Simon and Bowie do provide a basic sketch of philosophy which is particularly relevant to LD debate. what they do not do is provide the most up to date, ardent, or quotable defense of any of them. I would reccommend Grady's Dictionary of Philosophical Quotations or Singer's overview of ethics much more highly for any debater who aspires to more than mere mediocrity. In the world of debate, this is the huge survey lecture course taught by a barely qualified TA. Those with intellect and motivation can do much better and needn't waste their money and confine their minds. Besides, LD is outgrowing this outmoded paradigm anyway--just read the LD-L if you wont take the word of a national circuit debater.

High school debate students who are just starting out would be well served to pick up a copy of this book. It is a terrific background source for a wide variety of philosophical concepts that are often used in competitive Lincoln-Douglas debate. It is important not to use this book as a primary source of evidence, but merely as a text to gain understanding of the philosophy in the vernacular. In conjunction with Scott Robinson's "L-D Road Guide", this book is a terrific tool for novice debaters.

If you want to get deep in your knowledge of philosophy, get this book. I bought it for my high school students.

WROX books used to be the only ones I'd buy; after having a grand ol' time with the ASP and ASP Databases series. The Professional series has been a real disappointment (and waste of money!). The books tend to be more wordy than necessary and spend too much time on the obvious and too little on the abstract. Cold Fusion is a fairly straight-forward programming language. WROX has somehow managed to make it much more. Perhaps too many cooks in the kitchen; looks like they had 18 authors put this beast together.
Look elsewhere...

Being a ColdFusion user group president, I give this book my seal of approval. This book is well written with easy to understand examples. It will help someone with no CF knowledge all the way to the experts. This book is well laid out and is enjoyable to read. I didn't know what to expect from Wrox on this. I have been a huge Ben Forta fan but this book is just as good as his (if not better)! If you want to learn CF, or just want to get better, buy this book. You will be very happy with it.

This is a very good book!
Vale a pena galera!

From the eyes/connections of a senior veteran Microsoftie you can learn for yourself how business is done and has been changed by technology. A great communicator, Mr. McDowell clears the eyes of the foggy headed, old thinking business manager to the wonders and money savings of tech. A must read for any modernizing or future thinking executive looking for success. This is one of those books that are a cheap investment in the future profitability of your company. Your employees should read it too!

Excellent book for those in industry, as well as anyone who wants to better understand how profoundly technology can impact business success.

I have a clear understanding in my mind of all the things my company can do to help businesses evolve strategy with our IT products and why that is important, but I have had what I believe to be a somewhat difficult time articulating the "whys and wherefores." This book provides lucid, clearly compelling explanations and examples that crystallize the message of the power of information technolgy.

McDowell and Simon make strong cases for how information technology should not be used simply to do things better than you have done them before, but instead to use it to do things you have never been able to do before. If you don't fully understand technology and want some non-technical explanations of why you should be using it, this book was written for you.

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great one of the best to have if you own a gameboy couldn't put it down

This is a GREAT book. It includes information, cheat codes, hints and tips for games like Animaniacs,(My personal favorite) Kirby's Dream Land, and a whole lot more. It's a great for Christmas presents.

I have a pretty great life, but this book complemented my life and led to some serious internal improvements. I work and play hard, so this book gave me the tools to quickly relax and enjoy the peace of being myself. I am not into mystical or energy work (I am a computer scientist) but I did get the opportunity to take a class with Robert Siegel and WOW!!! I was skeptical and a little pessimistic but was really impressed with his knowledge and grace. Anyway, the bottom line is: If you are open and willing to learn about yourself then this book will be benefitial.

Robert Simon Siegel's book, True Calm, helped me gain valuable insights about stress, anxiety, myself, and life itself. I recommend this book without reservation to anyone seeking a form of existence that nurtures creativity, peacefulness, and deeper spirituality. A "must read" by an author who knows much, and explains it well.

Mr.Siegel, who conducted the stress reduction program for the California Pritikin center, does an outstanding job of taking mountains of research and making the findings useable. This isn't a book for people who are looking for a way to blame someone else for their stress. It is an excellent book if you want to take responsibility for your stress and do something about it. Advocates of NLP, Ericksonian Hypnosis and Solution Focused Therapy will recognize components here. No long visualizations or recommendations for years of meditation, instead he gives quick, simple activities that provide immediate results.

Levers of Control presents a comprehensive theory illustrating how managers control strategy using 4 basic levers: belief systems, boundary systems, diagnostic systems, and interactive control systems (the whole book is based on these 4 levers). Simons shows how these control levers complement each other when used together and how effective top managers use these levers to stimulate and guide the search for strategies in the futures.

The book is far more interesting than the title suggests. "Levers of control" makes one think of man/woman being reduced to robots directed by the pulling of levers. The book is exactly about the opposite, how one can have his cake and eat it. It provides a practical framework on how to combine opposing forces in managing a company. Opposites like creativity and meeting profit objectives, precise objectives and alertness to the necessasity of changing course, reward and punishment, control and freedom. Some of the insights require reader effort to understand. For example. "Strategic planning is useless to develop strategies. Strategic planning starts once the strategy has been determined." What is meant is this. Long range planning carried out by staff departments trying to involve managers is a waste of time. Real strategies evolve interactively between several layers of managers in the organisation. Once a strategy is determined a plan must be made for implementing it. However the reader has to figure out that strategic planning no longer means strategy development but the development of a plan for strategy implementation, the execution of which has to be monitored. The book covers how to deal with the positive and negative motivations of employees, how it is possible to manage the tension between a budget system (referred to as a diagnostic system) and an action oriented intelligence-gathering system (referred to as an interactive control system). These two "control systems" are combined with two higher level "control systems", the vision and core values on the one hand and clarification of authority, accountability and no-go areas (referred to as boundary systems)on the other. None of these "control systems" are original. The originality of Prof Simons is that he shows how to operate these systems so that they reinforce and complement each other. This book is very useful for persons that have experienced how hard it is to implement strategies and to reconcile freedom with the requirement of delivering predictable financial results.

