LSU Faculty Published Books

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  Beliefs and Leadership in World Politics: Methods and Applications of Operational Code Analysis

  2006
  Mark Schafer

  Focusing on how policy makers make decisions in foreign policy, this book examines how beliefs are causal mechanisms which steer decisions, shape leaders and perceptions of reality, and lead to cognitive and motivated biases that distort, block and recast incoming information from the environment.

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  Above the Age of Reason: Miracles and Wonders in the Long Eighteenth Century

  2006
  Matthew Smith

  This final volume in the subseries is a coda to the 1731 campaigns. Paid for by Walpole's administration and postdating Francklin's conviction for seditious libel, the pamphlet is a point-by-point rebuttal of the Craftsman's agenda, blistering and confident.
  

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  Interpreting Nikolai Gogol within Russian Orthodoxy: A Neglected Influence on the First Great Russian Novelist

  2006
  Leonard J. Stanton

  Presents a tripartite thesis - that the Orthodox religion (though not Russian Orthodox) functions as a sub-text throughout Gogol's work; that Gogol works were of a moralist vein; and that Gogol's torch was passed not to Russian Orthodox writers, but to Jewish writers of Yiddish tales.

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  Dante's Pluralism and the Islamic Philosophy of Religion

  2006
  Gregory B. Stone

  This book explores the Islamic roots of the Western values of tolerance and religious pluralism, and considers Dante from the perspective of the Arab-Islamic philosophical tradition. It examines the relations between Islamic and Western thought, the historical origins of Western values, and the tradition of tolerance in classical Islamic thought.

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  Dante's Pluralism and the Islamic Philosophy of Religion

  2006
  Gregory B. Stone

  This book explores the Islamic roots of the Western values of tolerance and religious pluralism, and considers Dante from the perspective of the Arab-Islamic philosophical tradition. It examines the relations between Islamic and Western thought, the historical origins of Western values, and the tradition of tolerance in classical Islamic thought.

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  Econometric Analysis of Financial and Economic Time Series: Part A

  2006
  Dek Terrell and R. Carter Hill

  The editors are pleased to offer the following papers to the reader in recognition and appreciation of the contributions to our literature made by Robert Engle and Sir Clive Granger, winners of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Economics. The basic themes of this part of "Volume 20 of Advances in Econometrics" are time varying betas of the capital asset pricing model, analysis of predictive densities of nonlinear models of stock returns, modelling multivariate dynamic correlations, flexible seasonal time series models, estimation of long-memory time series models, the application of the technique of boosting in volatility forecasting, the use of different time scales in GARCH modelling, out-of-sample evaluation of the Fed Model in stock price valuation, structural change as an alternative to long memory, the use of smooth transition auto-regressions in stochastic volatility modelling, the analysis of the balanced-ness of regressions analyzing Taylor-Type rules of the Fed Funds rate, a mixture-of-experts approach for the estimation of stochastic volatility, a modern assessment of Clives first published paper on Sunspot activity, and a new class of models of tail-dependence in time series subject to jumps. This series aids in the diffusion of new econometric techniques. Emphasis is placed on expositional clarity and ease of assimilation for readers who are unfamiliar with a given topic of a volume. It illustrates new concepts.
  

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  Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Approaches Based on Rule Induction Techniques

  2006
  Evangelos Triantaphyllou

  This book outlines the core theory and practice of data mining and knowledge discovery (DM & KD) examining theoretical foundations for various methods, and presenting an array of examples, many drawn from real-life applications. Most theoretical developments are accompanied by extensive empirical analysis, offering a deep insight into both theoretical and practical aspects of the subject. The book presents the combined research experiences of 40 expert contributors of world renown.

