Conferences Books

FPL is one of the premier conferences on reconfigurable logic and computation. If you work on the leading edge reconfigurable application or the tools that support them, you simply must have access to this resource - or your research library must.

//wiredweird, contributor to this collection

FPL is one of the premier conferences on reconfigurable logic and computation. If you work on the leading edge reconfigurable application or the tools that support them, you simply must have access to this resource - or your research library must.

//wiredweird, contributor to this collection

FPL is one of the premier conferences on reconfigurable logic and computation. If you work on the leading edge reconfigurable applications or the tools that support them, you simply must have access to this resource - or your research library must.

--wiredweird, contributor to this collection

This is a big, lap-filling book containing translations of five of the books of the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh. They range from the incomparable Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) through the sexy Sheer Ha-Sheerim (Song of Songs) to the raucous book of Esther, folksy Ruth and the sobering Lamentations.

Normally, these are read in synagogue and we experience them as liturgy rather than literature. This lovely book is intended to provide a home reading experience-perhaps even a reading-aloud session. What makes it especially haunting are the 37 masterful watercolors by Leonard Baskin. These evocative full-page plates are positively Dantean in their reach and power and indeed, comparisons to Barry Moser's pen and ink drawings for Alan Mandelbaum's Divine Comedy.Inferno: The Divine Comedy (Bantam Classics).

This is a dramatic, impactful volume and one that seems destined to be passed down through generations.


Lynn Hoffman, author ofNew Short Course in Wine,The and bang BANG: A Novel

With the promise of the impending, "Semantic Web", the word "ontology" has been bandied about quite a bit by people who really have no idea what it means. The dictionary is of no help here, as it typically defines ontology as something like, "a theory of being". For those who know, and more importantly for those who *think* they know, the word has experienced a bizarre duality and evolution of meaning as the progenators of web-based information system have used and abused the term. This book contains a collection of articles by experts - scholars and practitioners in philosophy, linguistics and computer science - that address the real meaning of ontology, what it means to specify and use ontologies, the promise of ontology-enabled information interchange, and the influence 2000 years of analytic metaphysics can have on real world engineering problems.

This book is quite unique in that the collection of authors, such as Barry Smith, Sergei Nirenburg, and Nicola Guarino, to name but a few, run the gamut from philosophers to engineers; such a diverse collection of researchers are rarely seen together, and the mix yields a fascinating range of ideas.

This book covers the topic of Obedience. It starts by explaining how obedience is a path of love and true freedom. It set us free so that we no longer have to chose between good and evil, but to only do good. Our acts that proceed from a will thus fixed in the good become perfect virtue.

The book also touches on the Carthusian statues and how Vatican affected them. Plus it very briefly covers the responsibilities of the Prior and the officers within the Charterhouse.

If then, a blind man guides a blind man, both will fall into a pit. What is true for individual men is also true for the organizations that lead them. Hazlitt makes the sound case that the IMF is the root cause for world inflation. Henry Hazlitt, a man who was one of the greatest thinkers of our time, assembled in this book a series of editorials that he wrote while working at the New York Times when the Bretton Woods agreements were being constructed in 1944 and 1945.

Hazlitt's recurring criticism of the IMF was that it put too much pressure on the US Dollar as the world reserve currency. Under Bretton Woods, currency exchange rates were fixed as opposed to today where rates are deciphered and freely set by the market. No requirements were put on borrowing governments to keep their financial house in order. Governments could irresponsibly print currency and the US would have to buy that foreign fiat at the previously agreed fixed rate which was ultimately much higher than a free market would have paid. Now you know how the gold supply in this country went bye-bye. Hazlitt specifically cites the subsidizing of the French Franc at levels far above what a free market would tolerate, as being the reason the US was drained of most of its gold. Nixon doesn't get all the blame here folks. As stated on page 19 in the book, "The world dollar-exchange system was inherently brittle, and it broke."

Hazlitt also pointed out that The World Bank could lend prudently to counties that needed to rebuild after the war and that the IMF wasn't really needed. He also mentions different financial organizations that expressed the same thinking. Their sound reasoning was ignored. When Lord Keynes (the lead author of Bretton Woods) appeared before the House of Lords in England to promote his economic theory, he proudly stated that it was the exact opposite of a gold standard. Lord Keynes; as Hazlitt so aptly described him, as a man confused by the triangular exchange through the medium of money; ignored the necessity of production in favor of an orderly devaluation of currency. Talk about a blind guide. Opposite indeed!

Hazlitt urged the return to the gold standard as the only way to save the world's economic system. If a government is on a gold standard, they have to be fiscally responsible. And if every government is being responsible monetarily, then exchange rates will stabilize themselves. Henry offered a solution to the United States. Announce the return to a gold standard in a few years time. Meanwhile, balance your budget for the few years leading up to that return. Only then, will confidence be restored in the currency. That advice was given twenty-three years ago and fell on deaf ears. If you're counting, that's two out of three monkeys. I suppose the modern solution would be to enact a permanent pay-go law that the government had to stick to. And that interest rates shouldn't be suppressed to an unnaturally low level. Even Milton Friedman observed that the Fed has an "obsession" with interest rates. If you look up the dictionary definition for obsession, you'll see it to be an accurate description of the situation.

Every time the Fed meets, they report inflation as if it were some economic constant being tamed by current financial engineering. The truth is that inflation is an economic consequence that cannot be controlled. The bad monetary decision making on government's part has to stop for it to be eradicated. The fact that almost every government reports inflation as a constant, in and of itself, proves Hazlitt's point. Unfortunately, since most people have lived with it being reported all their lives, they too view it as a fact of life. It's no wonder Marc Faber recently described all fiat currency as confetti.

Things are different in the world now. The governments around the world have the ability to produce as opposed to the chaos after WWII, when everyone but the US was bombed to ashes. Currency has a free market and different national groups won't be so quick to listen to the IMF. Today individuals can own gold themselves, so they can be their own central banker in a sense, and preserve their current purchasing power. It's almost a joke now when the IMF comes out and states what currency values should be, as they have done in the last few days. No one remembers Bretton Woods, nor do they care to have some abstract organization dictate how much purchasing power they should have. Unfortunately, it's the holders of US currency that will now suffer the most as the reasons for the IMF have faded, but their consequences remain. Every time the price of gold establishes a new higher base, it is a worldwide vote of no confidence in the US Dollar. The same is true to a smaller extent for the rest of the world's currency, since gold is the only recognized form of money that is not an instrument of debt. People don't believe the US Treasury Secretary when he says that a strong dollar is in the best interest of the United States. The public recognizes that it's his job to speak no evil. He's become the third monkey.

Although the reading is not easy with respect to the events and people at that historic time, I will read it again when I will have time because I like the analysis conducted in this book.

Hans Frauenfelder is a legend who has inspired generations of young scientists. This latest treatise explores the cosmology of intergalactic gastronomical disturbances. Definitely highly recommended both as interesting, high class science and as entertainment. It is proof that science and humour belong together. A must buy.

The Fuehrer Conferences are necessary reading for any historian of naval affairs or World War II. In these documents, Hitler outlines his strategy for preventing food and munitions from being shipped from the neutral countries, predominantly the United States, to Great Britain. The decision on how far to push the United States was a crucial one, as it had helped push the Western giant over the edge in World War I, and Hitler could not afford another powerful enemy. Yet, as Germany's chance of successfully invading Great Britain waned, the need to stop shipments of supplies from neutral countries waxed urgent. There is gripping drama in the documents themselves, and a chance to peer into Hitler's own diplomatic and strategic processes. A wonderful resource and good entertainment.