Most Popular Books by Michael Silverman

From the 8-time All Star and 3-time Cy Young Award-winning pitcher, a bold, no-holds-barred memoir of his career, from his hardscrabble upbringing in the Dominican Republic to becoming one of the greatest pitchers of all time

An “instructive first-hand account of how Iraq’s insurgents were defeated” in the surge of 2007—written by a Combat Arms Battalion Commander who lived it (Publishers Weekly). In August 2006, the American war in Iraq was looking grim. Control of Al Anbar Province, the seat of the Sunni insurgency, was said to be irrevocably lost to the insurgents. Al Qaeda in Iraq had planted their flag in the provincial capital, Ramadi, declaring it the capital of their new “Islamic State of Iraq.” In January 2007, the 3rd Battalion, 69th Armored Regiment, deployed to Ramadi, spearheading a surge that would become the D-Day of the Global War on Terror. By mid-summer 2007, attacks in the province were down ninety percent. As the “awakening” swept through Iraq, it brought about the best security situation since 2003. The 3rd Battalion was the only unit to participate in this campaign from start to finish. Moreover, many of the US successes came directly from this unit’s work. Awakening Victory tells the story of this incredible campaign through the eyes of the 3rd Battalion commander. It describes the battalion’s actions, including incidents previously unknown to the public, but it is not merely another war story. The author uses the actions of his battalion to describe a paradigm shift, moving from a war of bombs and bullets to one of partnership and ideas.

"This purpose of this text is to describe the who, what, when, where, why, and how of music therapy for illness management and recovery for adults with mental health conditions specific to clinical group-based practice within the United States. Other goals of this monograph include informing administrators of music therapy, providing theory-based approaches to music therapy in mental health settings, educating music therapists about related literature outside the profession, stimulating research and employment, increasing access to services, and influencing legislative policies. Perhaps the most essential purpose of this text is to encourage both critical thinking and lifelong learning about issues, ideas, and concepts related to various intersections between mental health and music therapy."--Publisher.

Del gran lanzador, campeón de la Serie Mundial, miembro del Salón de la Fama, invitado ocho veces al Juego de las Estrellas y ganador del Premio Cy Young en tres ocasiones, llegan estas memorias. Pedro Martínez nos cuenta sobre su vida y carrera, desde una niñez pobre en República Dominicana hasta convertirse en uno de los mejores lanzadores de todos los tiempos… y uno de los más intimidantes. Con el humor pintoresco que lo caracteriza, Pedro Martínez cuenta su extraordinaria historia: desde sus días en las ligas menores esforzándose por ganarse el respeto de sus compañeros y sus primeros días en el solitario Montreal, hasta su legendaria carrera con los Red Sox de Boston. Estas memorias de una de las figuras más enigmáticas y emblemáticas del béisbol inspirarán a generaciones de fanáticos. www.pedromartinez.com “Mi compadre tiene la fuerza y el carisma para inspirar. Así como lo hizo conmigo en el inicio de mi carrera, lo hará con todo el que lea este libro”.— VLADIMIR GUERRERO, Expelotero dominicano de Grandes Ligas, Jugador Más Valioso de la Liga Americana en 2004, miembro del Salón de la Fama Nacional del Béisbol de Estados Unidos y del Salón de la Fama del Béisbol Canadiense “Hay muy poco que este campeón de la Serie Mundial no cuenta en este libro; se expande sobre cualquier tema, y ofrece una mirada reveladora de una carrera llamativa... Los detalles íntimos que comparte Martínez desde dentro y fuera de la casa club hacen de este un libro único”. - WASHINGTON POST ENGLISH DESCRIPTION From the eight-time All-Star and three-time Cy Young Award–winning pitcher, a bold, no-holds-barred memoir of his career, from his hardscrabble upbringing in the Dominican Republic to becoming one of the greatest pitchers of all time. Pedro Martinez entered the big leagues a scrawny power pitcher with a lightning arm who they said wasn’t “durable” enough, who they said was a punk. Yet Martinez willed himself to become one of the most intimidating pitchers to have ever played the game, an eight-time All-Star, three-time Cy Young Award winner, World Series champion, and Hall of Famer. In Pedro, the always colorful pitcher opens up to tell his remarkable story. From his days in the minor leagues clawing for respect; to his early days in lonely Montreal; to his legendary run with the Red Sox when, start after start, he dazzled with his pitching genius; to his twilight years on the mound as he put the finishing touches on a body of work that made him an icon, this memoir by one of baseball’s most enigmatic figures will entertain and inspire generations of fans to come. “Pedro the book is as smart, as funny, and as diva-esque as Pedro the pitcher . . . Buy the book. Read the book. Celebrate a golden era in Boston baseball.” —Boston Globe “There is little the eight-time All-Star holds back about any subject as he offers a revealing look at a colorful career . . . The intimate details Martinez offers up from both inside and outside the clubhouse make the book a winner.” —Washington Post “This is the beauty of this book, the machinations of a modern pitcher''s mind . . . Knowing and gritty, this memoir should’ve been printed on rawhide.” —Los Angeles Times

