The dream of automatic language translation is now closer thanks to recent advances in the techniques that underpin statistical machine translation. This class-tested textbook from an active researcher in the field, provides a clear and careful introduction to the latest methods and explains how to build machine translation systems for any two languages. It introduces the subject's building blocks from linguistics and probability, then covers the major models for machine translation: word-based, phrase-based, and tree-based, as well as machine translation evaluation, language modeling, discriminative training and advanced methods to integrate linguistic annotation. The book also reports the latest research, presents the major outstanding challenges, and enables novices as well as experienced researchers to make novel contributions to this exciting area. Ideal for students at undergraduate and graduate level, or for anyone interested in the latest developments in machine translation.

This 2006 book provides a theory of the logic of survival of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), one of the most resilient autocratic regimes in the twentieth century. An autocratic regime hid behind the facade of elections that were held with clockwise precision. Although their outcome was totally predictable, elections were not hollow rituals. The PRI made millions of ordinary citizens vest their interests in the survival of the autocratic regime. Voters could not simply 'throw the rascals out of office' because their choices were constrained by a series of strategic dilemmas that compelled them to support the autocrats. The book also explores the factors that led to the demise of the PRI. The theory sheds light on the logic of 'electoral autocracies', among the most common type of autocracy, and is the only systematic treatment in the literature today dealing with this form of autocracy.

This book aims to demonstrate that the changing relationship between humanity and nature is key to understanding world history. Humans have been grappling with environmental problems since prehistoric times, and the environmental unsustainability of human practices has often been a decisive, if not immediately evident, shaping factor in history. The measures that societies and states have adopted to stabilize the relationship between humans and the natural world have repeatedly contributed to environmental crises over the course of history. Nature and Power traces the expanding scope of environmental action: from initiatives undertaken by individual villages and cities, environmental policy has become a global concern. Efforts to steer human use of nature and natural resources have become complicated, as Nature and Power shows, by particularities of culture and by the vagaries of human nature itself. Environmental history, the author argues, is ultimately the history of human hopes and fears.

Commutative ring theory is important as a foundation for algebraic and complex analytical geometry and this text covers the basic material with a solid knowledge of modern algebra as the only prerequisite.

Since the end of the Cold War, the operations of secret police informers have come under the media spotlight, and it is now common knowledge that vast internal networks of spies in the Soviet Union and East Germany were directed by the Communist Party. By contrast, very little historical information has been available on the covert operations of the security services in Mao Zedong's China. However, as Michael Schoenhals reveals in this intriguing and sometimes sinister account, public security was a top priority for the founders of the People's Republic, and agents were recruited from all levels of society to provide intelligence and ferret out "counter-revolutionaries." On the basis of hitherto classified archival records, the book tells the story of a vast surveillance and control apparatus through a detailed examination of the cultivation and recruitment of agents, their training, and their operational activities across a twenty year period from 1949 to 1967. These revelations add an entirely new dimension to modern China's troubled social and political history. Although the story may be safely set in the past, the development of human sources to sustain an oppressive domestic order is nothing if not eerily relevant to students of the present.

The past quarter of a century has seen dramatic developments in social and political thought. These essays offer an indispensable introduction to some of the most influential amongst them. Quentin Skinner's Introduction traces broad transformations such as the erosion of empiricist assumptions and the undermining of the positivist ideal of the unification of the sciences by the impact of foreign traditions on English-speaking social science. The essays themselves discuss major figures such as Gadamer, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Althusser and Levi-Strauss, giving valuably lucid introductory studies of some difficult but unquestionably major thinkers of our time. Professor Skinner has been awarded the Balzan Prize Life Time Achievement Award for Political Thought, History and Theory. Full details of this award can be found at http://www.balzan.it/News_eng.aspx?ID=2474

Beginning graduate students in mathematics and other quantitative subjects are expected to have a daunting breadth of mathematical knowledge. But few have such a background. This 2002 book will help students to see the broad outline of mathematics and to fill in the gaps in their knowledge. The author explains the basic points and a few key results of all the most important undergraduate topics in mathematics, emphasizing the intuitions behind the subject. The topics include linear algebra, vector calculus, differential geometry, real analysis, point-set topology, probability, complex analysis, abstract algebra, and more. An annotated bibliography then offers a guide to further reading and to more rigorous foundations. This book will be an essential resource for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students in mathematics, the physical sciences, engineering, computer science, statistics, and economics who need to quickly learn some serious mathematics.

