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Aug 9, 2011 | No Comments
Public-Private Partnerships aims to discover the conditions under which public private partnerships may provide a viable alternative to the provision of public services and infrastructures by the state, while achieving efficient, sustainable, peaceful, and equitable development in four transition countries: China, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. These countries have experienced command economy under communist rule for at least thirty years. They have only recently introduced market mechanisms. In spite of a huge literature in favor of public private partnerships in the west, scientific empirical evidence is generally mixed and balanced. Success or failure depends upon many factors that need to be identified and analyzed. Moreover, economic performance may be achieved at the expense of other criteria such as equity, public scrutiny, and accountability. This research (a cooperation between the University of Geneva and the United Nations) is the first attempt to evaluate public private partnerships based upon a review of the literature in Europe, documentary analysis, and in-depth interviews in the four countries with representatives of the public and private sectors, as well civil society organizations. Download Here If you liked this post, buy me a beer. (Suggested: $3 a beer or $7.5 for a pitcher)
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Aug 9, 2011 | No Comments
In the past decades our understanding of stem cell biology has increased tremendously. Many types of stem cells have been discovered in tissues of which everyone presumed were unable to regenerate in adults; these include particularly the heart and the brain. There is vast interest in stem cells from biologists and clinicians who see the potential for regenerative medicine and future treatments for chronic diseases like Parkinson, diabetes and spinal cord lesions based on the use of stem cells and entrepreneurs in biotechnology who expect new commercial applications ranging from drug discovery to transplantation therapies. As is often the case in science, many early claims turned out to be different from those expected. Embryonic stem cell therapies have not moved rapidly into clinical practice. Adult stem cells certainly have given certain degrees of success but not nearly to the extent that advocates would have wished for. Some claims of early successes in adult stem cell therapies have not been sustained in double-blinded, randomized clinical trials. Some claims are now close to routine therapy. Some of the claims not supported by evidence have nevertheless reached private clinical practice so that “stem cell tourism” is beginning to reach exaggerated proportions. This book provides the reader background information on stem cells in a clear and well-organized manner. It provides the non-stem cell expert with an understandable review of the history, current state of affairs, and facts and fiction of the promises of stem cells. It distinguishes itself from the multiplicity of websites on the subject of stem cells by being scientifically, politically and ethically neutral, explaining pros and cons for stem cells of every sort with the intention of reaching a wide readership ranging from advanced students and patient advocacy groups to clinicians, specialists and early phase medics in training. By providing the background scientific and social information, it provides readers with the information they require to form their own opinions on the use of stem cells on the basis of facts rather than hype. * Explains in straightforward, non-specialist language the basic biology of stem cells and their applications in modern medicine and future therapy * Includes extensive coverage of adult and embryonic stem cells both historically and in contemporary practice * Richly illustrated to assist in understanding how research is done and the current hurdles to clinical practice Download Here If you liked this post, buy me a beer. (Suggested: $3 a beer or $7.5 for a pitcher)
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Aug 9, 2011 | No Comments
The process of globalisation has been ongoing for centuries, but few would doubt that it has accelerated and intensified in recent decades. This acceleration is evidenced as much by the strong synchronicity in the rapid transmission of financial crises starting in late 2007 as it is by the decade of almost unprecedented growth in international trade and financial market liberalisation that preceded it. This book shows how the international economy has become more connected via increased production, trade, capital flows and financial linkages. Using a variety of methodologies, including both panel econometrics and DSGE modelling, a team of experts from academia, central banks and the IMF examine how this increased globalisation has affected competitiveness, productivity, inflation and the labour market. This timely contribution to the globalisation literature provides a longer-term perspective while also evaluating some of the potential implications for policy makers, particularly from a European perspective. Download Here If you liked this post, buy me a beer. (Suggested: $3 a beer or $7.5 for a pitcher)
