Conferences Books

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

It is good to see that there is a compilation of essays on Hans Christian Andersen. The bibliographic references, alone, make this an important volume of scholarship. I liked some of the pieces of writing. There are fine essays in a section that deals with translations of Andersen's stories and poems in other languages. I also gained good insights by reading about Andersen's work in relation to the historical and political contexts of 19th Century Denmark. There is a range of quality in the overall texts, however, and some of the pieces are simply not compelling reading.

A variety of articles of criticism show up here, of various length and dryness, but most are rather interseting, drawing on ancient mythology or even biblical mythology to prove a point. Some articles are easier to get than others, depending on what the reader has read. Anyone who's read Neuromancer by William Gibson might want to take a peek.

Editors Pauline J. Sheldon, Karl W. Wöber and Daniel R. Fesenmaier present 40 papers from the International Conference on Information and Communication Technology in Tourism, now in its eighth year. At this conference, tourism and information technology (IT) experts, practitioners and researchers made presentations in 14 categories. Their research, which reflects their individual approaches, covers innovative IT solutions for tourism, knowledge management and change in the tourism industry, electronic communications, Internet marketing, business to business tourism, how consumers use destination web sites, intelligent recognition systems, tourism education and the hotel industry's IT challenge. These highly technical, sometimes even mathematical, articles are targeted to a specific market - those immersed in IT and tourism. We from getAbstract suggest this expert compilation to information officers, IT academics and tourism executives interested in IT for their companies. If you are interested, but not an insider, you'll like the chapter abstracts that summarize key articles (but, then again, we do have a soft spot for abstracts).

The new International Residential Code, (IRC), promises to be an extremly user friendly building code for houses. It has all of the aspects of construction including construction, plumbing, electrical, mechanical and even energy codes combined into one easy to use format. There are sketches galore! For those used to dealing with the previous model codes, this code will exceed your expectations for its user-friendly nature. There are some changes to building code requirements to which inspectors and builders are accostomed. The separation between the house and garage is limited to a single layer of 1/2" drywall. The alternative building material such as ICF (insulated concrete form) wall systems and ISP (insulated structural panels) are now inside the conventional aspects of the code. Certain shear wall provisions have changed. Footing design can now rely on an assumed 1500 psf minimum soil bearing pressure. But there are other problems. The seismic map has been hinged to the postal zip code and consequently, several different seismic zones are within a single community. Other problems will certainly be resolved by the code body in the years to come. As ever, changes are slow, but local jurisdictions will surely allow for these changes locally This Item is available at$47 & $55 and I don't know the difference.

As it often happens with books editing the contents of a Conference, this is also a very heterogeneous book, with some very good chapters/papers and others not so qualified. But since all articles come with a "comment" made by another conference participant, the reader's life is made easier, as most of the problems are already pointed out in the comments. The book is also very heterogeneous in its topics, so any reader will likely find 3-4 of the papers very useful, but not all of them.

Some of the suggestions made my St. LaSalle are humorous by today's standards. But when taken in the historical context of his day you can see what he was trying to accomplish. In fact many of his suggestions would be worthwhile in putting back into Catholic schools. Today's Catholic schools have strayed far and many students have lost much respect for the Faith. Reading this book could give many Catholic administrators and teachers ideas on how to restore the Faith in their schools.

The sentence-level writing advice in this book is sound, but there could be more of it. The formatting advice is adequate, though I'd like to see more on how to write a true, up-front summary. And the "fundamental guidelines" chapter offers practical and useful information about the world of appellate judging for novice judges and law clerks.

That gets you to page 64. Pages 65 to 150 (the rest of the book, excluding appendices and index) is devoted to citation. This section duplicates the Bluebook and the ALWD Citation Manual--unnecessarily--and changes a lot of basic citation rules. Plus, there are 45 pages of suggested abbreviations. Are abbreviations a big problem in judicial writing? Given the coverage in this book, you might think so, but the book would have been better without a citation guide and with more organizational and style advice.