Manipulation

I was dissapointed in the contents and projects in this book. Although beautiful, I think most were impractical. I also felt the book would be giving help and ideas for embroidery machines, not just embroidering on a standard sewing machine. While I would like to embellish cloth with embroidery, this book seemed beyond a beginner in scope and terminology.

The title of this book is misleading; a more apt title would have been - "The Art of Fabric Manipulation: using Machine Embroidery as Embellishment"

What this book offers is a wonderful view into the techniques of fine artists specializing in fiber/textile arts. Each page is richly illustrated with the artists' craft incorporating fine art techniques such as encaustics (paint, crayon), plastics, polymer clay on to fabric and lace. Most or all of the creations featured are one-of-a-kind pieces or benefit as exhibition pieces. If you consider yourself a fine artist with fabric, you will appreciate what this book has to offer in the way of fabric manipulation through sewing machine embroidery and fine art medium. The specific aspects of this book leads me to view this textbook as a professional monograph.

If you are looking for machine embroidery techniques to use with your computerized embroidery machine (Bernina, Pffaff, Brother etc), then I suggest you look into Embroidery Machine Essentials by Twigg and Goodall.

This is well planned and laid out book. It takes you through the basics and onwards to more advanced and interesting projects which will suit more adventurous stitchers, especially those involved in City & Guilds. The author is concise and to the point in her instructions and the book is also well illustrated.

Tainted Truth took the far opposite side of the manipulation of fact argument. I feel that the content of the book turns the weak minded cynical, and the strong minded incensed. The data provided within the book is accurate for the most part, but there are glaring errors in the data provided in many of the vignettes.

This Book was used in a Graduate school class; I saw some of the class take the information as Gospel, turning them into cynics about any data for the remainder of the program. Others who realized that this was nothing more than another point of view took it as just what it is: another point of view

This book will open your eyes to what goes on behind the "research" we hear reported on every day. After reading this book you'll no longer be swept along by empty media hype which lacks substance.

She tells some fascinating stories about what really goes on in food and drug "research."

Read it, if you're a lover of hard hitting truthful books.

good introduction to how people abuse research studies, and sometimes, even worse, commission studies with the intent of only releasing them if they spin the results in their favor.

As with a lot of the wrox press books ; they are incredibly difficult to read; both literally and physically!!!;
you can't keep a page open because the book spine is so tight that it keeps flipping shut.
The book should start at the beginning and work its way through but instead it jumps into the deepend drowning newer users.
Really found this book annoying and although it has a lot of content and usefull code the format and delivery make it ultimately a waste of money (my opinion.)

Unless you are writing games for a living, YOU WILL be spending a lot of time manipulating text. I have a true love/hate relationship with using regular expressions but there is no argument about the sheer power they bring to a developer's workbench. This guide is very concise and is a 'must have' reference book. Well organized and written.

I don't know what's happening with it's publication. I got it from Amazon from a re-seller and I'm not quite sure if it's still being printed. I know that when I went to download the sample code I was redirected to another site. Whatever it's status is, don't miss out and get your copy now. I don't know of another reference for the .NET developer for text/string/regular expressions.

Wow! Quite impressed! I have been programming in VB, C and Java for years. This book is a concise explanation of strings with great history for perspective and detail about .NET implementation.

This book reads very well and has great code examples. I suppose someone that doesn't know anything about programming shouldn't be trying to read a book about string encoding and regular expressions in the first place. This is not an introductoryto VB.net book (thank god!)

If you are an intermediate or greater developer that is new to .NET then this book is a must read. I've seen so many VB developers hurt themselves with string concat in VB. This book explains why and how the .NET framework solves those problems.

Regular Expressions is such a powerful tool. It is a shame that it took so many years for it to become part of the Microsoft arsenal. It has been used in Perl for decades.

It behooves every programmer to learn about the following three topics...

1] The StringBuilder class
2] Interning Strings
3] Regular Expressions.

