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This review samples ten of the nation's most widely used junior and senior high school history textbooks comparing what respected historians say about Islam in authoritative histories to what is being said in textbooks. It assesses how today's history textbooks characterize Islam's foundations and creeds; changes and additions that have occurred in textbook material written before 2001; and what textbooks say about terrorism. Further, it assesses what textbooks say about the September 11 air attack on the United States, weapons of mass destruction, Islamic challenges to global security, and looming dangers to the United States and world. The review concludes that many political and religious groups try to use the textbook process to their advantage, but the deficiencies in Islam-related lessons are uniquely disturbing. History textbooks present an incomplete and confected view of Islam that misrepresents its foundations and challenges to international security. Misinformation about Islam is more pronounced in junior high school textbooks than high school textbooks. Outright textbook errors about Islam are not the main problem. The more serious failure is the presence of disputed definitions and claims that are presented as established facts. Deficiencies about Islam in textbooks copyrighted before 2001 persist and in some cases have grown worse. Instead of making corrections or adjusting contested facts, publishers and editors defend misinformation and content evasions against the record. Biases persist. Silences are profound and intentional. Islamist activists use multiculturalism and ready-made American political movements, especially those on campus, to advance and justify uncritical Islam-related content makeover in history textbooks. Particular fault rests with the publishing corporations, the boards of directors, and executives who decide what editorial policies their companies will pursue. [Funding was provided by the Searle Freedom Foundation, Achelis Foundation, and the Stuart Family Foundation.]

This world history review examines standard textbooks used between the sixth and twelfth grades in schools across the nation. These established textbooks dominate the field and set the pitch for new and forthcoming volumes. The 2002 Texas history textbook adoption and the California list have influenced what textbooks will dominate the national market during the current decade. New world history titles introduced into Texas have yet to prove their viability and continued shelf life. Of the seven textbooks originally examined, examples are selected from the four most widely adopted world cultures and world history textbooks. This review found that in order to meet demands for scope, diversity and readability, world history textbooks abandon narrative and complexity. High school world history textbooks are superior to middle-grade world cultures textbooks. They emphasize "Western" subjects. Dire claims of the loss of European political history can be overdrawn. Western antiquity, Judaism and Christianity, and the rise of modern democratic government, reviewers complain, are lost in a procession of trivia designed to satisfy competing demands for inclusion, diversity and multiple perspectives. What should be central topics and themes are compressed to make room for new topical material, some of which is ideologically loaded. In subjects ranging from Africa to terrorism, the nation?s leading world history textbooks provide unreliable, often scanty information and provide poorly constructed activities. In doing so, these textbooks foster ignorance of geopolitics and deprive students of authentic global understanding. Publishers could and should be providing high school teachers and students with cheaper, smaller, more legible volumes, stripping trivia and superfluity from current volumes. Pressure from educators themselves is needed, but whether sufficient will exists to force publishers to change remains an open question. Rooted in a flawed production system and publience, the problems with world history textbooks go deep enough to raise questions about corporate violations of public trust. Who should pay attention to this review and take action? Textbook purchasers, including members of state boards, department of education officials, and school textbook committees. So should elected officials, editorial writers, and policy analysts. World history textbooks undermine their hopes, standards, curriculum frameworks, and official policies.

We discuss the fluctuation properties of equilibrium chaotic systems with constraints such as iso-kinetic and Nos\'e-Hoover thermostats. Although the dynamics of these systems does not typically preserve phase-space volumes, the average phase-space contraction rate vanishes, so that the stationary states are smooth. Nevertheless finite-time averages of the phase-space contraction rate have non-trivial fluctuations which we show satisfy a simple version of the Gallavotti-Cohen fluctuation theorem, complementary to the usual fluctuation theorem for non-equilibrium stationary states, and appropriate to constrained equilibrium states. Moreover we show these fluctuations are distributed according to a Gaussian curve for long-enough times. Three different systems are considered here, namely (i) a fluid composed of particles interacting with Lennard-Jones potentials; (ii) a harmonic oscillator with Nos\'e-Hoover thermostatting; (iii) a simple hyperbolic two-dimensional map., Comment: To appear in Phys. Rev. E

This article examines the history textbooks available in 1998 for adoption in the United States at both the high school and elementary levels. New books have appeared on the scene since the last textbook adoption series. California begins its textbook considerations in August. The California adoption will rekindle national interest in the content of history textbooks and indicate in what ways the textbooks and social studies content have changed after a decade of exposure to multiculturalism. The document examines the predominant role of the large textbook consumers, California and Texas, as well as the emerging themes and "watered-down" text in many of the books. The shrinking numbers of publishers and the increasing costs of production for books and ancillary materials raises some basic questions of quality, content, and purpose of textbooks. The article lists the major textbooks considered for adoption and analyzes some of the shortcomings of the texts. (EH)

Are large biological extinctions such as the Cretaceous/Tertiary KT boundary due to a meteorite, extreme volcanic activity or self-organized critical extinction cascades? Are commercial successes due to a progressive reputation cascade or the result of a well orchestrated advertisement? Determining the chain of causality for extreme events in complex systems requires disentangling interwoven exogenous and endogenous contributions with either no clear or too many signatures. Here, we study the precursory and recovery signatures accompanying shocks, that we test on a unique database of the Amazon sales ranking of books. We find clear distinguishing signatures classifying two types of sales peaks. Exogenous peaks occur abruptly and are followed by a power law relaxation, while endogenous sale peaks occur after a progressively accelerating power law growth followed by an approximately symmetrical power law relaxation which is slower than for exogenous peaks. These results are rationalized quantitatively by a simple model of epidemic propagation of interactions with long memory within a network of acquaintances. The slow relaxation of sales implies that the sales dynamics is dominated by cascades rather than by the direct effects of news or advertisements, indicating that the social network is close to critical., Comment: 5 pages including 3 figures final version published in Physical Review Letters

We discuss a two-parameter family of maps that generalize piecewise linear, expanding maps of the circle. One parameter measures the effect of a non-linearity which bends the branches of the linear map. The second parameter rotates points by a fixed angle. For small values of the nonlinearity parameter, we compute the invariant measure and show that it has a singular density to first order in the nonlinearity parameter. Its Fourier modes have forms similar to the Weierstrass function. We discuss the consequences of this singularity on the Lyapunov exponents and on the transport properties of the corresponding multibaker map. For larger non-linearities, the map becomes non-hyperbolic and exhibits a series of period-adding bifurcations., Comment: 17 pages, 13 figures, to appear in Discrete and Continuous Dynamical Systems, series B Higher resolution versions of Figures 5 downloadable at http://www.glue.umd.edu/~jrd/

This paper presents an {\it ab initio} derivation of the expression given by irreversible thermodynamics for the rate of entropy production for different classes of diffusive processes. The first class are Lorentz gases, where non-interacting particles move on a spatially periodic lattice, and collide elastically with fixed scatterers. The second class are periodic systems where $N$ particles interact with each other, and one of them is a tracer particle which diffuses among the cells of the lattice. We assume that, in either case, the dynamics of the system is deterministic and hyperbolic, with positive Lyapunov exponents. This work extends methods originally developed for a chaotic two-dimensional model of diffusion, the multi-baker map, to higher dimensional, continuous time dynamical systems appropriate for systems with one or more moving particles. Here we express the rate of entropy production in terms of hydrodynamic measures that are determined by the fractal properties of microscopic hydrodynamic modes that describe the slowest decay of the system to an equilibrium state.