Finance provides a dramatic example of the successful application of advanced mathematical techniques to the practical problem of pricing financial derivatives. This self-contained 2002 text is designed for first courses in financial calculus aimed at students with a good background in mathematics. Key concepts such as martingales and change of measure are introduced in the discrete time framework, allowing an accessible account of Brownian motion and stochastic calculus: proofs in the continuous-time world follow naturally. The Black-Scholes pricing formula is first derived in the simplest financial context. The second half of the book is then devoted to increasing the financial sophistication of the models and instruments. The final chapter introduces more advanced topics including stock price models with jumps, and stochastic volatility. A valuable feature is the large number of exercises and examples, designed to test technique and illustrate how the methods and concepts can be applied to realistic financial questions.

Now in its fourth edition, this book has become a classic because of its accessibility to students without a mathematical background, and because it covers not only the staple topics of an intermediate logic course such as Godel's Incompleteness Theorems, but also a large number of optional topics from Turing's theory of computability to Ramsey's theorem. John Burgess has enhanced the book by adding a selection of problems at the end of each chapter.

In the fourteenth century the Old World witnessed a series of profound and abrupt changes in the trajectory of long-established historical trends. Transcontinental networks of exchange fractured and an era of economic contraction and demographic decline dawned from which Latin Christendom would not begin to emerge until its voyages of discovery at the end of the fifteenth century. In a major new study of this 'Great Transition', Bruce Campbell assesses the contributions of commercial recession, war, climate change, and eruption of the Black Death to a far-reaching reversal of fortunes from which no part of Eurasia was spared. The book synthesises a wealth of new historical, palaeo-ecological and biological evidence, including estimates of national income, reconstructions of past climates, and genetic analysis of DNA extracted from the teeth of plague victims, to provide a fresh account of the creation, collapse and realignment of Western Europe's late medieval commercial economy.

This volume brings together a distinguished group of scholars working to address the puzzling durability of communist autocracies in Eastern Europe and Asia, which are the longest-lasting type of nondemocratic regime to emerge after World War I. The volume conceptualizes the communist universe as consisting of the ten regimes in Eastern Europe and Mongolia that eventually collapsed in 1989–91, and the five regimes that survived the fall of the Berlin Wall: China, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, and Cuba. Taken together, the essays offer a theoretical argument that emphasizes the importance of institutional adaptations as a foundation of communist resilience. In particular, the contributors focus on four adaptations: of the economy, of ideology, of the mechanisms for inclusion of potential rivals, and of the institutions of vertical and horizontal accountability. The volume argues that when regimes are no longer able to implement adaptive change, contingent leadership choices and contagion dynamics make collapse more likely. By conducting systematic paired comparisons of the European and Asian cases and by developing arguments that encompass both collapse and resilience, the volume offers a new methodological approach for studying communist autocracies.
Offers a new theoretical explanation of the resilience of communist autocracies that emphasizes the structural conditions under which these regimes are able to implement adaptive change
Offers a new methodological approach for studying communist autocracies by conducting paired comparisons between the ten regimes that eventually collapsed in 1989�91 and the five regimes that survived past 1989: China, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, and Cuba
Makes a major empirical contribution to our knowledge of how communist autocracies function by: 1) adopting a global perspective onto the phenomenon of global communism; 2) analyzing unfamiliar adaptations, such as the development of institutions of accountability; and 3) using new evidence to challenge existing interpretations of communist durability (especially for countries like China, Vietnam, and North Korea) and of the eventual collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and in Mongolia

