Spectres of Capitalism: A Critique of Current Intellectual Fashions

Book Description

Amin, one of the most influential economists today, examines the changing notion of crisis in capitalism; misconceptions of the free market model; the various distortions of Marx's method; the role of culture in revolutions; the decline of the "law of value" in economics; the philosophical roots of postmodernism; how telecommunications affect ideology; and the myth of "pure economics."

Customer Reviews:

spectres of analysis.......2000-08-08

Although I enjoyed Amin's book, I was quite frustrated with it. Most of its content deals with questions that go unanswered and many different reasons as to why he wont "go further" into a subject. Although the book contains analysis, it seems to be a review and and explanation of Marx's communist mannifesto. However, despite the lack of analysis, the book contains many significant facts and helps explain Marx's theory and why it applies to the current world.

Book Description

Angel Kwolek-Folland presents an authoritztive, much-needed survey of women in business from the 1600s to the present day. She introduces some of the women--famous, infamous, and forgotten--who have been central to business throughout US history as workers, managers, and professionals. This stimulating narrative challenges our expectations about both the history of women and the history of business as it focuses on the changing legal and social climate for women's economic activities through the centuries.

Book Description

At the dawn of a new millennium, faith in technology soared following the successful eradication of the potentially paralyzing Y2K bug. Young dot-coms with little experience and possessing few assets other than a concept, flourished boasting market values in the millions and even billions of dollars. Then reality settled in as the market crashed and over a hundred dot-coms perished. The highflying NASDAQ dropped over 60% and the longest economic expansion teetered on the brink of recession. Despite the disconcerting scenario, this was not the demise of the Web, but merely the conclusion of its innocent childhood or the first stage of meteoric growth. After all, the Web was only 10 years old. There were still trillions of dollars worth of opportunities, as the more rigorous applications waited to be accomplished. The Web is a revolutionary event, yet there is no evident vision of its future. This book projects the Web until the year 2020 and will interest anyone intrigued by the Web, but perplexed by its seemingly erratic course. The book clarifies the murky Web, showing how it will interconnect emerging digital technologies to revolutionize our home, work, and society. In short, 2020 Web Vision will relieve the future shock engendered by the Web. It will also be helpful to those interested in building new applications or investing in future technological enterprises.

Customer Reviews:

A weekend read.......2001-09-04

Web Vision is not primarily a book about the Internet, the Web, e-business, or e-commerce; it is a vision of how these technologies will take society forward. The Internet is more than thirty years old and its technology is poised to enable society to take off in new directions. The book, Web Vision, explores these directions in logical and insightful ways. As one author put it, firms are beginning to realize that the real action in the web is yet to happen and is in digital space. The book is a good resource for those that want to develop strategies to position themselves or their organization to take advantage of these new opportunities.

The book is well thought out, well reasoned, and well presented; consequently it is easy to read and follow. The ideas presented are done in a straightforward non-technical non-threatening manner. The author uses his twenty-plus years of experience to provide pleasant compelling examples of how and why this "new" technology will impact us.

I found the chapters addressing work and virtual society to be particularly interesting. The author explores how cyber space can be used to create virtual offices, virtual meeting places, and virtual commuting, thereby providing a driving force in the next generation of work and play. The idea that technology can be used to help society's problems is well presented and appealing.

2020 Web Vision.......2001-08-21

"Web Vision is an excellent tool for evaluating the possibilities of not only the Web and its future, but of its impact upon our lives."

A technician's view........2001-08-18

For the last four years I have been concentrating on the technical aspects of Web development. This book provided me with the background and business perpective I was missing so I can relate the work I've done to the larger framework of e-business. I would highly recommend this book.

