Factor

This book is a good resource for builders, architects or people building a house.

Universal Design DOES NOT EQUAL wheelchair accessibility and this book makes that very clear. Universal Design (hereafter UD)means taking into account the best way to design for everyone, not just the small percentage of average height, "able-bodied", 20-50 year old "perfect" people in the world. This book also points out that fewer people want to move in with their kids or into a "home" when they get older. So why build houses that will prevent this from happening?

UD is about making things useable for people of almost all physical conditions; sight-impared, mobility-impared, mentally-impared, size-impared (short or tall), and even "average, healthy" people.

This book makes it abundantly clear that UD is not difficult to do on new construction. UD does not have to add hundreds of square feet to your plan.

The book does not, however, have a lot of photos or ideas on how to make UD attractive. The small number of photos in this book are small, black and white, and poor quality. They do make their point, even though they are not pretty to look at.

The book is FULL (almost cover to cover) of diagrams and line drawings which show the possibilities AND detailed requirements of universal design. Many of the details are wheelchair-oriented, but this is because wheelchair access is often the lowest common denominator.

If you need to be concerned about UD or if you feel that it is a smart thing to do (I firmly believe it is a smart thing to do), then buy this book. There are no pretty, inspiring photos to show you how to do it beautifully, but there are tons of details to make sure you don't do it wrong. EVERY ARCHITECT AND BUILDER OUGHT TO HAVE A COPY OF THIS BOOK.

(P.S. Just think of the "fun" you would have in your current house if you had to use a walker, wheelchair, or only one hand. What about even a broken leg? You WILL more than likely get old sometime. You could even be injured and become disabled (even if only temporarily). Do you want your house to be a barrier in that event? UD really should be something everyone thinks about, seriously!)

Here is a great book that takes into account how our needs and use of the kitchen and bathroom change through life. It goes beyond the idea of providing access for the handicapped and shows how these rooms need to take into account how big or tall or short we are and considers how our ability to do things changes with age. "Universal Kitchen and Bathroom Planning: Design That Adapts To People" is a needed source book whether you are a design professional or a homeowner interested in remodelling.

WPA is a book that makes a horrible contradiction, it asks professionals working in related fields to the AIDS pandemic to examine certain kinds of structural violence regarding gender and poverty, which the authors correctly claim have been mostly overlooked - that is, poor women forms one of the groups most brutally hit by AIDS. No help, no medicine, no programs, no interest from academics, public health institutions, etc results in brutal and lethal suffering for poor women and their families. On the other hand, by the language they use to talk about prostitution systems, WPA authors practice and perpetuate serious forms of structural violence against poor women and children.

The book is divided into 3 parts: 1) "Rethinking AIDS" tries to take a global look at the AIDS pandemic specially regarding poor women; 2) "Rereading AIDS," examines problems with social science, public health, and clinical medicine on AIDS and poor women; and 3) profiles organizations who offer services to people with AIDS with a sensitive framework towards poverty and women.

Throughout the book, where the issue of prostitution regularly appears, the authors adopt the trend to refer to women and children in prostitution as "sex workers." They do alternatively use "prostitute," but the emphasis is "sex worker," "sex tourism," "sex industry," words which serve to hide any form of violence, crime, and torture in prostitution systems. Even in their own vignette of Lata, a prostituted teenager, which is such a typical case in prostitution or the rape tourism industry, which exemplifies so many of the forms of violence suffered by prostituted children and women, the authors use mostly a falsely non-violent language that serves to make invisible and push away from conscience the very violence the authors are describing. Lata is an Indian girl who is "sold" by her parents to a pimp, she is raped, kidnapped, and sexually and psychologically abused into a prostitution system, and after all of that, while still in captivity, while still being coerced to have sex with men (i.e. being systematically raped), she is called by the authors a "sex worker." It is particularly disgusting to see authors who write a book asking people to take into account structural forms of violence against women - in particular, the brutal consequences of poverty: lack of safety, human rights, medical care, care for their children, economic survival, psychological well being- and who at the same time use a vocabulary and language that serves to hide so many forms of violence perpetrated against these very women and children in prostitution systems. I don't see using "sex worker" as a step forward from "prostitute." If the word "prostitute" carries a stigma, the problem won't be resolved by using a language that serves to hide the violence involved in the system. Authors can come up with something less irresponsible than that.