Also, in the past, I have not been a big fan of wrox books. ..not sure why. I think, comparatively, they were hard to read. Even when reading topics that I thouroughly knew, I found the wording and layout less than ideal. It was probably just a bad group of editors. (There are even a few mispellings and mistakes in this book) However, I am a big fan of this new layout. Smaller books covering specific topics that you want to learn is the way to go.

This book is great. Get it.

Firstly, Martin Evening is a Photoshop wizard. Unfortunately he has difficulty conveying his knowledge. Reading this book is a bit like listening to an expert mumbling away to himself about his field of expertise. You have to strain to glean the information, but it is there nevertheless. Furthermore, he has assumed an odd starting position of the reader. He assumes you have years of experience with commercial printing, and that you are familiar with older versions of Photoshop. He wastes too much space explaining how things used to work in previous versions. This book will not teach you Photoshop. Learn Photoshop (read the Adobe manual), become a power user, and then read this book (a few times to make sense of it).

I think this book is a wonderful overview of not only Photoshop techniques which directly apply to a photographer, but also a lot of information about the scanning,saving, and printing process. It makes the world of Digital Graphics real for a photographer. I recommend this book to photographers out there who are getting started with the digital processes. It clears the smoke.

This is a GREAT book. I've read a lot of Photoshop books about levels and curves, but this was the first book to show me how to actually use them to color correct scanned images. The other books tell you how the levels and curves work, but this book showed my how to use them to evaluate an image and then correct the image. This is also the first book that really taught me how to use the measure tool to automatically rotate an image to a level position. It's full of tips like that. I keep a pile of my most frequently used reference books next to my computer, and this is the one that's usually on the top of the pile. This is not a photoshop beginners book, but I use tips from this book all the time on all of my images.

I'm a licensed massage therapist (3 years) and massage instructor at a local school. When I bought this book, I thought I'd come away with some practical information that I could apply to my practice immediately. Well, after reading it I don't feel that at all. In fact, I feel that it may be another 10 years before I can become proficient in all the modalities that Weintraub combines to achieve his reported results. Among the courses I'll need to certify in are Acupressure, myofascial release, Body-Mind Centering and visceral manipulation. He's been doing this for 30+ years and I don't feel he has been able to write a book that can teach this method, though he successfully describes the myriad skills needed to practice it. ...

Weintraub certainly knows his way around the body. I am moderately well versed in medical terminology and anatomically I am fairly astute having studied both in college and independently. I work in a medical laboratory. The man (or woman) on the street will be quickly left in the wake of unfamiliar terms. Further, his knowlege does not translate well if you're looking for a way to heal yourself... The chapter titled "Self Help Strategies" runs to all of seven pages. Neither, does the book offer any clues as to how to contact a practitioner versed in his methods (he seems to be the only one), nor does it contain any contact information for the author.

The citations are numerous and the book is well referenced: something that is often lacking in similar books. He has definitely done his homework. Unfortunately, the unique array of talents which he purports to bring to his method, would be unlikely to occur with any regularity in the general population of manual therapists. I am skeptical of his claim to be able to palpate electrical and magnetic fields. Possible, I suppose, but I remain unconvinced.

In all a well written and documented study. Hopefully, it will lead others in this direction. A lot more work needs to be done, and a modality developed which is widely accessible

Weintraub's book provides unprecedented help and hope for people who suffer from sports, overuse, or accident injuries. It is extremely informative in its clear accessible descriptions of the cellular, neural, electrical, and biomechanical levels of injury and healing and how manual therapy can assist complete recovery. I am a 20 year practitioner and teacher of hands-on modalities. My interventions are more effective because of his specific explanations of how to work precisely with the microstructure of the tissue. I highly recommend this book to health professionals, sports and movement trainers, and everyone interested in an innovative method of enhancing recovery from serious injury.

The first and most important thing to understand about this book is that it is NOT a political psychology book. Anyone looking for that will be sorely disappointed. This is a book dealing primarily with the manipulation of voting rights and practices to achieve a given result.

