Great for Tournaments and Improvement in Pattern Recognition
937526
I had the opportunity to preview this book when I got my local public library to order Lev Alburt's complete training series. It was so good as a tournament trainer that I just bought it on Amazon. This book conveys many tactical and endgame concepts in puzzle form, many taken from famous games, such as Lasker's double bishop sacrifice. On the left hand side of the page are four problems, and on the right hand side are the solutions with explanations that vary in degrees of extensiveness. Alburt recommends to try to solve these problems quickly and don't worry about getting them correct, because the value in the book is repeatedly going over the problems until your recognition of the patterns the problems contain is automatic. I followed Alburt's advice and noticed a decent improvement in my tactical recognition when I played in a tournament in Chicago and on line. The beauty of this book is that it is truly a "pocket book" so that I was able to do puzzles on the bus and other places of leisure while sitting. :) My only quip is that the commentary on problems varies from extensive to none at all and I would like to see a categorization of problems. The price is also slightly on the high end (but in my opinion worth it) for the amount of material provided.
3705334
I have needed to scan numerous color slides, black and white negatives, and black and white printed images for use in publications, so I needed a professional quality scanner. I had been paying my local photo lab a hefty sum to scan slides and negs for me but they have closed and anyway I wanted to be able to do it myself. I chose the Epson Perfection V750 Pro after reading several of these very helpful reviews. Overall I have been very pleased, but it took some research and experimentation to figure out how to get the best results.

I discovered that there is a huge difference in the results you will get from different scanner driver software packages. I get the best results from the standard Epson Scan software that comes with the scanner. The SilverFast driver that is bundled with the scanner and that many professionals seem to be excited about, judging from online chats, always produced out-of-focus results for me when scanning slides. There was no combination of settings I could find to get better results. I also tried downloading VueScan that a lot of people seem to like, but it produced very harsh results. Epson Scan is the best, and I use it with no special settings. I like the raw scan, and then I add effects such as Unsharp Mask in PhotoShop.

The scanner produces passable results with color slides. The results are publishable, but not as good in terms of sharpness and highlights in the dark areas as my pro lab used to get. I do not know what scanner they used. The point is that there are better professional scanners out there, but my understanding is that they cost thousands of dollars. Interesting hint I learned: always select 6400 dpi for slides and negatives, which is the maximum actual resolution the scanner can achieve. There are higher settings, but those are interpolated resolutions. The computer compounds the data, which can be useful for some purposes that I do not understand, but you will not get sharper images that way, just much larger files.

The scanner is a real champ with black and white, 35 mm negatives. Very easy to use, and I find the results to be even better than old fashioned darkroom printing. The results can appear more grainy than darkroom prints, but the grain can be reduced in PhotoShop with the Reduce Noise Filter. The scanner also produces very sharp and bright scans of flat paper prints. Much better than my old desktop scanner. Overall it was well worth the money, and my only disappointment is that it does not scan slides as well as it scans black and white negatives.
65906
An excellent introduction to chess visualization that any player rated under 2000 should use. Explanations, examples and tests are plentiful in the book. It covers familiarizations with squares, lines of attack and even Knight paths. There is also a section on learning to play blindfold chess. Visualization isn't easy to master in any circumstance, but this book offers important steps you can take to improve your abilities. Highly recommended as a learning tool.
1544591
I like this book! I will check it often to see, "What's Up Tonight" since the author suggests many objects not on my list. The suggested Field Of View will solve the problem of my selecting too small an FOV because a chart caused me to underestimate the full size of an object plus some star field around it. I don't discover that mistake until the following day. The suggestion of a IDAS filter has already improved my images from a light polluted back yard. The suggested processing for each object will be very helpful.
4890081
This book is not as advanced as some others out there, but the breadth of information covered should help any tournament player.  The book assumes that you already know how to play TAG and introduces more LAGGY concepts.  It helped my game quite a bit in a sense that it gave me a glimpse into how some of the tournament regulars think.  The next step is to use this information and exploit others.  Overall, an excellent book, deserving its place on any poker bookshelf.
4112497
Prof. Wagon shares his experience about the difficulties he encountered in ensuring the correctness of the algorithms.
The lessons he offers on the importance of careful thinking and meticulously checking the results of calculations is alone worth the price of the book.
The algorithms in the book require Mathematica 3. They seem to work well with Mathematica 4 as well.
The selection of topics is excellent. This book can provide a great start to a lot fun and learning with Mathematica.
I hope Prof. Wagon brings out a new expanded edition for the current edition of Mathematica soon.
1511934
Fukunaga is a standard source for pattern recognition methods often cited in the engineering literature. Covers parametric (particularly linear and quadratic discriminant algorithms) and nonparametric methods (density estimation). It is designed for and popular with engineers. When I was working at Nichols Research Corporation Fukunaga's papers and this book (earlier edition) were often cited as sources to justify the algorithms we used for discrimination problems. In fact Fukunaga had been a consultant to the company (used primarily by the Boston branch of the company where the KENN algorithms were developed). It is a reputable source. I still like Duda and Hart (1973) for good explanations of the fundamental concepts. The second edition that was recent ly published with Stark as a third author is also highly recommended.  For statisticians McLachlan's book is now far and away the best source.
1474518
I ended up not using the software.  It is very old school.  It was easier to run a small tournament by hand than try to deal with the software.  Save your money unless you have someone to teach you the tricks or you are planning a large tournament.
1459613
For the analyst wanting to get into image recognition, Davies offers a detailed look at the many methods used in the last 30-40 years. These include neural networks, support vector machines, and the Hough transform.