The term "sex worker" is so comfortable, so nifty, so postmodern-chic, so trendy-but so disgustingly violent, so corrupt in its insensitivity to the suffering and trauma perpetrated against defenseless children and women in prostitution, and so in collusion with every single person who would like to erase from the public eye, and consequently from accountability and punishment, the great violations of various human rights involved in systems of prostitution and the rape tourism industry. This is particularly problematic in a book that has subtitles such as " the use of culture and construction of denial to explain this or that," "making it explicit: women, poverty, AIDS," "exaggeration of poor women's agency," and not least, "lack of accountability." It's Orwellian.

Authors such as those from WPA usually justify their practice of the above violence by saying that "sex worker, et al" is a vocabulary that does not stigmatize those in prostitution. But the compounded horrendous forms of violence (specially structural ones) in prostitution are much worse than the processes of stigmatization. So why, when there is so much violence in prostitution, have academics adopted such a camouflaged, deceptive wording? How privileged, dehumanized, and lacking in accountability regarding a language that erases real violence from conscience in prostitution systems are these and other authors?

The answer, unfortunately, is "very." Albeit WPA provides some very important information, plus heartbreaking profiles of diverse women, nationally and internationally brutalized by AIDS, plus the discussion of various serious problems regarding poor women and AIDS, it felt, in my view, like two steps backwards, one step forward. Purporting to raise issues of the violence of poverty towards women and their families - of which prostitution is a significant destroyer of human rights-the authors end up caught up in the same problem they are trying to denounce.

"Lucid, smart, passionate, and compassionate, Women, Poverty & AIDS puts the calss back into class analysis. Through a diversity of voices, experiences, geographies and disciplines, the contributors argue that poverty as a factor in the global HIV epidemic is pervasive, neglected, and urgent. Povery is inescapably linked to gender. Acall to arms on behalf of health and social justice for poor women, its impact is searing." --Paula Treichler, University of Illinois, Urbana, editor of The Feminist Dictionary

"Exceedingly well-written, this book shows that AIDS is a wake-up call--we must be about the business of transforming our world, if for no other reason than to prevent the creation of a worse epidemic, which could be the inevitable sequel to our failure to contain this one. A compelling presentation of people, programs and ideas, Women, Poverty & AIDS has an important message of hope." --Robert Fullilove and Mindy Fullilove, M.D., Columbia School of Public Health

"Moving beyond a simple biomedical model, this book compels us to view AIDS in women in a wholly new way, as an inescapable event in lives devalued by the forces of poverty, racism, and sexism. This extraordinary multidisciplinary effort should serve as the guidebook for those who want to understand how AIDS could become a leading killer of young women in a mere decade." --Deborah Cotton, M.D., Massachusetts General Hospital, editor of The Medical Management of AIDS in Women

"Women, Poverty & AIDS makes a major contribution by staying always close to the lived realities of real people in real places, and refusing the old, empty, pat answers to difficult questions. A hard-nosed, real-life analysis--an antidote to status quo thinking--this should be required reading for all who care about AIDS--or public health." --Jonathan Mann, M.D., Director of the International AIDS Center, and the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health

This book has all the imformation i needed all in one book.

This book was developed from the proceedings of the first major professional symposium of aging with a spinal cord injury (held in Denver in 1991). The content is very comprehensive and focuses on different body systems and how normal aging of these systems effects the person with SCI, and how SCI may modify the aging process. While this book was published a number of years ago, it contains most of the research to date, and is based on collaborative data from major SCI centers in both the USA and England. While heavily focused on the medical model, it can be a valuable resource for both professionals working with people with SCI as well as those with SCI and their families.

Alpha Factor is the first of five modules release for the 3rd edition of TSR's Gamma World game setting. Players find themselves enmeshed in a post-apocolyptic world who's previous inhabitants, known as the Ancients, are only a distant memory, and the technology they have left behind is a riddle to be solved.