Book Description

"The book has the advantage that chapters are fairly self-contained, so the reader can dip into sections that look helpful. There is good material on data sources, research details to include, checklists to use, and methodology to develop." --John M. Wilson in Journal of the Operational Research Society "This information-packed book is designed to help the researcher approach the grant application process and develop a competitive and successful application. Applying for Research Funding moves the reader through important elements of the application process: making choices at the start, making key contacts, assessing research environments, and knowing what to include on and how to write an application. Some of the other topics this helpful volume covers are writing a persuasive application to its reviewers, and what to expect when an application is or is not funded." --Science, Technology & Society "Ries and Leukefeld have brought together a wealth of experience in this field. They have produced a book which should greatly enrich the research-process literature. . . .What this book promises is a comprehensive and structured form of coaching for the novice, and a clarification and sharpening up of the process for the more seasoned researcher. The layout of the book reflects the ease with which it is intended to be read. . . . Even if one is not applying for funding, this book is worth reading prior to undertaking a major piece of research for the intelligent contribution it can make to structuring your thoughts and to making you look outside the confines of your study topic." --Ramon Pediani in Journal of Advanced Nursing In an environment of shrinking resources, getting research funding from both the government and the private sector is becoming more and more competitive. This information-packed book is designed to help the researcher approach the grant application process and develop a competitive and successful application. Applying for Research Funding moves the reader through important elements of the application process: making choices at the start, making key contacts, assessing research environments, and knowing what to include in and how to write an application. Some of the other topics this helpful volume covers are how to write a persuasive application, how to target the application to its reviewers, and what to expect when an application is or is not funded. Both the beginning and seasoned researcher will find this supportive book invaluable in embarking on and completing the grant-writing process that is so frequently vital to career enhancement.

Book Description

Selecting and evaluating jobs and employers is a task for which few are well prepared, yet the process of changing jobs requires major personal decisions. Improving the outcome involves evaluating the job, the employer, and the community in a systematic and comprehensive manner to determine both desirable and undesirable factors. All employment decisions are made in the context of comparing one's present situation with alternatives.

This book will provide the tools to evaluate a present or potential job, employer or community. Business consultant Gordon Bing draws on his years of experience to guide the reader to develop a plan of action, to identify critical factors such as personal goals, cultural factors, employment environment, job descriptions, company position, industry climate, and compensation and benefits that will result in a successful match for both the employee and the employer.

Presents a practical and comprehensive approach for evaluating an employer, job offer, or employment situation

This is the only career search and career development book that looks at the issue of evaluating the employer as a key aspect of job satisfaction, favorable transition, and success

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Business and Personal Finance, Student Activity Workbook
McGraw-Hill
Manufacturer: Glencoe/McGraw-Hill
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Student Activity Workbook is designed to reinforce student learning with hands-on activities correlated to chapter content.

Personal Finance, Student Activity Workbook

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Business and Personal Law Student Activity Workbook

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Book Description

Development of ferrite core memory technology during the 1950s was probably the most important innovation that made stored-program computers a commercial reality. IBM's leadership in this development made possible the introduction in 1964 of the IBM System/360, which was so widely copied that it became a standard for electronic stored-program computers that have become so much a part of American life.

This book provides a rare and candid glimpse into the innovations as well as the immense risks and imprecisions sometimes involved in technical decision making. It identifies the basic characteristics of technology management that the author believes accounted for IBM's success during this period, and gives a balanced view of the contributions by talented scientists and engineers both within and outside the company.

The book chronicles a twenty-five-year period during which IBM evolved from the position of leading supplier of electromechanical punched-card equipment to dominance in the field of electronic computers. It describes IBM's response to the postwar challenge of electronics, its highly successful cooperative effort with MIT on an automated air defense system, the introduction of commercial ferrite core memories, developments and decisions leading to System/360, and the manufacturing problems posed by System/360's success.

An internationally recognized leader in magnetics and computer memory technologies, Emerson W. Pugh is a member of the research staff at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights and author of the widely used text, Principles of Electricity and Magnetism. This book is included in The MIT Press Series in the History of Computing, edited by I. Bernard Cohen and William Asprey.

Customer Reviews:

Thanks for the Memories.......2000-04-28

Memories That Shaped an Industry by Emerson W. Pugh

A review by Frederick A. Ware

This was a fascinating book, covering the first 25 years of computer memory technology. The story includes technical details, legal battles, manufacturing disasters and personality clashes. It has a definite IBM-centric viewpoint, but that can probably be excused given IBM's dominance of the industry in this time period. The dominance was due in large part to IBM's mastery of ferrite core technology, as the book explains convincingly.

The early stored program computer was critically dependent upon the size and speed of its main memory. After the Eniac project demonstrated the ineffectiveness of patch cables for the (instruction) sequencing of digital calculating machines, it was generally recognized that instructions as well as data must be held in a central memory. The read and write time of this memory would effectively determine the performance of the computer, since an instruction would need to be accessed in every cycle. Several technologies were developed and discarded before the computer industry settled on a relatively robust solution - the ferrite core memory cell.

