Retracing Public Administration (Research in Public Administration)

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Hardbound. What is public administration? How can we identify it, characterize it? The meaning of public administration seems more problematic than ever after the late 20th century cry for privatization. Some argue there is no need to elucidate the meaning of public administration, others stick to more limited notions like 'public management' or introduce new vocabulary such as 'governance'.

Retracing Public Administration deals with our understanding of public administration. Before discarding 'public administration' a more profound analysis of its meaning is preeminent. Where did the concept originate, why and how was it grounded, and can we perhaps (re)establish its meaning as a core concept for understanding and changing social reality?

This volume presents the reader with a number of conceptual studies that can be regarded a prerequisite for thinking about public administration. The studies are reflections upon the administrative dis

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Here is a completely updated edition of the best-selling Resolving Conflicts at Work. This definitive and comprehensive work provides a handy guide for resolving conflicts, miscommunications, and misunderstandings at work and outlines the authors’ eight strategies that show how the inevitable disputes and divisions in the workplace actually provide an opportunity for greater creativity, productivity, enhanced morale, and personal growth. This new edition includes current case studies that put the focus on leadership, management, and how organizations can design systems to change a culture of avoidance into a culture of creative conflict. The result is a more practical book for today’s companies and the people who work in them.

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Here is a completely updated edition of the best-selling Resolving Conflicts at Work. This definitive and comprehensive work provides a handy guide for resolving conflicts, miscommunications, and misunderstandings at work and outlines the authors eight strategies that show how the inevitable disputes and divisions in the workplace actually provide an opportunity for greater creativity, productivity, enhanced morale, and personal growth. This new edition includes current case studies that put the focus on leadership, management, and how organizations can design systems to change a culture of avoidance into a culture of creative conflict. The result is a more practical book for today's companies and the people who work in them.

Book Description

Crisis management planning refers to the methodology used by executives to respond to and manage a crisis and is an integral part of a business resumption plan. Crisis Management Planning and Execution explores in detail the concepts of crisis management planning, which involves a number of crises other than physical disaster. Defining the term crisis management plan, the book begins by explaining the business continuity plan and how it comprises the prevention, emergency response, and business resumption plans. It examines the stages of a crisis, the four steps needed to manage a crisis, and the executive management team section of the crisis management plan. The book deals with the crisis communications team and plan, reviews development of the crisis management plan, and discusses the command center. The book concludes by illustrating the importance of exercising the plan. Providing a practical methodology, Crisis Management Planning and Execution teaches the business continuity/business resumption professional how to encourage executives to participate in the development of their sections of the crisis management plan. It incorporates a step-by-step process for crafting a plan unique to every company dealing with disasters.

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This unique and informative text describes how stars are classified according to their spectral qualities and temperature. James Kaler explains the alphabet of stellar astronomy, running from cool M stars to hot O stars, and tells the story of their evolution. Before embarking on a voyage of cosmic discovery, the author discusses the fundamental properties of stars, their atomic structure and the formation of spectra. Then, Kaler considers each star type individually and explores its spectra in detail. A review of unusual, hard-to-classify stars, and a discussion of data related to the birth, life and death of stars round out the text. This book is an important resource for all amateur astronomers and students of astronomy. Professionals will find it a refreshing read as well.

Customer Reviews:

Stars and their Spectra: An introduction to the spectral sequence.......2007-09-26

I am in the process of building a spectroscope to be used in our astronomy club's 14 inch Celestron. This book has been a great source of technical information needed to both understand how they work. Subsequently it will be a useful reference should we be able to take spectrophotos and compare them to spectra in the book. Highly recommended.

Excellent book with terribly reproduced graphic images - buy the earlier edition.......2006-11-03

As others have indicated in their reviews, this is an excellent book. I do have a complaint with
the paperback reissue however - the images are very poorly reproduced from the earlier edition. I
have seen the earlier edition where the images are clear, and unfortunately, many of the reproductions of spectra
in the later edition are so poor that it is impossible to see the features discussed in the text.

The paperback edition is an embarassment to the Cambridge University Press which usually produces very high
quality books. If you can, you should obtain the earlier edition instead of purchasing the reissued
paperback edition.

Very engaging and makes a good reference too.......2003-07-08

"Stars and their Spectra" is overall a significantly better read than Kaler's earlier work "Stars", which touched on many topics but didn't dive into any of them satisfyingly enough. This book delivers a thorough yet introductory coverage of the science of stellar spectroscopy. As an added bonus, it's very well-written and is great fun to read cover to cover. Kaler clearly harbors great enthusiasm for this subject, particularly when he discusses extreme stars like supergiants and white dwarfs.

Kaler spends the first eighty pages or so covering the basics of how stars work, spectral theory, and history of the modern scheme of spectral classification (OBAFGKM, easily remembered by the popular mnemonic Oh Be A Fine Girl Kiss Me). The meat of the book comes next: a chapter devoted to each letter of the sequence, starting from the cool M stars and working up to the ultra-hot O stars. Here Kaler goes into significant detail on the defining characteristics of each class and how those characteristics manifest themselves physically. We learn how dwarfs, giants, and supergiants may share a spectral class but are fundamentally different (the giants and supergiants almost always aged into that spectral class from a different one). A wealth of other information on each class is presented. We finish up with stars that don't really appear on the regular H-R diagram, such as white dwarfs and neutron stars. Kaler also gives a nice overview at the end of how stars journey along the H-R diagram, changing spectral classes as they age and their internal fusion engines deplete their fuel.

I see stars of a myriad of different colors through my telescope. A few are stunning and a great many come in attractive pairs or multiples. Yet visually they're all points of light with little meaning. It was fascinating to see how much can be learned from analyzing the detailed characteristics of a star's light by dispersing it in a spectrograph. Due to the advancements in this science and the aggregation of data points on the modern H-R diagram, it is often possible to guage a star's size, age, chemical composition, and distance solely from the qualities of its light.

I sell most books after I read them but this one's a keeper and has a permanent spot on the shelf!

How to make astrophysics interesting and comprehensible.......2001-02-26

If you think that star spectrography is an obscure and boring field of research reserved to people with a Cambridge degree, well, you're wrong, and here's why. "Stars And Their Spectra" is yet another marvelous book by James Kaler one of the leading (and still the most underrated!) divulgator of stellar astronomy. It's the natural follow-up of "Stars", Kaler's book on the birth, evolution and death of (guess what?) stars. It explains how the light coming from objects distants thousands of light-years (or more) does contains a wealth of informations on the nature of those little points of light in the night sky. The classification of spectral data, the nature of emission and absorbtion lines, the whole array of concpet behind the analisys of stellar light, it's all presented in a clear manner, with great examples and the right amount of illustrations. Moreover, Kaler it's a divulgator but a scientist too, and he never insults the intelligence of the reader trying to banalize the subject matter. Based on a series of articles appeared on "Sky And Telescope", "The Stars And Their Spectra" will make turn you instantly in an amateur spectrographer...

Superbly done.......2000-05-26

As an amateur astronomer I simply cannot beleive I have gone so long enjoying astronomy without coming to grips with spectra. While the concepts are generally known this book takes the general reader step by step through probably the most important pillar of modern astronomy, analyses of light.

The book requires no advanced mathematics (if it had I wouldnt have understood it) and sticks to good solid concepts.

While it is accessible to the general reader Kaler pulls no punches even when you wish he had, insisting on parsecs instead of lightyears for example. However the joy of him pulling no punches is you are left with a good grounding with which to move onto other works or even do some spectroscopy yourself as I did.

I would commend other astronomy enthusiasts or lovers of space science to get to grips with how we determine the make up of stars and other objects, this is the book to do it.

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Roadmap to the Regents: Physical Setting / Chemistry (State Test Prep Guides)
Princeton Review
Manufacturer: Princeton Review
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0375763082
Release Date: 2003-02-18

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If Students Need to Know It, It’s in This Book
This book develops the chemistry skills of high school students. It builds skills that will help them succeed in school and on the New York Regents Exams.

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We know what it takes to succeed in the classroom and on tests. This book includes strategies that are proven to improve student performance. We provide

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An unusual scientific reference work by any measure, The Book of Life opens with an unusual protest from its editor, Stephen Jay Gould, who worries that it may have left out much of importance discovered between the present and the book's original publication in 1993. Gould's worry is well placed--in the last few years, many advances have been made in taxonomy and genetics, to name just two areas. Still, the book is a lucid, readily comprehensible, and largely up-to-date overview of the origins and evolution of life on earth, from the emergence of bacteria 4 billion years ago to that of Homo sapiens in recent geological time. Written by distinguished scientists, the text proceeds chronologically, giving an in-depth account of the fossil record. It is matched by hundreds of paintings, drawings, charts, and graphs that reinforce the authors' discussions.

More than all that, The Book of Life is a manifesto proclaiming the essential correctness of evolutionary theory, which has come under fire in places like Afghanistan and Kansas. "Life has changed through time," paleontologist Michael Benton observes. "No other explanation will account for the sequence and variety of the life forms preserved as fossils, or the history recorded since humankind began to draw, paint, and carve, about 30,000 years ago." The book's careful documentation of those changes makes it a highly useful reference for high school and university students, and it's a book that rewards casual browsing as well. --Gregory McNamee

Book Description

A new edition of the beautifully illustrated depiction of the dramatic story of survival and extinction. The Book of Life uses an exemplary fusion of art and science to tell the story of life on earth. The text, under the editorship of Stephen Jay Gould, provides a thorough understanding of the latest research and is accompanied by paintings prepared especially for this book. Never before has our planet's evolution been so clearly, so ingeniously explained.

History is marked by disaster. The Book of Lifeexplains how mammals, having survived at least one of these disasters—the impact of a massive comet—luckily inherited the earth. Next came the rise of modern humans, who would shape the world as no creature has. As this fascinating history unfolds, gorgeous illustrations allow us to observe climate changes, tectonic plate movement, the spread of plant life, and the death of the dinosaurs. We discover the chains of animal survival, the causes and consequences of adaptation, and finally the environmental impact of human life. Color illustrations throughout.

Customer Reviews:

A nice overview of evolutionary history, but..........2007-01-04

...a little behind the times and anthropocentric. These failings are admitted in the book, however, and do not much detract from its being a useful work.

Recommended.

Nice high level view.......2006-04-10

I think this is a great book. It has a lot of interesting material, but it's also very readable. I consider it an intermediate level book. It doesn't require any previous knowledge, but there is a lot of material and it sometimes comes quite fast. Some of the material is more complex than one usually finds in popular science books, but it is usually put is boxes separate from the main text.

The book opens up with some introductory material. It's pretty standard: geological time, continental drift, fossils and a high level view of the tree of life. The book is biased towards the evolution that lead to humans, but this bias is explained in the introduction.

The books starts at the beginning, explaining why carbon is essential to life as we know it, describing prokaryotes, describing eukaryotes and it looks at what we know about pre-Cambrian life. Then it moves on to the Cambrian explosion, fish, tetrapods, amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs, mammals and humans. A lot of very interesting material is presented, a small sample would be: cyanobacteria and the increase in atmospheric oxygen levels, the evolution of legs from fins, biomechanics, mass extinctions and molecular clocks.

I think this book would appeal to a wide range of people. Obviously the amount of material available for a book like this is enormous. So the challenge of an author/editor is deciding what to include and what to leave out. I think this book had a very nice selection. Most of the material is accessible. There is more challenging material and although it adds a lot to the book, even most of this could be skipped without hindering comprehension of the remaining material. I also thought the illustrations were very good. The amount of material is impressive, as is the clarity (in general) of the writing.

Good but not great........2006-03-08

The Book of Life, an illustrated history of the evolution of life on Earth, edited by Stephen Jay Gould is a great gift for any natural history fan.
Chapter after chapter about the evolution of fish, dinosaurs, mammals and mankind by such greats as Peter Andrews, Christine Jones and Michael Benton. How did fish develop and make it to land? Why did mammals do so well after the dinosaurs died? And the illustrations, alone, are worth the price of the book.
Of course most of the questions can't be answered but just exploring the issues and topics is fun. Thinking is good for you and this book plugs into many of my other natural history interests allowing me to have a foundation, a background, before diving into the more advanced books on the same subjects.
True, being first published in 1993 and updated in 2001, means that the information is slightly outdated. For example, we DO know what a dinosaur heart looks like and we DO have soft tissue from a T-Rex bone. Also, they seem to be linking Homo ergaster to Homo habilis while all the other books I have on human evolution seems to link H. ergaster to Homo erectus.
The book is good for any library, new or used, so go buy it.

The Greatest Story Ever Told.......2005-03-31

From the origin of life on Earth to its many incredible forms and huge setbacks (mass extinctions) up to the present day dominance of a very successful species of uber-ape, this book is fascinating reading. I did not find the subject matter difficult to understand and I am a relative novice, so I would recommend it to those who have not delved deeply into the topic before. Many concepts well known to the general public are given thorough treatment and add several layers of knowledge onto what the reader may be starting off with. For instance, the section dealing with the most famous mass extinction, the demise of the dinosaurs, is not only a thorough look at all the possible causes of the event itself, but also a critique of the theorizing that has resulted in the common belief that the cause was primarily extraterrestial. One comes away with not only a better understanding for the possible causes, but also a better appreciation of scientific research and debate that leads up to theories being proposed and eventually accepted or rejected. The illustrations are excellent for the most part, and include many very informative diagrams. One of my favorites is the one showing how some species of fish evolved legs from their fins, allowing purely aquatic animals to begin the move onto land. All in all, this book is essential reading to anyone interested in the topic, and I highly recommend it.

A good synthesis,a bit outdated at times.......2002-01-30

You would have expected more time and detail to the ermergence of the nervous system and the Cambrian Explosion. A more up-to-date section on human evolution (no mention of Ardipithecus Ramidus) but on the whole the book is a good synthesis of the state of the knowledge in this field.

Book Description

This is the story of the Soviet Union's first intercontinental jet bomber, which was to have become a carrier of nuclear missiles and the Soviet answer to the Boeing B-52. Much to the surprise of many, the little-known Myasischev bureau was chosen to do the job; it had been disbanded a few years earlier and reinstated solely to create such a bomber. Known to the West as the Bison, the new bomber employed many innovative features (including a bicycle landing gear) and was created within the short period of just one year; Western military observers were stunned when the aircraft was formally unveiled at the 1953 May Day parade. The M-4 and the much-improved 3M remained in service for 40 years until retired and scrapped in compliance with the START treaty. The Bison also served as the basis for the VM-T Atlant specialized cargo aircraft designed to piggy-back the Buran space shuttle and components of the Energiya launch rocket. Also described in this book are the many projected derivatives of the M-4 designed in the 1950s, including longrange airliners.

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Science Without Limits: Toward a Theory of Interaction Between Nature and Knowledge
James S., Ph.D. Perlman
Manufacturer: Prometheus Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0879759623

Average customer rating:
Science Without Limits: Toward a Theory of Interaction Between Nature and Knowledge
Ph.D. Perlman James S.
Manufacturer: NY
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000MU7D30

Customer Reviews:

A tropical bamboo reference.......2000-02-24

This is a long overdue book to the bamboo-world that concentrates mostly on tropical, or clumping, bamboo. If you live in a geographical area (zone 9 and above)that allows you to grow tropical bamboo, or if you just wish to learn more about tropical bamboo, this book is a wonderful resource. It touches on the specifics of growing many tropical species, including propagation. The poor reputation that invasive, running, temperate bamboo has carried is not shared by the tropical species. Thanks to references like this book, bamboo-enthusiasts are learning that, for some, there is an alternative.

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