Scholarly & Professional Books

What’s Jewish about Jewish humor? How far back does it go? Humor has had a profound effect on the way the Jewish people see the world, sustaining them through millennia of hardship and suffering. Believe it or not, there is a great deal of humor and wit in the ancient Jewish texts – the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, and Midrash. Inevitably, this oeuvre of Jewish humor has itself influenced generations of comics, as well as genres of humor. Publisher’s Weekly has said “In this lighthearted but thoughtful study, professors Friedman and Friedman … trace the origins and evolution of Jewish humor from religious texts … Lay readers will appreciate the leavening of what could have been a dry recital with multiple examples of contemporary jokes, and examples from TV shows including Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm..."

Researchers develop simulation models that emulate real-world situations. While these simulation models are simpler than the real situation, they are still quite complex and time consuming to develop. It is at this point that metamodeling can be used to help build a simulation study based on a complex model. A metamodel is a simpler, analytical model, auxiliary to the simulation model, which is used to better understand the more complex model, to test hypotheses about it, and provide a framework for improving the simulation study.

The use of metamodels allows the researcher to work with a set of mathematical functions and analytical techniques to test simulations without the costly running and re-running of complex computer programs. In addition, metamodels have other advantages, and as a result they are being used in a variety of ways: model simplification, optimization, model interpretation, generalization to other models of similar systems, efficient sensitivity analysis, and more.

This book focuses on using programming to solve problems in business information processing, rather than on compiler writing and language design. This book combats the problem of language dependence by showing how programming languages achieve the same results using different syntactic constructs. Covers the programming languages COBOL, MODULA-2, C, Pascal, Smalltalk and Prolog, and discusses programming paradigms - imperative, functional, rule-oriented, object-oriented, access, dataflow and constraint.The hardcover originally published in 1991 by Prentice Hall is now out of print.Want to read the book? This site contains the original book, chapter by chapter, in pdf format.

Soon to be offered as a free ebook. Yes, it's old, but some of the material is still interesting and relevant. (Sigh! No C++) Stay tuned.