Transport by normal diffusion can be decomposed into the so-called hydrodynamic modes which relax exponentially toward the equilibrium state. In chaotic systems with two degrees of freedom, the fine scale structure of these hydrodynamic modes is singular and fractal. We characterize them by their Hausdorff dimension which is given in terms of Ruelle's topological pressure. For long-wavelength modes, we derive a striking relation between the Hausdorff dimension, the diffusion coefficient, and the positive Lyapunov exponent of the system. This relation is tested numerically on two chaotic systems exhibiting diffusion, both periodic Lorentz gases, one with hard repulsive forces, the other with attractive, Yukawa forces. The agreement of the data with the theory is excellent.

We consider the time-dependent statistical distributions of diffusive processes in relaxation to a stationary state for simple, two dimensional chaotic models based upon random walks on a line. We show that the cumulative functions of the hydrodynamic modes of diffusion form fractal curves in the complex plane, with a Hausdorff dimension larger than one. In the limit of vanishing wavenumber, we derive a simple expression of the diffusion coefficient in terms of this Hausdorff dimension and the positive Lyapunov exponent of the chaotic model., Comment: 20 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Nonlinearity

We consider a one-dimensional persisent random walk viewed as a deterministic process with a form of time reversal symmetry. Particle reservoirs placed at both ends of the system induce a density current which drives the system out of equilibrium. The phase space distribution is singular in the stationary state and has a cumulative form expressed in terms of generalized Takagi functions. The entropy production rate is computed using the coarse-graining formalism of Gaspard, Gilbert and Dorfman. In the continuum limit, we show that the value of the entropy production rate is independent of the coarse-graining and agrees with the phenomenological entropy production rate of irreversible thermodynamics., Comment: 21 pages, 8 figures, to appear in Physica A

The theory of entropy production in nonequilibrium, Hamiltonian systems, previously described for steady states using partitions of phase space, is here extended to time dependent systems relaxing to equilibrium. We illustrate the main ideas by using a simple multibaker model, with some nonequilibrium initial state, and we study its progress toward equilibrium. The central results are (i) the entropy production is governed by an underlying, exponentially decaying fractal structure in phase space, (ii) the rate of entropy production is largely independent of the scale of resolution used in the partitions, and (iii) the rate of entropy production is in agreement with the predictions of nonequilibrium thermodynamics.

In this paper, we discuss a simple model for a field driven, thermostated random walk that is constructed by a suitable generalization of a multi-baker map. The map is a usual multi-baker, but perturbed by a thermostated external field that has many of the properties of the fields used in systems with Gaussian thermostats. For small values of the driving field, the map is hyperbolic and has a unique SRB measure that we solve analytically to first order in the field parameter. We then compute the positive and negative Lyapunov exponents to second order and discuss their relation to the transport properties. For higher values of the parameter, this system becomes non-hyperbolic and posseses an attractive fixed point., Comment: 6 pages + 5 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. E

We generalize Gaspard's method for computing the \epsilon-entropy production rate in Hamiltonian systems to dissipative systems with attractors considered earlier by T\'el, Vollmer, and Breymann. This approach leads to a natural definition of a coarse grained Gibbs entropy which is extensive, and which can be expressed in terms of the SRB measures and volumes of the coarse graining sets which cover the attractor. One can also study the entropy and entropy production as functions of the degree of resolution of the coarse graining process, and examine the limit as the coarse graining size approaches zero. We show that this definition of the Gibbs entropy leads to a positive rate of irreversible entropy production for reversible dissipative systems. We apply the method to the case of a two dimensional map, based upon a model considered by Vollmer, T\'el and Breymann, that is a deterministic version of a biased-random walk. We treat both volume preserving and dissipative versions of the basic map, and make a comparison between the two cases. We discuss the \epsilon-entropy production rate as a function of the size of the coarse graining cells for these biased-random walks and, for an open system with flux boundary conditions, show regions of exponential growth and decay of the rate of entropy production as the size of the cells decreases. This work describes in some detail the relation between the results of Gaspard, those of T\'el, Vollmer and Breymann, and those of Ruelle, on entropy production in various systems described by Anosov or Anosov-like maps., Comment: 30 pages + 20 figures, to appear in Journal of Statistical Physics