I searched for 2 years for this book. It is a wonderful way to start my day.

This book is a wonderful daily devotional and I wouldn't start the day without ready it. It has brought much joy to me. I bought another one for a friend.

I stumbled upon this book while researching for a study of the conjoined paganization/Christianization of Medieval literature. What a find! As the reviewer above mentioned, Russell's strength lies in the amazing range of his scholarship. This intellectual breadth, however, does not detract from Russell's more focused, balanced, and lucid examination of key points (e.g., anomie as a factor in social religious conversion, fundamental worldview clashes between Christianity and Germanic converts, etc.). Russell covers a lot of ground in a mere 200+ pages. Moreover, his final assertions are modest enough to be credible, and yet daring enough to remain highly interesting. Plus, from a research perspective, the bibliography alone is worth a handful of other books. This book has been normative in my decisions about the contours of any future scholarship I pursue. Alas, I was left hungering for a continuation of many of the themes, to which Russell often just alludes (e.g, the imbibed Germanic ethos as the animus for the "Christian" Crusades, the contemporary implications of urban anomie for our globalizing world, etc.). Of course, such stellar scholarship cannot be rushed. Surely Russell's next inquiry is worth the wait!

Scholar James Russell has given us an important work with this detailed study. Subtitled "A sociohistorical approach to religious transformation," it is an exceedingly well-researched and documented analysis of the conversion of the Germanic tribes to the imported and fundamentally alien religion of Christianity during the period of 376-754 of the Common Era. Russell's work is all the more dynamic as he does not limit his inquiry simply to one field of study, but rather utilizes insights from sources as varied as modern sociobiological understanding of kinship behaviors, theological models on the nature of religious conversion, and comparative Indo-European religious research. Dexterously culling relevant evidence from such disparate disciplines, he then interprets a vast array of documentary material from the period of European history in question. The end result is a convincing book that offers a wealth of food for thought-not just in regards to historical conceptions of the past, but with far-reaching implications which relate directly to the tide of spiritual malaise currently at a high water mark in the collective European psyche. The first half of Russell's work provides an in-depth examination of various aspects of conversion, Christianization and Germanization, allowing him to arrive at a functional definition of religious transformation which he then applies to the more straightforward historical research material in the latter sections of the book. Along the way he presents a lucid exploration of ancient Germanic religiosity and social structure, placed appropriately in the wider context of a much older Indo-European religious tradition. Russell completes the study by tracing the parallel events of Germanization and Christianization in the central European tribal territories. He marshals a convincing array of historical, linguistic and other evidence to demonstrate his major thesis, asserting that during the process of the large European conversions Christianity was significantly "Germanicized" as a consequence of its adoption by the tribal peoples, while at the same time the latter were often "Christianized" only in a quite perfunctory and tenuous sense. Contrary to simplistic models put forth by some past historians, this book illustrates that conversion was not any sort of linear "one-way street"; a testament to the fundamental power of indigenous Indo-European and Germanic religiosity lies in the evidence that it was never fully or substantially eradicated by the faith which succeeded it. As Russell shows, a more accurate scenario was that of native spirituality and folk-tradition sublimated into a Christian framework, which in this altered form then became the predominant spiritual system for Europe. Russell's Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity is wide-ranging yet commanding in its contentions, and academia could do well with encouraging more scholars of this calibre and fortitude who are able to avoid the pitfall of over-specialization and produce works of great scope and lasting relevance. Make no doubt about it, this is a demanding and complex book, but for those willing to invest the effort, the benefits of understanding its content will be amply rewarding, and of imperative relevance for anyone who wishes to apprehend the past, present and future of genuine European religiosity.

The more one learns about the Jewishness of Christ, Paul, and the Apostles, the easier it becomes to understand their mindset when writing the New Testament. Situations, idioms, cultural knowledge, and history are different now than they were in the first century A.D.

Russel's proposition is this: if the Bible predicted a series of events, and if a part of history can be found in which those events were fulfilled to the letter, why presume that they haven't yet been fulfilled?

He uses Hebrew and Greek culture, historical writings, and language to map all of the predictions of the "End Time," one for one, to events and persons prominent in the Roman siege of Jerusalem in A.D. 70.

The Bible predicts an end of the old world and the creation of a new world in which Christ reigns. In A.D. 70, Biblical Judaism was wiped out. The Temple was destroyed; there have been no more blood sacrifices since then; the Priesthood was abolished. The old world was destroyed.

