i would like a pge of John Dewey's subject on mind and consciousness. Any comments???

Only 2 chapters in this book were given to me as a class assignment but I found it so informative and interesting I found myself reading the entire book and purchasing it for future reference.

Karen Daniels has taken the Zaddack Tales to a surprising and wonderful end with Mindspark, book 3 of the trilogy. Her stories are suspenseful, engaging, and complex, as are her characters. I couldn't put it down! It's a fascinating experiment: take social/personal themes and issues and place them in an imaginary context light years from the one in which we live. Watch how it plays out. The message of her third book is profound, and challenges our sense-our very perception-of light and darkness, good and evil, the nature and balance of the universe.

As someone who's not necessarily a fan of science fiction, I found myself completely consumed by the worlds Daniels has created. What brilliant imagination! I strongly recommend this book, particularly for those who may not be so inclined to pick up a science fiction novel. You won't be disappointed.

It is difficult to know where to begin. This book is a must have for any archaeologist who works in the Great Basin. However, It would be of benefit to anyone who works in North America. Beck put together a splendid volume that includes articles by many of the movers and shakers in Basin archaeology. The title describes the contents of the book, with a review of important archaeological questions and models that Basinists were dealing with in the past and how that leads up to what we are doing now. My copy is already well worn.

A good book for amatures and experts alike. Gives the basic stats of a variety of modern military aircraft from around the world in clear easy language

This is one of the best collections of poetry that I've read in years. Visual poetry such as "Digging a hole in Arizona", to the dark images of " Rolling out to Sea" and "Glimmer" make this a must have collection. I've never heard of this guy, but Wow! I expect to see great things to come.

This book is an excellent source of information regarding stochastic halftoning. No book comes close to reviewing such a broad array of halftoning algorithms and statistical models. It is clearly within the top three of all technical books on halftoning.

The author tells us how medieval and early Renaissance music acquired its voices-cum-instruments interpretation, then shows that the recent shift to unaccompanied voices in music of these periods is the recovery of an earlier understanding. The first chapter, "The invention of the voices-and-instruments hypothesis," shows that those who rediscovered old music in the 19th century considered it purely vocal music. Even Hugo Riemann in his Musik Lexicon (1892 and 1893 editions) agreed completely. But in his 1905 edition, Riemann insisted that untexted parts of polyphonic songs were played on instruments, and many phrases of texted melodies were actually instrumental preludes, interludes and postludes. This soon became the standard point of view, for Riemann's book was a popular and influential reference. Guido Adler was one of the few scholars who disagreed. Medieval illustrations of singers and instrumentalists were misinterpreted to reinforce this thinking. In chapter 2, "The re-invention of the a cappella hypothesis," he recounts the early reaction to this orthodoxy in the 1950s and the turning point of Christopher Page's 1977 article in Early Music. Since then, Page, Andrew Parrott and Paul Hillier have led many performances and recordings that demonstrated the sound of early music without instruments, and David Fallows supported their efforts in his writings. Two more chapters fill in the background of the arguments. National prejudices and Nazi ideology come into play, and details are provided. No one who listens to early music will want to pass up this magisterial treatment of its 20th-century evolution. The fight is not yet over, for most recordings of this music still use instruments in the fashion that Leech-Wilkinson thoroughly discredits in this engaging book.

This book provided the impetus for taking the law of trust investment into the modern age of portfolio theory. It is well thought-out and written. If you are an attorney, trustee or other professional concerned with trust investments, you should read it.

Addressing a timely and vital topic, 'Modernizing Legacy Systems' is an excellent book from the standpoints of both content and presentation. The advocated approach, which is termed the Risk-Managed Modernization (RMM) Approach, is synopsized on page 28 in UML activity diagram form. The exposition in the subsequent chapters is keyed to corresponding activities in this diagram. This key makes it quite easy to situate and interrelate the coverage of the respective chapters in the context of the RMM Approach. I found this recurring orientation feature to be very helpful in understanding and integrating the book's content.

The book describes, rationalizes, and selectively illustrates the RMM Approach, where the continued availability of the legacy system capabilities is necessary over the sequence of modernization increments. While the approach is illustrated through an incremental transformation of a legacy COBOL-based system to a Java-based derivative, the RMM Approach is nevertheless applicable to other modernization problems or technologies. Moreover, the book does an exceptionally good job of interweaving explanations with examples. These examples are modest but salient and revealing, thereby avoiding unwarranted detail or distractions.

The advocated approach is at once both architecture-centric and component-centric. Architecture centricity captures and sustains a rather specific vision of the as-desired system, and the associated target architecture provides a stable reference over the various modernization activities. Component centricity enables the identification, analysis, grouping, and ultimate realization of system elements that are allocated to the respective modernization increments. Overall then, the target architecture establishes the initial and termination points of a modernization project, and the componentization installments determine the actual redevelopment trajectory connecting the project end points.

For me, the most intriguing, innovative, and vital parts of the approach appear under the RMM activities labeled Define Modernization Strategy and Reconcile Strategy with Stakeholder Needs (Chapters 13-15 and Chapter 16, respectively). Basically, the modernization strategy provides a systematic approach to delineating, analyzing, and grouping modernization elements through an examination of the legacy system implementation, subject to project constraints and certain prior higher-level technical decisions. Then, the finalization of element groupings into sequential increments is determined using programmatic preferences of the various stakeholders. This two-stage definition of modernization increments is driven prominently by cost and risk considerations, as well as by programmatic and technical factors. Ultimately, the designated increments establish waypoints on the aforementioned redevelopment trajectory, thereby identifying interim architectural configurations that facilitate closure on the target architecture, while simultaneously maintaining user capabilities during the modernization effort.

In all, 'Modernizing Legacy Systems' is a readable, coherent, illuminating, and surprisingly broad treatment of a vital topic. Hopefully, the RMM Approach or variants thereof will see widespread use in industry, thereby exploiting "a systematic and fact-based method that avoids arbitrary, intuitive decision making..."