Conferences Books

Divided into four sections (the 19th century, the 20th century, biography and literature, and bibliographies), this book covers a wide array of topics concerning the lives of Mexican Americans throughout the history of Texas. This book is a compilation of papers that were originally presented at the 1991 "Mexican Americans in Texas History". As such, I have a few favourites that I found particularly well-written and interesting. One of which is "Agents of Americanization: Rusk Settlement and the Houston Mexican Community, 1907-1950" by Maria Cristina Garcia, which traces the history of settlement houses in Houston. Not only does this piece present how Mexican Americans were victims of racism in Houston society, but it also demonstrates how they resisted and negotiated such views. This article also indicates how settlement workers, arguably possessing good intentions, were attempting to 'americanize' early immigrants. Another excellent piece is entitled "Mexicanos in Texas During the Civil War" by Miguel Gonzalez Quiroga. This article not only discusses the role northeastern Mexico played during the Civil War (the provision of goods to the South), but also why individual Mexicans joined the war. In the third section (Biography and Literature), there are three biographies. Yolanda Romero writes of Trini Gaamez, a community activist from Hereford; Felix Almaraz writes of Carlos E. Castaneda, the first Mexican American to achieve success as a professor in Texas; and, Ramon Saldivar analyzes the work of Americo Paredes and his early novel "George Washington Gomez".

This book will be of immense benefit to anyone interested in the roles Mexican Americans played throughout the history of Texas.

Milcom is one of the most widely respected IEEE sponsored conferences in the field of communications. Since its first event in 1982, this conference has the unique advantage of gathering the bests of academia, military and even commercial communities. This mixture has resulted in a leading role in bringing the most advance research in the communications. The conference covers many themes such as: secure communications, spread spectrum system, signal processing, coding techniques, networking, satellite systems, smart antennas, advanced software topics, communication theory and many more which they are all can be found in the proceeding.

This is a book with an excellent collection of reviews. These articles are based on short courses taught by a mix of well established statistical mechanics and nonlinear dynamics type folks from US and Latin America. Several articles are outstanding for grad students. Few are short - but overall this is a nice collection for a grad student.

This book will interest anyone who wants to become a practitioner of international diplomacy, especially international conferences and international organisations, and anyone generally interested in the subject. It is also relevant to anyone who attends international meeting of any kind where business is transacted, because it is full of practical advice on how to deal with other delegations, how conferences are run, why they succeed or fail, the importance of good chairmanship and how to influence the chairman (chairperson?), and the nature and behaviour of the main players on the international scene. It is interspersed with some illustrative and at times amusing personal anecdotes. If you want to learn about the mysteries of modern international diplomacy, this book will reveal all. Recommended especially for neo-cons.

For fellows researchers: the review of this book by E. Nissan is available in JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL COMPUTING RESEARCH 17: (3) 319-320 1997

The most distinctive thing about this proceeding writeup are the colour plates at the back of the book. Lovely and memorable. Some show the geology of Mars. Others show mockups or artists' conceptions of the Mars Ball Rover and the Mars Sample Return. Look at the picture of the Mars Ball Rover. Quite different from the way that Sojourner landed successfully in 1997 and moved around on the surface. But this book was written in 1986. So the predictive effort wasn't bad.

Other plates describe what is still in the future. Transportation systems for routine visits. Alas, the space program is so SLOW! Twenty years after this conference, we are still not quite at this stage.

The Christian "Liturgy of the Hours," or "Divine Office," includes prayers for various times of day. This book is a slim, inexpensive paperback of "night prayer," which is said just before going to bed. Night prayer includes a psalm or psalms, another short scripture reading, an examination of conscience, and various prayers and verses that are used every night (so after a while you'll probably have a lot of them memorized). Night prayer is the shortest and simplest of the daily offices of the Liturgy of the Hours. It can be said in about ten minutes, either alone or with others, and you just flip to the day of the week to know what prayers to say, referring to the appendices to choose a penitential prayer and an antiphon to Mary.

Note that there's a more recent edition of this book. If it isn't available on Amazon, you can get it from the USCCB Publishing web site.

I have used this book extensively as a reference for my own research. It is an excellent presentation from two leaders in the field. My only criticism is that the examples presented in the book tend to be trivial (namely, one-dimensional), so much additional work is required to actually implement the spectral methods described in the text.

I read the Kindle version of this book and it was a great match for the Kindle. There was an occasional line break problem because of the "screenplay" format the book used. For instance the quote prefaced with the speakers name and a colon like - Boss: Hi Bill. and the Reply - Bill: Sorry I'm late. would occasionally all appear on one line like this:

Boss: Hi Bill. Bill: Sorry I'm late.

whereas it should have had a line break after Hi Bill so the next speaker's name would appear on the next line like this:

Boss: Hi Bill.
Bill: Sorry I'm late.

This is just a minor quibble though because the text was funny.

Each overheard quote would have an appropriate title that tied the whole quote together. If you work in an office you've probably heard much of this type of talk there and can relate. Some of the quotes were a bit risque - so if you're a bit prudish this might not be the book for you. But if you like funny quotes and humor and don't mind a bit of sexual innuendo this is the book for you.

I took off one star because from what I can tell all of the quotes are available for free on the associated website where the information originally appeared and it seemed like the book was a tad short compared to the other book by the author Overheard in New York (albeit that edition does say it's UPDATED).

2/22/08 Copright in 1971 by the 'National Conference of Catholic Bishops' ,this 60 pages in details (182 paragraphs -all numbered )the 'guidelines" for (formation and ministry)of permanent deacons, with several pgs devoted to "the dicoaconate need" ,with Paragraphs 26-64 focusing somewhat on "particular commmunities": (ethnic, rural and university campuses), and how the rest of the church(laity and lay persons) in "those times "1971" being driven by the visions of then pope, Pope Paul VI (example of which is part of his letter dated May 14,1971 to Canadian born, "Cardinal Maurice Roy") (Pgs 4 & 5) can "best serve".