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Aug 9, 2011 | No Comments
“…This collection of essays is a celebration of global, peer-to-peer participation in social media, which is certainly impacting culture and education, in its span of concerns from the classroom to the world. Mizuko Ito discusses post-Pokemon media for children in Japan, where there is a convergence of old and new media forms that encourage hyper-social participation, even a degree of authoring, through personalization and remix. The arenas that allow this most thoroughly are Yugioh and Hamtaro. Yugioh is a consumers’ constellation of serialized manga, card and video games, movies, and miscellaneous chara (cartoon character) merchandise. One survey in 2000 found that EVERY Japanese student in the third grade owned Yugioh cards. Each child regularly purchased five cards—cost, about a dollar—and there exists a robust collectors’ market for single cards outside of the five-packs. The culture of tournaments and new releases is covered in Shonen Jump Weekly, where the comic also appeared. Hamtaro is a similar arena, but catering to girls, featuring a little girl character’s pet hamster. The hamster stories have spawned book, an animated film in 2000 and over 50 hamster games. Some games determine which pet is the right one for your friends, or matches couples much as would a horoscope, has contests for drawing the various chara (or the Pokemon characters). Hamtaro has also spawned an active amateur comics scene. In Christina Schwalbe’s essay “Change of Media, Change of Scholarship, Change of University” begins with a concept of Regis Debray, who so memorably divided the political planet into three worlds a generation ago during the cold war. More recently Debray has defined three mediospheres: the logosphere of words, the graphosphere of graphics, the videosphere of television. To that Schwalbe adds a now evolving digital mediosphere, containing the increasingly mashed-up scholarly research, publication, discussion, disputation, and function of academic disserations. To this she adds further comments on the European university and its evolution. Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss, the program director of a “Learning Intensive Society”. His wide-ranging essay weaves together crowdsourcing, GPS child-tracking, social networking, bookmarking of blogs, RSS feeds, redefining new media literacy in the public and the amateur media artist. He cites the movie RIP as one digest of the issues. Ours is an era of culture hacking and civil engagement, from the culture jamming trivial flash mobs to the Pirate Party in Sweden and Germany, and looks to the philosopher Slovoj Zizek on complicity. Elsewhere, Wey-Han Tan condemns disruptive un-usability in some educational games, which devalues the game to zero once you don’t want to play it again. Transmediacy in Japan is praised as giving a unifying experience to gameplay. The end result is a metagaming: awareness, sharing, hacking. In “A Classroom 2.0 Experiment”, Noora Sopula and Joni Leimu employ an interactive wall projection system, 3D scanner, video project of online participation. Technology allows the ancient tradition of the campfire storyteller to expand into virtual reality and (eventual, they predict) telepathy. Brenda Castro presents a Virtual Art Garden, online GUI collaboration produced as a learning community for study of historical images as “plants”, paintings viewed for scholarly understanding between the digital foliage. Adobe Breeze, the virtual world Second Life , the data glove and light pen all figured in various experiments in an ubiquitous computing model enhancing and enlivening the classroom. In other chapters, Tere Vaden of Wikiworlds personal Finnish University is interviewed by Juha Varto, and David Gauntlett shares answers he solicited on Web 2.0 issues, finding its origins in 1980s bulletin boards. Gauntlett notes an ongoing evolution of media manipulation into a hobby not a job. In one of the most theoretical of the essays here focused on transformations in the arts, Eduardo Navas’ taxonomy of mashups breaks into discreet genera. The first is that of Regressive mashups, said to occur after two or more previously released songs are mashed. Frederick Jameson, J.