The authors focus primarily on military applications with hostile jammers, rather than commercial applications where co-channel interference is the main concern. The direct-sequence (DS) CDMA parts, however, are neither comprehensive nor up-to-date. This text would not deserve its label of "handbook" in its DS-CDMA coverage.

The frequency-hop (FH) CDMA parts of this text contain much useful and detailed mathematical exposition that I cannot readily find elsewhere in one volume. Quite inconveniently, the FH-CDMA sections are inter-mingled with the DS-CDMA sections. While I find plenty of useful mathematical details on FH-CDMA, those details are presented with little cohesion and offer little qualitative insight. I find myself buried with an avalanche of details with limited perspective.

The technical exposition here is truly terrible. I have just been reading the following sentence for several minutes and am yet to figure out its meaning: "In particular assume the simple repeat m code where for each data bit, m identical BFSK tones are sent where each of these tones are hopped separately." In what sense are these tones "identical" but yet "separate"? A simple equation here would have helped. In fact, I get so irritated by this poor technical writing that I get on the web and write this review to vent my frustration. The authors' aversion to use rigorous mathematics in their exposition does not help. The exposition ends up with very wordy but vague verbal descriptions, in place of concise and exact elucidations.

This book is the master piece in spread spectrum communications. One can find the complete information in this book on the origin of spread spectrum communications, the fundamental knowledge in DS and FH systems, and applications. It gives in-depth knowledge in critical topics, including antijamming, sequences, synchronization and SS system performance analysis, etc. This book has served for a very large number of readers, including undergraduate students, graduate students, engineers and researchers. Many researchers in spread spectrm communication theory started with this book. Many of them have become famous and are leading in communication theory research. The rich figures showing implmentation are very helpful to practitioners.

Unlike many books of this style, the emphasis is on the text rather than the art. The art is a marvelous collection of Marian works by Ann Rayme, Leonardo da Vinci, Henry Ossawa Tanner, anonymous "folk" art, J. Michael Walker, Fra Filippo Lippi etc.

The text ranges from Biblical to contemporary; they are longer than is often the case in similar books - some are memories, some philosophical or theological reflections. The works are selected from individuals such as Robert Sullivan (in Life magazine), Patricia Pfeiffer, Uta Ranke Heinemann, Fr. Robert Bullock, Jaroslav Pelikan, Terrance Simien (zydeco musician). The volume gives short descriptions - just a few words - to identify the authors.

An excellent book for individual devoted to our BVM.

Robert Simons is Professor of Business Administration and a director of research at Harvard Business School. This Harvard Business Review article was published in the May-June 1999 issue.

In this interesting article the author introduces the risk exposure calculator, which is "a mechanism used to gauge a company's likelihood of being surprised by errors or breakdowns that could threaten the company's franchise or strategy." It is not a precise tool, its results are directional. The risk exposure calculator is divided into three types of internal pressure: growth, culture, and information management. For each of these pressures, success can increase the level of risk. Simons discusses each of these pressure points in detail, whereby he each of these three pressures splits into three specific parts. These form the keys on the risk exposure calculator (3 x 3 = 9 keys). For growth, the keys are pressures for performance, rate of expansion, and inexperience among key employees; for culture, they are rewards for entrepreneurial risk taking, executive resistance to bad news, and level of internal competition; and for information management, they are transaction complexity, gaps in diagnostic performance measures, and degree of decentralized decision making. Apart from the relationship between risk and reward, there is the relationship beteen risk and awareness. In order to manage this relationship, Simons introduces four levels of control - belief systems, boundary systems, diagnostic control systems, and interactive control systems - and he provides one question for each lever. Finally, the author introduces five questions which will help managers implement the levers-of-control model, which in turn should result in maximum performance with adequate safeguards against risks.

Interesting article covering the risks that come with success. Perhaps the risk exposure calculator is directional, it suggests where risk is growing and how fast. It is then up to managers to decide on the risk level and levers-of-control. This article is very much in line (again) with Kaplan & Norton's balanced scorecard articles and the author's 1998-article with Antonio Davila (How High Is Your Return on Management?), since it introduces non-financial performance measurement tools. Yes, I also agree that sometimes those tools are unrealistic, but used correctly they are great tools. The article is written in simple US-English.

I'm not ready for the exam yet, but already I've picked out numerous typos, goof-ups and errors. Seriously it seems like they didn't even bother to proof read it before printing. The more I read the angrier I get - there's no excuse for this kind of sloppiness in a text that deals with very complicated material, where subtle differences in meaning make a HUGE difference for the exam. I'm tempted just to not finish reading it, it's very difficult to read, worded poorly and circularly, and often just does more to confuse me than help. The full size study guide is much better. Read that first and then approach these exam notes critically, and DON'T rely on them. If in doubt check your facts with other sources, cause this book can't be trusted.

I typically don't bother writing reviews but the quality of this book is upsetting. In terms of the content this book is alright but don't expect to get away without one of the larger ones. This is only a brief review after all and sometimes not well explained. However, I must say this book is the lousiest quality I have seen for a while now. More errors and typos than all the books together I have read during the last year. Be aware, this book is brief and compact and it gives you a lot of brief and compact misinformation.

I got the book and didn't see any of the typos that other people were mentioning and I am a consultant who uses the language quite a bit... perhaps it was a newer edition, but i found this book useful