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  Autobiographical Reflections

  2006
  Eric Voegelin and Ellis Sandoz

  The thirty-fourth volume of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin consists of Voegelin's Autobiographical Reflections , reprinted from the 1989 edition with additional annotations; a glossary of terms used in Voegelin's writings, illustrated with examples from throughout the Collected Works ; a volume index; and a cumulative index. The last covers the entire edition, apart from The History of Political Ideas, which has its own index, and volumes 29 and 30, the Selected Correspondence , which are at present not published. The glossary lists, defines, and illustrates from the author's writings many of the key terms employed, paying particular attention to the Greek terms. The cumulative index supplies a more comprehensive access to the contents of the entire Collected Works. Together, the glossary and index systematically include names, subjects, ideas, writings, and terms, making this culminating volume an indispensable help for any serious study of Eric Voegelin's oeuvre.
  

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  Advances in Damage Mechanics: Metals and Metal Matrix Composites with an Introduction to Fabric Tensors

  2006
  George Z. Voyiadjis and Peter I. Kattan

  The book presents the principles of Damage Mechanics along with the latest research findings. Both isotropic and anisotropic damage mechanisms are presented. Various damage models are presented coupled with elastic and elasto-plastic behavior. The book includes two chapters that are solely dedicated to experimental investigations conducted by the authors. In its last chapter, the book presents experimental data for damage in composite materials that appear in the literature for the first time.

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  The Coupled Theory of Mixtures in Geo-Mechanics with Applications

  2006
  George Z. Voyiadjis and Chung R. Song

  Geomaterials consist of a mixture of solid particles and void space that may be ?lled with ?uid and gas. The solid particles may be di?erent in sizes, shapes, and behavior; and the pore liquid may have various physical and chemical properties. Hence, physical, chemical or electrical interaction - tween the solid particles and pore ?uid or gas may take place. Therefore, the geomaterials in general must be considered a mixture or a multiphase material whose state is described by physical quantities in each phase. The stresses carried by the solid skeleton are typically termed "e?ective stress" while the stresses carried by the pore liquid are termed "pore pressure. " The summation of the e?ective stress and pore pressure is termed "total stress" (Terzaghi, 1943). For a free drainage condition or completely undrained c- dition, the pore pressure change is zero or depends only on the initial stress condition; it does not depend on the skeleton response to external forces. Therefore, a single phase description of soil behavior is adequate. For an intermediate condition, however, some ?ow (pore pressure leak) may take place while the force is applied and the skeleton is under deformation. Due to the leak of pore pressure, the pore pressure changes with time, and the e?ective stress changes and the skeleton deforms with time accordingly. The solution of this intermediate condition, therefore, requires a multi-phase c- tinuum formulations that may address the interaction of solid skeleton and pore liquid interaction.

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  Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long

  2006
  Richard Downing White

  From the moment he took office as governor in 1928 to the day an assassin's bullet cut him down in 1935, Huey Long wielded all but dictatorial control over the state of Louisiana. A man of shameless ambition and ruthless vindictiveness, Long orchestrated elections, hired and fired thousands at will, and deployed the state militia as his personal police force. And yet, paradoxically, as governor and later as senator, Long did more good for the state's poor and uneducated than any politician before or since. Outrageous demagogue or charismatic visionary? In this powerful new biography, Richard D. White, Jr., brings Huey Long to life in all his blazing, controversial glory. White taps invaluable new source material to present a fresh, vivid portrait of both the man and the Depression era that catapulted him to fame. From his boyhood in dirt-poor Winn Parish, Long knew he was destined for power--the problem was how to get it fast enough to satisfy his insatiable appetite. With cunning and crudity unheard of in Louisiana politics, Long crushed his opponents in the 1928 gubernatorial race, then immediately set about tightening his iron grip. The press attacked him viciously, the oil companies howled for his blood after he pushed through a controversial oil processing tax, but Long had the adulation of the people. In 1930, the Kingfish got himself elected senator, and then there was no stopping him. White's account of Long's heyday unfolds with the mesmerizing intensity of a movie. Pegged by President Roosevelt as "one of the two most dangerous men in the country," Long organized a radical movement to redistribute money through his Share Our Wealth Society--and his gospel of pensions for all, a shorter workweek, and free college spread like wildfire. The Louisiana poor already worshiped him for building thousands of miles of roads and funding schools, hospitals, and universities; his outrageous antics on the Senate floor gained him a growing national base. By 1935, despite a barrage of corruption investigations, Huey Long announced that he was running for president. In the end, Long was a tragic hero--a power addict who squandered his genius and came close to destroying the very foundation of democratic rule. Kingfish is a balanced, lucid, and absolutely spellbinding portrait of the life and times of the most incendiary figure in the history of American politics.

