LSU Faculty Published Books

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  Stakes and Kidneys: Why Markets in Human Body Parts are Morally Imperative

  2005
  James Stacey Taylor

  It is well known that the numbers of organs that become available each year for transplantation fall far short of the numbers that are actually required. In this boldly argued book James Stacey Taylor contends that, given both this shortage and the desperate poverty that some people endure, it is morally imperative that the current methods of organ procurement be supplemented by a legal, regulated market for human transplant organs purchased from live vendors.Taylor pays particular attention to outlining the implications that recognizing the moral legitimacy of these market transactions in human body parts and reproductive capacities have for public policy.

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  Mechanics of Composite Materials with MATLAB

  2005
  George Z. Voyiadjis

  This is a book for people who love mechanics of composite materials and ? MATLAB . We will use the popular computer package MATLAB as a matrix calculator for doing the numerical calculations needed in mechanics of c- posite materials. In particular, the steps of the mechanical calculations will be emphasized in this book. The reader will not ?nd ready-made MATLAB programs for use as black boxes. Instead step-by-step solutions of composite material mechanics problems are examined in detail using MATLAB. All the problems in the book assume linear elastic behavior in structural mechanics. The emphasis is not on mass computations or programming, but rather on learning the composite material mechanics computations and understanding of the underlying concepts. The basic aspects of the mechanics of ?ber-reinforced composite materials are covered in this book. This includes lamina analysis in both the local and global coordinate systems, laminate analysis, and failure theories of a lamina.
  

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  The American Way: A Geographical History of Crisis and Recovery

  2003
  Carville Earle

  The geography of contemporary U.S. political economy--the relocation of firms toward the sunbelt and abroad; the decline of manufacturing in the rust belt; and the rise of footloose producer services, NAFTA-inspired trade flows--has roots that run deep into our past. This innovative history by one of our most distinguished historical geographers traces their growth back to the seventeenth-century origins of liberalism, republicanism, and the regular financial crises by then endemic in capitalist societies. The problem the English and then the Americans faced was overcoming these crises while avoiding the political extremes of royal absolutism and later of socialism, communism, and fascism. The English way alternated between the doctrinaire ideologies and geographies of republicanism and liberalism. In 1776, by mixing elements of both, Americans created entirely new ideological alloys. Henceforth, policy regimes alternated between Democrats and Republicans and their distinctive fusions of liberal and republican ideology. Democrats combined publicanism's tenets of equality, diversified and volatile regions, and consumer revolution with liberalism's tenets of free trade, geographical consolidation, and dispersion (New Deal 'liberalism'). Republicans mixed liberalism's biases toward elites, regional specialization and stability, and producer revolution with republicanism's tilt toward nationalism, expansionism, and demographic concentration (Reagan's America). Muddying liberal and republican ideologies and geographies in ways that tempered their extremes, Americans would add one more twist. Thrice, upon the birth of the first, second, and third republics, they enlarged the geographical jurisdictions of the federal government, extended the domains of U.S. power, and redefined the nature of the state. Carville Earle defines these enlargements as the distributive and partisan 'sectional state' of the 1790s, the regulatory and redistributive 'national state' of the 1880s, and the neoliberal 'transnational state' of the 1980s. In tandem with the American dynamic of crisis-and-recovery, the author argues that these three 'states' have fashioned a dynamic and dialectical series of geographies that, as tools of ideology, have done much more to ensure the growth and viability of the U.S. economy, polity, and society.

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  Essential Statistics for Public Managers and Policy Analysts

  2002
  Evan M. Berman

  Known for its brevity and student-friendly approach, Essential Statistics for Public Managers and Policy Analysts remains one of the most popular introductory books on statistics for public policy and public administration students, using carefully selected examples tailored specifically for them. The Fourth Edition continues to offer a conceptual understanding of statistics that can be applied readily to the real-life challenges of public administrators and policy analysts. The book provides examples from the areas of human resources management, organizational behavior, budgeting, and public policy to illustrate how public administrators interact with and analyze data.

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  Multi-Criteria Decision Making Methods: A Comparative Study

  2000
  Evangelos Triantaphyllou

  Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) has been one of the fastest growing problem areas in many disciplines. The central problem is how to evaluate a set of alternatives in terms of a number of criteria. Although this problem is very relevant in practice, there are few methods available and their quality is hard to determine. Thus, the question `Which is the best method for a given problem?' has become one of the most important and challenging ones. This is exactly what this book has as its focus and why it is important. The author extensively compares, both theoretically and empirically, real-life MCDM issues and makes the reader aware of quite a number of surprising `abnormalities' with some of these methods. What makes this book so valuable and different is that even though the analyses are rigorous, the results can be understood even by the non-specialist. Audience: Researchers, practitioners, and students; it can be used as a textbook for senior undergraduate or graduate courses in business and engineering.