Customer Reviews (1)

'Developing' Uganda?
Those familiar with H. B. Hansen and M. Twaddle's series of books dealing with Uganda's politics, economy, society and international relations will not be disappointed with 'Developing Uganda'. If you are not familiar with this series but have an academic or more practical interest in this key state in Eastern Africa then it will serve as an excellent, although indepth, introduction.

'Developing Uganda' is an edited volume with contributions from academics and policy makers based in Africa, Europe and the US. The content of the books' 20 chapters is very broad. It addresses a number of issues salient to contemporary Uganda from the power and influence of the World Bank/IMF and neoliberal reform, to new social movements and the role of NGOs, to issues of gender and AIDs.

However, those of a more progressive political persuasion may find the book a touch lacking. In fact, a previous book in the same series edited by Hansen and Twaddle, 'Changing Uganda' (1991), is far more inclusive of radical as well as establishment approaches and is, as a result, a more nuanced volume - although now a touch out of date. Nonetheless, within the text reviewed here the chapters by S. Dicklitch on NGOs, G. B. Tukahebwa on privatisation, I. Livingstone on industry, and V. Jamal on poverty are all excellent and insightful contributions.

Despite its faults, 'Developing Uganda' is definitely a recommended text. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. 1979-   2. Africa - General   3. Business / Economics / Finance   4. Current Affairs   5. Development - Economic Development   6. Economic conditions   7. Economic policy   8. Political   9. Political History   10. Politics and government   11. Politics/International Relations   12. Uganda   

Customer Reviews (1)

A new approach to stochastic partial differential equations
SUMMARY: This book presents a new approach to stochastic partial differential equations based on white noise analysis. The framework makes heavy use of functional analysis and its main starting point is the Wiener chaos expansion and analogous expansions on different functional spaces (Schwartz spaces).

A stochastic PDE is a PDE containing a random noise term, which may be additive or multiplicative. One of the problems when working with Stochastic PDEs is to define a notion of solution which is meaningfully extendable to the nonlinear case. Problems arises because the noise term is highly irregular: for each sample of the noise, one has a (nonlinear) PDE with a very irregular term in it. In physical terms, one may encounter "ultraviolet" divergences. So, one is first faced with an existence/ unicity problem for such equations. Additionally, one would like to describe probabilitic properties of such solutions.

The method proposed by the authors can be described as follows: first, one expands the noise term in the PDE using a Wiener chaos expansion. Truncating the expansion at a certain order n yields a "regularized" equation in which the noise is smoothened. This can be roughly described as an ultraviolet cutoff. The equation then has a unique solution in an appropriate functional space. The solution of the original SPDE is then defined as the sequence of truncated solutions. In some cases, this sequence may converge in some classical sense in an appropriate function space to a weak or strong solution defined in the usual sense. But, in general, this is not the case and the notion of solution defined by the authors may be different from classical notions.

Although the title contains the word 'modeling', it may look as the abstract definition of solution proposed by the authors may have little to do with the physical notion of solution. One feels a need for a justification why this definition of a solution is physically relevant at all, which I feel is lacking. The authors give some examples, such as the noisy Burgers equation and the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation, but the results predicted for the solutions seem to be different than the ones predicted for example by renormalization group analysis for example regarding the scaling exponents for KPZ. Also, it would be interesting to compare this notion of solution with more classical ones for example using the semigroup/ Green function approach.

The approach proposed bears a strong resemblance to ultraviolet regularization schemes used in renormalization group theory. In fact, this framework may be seenas a probabilistic setting for renormalization methods.Unfortunately there is little discussion of this point in the book.

The first chapters contain an interesting review of white noise expansions and chaos expansions, useful in their own interest.

Overall I recommend this book as interesting for researchers in mathematical and theoretical physics. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Mathematics   2. Partial Differential Equations   3. Probability & Statistics - General   4. Science/Mathematics   5. Stochastic Processes   6. Stochastic partial differentia   7. Stochastic partial differential equations   

Subjects:  1. 1979-   2. Africa - Central   3. Business/Economics   4. East Africa - History   5. Economic conditions   6. History   7. History - General History   8. Uganda   

Subjects:  1. Copyright and electronic data   2. Copyright and electronic data processing   3. Data protection   4. Electronic commerce   5. Law   6. Law and legislation   7. Patent, Trademark, Copyright