If you are tempted to use [or are using] the OpenCV code base for image research, then the book can be a vital theoretical framework. OpenCV is about the best open source image code out there on the net, but it is poorly documented. It does come with many methods for basic and vital operations like make a grayscale image from a colour image, and making a binary image from a grayscale image. But why the code does certain things (actually many things) is rarely explained. Try using this book for understanding. Plus, the text lets you get an idea of how to modify OpenCV for your purposes.

And if you are going to use this book with OpenCV, look closely at the section on using multiple classifiers for training and then testing against unknown images. It is the basic idea for the cascading classifiers used by OpenCV.

Along these lines, one improvement for a future edition of the book could be an analysis of code packages that are currently available for image processing. Just a thought. But it would greatly help people wanting an expert assessment on the efficacies of available packages. Or, on a more basic level, it would aid simply in delineating what is out there.
878474
This is Murray Chandler's follow up to his highly successful "How To Beat Your Dad At Chess". The book presents 50 common tactical ideas - pins, skewers, forks, stalemate and many more - each one explained and illustrated in a double page spread. Only themes which occur fairly commonly in practice are included, and there are six diagrams per double page. The explanations are in simple language, and each diagram is accompanied by a brief commentary pointing out the salient features of the position. The continuations are very short (usually only one or two moves) so they can be followed easily without the need for a board.

Three or four examples are given of each tactical trick, with the aim of getting the reader to recognise certain patterns, and hopefully apply this newly acquired pattern recognition to his/her own games. To test how well the patterns have been absorbed there are 54 test positions for the reader to try. If the reader is unable to spot the continuation, a hint is given by way of a reference to the number of the tricky tactic that is being tested. So you can refresh your memory by looking back at the illustrated examples and then hopefully spot the same theme in the test position. All of the illustrative positions and test positions are taken from actual play (though there are no game references given), and there are no artificially composed positions.

Although the book is aimed at children in the first instance, it could be used equally profitably by adult beginners who wish to sharpen up their tactical awareness.

This review first appeared in the magazine En Passant.
3871557
Of the several computer vision textbooks that I haved owned and read, this book provides the best combination of introductory techniques with more advanced material in a very readable style.