Leading privacy visionaries share their knowledge on how privacy on the Internet will affect every business and individual worldwide. Includes essays from executives at Fortune 500 companies.

The explosive deaths of stars, known as a supernovae (SNe), have been critical to our understanding of the Universe for centuries. From the first evidence of a changing Universe beyond the Moon (Brahe1573) to the first evidence of the accelerating expansion of the Universe (Riess et al. 1998; Perlmutter et al. 1999), SNe - and often a specific subclass of SNe called Type Ia SNe (SNe Ia) - have been integral to astronomical research. An introduction to SNe, their importance in astronomy, and how we observe them is given in Chapter 1. How SNe Ia explode, what progenitor systems give rise to them, and how different initial conditions affect the observed outcomes of these objects are understood only at a relatively basic level. In other words, a detailed understanding of the physics behind SNe Ia is still lacking. One way astronomers can begin to solve these problems, and others involving SNe Ia, is to obtain and analyze a large, self-consistent dataset of SN Ia observations. This is the goal of the Berkeley SN Ia Program (BSNIP) which comprises the majority of this Thesis. In the second Chapter, I present the full BSNIP sample which consists of 1298 low-redshift (z greater than or equal to 0.2) optical spectra of 582 SNe Ia observed from 1989 through the end of 2008. Many of the SNe have well-calibrated light curves with measured distances as well as spectra which have been corrected for host-galaxy contamination. Most of the data were obtained using the Kast double spectrograph mounted on the Shane 3 m telescope at Lick Observatory with typical wavelength coverage of 3300-10400 A, which is significantly larger than that of most previously published SN Ia spectral datasets. I also present the BSNIP observing and reduction procedures used during the two decades over which the data were collected. In addition, I describe our spectral classification scheme (using the SuperNova IDentification code, SNID; Blondin & Tonry 2007), utilizing my newly constructed set of SNID spectral templates. These templates allow me to accurately spectroscopically classify the entire BSNIP dataset, and by doing so I am able to reclassify a handful of objects as bona fide SNe Ia and a few other objects as members of some of the peculiar SN Ia subtypes. In fact, the BSNIP dataset includes spectra of nearly 90 spectroscopically peculiar SNe Ia. I also present spectroscopic host-galaxy redshifts of some SNe Ia where these values were previously unknown. The sheer size of the BSNIP dataset and the consistency of the observation and reduction methods makes this sample unique among all other published SN Ia datasets and is complementary in many ways to the large, low-redshift SN Ia spectra presented by Matheson et al. 2008 and Blondin et al. 2011. I present measurements of spectral features of 432 low-redshift (z z x1 and c) and spectral measurements to calculate distance moduli. The residuals from these models is then compared to the standard model which only uses light-curve stretch and color. The pEW of Si II lamda 4000 is found to be a good indicator of light-curve width and the pEWs of the Mg II and Fe II complexes are relatively good proxies for color. However, a distance model only using these spectroscopic measurements performs worse than the standard model which uses only light-curve parameters. When using a distance model which combines the ratio of fluxes near 3̃600 A and 4̃300 A with both x1 and c, the Hubble residuals are decreased by 12%, which is found to be significant at the 2.4 omega level. The weighted root-mean square of the residuals using this model is 0.130 plus or minus 0.019 mag (as compared to 0.146 plus or minus 0.019 mag when using the same sample with the standard model). This Hubble diagram fit has one of the smallest scatters ever published and at the highest significance ever seen in such a study. Finally, these results are discussed with regard to how they can improve the cosmological accuracy of future, large-scale SN Ia surveys. Finally, I conclude this Thesis with an in-depth study of a quite peculiar SN Ia, not included in the BSNIP sample. Chapter 5 presents and analyzes optical photometry and spectra of the extremely luminous and slowly evolving Type Ia SN 2009dc, and offers evidence that it is a super-Chandrasekhar mass (SC) SN Ia and thus had a SC white dwarf (WD) progenitor. Optical spectra of SN 2007if, a similar object, are also shown. SN 2009dc had one of the most slowly evolving light curves ever observed for a SN Ia, with a rise time of 2̃3 d and delta m15(B) = 0.72 mag. I calculate a lower limit to the peak bolometric luminosity of 2̃.4x1043 erg s-1, though the actual value is likely almost 40% larger. Optical spectra of SNe 2009dc and 2007if obtained near maximum brightness exhibit strong C II features (indicative of a significant amount of unburned material), and the post-maximum spectra are dominated by iron-group elements. All of the spectra of SNe 2009dc and 2007if also show low expansion velocities. However, I see no strong evidence in SN 2009dc for a velocity "plateau" near maximum light like the one seen in SN 2007if (Scalzo et al. 2010). The high luminosity and low expansion velocities of SN 2009dc lead to a derived WD progenitor mass of more than 2 MSun and a 56Ni mass of about 1.4-1.7 MSun. I propose that the host galaxy of SN 2009dc underwent a gravitational interaction with a neighboring galaxy in the relatively recent past. This may have led to a sudden burst of star formation which could have produced the SC WD progenitor of SN 2009dc and likely turned the neighboring galaxy into a "post-starburst galaxy." No published model seems to match the extreme values observed in SN 2009dc, but simulations do show that such massive progenitors can exist (likely as a result of the merger of two WDs) and can possibly explode as SC SNe Ia.

