Thirteen-year-old Robert Stevens, known as Qwerty for the mistake he made in his third grade keyboarding class, unearths in his backyard a large mysterious wooden box that has the name Thomas Edison inscribed with gold lettering.

Qwerty and his best friend Joey who lives in West Orange, New Jersey in a community called Llewellyn Park bordering the mansion that Edison once lived in,locked themselves in his room to discover what was in the aged box. To their surprise, it was Thomas Edison's time Machine.

Unsure whether to give the machine to the authorities, sell it for millions, or take it to school to show off to their friends, the boys decided to find out how the time machine works before bringing it out of obscurity.

Qwerty hooked up the wires from the machine to his computer and with a touch of a button he was transported into Thomas Edison's workshop where he helped him develop the electric light bulb. Qwerty Stevens had no problem getting there. However, he needs his older sister, whom he hardly says more than one word to, to help him return home safely.

The author cleverly depicts Edison's story while adding circumstances that bring his character into the 21st century. In addition to the text, Gutman includes a "Truth and Lies" section in the back of the book with one recommendation "Read the story first!" Also included are black and white photographs of Edison's mansion and laboratory. In the far back of the book is the chronology of Thomas Edison. Younger children will also enjoy this book as a great read aloud. Living in the next town over from West Orange, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book because the author captured the authenticity of the town. Children everywhere will enjoy this book but I know it will be a big hit in New Jersey.

Created for all school leaders -- administrators and planning committees as well as board members -- this book is written in a discussion guide format that's easy to follow. It helps school leaders hurdle barriers to change, understand the importance of their leadership, prepare for technology planning, and confront important technology-related issues such as: purchasing, staff development, curriculum revision, facility improvement, and evaluation. The goal is to ground readers in the knowledge they need to ask the right questions and initiate appropriate policies regarding technology in schools. A glossary of terms and a bibliography further support readers along the learning curve.

GENERAL IDEA: Broad coverage but it lacks depth and details - particularly practical details. That is, the presentation is often too sketchy, mainly because it approaches too many subjects for its available space. I would not say that this book is strong on theory either. It is quite obvious that it avoids getting too formal and rigurous, probably to remain attractive for non-specialists too.

CASE STUDY: One specific problem I had with the Hidden Markov Models, that are supperficially presented (or spread I could say) in several separate sections of the book, so it's not been a pleasure trying to actually understand them properly and completely as a fundamental concept, to make them work in my particular application.

TITLE: The book's title IS misleading because it starts with "Speeech" and this book's main subject is not speech but (written) language. Actually there are only a few chapters on speech.

CONCLUSION: Get this book if you are looking for a good overview of the field. As soon as you need in-depth coverage of some particular topic you will look for additional resources.

This book is a feat for anybody interested in Natural Language Processing and probably the most comprehensive book on this subject. It provides an in-depth overview of the most important aspects of NLP from regular expressions to sense disambiguation, discourse, and machine translation. I particularly like the bibliographical and historical notes in each chapter, which provide additional historical context and lots of references.

The book is well written and carefully structured. However, it contains several silly typos (real-word errors) that are a bit embarrassing, considering the topic of the book.

This book does not cover the hardware components of speech recognition. It only provides an introduction to the computational aspects. Nevertheless, I don't think the title is misleading (as other reviewers claim), but the back-cover should mention that it doesn't cover the electronic and signal processing components of speech recognition.

The book showcases a comprehensive and user-friendly approach to cover the leading research in the field of Natural Language Processing and Speech Recognition. It mingles theories and applications to demonstrate the full developmental cycle of computational aspect of NLP. It is a MUST-have for those who can afford only one book but desire to learn virtually aspects of computational linguistics.

Divided by plans/policies and then by topic -- such as purchasing, copyright, network/Internet use, ethics, staff development, curricular integration, technology access, equity, community involvement, evaluation, and more -- the appropriate portions of 35 districts' documents appear as samples to consider when creating and revising your own plans and policies for K-12 schools. This book also guides administrators and board members therough the steps of planning and policy-setting, provides tips and warns of traps, reprints full technology plans, offers sample job descriptions and survey guides, and recommends additional resources.

This is a lavish book. Great pictures and stories about the founding fathers of jazz, particularly Louis Armstorng and Duke Ellington and how they affected and were affected by historical events. This also gives a lot of insight about earlier jazz artists who are not as popular today but still important.

What bothers me the most about this book is that it seems to abruptly end at about 1955-1960. Admittedly jazz becomes harder to cover as styles branch out and diversify. However, I am a big Miles Davis fan and I was greatly disappointed by the coverage of Miles and artists of the last 50 years. A lot of sniping in the book from artists about other artists. I'm more interested in the stories behind the music.

That said, this is a great book about jazz up to 1955, but it runs into a brick wall and stops. This series is good in that it will get people interested in all type of jazz again but there is a lot more than what this book covers.

I loved this book; it's well-balanced and has plenty of cultural perspective. There were lots of anecdotes and photos that I have never seen before (the pictures of blacks dancing at an outdoor big band show at Randalls Island in 1938 are almost worth the price of the book alone). The main criticism about this book (and the Ken Burns Jazz series in general) is that it gives short shrift to jazz since the 1960s. First off, as Ken Burns has said himself, he's an historian, so this project will obviously focus more on the origins and development of the music rather than present-day musicians. And as much as today's jazz musicians and fans like to tell you otherwise, there haven't been too many groundbreaking developments in the music since the free jazz movement of late Coltrane and early Ornette Coleman, or the funk/rock excursions by Miles Davis. Furthermore, and more importantly, jazz is simply no longer a big part of the present-day American landscape. Although jazz records rarely sold as well as more pop-oriented music (a jazz record that sold 20,000 copies was considered a big hit), the music was always written about in mainstream publications and talked about by just about anyone. Heck, guys like Miles, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Coltrane were occasionally featured on prime-time television. Today, the biggest (and perhaps only) jazz star is Wynton Marsalis, a bland neo-traditionalist who hasn't forged any new ground himself. For myself, I'd rather read about Satchmo, Bird, Billie Holiday and Monk.

As a jazz fan and a professional music retailer, I can recommend this book as a wonderful place to begin one's discovery of jazz or gain more knowledge of the cultural legacy of the music. In conjunction with the excellent video series and a box of cds by the titans written about by Ward, ie. Armstrong, Ellington, Davis, Parker, Holiday, etc., one can have a wonderful adventure either discovering the music for the first time or revisiting and expanding old passions. Those who quibble with its incompleteness run the risk of branding themselves cynics after the fashion of Wilde's definition: "A man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing."