Best Selling Books by Tom Leonard

The poet James Thomson (1834-82) was author of the pessimistic masterpiece THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT, which Herman Melville described as ''a modern Book of Job''. Born into a millenialist family, reared in a London Scottish orphanage, Thomson was an early member of the Corps of Army Schoolmasters. Expelled from the Army for insubordination, he wrote for the weekly freethought NATIONAL REFORMER where he published pioneering translations of Leopardi, versions of Heine, prose satires on church affairs and biting criticism of the narrowness of contemporary British Literature. He early championed Browning and Meredith, made the study of Shelley his life''s work, and in his own poetry presented as no other has done in English the alienation of the isolated and displaced in industrial society. An outsider on the Bloomsbury scene around W M Rossetti, Thomson died homeless and in poverty in 1882.This second edition was completed by Tom shortly before his death and is being published posthumously.Contains edits to chapters 1, 2 and 22 Tom made after the first edition and also full text to James Thomson''s poem The City of Dreadful Night.

Radical Renfrew challenges the view of nineteenth-century West of Scotland literature which sees it as a desert in which a few ''minor figures'' bloomed: it asserts that people have been deprived of a whole literature of what they once held to be valid poetry. The introduction closely argues why and how this has come about.Nearly four hundred pages of poetry are brought back into print, all from the extensive archives of Paisley Central Library where Tom Leonard worked as writer-in-residence during the book''s compilation.Besides known Renfrew poets such as John Davidson and James Thomson of Port Glasgow, over 60 other writers are featured, including the forgotten radical feminist Marion Bernstein, and the pungent Chartist satirist Edward Polin. For the reader''s help, a guide to some of the main themes supplements the contents list.The aim of the book, Leonard stated, was to be pan of that process by which anyone can use the public library to reclaim and reconstruct their own past.TOM LEONARD was born in Glasgow in 1944 and died in 2018. This book is published by his surviving family, thirty years after it was first published.

This is a 2019 reprint published by his surviving family and intended to be as close to the original as possible. The text below came from the original book: The prose in this collection falls mainly into three categories: literary, topical-political and personal. They overlap. Some of the literary criticism was written when John Linklater was literary editor of the Glasgow Herald. He let me choose which books to review and, unusually for a daily paper editor, let me have complete editing control on my copy to the usual limit of about a thousand words. I am grateful to him for the space he thus gave me to pursue some lines of thought around writers such as Browning and Clare. Several of the fuller essays were written for the Edinburgh Review when Peter Kravitz was the editor in the eighties. Here too it was liberating to have the trust of an editor granting me as it were a space when I wanted to pursue ideas and, as these things work, to try to find out in words what I believe. The prose runs from an essay of 1973 written for Scottish International to some extracts this year from the journal I have maintained on my website since 2009. The extracts from this journal overall are arranged in three separate sections under the title "From a Room in Scotland". The letter which follows the article "A Taboo too Far" was not composed for publication but seemed appropriate to add as its composition is referred to in the article that precedes it; and I think it may be of practical use for some. A co-dependency between mendacity and violence seems to be a recurring theme over the years, for which creativity in and through art is put as one restorative bond of integrity of purpose. Tom Leonard Glasgow, September 2012

This updated and expanded second edition of Book provides a user-friendly introduction to the subject, Taking a clear structural framework, it guides the reader through the subject''s core elements, which can be used as a learning material for students pursuing their studies in undergraduate and graduate levels in universities and colleges and those who want to learn the topic via a short and complete resource. We hope you find this book useful in shaping your future career.

A Bayesian updating procedure is proposed for filtering the process parameters in the two-stage Markovian constant variance model for time varying normal data in the situation where the signal to noise ratio is unknown. A forecastign procedure is described which yields the entire predictive distribution of future observations; a numerical study involves an on-line analysis for chemical process concentration readings. A similar method is developed for Poisson data and applied to the analysis of an industrial control chart.

Significance tests are commonly used in many application areas as attempts to formally confirm or refute specific conclusions. For example, in the social sciences (e.g. psychology, sociology, and econometrics) there is often much more emphasis on data-fitting and seeking ''significant'' results than on developing proper mathematical models which reltae in an inductively sensible way to the real-life problem. In the present paper a new formulation is used to demonstrate that significance tests tend to be much too ready to reject the null hypothesis for large sample sizes. It is recommended that the usual percentage points should be replaced by quantities depending in a particular way upon sample size, but not upon a choice of significance level. The phenomena discussed would appear to be particularly relevant to the area of scientific reporting. For example, many results in applied journals which might have been viewed as ''significant, '' because they yield a low p-value, may in fact serve to detract from the very scientific theory which they claim to substantiate. For large sample sizes, the techniques proposed in this paper permit a larger range of viable null hypotheses than experienced under fixed-size significance testing. It should therefore be easier to use them to find a data-credible model which is also reasonable in real-life terms.

Applications of the EM algorithm to the estimation of Bayesian hyperparameters are discussed and reviewed in the context of the author''s philosophy involving the inductive and pragmatic modelling of sampling distributions and prior structures. Frequently the hyperparameters may be estimated from the data, thus avoiding the subjective assessment of these values. The ideas are applied to multiple regression models, histograms and multinomial distributions. A numerical example is described in the context of smoothing the cell probabilities of several multinomial distributions. (Author).

During the Spring semester of 1981, the Mathematics Research Center held a weekly statistical discussion series as a precursor to its special year on Scientific Inference, Data Analysis, and Robustness. The many discussants included G.E.P. Box, D.V. Lindley, B.W. Silverman, A. Herzberg, C.F. Wu, B. Joiner and D. Rubin. Many aspects of statistics were discussed, including the Box philosophy of deductive and inductive reasoning, and Lindley''s coherent Bayesian viewpoint. The present paper attempts to constructively review the discussion series, and to add a number of retrospective comments and suggestions. (Author).

Paper, researched at Houlton, Me., Spring 1971, on jokes collected at Ricker College.

Some methods are considered for the estimation of probability densities. They employ a linear approximation to either the density or the logistic density transform. The coefficients in the approximation are estimated by maximum likelihood and the number of terms is judged via an information criterion. Hence the traditionally difficult problem of judging the degree of smoothness is carried out in a relatively simple manner. Criteria considered include the penalties proposed by Akaike and Schwarz for model complexity, together with an empirical criterion based upon a plot of the log-likelihoods. The practical procedures are related to an asymptotic consistency argument and a number of numerical examples are presented.