-F. Lyotard and Theodor Adorno’s theory of regression are all mustered in support, and the Macintosh graphic user interface introduced as mashup of a desktop metaphor. Reflexive mashup, such as a news feed, regulate constant change with respect to the work’s remix history. Examples of this kind are Jamaican dub mixes, or disco remixes for longer stretches of nonstop dancing, that add and subtract audio elements. The Reflexive remix both require and showcases the track’s history. Finally, Regenerative remixes are ahistorical updates that change the initial musical or audio data itself. But the mashup historian’s question is: do Regenerative remixes mark an end to critical distance, in a youth culture where ahistoricity is the norm? Doris Gassert brings up Fight Club (1999) content and form, questioning the aesthetics of narrative in its process to digital form. Torsten Meyer contemplates writers block and its solution when posed with the enormity of the world. The writer contrasts the art exhibition Documenta 11, which was multi-site, disorganized, not user-friendly, with friendlier books, citations, and cyberhistory (an examination of CERN and its role in creation of the World Wide Web). Meyer years for some organizing principle, like Brunelleschi’s perspective, productively imposed upon the architecture of his Florentine Baptistry. Axel Bruns calls the act of remixing mashups “produsage”, a term which appropriately reads like sausage. A process dating back to 1920s Dada collages, it now flourishes in Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube and Wikileaks. It is encouraged under the Creative Commons standard, where media is considered open source, unfinish and continuous, common property, probably giving the originator more intellectual rewards and citation than financial ones. Guitarist Robert Fripp said the pop music industry is “founded on exploitation, oiled by deceipt, riven with theft and fueled by greed”. Note that the online newsletter Rock & Rap Confidential often headlines articles under the category Who Needs the Record Industry? Some mashup models call to mind the Museum of Jurassic Technology in California, a site of fiction that helps one to understand a greater truth about our understanding of science. Henry Jenkins – long interested in established and emerging artists’ contexts – documents the Macarthur Foundation-funded Project New Media teacher’s guide, and the use of Ricardo Pitts-Wiley’s “Moby Dick: Then and Now” at Rhode Island Correctional facility. This remix might be compared to DJ Spooky’s “Birth of a Nation” remix (or this reviewer’s own 1990 “Hucklefine” Macintosh Hypercard reworking of Huckleberry Finn). Pitts-Wiley collaborated with young men in prison, who chose this classic to update because they were in agreement that the book was “All about the money!” Residents in the facility contributed metaphors of the color white, where the drug industry serves as whaling, Elijah sees the attack on New York on 9/11, and Ishmael is a Navy Seal with a dishonorable discharge for his drug habit. Jenkins laments that schools ignore other versions of a work in pop media of the classics, such as the myriad movie versions (which are watched intently in English literature classes in other nations, like Japan). One solution was that discovered by Tim Rollins and K.O.S., (Kids of Survival)in the 1980s, a struggling high school literature teacher and his students who painted upon the pages of a text. Melville’s Moby Dick itself is often cited as a mashup, for its a raft of digressions, but what about the last two great whales of novels by James Joyce? Jenkins asserts that we all have the right – or obligation! – to revise, retell, remix the classics. A remix is then good if, rather than superficial or arbitrary, the new, ensuing work is aesthetic, meaningful and generative.” Leonardo on-line, reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher, Saginaw Valley, State University Download Here If you liked this post, buy me a beer. (Suggested: $3 a beer or $7.5 for a pitcher)
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Aug 9, 2011 | No Comments
“When an author uses a loaded word like ‘reckless’ in a book’s title, the burden of proof is high. . . . Steffy meets the burden by demonstrating that corporate behemoth BP (formerly British Petroleum) could have prevented the 11 deaths on April 20, 2010, aboard the Deepwater Horizon. . . . The deaths and the gigantic oil spill following the sinking of Deepwater Horizon will surely become a landmark of corporate ineptness and greed for the remainder of human history, thanks in part to Steffy’s remarkable account.” San Antonio Express-News “Steffy has produced a fascinating, gripping, revealing account. . . . The book details events aboard the Deepwater Horizon in April of 2010 to start, but it digs deeper into what is revealed as a culture of cost-cutting boiling over within BP. Steffy documents years of incidents and poor management decisions, detailing the rise of key characters like John Browne and Tony Hayward alongside riveting outlines of horrifying events in Texas City and at other BP locations. . . . The book reads like fiction at times, with the author’s