The imminent demise of the nation-state in the face of global capitalism and supra-national agencies like the United Nations has often been predicted, yet in practice the death of the state seems unimaginable: indeed terrorist activity and corporate collapse have made states, if anything, more assertive in recent years, and the condition of 'statelessness' is regarded as pitiable and grave in the extreme. This volume offers a coherent survey of perceptions of the state, its history, its theoretical underpinnings, and its prospects in the contemporary world. The coverage of the Western European experience is thorough and wide-ranging, with the greatest post-colonial democratic state, India, as a comparative example. The provocative and accessible contributions of a very distinguished and genuinely pan-European team of contributors ensure that States and Citizens provides a unique and valuable resource, of interest to students and teachers of the history of ideas, political theory and European studies. Professer Skinner has been awarded the Balzan Prize Life Time Achievement Award for Political Thought, History and Theory. Full details of this award can be found at http://www.balzan. it/News_eng.aspx?ID=2474

“Addressing the public performances through which crowds and other collectivities state grievances and make claims, Charles Tilly adds yet another dimension to his extraordinary explorations of the dynamics of contention. He deepens the approach to repertoires of contention which he made a staple of the field. In this book his cases come from late 18th and early 19th century Britain but his approach is important for all students of contentious politics everywhere. Tilly’s lively voice animates this book as his intelligence sharpens the analysis.”
-Craig Calhoun, New York University
“Drawing upon a dazzling array of qualitative and quantitative data, Charles Tilly explains the remarkable coherence and continuity of protest repertoires in a wide variety of historical and contemporary settings. This valuable synthesis, by the acknowledged master of the study of contentious politics, advances countless theoretical and methodological contributions to the field.”
-Elizabeth J. Perry, Harvard University
“Only one historical sociologist has, for the past half century, launched so many ships to so many intellectually valuable destinations, and only one has managed to keep the massive sea-lane traffic that resulted so firmly in lucid and critical analytical view. He is Charles Tilly. It’s hard to know what we, mere navigators by the charts he invented, will do without him.”
-James C. Scott, Yale University
“Contentious Performances, completed a few months before Charles Tilly’s untimely death, takes up one of his most important and fruitful ideas: that contentious politics is structured by ‘repertoires of contention.’ In this book Tilly sets out to define repertoires more exactly, to propose methods for detecting their presence, and to show how repertoires emerge and change in varying political contexts. Written with Tilly’s typical verve, this book is an important addition to the oeuvre of one of the great social scientists of our era.”
-William H. Sewell, Jr., The University of Chicago

The Six Dynasties Period (220–589 BCE) is one of the most complex in Chinese history. Written by leading scholars from across the globe, the essays in this volume cover nearly every aspect of the period, including politics, foreign relations, warfare, agriculture, gender, art, philosophy, material culture, local society, and music. While acknowledging the era's political chaos, these essays indicate that this was a transformative period when Chinese culture was significantly changed and enriched by foreign peoples and ideas. It was also a time when history and literature became recognized as independent subjects and religion was transformed by the domestication of Buddhism and the formation of organized Daoism. Many of the trends that shaped the rest of imperial China's history have their origins in this era, such as the commercial vibrancy of southern China, the separation of history and literature from classical studies, and the growing importance of women in politics and religion.

Describing the physical properties of quantum materials near critical points with long-range many-body quantum entanglement, this book introduces readers to the basic theory of quantum phases, their phase transitions and their observable properties. This second edition begins with a new section suitable for an introductory course on quantum phase transitions, assuming no prior knowledge of quantum field theory. It also contains several new chapters to cover important recent advances, such as the Fermi gas near unitarity, Dirac fermions, Fermi liquids and their phase transitions, quantum magnetism, and solvable models obtained from string theory. After introducing the basic theory, it moves on to a detailed description of the canonical quantum-critical phase diagram at non-zero temperatures. Finally, a variety of more complex models are explored. This book is ideal for graduate students and researchers in condensed matter physics and particle and string theory.