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  Modern Baptists: A Novel

  2006
  James Wilcox

  Universally and repeatedly praised ever since it first appeared in 1983, Modern Baptists is the book that launched novelist James Wilcox's career and debuted the endearingly daft community of Tula Springs, Louisiana. It's the tale of Bobby Pickens, assistant manager of Sonny Boy Bargain Store, who gains a new lease on life, though he almost comes to regret it. Bobby's handsome half brother F.X. -- ex-con, ex-actor, and ex-husband three times over -- moves in, and things go awry all over town. Mistaken identities; entangled romances with Burma, Toinette, and Donna Lee; assault and battery; charges of degeneracy; a nervous breakdown -- it all comes to a head at a Christmas Eve party in a cabin on a poisoned swamp. This is sly, madcap romp that offers readers the gift of abundant laughter.
  Modern Baptists was included in Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, in GQ magazine's forty-fifth anniversary issue as one of the best works of fiction in the past forty-five years, and among Toni Morrison's "favorite works by unsung writers" in U.S. News and World Report.

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  Using Computers in Educationals and Psychological Research: Using Information Technologies to Support the Research Process

  2006
  Jerry W. Willis

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  Saving the Nation: Economic Modernity in Republican China

  2006
  Margherita Zanasi

  Economic modernity is so closely associated with nationhood that it is impossible to imagine a modern state without an equally modern economy. Even so, most people would have difficulty defining a modern economy and its connection to nationhood. In Saving the Nation, Margherita Zanasi explores this connection by examining the first nation-building attempt in China after the fall of the empire in 1911.
  
  Challenging the assumption that nations are products of technological and socioeconomic forces, Zanasi argues that it was notions of what constituted a modern nation that led the Nationalist nation-builders to shape China's institutions and economy. In their reform effort, they confronted several questions: What characterized a modern economy? What role would a modern economy play in the overall nation-building effort? And how could China pursue economic modernization while maintaining its distinctive identity? Zanasi expertly shows how these questions were negotiated and contested within the Nationalist Party. Silenced in the Mao years, these dilemmas are reemerging today as a new leadership once again redefines the economic foundation of the nation.

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  Market Reform in Society: Post-Crisis Politics and Economic Change in Authoritarian Peru

  2005
  Moisés Arce

  Going beyond the usual state-centric approach to the study of the politics of neoliberal reform, Moisés Arce emphasizes the importance of understanding the interaction between state reformers and collective actors in society. In Market Reform in Society he helpfully focuses our attention on how various societal groups are affected by different types of reform and how their responses in turn affect the state's subsequent pursuit of reform.

  As a country characterized by strong state autonomy and widespread disintegration of civil society and representative institutions during the 1990s when Alberto Fujimori was president, Peru serves as an excellent case for examining how collective actors can succeed in influencing the reform process. Arce compares reforms in three areas: taxation, pension privatization, and social-sector programs in poverty alleviation and health decentralization. Differences in the concentration or dispersion of costs and benefits, he shows, affected incentives for groups to form and engage in collective action for supporting, opposing, or modifying the reforms.

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  Between Chora and the Good: Metaphor's Metaphysical Neighborhood

  2005
  Charles P. Bigger

  Charles Bigger's goal is to align the primacy of the good in Plato and Christian neoplatonism with the creator God of Genesis and the God of love in the New Testament.

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  An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature

  2005
  Craig Colten

  Strategically situated at the gateway to the Mississippi River yet standing atop a former swamp, New Orleans was from the first what geographer Peirce Lewis called an impossible but inevitable city. How New Orleans came to be, taking shape between the mutual and often contradictory forces of nature and urban development, is the subject of An Unnatural Metropolis. Craig E. Colten traces engineered modifications to New Orleans's natural environment from 1800 to 2000. Before the city could swell in size and commercial importance as its nineteenth-century boosters envisioned, builders had to wrest it from its waterlogged site, protect it from floods, expel disease, and supply basic services using local resources. Colten shows how every manipulation of the environment made an impact on the city's social geography as well - often with unequal, adverse consequences for minorities - and how each still requires maintenance and improvement today. For example, while the massive levee system has controlled the unpredictable Mississippi, it also captures heavy down-pours, creating a new set of internal flood problems.

