Forecasting

The debate held in Warsaw is, in essence, a valiant defense by Rorty of the merits of American anti Platonism. Habermas, Kolakowski and Gellner offer criticism of Rorty's "relativism," but none of them are able (except perhaps Gellner in his brief and insightful American history narrative) to compete with Rorty's style, confidence, and multi-textual brilliance. Is Philosophy dead? Rorty's case presumes that the realization of the Platonic myth of "finding" knowledge requires an embracing of pragmatic utility towards a unified global community, and a better existence. Rorty's case is, as he admits, a romantic one. In addition, several of his thoughts delve frighteningly further into extreme liberalism as to partly dissociate himself from moderate pragmatists such as Quine and James. Yet the dry, albeit insightful, arguments of Habermas and the occasionally obtuse criticisms by Kolakowski are unable to sway the impetus of persuasion away from Rorty. Rorty, in my mind, wins this debate--if it can be won at all. This does not, however, imply that the intellectual realm is abandoned. To the contrary, as Rorty asserts, it means much of the work has yet to begin.

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In the first few pages, Jurgen Habermas delivers a helpful picture of the historical emergence of rational thinking from preceding mythical worldviews and the debate which then ensued between Platonism (rational, ideal forms of thought) and anti-Platonism (relative, contingent skepticism) that continues to this day. He demonstrates how a flux between the two sort of generates a need for the other, but also why anti-Platonism (like Rorty's relativism and Derrida's deconstruction of today) can never deliver a legitimate, conclusive argument against the necessity of Platonic idealism.

Habermas' argument in a nutshell, quoted here from page 4:

"The practice of criticizing Platonist pseudo-objects moves within a conceptual frame and employs conceptual means which in turn cannot be deconstructed without depriving anti-Platonism of it's own critical sting. The radical attempt to do away with any abstraction, idealization, or concept of truth, knowledge, and reality that transcends the local 'hic et nunc' would run into performative contradictions."

In other words, deconstructive critique operates from a rational, metaphysical premise of thought, even if that premise is obscured by labyrinthine linguistics (the critique requires a rational frame of mind to recognize the critique).

The point is not that relativism is always a worthless concept, but that idealized forms of thought can never be done away with because they are in fact a necessary premise of human communication. Therefore we ought to work toward mutual understanding and definition of ideas than destroying them. This is the basis of Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action, which tries to direct philosophy away from divisive moral relativism and toward enlightened intersubjective responsibility.

Two knowledgable authors gave in-depth treatments on the subject of DCM. The math is fairly easy to follow in most places. The biggest strength is a nice combination of theoretical and practical issues. The readers however should be benefitted from a new edition, which should include, among other things, extended exposures on ordered responses and grouped/aggregated data analyses with DCM. An introduction to the existing software and relevant issues should also be a plus.

This book is intended for serious graduate students who wish to learn demand analysis. This book is used as a text for the demand analysis course at MIT for 1st/2nd year grad students. Rigorous statistical and econometric background is a must preparation for this book. Includes very crisp and elegant proofs and dicussion. Impressive methodological treatment for demand analysis. Although all examples are drawn from the Transportation field, the content can easily be implemented for Marketing Science and other fields.

Since at least the 1982 publication of his book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, Michael Novak has been the leading voice in the effort to reconcile Catholicism and capitalism, an effort which bore spectacular fruit with the 1991 papal encyclical, Centisimus Annus. The tension between the two -isms, though partially a function of the fact that Capitalism is associated with Protestantism, was for the most part a fairly natural result of capitalism's dependence on individualism and self-interest, as opposed to Catholicism's hierarchical and authoritarian structure and Christianity's requirement of selflessness and charity.

