Extension Books

This book is an overview of work done by the author in extending the Casson invariant of integer homology 3-spheres to the rational homology case. The proofs given are very detailed and they bring out how difficult it is to show isotopy invariance via an example of a Heegard splitting of genus 2. The author does a good job of detailing the background needed in the chapter on representation spaces, and discusses effectively the properties of the invariant, such as its invariance under a reversal of orientation, and how it transforms under a Dehn surgery.

The Casson-Walker invariant was generalized to all 3-manifolds by Christine Lescop and is now called the Casson-Walker-Lescop invariant. In addition, a modified version of the Seiberg-Witten invariant and the Casson-Walker invariant for rational homology 3-spheres have been shown to be related, and there are also interesting connections of the invariant to formulas in topological quantum field theory and knot theory.

The book serves well as introduction to these results and should be of interest to students or mathematicians who desire to know more about this exciting field.

I found the book laugh out loud funny and sad and a little enlightning. It brought back memories from the 60's,70's and 80's that I had forgotten. Back when life was much simplier and not so stressful. It's about kids growing up a little on the devilish side but never hurting anyone but themselves. And playing sports with different neighborhoods in the surrounding towns and school and some of the off the wall things that were done there. If a book doesn't grab my attention on the first page I put it down and forget it. Mr. Taylor has a way of wording things that keeps you reading. Hope he writes more.

Extensions is a novella that never does what you expect. The most engrossing part of the story is about exceptional kids groping their way toward friendship and adulthood in rural futuristic surroundings where more is going on than meets the eye. But if this sounds like Orson Scott Card, hold onto your hat, because the answers are bigger and meaner than you imagine. Every time you think you've figured it out the author adroitly yanks the rug out from under you, leaving you standing somewhere you never expected to be.

All you need to know about hairextensions is in this book. I really recommend it.

This fine text is over fifty years old, and addresses one of the most important, yet ignored, topics of central interest. What do we value and why? If you object to the word "value" because of its connotations with "traditional moral values," Hilliard would agree, those "values" are not human values. If you object to the word "value" because of its connotations with "judgmentalism," Hilliard would agree, those judgments are ill-informed and wrong.

Between these excesses and defects, Hilliard argues for a modified Epicurean standard of axiology (values). Epicurus, of course, authored the self-evident doctrine of hedonism: Pursue pleasure, avoid pain. David Hume confirm the validity of hedonism in his Treatise as essential biological markers to establish a naturalistic morality, rather than deontological or divinely-revealed morality. Adam Smith followed Hume's lead with "The Theory of Moral Sentiments," which comport with insights from evolutionary biology some two-hundred years later. No Is/Ought fallacy, or naturalistic fallacy, simply comportment.

The first chapter is the most accessible. Hilliard modifies the hedonist axiom to read: Pursue the most-pleasant, avoid the least-pleasant. Of course, we humans do nothing other. Even delayed gratification is understood eudaimonistically, not repudiation of the hedonist imperative. Of course, one can consider utilitarian axiology, but it seems pretty dead to those in the analytic tradition, despite R. M. Hare's efforts to save the calculus. Even a liberal democracy is not reduced to simple majoritarianism of utilitarian calculus (thankfully, despite present moments suggesting otherwise).

After establishing the modified axiom, Hilliard examines it through various prisms of economics, justice, ethics, aesthetics, and other "value" judgments under axiological theory. An excellent work, but not likely to find neophytes following Hilliard's rigors of analysis. A must for the professional philosopher; a reference for the student.

I've read several books on this remarkable woman's life (1896-1982) and this is one of the most detailed and thoroughly referenced.

The book is based on scores of personal interviews. The author is uniquely qualified for this type of in-depth account.

The book first traces Anandamai Ma's life, and then in a sense doubles back and looks at many events from the viewpoint of people who knew her, while putting these events into the context of the culture.

From my perspective the fact that Hallstrom brings in her extensive academic understanding of Anandamai Ma's culture is both a plus and a bit of a minus. In the latter case I felt that the work leaned a bit toward a doctoral dissertation (which it apparently was) at the expense of a moving and approachable account of Anandamai Ma's life.

It didn't help that the type used for the book was rather small and that Eastern religious terms were constantly used that are unfamiliar to most Westerners. Even though they may have been initially defined, as the reading progressed I found it almost impossible to remember what these unfamiliar terms meant. (There is a Glossary for many of these terms, but it's a pain to keep looking up key terms.)

This being said, the book does what no others do: it puts Anandamai Ma's life into the perspective of her culture, a culture that from a Westerner's point of view was rather restrictive -- especially for a woman.

The fact that Hallstrom wasn't a disciple of Ma, plus the scholarly and objective approach she takes, gives the book credibility.

Unlike the stories of most saints, this information is based almost entirely on first-hand accounts. The book also includes seven photos of Anandamai Ma.

Hallstrom's book is definitely recommended for anyone interested in a woman who many feel was far beyond "just" being a saint.

First published in 1975 and then reprinted by Anvil Press in 1984 with a photo of a Pompeian Necropolis on the cover, Tony Harrison's Palladas is still the best introduction to this bitter, cynical, darkly comic poet of the 4th Century CE. Dubbed "the last pagan," Palladas watched the Classical Age fall to the hands of fanatical Christians from his Alexandrian home and consoled himself by berating them (and bemoaning his disappearing world) in some of the most nihilistic poetry of all time. British poet Harrison translates 70 poems, a small percentage of Palladas's work which has come down to us, but a fine taste of this man's acidic wit.