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  A Hobo Life in the Great Depression: A Regional Narrative From the American Midwest

  2005
  Rebecca W. Crump

  Provides an expression of the American experience sometimes labeled as modernism. This book includes the early twentieth century search for the meaning of life in an era of social and economic break-down, characterized by a sense of loss of a stable, secure world, based on a belief in absolute truth.
  

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  The Economic and Political Aspects of the Tobacco Industry: An Annotated Bibliography and Statisical Review, 1990-2004

  2005
  Tom Diamond

  This unique annotated bibliography guides the reader through the economic and political aspects of the tobacco industry from 1990-2004. The work provides access to quality print and electronic materials, and serves as the standard and comprehensive historical reference source for documents examining a critical side of the tobacco industry. Readers will learn about economic aspects such as packaging, products, sponsorships, military sales, and illegal trade (e.g. smuggling). Political facets include California's battle with the industry - politics, politicians, and lobbyists - and the various tobacco settlement agreements. Four appendixes provide statistical data (e.g. military and commissary tobacco sales), tobacco company profiles, selected tobacco litigation, duty-free and tax-free worldwide sales, and tobacco web sites.

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  Wandering Monks, Virgins, and Pilgrims: Ascetic Travel in the Mediterranean World, A.D. 300-800

  2005
  Maribel Dietz

  Religious travelers were a common sight in the Mediterranean world during Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. In fact, as Maribel Dietz finds in Wandering Monks, Virgins, and Pilgrims , this formative period in the history of Christianity witnessed an explosion of travel, as both men and women took to the roads, seeking spiritual meaning in a life of itinerancy.

  Much of this early Christian religious travel was not focused on a particular holy place, as in the pilgrimage of later centuries to Rome, Jerusalem, and Santiago de Compostela. Rather, the inspiration was more practical. Travel was a way of escaping hostility or social pressures or of visiting living and dead holy people. It was also a means of religious expression of homelessness and temporary exile. The wandering lifestyle mirrored an interior journey, an imitation of Christ and a commitment to the Christian ideal that an individual is only temporarily on this earth.

  Women were especially attracted to religious travel. In the centuries before the widespread cloistering of women, a life of itinerancy offered an alternative to marriage and a religious vocation in a society that excluded women from positions of spiritual leadership.

  Eventually, ascetic travel gave way to full-fledged pilgrimage. Dietz explores how and why religious travel and monasticism diverged and altered so greatly. She examines the importance of the Cluniac reform movement and the creation of the pilgrimage center of Santiago de Compostela in the emergence of a new model of religious travel: goal-centered, long-distance pilgrimage aimed not at monks but at the laity.

  Wandering Monks, Virgins, and Pilgrims is essential reading for those who study the history of monasticism, for it was in a monastic context that religious travel first claimed an essential place within Christianity. It will also be important for anyone interested in pilgrimage and the role of women in the history of Christianity.

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  Creating EAD-Compatible Finding Guides on Paper

  2005
  Elizabeth H. Dow

  Many archivists work in a repository that cannot consider publishing its inventories on the World Wide Web at this time. They have watched the growing use of the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) for publishing inventories and other finding aids on the Web, and they look forward to the day when their repository will also have a place in the Internet's mega-library of intellectual resources. This book shows those archivists how to create clear and precise archival description in order to start preparing for that day. Dow focuses on the information needed to collect and describe one's collection, where to put it in relation to other information, and what standards to use in the process. Rounding out this publication is a bibliography, a glossary of terms, and an index.

