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It remained for Nazi Germany to design the most satanic
psychological experi ment of all time, the independent variables
consisting of brutality, bestiality, physical and mental torture on
an unprecedented scale. What were the effects of this massive
assault on the human spirit, on man's ability to assimilate such
experiences, if he survived physically? While the terror of the
Nazi concentration camps has been indelibly engraved in the history
of Western civilization as its most shameful chapter, little
systematic study has been addressed to the subsequent lives of that
minority of inmates who were fortunate enough to escape physical
annihilation and lived to tell about their nightmare. Dr. PAUL
MATUSSEK, a respected German psychiatrist, aided by a small group
of collaborators, performed the task of identifying a group of
victims (mostly Jews but also political prisoners), who, following
their liberation, had settled in Germany, Israel, and the United
States. By careful interviews, questionnaires, and psychological
tests he brought to bear the methods of sensitive clinical inquiry
on the experiences of those who dared to reminisce and who were
sufficiently trusting to share their feelings and memories with
clinical investigators. It is a telling commentary that many
people, even after the passage of years, refused to respond."
Professor Bosch's study of infantile autism is a most valuable
contribution to the slowly increasing body of knowledge about this
baffling and most severe psychiatrie disorder of childhood. Reading
it in the original German when it first appeared in 1962, I was
greatly impressed by his deep sympathy for these unfortunate
children and by his keen insight into the overt manifestations of a
behavior which presents the observer with tantalizing riddles.
Having spent nearly a lifetime in unravelling the meaning of the
behavior of autistic children, I was much taken by Professor
Bosch's very different approach to the same problem. His research
sheds further light into the darkness that reigns in the mind of
the autistic child. I am delighted that his important contribution
is now easily available also to American readers. Everybody who
works with children suffering from infantile autism for any length
of time and also studies this disease, becomes impressed by how
much their inability to relate and to resporrd appro"prrately can
teach us about human psychology in general, and in particular how
and why things go wrong in man's relations to his fellow man. All
through his book, Professor Bosch correctly stresses that autistic
behavior is neither asymptom nor a syndrome, but a unique form of
breakdown in all inter personal relations."
The formalism of probabilistic graphical models provides a unifying
framework for capturing complex dependencies among random
variables, and building large-scale multivariate statistical
models. Graphical models have become a focus of research in many
statistical, computational and mathematical fields, including
bioinformatics, communication theory, statistical physics,
combinatorial optimization, signal and image processing,
information retrieval and statistical machine learning. Many
problems that arise in specific instances-including the key
problems of computing marginals and modes of probability
distributions-are best studied in the general setting. Working with
exponential family representations, and exploiting the conjugate
duality between the cumulant function and the entropy for
exponential families, Graphical Models, Exponential Families and
Variational Inference develops general variational representations
of the problems of computing likelihoods, marginal probabilities
and most probable configurations. It describes how a wide variety
of algorithms- among them sum-product, cluster variational methods,
expectation-propagation, mean field methods, and max-product-can
all be understood in terms of exact or approximate forms of these
variational representations. The variational approach provides a
complementary alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo as a general
source of approximation methods for inference in large-scale
statistical models.
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