It is difficult to imagine the average reader getting excited about the subtle implications of what order certain proposals, etc. are voted on in. However, the author is obviously enthusiastic, and to an extent, it is catching. If you read carefully enough (and it should be noted that it is a dry subject, so it can be slow going), the games played become clear, and it can be exciting-- up to a point.

This book is organized as a series of case studies, beginning all the way back in Classical Greece, moving up through the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, and on to modern-day club voting and Congressional vote-trading. This last example is probably the most useful to the modern reader, as it does provide a useful explanation of the utility and even necessity of what is commonly seen as "sleazy politics".

This book is lacking in the explanation of theory or conclusion, either in the realm of the morality of the sort of manipulation presented or in the theory of practice. Riker's one stab at theory comes in the form of coining a new word to cover the art of voting effectively. The examples given, however, are well-explained, and can be useful to anyone involved in parliamentary procedure. It should be noted that this IS an important subject, and provided an important impetus toward the development of modern parliamentary procedure.

I read this when I was in high school, I not only found it easy to comprehend (which says alot given the state of education in this country), but narrated quite well. Riker provides both access to the material without requiring a graduate degree, but provides new material to even those with graduate degrees. A must read for those who wish to know how bills really become or don't become laws.

God bless the people who have been taken in by inmates trying to con you. I work in a prison and it is a daily part of life there. I wish I had read this book before starting. I think it does a good job of scaring you just enough to be more careful. I found myself marveling at the ingenuity behind some of the cons. If only they would put that much time, effort and thought into other things...But what is really scary is the number of people who have been taken in by them. The advice is practical and indispensible for anyone working in the corrections field. It is easy to think it won't happen to you, but it happens to many people each year. This well written and easy to read book helps you recognize the con and thus protect yourself against it. Real life examples and responses help make the teachings more concrete. It also offers a brief analysis of why inmates try to manipulate.

This book is authentic to the original Downs volume. It beautifully describes the moves and sleights. However, it also goes into the deeper philosophy of coin magic. Overall it is a good addition to you coin magic library

Winston's book is really terrible. I mean truly repellently, malignantly bad. "Can it really be as bad as all that?" you wonder. Yes!! It's that bad!! For starters, the book is poorly organized. Topics that logically belong together are often several chapters apart. There is no overall structure to the book. It seems like a collection of topics in AI that were hastily assembled without concern for thematic organization or flow. For example, the forward and backward chaining algorithms are presented in a chapter (Ch. 7) on rule-based systems, but are not even mentioned in the chapter (Ch. 13) on logic! Perceptron training is presented AFTER backpropagation! Contrast this with the much better book by Russell and Norvig, which uses the theme of intelligent agents as a continuing motivation throughout, and which groups related topics into logically arranged chapters.

The examples in Winston are atrocious. The main example in the backpropagation chapter is some kind of classification network with a bizarre topography. This example is so trivial and weird that it totally fails to illustrate the strengths of backpropagation. The explanations of generalization and overfitting in backprop training are awful.

The only chapter of this book that is not an unmitigated pedagogical disaster is the chapter on genetic algorithms, although better introductions exist (e.g. Melanie Mitchell).

A further annoyance is the placement of all the exercises at the end of the book instead of the end of the chapters to which they correspond.

Avoid this book. It is truly horrible, and vastly superior books on AI are readily available at comparable prices.

Suppose you are, like me, a software engineer who never actually studied CS beyond junior level undergraduate 'data structures'... and now you have to work on something involving complicated pattern matching... this is how to do it: buy this book and Sipser's on the Theory of Computation. After digesting them (which is easy if you're as good with logical mathematics as the typical software engineer), you should be able to read current literature in either field, and will have a deep, fundamental understanding of how to best solve whatever problem you're working on. That's what worked for me, anyway. An excellent book, as is Sipser's.

Having purchased this book as a supplement to Winston's course at MIT, I can very highly recommend it as a very comprehensive, up-to-date, well written text summarizing the field. The book covers essentially all of the topics pertenant in modern AI with enough detail for a complete implementation without being overly technical. I strongly recommend it to anybody looking to build intelligent systems or to anybody simply perusing the field for abstract ideas.

