Very, Very informative and handy!

... you can bet I'll have it with me when I go back. The usual Streetwise quality is evident in this map; the only quibble I have with it is the rather odd orientation. Thanks to the fact that all Streetwise have to fit into their standard rectangle shape, and the somewhat unusual shape of Toronto means that in order to fit it in, it has to be oriented with north nowhere near "up". Once you get used to that, though, you have a dandy, sturdy map of Toronto, including the TTC subway lines.

Regardless of the map you WILL find a deadend in Venice - turn the corner and there is no more - either a wall or a canal.

This map is great - thin and water-resistant (coated) overall
best deal for the price/size.

The first part of this booklet is a re-publication of an article written by UK Prime Minister Tony Blair for Prospect magazine (March 2001). It is a curious article which appeals for an end to attacks on his "third way" on the basis of a bogus left unity: "for the left itself to join in is a curious form of self-mutilation. Constructive criticism is healthy: lazy negativism is not" (p.3). This implies that the "left" is a monolithic whole and that this whole identifies with the Blair project. Of course neither is true. The hurt tone of Blair's comments does indicate, however, that he has been stung by criticisms of his project...

His counterblast uses NuSpeak about NuLabour. He describes those who work for charities and the voluntary sector as "social entrepreneurs". Is this the way they see themselves? Isn't the analogy between society and the market just too stretched here? Blair also makes attempts to equate his "third way" with the term "progressive politics". The implication is that there is no other way forward. The misuse of language by Blair certainly jarred with me. I was pleased to see that others felt likewise. The two critics of Blair writing in part two of the pamphlet point out a number of his strange language habits including stating contradictions "as if they were combinations" (p19) Can anyone using language in this way ultimately avoid deluding themselves?

Tony Blair highlights six areas where we need "to grapple new issues" (p.6). These are harnessing new technologies; transforming education; inequality and social mobility; overhauling government and public service provision; renewing democracy and international engagement. I found the most amusing in the list "renewing democracy and overcoming the alienation and disconnection from politics that is a marked feature of our lives" (p.7). The last General Election saw one of the poorest turn-outs ever. Most of those questioned as to why they didn't vote stated they did not believe it would change anything. The constitutional changes brought in by NuLab have not heightened interest in politics significantly or raised the level of debate. More and more people are interested in issues which appear to remain unaddressed by any of the establishment parties. Many regard the rituals of a representative democracy - like the placing of a cross on a ballot paper every few years - as outdated and of little effect. The more intelligent view the establishment parties as simply the enabling mechanisms of big economic interests.

Blair nowhere suggests that a real transfer of power is needed to revitalise our democracy. Power relations are seldom discussed by Blair at all. Blair says that "Democracy needs to respond to people's demand that they have a right to be listened to even if decisions do not always go the way they want".(p.7) It seems that people are asking for the right to be listened to before they are ignored. A curious demand.

We in the real Third Way have argued for years that measures that transfer power are needed to build an active and responsible citizenry. We favour Swiss-style direct democracy, reform of the voting system and measures to ensure fair allocation of media time amongst others. Blair does not even consider these options.

In Part Two of the booklet, Ken Coates and Michael Barratt Brown reply to Blair. They are uncompromising in their criticism. They say Blair's "third way" has simply "afforded a media friendly cover for the extension of neo-liberal politics of de-regulation, the untrammelling of market forces, privitisation and the roll-back of welfare."(p.10) Elsewhere they say "the Third Way is the takeover of Labour by Capital"(p.14)

These critics are far from lazy. They ask pertinent and sensible questions. Quoting one of Blair's mantras on dynamic markets combining with strong communities they ask "how is that to be done when the jobs are gone on which the communities depended?"(p.16). They rightly point out that in the list of Blair's social innovations, the University for Industry, NHS Direct etc "Any transfer of power involved in these initiatives moves away from popular involvement."(p.18) The ethos of NuLab is really top-down, we know better than you.

Ken Coates and Michael Barratt Brown address the real issue -- power. This is something Blair never does. As they say "If fairness means social justice we need not what Blair keeps offering us which is 'a sense of social justice', but the reality. That means the actual redistribution of power and income, not only by a fundamental revision of our system of taxation and public spending, but by a genuine shift in the balance of wealth and power." (p.19).

The critics neatly summarise where we are heading: "Effective markets mean the domination of the largest accumulations of capital and globalisation means that these will be primarily American".(p.19)

 

A very good illustrated book, plenty of informations about all the signs you could find in a wood, a beach, a street.. Just open the book and you'll be able to find out which species of bird flown on your garden, which one eat your loved flowers... Very nice and veru useful!

This book discusses most aspects of stormwater hydrology, provides theory of various competing methods, AND many worked examples. The format is very readable, and the explanations helpful. While I found the book very useful, and would buy it again, it has very little information on infiltration basins, and the TR-20 program included has been outmoded by commercially available programs.