The story begins in the main settlement of the Restorationists, a group trying to restore the world to it's former state. The players have been recruited by the village elder, Gene, to explore an Ancient installation for possible future colonization. Rumors of miraculous events occuring at the installation have also been circulating. It is up to the players to discover the truth. The adventure will not prove to be uneventful, of course. The world is a dangerous place where relics can change the course of history, the local flora is lethal, and neighboring villages are beating the drums of war.

The epic quest to find the fabled Cities of Man begins in this module and continues through the remaining modules ("Beta Principle", "Gamma Base", "Delta Fragment" and "Epsilon Cyborgs"). A supplement to the original game rules indicated that the story would ultimately end with "Project Omega", however the writers never got that far. The story line is an excellent jumping off point for future adventures however, and slowly unravels the mystery of what it was that destroyed the world of the ancients.

The object of this book is to introduce the multivariate technique of factor analysis to students within the natural sciences. It is the revised and expanded version of a book by Joreskog, Klovan and Reyment, that first appeared in 1976. The first chapter provides a brief example of a factor analysis and an overview of the problems amenable to factor analysis. This overview provides the reader with an impression of the many and varied fields of scientific research that are subsumed under the heading of the natural sciences. The second chapter explains basic mathematical and statistical concepts that are needed in the subsequent chapters. This chapter covers a lot of ground in a relatively short space. As a result, certain concepts are treated rather poorly. For instance, the explanation of a determinant as 'a scalar derived from operations on a matrix' (p. 32) is unlikely to engender very much understanding. Fortunately, the authors do provide references to more extensive treatments of the subject matter, and certain subjects do re-emerge later in the chapter. The chapter ends with a treatment of the not-so-basic concepts of the eigenvalue decomposition, the Eckart-Young theorem, and finally, the canonical analysis of asymmetry. The canonical analysis of asymmetry receives a curt treatment. Chapter three introduces the aims, ideas, and models of factor analysis. This chapter starts with a good description of the exploratory model for R-mode factor analysis, i.e. the analysis of the relationship among variables. A matrix and scalar notation are used to explain the model both for the observations and for the dispersion matrix. Both principal component analysis and true factor analysis are distinguished and the major difference in objectives explain. The chapter ends with an example of a common factor exploratory (true) factor analysis followed by orthogonal and oblique rotations. The data are artificial, so the results are unambiguous. Chapter 4 is devoted entirely to R-model factor analysis. Again, true factor analysis and principal component analysis are discussed. The fact that PCA is also applied as an exhaustive, and informative transformation (e.g. in allometry), is mentioned briefly (p. 101), but, as is now to be expected, the emphasis is on PCA as a form of factor analysis. Many important subjects related to PCA are explained clearly, and illustrated. These include robust PCA, cross validation, sensitivity analysis and the analysis of compositional data. The illustration of robust PCA involves the analysis of a heterogeneous dataset. Apparently the data are a mixture of two multivariate normal distributions. This is could be useful to emphasize the importance of the distributional assumption of identicalness and independence, but is less than ideal in an illustration of robust PCA. Remarkably, the reader is warned against heterogeneity of samples later on in the book (p. 198). True factor analysis receives less attention, although here such issues as sensitivity and cross validation are also important. The Heywood case, an inadmissible solution due to a negative residual variance, is not treated. This is a pity, because Heywood cases are known to occur often in exploratory factor analysis, and are an important diagnostic of model mis-specification. This omission is all the more surprising, because the illustration of a true factor analysis on page 110 actually contains a Heywood case. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of path analysis and Wrightian factor analysis. The exact definition of 'Wrightian factor analysis' is lacking. Judging by the illustrative analysis of the Wright's famous leghorn data, Wrightian factor analysis is simply a confirmatory factor analysis using ULS estimation. The results of this illustrative analysis are obtained using LISREL and another program. On page 135 one reads 'Note the system LISREL is a convenient way of making a path analysis'. There is little doubt that this is true, but there is nothing in this the book to substantiate the remark. Chapter 5 is devoted to Q-mode methods. These are methods concerned with the relationship among objects, rather than among cases. Three Q-mode methods are treated: Imbrie's Q-mode factor analysis, Gower's principal coordinates, and later in the chapter, the analysis of asymmetry, which is also due to Gower. It is clear that Q-mode methods are more difficult than R-mode methods. They require more technical knowledge (e.g. distance measures) and are sometimes less intuitively appealing (e.g. analysis of asymmetry based on the factorization of a skew-symmetric matrix). However, the difficulty of the subject matter is somewhat compounded by details relating to the presentation. For instance, it is stated on page 137 that the 'main interest in doing a Q-mode analysis is graphical', but that Imbrie's Q-mode factor analysis 'is concerned with obtaining answers to several questions, of which the graphical appraisal of the data is only one (...)'. Later still, (p. 142) the graphical representation in Q-mode factor analysis is 'incidental to the analysis'. On page 140, the terms Euclidian distance and Pythagorean distance in two consecutive sentences, while they represent the same distance. The term duality is used repeatedly to indicate a certain similarity between techniques (e.g., p. 140), but never defined. These are just detail, of course, but they do not make the subject matter in this chapter any easier to follow. Still it should be said that the explanations of the Q-mode techniques are quite clear. The illustrations using artificial and real data are informative and work well to facilitate and deepen the understanding of the models. Q-R-mode analysis is the subject of chapter 6. The treatment of Q-R-mode analysis is fairly brief. The technique is illustrated. Subsequently, Gariel's biplots, and CANOCO, an amalgamation of canonical correlation analysis and correspondence analysis, are discussed. Again the techniques are illustrated. Chapter 7 concerns various practical aspects that one faces in carrying out an statistical analysis. Many of these are quite general in that they apply to any statistical analysis, not just to a factor analysis. Other aspects are inherent to exploratory factor analysis, such as the method of extraction, the choice of the number of factors to retain and the method or rotation. In view of the many techniques discussed, especially in chapters 5 and 6, a section containing a clear discussion of the issue of 'which technique to use when', would have been welcome. In chapter 8, a number of examples and two case histories are presented. These are useful and quite interesting to read. They do require specialized knowledge of the subject matter to fully appreciate the substantial aspects of the results. The appendix is written by Leslie F. Marcus. It is devoted entirely to the MATLAB programming language and scripts to carry out many of the illustrative analyses presented in the book. The inclusion of the appendix fits in well with general approach of the book and offers the reader an opportunity to gain first hand experience in carrying out the various analyses. One does require the MATLAB program, and an understanding of the MATLAB programming language. Possibilities, if any, to carry out analyses using multi-purpose statistical packages are not discussed. This is not a simple introduction to applied factor analysis. It requires a fair degree of mathematical sophistication to understand the various models, especially those based on Q-mode and Q-R-mode techniques. It requires careful reading to come to grips with the subtle distinctions between the various model. The presentation at times could be a little bit more accommodating. Still, with its extensive use of illustration and worked examples, and the availability of MATLAB m-files to use in one's own analyses, I think that this book is a useful introduction. The book contains a few typographical errors, all of which are innocuous.

