Future Books

Well done! Another straight-forward and informative volume from Dr. Keenan and associates. Solid information is mixed with inspirational stories. A gem within the book is Mecca Chiesa's chapter that clears up the whole issue of Applied Behavior Analysis as a science as opposed to specifically a "treatment for autism." Sorry for my American spelling of behaviour.

This is a very well written book from an MBA's perspective. In other words, the emphasis is more on intuition rather than the underlying mathematics of option pricing. The book in fact starts with the Binomial Tree approach to option pricing - a method that is much more intuitive and powerful compared to Black-Scholes. The author walks you through certain arbitrage relationships before developing the binomial tree approach. Black-Scholes is introduced once you have obtained a thorough understanding of the binomial tree approach. There is a decent treatment of Forwards, Futures and Swaps and a very elegant proof for how CAPM weaves into option pricing. I strongly recommend the book to anyone starting out in option pricing. Once you have developed sufficient competence with trees and formulae, you can move to Hull's book which is much more technical but provides robust treatment of exotic options.

Reid wrote a book that covered many of the industries luminaries including Jerry Yang and Marc Andreessen and other forgotten people like Mark Pesce who dreamed too far ahead of the kerb.

The book dates better than business potraits because it allows insight into the creators of some of the webs cornerstones like Java and Yahoo! before the corporate comms people managed to use a PR backhoe loader to dump in excessive messaging, spin and massaging the annals of history.

THis edited book covers all the major issues of American defense planning, procurement, the military-industrial complex and so on. The range of views represented here covers the gamut pretty well, from the anti-proliferation side (an excellent, albeit brief chapter by Lora Lumpe) to those who just want the arms industry to run more efficiently, this is a great resource. If you want to know how, who, when or why regarding the defense industry in the 1990s, this is essential reading and a really handy reference. Flamm's chapter alone makes it worth getting, I thought, and was much more readable than his work in Susman and O'Keefe.

There are other books on this subject, but most have more bias than this, and the authors collected here are so knowledgeable that their work is likely to be included in any other edited book. If nothing else, this is more recent than most of those, which makes it valuable

This book is one of the best studies carried through on the problematic of the public art in the internacional context. The author displays of a form notable the new conceptions of public art, collated with the classic conceptions that afect the monument. He analyzes some of the interventions more interesting of the public space, and explains the intentions of each creator. Richard Serra, Rachel Whiteread, Tone Otterness, Antony Gormley, Isamu Noguchi, Mierle Ukeles, Wodiczko, is some of the examples that the author appeals to show to the diversity of the proposals contemporaries. For beyond the artists, the author collates diverses teses defended by Rosalin Deutshe, Suzanne Lacy, Sara Selwood, Harriet F. Senie, among others. If it is interested in deepening its knowledge in the field of the public art, cannot leave to possess a unit of this book in your private library.

This is an important and timely book. In writing about the leaders at Asia's largest and most important financial institutions, Peter Hoflich has chronicled not only the current state of banking in Asia, but also how these institutions survived the Asian financial crisis and where they are going, in bringing banking services to the some of the world's largest emerging consumer markets.

As US and UK banks are crumbling around us, the tales that the CEOs in this book have lived to tell are especially important. Japan's Shinsei emerged from the former Long-Term Credit Bank after a private equity buyout; Thai banks implemented painful credit controls; Indonesian banks are only now recovering, after a round of mergers.

The range of institutions and personalities covered in this book is breathtaking. Banks include China's ICBC which raised $22 billion in its IPO to India's HDFC that is developing products for all categories of consumers, from the super wealthy to the 700 million unbanked people in the country. Internet-only banks, foreign banks jostling for position among the local domestic giants, family owned and nationalized banks are also featured. One thing's for sure -- these men are women are determining the direction of economies in Asia through the banking services they are developing. They discuss their travails and triumphs in this book.

Hoflich's coverage of Japanese and Korean financial institutions is particularly strong. Certain markets, like Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam, are, unfortunately, not covered. But his fluency on issues, easy writing style and wit makes this book an enjoyable read. A must for anyone interested in banking.

