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With this book: No problem at all!
The book is great!
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Explained are the educational takeaways from historical, leading edge developments of e-commerce, e-procurement and electronic marketplaces and how they can be applied based on the realized importance of extended business relationships. This book then addresses the appication of the newest developments, including peer-to-peer, collaborative commerce, and B2B integration within the supply chain in the currently developing (Real New) digital economy.
This book is recommended reading as it clearly details the digital past and provokes thought on how to continue to execute using new technologies within business today.
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This beautiful translation into English, directly from Hebrew, is to be praised for its sound, strong, energetic poetry and more so for its scholarly introduction. Mitchell's interpretation of the book of Job is not one of spiritual acquiescence, of capitulation to an unjust, superior force, but of a great poem of moral outrage, a Nietzchean protest. In it, Job embodies Everyman and grieves for all human misery, and acquiescence at the end of the poem is a result of spiritual transformation, a surrender into the light, the acceptance of a reality that transcends human understanding.
As with so much of Stephen Mitchell's work, it's easy to pick on him for what he's decided to leave out. Here, his translation of Job omits the hymn in praise of Wisdom and the speech (in fact the entire presence) of the young man Elihu. I tend to disagree with his reasons for skipping them. But having read his translation for nearly a decade now, I have to admit we don't miss them much.
His work has been described as "muscular," and that's a very apt term. Not only in Job's own language (from his "God damn the day I was born" to his closing near-silence after his experience of God) but in the voices of all the characters -- and most especially in the speech of the Voice from the Whirlwind -- Mitchell's meaty, pounding, pulse-quickening poetry just cries out to be read aloud.
And as always, I have nothing but praise for Mitchell's gift of "listening" his way into a text and saying what it "wants" to say. In particular, his translation of the final lines has a wee surprise in store for anyone who hasn't already read it. (He disagrees with the usual repent-in-dust-and-ashes version and offers a denouement more fitting to the cosmic scope of Job's subject matter.)
Moreover, all this and much else is discussed in a fine introduction that -- in my opinion as a longtime reader of Mitchell -- may well be his finest published commentary to date.
Essentially, he deals with the so-called "problem of evil" by simply dissolving it. The God of Mitchell and of Mitchell's Job is not a feckless little half-deity who shares his cosmic powers with a demonic arch-enemy and sometimes loses; this God, like the God of the Torah itself (and incidentally of Calvinist Christianity, at which Mitchell takes a couple of not-altogether-responsible swipes), is the only Power there is. Ultimately God just _does_ everything that happens, because what's the alternative? "Don't you know that there _is_ nobody else in here?"
As I suggested, there are a handful of half-hearted jabs at traditional (usually Christian) religion, but for the most part it should be possible for a theologically conservative reader simply to read around them. (This is a nice contrast with Mitchell's Jesus book, which -- to the mind of this non-Christian reviewer -- seems to be brimming with anti-Christian "spiritual oneupmanship.")
So it's not only a fine translation that properly recognizes Job's central theme of spiritual transformation, but a universally valuable commentary into the bargain. If you haven't read any of Mitchell's other work, this is a great place to start. And if you _have_ read some of Mitchell's other work, do get around to this one. It's probably his best.
I'm sure if I had read this version, it would have had the same effect.
Job essentially worships an idol. He worships an orderly God who runs an orderly, boring universe where the good get rewarded and the evil get punished. The real God shows him that things are a bit different. The universe is not simple, it is a grand, messy explosion of beauty where frail, innocent humans often get trampled. Is it just in a way that would conform to human standards of justice? God basically says, "Who cares, look at it."
Thus, a translator/poet has a tough job. In a few pages, he or she has to show the reader God's glorious universe. No easy task (except for G.M. Hopkins).
Mitchell gets it done with short "muscular" phrasing, reminscient of the way Lombardo treats the Iliad. I.e., Job ch 3 reads something like "Damn the day I was born/Blot out the sun of that day . . ." Along the way Mitchell eliminates some of the "interpolations" and "corruptions" that scholars have found were not part of the original text. And I don't think this detracts from either the beauty or the meaning of the poem.
I would have added a more detailed introduction however. If I may recommend a book, please also take a look at The Bitterness of Job: A Philosophical Reading, by John T. Wilcox. If you read these two together along with an orthodox translation like the JPS (mentioned in another review) or the NRSV, I think you will have a good grasp of this text from a wide variety of viewpoints, secular and religious. You can't get too much Job. As Victor Hugo said, "If I had to save one piece of literature in the world, I'd save Job."
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However, as Willard points out, mathematics is learned by successive approximation to the truth. As you becomes more mathematically sophisticated, you should relearn algebraic topology to understand it the way that working mathematicians do. Peter May's book is the only text that I know of that concisely presents the core concepts algebraic topology from a sophisticated abstract point of view. To make it even better, it is beautifully written and the pedagogy is excellent, as Peter May has been teaching and refining this course for decades. Every line has obviously been thought about carefully for correctness and clarity.
As an example, ones first exposure to singular homology should be concrete approach using singular chains, but this ultimately doesn't explain why many of the artificial-looking definitions of singular homology are the natural choices. In addition, this decidedly old-fashioned approach is hard to generalize to other combinatorial constructions.
Here is how the book does it: First, deduce the cellular homology of CW-complexes as an immediate consequence of the Eilenberg-Steenrod axioms. Considering how one can extend this to general topological spaces suggests that one approximate the space by a CW-complex. Realization of the total singular complex of the space as a CW-complex is a functorial CW-approximation of the space. As the total singular complex induces an equivalence of (weak) homotopy categories and homology is homotopy-invariant, it is natural to define the singular homology of the original space to be the homology of the total singular complex. Although sophisticated, this is a deeply instructive approach, because it shows that the natural combinatorial approximation to a space is its total singular complex in the category of simplicial sets, which lets you transport of combinatorial invariants such as homology of chain complexes. This approach is essential to modern homotopy theory.
This book is aimed at marketing professionals, MBA/marketing students in intermediate-advanced courses, and CMOs who want a kick in the pants. Those looking for a "how to" guide or hands-o, jargon-free approach will be disappointed.
If I have one criticism of this book it's that it makes two big, bold assumptions: (1) you work for a large, multinational corporation with established products or services and (2) you have millions of dollars for marketing research. If, like me, you are launching a startup, then at best this book will give you some hope that some day you'll have the money to actually DO some of the things they propose.
The authors cram a tremendous amount of information into 348 pages. They use a lot of real-life examples to demonstrate the many ways in which marketers can be their own worst enemies. These include:
* Not integrating marketing and strategic planning
* Not integrating various components of the marketing plan
* Thinking good marketing can be done by intuition
* Thinking it's more important to do it fast than do it right
* Misusing focus groups and telephone surveys
* Not having a clearly defined and well understood target market
* Automatically targeting heavy users without analyzing whether this is the most profitable segment
* Ignoring tangible benefits in order to focus on intangibles
* Assessing only the appeal and not the profitability associated with various strategies and tactics
* Over-surveying customers
More importantly, they offer a lot of advice about how to avoid these problems by using what they call 'Counter-Intuitive Marketing.' I have a bit of a problem with this name since the approach (get good data BEFORE making a decision) seems highly intuitive to me. Really what they're getting at though is the fact that this is often NOT the approach that's followed and that's what leads to many of the mistakes described above. As someone who frequently champions the need for careful analysis before a decision is made, I was gratified to see lots of examples and data confirming that what they describe as 'rigorous analysis of unimpeachable data' does indeed outperform 'gut instincts.'