There are literally dozens of errors in this dictionary. "Banner year" is translated literally as "año insignia," which is nonsense in Spanish. "Mover and shaker" is also translated literally ("promotor e impulsor"). It's as though the author didn't understand English! Other absurdities are "herein" (aquí dentro--should be "en el presente"), hereunder (más abajo--should be "conforme al presente"), etc. Again, these are literal translations that do not fit in business or legal writing. "Judicial notice" which is actually "reconocimiento de hechos notorios" is translated as citación judicial--again, complete lack of understanding of the term. I'd stay away from this one like the plague.

As a translator who specializes in financial and commerical texts, I can honestly say that the Routledge is the most complete dictionary I have found on the subject. There is nothing that compares to it.

Bio-inspired computing has taken the world by storm in the last few decades, going by the names of neural networks, genetic algorithms, evolutionary programming, and swarm intelligence. Another one has arisen has appeared in the last 15 years or so, is inspired by the biology of the immune system, and is the subject of this book. The authors of the book are aware that the approach is novel, but do a good job of presenting the field to newcomers (like myself), who want to know what it is all about and if it indeed has useful applications. They discuss their own work in the area and that of others, and extensive references are given for further reading.

After a short introduction to the subject in chapter 1, the authors move on to a description of the biological immune system in chapter 2. They stress the need for understanding the mechanisms that regulate the adaptive immune response, so as to be able to control the transformation of an immune response from an "aggressive" to a "benign" state. The authors explain the difference between the "innate" immune system and the "adaptive" immune system. As the name implies, the adaptive immune response is a kind of "learning" ability that allows the immune system to improve itself as antigens are encountered. The innate immune response though remains constant along the lifetime of the organism. A short description of the T-cells and B-cells is given, some of which can differentiate into "memory cells" that remain circulating in the body and protect against a given antigen. Particularly interesting is the role of "pattern recognition receptors" that recognize molecular patterns associated with pathogens. The clonal selection theory of the adaptive immune system, along with the somewhat controversial immune network theory.

Chapter 3 is an overview of how to to actually create an artificial immune system (AIS). The emphasize that anything deemed controversial in the biological framework need not be when viewed from a computational perspective, such as the immune network theory. Biology is used for the inspiration of the computational models, and as such they need not reflect entirely what is true in the biological case. They also emphasize that the various attempts to simulate the immune system on computers are not examples of an AIS. Also, an AIS is more than just a pattern recognition algorithm, even though it must employ this in its use. To give a framework for an AIS, the authors employ a model of immune cells and molecules called a "shape-space". In this shape space one models the affinity of the "molecules" via a metric, which the authors eventually choose to be the Hamming metric. They then give an overview of various algorithms for modeling the immune system, such as bone marrow, thymus, and immune network models, in addition to clonal selection algorithms. For those readers familiar with dynamical systems, the immune network models are very interesting, due to the use of differential equations, and also the fact that such in immune network models the immune system is performing even in the absence of external stimuli.

Chapter 4 gives a survey of artificial immune systems, such as spectra recognition for chemical reactions, infectious disease surveillance, analysis of medical data, and computational security. The latter was of particular importance to me, so I read the discussion and the references with more attention than other parts of the book. The issue with the approaches for network intrusion detection and virus detection lie mostly in the performance of the network. Agents that are cleverly designed may form a very accurate way of detecting this malicious behavior, but their deployment on a network may degrade the its performance considerably.

I did not read chapters 5 and 6 so I will omit their review.

In chapter 7, the authors discuss various case studies in artificial immune systems that shed more light on the examples of Chapter 4. The computer network security application is discussed again, and a low number of false positives is shown to follow after the artificial immune system is simulated. However, the performance of the network is not pointed out by the authors. The authors also give more details on the application of artificial immune systems to data analysis and optimization. The discussion is interesting, but it is still an open question as to whether this approach is indeed better than other ones in optimization theory, i.e. how does the immune approach compare with the "free-lunch" theorems so often quoted in optimization theory? The authors do make a brief comparison of their optimization algorithm with evolution strategies, and this is somewhat helpful to those who are familiar with the latter.