1.I'M NOT A SOCIAL ACTIVIST,
by Ronald J. Sider.


I'm not a social activist. I'm a disciple of Jesus
Christ, the Savior and Lord of the universe.
In the inner-city congregation where my family
worshiped for more than a decade, the choir often
sang a song I still love:
Jesus, you're the center of my joy;
All that's good and perfect comes from you.
You're the heart of my contentment, hope for all I do.
Jesus, you're the center of my joy.

That's what I want to talk about here.

I've been blessed in so many ways in life: wonderful
Christian parents who loved each other dearly and
their Lord even more; a lovely gifted woman who has
grown with me over 42 years of joyful marriage;
three wonderful children; a great education;
ministry opportunities that vastly exceeded even the
wildest dreams of this farm boy.

At the center of all that goodness and joy stands
Jesus my Lord.

My parents taught me by their words and actions what
the little motto they hung in my bedroom constantly
announced:
Only one life 'twill soon be past,
Only what's done for Jesus will last.

In college when classical intellectual doubt led me
to question whether an honest thinker in the modern
world could still believe in historic Christian
faith, a brilliant professor helped me see that the
historical evidence for Jesus' resurrection was very
strong.

When the typical problems that invade every marriage
threatened to destroy the joy and happiness that
Arbutus and I had experienced for more than 15
years, the commands and power of Christ kept us
faithful to each other and enabled us to work
through tough challenges and discover a better,
stronger, deeply satisfying marriage.

When new opportunities as an evangelical social
activist opened up, leading me to modify my earlier
sense of call to be an apologist for historic
Christianity in the secular university world, I
resolved to keep Jesus - the full biblical Christ -
at the center of my heart, theology and work -
grounding my social activism in historic Christian
faith and maintaining a strong passion for
evangelism.

Jesus, you're the center of my joy. It is you I
love, you I adore and worship, and you I have sought
to follow and obey.

Whenever I think carefully about Jesus, I am utterly
astounded. About two thousand years ago in a little
corner of the Roman Empire, an obscure Jewish
carpenter claimed to be the long-expected Messiah
who, his people expected, would drive out the
conquering Romans and begin the new age of peace,
justice and resurrection. But the authorities
crucified him - using the most shameful and powerful
death possible - to prove he was a fraud. But then
just three days later, his astonished disciples
reported, he rose from the dead. And within a very
short time these strict Jewish monotheists, whose
most basic belief was that there is only one God,
started telling the world that the Carpenter from
Nazareth was God in the flesh, Lord of the universe,
reigning King although Caesar mistakenly thought he
was in charge of the world. What an utterly amazing
thing for a handful of oppressed Jewish colonials
living at the edge of the powerful pagan Roman
empire to believe and preach...

- Ron goes on to explore this incredible development
under four parts:
Jesus' Gospel
Jesus' Death and Resurrection
Jesus' Person
Jesus' Agenda

To read the rest of Ron's sermon, which was his
concluding talk at ESA's 30th Anniversary
Celebration last July, and to learn why Ron considers
himself not a social activist but a follower of Christ

Interesting points, but book flawed by author's obsessional contempt for Ron Sider. Reading the book... (good grief, reading the dustjacket copy!)makes you fear for Chilton's health, pursuing as he does a scorched-earth policy toward the other writer. These passions are most commonly associated with a divorce court, not one confessing Christian responding to another. I kept instinctively reaching for my dainty hanky to wipe the froth off Chilton's chin.

If you really, really hate Ron Sider or love, love David Chilton, this is the book for you! Otherwise, non-combatants should clear the dance floor!

Although this work was written specifically to rebut Ron Sider's book "Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger," it also gives a thorough introduction to explicitly Biblical economics. One needn't have read Sider's book to benefit from Chilton's critique of Sider's socialist economics. Chilton gives specific examples of how to apply the economic laws of the Old Testament, and more importantly, why we ought to do so. It is no doubt due to Chilton's persuasive arguments that Sider has, in subsequent editions of his own book, rescinded many of his previously extremist theories.