Surviving Corporate Downsizing with Dignity and Grace!

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Finally, Some Information You Can Use!

How to "stand up" after the horse you ride bucks you!

Surviving Corporate Downsizing with Dignity and Grace!
Mitchell C. Baldwin
Manufacturer: Smart Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Business Life | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0966908007

Book Description

A practical handbook that tells you how to gather your thoughts, pick yourself and your self-esteem up and get back into the mainstream of life. Written by someone who experienced downsizing and gives an inspirational twist to what seems to be a devastating blow.

Customer Reviews:

Finally, Some Information You Can Use!.......2000-06-08

Surviving Corporate Downsizing with Dignity and Grace opens your eyes to the entire issue of downsizing in Corporate America. If we're enjoying such a wonderful economy, why are so many people losing their jobs? The author, Mitchell Baldwin, offers advice for people who have been recently downsized, and even those who are still waiting for the ax to fall. His financial advice is practical, easy to understand, and it works. I have put into place all of his suggestions and my financial picture is greatly improved. He also offers suggestions about what to do next, how to retrain yourself, where to look for a job, and even how to go about starting your own business, as he did. Baldwin addresses the depression and anxiety one may feel when leaving a job, as well as the guilt that is often felt by the survivors. And, all of his suggestions and advice is presented from a Christian perspective, which meant a lot to me. I advise anyone who has lost a job, or thinks they may be in danger of losing a job, to get this book for their own personal library. You'll want to make notes in the margins!

How to "stand up" after the horse you ride bucks you!.......2000-04-13

This book is a must read for any individual who is involved in corporate downsizing. This book gives you a sensitive understanding of how one can associate their identity with an employer. Mitch uses analogies that one can easily relate to in defining how your self-esteem becomes a part of the corporation you are leaving. In addition, he gives the basics of how you can put your life back together. These basics includes preparing a budget to remain financially afloat, reviewing the current situation before making plans for the future, etc. This is a good book that tells a dramatic story of his downsizing before revealing what to do to get back on track!

Book Description

This digital document is an article from The Australian Library Journal, published by Australian Library and Information Association on May 1, 2001. The length of the article is 515 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Becoming a fundraiser: the principles and practice of library development.(Review)
Author: Peter Limb
Publication: The Australian Library Journal (Refereed)
Date: May 1, 2001
Publisher: Australian Library and Information Association
Volume: 50 Issue: 2 Page: 187

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

Book Description

This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1814 edition by Philipp Krüll, Landshut.

Book Description

This Handbook is a new comprehensive reference of the methodologies (field, laboratory and desk work) for using radionuclides, primarily ¹³⁷Cs and ²¹⁰Pb, to establish rates and spatial patterns of soil redistribution within the landscape and determine the geochronology of sediment deposits. It is based on the recent developments made by a global network of research scientists working on soil erosion and sedimentation research using environmental radionuclides.

Book Description

These edited proceedings provide a thematic review of four important areas of marine biology. The theme of the first part of the volume is production at boundary systems and in particular it deals with rates of production and related processes at boundary systems, including shelf breaks, termoclines and the fronts between stratified and mixed waters, and the contribution of the production of such systems to the overall productivity of a region. The second part looks at the dynamics of deep-sea life: new techniques of, and results from, direct observation, in situ experimentation and sampling, especially those concerning rates and processes in the deep sea. The third part examines concepts of community organisation in the benthos: theoretical and empirical studies that synthesise the structural and functional properties of benthic communities. The final section on adaptive aspects of biochemical and physiological variability considers the genetical basis and adaptive relevance of variability in biochemical and physiological processes, with particular emphasis on relationships between population genetics and physiological and biochemical ecology.

