifold and the algebro-geometric moduli space of stable holomorphic bundles over the manifold. The extra geometric richness of the $SU(2)$-moduli spaces may one day be important for purposes beyond the algebraic invariants that have been studied to date. It is for this reason that the results presented in this volume will be essential.

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Out of date, but still could be useful

Metrics, Connections and Gluing Theorems (Cbms Regional Conference Series in Mathematics)
Clifford Henry Taubes
Manufacturer: American Mathematical Society
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0821803239

Book Description

In this book, the author's goal is to provide an introduction to some of the analytic underpinnings for the geometry of anti-self duality in 4-dimensions. Anti-self duality is rather special to 4-dimensions and the imposition of this condition on curvatures of connections on vector bundles and on curvatures of Riemannian metrics has resulted in some spectacular mathematics.

The book reviews some basic geometry, but it is assumed that the reader has a general background in differential geometry (as would be obtained by reading a standard text on the subject). Some of the fundamental references include Atiyah, Hitchin and Singer, Freed and Uhlenbeck, Donaldson and Kronheimer, and Kronheimer and Mrowka. The last chapter contains open problems and conjectures.

Customer Reviews:

Out of date, but still could be useful.......2002-10-01

The results in this book have been superseded by the results of Nathan Seiberg and Edward Witten that appeared a short time after this book was published. The Seiberg-Witten theory caused great excitement among the mathematical community who do research in differential geometry and differential topology, particularly in the area of the differential toplogy of 4-dimensional manifolds. Proclaiming the "end of the Donaldson theory", mathematicians moved on to study the properties of the Seiberg-Witten equation, which is still nonlinear enough to be interesting.

Thus the discussions in this book are somewhat dated, but still could be of interest from a mathematical history standpoint or with the goal perhaps of motivating the Seiberg-Witten theory, although the self-dual Yang-Mills equations, a cornerstone of the Donaldson theory, are not discussed in the book. Instead the author studies the anti-self dual equations. These arise uniquely in four dimensions due to the fact that the Lie algebra so(4) of the special orthogonal group SO(4) is not simple, but instead decomposes as the direct sum of two copies of the Lie algebra so(3) of SO(3). This enables one to decompose the tangent bundle of the manifold into a direct sum of two oriented 3-plane bundles. The curvature of the Levi-Civita connection then splits with respect to this decomposition, the decomposition having entries involving the scalar curvature, the traceless Ricci tensor, and the self-dual and anti-self dual Weyl curvature tensors. The question of the existence of metrics on the manifold for which the anti-self dual part vanishes is the subject of the book, with particular attention paid to complex vector bundles over the manifold. The anti-self dual equations are consequently a set of algebraic equations for the curvature, which are equivalent, over an open set in the manifold, to a first-order differential equation involving a 1-form over this open set and taking values in the Lie algebra of complex 2-space. The main strategy the author employs for studying these equations is to show that they linearize to Fredholm equations. Thus a kind of generalization of the Fredholm property holds here in the context of (infinite-dimensional) vector bundles. A section of an infinite-dimensional vector bundle which linearizes to a Fredholm operator acts essentially like a section of a finite dimensional bundle over a finite dimensional manifold.

Book Description

This milestone collection gathers unpublished stories, essays, letters, poems and a teleplay written by Acosta (1935-1974), the Chicano attorney, political activist and writer, between the early 1960s and shortly before his misterious disappearance in Mazatlán, Mexico in 1974.

Customer Reviews:

work of literature.......2000-07-31

With this book the Brown Buffalo has established himself as a great writer of gonzo.

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