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  Poetics of the Creative Process: An Organic Practicum to Playwriting

  2005
  Femi Euba

  Based on the author's teaching methods and experience, the book presents an examination and analysis of the creative process of playwriting through the insight of the very foundations of drama and theatre--the ritual process. Using the playwright as a ritual quester, it attempts to concretize the playwright's creative experience from the gestation of a dramatic idea, through the development of that idea, to its expression as a scripted and theatrical expression. To give the concept a wider scope, parallels and/or contrasts are often made with similar creative experiences, especially performative. The first part of the book visually crystallizes the ritual-creative concept in the psychical emanations of the questing playwright; the second part locates the concept in the dramatic structure, a result of the physical engagement, struggle and expression of the playwright. Various established dramatic works, classical and contemporary, are used to illustrate this creative concept.

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  Conversations with Issac Asimov

  2005
  Carl Freedman

  Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), one of the most popular and influential American authors of the twentieth century, sparked the imagination of generations of writers. His Foundation trilogy paved the way for science fiction that was more speculative and philosophical than had been previously seen in the genre, and his book I, Robot and his story "The Bicentennial Man" have been made into popular movies. First published as a teenager in John W. Campbell's groundbreaking science fiction magazine Astounding , Asimov published over two hundred books during his lifetime.

  While most prolific writers tend to concentrate almost exclusively on a single genre, Asimov was a polymath who wrote widely on a variety of subjects. He authored mysteries, autobiographies, histories, satires, companions to Shakespeare, children's books on science, and collections of bawdy limericks. A lifelong atheist, he nevertheless wrote more than a half dozen books on the Bible.

  Asimov's varied interests establish him as a premier public intellectual, one who was frequently called upon to clarify debates in science, in history, and on the effects of technology on the modern age. Conversations with Isaac Asimov collects interviews with a man considered to be--along with Robert Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt, and Arthur C. Clarke--a founder of modern science fiction. Despite this, Asimov is perhaps best known for his many books of popular science writing. Carl Sagan once described Asimov as the greatest explainer of his age, and this talent made Asimov a natural for the interview form. His manner is always crisp and lucid, his tone always engaging, and his comments always enlightening.

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  Scientific and Religious Habits of Mind: Irreconcilable Tensions in the Curriculum

  2005
  Ron Good

  The open, inquiring nature of science is fundamentally incompatible with the closed, authoritarian nature of most religious training. Reasons for rejection of personal god concepts by Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, and Bertrand Russell are used by this author to underline this incompatibility and to show how each of these important scientists came to reject organized religion. Conflicts between scientific and religious habits of mind are described and ideas for education are offered. Common assumptions about our natural environment and human nature are shown to be obstacles to scientific literacy and to a sound liberal education. Research on the nature of the relationship between scientific and religious habits of mind is proposed, recognizing the potential incompatibilities between these important influences in society.

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  Distributed Sensor Networks

  2005
  Sundararaja S. Iyengar

  The vision of researchers to create smart environments through the deployment of thousands of sensors, each with a short range wireless communications channel and capable of detecting ambient conditions such as temperature, movement, sound, light, or the presence of certain objects is becoming a reality. With the emergence of high-speed networks and with their increased computational capabilities, Distributed Sensor Networks (DSN) have a wide range of real-time applications in aerospace, automation, defense, medical imaging, robotics, and weather prediction. Over the past several years, scientists, engineers, and researchers in a multitude of disciplines have been clamoring for more detailed information without much success. Until now, in fact, this evolving technology was so new and proprietary that information has been available only in scattered articles or basic books.
  
  Distributed Sensor Networks is a complete, self-contained book that introduces background theory and applications of this revolutionary new technology. It contains essential background on wireless networks, signal processing, and self-organizing systems. This volume encompasses a number of recurring themes like multidimensional data structures, reasoning with uncertainty, system dependability, and the use of metaheuristics.
  
  With over 500 illustrations and over 1,000 pages of in depth information, Distributed Sensor Networks is both an excellent introduction to the field and a complete reference source. With contributions from leading experts, virtually every major topic on 'Smart Dust' is examined. This volume promises to become the definitive guide to understanding this far-reaching technology for years to come, opening frontiers in research and applications.