Book Description

The aim of this book is to review recent achievements in the theoretical investigations of the electronic structure, optical, magneto-optical (MO), and x-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD) properties of compounds and Multilayered structures.
Chapter 1 of this book is of an introductory character and presents the theoretical foundations of the band theory of solids such as the density functional theory for ground state properties of solids including local density approximation (LDA). It also presents some modifications to the LDA, such as gradient correction, self-interaction correction, LDA+U method, orbital polarization correction, GW approximation, and dynamical mean-field theory. The description of the magneto-optical effects and linear response theory are also presented.
The book describes the MO properties for a number of 3 d materials, such as elemental ferromagnetic metals (Fe, Co and Ni) and paramagnetic metals in external magnetic fields (Pd and Pt), some important 3 d compounds such as XPt3 (X=V, Cr, Mn, Fe and Co), Heusler alloys, chromium spinel chalcogenides, MnB and strongly correlated magnetite Fe304. It also describes the recent achievements in both the experimental and theoretical investigations of the electronic structure, optical and MO properties of transition metal multilayered structures (MLS).
The book also presents the MO properties of f band ferromagnetic materials: Tm, Nd, Sm, Ce and La monochalcogenides, some important Yb compounds, SmB6 and Nd3S4, UFe2, U3X4 (X=P, As, Sb, Bi, Se and Te), UCu2P2, UCuP2, UCuAs2, UAsSe, URhA1, UGa2 and UPd3. Within the total group of alloys and compounds, we discuss their MO spectra in relationship to: the spin-orbit coupling strength, the magnitude of the local magnetic moment, the degree of hybridization in the bonding, the half-metallic character, or, equivalently, the Fermi level filling of the bandstructure, the intraband plasma frequency, and the influence of the crystal structure.
In the last chapter results of recent theoretical investigations on the MXCD in various representative transition metal 4 f and 5 f systems are presented.

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Earthquakes, market crashes, hurricanes, wars: are these random forces of nature, or foreseeable blips on the radar screen of history? In this lively book, science journalist Mark Buchanan introduces readers to a developing branch of science that looks for order in what seems to be utmost chaos.

In the late 1980s, three physicists set out to investigate the apparently inherent instability of complex systems. In a process that Buchanan illustrates by analogy with a sand pile, they discovered that these systems tend to arrive at a "critical state," after which point any random grain falling in just the right place can touch off an avalanche. So it is, Buchanan shows us, with the onset of world wars, economic shocks, traffic gridlock, and other dislocating events--all of which this new science may one day help predict.

In clear and vigorous prose, Buchanan brings readers insights from nonequilibrium physics, offering a new way of seeing the "fingers of instability" that poke through the world's fabric--and that in turn make it such an interesting place. --Gregory McNamee

Book Description

Why do catastrophes happen? What sets off earthquakes, for example? What about mass extinctions of species? The outbreak of major wars? Massive traffic jams that seem to appear out of nowhere? Why does the stock market periodically suffer dramatic crashes? Why do some forest fires become superheated infernos that rage totally out of control?

Experts have never been able to explain the causes of any of these disasters. Now scientists have discovered that these seemingly unrelated cataclysms, both natural and human, almost certainly all happen for one fundamental reason. More than that, there is not and never will be any way to predict them.

Critically acclaimed science journalist Mark Buchanan tells the fascinating story of the discovery that there is a natural structure of instability woven into the fabric of our world. From humble beginnings studying the physics of sandpiles, scientists have learned that an astonishing range of things–Earth’s crust, cars on a highway, the market for stocks, and the tightly woven networks of human society–have a natural tendency to organize themselves into what’s called the “critical state,” in which they are poised on what Buchanan describes as the “knife-edge of instability.” The more places scientists have looked for the critical state, the more places they’ve found it, and some believe that the pervasiveness of instability must now be seen as a fundamental feature of our world.

Ubiquity is packed with stories of real-life catastrophes, such as the huge earthquake that in 1995 hit Kobe, Japan, killing 5,000 people; the forest fires that ravaged Yellowstone National Park in 1988; the stock market crash of 1987; the mass extinction that killed off the dinosaurs; and the outbreak of World War I. Combining literary flair with scientific rigor, Buchanan introduces the researchers who have pieced together the evidence of the critical state, explaining their ingenious work and unexpected insights in beautifully lucid prose.

At the dawn of this new century, Buchanan reveals, we are witnessing the emergence of an extraordinarily powerful new field of science that will help us comprehend the bewildering and unruly rhythms that dominate our lives and may even lead to a true science of the dynamics of human culture and history.