Christ returned as predicted. He rescued the believers by getting them out of the city and up into the mountains (clouds). From this point on there could be no doubts that God had abolished Judaism and given the Kingdom over to the Church. A new world was created in which Christ reigns.

I hope this will whet your appetite for a deeper understanding of what took place in A.D. 70, and how it fulfilled all remaining Biblical prophecy.

First of all, the "interview" with J.S. Russell presented is a different J.S. Russell from the author of this book, which was written in the 1890's and is reprinted by Kingdom Council. The Parousia is a classical and thorough, well-written example of Biblical exegesis which argues the case for full Pretorism, the view that all of the prophecies written about in the Book of Revelation were fufilled during the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. This view, which is recently regaining theological popularity, was the majority view until premillenial dispensationalism took over the theological thinking of evangelical Christians in the early 1900's. Since that time we've had endless speculations about "the Last Days" or the "End Times" which have bordered on the ridiculous ("Last Days Madness") and which have discredited Christians in the eyes of non-Christians all over the globe. If you are interested in an understanding of Revelation which does not make silly claims and reduce Christian theology to the level of Action comic books, then I most highly recommend you take the time to read this book. The only downside to the book is that it is written in a highly literate, pre-television fashion that requires real thought and attention to digest. It is well worth the effort, however, both in terms of challenging your ideas and also in terms of introducing you to a mannor of civilized thinking that is unfortunately becomming lost in our increasingly barbaric culture

This is the finest work on military technology it has ever been my pleasure to read. The authors have clearly articulated the implications of integrated systems of information technology and precision navigation emerging in the arsenals of today.
Two sections of this book are particularly instructive. The chapter on the history of military navigation sets the table for the remaining topics. It also answers the question, "What is so important about navigation, anyway?" The chapter on future policy implications reveals how precision is not a panacea - but an effective tool for specific tasks.
This book should be read by everyone interested and/or involved with military operations, aquisition, logistics, and strategy.

Mr. Hasik and Mr. Rip have written the finest unclassified work on how GPS and inertial guidance (with their supporting technologies) have revolutionized warfare. Although the underlying math is explained in excruiciating detail (for a liberal arts major), it is more than compensated for by outstanding case studies. As a professional military officer with service in the US Army and Air Force, I found this book to be required reading for those in the profession of arms or those who seek a greater undrestanding of the basis of the United States' current military dominance.

this is a fantastic story of russell's overcoming and persaverance. i think russell is probably a genius. . . aren't many these days (santana, russell, and jim carrey to name a few.) particularly interesting was russell's early years, having recently survived what i think was probably SARS I felt i could relate with the idea of struggle. buy this book, you will thank me for it!

Here we go - another biography from James Dickerson, which means strap yourself in for quite a ride. Few, if any, biographers approach their subject with such sheer relentlessness as does this Mississippi-based author.

And now he's taking on the life of Russell Crowe, one of the most enigmatic, and talented actors working today. The author knows a good subject when he sees one and a good case could be make that he's caught Crowe's life when he's getting ready to leap into full-blown movie stardom.

We learn some things about Crowe we didn't know (his Maori ancestry), some things we'd heard about (his being a musician and a darned good one) and some things about him we know all too well (his, er, gruffness). It's a handsome book and if the author had packed any more detail into these 175 or so pages, you'd have to get help picking it up.

Some say biographies don't mean much unless you have the subject's cooperation. It looks like Dickerson disagrees and we should be grateful for his attitude about his work. Without fetters or favor we get probably as close to Russell Crowe as anyone ever will -- and maybe closer.

Bravo to the bio and to Russell Crowe for being his own man. Sometimes we need guys who throw punches - and biographies like this that refuse to pull them.

An invaluable aid for me as a Power Plant Engineer. All questions are completely related to the Utility Industry. I have used this book repeatedly to test the knowledge of Plant Operators in our Power Station. Congratulations to Mr James Russell on a fine publication. Well Done!

I was very impressed with our first purchase of this book and would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the Author on a fine publication. Our order for more manuals for our remaining Power Plant Operators must indicate to you that we have found this publication very useful. Thank you, Mr. Russell, for your time and effort in compiling an excellent book.

Very spiritual book. It makes you look at your life, and it inspires you to find your purpose. Reading the book causes intellectual review on your thoughts of spirituality and your sense of being. Few books really move me to look at who I am and how I live my life, but this book does just that almost every page.

