Inclusion Polymers (Advances in Polymer Science)

Inclusion Polymers (Advances in Polymer Science)
Gerhard Wenz | 2009-07-01 00:00:00 | Springer | 240 | Chemical Engineering
Inclusion Polymers (Advances in Polymer Science)
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Liberal Modernity and Its Adversaries (Studies in Critical Social Sciences)

Liberal Modernity and Its Adversaries (Studies in Critical Social Sciences)
Zafirovski | 2007-06-30 00:00:00 | BRILL | 582 | Social Sciences
The book rediscovers liberal modernity as the master process and destination of Western civilization, and its anti-liberal adversaries, notably conservatism, as the ghosts of a dead past. The anti-liberal rumors of the dead of liberalism are greatly exaggerated.

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Understanding Competitive Advantage: The Importance of Strategic Congruence and Integrated Control

Understanding Competitive Advantage: The Importance of Strategic Congruence and Integrated Control
Fredrik Nilsson,Birger Rapp | 2004-11-10 00:00:00 | Springer | 231 | Economics

This book is about competitive advantage and how it is created at the company level. It is based on the premise that the alignment of strategies and control systems affects the firm`s chances of successfully positioning itself in its chosen arena of competition. The firm is in a better position to concentrate on activities that create value for the customer if its strategies and control systems are mutually consistent and adapted to expected external demands. This book is thus a contribution to the literature that treats competitive advantage on the basis of the match between the environment and internal resources. The authors believe that the co-ordination and integration of strategies and control systems will provide a necessary, and long-overdue, expansion of knowledge in the area.

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SAS/Genetics 9.1.3 User's Guide

SAS/Genetics 9.1.3 User's Guide
| 2005-08-24 00:00:00 | | 0 | Computer Application


SAS/Genetics is a collection of SAS procedures along with a SAS macro specifically designed for the statistical analysis of genetic marker data. This guide is intended to provide you with the statistical genetics background and the procedural syntax needed to use this software, as well as examples showing some common applications of the methods in these procedures.

The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies

The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies
James Neill | 2009-01-05 00:00:00 | McFarland | 478 | History
This groundbreaking work draws on a vast range of research into human sexuality to demonstrate that homosexuality is not a phenomenon limited to a small minority of society, but is an aspect of a complex sexual harmony that the human race inherited from its animal ancestors. Through a survey of the patterns of sexual expression found among animals and among societies around the world, and an examination of the functional role homosexual behavior has played among animal species and human societies alike, the author arrives at some provocative conclusions: that a homosexual or bisexual phase is a normal part of sexual development, that same-sex relations play an important balancing role in regulating human reproduction, that many societies have institutionalized homosexual traditions in the past, and that the harsh condemnation of homosexuality in Western society is a relatively recent phenomenon, unique among world societies throughout history. This well researched and meticulously documented book is the first that integrates into a coherent picture the startling revelations about human sexuality coming from the recent work of sexual researchers, psychologists, anthropologists and historians. The view that emerges, of an ambisexual human species whose complex sexual harmony is being thwarted by the imposition of an artificial understanding of nature, represents a new way of thinking about sex.
Reviews
I found this book to be very easy to read and helpful in understanding both homosexuality and human nature. I was raised in a religious setting where it was believed that homosexuality was an evil spirit that was to be cast out through united prayer.

Being raised in a foreign country that accepted homosexuality as natural as hetrosexuality confused me, and I found this book helpful in understand the way sexuality was viewed in Japan.

The argument in this book was englightening as it was very conviencing as to how human nature changed over the course of history while the biological urges did not.

This book, in my opinion, is helpful to those who do not fully understand homosexuality, and encourages a new outlook concerning human nature in general.

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Software by Numbers: Low-Risk, High-Return Development

Software by Numbers: Low-Risk, High-Return Development
Mark Denne,Jane Cleland-Huang | 2003-10-18 00:00:00 | Prentice Hall | 208 | Software Engineering
Reviews
This book was a surprise but only because I didn't read the title properly.

"Software by Numbers : Low-Risk High-Return Development".

Fundamentally, it is about project planning and prioritisation and not about estimation.



This book starts with three assumptions:-

1. You are using a feature-driven development iterative release approach to a project.

2. You can attach numeric business value to each of the features.

3. You can estimate the cost of developing the required software modules to implement the above features.



With these assumptions in place, the authors then use a number of net present value accounting algorithms to help you schedule the software module development to provide "Low-Risk High-Return development".

The algorithms are designed to maximise business return and minimise the risk as per the book's title.



It is only 190-pages, well-laid out with clear examples pitched at the right level for me so I swallowed in a week-end with only faint and distant grumbling from my wife.



I will be trying it out on my next green-field project and interested to see how assumptions 2 and 3 stand up to the test.



Highly Recommended.
Reviews
I am an advocate of Agile Software Development methods so I read this book with that bias. What I found was this book quantifies many of the ideas of agile development that before just made intuitive sense. The book explains the potential value of developing in small steps, and has a great discussion of how incremental development and architecture interact to affect return on investment.



If you are not involved in the financial side of planning software projects you may find yourself skimming through parts, but the general themes are ones that everyone involved in planning software projects will find interesting. (This includes developers in small teams.)



