One example, simply because I opened the book to this page after reading your comment and happen to know a bit about the subject (p49): "[t]he algorithm takes

One example, simply because I opened the book to this page after reading your comment and happen to know a bit about the subject (p49): "[t]he algorithm takes the difference between every pair of items and tries to make a chart in which the distances between the items match those differences" This is referring to multidimensional scaling which is a large family of techniques, some of which attempt to achieve this goal (delta ~= d), but not necessarily. Granted, in this case the algorithm presented DOES attempt to do this. BUT, the algorithm presented is not "multidimensional scaling". It is an implementation (not even a good one) attempting to minimize one of many possible objective functions. I noticed several more when I flipped through it initially, but this is the type of thing I'm referring to.