Books on Russia

After my visits to Moscow, I gained lots of interest in Russia,Russians and their culture,sociology,history...

I started searching for books giving me a hint on their sociology
Here are a few...

Rusya'da Başarısız Olmanın Yollari.

The writer is a Turkish journal (Radikal Newspaper) living in Moscow for several years.In his book,he describes what to do in order to be unsuccessful in Moscow.








His main advice is 'Use previous visitor's experience' and second is 'Drink vodka with Russians', honestly I did not get any other advice.Read if you have much time, not a great resource.



Other's were also far from my expectations but here is the list...





SSCB'den Dönüş

The famous French writer Andre Gide's impressions of the soviets during his visit to USSR for the funeral of famous Russian writer Gorki.The books contains critics on the soviet system of those days.
Very short book of a little more than 100 pages and a little boring.







Rus Devriminin Gölgesindeki Kadınlar

Memories of 15 Russian women before, during and after the revolution.The book shows how people worked so hard and with extreme devotion.
Worth reading.






Kadınlar ve Perestroyka

Yet another book on soviet women but this time long after the revolution and during the perestroyka days. The book tells how hard was the living and working conditions of women were during the end of soviet era.






Sovyetler Birliğinin Çöküşü Üzerine Anti-tezler

I really did not get anything of the writers points and what his claims are.
I did not get who or what is he blaming for the collapse.
It was just a waste of time and money.








Rusya'nın Dönüşümü

The book is a collection of articles of the writer published in a national newspaper.








KINGS OF THE KREMLIN: Leaders from Ivan the Terrible to Boris Yeltsin

I found this book at METU library. Gives short biography of Russian leaders, also mentions about the important of actors of those days.
Nice to read.Good content.Here is the amazon.com link.

Java based implementation of Apriori Data Mining Algorithm

This is my favor to CS grad students studying datamining:). Possibly this will be an assignment for you.Below is a brief description of Apriori with Java source codes.

Apriori is a well known algorithm for association rule mining, mainly used for market basket like data analysis.For example you are given a list of transactions, you are to find the rules such as
"90% of customers buying coffee and sugar also buy cream".

For the market basket data analysis, one needs two steps:
first determine the frequent item sets then form the association rules from these sets.

While forming the frequent item sets the Apriori principle is simple: Any subset of a frequent itemset must be frequent. Before starting to give the algorithm steps, let me give 2 definitions, support and confidence.

Support of an itemset X isfraction of transactions in D that contain X

Confidence c of an association rule X ⇒ Y in D is Fraction of transactions which contain the itemset Y from the subset of transactions from D which contain the itemset X.

First determine the frequency of each single item.
Then generate candidate sets, for each k-item
frequent set,join with itself to generate the candidates.
Next, prune candidates that don't match the apriori principle stated above.
Calculate the frequencies of the pruned candidates and now you have the item sets of size k+1.

After you have formed the frequent item sets not you need to generate association rules.

For each frequent itemset X
For each subset A of X, form a rule A (X – A)
Delete those rules that do not have minimum confidence


Computation of the confidence of a rule A ==> (X – A)

Confidence(A==>(X-A))=support(X)/support(A)


Thats all!,for the source code

Apriori.java -- the appriori implementation
Kume.java -- helper class, implementation of Set which supports subsets(k) and minus() operations

Third lieutenant on mission!

Sleep well Turkey,I am defending you!