Morgan and Me had a great impact on me as a child. I would suggest that anyone pass this book along to their child. It was responsible for igniting my love for horses and consequently for the name of my youngest child! :) Enjoy!

I loved this book as a child for the story as well as the beautiful illustrations. I treated the book well and some years later now share it with my daughter who loves it as much as I did.

"Morgan and Me" is the story of a young princess who lives in the Land of Later. She's a dreamer, but mostly she's a procrastinator, always putting off her duties until later.

One day she gets lost in the woods and finds a unicorn with his horn stuck in a tree branch. Morgan, the unicorn, asks if she'll help him break free. The princess, however, would rather go play than help Morgan this minute. But she promises to return later.

Once she grows bored of playing, the princess returns and cuts the branch away for Morgan. Together they roam the meadow, Morgan having since forgiven the princess for her belated rescue. However, the princess doesn't watch her step while they are playing and falls into a pond. From the safety of a lily pad, she calls for Morgan to help her. Morgan replies he will--eventually.

The princess realizes her mistake earlier and heartfully apologizes to Morgan. Convinced, Morgan rescues the princess from the pond. And ever since, they've been best friends.

I would recommend this book to young children, but I'm sure most adults will enjoy it just as much. Robin James is the talented illustrator of "Morgan and Me" and many other Stephen Cosgrove books. I highly recommend you read all of Cosgrove's books if you liked this one.

I was not planning to read the whole book, I just planned to read enough to get me through one period of high school. Guess I should have picked a different book because once I got into this book, I couldn't put it down. I read through all my classes, including geometry. I really reading about Nathan and Kylen, I only wish it told us if Kylen was alive or dead...I haven't read the second book yet(Demolition War) but I am really looking forward to it.

I dont read too many books like this so for me to rate this so well, it has to be great. I am a trekkie and I only read startrek but this book has changed my mind, other books can be enjoyable. If you have never read Sci-Fi before, this IS the book to start with.

Space: Above and Beyond by Peter Telep is the first S:AaB book and is faithful to the TV script.

It is written for adults, unlike the four children's titles.

If you want to re-live S:AaB, but do not have the tapes, then this book is essential for all S:AaB fans. If you do have the tapes, then still buy this title. It is perfect for remembering Space: Above and Beyond.

All Saab books are great and Teleps a great sci-fi author I just wish I could find Any space above and beyond book for my personall library if you would sell me one in good condision e-mail me at Spbeyond@Yahoo.com

This is one of those very rare books about music performance that is actually useful to the performing musician (as well as the devoted listener). It describes the historical basis of our perception of rhythm, its expressive impact, and its practical application. It has had an enormous impact on me both as a performer and a teacher is an invaluable tool for all musicians! I give it my highest recommendation!

My trumpet teacher in college, Charles Schlueter of the Boston Symphony, recommended this book to all of his students. I learned a great deal on expressive playing. This is very helpfull to young and accoplished musicians alike.

Fully explains through musical example, the concept of expressive musicianship as taught by Anton Horner, William Kincaid and Marcel Tabuteau. This book clearly illustrates how to teach students to play or sing with expression, musicianship and style and will help to make your performances "come alive".

"Here in print are exactly the concepts I was taught by Robert Shaw and Julius Herford...it has had a profound influence upon music education everywhere!" Weston H. Noble Director of Music Activities, Luther College

Dr. Thurmond has had a profound impact on musicians all over the world. This book unlocks the secrets of playing musically. A must for all players and teachers!

In the vast body of knowledge dedicated to network design this book stands out as a single, shining example of how to do it right.

The approach given in this book is to focus on the larger end goal, providing services via the network, instead of the lower-level technical details. This approach requires greater emphasis on requirements to which three chapters are devoted. Mr. McCabe's treatment of requirements gathering and analysis is among the best in literature and is consistent with best practices that are performed by other engineering disciplines.

What I especially like about this book, however, is the flow analysis that ensures you will produce a network design that has the following characteristics: (1) traceable to requirements, (2) focused on providing application response and network services to users, and (3) is a solid baseline for performance and capacity management of the network as it evolves.

