Book review

Law & the Internet: Regulating Cyberspace Edited by Lilian Edwards and Charlotte Waelde; Published by Hart Publishing, Oxford, 1997, xix + 264 pp. ISBN 1–901362–30–2 pb, £25.00.     

Book reviews

Software Copyright Law David Bainbridge, 1992 London: Pitman. 256 pp. £47.50

The Electronic Media and the Transformation of Law M. Ethan Katsch. 1989 Oxford: Oxford University Press. 347 pp. £13.95     

Book reviews

Computer Software: legal protection in the United Kingdom Henry Carr & Richard Arnold, 1992 London: Sweet & Maxwell, 2nd ed, xv + 312 pp., £45.00 (hardback)

Advanced Information Systems for Lawyers V. Mital & L. Johnson, 1992 London: Chapman & Hall. pp. 306, £35.00

Law of Contract Laurence Koffman & Elizabeth MacDonald, 1992 London: Fourmat Publishing, 430 pp., paperback £22.50

The Electronic Media and the Transformation of Law M. Ethan Katsh, 1991 Oxford: Oxford University Press. £13.95     

Book Review

Abstract

Computer Supported Cooperative Work: Paul Wilson, Intellect, Oxford, £14.95, ISBN 1-871516-26-9/ Kluwer, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, ISBN 0-7923-1446-8     

Book Review

Abstract

The Visual Mind, Art and Mathematics Emmer, Michele (ed) The MIT Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Leonardo Book series. ISBN 0-262-05048-X. Price £35

Multilingual Multimedia: Bridging the Language Barrier with Intelligent Systems Yazdani, Masoud (ed) Intellect Books, Oxford, 1993 ISBN-l-871516-30-7. Price £14.95     

Book reviews

Crime and the Computer, Martin Wasik, 1991, Oxford: Clarendon Press. £35.00.

Yearbook of Law, Computers and Technology, Volume 5. K.V. Russell (Ed.), 1991. London: Butterworths. £29.50.

Computers, Artificial Intelligence and the Law. Mervyn E. Bennun (Ed.), 1991. London: Ellis Horwood. xx +132 (including bibliography & index), £26.50

Modelling Legal Argument: reasoning with cases and hypotheticals. Kevin D. Ashley, 1990. Cambridge: MIT Press. 329 pp.     

Book reviews

Monk, A., Diaper, D., and Harrison, M. D. (1992). People and Computers VII. 534 pages, US$69.96: Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. (ISBN 0–521–44591–4)

Duffy, T. M., Palmer, J. E., and Mehlenbacher, B. (1992). Online Help: Design and Evaluation. 260 pages, US$55.00 (cloth) US$26.50 (paper): Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corp. (ISBN 0–89391–848–2)     

Book reviews

Foley, James D., van Dam, Andrles, Feiner, Steven K., and Hughes, John. Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice (2nd Ed.), Reading, MA: Addison‐Wesley (1990), pp. 1774. $59.95 (U.S. dollars), ISBN 0–201–12110–7.

Berry, Dianne and Hart, Anna (Eds.). Expert Systems: Human Issues. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (1990), pp. 263. $35.00 (U.S. dollars), ISBN 0–262–02307–5.     

Book reviews

Patent Harmonization Harold C. Wegner London, Sweet & Maxwell, 1993 xx + 376 pp., £70.00 (hardback)

Of Authors and Origins: essays on copyright law Brad Sherman & Alain Strowel (Eds) Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994 xiv + 313 pp., £30.00 (hardback)

Future Air Navigation Systems Werner Guldimann & Stefan Kaiser Dordrecht, Martinus Nijhoff, 1993 Utrecht Studies in Air and Space Law, Vol. 13 viii + 281 pp., £76.50 (hardback)

The Law of Copyright Terence Prime London, Fourmat Publishing, 1992, xxiv + 313 pp., £30.00 (paperback)     

Book reviews

Communication Patterns and Contextual Forms Graziella Tonfoni Intellect, Exeter, 1996 ISBN 1–871516–65‐X

Reflections on Artificial Intelligence The legal, moral and ethical dimensions Blay Whitby Intellect, Exeter, 1996 ISBN 1–871516–68–4. Price £14.95.

Intranets: the surf within James D. Cimino Charles River Media, Rockland, MA, 1997. ISBN 1–886801–40–1. 338pp.

Designing large‐scale web sites: a visual design methodology Darrell Sano Wiley & Sons, New York, 1996. ISBN 0 471 14276 x. 288 pp.     