The last chapter of the book looks to future applications of artificial immune systems, and in its connection with learning paradigms in artificial intelligence. The authors are open-minded about the future of AIS but also subject it to critical analysis.

The book motivated me to investigate the use of AIS more fully, and to begin thinking about possible applications, such as 1. Event correlation in networks. 2. Network routing: Routes that are inefficient are viewed as "antigens", and the network immune system will then cure the system of these routes, meaning that it will remember them as being antigens up to some practical time scale. The routing scheme in place will not implement these routes within this time frame. 3. The TCP/IP protocol in the context of the immune network theory where reliable connections are based on the epitope/paratope recognition capability. Any emergent properties of the network overlaid with the TCP/IP protocol such as learning, memory, and self-tolerance could be studied by viewing the packet network as an immune network. 4. Network QoS, with packets marked as low priority viewed as temporary antigens. 5. Using the function optimization capabilities of AIS do calculate the effective bandwidth of ATM networks. 6. Data analysis, particularly in the construction of algorithms to distinguish chaos from noise.

The translation of a famous discussion between Fidel Castro and one of the major spokesmen of Liberation Theology. The priest seems to worship Fidel more than G-d and offers very little discussion, simply pandering to Castro, agreeing with his every word, and giving him a platform to talk about a wide range of topics. Reads more like 'Fidel's Philosophy'. Fidel isn't exactly the great orator he is supposed to be, judging from reading his speeches, but he does make some nice points that apply to education and religion worldwide. Somewhat recommended. Better than your average fare from Cuba.

The writter lacks of the knowledge of the industry in Cuba,the people interviewed are in the majority employees of the same firm in Pre-Castro Cuba, mainly the book is a "propaganda" to Goar Mestre, a Cuban Zar of Cuba's Radio and Television.

This book details Castro's use of Marti, the Cuban patriot, in his speeches and his rhetoric to try to legitimize his regime. It would have been nice to compare this to how the Cuban-Americans in Miami also claim Marti as supporting their views but Rice's study prefers to focus on Fidel's speeches. A rare balanced book on Cuban affairs. Unfortunately, a very dry account as well.

This book COULD have been a vital link between disciplines--anthropology, cultural theory, sociology and linguistics. Instead one gets the vague sense of incohesiveness from the work as a whole.

But that problem is eclipsed by another more insidious one--the book has countless spelling, syntax and general native language interference errors, to the point that even the most sympathetic reader mistrusts the message as well as its execution. A shame; I had great hopes for this book. One expects better from this press, which has produced such useful texts as Jack Child's Introduction to Spanish Translation.

Translators, translations theorists and their students are not alone in being discriminating readers, but they are especially so, and deserve better.

I'm truy beginning to beieve that we should have a rating system for these books because this one is a dog ...

OK so we have Warren in this contemporaty book (note I don't call it an erotic novel) and he convinces Angela, his pretty girlfreind that they shoud spice up their life with some eroticism that he learned about in his erotica collection.

Unbelievable as it may be, Warrent then dresses Angela up as a horse, with a bridal and a bit, and then makes her whinnie as he of course spanks her. I saw a TV thing recently where there are actually people that enjoy behaving and dressing up as horses.

Anyway, after the horse thing our young couple goes to some remote Montana farm where they are spanked, spanked, cross dressed and wel .. yawn yawn yawn ...

OK so here is this books score on a scale of 5 .....

eroticism 0

plot 1

character development 1

just plain sex 0 (...)

horse imagery 4

save your money friends .... like I said it's a dog .... or horse or whatever

I was extremely disappointed in this book -- I didn't even finish it. It seems the only dialog the main characters were capable of was, "No-no-don't-I couldn't stand it." There was no imagination in the writing of this book. The same things happened to each of the characters, i.e. what happened to the man in one chapter happened to the woman in the next. No character development to make you care about any of the characters and the plot was sorely lacking. What a disappointment for a Blue Moon book.

More of what you usually find in writing about Cuba, either the Castro is Perfect or Castro is Evil Personified. Mallin favors the latter view and doesn't let objectivity get in the way of a good partisan screed. There are few good balanced books on Cuba (Louis Perez Jr.s' history is, I think, the best) - this book is not one of those few. It's more of the same old, same old we've been seeing the past 40 years.