The book's charts are fantastic! They give all the info women need to determine risk catagories and are the best part of the book. In very small print it says Rita Watson MPH designed them.

Shrouded in a cloak of mystery and full of intrigue and complexity. The author weaves the most enticingly detailed plot. The books characters are fully 'alive.' Certainly a rare treasure of a talent. The author is destined to become a GIFT to the literary arts.

It is a book of its kind, rarely seen in the public speaking market. Though the theme that runs throughout this manual concerns itself with "charisma" and how to acquire it, as one reads deeper into its pages, one will realize that what it is actually hitting at is the art and craft of charismatic public speaking, of how great orators of old has held audiences spellbound and charmed with their eloquence, cadence, vocal quality, and the charming content of their speeches. Not only does it touch on the mere technicalities of speaking in public and making presentations, it is a revelation of the "tricks" and "methods" of how charismatic speakers of past and present directly or indirectly used on their way to oratorical glory.

Although generic and unspecific, Dr. Glantz brings up a lot of issues about changes that will be required in fishing techniques and gear. This book is easy to read and provocative. Due to the "uncertainty factor" regarding changes in ocean circulation patterns, there is much not yet known (even since the publication date), despite scientist's best efforts to do predictive modeling. This book points to areas that will require further research, and is one of the few books written addressing this topic.