Natural History in The Books Store

This is a book for any student or professional biologist who wants to process data using a statistical package on the computer, to select appropriate methods, and extract the important information from the often confusing output that is produced. It is aimed primarily at undergraduates and masters students in the biological sciences who have to apply statistics in practical classes and projects. Such users of statistics do not have to understand either how tests work or how to do the calculations, and these aspects are not covered in the book.

The new edition has been updated to cover the very latest versions of the computer packages described, expanded to include coverage for logistic regression, a more detailed consideration of multivariate analysis, data exploration and further examples of Principle Component Analysis and Discriminate Function Analysis are given.

• New edition will use SPSS 10.0, Minitab 13.1 and Excel 2000.
  
• New simplified version of the Key and flow chart of decisions to reach simple statistical tests.
  
• Section on multivariate techniques expanded to give further examples of PCA and DFA.
  
• Aimed at students using statistics for projects and in practical classes.
  
• Statistical jargon explained through an extensive glossary and key to symbols.
  
• Stresses the importance of experimental design, measurement of data and interpretation of results rather than an understanding of the statistical tests themselves.

Audubon was not, for the record, a kind of starry-eyed precursor to the Sierra Club, leaving nature untouched by human hands. It's telling that in his self-portrait, the artist is gripping neither palette nor paintbrush but a flintlock rifle. Gunning down his ornithological subjects was a necessary prelude to portraying them. Still, Audubon had quite a few of what we moderns would call conflicted moments, during which his admiration for, say, the Mississippi kite would temporarily halt the killing spree. Here the sight of a mother attempting to rescue its chick manages to stay his itchy trigger finger--for a millisecond, anyway:

My feelings at that moment I cannot express. I wished I had not discovered the poor bird; for who could have witnessed, without emotion, so striking an example of that affection which none but a mother can feel; so daring an act, performed in the midst of smoke, in the presence of a dreaded and dangerous enemy. I followed, however, and brought both to the ground at one shot, so keen is the desire of possession!

This best-selling volume presents the principles and applications of physical chemistry as they are used to solve problems in biology and medicine. The First Law; the Second Law; free energy and chemical equilibria; free energy and physical Equilibria; molecular motion and transport properties; kinetics: rates of chemical reactions; enzyme kinetics; the theory and spectroscopy of molecular structures and interactions: molecular distributions and statistical thermodynamics; and macromolecular structure and X-ray diffraction. For anyone interested in physical chemistry as it relates to problems in biology and medicine.