The three essays in this collection, originally delivered as the Pfizer Lectures at the American Enterprise Institute, address the future of the corporation, intellectual property rights, and corporate governance. They are unified by the way in which Novak treats business and the corporation as institutions which have important moral roles to play in society. First he discusses the fact that corporations are voluntary associations, which allow individuals to work together in ways that make them more powerful and effective than they could ever be on their own and which serve important social ends :

From the point of view of civil society, the business enterprise is an important social good for four reasons. First, it creates jobs. Second, it provides desirable goods and services. Third, through its profits, it creates wealth that did not exist before. And fourth, it is a private social instrument, independent of the state, for the moral and material support of other activities of civil society.

In fact, he argues, the effectiveness of corporations in providing goods and services, in creating wealth, jobs, and opportunities, and in providing a counterweight to the power of central government, makes them second in importance only to religious organizations in terms of the role they have played in creating and guaranteeing democracy.

In this section he makes the really intriguing point that some of the earliest capitalist corporations were born out of the Catholic monasteries of the Middle Ages. He quotes the great modern Tory historian Paul Johnson to the effect that :

A great and increasing part of the arable land of Europe passed into the hands of highly disciplined men committed to a doctrine of hard work. They were literate. They knew how to keep accounts. Above all, perhaps, they worked to a daily timetable and an accurate annual calendar--something quite alien to the farmers and landowners they replaced. Thus their cultivation of the land was organized, systematic, persistent. And, as owners, they escaped the accidents of deaths, minorities, administration by hapless widows, enforced sales, or transfer of ownership by crime, treason and folly. They brought continuity of exploitation. They produced surpluses and invested them in the form of drainage, clearances, livestock and seed...they determined the whole future of Europe; they were the foundation of world primacy.

This is ingenious both for the insight that the great innovation that these first corporate entities offered was continuity, of a type that was not available to individuals or even to families, and for the way in which it implicates the Church in the creation of capitalism. Novak's writing is characterized by this unique combination of perceptive analysis on general issues combined with more subtle demonstrations that capitalism and Christianity are and have been compatible.

The second section, on intellectual property, is so compelling that it actually made me rethink my position on Napster. Most of us have been tape recording albums, videotaping shows, "borrowing" computer programs, and now burning cd's, for so long that we've become inured to the idea that the underlying products are ours to exploit and that this will have little or no effect on the artists who create this product. Novak draws upon Abraham Lincoln's 1850 Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions in order to make the case that protection for patents and copyrights is one of the central innovations of the American system, one that deserves to be defended. He points out, for instance, that the right of inventors and authors to receive royalties is the only "right" mentioned in the body of the Constitution. It can hardly be a coincidence that the country which affords such creative activity the greatest protection has been the most creative nation. Novak discusses the ways in which these protections, which reward those who are willing to share their ideas and to take risks to develop them into products, have served to benefit not merely the innovators themselves but the society at large, and concludes :

Patent regimes recognize the right of inventors and authors to the fruit of their own labors as a right in common law. They do so because this right serves the common good by stimulating useful inventions and creative works from which a grateful public benefits. Far from protecting private interests at the expense of the common good, patent protection advances the common good by means of private interest. The common good is the end, private interest is the means.

Here again, we see that although it is often blithely assumed that capitalism serves only individual interests, it is in fact the most effective way for society in general to achieve progress.

In the final section, Novak discusses the various threats to the corporation presented by the various efforts to change how they are governed. He cites Michael Oakeshott's differentiation between the "civic association" and the "enterprise association" :

The civic association aims at something larger than any particular end, interest, or good: the protection of a body of general rules and a whole way of life; in other words, the larger framework within which, and only within which, the pursuit of particular ends becomes possible, peaceable, and fruitful. Given such a framework, individuals are free to choose myriad activities. The state is a civic association, he thought, or at least should be; so is the church; and so are many kinds of clubs, charitable organizations, and associations for self-improvement.

... By contrast, Oakeshott noted, the enterprise association is built to attain quite particular purposes... Enterprise associations are focused, purposive, instrumental, and executive: they fix a purpose and execute it.