Es un libro que en toda casa con un nino con SA debe de tener. Explica de una forma facil que es lo que es el Sindrome de Asperger, ademas de cosas utiles para los papas. Es una forma mas de unir a los padres con sus hijos Aspies.

This book contains a comprehensive assessment of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Authors from all three countries probe different aspects of the deal; they provide an overall assessment as well as detaailed examination of some of the critical issues and sectors that will be affected.

In addition to assessments of NAFTA from Canada, Mexico, and the United States, the book examines specific issues, namely, the enviroment, agriculture, investment provisions, rules of origin, the trade in automotive goods, dispute settlement, energy, the textile and apparel sector, and the financial sector. -- from book's back cover

In so many ways this is a stunning book. De Witt Douglas Kilgore, an English professor at Indiana University, employs the tools of post-modern analysis to pro-space advocacy from David Lasser in the 1920s and 1930s to Robert Zubrin at the end of the twentieth century. He suggests that advocates of spaceflight have long believed that it is human destiny to become a multi-planetary species, but not just as an end in itself but because of the desire to create a utopian society free from the constraints of cultures on Earth. His term for this is "astrofuturism," an extension of the American tradition of technological utopianism that has been so much a part of the political upheavals of the twentieth century.

Kilgore asserts that the pro-space utopian impulse was founded in the imperial politics and utopian schemes of the nineteenth century, but envisions outer space as an endless frontier that offers solutions to the economic and political problems that dominate the modern world. Its advocates used the conventions of technological and scientific conquest to express the ideals and contradictions endemic to American culture. Astrofuturists, according to Kilgore, imagined space frontiers that could extend the reach of the human species and heal its historical wounds. Their efforts both replicated dominant social presuppositions and supplied the technologies necessary for the critical utopian projects that emerged in the latter twentieth century.

Kilgore's scintillating narrative explores how this has played out in the writings of several pro-space advocates. He begins with David Lasser, an American who worked as an editor on two of Hugo Gernsback's science fiction magazines. Lasser wrote "The Conquest of Space" in 1930, laying out a leftist agenda for societies in space. He later went on to work as a union organizer but never abandoned his commitment to spaceflight as a way in which the oppressed might achieve an egalitarian society. From there Kilgore explores the work of science fiction authors Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ben Bova. He also offers an in-depth exploration of the thinking of Princeton University scientist Gerard O'Neill, who excited numerous counterculture refugees in the 1970s with his vision of colonies in space. Finally, Kilgore extends this search for a perfect society to current explanations of colonies on Mars and other planets.

Throughout this book Kilgore is concerned with the envisioning of futures that are inherently better in space than what exists on Earth. The novelists that he discusses always display a strong sense of justice, meritocracy, and, at least in the case of Heinlein, not a little libertarianism. A special theme that he investigates in this study is how the astrofuturists dealt with the racism so prevalent in American society, showing that in the science fiction discussed here it is overcome by a belief in the worth of all persons and an acceptance of others based on their capabilities. As Kilgore demonstrates, all of the astrofuturists, whether science fiction writers or not, always posit an open, boundless future for all humanity in space. It would be a place in which justice ruled and all had enough of every necessity of life. Space exploration would bring that, the astrofuturists believed, helping people to live together in greater harmony than ever before by ending the need to compete for resources. Kilgore maintains that this is a very important aspect of a positive future. He insists that "It is through this kind of imaginative work that we develop the tools we need to change the future" (p. 238).

"Astrofuturism" is a provocative discussion of how we have looked at a positive future in space. Kilgore notes that those involved in promulgating the astrofuturist ideology have emphasized the synergy between human and machines, social concerns and possibilities. Highly recommended.

With little time and a big millennium before us, this book is perhaps the best single navigation tool. It provides quick, customized guidance for each of us, by sign, explaining what our key work is and how best to go about it. As someone who loses track of the many significant planetary shifts occuring until my life is disrupted, I also found it helpful to have these spelled out by date so I can live more consciously in these themes. As an Aries, being in community is and will be a huge shift and source of my learning and success. Since reading about this, I've been much more willing to forego the lone wolf role and have already experienced great benefits. Also great coffee table or resource book for seminars -- people can't resist looking up their sign, once they understand what it's about.