heavily-detailed accounts of explosions and conversations creating vivid, nearly fantastical images. The tragic history of BP is all-too-real, though, as the lost lives and environmental damage certainly attest to.. . . Steffy is a thorough, straightforward author. His concerns largely lie with the loss of life and the general culture of cost-cutting of BP, painting an apt and terrifying picture of rampant, steady, costly neglect.” Seattle Post Intelligencer “Steffy provides valuable insight and crucial corporate context in explaining how so much oil ended up in the Gulf of Mexico.” BusinessWeek “[Steffy's] investigations reveal a corporate culture of cost-cutting initiatives that put profits ahead of workers’ lives and the environment, with repeated safety violations and an abysmal accident history. . . . Steffy details how, in the context of BP’s record, the disaster was just part of a pattern of poor decision making in the relentless pursuit by BP to become the largest and most profitable oil company in the world.” Booklist About the Book As night settled on April 20, 2010, a series of explosions rocked Deepwater Horizon, the immense semisubmersible drilling platform leased by British Petroleum, located 40 miles off the Louisiana coast. The ensuing inferno claimed 11 lives, and it would rage uncontained for two days, until its wreckage sank to a final resting place nearly a mile beneath the waves. On the ocean floor, the unit’s wellhead erupted. Over the next ten weeks, as repeated attempts to cap the geyser failed, an estimated 200 million gallons of oil—the equivalent of 20 Exxon Valdez spills—spewed into the Gulf of Mexico, eventually lapping up on beaches as far away as Florida. Drowning in Oil , by award-winning Houston Chronicle business reporter and columnist Loren Steffy—considered by many to be the writer with the best access to the story—is an unprecedented and gripping narrative of this catastrophe and how BP’s winner-take-all business culture made it all but inevitable. Through never-before-published interviews with BP executives and employees, environmental experts, and oil industry insiders, Steffy takes us behind the scenes of 100 years of BP corporate history. Beginning with the conglomerate’s early gambits in the Middle East to its recent ascent among energy titans, Steff unearths the roots of the Gulf oil spill in the unwritten bargain between oil producers and consumers, whose insatiable appetites drive the search for new supplies faster, farther, and deeper. Beyond this, the Deepwater Horizon disaster took place after a history of cost cutting in pursuit of profits, particularly under the guidance of its two most recent ex-CEOs, John Browne and Anthony Hayward. Exhaustively researched and documented, Drowning in Oil is the first in-depth examination of how a lack of corporate responsibility and government oversight led to the biggest offshore oil spill in U.S. history. It is an objective, no-punches-pulled account of the energy industry: its environmental impact and the intense competition among stakeholders in today’s oil markets. This book puts all the pieces together, offering a definitive account of BP’s pursuit of outsized profits as the industrial world awakens to the grim realities of Peak Oil. “ They fumbled around the darkened room and found an instruction manual. By flashlight, they read the starting procedures. They were doing everything right. After five or six futile tries, they gave up and headed back toward the bridge. Back on the bridge, alarms were shrieking and the captain knew they were running out of time. The subsea engineer had hit the emergency disconnect for the well, and although the control panel showed the rig should be free, it wasn’t. The hydraulics were dead. Fire continued to shoot from the top of the derrick. The rig had no power, and without power, it had no pumps for the firefighting equipment, no way to shut off the flow of gas from the well, and no way to disconnect the rig from the flaming umbilical that had it tethered to the wellhead. ” —from Drowning in Oil Download Here If you liked this post, buy me a beer. (Suggested: $3 a beer or $7.5 for a pitcher)
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Aug 9, 2011 | No Comments