Customer Reviews:

Pareto is ubiquitous.......2002-12-02

In the book Ubiquity by Mark Buchanan, processes as diverse as forest fire size, stacking rice grains, market fluctuation, scientific paper citations, species extinction history, epidemiology, sizes of wars and earthquake severity are said to generate occasional catastrophic behavior following similar statistical behavior. Buchanan presents these arguments in a very readable style at a level that can be grasped by the layman. I found the physical descriptions of the processes fascinating. The phenomena is, indeed, ubiquitous. Repeatedly, we find that, if X measures severity and f is the frequency histogram of occurrence, then numerous processes containing a catastrophic component adhere to a linear log-log plot with negative slope. Although unsaid in the book, probably to allow access to a wider audience, the underlying probability density function of the ubiquitous process is a Pareto random variable with probability density function f(x)=(a/b)*(b/x)^(a+1) for x>b and zero otherwise. The enormously fat tails of this distribution allow the outlier-like catastrophic events described in the book. Taking the log of both sides of the density function gives log[f(x)] = -(a+1)*log(x) + constant which is a line of negative slope on a log-log plot. If U is a uniform random variable on (0,1), then X=b*U^(-1/a) is a Pareto RV. Using this, plots similar to the time series and log-log plots in Ubiquity can be straightforwardly simulated. Googling "Pareto distribution" gives a plurality of interesting web accounts, many mathematically deeper, of this remarkable phenomena made wonderfully accessible by Buchanan.

A new kind of hype?.......2002-08-24

There is no physical theory that explains history, economics, etc. The wary reader should beware that wishful thinking has won over scientific criticism in this book. To be more specific, sandpile models do not explain earthquakes, turbulence, economics, and so on. Sandpile models are an interesting way of trying something new and stimulating in statistical physics but certainly cannot be elevated to the level of explaining the world. Fluid turbulence is not like dynamically an earthquake, financial markets are not like sandpiles, and Hitler is not explained by any model of statistical physics (need one really say this!?). The historians and biologists need not pack their bags and go home...

(A physics professor)

Can my small comments make a change?.......2002-08-20

This is not one of my favourite reads. In some ways I found it a labour as it went over the same material again and again, albeit in very diverse areas. I understand the power law that Mr Buchanan describes and its implications, but it seems to be such an after-the-event view that can have little material impact on modern endeavours. It proves futility. It is as if what is ubiquitous is our necessary failure to achieve. But I'm sure we do do better than that.

On the other hand there was one revelation in this book that truly fascinated me. I have always been interested in the dinosaurs and their extinction. Books like 'The Dinosaur Heresies' by Bakker and 'Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs' by Desmond developed a genuine need-to-know-more. But the matter of extinction is so challenging. There are strong suggestions that an impact of an asteroid caused such havoc that the dinosaurs became extinct - all of them, the small ones, the large ones, the carnivores, the herbivores, the pterosaurs (flying dinosaurs) and the plesiosaurs (sea-going dinosaurs). And yet, for all that, other animals - notably mammals - did survive. What allowed them through the window of extinction? In my reading I have encountered this debate many times and most writers do have a preference for one theory or another. But even those who do support the impact theory do not have evidence of an impact associated with each of the great periods of extinction that have occured through time. So, the thesis of 'Ubiquity' does provide an alternative - that sometimes the effect of even a small change will cause monumental alterations to the world according to the ubiquitous power law. What was the small change that extinguished the dinosaur SPECIES but allowed others to survive, and in the absence of the dinosurs, thrive? It seems to me that knowing what this small change was would fundamentally advance our knowledge of what the dinosaurs really were.

The most powerful voice in the campaign for popularising the impact theory of dinosaur extinction is Alvarez who discovered the site of the impact that occured 65 million years ago just about the time the last dinosaur walked on the Earth. What Buchanan points out, that so few other writers do is this ....

'...the bulk of the long 1980 paper by Alvarez and his colleagues was 'confined to the geological and physical evidence for an impact, and the physical results of the impact. The discussion of the biological results of the impact occupies only half a page. (quoted from M. Benton) The reason is simple: no one really has much of a clue about what an impact would really do to life all over the planet.'

This is perhaps the strongest argument I have read against the impact causing the extinction of the dinsoaurs. Not that it couldn't have, but that the opinionated science community is so set on Alvarez' findings that they have taken the most tenuous suggestions from Alvarez' paper to support their theories.

Certainly plausible and explains a lot.......2002-08-20

Buchanan's book Ubiquity is a fascinating volume on self organizing criticality. It bears a striking resemblance to Per Bak's book How Nature Works, and Bak's research is cited a number of times throughout the text. As with the Bak work, Buchanan's covers a wide variety of subjects from wars to stock market fluctuations. Of particular interest to me was the discussion of evolution and the episodic character of mass extinctions, since I've read a number of books on the subject of the K-T boundary extinction.