The symbol grounding problem … remains unsolved

Taddeo and Floridi [2007. A praxical solution of the symbol grounding problem. Minds and Machines, 17, 369–389. (This paper is reprinted in Floridi, L. (2011). The philosophy of information. Oxford: Oxford University Press)] propose a solution to the symbol grounding problem (SGP). Unfortunately, their proposal, while certainly innovative, interesting and – given the acute difficulty of SGP – brave, merely shows that a class of robots can in theory connect, in some sense, the symbols it manipulates with the external world it perceives, and can, on the strength of that connection, communicate in sub-human fashion.     

Book review

Emmeche, Claus, translated by Steven Sampson, (1994). The Garden in the Machine: The Emerging Science of Artificial Life, 199 pages: Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (ISBN 0–691–03330–7)     

Periodic use of time-varying state feedbacks for the receding horizon control of bilinear systems

This paper provides a receding horizon control method for SISO bilinear systems in the presence input constraints. Periodically-invariant sets are derived for a bilinear system with respect to a series of time-varying state feedback gains. The dual-mode control strategy is adopted and the periodically-invariant sets are used as target invariant sets. The state feedback gains used to define the target invariant sets are also used to render degrees of freedom to steer the current state into the target set. The region of attraction for the proposed algorithm is enlarged significantly with an extension of the horizon of periodicity while the on-line. Recommended by Editorial Board member Young Soo Suh under the direction of Editor Jae Weon Choi. This project is conducted through the Practical Application Project of Advanced Microsystems Packaging Program of Seoul Technopark, funded by the Ministry of Knowledge Economy. Young Il Lee was born in Korea in 1963. He received his B.Sc., M.S. and Ph.D. in Control and Instrumentation from Seoul National University. He is currently a Professor of the Dept. of Control and Instrumentation, Seoul National University of Technology. He spent two years at Oxford University as a Visiting Research Fellow. Basil Kouvaritakis was born in Athens, Greece in 1948. He was awarded First-Class Honours in Electrical Engineering from the Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, where he also received his Master and Doctorate. He is currently a Professor in Engineering at the Department of Engineering Science and a Tutorial Fellow at St Edmund Hall, Oxford University. Mark Cannon was born in England in 1971. He received M.Eng. and D.Phil. degrees from Oxford University and S.M. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is currently a University Lecturer in Engineering and Fellow of St. Peter’s College, Oxford University.     

Stability and Scepticism in the Modelling of Doxastic States: Probabilities and Plain Beliefs

There are two prominent ways of formally modelling human belief. One is in terms of plain beliefs (yes-or-no beliefs, beliefs simpliciter), i.e., sets of propositions. The second one is in terms of degrees of beliefs, which are commonly taken to be representable by subjective probability functions. In relating these two ways of modelling human belief, the most natural idea is a thesis frequently attributed to John Locke: a proposition is or ought to be believed (accepted) just in case its subjective probability exceeds a contextually fixed probability threshold \(t<1\). This idea is known to have two serious drawbacks: first, it denies that beliefs are closed under conjunction, and second, it may easily lead to sets of beliefs that are logically inconsistent. In this paper I present two recent accounts of aligning plain belief with subjective probability: the Stability Theory of Leitgeb (Ann Pure Appl Log 164(12):1338–1389, 2013; Philos Rev 123(2):131–171, 2014; Proc Aristot Soc Suppl Vol 89(1):143–185, 2015a; The stability of belief: an essay on rationality and coherence. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015b) and the Probalogical Theory (or Tracking Theory) of Lin and Kelly (Synthese 186(2):531–575, 2012a; J Philos Log 41(6):957–981, 2012b). I argue that Leitgeb’s theory may be too sceptical for the purposes of real life.     

Book reviews

Booth, Paul. An Introduction to Human Computer Interaction. 268 pages, $39.95 (Hardback), $19.95 (Paperback): Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1989, ISBN O‐86377–122‐X (Hbk); ISBN O‐86377–123–8 (Pbk)     

Enquiring about mathematicians enquiring about mathematics

Burton, L. (2004). Mathematicians as Enquirers: Learning about Learning Mathematics. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ISBN 1–4020–7859–5     

Book reviews

Laver, Murray Information Technology: Agent of Change. 189 pages, hardcopy 39.50, paperback 14.95, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1989 ISBN 0 521 35035 2 (hbk.), ISBN 0 521 35955 2

Edited by Long, John and Whitefield, Andy. Cambridge Series on Human‐Computer Interaction 1: Cognitive Ergonomics and Human‐Computer Interaction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1989), pp. 259. $49.50, ISBN O‐521–37179–1.     

Geometry starting with Euclid

Hartshorne, R. (2000). Geometry: Euclid and Beyond. New York: Springer, 2000. ISBN 0–387–98650–2.     

Analysing exemplary science teaching

Alsop, S., Bencze, L., & Pedretti, E. (Eds.). (2005). Analysing Exemplary Science Teaching. Maidenhead: Open University Press. ISBN: 0–335–21311–1