My daughter loves flap books but never picks this one up to read. The illustrations are nice but perhaps not as appealing to a toddler. Text does not instill her curiosity.

I was hoping for a book that was more concise, more organized, and more instructional.

I thoroughly enjoyed the half hour it took to read this book - that is to say that if you're in the mood for a tongue-in-cheek discussion about gourmet cooking, this is excellent. It is, however, not an instructional book whatsoever. It discusses different utensils and real styles of cooking, but it does not offer advice or recipes. Great as a fun gift to accompany some real cooking stuff.

This is an archaic book with very little useful information for a beginning modeller. The ships plans contain very little detail and the text contains only the highest level instruction on how to approach any tasks.

This is a cute Christmas story for youngsters, however, it would have been better had it been based on fact. The words for Silent Night were written in Mariapfarr, Austria in 1816 and the music added in Arnsdorf, Austria in 1818. The poor mice were not to blame for the malfunction of the organ in St. Nicholas Church in Oberndorf. That was an ongoing problem and easily fixed. The real problem was the flooding of the Salzach River which caused rust and mildew. I like mice stories for children, but if they are connected with something realistic such as Silent Night, the story should be woven around the facts with more care and consideration.

I expected much more of this book. There are MANY cities and towns in the U.S. having 4-year colleges .... and this book perhaps looks at 0.5% of the total number .... Perhaps I should have looked at the book's page count before I bought it. That would have been a clue to the low number of cities and towns covered. Look at the low prices being asked for used copies of this book. That gives a telling clue to the low values that buyers of the new book place on their used books. I personally do not recommend this book.

One must appreciate that Dr. Noguchi was at the forefront of forensic medicine around the time of this book, and in that respect he deserves accolades. In this, his second "coroner" book he assumes a consultant viewpoint of some famous and mysterious, unresolved deaths. Some of the more interesting ones are Elvis, the family members of Jeffrey McDonald, and even Jack the Ripper. It is interesting to see his viewpoints, although the novel at this point in time is becoming dated. Technology is rapidly evolving and resolving more and more questionable deaths. We have Mr. Noguchi to thank for promoting the field.

This book looks promising, but the authors seem to be writing about recent-past trends in curriculum as if they were the waves of the future. They seem to have a strong bias for unstructured classrooms and postmodernism, even though those ideas appear to have reached their peaks and begun to decline in the real world. They talk at several points on the uselessness of standardized testing, but the consensus these days is it is an abdication of responsibility to omit verification of results in the classroom.

The book also adds new sections on technology and here again I have my doubts that the authors really understand the topic. For example, in chapters one and six they write about the rise of the internet and it's effect on the classroom learning environment. Sound promising? I thought so and was sorely disappointed. They write about the internet as the vanguard of the unstructured classroom of the future, but provide little evidence to back it up. They write that it will usher in a future time when students will guide their own learning and, through self motivation, study the things they are supposed to study. They will do this because they are motivated to learn. Have the authors been near any children lately? It seems highly debatable that kids will find learning "cool" and pursue it on their own simply because they can do it at a keyboard. I suspect they'll do what they do now and pick games over information. Wiles and Bondi argue that children have never had the opportunity to study what they want to study when they want to study it; but there have been public libraries for centuries. One can learn whatever one wants there, and in any order. Little evidence of enthusiasm for them on the part of students has been seen thus far. In truth, kids rarely use the internet for learning. They use it for entertainment, and the authors don't seem to understand this. In fact, while arguing for unstructured learning, the authors state that the biggest problem with the internet is it's lack of structure! They are right about that one.

There is another problem in the book, and it is most disturbing. There seems to be a radical leftist bias in parts of the book. At one point they state that the internet will level the playing field in learning so much that the role of teacher will whither away and students will be in charge of their own learning. Eventually the schools themselves will whither away and unstructured learning will dominate in the future, producing an equal environment for all. They appear to be advocating this strongly throughout the book. This idea sounds distinctly Marxist, and I question strongly whether it belongs in teacher education in the United States of America.

The book does well where it sticks to the facts, but these facts are drowned in a sea of opinion and debatable conjecture. In my opinion there are better choices available in the field of curriculum development.

Clark Gilbert and Joseph L. Bower are Assistant Professor and Professor at Harvard Business School respectively. This article was published in the May 2002-issue of Harvard Business Review.

We all experience different changes in our lives and the way we approach those changes, either as a threat or an opportunity, shapes our behavior...

This disappointing article attempts to provide a framework to cope with disruptive change. It is an interesting subject, but the authors do not really enter the territory by great depths. The focus is primarily on the impact of the Internet on traditional organizations, but even on this subject the authors barely touch the surface. There are some interesting remarks, but most of it has already been said before. The article is written in simple business US-English.

We used this product in nursing school. The nice thing about it is that you pick your NANDA diagnoses from related groups, then hone in on your patient's specific medical diagnosis. The program then takes you through anywhere from 5-15 pertinent nursing diagnoses, each with nursing interventions, which you then select. The end product is a printed copy of the specific medical diagnosis, a synopsis of the medical condition (pathophysiology, nursing implications, etc.) then each of the nursing diagnoses and interventions you picked with their rationales.

The down side of this product was the difficulty in modifying the output. The printouts usually were too general and so much was not pertinent to my patient, but you could not delete anything selected from the "canned text." I usually had to either scratch out stuff that didn't apply, or highlight the stuff that did apply.

There also were problems with the software -- rationales didn't go with the interventions I selected, couldn't save sometimes, etc. but hopefully they've worked those out.

Overall, a fair product to get started with nursing diagnosis after you've become proficient at it.