Like Bak, Buchanan points out that much that appears to have historical significance and specific causation, while it makes for good story telling, has little predictive value about it. He uses Bak's sandpile experiments to illustrate the futility of such efforts by creating a "Sandman's view" of catastrophe (pp. 179-180). He imagines a catastrophic sand slide from the point of view of a tiny survivor to whom events seem to have been "due" to negligence on the part of the individuals responsible for a steep area. From the point of view of the sandpile, though, the information required for such control would have to be staggeringly large and nearly perfect in order to have predicted the slide and its effects. Had some minute change to the pile been possible at the putative disaster site, a similar slide could have occurred elsewhere. Then the caretakers of the sandpile would have been blamed for causing a disaster rather than preventing one. One can see in this parable why politicians in the real world tend to seek their own ultimate good rather than that of their constituents or of the environment itself. The vagaries of prediction caused by the intertwining of particulars and the vastness of the data involved put such individuals in impossible positions. They are either guilty of not preventing or of causing various negative outcomes if they are unfortunate or praised for positive outcomes if fortunate. As the author points out in a quote of John Galbraith, "Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable (p. 1)."

The key point of the book seems to be that many systems are organized on the critical edge between instability and stability. Life itself may owe its very existence to that fact. Because of this poised-on-the-edge characteristic, small events may cascade in such a way as to produce major changes: a new value for stocks, a massive extinction that creates new opportunities for remaining species, a redistribution of power among nations, etc. Which outcomes occur and when, however, are not subject to predictive formulae, even though they may seem ideally suited to it. If even extreme events are the results of myriads of small, seemingly unimportant events-sort of the butterfly in Japan fluttering its wings concept-then there are no means by which catastrophic events can be predicted any more than smaller ones can be. According to the author, while there seems to be a mathematical frequency with which incidents of different magnitudes occur, there is no way of divining when a specific outcome of a given magnitude will actually occur, nor are the consequences should such an event be forestalled. This has implications for events meaningful to human beings: wars, the stock market peaks and valleys, even extinction events. For Buchanan, history itself may arise by virtue of natural resolutions of unstable systems of whatever kind.

After reading the author's discussion of the Gutenberg-Richter power law and the scale invariance of some systems, it occurred to me that the end of the world scenario presented by Carl Sagan in his book Cosmos-and credited to an earlier researcher-may fall into this category. In that volume, a chart had been created that plotted murder (private war) to the total destruction of mankind against a time line, finding that total annihilation should occur a few years after the year 2000. (It was expected closer to mid 21st century, but the original author had not factored in the destructive power of nuclear war. Later individuals did and produced a chart that suggested armageddon would be around 2010). While the ultimate war may well occur, if Bak and Buchanan are correct, it might not be due to either predictable or controllable factors, and it will probably not occur on any clear cut timetable like that suggested in Cosmos.

An amazingly interesting book full of concepts that, however theoretical, are certainly plausible and explain a lot about our world.

Games Physicists Play.......2002-06-18

It is a matter of degree. If I, with my degrees in Chinese Lit, were to hurl a hundred frozen potatoes at a wall, I would probably end up in a stait-jacket. If someone with degrees in Physics does that, it's research.

Mark Buchanan, however, does away with degrees. As the title of this book implies, all or nothing: Ubiquity is a sole authority. Only my knife cuts potatoes, no knife but mine can cut potatoes. While I agree that the existence of power laws is fascinating, I would not perhaps extend them as far as Buchanan does; I would be more interested in probing why distribution is so regular, rather than insisting that all phenomena must be explained by this, and only this, rule. A power law may signify that a country can be bled, or a forest burned, so far before you run out of fuel. This is more interesting than assuming that because the numbers resemble each other, the conditions necessarily illuminate each other. (As to the power law, please note the comments in Dennis Littrell's review of this book).

I got to the point where I dreaded having to read about yet another game that, amazingly enough, proves the power law (do any games disprove it?). Games seem to go to Buchanan's head, where they practically replace reality, which, needless to say, is far more complex. There are games and there are games, though. On page 126 (paperback version), Newton is praised for simplifying for ease of reasoning; then on page 142, economists are excoriated for simplifying for ease of reasoning. I never thought I would see the day that I stood up for economics, but isn't this a double standard? By the same token, after he so thoroughly debunked the efficient market hypothesis, I was surprised to read on page 188 that after war releases stress, 'each nation is brought back into rough balance with its true economic strength.' But as he says on the next page, 'None of this is meant to be fully convincing.' It's not.