In most cases customers want you to build a software application to help them make or save money, and reading this book will help you to understand that.
Reviews
This book caught my attention because I was searching for a decent book on ROI and software development, and Dr. Jane Cleland-Huang was a professor at the graduate school I attended (I was never a student of hers and have never met her). Furthering my interest in "Software by Numbers" were the facts that it runs less than 200 pages and is from Sun Microsystems. In my opinion, most large technology works can be significantly shortened if the fluff is removed from them (who has time to read fluff?), and I view Sun as a respected firm that is involved with a lot of the technologies in my workplace. Maximizing financial return during the development of software is the main subject of this book, and the attempt of Jane and Mark Denne, her co-author, to show how to do so is a good one. Interestingly enough, the Preface of this text discusses how the authors arrived at the title "Software by Numbers", and although this title is better than the others that their friends and colleagues suggested, because it is a bit too similar to the common expression "paint by number" (which can be an idiomatic expression for "easy" or "mindless"), I do not think it does the book content justice. ROI is anything but a simple subject. Multiple formulas exist for ROI to begin with, and return can be a subjective matter because it can involve a lot of assumptions. Quite a few financial tables are presented with the book material, and a cursory review of the accompanying ROI examples shows that there is a bit of explanation missing. Of course, there is a tradeoff here between conciseness and thoroughness, and explaining all of the assumptions made would probably not be appropriate for most readers. The authors start the discussion by stating that software development is a very difficult endeavor. The following portions of the introductory chapters explain well much of the language used throughout the rest of the book, such as minimum marketable feature (MMF) and return on investment (ROI). The authors then compare MMF-based ROI with classic ROI and discuss how to discover MMFs, how to determine their value, and how this all fits with incremental funding methodology (IFM). While there exists overlap between the architecture discussion and the content of "Architecture in Practice" (see my review for that text), the authors quickly move forward to discussing the delivery of valued features to customers and how parallel development of multiple MMFs is often well suited for meeting customer needs. Although the chapter on how to manage intangibles provides a much more simple explanation than books such as "Making Technology Investments - ROI Road Map to Better Business Cases", the authors get their point across in a succinct manner. Similarly, the authors discuss how IFM can thrive when used with the (Rational) Unified Process and other more agile software engineering methodologies.
Reviews
Software by Numbers focuses on the financial aspects of software development. It introduces a method called "Incremental Funding Method" which demonstrates how software development with incremental delivery can fund itself, therefore lowering investment costs and thus lowering the risks for starting the development. The key-idea in the method is probably to break up the feature sets of a software product in MMFs (minimum marketable features) and calculate the investment and ROI of these separately and then deciding in what order they could be developed to maximize the total ROI.



The ideas of software by numbers are important to understand when selecting a development method that enables incremental delivery (like most agile development methods). Its especially good in convincing people who do not know software development that incremental delivery is a very good idea and financially sound idea.



To me this book was definitively worth reading. However, at some points the book seemed to lose my attention. At points I felt the authors were just repeating the same points over and over again. Eventhough the book is not very thick, I felt it could have been even thinner and conveying the same message.



Still, it's a recommended read.
Reviews
The core theory of the book is that feature/stories need to be prioritized based on business value. To anyone doing Agile (Scrum, XP, FDD) this is pretty much standard stuff.

What is new in the book is that they provide a framework for tying individual features to future cash flow/benefit for that feature to drive an analysis of net present value.

My viewpoint is that this book is very academic in orientation rather than grounded in the real world examples. As an example, there is no detailed example/sample/case study of how future cash flows were determined for a given set of features. The derivation of these values is critical to the applicability of the approach.

Do I buy it? No. I think XP User stories prioritized by the customer(s) will be a much more robust mechanism for selecting what to work on next. It will also come at a lower cost.

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Chaussettes faciles au tricot : creations tendance et fantaisie pour tricoteuses tous niveaux

Chaussettes faciles au tricot : creations tendance et fantaisie pour tricoteuses tous niveaux
Jeanette Trotman | 2008-01-01 00:00:00 | Tutti Frutti | 121 | Do It Yourself
Jamais il n a ete aussi facile de tricoter des chaussettes! Source inegalable de confort, les chaussettes faites main, douces et moelleuses, font partie des petits luxes de la vie. Ce livre tres accessible presente 20 modeles surprenants de simplicite, dont la plupart peuvent etre realises le temps d un week-end. Chaque modele est accompagne de photographies illustrant les etapes importantes de la realisation. Vous apprendrez a tricoter les points de base et assimilerez les methodes de confection d un ouvrage, selon des techniques simples avec les aiguilles droites, les aiguilles a double pointe et l aiguille circulaire. Vous profiterez d un large choix de modeles adaptes a toute la famille : fantaisie, detente, elegants ou duveteux, les chaussons feutres pour les jours de flanerie, les chaussons abeille ou papillon, les chaussons rayes Bambino, ou les ballerines " C?ur d amour ". Vous vous perfectionnerez grace aux explications claire et personnaliserez vos chaussettes grace aux nombreux conseils sur les fils et sur les techniques d ornement.
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