I found that in the words, he move us with Infinitpossibilitties. Many talents and many dreams are reinforced as being real. It is almost like us as the readers are the unknown author writing the poems. It is something to be felt souly. Just look at the cover and look at the real man who bends before you.

Well worth the price. The first chapter, on the neurobiology of autism, is one of the best sources I've seen for lay readers on what is known or suspected about the basic brain biology of autism. The rest of the book is in the main British neuropsychology, to my mind some of the richest psychological thinking on earth, and a paradigm shift for parents and practitioners accustomed to taking a strictly "behavioral" view of the disorder and the people who have it. Behavior management and behavioral teaching methods are certainly essential to children and adults with autism, but they don't take us inside the disorder. That is the project of neuropsychology.

Russell's book is a rebuttal of "theory of mind" proponents by "executive function" (EF) proponents. The theory of mind folks argue that autism involves a core deficit in mind-reading ability; the "executive function" researchers in Russell's book present evidence supporting the position that any apparent theory of mind deficits are secondary to a basic frontal lobe problem in EF.

Executive function is the "ability to plan and execute complex behavior." A person with high EF is able to want to do something, to plan how to do it, and then to stay on track while he is doing what he set out to do. EF is thought to be "modular"; any one of its various components can be impaired while the others are up and running.

An important aspect of EF is the ability to stop doing whatever you're doing when you need to: a person with a healthy EF has the ability not to become "stuck." Of course children with autism get stuck all the time, and Russell's authors present evidence that these children have many abilities they aren't able to access or demonstrate because they can't move on from what they're doing in order to get to higher-order play or communication skills.

For instance, one chapter presents research on pretend play in autism, showing that children with autism may in fact have the capacity and desire to engage in far more pretend play than they do. The reason they don't use this capacity, the researchers argue, is that they get stuck spinning wheels and lining things up. They can't move on.

There is another terrific chapter comparing the EF deficits in ADHD to EF deficits in autism; this was the first time I've encountered an explanation for my frequent sense that ADHD kids are harder to deal with even though "technically" autism is the more challenging diagnosis.

And last but far from least Russell includes a chapter on the particular strengths of people with autism-an approach that is almost never taken here in America, where we focus exclusively on deficits, and tend to see children with autism as one big ball of problems to be remediated.

A wonderful, wonderful book.

The book contains:

a) An overview of evolutionary programming techniques.

b) An exposition of the argument that intelligent behavior has a large social component in addition to a genetically determined component.

c) The presentation of an optimisation technique whereby a swarm of possible solutions fly through a problem space and base their search trajectories not only on personal experience but also on the experiences of the group. ie- There is a social component to the search of the problem space.

The presentation of (a) and (b) was quite good and readable. The presentation of (c) I found to be a little bit unclear. The algorithm is quite simple, and can be expressed succinctly, but I ended up having to go to secondary sources (web site and PSO C code) to understand exactly what they were doing. The title of the book seems to suggest the swarm develops an emergent property of intelligence. This is over-reach, and is probably not an interpretation that the authors would place on the PSO algorithm. The PSO algorithm is an interesting numeric optimisation technique, and it seems to be a more organic approach to developing neural network weights than techniques like back-propagation of errors.

Overall, a good book that I would recommend. Points off for not being clearer in explaining the algorithm details.

My original motivation for reading Swarm Intelligence was a desire to learn about the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm -- in particular, to learn how to implement it in a Java program. To the credit of its authors, what I found in Swarm Intelligence was far more than that. The authors have taken on the rather daunting task of presenting a new paradigm -- a new way of thinking about mind and intelligence -- and they have succeeded.

PSO, itself, is deceptively simple. The heart of the algorithm can be written in a single line of code. Understanding the basis for its approach to intelligence isn't difficult, either. The authors begin their explanation using the old parable about the blind men and the elephant. You are most likely familiar with the story. In summary form, it is about a group of blind men standing around an elephant each declaring "what an elephant is like" based upon which part of the elephant they are touching -- and elephant is like: a wall (side); a tree trunk (leg); a hose (trunk); a fan (ear); and so on.

What is wrong with this story, the authors point out, is its implicit assumption that these blind men are also deaf. If not, as they each announced their impressions the individuals, as a group, would discover much more about what an elephant is. The significance here is easily missed. The capabilities of a group emerge from the individuals immersed in it. The group can do more (see more, discover more, experiment more) than the individuals from which it emerges and, by virtue of their immersion in it, the individuals benefit (and in turn, the group then benefits as it now emerges from these "benefited" individuals).