Faith threatened by Bible study? Well, it depends on what kind of Bible study you're speaking of. In the academic arena, the student of Scripture had better be prepared for more than Sunday School. Such a student will find a worthy introduction and guide to the field of biblical studies in what Brown has to say. I should add, that this is an introduction to the field as is it today represented in the mainline seminaries and universities, and therefore needs to be balanced with several conservative works for a fuller representation of the field. This said, the student of the Scriptures will get a good idea of where the field is at today.

The author, Michael Joseph Brown is a professor at Candler School of Theology at Emory University, with a M.Div. and Ph.D from the University of Chicago. Thus, he is more than qualified to offer the would-be student of academic biblical studies an intro to this field.

In the first chapter he outlines the purpose and method of academic biblical studies as opposed to the devotional study of the Bible. In the following chapters, he gives 28 rules of thumb for reading and interpreting biblical texts, and for understanding and surviving biblical scholarship. I would say that most of the rules are very sound...though not all. As Brown himself would say, read everything with a critical eye. However, the rules of thumb for understanding biblical scholarship are particularly good and, well, honest.

He writes from a moderately critical perspective, and though his persuasion is always evident, he does not aggressively push his conclusions on the reader. He is evidently aware of the limits of all biblical study...even his own. Certainly frustrating to the conservative student will be the obvious skepticism for the historicity of the events recorded in in the Bible, but I would say read on. Don't look here for a proper understanding of what the Gospel is, but rather to understand the methods, assumptions, and rules of critical scholarship. Whether you like critical scholarship or not, if you dare enter the field of biblical studies, this is what you will contend with.

Much biblical scholarship today, including critical scholarship, is full of overstated cases, imbalance, and arrogance, but Professor Brown comes across as equitable, sincere, and with a real desire to help the student study the Bible academically without losing their faith in God. Although I do not endorse much of what Brown says, I think that students desirous of entering the field could read this and benefit greatly from it. At the very least, it will wake them up to realize that seminary isn't Sunday School, and to their likely surprise will greatly challenge their faith.

THIS BOOK by Michael Barratt Brown sheds some light on the origins of the war in Yugoslavia. Like all serious studies, it shows that the wars were not the result of ethnic differences. There are no ethnic differences among the Slavs who make up Yugoslavia. Serbs, Croats and Muslims are not separate nations: they are all Slavs.

But why then did this ghastly conflict suddenly erupt when it did? To answer this question, we have to look at Yugoslavia's economic record. In the late 1980s, Yugoslavia suffered a massive economic crisis.

From its inception in 1945, Tito's Government had tried to integrate Yugoslavia into the capitalist system, receiving credits from the US Government. In 1960, the Yugoslav Government gave up the state monopoly of foreign trade; this meant that it could not protect the country's infant industries. It borrowed heavily from Western banks: the resulting debt payments absorbed 30 per cent of export earnings.

By the 1980s, Yugoslavia had the highest level of debt to national income of any country in Europe. The EC and the banks rejected the Yugoslav Government's requests for help with rescheduling their debts. They demanded that the debts be paid, whatever the cost. The ever-increasing debt burden caused economic disaster. Yugoslavia's economy suffered a catastrophic collapse, which led to a social breakdown.

Barratt Brown quotes Susan Woodward's book, The Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and dissolution after the Cold War, (Brookings Institution, 1995), "The conflict ... is the result of the politics of transforming a socialist society to a market economy and democracy. A critical element of this failure was economic decline, caused largely by a program intended to resolve a foreign debt crisis. More than a decade of austerity and declining living standards corroded the social fabric and the rights and securities that individuals and families had come to rely on." The Guardian/Channel 4 book, Bloody Bosnia, ignores this economic disaster.

In 1983, Yugoslavia placed itself in the International Monetary Fund's hands. The IMF imposed economic measures that as usual worsened the problems. It insisted on cuts in the universal social services and in the programmes which to some extent redistributed wealth to the less developed regions. Devolution of power to the regions also undercut the economic integration so vital to building a united nation.

Yugoslavia stopped being a single market: the South of Yugoslavia lost its Northern markets for primary products. Only a third of its national output and 20 per cent of its capital movements circulated between the regions. This, incidentally, shows how important it is that Britain's workers reintegrate England, Scotland and Wales economically, even under capitalism, to prevent further economic decline.

Between 1980 and 1984, Yugoslavia's standard of living fell by 30 per cent, and unemployment rose to 15 per cent. By 1989, Kosovo's unemployment rate was 50 per cent; in the southern regions, Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Macedonia, it was between 20 and 30 per cent.

This book shed light on the origins of the war in Yugoslavia. It shows that it is wrong to blame the whole disaster on Serbian aggression, or indeed on Croat fascism or on Bosnian fundamentalism. But if nationalism is not to blame for the war, why does Barratt-Brown maintain that his book's central theme is to 'condemn all forms of nationalism'? Surely, his economic analysis has shown that capitalism, not nationalism, is to blame for the war.

From a 'Left' perspective, he argues, wrongly, that any attempt to build a self-reliant economy must end in disaster, and that only a federal, capitalist, Europe can prevent wars. But the Yugoslav government, as we have seen, relied increasingly on capitalism, creating rivalry between regions and enterprises. This deepened regional inequalities, and increased the pressures towards devolution and breakup. The government imported goods that Yugoslavs could have produced themselves; this created huge debts and increased unemployment.