The book is chronological, with the relevant time period divided into roughly three intervals:

1945-50 Vacuum tube processors with delay line or CRT memories

1950-55 Vacuum tube processors with ferrite core memories

1955-70 Transistor processors with ferrite core memories

The ferrite core memory had a lifetime of roughly two decades before being supplanted by semiconductor memory in (about) 1970.

Chapter one covers the post-WWII period. The emerging computer industry had a number competing groups. Aiken of Harvard and IBM had cooperatively developed a series of electromechanical calculators with punched card sequencing. The Eniac team from the University of Pennsylvania formed the Univac Corporation. The Eckert mercury delay line was the basis of the main store of their early machines. Another IBM group developed the 603/604 series of vacuum tube calculators. They went on to build the IBM 701, a vacuum tube processor with Williams electrostatic CRT's for the main store.

Chapter two describes the early ferrite core experiments. The idea was developed independently by Wang of Harvard (founder of Wang Labs), Haynes of the University of Illinois, Forrester of MIT, Raschman of RCA, and Eckert of the University of Pensylvania all worked on the basic idea in the mid-to-late 1940s.

The basic idea was to build a small ring out of magnetic material which had a large magnetization threshold. Cores would be placed in a two dimensional array with independent sets of accessing wires in the x any directions. A single core is accessed by pulsing one x and one y wire simultaneously. Current pulses in a single x or y wire would be unable to flip a core's magnetization, but the single core addressed by both an x and a y wire would be magnetized in the proper direction (for writing a bit). Reading was destructive - a zero would be written into a core, and a third sense wire would have a different type of pulse depending upon whether the core originally had a zero or one.

Chapter three describes the efforts of an MIT group to build the Whirlwind computer (with core memory) for the Department of Defense. Chapter four describes the follow-on project (Sage). These were the first real-time computers. The Sage processor had a 64x64x36 core memory with a 7.5ns cycle time. It was delivered in 1953. Each 64x64 plane required 40 hours of hand labor to assemble.

Chapter five describes a number of commercial systems developed with core memory. These include: IBM 702 tape buffer in 1953

Sperry Rand 1103 computer in 1954

IBM 704 computer in 1955 (64x64x36 memory)

IBM 709 computer in 1957 (512x256x36 memory)

Initial resistance to core memory disappeared once it was demonstrated that it had a 35x lower error rate than the Williams electrostatic CRT memory. The core cost in 1955 was about one dollar per bit.

Chapter six describes the Stretch computer development at IBM. It was to have a 10MHz processor clock and a 2us memory cycle time (128x128x72). It would have about 100x the performance of the IBM 704, and was developed for the Atomic Energy Commision. It was delivered in 1956. Technology from this project went into the 7090 scientific computer and 7080 business computer. Within a year or two, Ferranti, Sperry-Rand and Control Data Corporation had developed machines comparable to Stretch.

Chapter seven covers the period in which IBM develops the 360 computer family. The goal was a family of five CPUs which had compatible instruction sets, but which spanned a performance range of 100x. They would be delivered in the 1964-66 time frame. They would consist of:

Model 360/30 0.5xIBM709 1 byte/cycle

Model 360/40 1.2xIBM709 2 byte/cycle

Model 360/50 4.5xIBM709 4 byte/cycle

Model 360/60 12.0xIBM709 8 byte/cycle w/ 2-way interleaving

Model 360/70 48.0xIBM709 8 byte/cycle w/ 4-way interleaving

The memory bandwidth spanned a32x range, approximately matching the performance target.

Chapter eight covers some of the legal battles fought over core memory technology. Since much of the early work was done by researchers at different institutions and organizations, multiple cross licenses were required by any company manufacturing core memory. IBM paid about one cent per bit in royalties to MIT and RCA in the 1960's. These continuing payments were one reason why IBM investigated many alternate memory technologies, including: monolithic magnetic films cryogenic memory dual core memory multi-hole core memory plated wire memory semiconductor memory

These other technologies were investigated because of performance and manufacturing cost issues with ferrite core technology. Eventually semiconductor memory became the obvious winner, and has dominated memory technology ever since.

Chapter nine wraps up the story, but leaves the reader ready for an accounting of the last thiry years of semiconductor memory technology.

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Memories That Shaped an Industry: Decisions Leading to Ibm System /360
Emerson W. Pugh
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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Detailed information on conducting offshore business and investment activity in the country. Updated annually, available on a CD-ROM.

Malta Tax Guide (World Offshore Investment and Business Library)

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Basic information on tax regulations, rules and procedures for companies and businessmen.

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