“This book should be on the seasoned entrepreneur’s list of ‘what I should have read before I started my business.’” JOE KEELEY, President & CEO, College Nannies & Tutors Development “This is one of the best entrepreneurship books I’ve read…I wish I had this book when I first started out.” RYAN O’DONNELL, Cofounder and CEO, BullEx Digital Safety Your own business: Take the leap, make it happen, and make it succeed! · The truth about choosing the right business for you and maintaining a healthy personal life · The truth about planning, funding, hiring, and successful launches · The truth about financial management, marketing, and growth This book reveals 53 bite-size, easy-to-use techniques for choosing, planning, launching, and growing your winning business. You’ll learn how to generate and test business ideas, and pick the one that’s best for you…select the right entry strategy…name and locate your business…raise capital…build your team and get expert advice…protect your business secrets and intellectual property…effectively brand your business and market its offerings…handle pricing, distribution, and sales…manage your finances to specific objectives…prepare for growth…and even maintain your work/life balance as an entrepreneur. This isn’t “someone’s opinion”: it’s a definitive, evidence-based guide to building your own successful enterprise–a set of bedrock principles you can rely on whoever you are, wherever you are, and whatever business you choose to launch. Download Here If you liked this post, buy me a beer. (Suggested: $3 a beer or $7.5 for a pitcher)
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Aug 9, 2011 | No Comments
Networking can be a complex topic, especially for those new to the field of IT. This focused, full-color book takes a unique approach to teaching Windows networking to beginners by stripping down a network to its bare basics, thereby making each topic clear and easy to understand. Focusing on the new Microsoft Technology Associate (MTA) program, this book pares down to just the essentials, showing beginners how to gain a solid foundation for understanding networking concepts upon which more advanced topics and technologies can be built. This straightforward guide begins each chapter by laying out a list of topics to be discussed, followed by a concise discussion of the core networking skills you need to have to gain a strong handle on the subject matter. Chapters conclude with review questions and suggested labs so you can measure your level of understanding of the chapter’s content. Serves as an ideal resource for gaining a solid understanding of fundamental networking concepts and skills Offers a straightforward and direct approach to networking basics and covers network management tools, TCP/IP, the name resolution process, and network protocols and topologies Reviews all the topics you need to know for taking the MTA 98-366 exam Provides an overview of networking components, discusses connecting computers to a network, and looks at connecting networks with routers If you’re new to IT and interested in entering the IT workforce, then Microsoft Windows Networking Essentials is essential reading. Download Here If you liked this post, buy me a beer. (Suggested: $3 a beer or $7.5 for a pitcher)
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Aug 9, 2011 | No Comments
Although Lean and wireless professionals seek the same goals, few are fluent in each other’s language. Those who are have already helped their companies tap into the competitive advantages possible by integrating wireless technology into a Lean culture of continuous process improvement. Highlighting wireless as a powerful and inherently Lean tool,? Thin Air: How Wireless Technology Supports Lean Initiatives proposes practices and paradigms to help you seamlessly integrate these two dynamic resources for virtually effortless process improvements. This authoritative resource discusses the application of a wide range of wireless technologies, including RFID, wireless sensor networks (WSNs), real-time location systems (RTLSs), and global positioning systems (GPS). It addresses the modernization of infrastructure, elimination of costly hardware and redundant equipment, the facilitation of e-Kanban, and the provision of real-time visibility into any operation. It also touches upon “airsourcing,” the wireless cousin of outsourcing. The book contains a strong healthcare component with a case study on Mercy Medical Center that appears throughout the text. Download Here If you liked this post, buy me a beer. (Suggested: $3 a beer or $7.5 for a pitcher)
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The Million-Dollar Idea in Everyone gives you new and exciting ways to make money from your interests, insights, and inventions. With the phenomenon of ?open source innovation? it?s easier than ever to turn your ideas and expertise into profits. This book shows how lone inventors are being supplanted by everyday experts using blogs, virtual communities, and microbusinesses to bring ideas and inventions to fruition. Whether you just want to make a few extra dollars or start a new business, this handy inventor?s guide points the way. Download Here If you liked this post, buy me a beer. (Suggested: $3 a beer or $7.5 for a pitcher)
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Aug 9, 2011 | No Comments
Steven L. Danver, “Popular Controversies in World History: Investigating History’s Intriguing Questions” Publisher: ABC-CLIO | 2010 | ISBN: 1598840770 | PDF | 1424 pages | 10.5 MB
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