Buchanan at times seems to forget that there is more to human history than wars and revolution, and that great people can change the course of history; where would we be today if George Washington Carver had not saved southern agriculture? Buchanan's total belief in the ubiquity of his games leads him to say something as ridiculous as "the mark of the great scientist lies not so much in having profound ideas that revolutionize science, but in taking ideas ... and making that potential real"(p183). ...limits our reviews to 1,000 words, so I will leave it this sentence for you to explode .

Even if we discount the role anybody but scientists and soldiers play in history, there should be some difference between incipient wars. Consider World War II, in which Germany and Japan geared for widespread conquest, planning meticulously years in advance. The German army would not have rolled through the center of Europe so irresistibly if the Hitler Youth had not trained the young so well; Japanese school children were primed to attack China before the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. Then compare this to the American Revolution, a beef far across the oceans between some (not all) ill-prepared colonists and a Great Britain preoccupied with India. Is it any surprise that WWII spread far and wide, while the American Revolution was fought locally?

I think the author has intriguing ideas, but he has overextended them. Nonetheless, Buchanan's doctrines have a familiar ring. Buddhism long has taught that any event is the result of an infinite number of causes, and the cause of an infinite number of results. The ideas in this book are well worth pondering, but with a grain of salt. One grain. Now, if you have a whole pile of grains of salt, one more might avalanche....

Book Description

Mary McCarthy was one of the leading literary figures of her time. In addition to the novels and memoirs for which she is best remembered, she was also a tireless literary and social critic. Starting out as a theater reviewer for Partisan Review in 1937, she quickly distinguished herself for her witty and fearless commentary on topics ranging from McCarthyism to the French New Novel to women’s fashion magazines. McCarthy was an eager controversialist, unsparing in her dissection of anything she found phony or hypocritical. Her reviews are sharp, sometimes malicious, and often very funny, but her criticism is also informed by deep erudition and enlivened by an inexhaustible capacity for enthusiasm. Her political writings, critical in equal measure of the Cold War consensus and of its critics, are less concerned with finding correct positions than with exploring the often absurd circumstances in which agonizing moral decisions are made.

While the soundness of McCarthy’s judgments can sometimes be doubted, her curiosity and intelligence cannot. The intellectual brio and acute judgment that characterizes her best fiction is vividly displayed in this selection of essays, which span McCarthy’s career from the late 1930s to the late 1970s. It includes her writings on topics such as fashion magazines, Eugene O’Neill, A Streetcar Named Desire, Look Back in Anger, Pale Fire, J.D. Salinger, Madame Bovary, Italo Calvino, and Watergate. The volume constitutes not only a valuable record of the ideological and cultural controversies that dominated American intellectual life from the Moscow trials to the Watergate hearings, but will also introduce a new generation of readers to a uniquely forthright and vibrant critical voice.

Customer Reviews:

A beautiful mind in a beautiful book.......2004-08-21

Mary McCarthy is one of the most important American thinkers of the twentieth century, and she was at the heart of everything in the New York worlds of politics and letters. This superb collection of her essays shows her at her shrewdest, on subjects ranging from Eugene O'Neill to fashion magazines to Portugal to society and political figures. Famous for her unrelentingly flinty lordliness (memorably and mercilessly caricatured in Randall Jarrell's PICTURES FROM AN INSTITUTION), she can be savage in her reviews. When her stinging rebukes are deserved, as in her famous withering critique of Salinger's FRANNY AND ZOOEY, they're a delight, but even when you feel they're unwarranted or off-target they're still instructive and illuminating, and are always written with incredible elegance and eloquence. We want the best of the best critics to show, more than anything, a point of view, which McCarthy undoubtedly does: a point of view that is Europhilic, intelligent, self-important, funny, biting, and exceptionally articulate.

This collection is an absolutely beautiful hardcover edition from NYRB that is as delightful to the touch as to the eye. It is an extremely worthy investment.

A BOLT FROM THE BLUE AND OTHER ESSAYS. Edited & with an introduction by A. O. Scott.

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A BOLT FROM THE BLUE AND OTHER ESSAYS. Edited & with an introduction by A. O. Scott.
Mary. McCarthy
Manufacturer: New York Review of Books,
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000N7EBGE

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