The problem that corporations (enterprise associations) now face is that politicians and political activists are trying to blur these lines and turn them into civic institutions, with responsibilities for meeting all kinds of political and social purposes. This diffusion of aims, unwise as it may be, is perhaps appropriate for government organizations : if affirmative action and the like are going to be implemented somewhere, better that it be in government which is already moribund. But one need only look at the havoc such social experiments have wreaked on the military [as Stephanie Guttman has done in her excellent book : The Kinder, Gentler Military: Can America's Gender-Neutral Fighting Force Still Win Wars? (2000)(Stephanie Gutmann) (Grade: B+)] in order to see the disastrous effects of making an organization with a single purpose (being prepared to fight and win) try to satisfy a multitude of political purposes (gender neutrality, acceptance of homosexuals, etc.). Such fiddling by the political class has rendered our once mighty fighting forces politically correct, but much less formidable.

Corporate America now finds itself prey to these same pressures. Already overregulated on the environmental, labor, and other fronts, business finds itself under attack for not being sufficiently socially conscious. They are being asked to ignore the bottom line, to eschew profits, and to instead focus on their role in local communities. It is supposed that society would be better off if corporations were governed so as to "benefit" their employees and their neighbors, and governed in the way that government thinks fashionable at the moment, rather than being run with mere efficiency and profits in mind. One would have thought that the long and disastrous European experiment with Socialism and the spectacular failure of Japan's once vaunted economic planning would have put this argument to rest, but, alas, such is not the case. There will apparently always be a class of activists, politicians, and bureaucrats who believe that they, if given the opportunity, could run the economy. But having seen how inefficiently they run our governments, we should resist them at all costs.

In this book, Michael Novak is really trying to steel business people, to whom the initial lectures were addressed, for this fight. He seeks to warn them that they must not give up the freedom from government interference which has made American industry so uniquely creative an

... and the rest of the western world. This is an incredible book, successfully debunking every anti-corporate myth. Far more than the usual abstract pro-capitalist treatise; it focuses on the single institution that underpins the success of capitalism, AND that is the sole salvation of the Civil Society - the corporation.

This is a good book, but potential buyers should realize that it is aimed at researchers, not traders. It would take considerable work to rediscover the successful neural net discussed in the book, and there is no guarantee that the net would do well in real trading because the author does not seem to have taken slippage and commissions into account.

This book contains a number of new and interesting insights into the application of neural networks and genetic algorithms for finance. The idea of using "network regression pruning" looks extremely powerful and it would be very interesting to see this compared with other network pruning techniques. An aspect also worth highlighting is the detailed treatment of the financial experiments which appear to have been conducted in a rigorous and careful manner. I have attended many seminars and talks in which the experimentation for financial applications has been extremely poor. In many instances there is a failure to establish objective test criteria. In this work a single test run on ten years' worth of data is conducted and the algorithm performs well, contradicting all forms of the efficient market hypothesis. The level of detail also allows the reader to reconstruct the algorithm and methods for their own use. Other books on this subject should be as clear and as open.

Susan George uses her impressize knowledge of global capitalism to and its effects on the many to look at the picture from the side of the few. The report presents a frightening look at what would be required to preserve the current capitalist order in the face of the increasing impoveritization of an increasingly populous and ecologically strained world.

The report was originally written as a hoax (she was not going to claim authorship), however, for reasons she declines to elaborate on she chose not go through with it. I actually wish she had released it as real, to see the reaction of the elite pundits and media who will now feel secure in ignoring the book.

Even so, it is a worthwile read, primarily as it helps us see what kind of reforms of the global economy would simply tame the excesses of capitalism and thereby make the system only stronger, and what reforms would truely challenge the powers that be.

This document, more that a "report" is a cold blood, cynical guide to enslave, decimate and exterminate the surplus or the human population using methods as birth control, contagious diseases, political, religious and ethnic conflicts and wars, famines, low salaries, etc. This "report" that may be see for many people as a science fiction novel or a Malthus write is a nowaday reality. If we pay attention to everyday news, we could see that most of the formulas mentioned in this "report" have being applied around the world in a systematic way as isolated cases successfully with none or few opposition by the victims. I strongly recommend this book to those people that in some way or another can do something to stop this systematic plan already running.