The people of Yugoslavia, like those of other countries, will have to take responsibility for rebuilding their country. This is a process in which outside forces will have no part.

I have to agree with previous reviewers, this book DOES cover quite a bit. From DHTML to IIS Applications, but it has to be considered a beginner to intermediate book on Web programming in VB6. Even though the long-term viability of Web Classes is under question, the utter lack of any quality material on the ONE thing Microsoft touts as "Web" enabled in VB6 is extremely disappointing for a book so expensive. You can debug problems with your objects in VB6 with WebClasses that you can't perform with an ASP page and a compiled dll. Do they even mention this? No.

For the interested, you can find most of the material discussed in this book by simply looking on MSDN or other web sites for articles on the subjects you're interested in. With multiple authors, that's all you will get out of this book, anyway.

I rated this 5 stars because it has the most useful writeup on writing Server Components in VB for use with ASP - chapters 9-11. I wanted to do this and had trouble getting working samples and explanations. I feel that industrial strength ASP is very ugly and unweildy if you don't encapsulate the code into components. MSDN has lots of reference material about this but little, if any, useful "how to" stuff that i could find.

This book showed me how to do exactly what i wanted to do.

Other than that, it is a good introduction into a good number of web concepts, old and new. The first 3 chapters were a good overview of Microsoft web concepts and techniques. The writeup on web classes, if you like them, is good. I really liked the CGI case study including how to implement standard input/output via the win32 API.

The relatively free use of various win32 API functions in VB help overcome a general fear of mixing VB and CC++ functionality.

The book was a bit large but was well organized. In general it gave me a much higher opinion of Wrox books.

Having purchased many other WROX books, I was eagerly awaiting this one for a current project. When it arrived I read through it like a mad man. Soaking up everything I possibly could. The examples are very clear and there are plenty of them! It covers everything from IIS, ASP and ADO to RDS, SQL, DHTML, MTS and WebClasses. All in one book! Plenty of examples with detailed descriptions and tables explaining the various methods for each function. I definitely recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn about using VB6 for web development.

I'm a huge fan of the Mrs. Murphy series; they're my favourites of all the cat/crime genre. Unfortunately, the latest volume doesn't come up to the standard set forth in the series so far. It reads like a rough draft turned in under a deadline. While the actual premise is interesting enough, it's both unoriginal and so far-fetched that it's hard for this ordinary person to care about it. The writing is wooden and stilted, more a recitation of events than a good story. The new characters are lifeless -- not even a budding romance has any real zing -- and the old characters are predictable. Nothing new is happening in the town of Crozet; let's eat some orange glazed cinnamon buns. Even the animals can't really save this one; they talk a lot but don't really contribute much. A fan of the series will want to read _Catch as Cat Can_, but get it out of the library.

Harry Haristeen, her two cats, and her dog find themselves caught in the middle of a social whirlwind in Crozet, Virginia--a whirlwind that grows increasingly serious and increasingly less social as murder marrs the festivities. Something is rotten in Crozet--but exactly what is hard to detect. Fortunately for Harry and for Virginia, the pets are on the case. And with these pets, Harry is certain to be dragged along.

A large part of reading a Mrs. Murphy mystery is the countryside and society that Harry hangs in. Although Harry is only a postal worker, she is a key part of the town--a town that consists of a fascinating bunch of husband-hunting single women, aristocratic pretention, and good-ole-boys out for a good time. CATCH AS CAT CAN delivers on this promise--and even gives Harry a new beau.

Author Rita Mae Brown delivers another light mystery. The clever pets don't try to be impossible (no driving in this one) and Harry actually does some detecting and some heroing on her own. The mystery itself was a little over the top, but this is a story about talking animals, after all. If you want serious and believable mystery, you've come to the wrong place. If you like a lighthearted with plenty of Virginia atmosphere and intelligent pets to save the day, CATCH AS CAT CAN is a winner.

In the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia lies the small bucolic town of Crozet located in the middle of Albermarle County. It is a special, magical town unlike any other because all the animals are sentient and can talk to each other including cross-species communication with one "muted" exception: that of the inferior humans who have not evolved enough to be on their level. Since man is the only species who kills for reasons other than food and defense, the animals of Crozet may have a point.

Currently Crozet is suffering from a crime wave with three murders, a stolen truck, an unexplained $530,000 in one of the homicide victim's safe, and other lesser felonies. Mary Minor "Harry" Haristeen, her gray tiger cat Mrs. Murphy, Pewter a fat gray cat, and Tucker the Welsh Corgi are as usual in the middle of the investigation and hope to close the case soon.

Any new Mrs. Murphy mystery is a joyful reading experience and CATCH AS CAT CAN is no exception. Rita Mae Brown and her feline Sneaky Pie have co-authored an adult mystery that appeals to the child in all of us. Although Harry and her ex-husband are still dating, the fair maiden has a gorgeous new suitor who seems to good to be true. Still Harry and her "owners" will never allow her romance to get in the way of justice; but then again she is human.

Harriet Klausner