If all networks were designed using the approach and techniques provided in this book service level management would be a less daunting endeavor. This is a five star book that adds a true engineering methodology to network design.

This book is amazing. Design, of any type, is an artform. Jim McCabe is an amazing artist. He has a unique grasp of the design process. Networks are notoriously complex systems to design; so many layers, so much technology, so much interdependence. Jim has captured the essence of this non-linear design process and has distilled it quite elegantly. This is an excellent primer on design in general, on networks particularly and ATM based networks most specifically.

I am a network teacher that is preparing two courses: "Network engineering", which has to do with network design from a systems point of view. (ex. thinking about the network in a bigger context, including hosts, service, etc.) and "Information Flow analysis" which deaks with the how-to's of elaborating a workflow model for networks and planning networks based on information flow. I have read this book and have found that it thoroughly addresses all the areas these two courses will cover. I will use it as a text and reference throughout the course of the term and would encourage others to do so as well.

I loved this book from start to finish. Reading Jesus' own words is far more inspiring and readable than the King James version of the New Testament (or any other version), a book which has been edited and modified to meet the political and economic needs of Christianity and the West. This book sets forth the mission of the Master Jesus in simple and understandable words which ring with truth, kindness, and compassion. Even the most hardened fundamentalist cannot deny that this book has a marvelous message and story to tell.

This book ranks at the very top of best metaphysical works. It's authenticity can be felt inside, as it gently touches the spirit within. The story is told as a narrative, which makes it easy to read while holding multiple levels of meaning and significance. After 4 readings, I still look forward to reading it again. This work by Master Jesus has my highest recommendation.

Okay. First I just want to say I'm not UNDER 13, I'm 13. I just ain't buying anything here. Anyway, the book:

Demolition Winter was great. It had all what the Show Space: Above and Beyond had. Danger, action, romance, humor...everything. The only thing that troubles me is that the characters seems differnt. Shane is all the sudden angry and let it go out on the squadron, Damphousse (the Engieneer) know less than Wang about planes and stuff...and McQueen is all smussy. This is not our Ty. But the book is nevertheless good. And Nathan has never been better.

Demolition Winter (Space : Above and Beyond) by Peter Telep takes the S:AaB universe another step forward by giving the characters more depth than a 45 minute episode ever could.

It is also faithful to Morgan and Wong (the Producer's) vision for S:AaB, which is a relief.

The characters show how young and inexperienced they are, as adults and yet they manage to survive and work together to complete their mission.

This S:AaB book is well worth the cover price and is a great read for anyone who loves S:AaB or just loves a good military story.

GOSH I LOVE SAAB AND THIS IS A GREAT ON

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.

"You think I am weak and must submit
Yet I but scratch you with this poisoned blade,
And you are dead as if I clove with it
That false fierce greedy heart.Betrayed!Betrayed!"

As I think of those bone chilling lines they ring ripples of fright and despair through my still salivating soul, because there's a part of me that longs for more. I remember the first time I encounted Mr. Thomson's masterpiece. It was only a few lines, but it left me starving for more. It soon became a small obsession. I had to have it! I read Thomson's "The City of Dreadful Night" and he became an instant favorite for me as far as poets are concerned. I have read Dickinson and Whitman and Poe, but none of them compare in my opinion to Thomson's morbid metaphors and detrimental descriptions of pain and suffering. I could almost feel the words literally penetrate the deepest recesses of my darkest heart of hearts. Emotions are impossible to put into words exactly, but I believe Thomson damn near succeeded in his "melancholia" as he would put it. You almost have to take breaks in the middle of reading in order to gather your now shattered positive emotions and regain a stronger than steel composure to take in just a little bit more. I feel like Thomson is one of my best friends now because I can relate to everything that he's feeling through his darkest times. He totally discouraged me as a poet myself and crushed whatever confidence I had in my own writing abilities. But it's okay, I'll recover and resume my own confidences denial about actually having skills...I think. For all of you who haven't read this masterpiece to mankind, I strongly suggest that you sink your teeth in and experience first hand how words can be daggers in your consciousness by the absolute best there is. For everyone with insomnia, scream loudly with me the words that should be echoed to the edges of the universe...

