Conferences Books

Too often, biased people want to insist that all the gays are white and all the people of color are straight. Too often, any study of gays focuses on New York City and San Francisco, but nowhere else. Too often, "people of color" focuses on Blacks only, or Blacks and Latinos only. This study is a nice retreat from those problems. It is a multi-city study. It speaks of Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans.

I'm glad it exists, but it is just a dry policy study. The book has no photos and is just a power point lecture put in text form.

Too many, this also feels terribly dated. While the study strongly emphasizes that many men who kick it with men don't identify as gay or bisexual, it never uses the new term "the down low." Further, I think this study was printed before more effective AIDS drugs called HAART therapy were produced. Luckily, I think this study has an awesome update in the studies compiled in the book by Sana Loue.

This book is of use primarily as a historical document. IT has been replaced in the United Methodist Chuch by the BOOK OF WORSHIP which is much better organized, more thorough and easier to use (Even though it is in need of revision as well.)

If you have any interest in the development of the current rites or in the former rites, this may be of some interest, otherwise not.

If we wish to find our way back to live a truly Catholic commitment to Peace based firmly upon the unchanging foundation of the life and teachings of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and the Holy and infallible Church He founded upon the Rock of Saint Peter (as noted by famed punster James Joyce, the singular Faith founded by the Living Word upon a play of words), we must examine carefully where we have come from, to see where we are going. This fairly brief book provides us ample and diverse vision, as it reflects from several perspectives upon the American Catholic Bishops's landmark pastoral statement: The Challenge of Peace; God's Promise and Our Response.

Much of what is here now appears petty bickering, dated and irrelevant. The unfortunate Mr. Michael Novak no longer speaks here courageously as a Catholic for peace as in the Sixties, but as a hired spokesmodel and mouthpiece for the capitalist American Enterprise Institute and its peculiar economic gospel drumming up profitable fear of the Soviets and visions of Nicaraguan rafts coming in to Harlingen, Texas. Such overheated rhetoric, given the passage of the decades, reads as absurdly now as it should have been read back then.

What does not age but informs is the final learned essay by Francis Xavier Meehan, professor of Theology at Immaculata, in which he draws a complementary and challenging interelationship between our present and primitive truly Christian pacifism and our later compromising criteria for a "just war" which was anethema and heresy to the first Christians. This theological essay remains as urgent and relevant now as then, and even moreso as we lose sight of the need for nonviolence demanded by our faith and by the cruel realities of indiscriminate modern warfare.

In my copy this essay has become so heavily highlighted as to appear a glowing light of caution at a traffic post. The margins are full of the stars I use for crucial passages. This essay provides us now substantial food fro considering seriously our current course, disasterous and critical at this juncture in our history of Salvation or death. Permit me therefore to limit my citation to Meehan's conclusion, and urge you with all my heart to study the rest very carefully. The silence of our present pastoral leaders is deafening and this one quiet voice of Meehan fills that deadly silence with hope and with light.

"I end then where I began this essay. In our arguments over just-war teaching or non-violence, we must try to get out of our heads and into the concrete world. And in that world we see the killing becoming unimaginably indiscriminate and brutal. In this real world we simply must try to stop so much evil; or we must at least diminish it. Grace calls us to lessen the violence of the killing. Christian realism begs us to stop the cycle of killing. But how can we ever even hope to stop the cycle in this real world? The times are urging upon us a realistic way, the way of nonviolence. In other words, the very impetus of the just-war teaching is pushing us to a development of doctrine which will finally teach us a very simple word; no more violence, only nonviolence from now on, war no more. When will this time come? My own belief is that it is already upon us. It is now. It is already in the hearts of many. What remains is, I believe, simply a process of discernment amid a praying, suffering, loving Church, especially the Church of the little ones upon whom indiscriminate and unproportionate violence takes its first toll. (p. 104)"

Echoes of the Beatified Blessed Archbishop Oscar A. Romero, whose final Sunday sermon called for an end to the killing, a few days before he too was killed. We must now and forever perceive that no amount of "surge" or escalation of our military violence against a civilian population will ever establish peace, understanding, trust, cooperation and democracy. Stop the killing now. Stop the war. Start the peace, and the development, not the chaos of destruction which sinks us further away from the path of God and deeper into the way of the Enemy.

