Computer-based diagnostic systems are among the most successful applications of knowledge-based systems (KBS) technology. Chris Price shows the best way to build effective diagnostic systems for different types of diagnostic problems by: - giving examples of different solutions to the problem of building effective diagnostic systems - helping you to decide on an appropriate strategy for building a diagnostic system to aid troubleshooting of that diagnostic problem - showing how to use diagnostic fault trees as a common representation for discussing different ways of approaching diagnosis. Computer-Based Diagnostic Systems is written in such a way as to make the material easy to understand even when you do not have easy access to the commercial tools.

A thoughtful reflection on evil, suffering and finding hope beyond band-aid solutions.

How does 'music hold us up'? In The Blind Singer, Wellington writer Chris Price 'cultivates the art / of listening' to explore this question. She has a clear and precise ear and the poems dance and shimmer around a??the heart of our hearing'. And she draws on wider material: Music and Science meet, shake hands, are introduced to History. Scepticism contends with superstition, and blindness and sight interrogate each other, eventually agreeing that 'Sometimes/ you have to turn away so you can see'. Price knits the curious and the arcane into her lines in poems variously elegiac, melodic, fiery, charming, observant and dramatic. The Blind Singer ends strongly with Price's long sequence 'The Angel Question', originally written for the science-literature project Are Angels OK? (2006). Here Price considers - by way of Einstein, Rilke and Picasso - how 'each bright / idea has its history': looking for traces of angels; walking the bright line between poetry and physics; and concluding that 'maybe a life can hang / from a thread of song'. Bursting with musical elements from bells, nursery rhymes and traditional ballads to Chaplin and Einstein playing string quartets and the Tubists' Universal Brotherhood Association, The Blind Singer is a luminous performance that continues to reverberate in the head long after the reading is over.

Chris Price won the NZSA Award for Best First Book of Poetry with her collection Husk (AUP, 2002). This second book, Brief Lives, is a surprise - a collection of prose poems of varying lengths, followed by a long essay, all elaborate and inventive variations on a theme. Brief Lives is a dictionary of biographical fragments and reflections on known and unknown figures. Chris describes it as 'a meditation on mortality and the tasks of recording, collection and recollection that we quixotically undertake to stave it off'. She explores human lives as performances or works of art, often peculiar or eccentric, and it is itself an example of this creative oddity. Chris writes with great lucidity and takes meticulous care in the arrangement of the pieces (by alphabetical order of title) and in the measured tone which allows elements of autobiography along with amazing snippets of arcane knowledge, a method somewhat reminiscent of Martin Edmond's awardwinning Chronicle of the Unsung. The final essay, on the French writer Villiers De L'Isle Adam, is brilliant - funny, warm, thoughtful and moving. In this bold and original work, fitting no established genre, Chris Price is taking New Zealand writing into unfamiliar territory.

This is a lively and enjoyable first collection of poems by a writer who is well known in the New Zealand literary world and who has published widely in journals. It is a polished, elegant, and mature work. Chris Price's poems are characterized by witty surprises, sudden unexpected shifts of image, and many forms of wordplay. Covering a wide range of interests, themes, and tones, there is an alertness and sense of delight about these poems.

From Victoria University's International Institute of Modern Letters, The Fuse Box offers writing strategies and guidance on keeping the faith from some of our best writers. Starting with the instigating spark, through to currents and connections, these essays shine a light on the creative process. They explore what to write about and how to get started, how to keep the flow going over time, freedom and constraint, how your writing might meet the world, and how to make the most of accidents. Poets, dramatists, novelists and writing teachers open up to reveal their wiring in essays that are strikingly honest, political and playful.