Somewhat similar to Wood and Wollenberg. Not nearly as detailed or rigorous as the other, but more "modern", i.e., market-oriented. 200 pages on using neural nets in price forecasting (probably useful if you believe in nets). Interesting for me were sections on ancillaries, comittment/dispatch and congestion management. For those, authors provide a good introduction: mostly narrative with some formulas to show exactly what they mean.

This was one of the best books I read on the subject of power market.

I found this to be an excellent book on forecasting financial markets. There is a very readable explanation about how to use forecasts for asset allocation and how some famous Wall Street analysts do their forecasting. I enjoyed this book and found it well written. This book is probably best for intermediate to expert financial people, however.

This book explained in plain English how to model financial markets using common forecasting tools. I was especially interested in the thorough review of how data can be used and misused to create a forecast. This is important because it is directly related to the reliability of a forecast, which was also discussed in depth. There also an easy-to-understand explanation of modern portfolio theory, as well as a review of the approaches of three other Wall Street practioners. Altogether an excellent book.

All books that promise to teach you how to manage your time and your tasks more efficiently must be judged by one simple measure: Do they offer techniques that you actually can implement into your life? In the case of Powerful Planning Skills, the answer is an unqualified yes. Although the slim book at first looks simplistic, don't be deceived. Peter Capezio has written a nuts-and-bolts guide that essentially is a straightforward, interactive workbook. The text zeros in on strategic and personal planning styles, while also offering information to help you understand why your past efforts to become the world's best planner might have gone astray. Like most books on time management, this one includes much that you've heard before, but if you're looking to walk away with few new planning tricks, we [...] recommend this book to you.

I was just placed in charge of a large project and I was looking for a book that would give me some level of comfort that I was on the right track in planning what needs to be done. This book delivered exactly what I needed.

The book addresses different types of planning -- such as strategic, tactical, personal, etc., and steps you through the basics of developing a sound plan -- from defining your purpose or your goal to setting objectives, on through implementing your plan.

The book not only tells you what you need to do, but it tells you how you need to do it. It does this by providing a list of questions you should ask yourself about your project as you move from one phase of planning through to the end. There's also a case study that you follow from beginning to end to make sure you understand the concepts and the impact good planning has on achieving your goals.

You're given the information you need without having to wade through hundreds of pages of boring text to find it. Everything you need to know is provided in an easy to read concise format.

I highly recommend this book if you want to make sure you're developing a thorough plan that will lead you to success.

This is an insightful exploration of the so-called third wave or new paradigm churches from a scholar who presents the information in a readable fashion. The author is an outsider, yet he provides a favorable account of these rapidly-growing, Pentecostal-type congregations that all originated in California. It is a great book for anyone who is interested in the contemporary Christian scene. It is filled with stories, keen observations, balanced analyses, and surveys on the movement.

CalvaryChapels has been an "underground" church for over 25 years now - an alternative for the typical lifeless church down the street. Now someone has studied this phenomenon to see why it continues to grow and attract more people (often from non-religious backgrounds). The same for Vineyards & HopeChapels (which both have intersecting histories with CalvaryChapel). The personal stories are touching and fascinating, The research is exhaustive if not exhausting. The author belongs to a mainline church and periodically shows his amazement at these new church movements. They were all built on simplicity of faith, by those whose lives were radically changed by Jesus Christ (often people who would be the last ones you would expect). A little too much psychology & sociology throughout but the author is a professor and the book is published by a university press.

I read this book on a plane trip from Ft Lauderdale to California. It was easy to read, and had some great ideas to do IMMEDIATELY. I couldn't wait to come back to the office and start writing a new marketing plan and putting that plan to action. Great job. I look forward to more books by Heidi Richards!

This is my first attemp at marketing and this book has been a BIG help. It laid a foundation for me to create a marketing plan that is simple to do and most important, affordable. I will refer to Rose Marketing over and over again. ps. I love the anectdotes and stories Ms. Richards uses to illustrate her points!