"A NIGHT SEEMS TERMLESS HELL!"

This late-nineteenth century long poem falls somewhere between "Paradise Lost" & "The Waste Land." It contains enough beauties to be a rewarding read, yet its flaws are hard to ignore. Chief among these flaws is Thomson's readiness to insert archaic words like "doth" and "feign" to fill out his meter & rhyme. In praising the poem I enlist the support of Melville, who admired it, & Eliot, whose "The Waste Land" appears to echo it. Eventually, after taking time to search for the least-flawed section or canto of the poem, I decided that section XIII seemed the least-flawed. Then I wondered if Thomson had arranged it that way intentionally, perversely saving his best work, his im-mutabilitie canto, for unlucky thirteen.

James "B.V" (stands for Bysshe Vanolis, a pseudonym he sometimes adopted) Thomson composed this long poem while wandering the streets of London, tormented by insomnia and what he called "melencholia," what we would probably call clinical depression.

His portrait of his mental state also became a portrait of an industrial society, and the vanity and pointlessness of its various sorts of activity and effort. His City of Dreadful Night, a true city of despair, held up a dark mirror to the urban England of his day, filled with faithless churches, empty and ultimately unrewarding activity, and the despair of grinding poverty.

In an age so filled with self-improvement twaddle and the cult of positive thinking, such a poem actually seems like a breath of fresh air. It ends with a splendid portrait of Dürer's Melencolia.

Jim Morgan gets most (but not all) of his facts straight, approaching his subjects with an affecting blend of humor, compassion, and both human and architectural insights. IF THESE WALLS HAD EARS: THE BIOGRAPHY OF A HOUSE offers up eight families' worth of bittersweet reminiscences, ruminations and recriminations comingled with the author's own personal reflections on this whale of a house. Portions of the book are uneven and a bit awkward as Morgan transitions between the families' and his own perceptions and his narration. But overall, it's an interesting and enjoyable read which should resonate truly with anyone who has ever experienced the mixed blessings of home ownership -- or found themselves haplessly ensnared by a four-walled moneypit.

Ed and Sheri Kramer: Chapter Ten

A house is an aggregate relic of all the people who have lived there, recording their improvements or their neglect. The author writes an interesting chronicle of the house's former inhabitants. It's disconcerting to reflect upon the fact that others owned our home before us, and we will leave it to others when we're gone. It's a reminder of how temporary our lives are, in our few hours upon the stage. Each generation, with all its hubris, is only a chapter, or a few pages, within the book of life.

Morgan has done here what every old house owner has dreamed of doing: answering the question "what history occurred here before we arrived?" In telling the rich stories of the people who preceded him as owners of this particular Craftsman bungalow in one old neighborhood of a single city, he spins a wonderful tale of our nations's history as well.

A dumpy little sheep named Yew wishes he could have a unicorn's horn like his best friend Morgan so that he can feel special instead of ordinary. When the Morning Star grants Yew's wish, he wears the horn for one day, but at the cost of his friend Morgan: the unicorn is gone! After crying of guilt and loneliness all night long, Yew pleads with the Morning Star to restore things to normal. After Morgan comes back to him and the horn is returned to the unicorn, the two friends play together forever and Yew never again envies his best friend.

Even very young children "get" the message in this book. It's been around for years--I even used it while doing my student-teaching more than 15 years ago. With bright, colorful illustrations and sweet characters, this book is a perennial favorite for primary school students.

I bought this book when I was in 3rd grade, it made me cry then and it makes me cry now! This book is great for kids as well as grown ups. The lesson in this book teaches about having material things at the expense of those we love. Good thing Yew learns the lesson and is able to fix it! In this day in age I am glad they are bringinning these books back. Not only will your child be reading, but learning a very important lesson. Not many books today do that! If you decide to purchase this book you won't regret it and there is a whole series of them, but this one is my favorite!

This was the Serendipity book I saved for special, cathartic occasions in my childhood when I had to have a good tearing-up. Possibly the most excellent and moving of the series, with the same beautiful illustrations.