The authors view this emergent/immergent "cycle" as the driving force behind mind and intelligence. In contrast to the normal (phenomenological) view of mind as an internal, private "thing that thinks," the authors assert that mind is something requiring sociality. To put it bluntly (and the authors do), in the absence of social immersion there is no mind; mind is social. The majority of the book is focused on this: why it's true, how it's true and how it is implemented in the PSO algorithm.

It is easy to see how the book might have ended up a long philosophical argument. It isn't. Instead, the authors present a nicely written history of efforts to achieve "computational intelligence" (a much better phrase than the more familiar "artificial intelligence") including great summaries of evolutionary approaches, fuzzy logic, neural nets and artificial life. Along the way they point out recent advances in psychology and sociology. The net effect is that they don't need to argue their point. By the end of this part of the book the importance of sociality has become rather obvious. If you are interested in sociology, psychology, engineering and/or computer science you will enjoy this part of the book immensely, learn a lot and find a wealth of references to additional sources of information.

The second part of the book presents the PSO algorithm, compares its performance with other methodologies (in addition to being simpler to understand and implement, it's an order of magnitude faster when applied to certain problems -- training neural nets, for example), demonstrates how it is applied to some "real life" problems and discusses some implications of (and speculations about) the approach. As with the first part of the book, the presentation is clear, concise and informative. There is, though, indications here that the PSO approach is rather new (young). There isn't enough experience with PSO yet to give this part of the book the same feeling of depth one gets from the first part.

It's worth noting that the presentation (and description) of the PSO algorithm is done in mathematical terms. I would have much preferred a programming approach (using pseudo code) not because the math is too difficult (it's not) but because I haven't been "immersed in a mathematically minded social group" for many years. The almost exclusive use of Greek letters for symbols (variables) made reading difficult. Not only are they visually unfamiliar, I don't know their pronunciations (to illustrate the difficulty by way of analogy, consider the difference between reading "y equals b times x plus z" and "xgt equals kqj times yxf plus ktv"). I ended up rewriting the formulas in more familiar terms (using the text to figure out what the symbols represent when necessary) before I felt that I understood them.

Mentioning my problem with the math is not meant to criticize but to suggest that the book could have been made accessible to more people had it also contained a more readable (and retainable) form of the algorithm, perhaps in an appendix. A good analogy of the PSO approach (more detailed than the "blind men" story) would also have been helpful. The only real criticism I have of the book's content is a minor one. Being as it is focused on the social requirements for mind, it tends to overlook the degree of individuality required to make PSO work. The algorithm, itself, has variables which control the expression of individuality and without which it could not work (at least not well), but this flipside to the social nature of the algorithm is never discussed as such. PSO works well precisely because it maintains the rather chaotic balance between the effects of sociality and individuality. The book presents a rather one-sided view of this balance.

An aside for programmers: There is a companion site (of sorts) on the web for the book through which you can download Visual Basic and C source code of PSO implementations. There is also a Java applet which demonstrates PSO applied to a number of test functions but the source code for it is not available. There will also be an open source Java implementation as soon as I can make one available.

This book is fantastic!
It consists of two parts. In the first part, the main ideas behind Evolutionary Computation and social behavior are tangibly described. A brief review of the most known evolutionary computation algorithms is provided and social behavior modeling issues are reported to prepare the reader for the second part.

The second part is devoted to the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm and its applications. Both binary and real variants of PSO are considered and several theoretical aspects are investigated. The book closes reporting several applications and insightful conclusions.

Perhaps the best book on collective intelligence and PSO.

This book will make you love economics. It covers both microeconomics and macroeconomics. It also explains how monetary policy and fiscal policy affects the economy. Some of the reasonings are counter intuitive however the authors provide very good examples to illustrate their point. I gained a very good understanding of aggregate demand and supply and how they get affected because of fiscal and monetary policy, employment, economic growth, taxes, trade tariffs, exports, imports, and other factors.

This is the book that makes you really love economics. includes macro and micro economics. clear, interesting, illustrated with perfect examples. you will love it. Perfect for AP (this text is adopted at Pine Crest School in Florida as their AP Economics Text)

it worth the 100 bucks you payed.

If you are interested in economics, you should add this book to your personal library.

This book is very well written (almost lively). It covers macro, micro and international economics in a very interesting way. A very good introductory economics book that will also refresh even the advanced readers.