Gene expression is regulated at both the transcriptional and post-transcriptional levels. While transcription controls only the rate of RNA production, numerous and diverse mechanisms regulate the processing, stability and translation of RNAs at the post-transcriptional level. At the heart of this regulation are RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) and their RNA targets. Thousands of RBPs are encoded in mammalian genomes, each with hundreds to thousands of RNA targets. Therefore, cataloging these interactions represents a significant challenge. Recent advances in high-throughput sequencing technologies have greatly expanded the toolkit that researchers have to probe RNA-protein interactions, but these technologies are still in their infancy and thus new methods and applications are required to move our understanding forward. We developed a novel, high-throughput approach to globally identify regions of RNAs that interact with proteins throughout a transcriptome of interest. We applied this technique to human HeLa cells and provide evidence that our approach captures both known and novel RNA-protein interaction sites. We identified global patterns of RNA-protein interactions, found evidence for co-binding of functionally related genes, and revealed that disease associated single-nucleotide polymorphisms are enriched within protein interaction sites. We also performed detailed analysis of the RNA targets for two specific RBPs; Poly(A)-binding protein cytoplasmic 1 (PABPC1) and Argonaute (AGO). First, we used CLIP-seq to generate a transcriptome-wide map of PABPC1 interaction sites in the mouse transcriptome. This analysis revealed that PABPC1 binds directly to the highly conserved polyadenylation signal sequence and to translation initiation and termination sites. We also showed that PABPC1 binds to A-rich regions in the 5'' untranslated region of a subset of messenger RNAs (mRNAs) and negatively regulates their gene expression. Finally, we applied a recently developed approach to isolate and sequence AGO-bound microRNA precursors (pre-miRNAs). We uncovered widespread trimming and tailing, identified novel intermediates and created an index for pre-miRNA processing efficiency. We discovered that numerous pre-miRNA-like elements are embedded within mRNAs, but do not produce functional small RNAs. In total, these studies provide several advances in our understanding of the global landscape of RNA-protein interactions and serve as a foundation for future mechanistic studies.

This research emphasizes those system properties and concepts that can be characterized without solving time-variable differential equations. Criteria are developed for determining the degree of controllability and observability of a time-variable system. These criteria are based on the rank of the controllability and observability matrices, newly defined quantities formed from the system coefficient matrices and a finite number of their derivatives. Based on the theory of equivalent systems and the criteria for controllability and observability, a new approach to the synthesis of nonstationary impulse response matrices is developed. This method of synthesis, which does not require an a priori assumption of separability, provides a systematic procedure for realizing a wide class of impulse responses. By relating the concepts of controllability and unilateral transmission, the existence of a class of unilateral networks composed solely of two-terminal RC (time-variable) components is demonstrated. A stable example of such a network is presented and possible applications discussed.