My only problem is that Harrison translates into a rhyming scheme. The thing is, most Greek and Latin poems did not rhyme. Translators however feel the need to enforce rhyme in their work, doubtless because they wish to cater to the common misconception that if it don't rhyme, it ain't poetry. Harrison I'd say enforces a rhyming scheme moreso because he's trying to replicate the feel of the Greek original, as the sound of ancient Greek verse was as important as the words themselves. Still, I can't help but wonder how much better this would be if Harrison didn't hinder himself with his self-enforced rhyming scheme.

Palladas ridicules Christians, married life, sickness, and even life itself in his snappy poems. What can be gleaned from between the lines is that Palladas suffered from an unhappy marriage and lack of funds; employed as a "grammarian," he taught Homer and the like to children. Only, these children were Christians, the prototypes of the victorious believers who would one day so destroy the Classical World that Palladas's poems would be forgotten in the West - along with the Greek in which he wrote them - for nearly a thousand years. Sad to say, even in his most nihilistic poems Palladas never once suspects something so terrible could happen.

But yet here we are, two millennia later, and Palladas seems like an old friend, that bitter yet side-splitting cynic you might see in the local bar, filled with hate over what the world has become and longing to go back to what it once was. More than just about any other personality of the ancient world, Palladas is the only one you'd probably enjoy hanging out with. (I mean, could you imagine hanging out with that fussy prude Augustus?)

Selections of Palladas appear in Kenneth Rexroth's "Poems from the Greek Anthology," Willis Barnstone's "Greek Lyric Poetry," and even Sherod Santos's dire "Greek Lyric Poetry." Yet none of them capture Palladas as well as Harrison; something Peter Jay realized when he put together his "Greek Anthology" for Oxford in 1973. There you will find early versions of many of these Harrison translations, though in the revised "Greek Anthology" Jay published through Penguin in 1981 Harrison's revised translations are used.

In sum, this is the best source for Palladas in English, despite its incompleteness and forced ryhming scheme. Long out of print, it can be found for relatively cheap. Seek it out and share a few bitter laughs with the Saul Bellow of Late Antiquity. And to wet your whistle, here are a few samples of Harrison's work:


Poem 4:

Born naked. Buried naked. So why fuss?
All life leads to that first nakedness.


Poem 9:

Agony comes from brooding about death.
Once dead, a man's spared all that pain.

Weeping for the dead's a waste of breath -
they're lucky, THEY can't die again.


Poem 14:

Life's an ocean-crossing where winds howl
and the wild sea comes at us wave after wave.

With Fortune our pilot, weather fair or foul,
all alike drop anchor in the grave.


Poem 53 (which just about any married man could agree with):

The theft of fire. Man's worst bargain yet.
Zeus created woman, He was that upset!

A woman dessicates a man with cares
and soon gives golden youth his first great hairs.

But Zeus's married life in Heaven above
`s no cloudy mattress of ambrosial love.

Zeus with Hera of the golden throne
longs to be divorced and on His own.

He often has to shove Her from the sky
to a dog-house cumulus to sulk and cry.

Homer knew this well and shows the two
squabbling on Olympus as mere mortals do.

Thus a woman nags and haggles though she lies
beside the Deity of Deities.

This extension to the PMBOK Guide provides an overview of key attributes of project governance that apply to most government organizations and that are generally recognized as good practices with widespread consensus about their value and usefulness. It is not designed as a replacement for the PMBOK, but is an extension to it, providing how to adapt the PMBOK material for this arena. *Not* a stand-alone read or concepts for general use in itself, but if you're in this area the value is that it maps between the PMBOK and government use. Most of the mappings are simply pointing to the PMBOK or pointing to the PMBOK with an alteration provided. CHAPTERS: 1 - Intro (5 pgs), 2 - Project Life Cycle and Organization (4 pgs), 3 - Project Management Processes for a Project (1 pg, largely points to Chap 3 of PMBOK), 4 - Project Integration Management (4 pgs), 5 - Project Scope Management (3pgs), 6 - Project Time Management (4 pgs), 7 - Project Cost Management (5 pgs), 8 - Project Quality Management (6 pgs), 9 - Project Human Resource Management (5 pgs), 10 - Project Communications Management (6 pgs), 11 - Project Risk Management (6 pgs), 12 - Project Procurement Management (15 pgs), Appendices (19 pgs). p.s. You may also wish to view the 2000 version, and if applicable, you may also wish to look at the DAU produced extension to the PMBOK, the US Department of Defense Extension to: A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (288 pgs).

Even though this book is a bit dated, since it was written in 1987 before the recent Mars Pathfinder and Mars Global Surveyor missions were even dreamed of, it does contain a lot of interesting information and photographs about the Planet Mars and the Viking Project. If readers are looking for more recent material about the planet Mars, Seymour Simon, has written a new book in 2000 titled Destination Mars. It's basically an updated version of the current book. Finally, while this book is geared towards children, I feel that many adults will find the text and the photographs quite interesting.

After reading through this book (which is actually better described as a collection of articles about related topics,) I found it to be a good overview for those wanting to learn more about distance learning and the library services associated with it. The book is very technical, however, and is really best suited for those already familiar with the terminology associated with higher education and academic libraries. The language is dense and it is written in a style commonly associated with scholarly journals. The main drawback to this book is that it was written in 1997 and becasue the field of distance education is so fast-moving, it may some be outdated.