The first two chapters are a very conversational overview of computer vision and image representation, but don't let this fool you. Starting in chapter three, the book becomes concise in presentation and in numerical examples. The authors starts out with the basics of binary image analysis which includes a very good discussion of image morphology. However, this is not an image processing book, so you should already be familiar with image processing on the same level as what is presented in Gonzales & Wood's "Digital Image Processing", which is my personal favorite among the various image processing texts. Next pattern recognition basics are discussed, including a section on neural networks that was clearer than anything I gleaned from Haykin's classic text on the subject. Next, the author moves into the realm of gray scale images by discussing the filtering and enhancing of images, which is similar to material in many image processing books. The basics of computer vision conclude with chapters on color, shading, and texture. Next, the book jumps into more advanced material that builds on the introductory material. For example, there are chapters on content-based image retrieval, a subject on which the author Linda Shapiro is conducting research at the University of Washington, and also on computing motion from 2D image sequences. Finally, the book tackles some 3D computer vision issues such as perceiving 3D from 2D images, object pose computation, and 3D models and matching using image "snakes". There are algorithms presented in pseudocode throughout this book, along with supporting mathematics, so the reader should have a good understanding of matrix algebra as well as calculus to really get the most from this book. The algorithms are concisely represented, and I had no trouble coding up a content-based image retrieval program based solely on the contents of this book. The pattern recognition chapter lacks a few details, and it might be helpful if the reader had a copy of Tom Mitchell's "Machine Learning", which parallels nicely with the pattern recognition chapter of Shapiro's book and is both complete and concise.
2397434
This book provides a survey of many modern statistical techniques such as bootstrapping and modern classification methods, as well as presenting the fundamentals of inferential theory.  The book appears to be aimed at an audience conversant in mathematics, but more interested in a general overview of methods than rigor and limit theorems.  As such, it presents brief and readable introductions to topics such as support vector machines, kernel estimation and Markov Chain Monte Carlo Methods that usually only appear in more specialized literature.  On the whole I found it a very useful and readable text.  A minor criticism is that there are a fair number of typographical errors, especially in equations in the later chapters; presumably this will be fixed in subsequent editions.
1066353
Bought this just last week for clocking tennis serve speeds. This is a big improvement over what I had been using, which was a Speed Trac. I was frustrated with the Speed Trac, because many times it would not register a speed. The Pocket Radar Ball Coach registers every time. Another drawback with Speed Trac is that it remembers only the last speed. However, the Pocket Radar Ball Coach remembers the last 25 speeds, which is very handy when you're practicing by yourself. On top of this, the accuracy is excellent. Recently, I've also had a chance to use the Sony Smart Tennis Sensor. I found that the Sony sensor tends to read serve speeds on the high side, perhaps by as much as 10%. This is to be expected, because the sensor is only measuring the serve speed indirectly. What it actually measures is the acceleration of the racquet head and then uses some formula or heuristics to translate to the corresponding speed. However, the Pocket Radar measures the serve speed directly.
3930314
This is an excellent book below 1500, even some B players may learn something new. It covers approximately 50 essential mating patterns (3 are drawing resources) in an easy to read and understand format. It is a very good introductory book on this subject. Repetition as the key to learning is a truism and pattern recognition is the way to success in chess. There are a few minor problems with a couple of examples but I still highly recommend this book for those under 1500.
331150
I'm an intermediate level NLHE player who was looking for a way to improve my reading skills. After seeing the great reviews for this product I felt it might be a good investment. I've been using it for about a month now and can see some definite results in my game. The AI is great as advertised and is difficult to predict making for a realistic poker experience. Some of the best features include the ability to see every winning hand whether or not it's shown down, great for confirming you made a good lay down. The customizable structure allows you to set up a tournament or sng just like the ones you play at your local casino or online. It's now more clear to me how to adjust my play based on the tourney or sng structure. The overall layout of the main screens are good, easy to use for the most part. There are some very minor problems such as, how much an oppenent bets and the current pot size are not displayed until your turn (you can place your cursor over the chips to see it.) The betting bar doesn't seem to be very intuitive or user friendly but you can use the shortcut keys like pressing number 5 after the flop bets 50% of the pot. There is also a ocassional small sound glitch when players fold that makes a squelching sound but it's rare. Overall, I'd recommend this product for any NLHE player looking for a solid poker simulator.
2115413
Nice book relatively easy to read, although sometimes less instructive in the details of particular algorithms than might be desired. I did skip part II of the book so that might be an issue. A great resource for cutting your teeth on data mining.
3812471
Really simple to use and a lot of information that was too much trouble to collect using manual measurements with my GPS app.  Scoring is automated and there are very few mistakes that need manual correction.  The variation on a club's distance and direction is actually more valuable than the average distance.  It lets me know where I need to focus my practice efforts and highlights my "problem clubs".