This brief passage gives only an incomplete sip of the wisdom of this essay, which justifies in itself the low price of this book. This brief passage is stripped of the definitions of terms which precedes it, and thus may be read too superficially and without full understanding. Please get this book and pray over the rest of this essay, as soon as you can, before our violence further increases and drowns us as well. Find the Path to Peace, which is Jesus Christ.

Four stars only because the other essays are mainly only of passing slight historical interest from an internicene discussion long over, not undying and everlasting words powerfully urging us to move on towards Eternal Peace in Our Lord.

The book is helpful, in so far as it tells you what each of the shrines have to offer. It will tell you the hours, give you the telephone, address and even tell you if the shrine has a cafeteria and what languages they specialize in. But, it makes no menion of the many places that ARE in this book that DO have relics of the saints. For instance, the National Shrine of Our Lady of Lebanon has a relic of St. Sharbel and in the book it makes no mention of the relic. One thing that would be helpful to include in the book is the web address of the shrine, as many of these shrines are on the internet. It's a helpful guide book, but not at its best.

Actually, I don't want to review this book since I am one
of the book editors. I just wish to point out that the book
is incorrectely referenced. The actual title, publisher and
editors are as follows:

title: Cellular Automata: Proceeding of the 5th International Conference on Cellular Automata for Research and Industry, ACRI 2002.

Editors: S. Bandini, B. Chopard, M. Tomassini

Publisher: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 2493, Springer
Verlag, Heidelberg, 2002.

I've quickly flipped through it. Read couple pages on what the methods and strategies of the event industry.

Pros: It has case studies ! So "theoretical" and "practical"; Kudos !

Cons: Its mainly based on the British industry as far as I read. Doesnt quite give me the international perspective in a good grasp...

PS: I like the tables where they discuses the average salary of the event-executive, event manager, and event director. Search the book, Its page 245 (Salary Levels).

Overall. 7.5/10

Here is a grab bag of economics papers. Stuffed full with tables, graphs and numbers. Dry as dust, as they try to write an overall analysis of the Latin American economies. Discussing topics like country risk; ie. the risk that a country might default on its sovereign debt. Argentina forms the main focus here. As that is exactly what it did just a few years ago. The economic consequences are studied.

Another topic is the currency risk. Or currency drop, describing what a nation's coin might do against the US dollar. Some of the remarks are historical, going back to Bretton Woods or earlier.

But when you go thru all this, the title of the book is still suspect. "Decline"? In the last 5 years, several of the nations have grown strongly. Especially Chile, Brazil, Argentina. Due to booming exports of minerals and food; mostly to feed the Chinese market. Plus many nations have built up massive foreign reserves (usually in US dollars), unlike previous booms. Collectively, the South American stock markets have been in a huge bull market, as investors can attest.

Yes, every boom comes to an end. But it genuinely seems that this time, the South Americans have laid foundations of a more durable secular economic system. And even when this boom ends, the publishing of the book, which is very recent, does not jibe with the expansion that occurred over the time it covers.

"Decline"???

Still no breakthroughs. The book's collection of research papers is of good quality. The topics span automatic speech recognition, neural networks, expert systems and other AI topics. What is qualitatively new, compared to a decade earlier, is the inclusion of papers on Internet/Web applications.

The overall impression is one of incremental advances. The applications described by the papers are worthy, and complex. B But there still appears to be no fundamental advance in what might be considered to be true AI.

It was ok because it was made of paper and it tasted nice

I do not want to write what it is usually called a "review". As an author that has been mentioned in some of the articles published by various authors in this book, I would like to get their e-mail addresses, so I can exchange a direct opinion with them. I think that this is actually a drawback of your books. You do not let the readers get in contact with the authors.
I would appreciate if you can give my email address to Dr. Sean Kingsley.
Yours,
Andrei Opait