Products Books

This book covers the Fokker from the beginning until the end of its development. The book gives a nice little biography of Anthony Fokker, a son of a successful businessman, and a drop out of college. Anthony is bitten by the aviation bug at an early age and starts building a version (not a copy) of a French design that evolved into the Eindecker.

Personally, I like the layout of this book. Squadron books are much too small for chapters. Also, there is no index. The book crams a lot of information, photographs, and has the usual color prints in the middle.

Modelers will get good ideas on how to superdetail their aircraft. The best areas to concentrate are on the rotary engine, the landing gear, and the cockpit. This book has lots of picture of the Fokker's various sub assemblies.

Last, the book give an important bit of historical fact. Yes, Fokker didn't himself design the gears that let the machineguns fire through the propellor. He headed the design committee. Now, this is like saying that Bill Gates did not personally design Windows. Fokker knew the specs of the product and what it took for it to successfully work.

Just for that tid bit I would have given the book four stars.

Enjoy.

For those interested in the evolution and function of Fokker's Eindekker, this book is the best resource on the market. Lots of pictures, descriptive text.

It wonderful! It's great to take with you when you go shopping to pick out the brands that offer products with no preseevitives. Also products with whole foods. My family's energy level has gone up from eating whole foods. I would recomend this book to all families who are intrested in their health!

Because I was aware of the harmful additives and preservatives used in most items carried in the grocery store, I learned to cook with the "basics" like beans, whole grains, nuts and seeds. This book opened my eyes to the thousands of SAFE products on my grocery store shelves that complement what I already have stored.

I like cooking "from scratch", but I am also a very busy person and I'm not always the one in charge of cooking, so my family enjoys knowing what products they can use to make a fast, completely nutritious meal.

Great book!!!!!

Business which is based on profit maximization is usually considered to be in conflict with the goals of environmental protection. This contradiction can be even more severe when the business owned by private sectors in developed countries extend their activities in far-away underdeveloped areas. The book looks at the environmental protection from business perspectives, especially extractive industries' involvement in biodiversity conservation. It explores numerous cases ("best practices") showing how business interests reconcile with environmental protection goals. The dynamics of various stakeholders was investigated to illustrate how the business strategic calculation of benefit and cost has been shaped by other stakeholders. According to the authors, there are two major reasons of why business starts to voluntarily involve in environmental protection: corporate reputation (intangible value) and eco-efficiency (tangible value). The book is a big contribution to the empirical studies of how business operation has been shaped by environmental protection and vice versa. I recommend the book to environmental experts, project managers and corporate environmentalists.

Business which is based on profit maximization is usually considered to be in conflict with the goals of environmental protection. This contradiction can be even more severe when the business owned by private sectors in developed countries extend their activities in far-away underdeveloped areas. The book looks at the environmental protection from business perspectives, especially extractive industries' involvement in biodiversity conservation. It explores numerous cases ("best practices") showing how business interests reconcile with environmental protection goals. The dynamics of various stakeholders was investigated to illustrate how the business strategic calculation of benefit and cost has been shaped by other stakeholders. According to the authors, there are two major reasons of why business starts to voluntarily involve in environmental protection: corporate reputation (intangible value) and eco-efficiency (tangible value). The book is a big contribution to the empirical studies of how business operation has been shaped by environmental protection and vice versa. I recommend the book to environmental experts, project managers and corporate environmentalists.

I needed 27 copies for a class that was started in a week ... Amazon saved me!!!

Kotler, a symbolic guru of marketing, has brought a new offering of "Framework for Marketing Management" since years' serial publication of classic texts in marketing management.
Some new issuse has been included in this edition in depth.

I have many of the audiobooks on economics. This is by far my most favorite. I have listened to it three times over the last few months. Very entertaining listening to Knight's views on people with his sarcastic comments thrown in. This is a biography and does not go into his theories.

I have the whole "Great Economic Thinkers" set on audio cassette. I found the material quite interesting and the presentation excellent. These presentations are more than just a book turned to audio media. Even if you have a fairly short commute, you can get through this material in a week.

The Chicago School is towards the end of the series. You may want to start with Adam Smith and work your way forward.

I am the President of Cohesion Inc, and also a part-time course director in the marketing faculty of the Schulich School of Business, York University in Toronto, Canada. Our mission is to build strong brands and businesses through transforming them into high performance marketing systems.

Leslie de Chernatony makes a valuable contribution to marketing and business literature in this excellent book. He articulates thoughtful and compelling arguments for considering brands from both internal and external perspectives, and he drives home the importance of organizational alignment as a critical means for building strong brands and businesses. Although some areas of the book may delve too deeply into "the theory" for some readers tastes, it is also full of practical ideas and tools that will prove useful for both new and more experienced practitioners alike.

In this second edition, Professor de Chernatony provides an authoritative and up to date analysis about the core ideas and processes involved in building and strengthening brands. The unique and robust model at the heart of the book is based on an important compilation of both consultancy and research work. A series of exercises and examples facilitate an understanding of the process involved in planning and implementing brand strategies. Both visionary and practical, this book makes the compelling case for balancing what happens inside the organisation with the tools for developing and delivering a coherent and integrated brand. This book is thus an invaluable reference for both marketing managers and academics alike.

The only better way to gain the insights Gary Lynn shares in this book is to invest years of time and tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to found a company around a new product The information in this book is useful for the neophyte as well as for those with deep experience in product development

I highly recommend this how-to book for newbies. While this book is ten years old, it has stood the test of time. It is absolutely a classic on using the "First-to-Invent" patent system for new inventors that are just starting out. It is written in a parable style which makes it easy and engaging to read. It is packed with how-to information on researching the marketability of a product and includes sample forms for disclosure documents, nondisclosure agreements and idea evaluation. Several changes have taken place since '95 in regards to the length of a patent, fees, and PPA which should be researched in conjunction with this book. Otherwise, it is an excellent foundation.

The German Historical School may be history but its influence certainly isn't.
The lineage and doctrines of this "forgotten" school are traced out well by Dr. Nicholas Balabkins, economics professor at Pennsylvania's Lehigh University and author of "Not By Theory Alone...The Economics of Gustav von Schmoller and Its Legacy to America." Prof. Balabkins's script is superbly brought to life by Louis Rukeyser, the most lucid expositor of economics in American popular media. The presentation, created in 1988 on Knowledge Products cassette tapes, has been transferred onto two handsome compact discs by Blackstone Audio Inc.
Woody Allen once said that most of life is just showing up. Writers and professors of the German Historical School would probably have said that most of understanding economic life is what shows up in context. History and culture, backed by statistical studies and accounting for time and place, are the keys to economic knowledge, they held. "Natural law" and other universalisms articulated in British-born Classical economics were bunk to be debunked.
Empiricism (reliance on observation and experiment verified by statistics) and inductive logic (examining parts before making statements about the whole) were the most conspicuous tools of Historical School scholars. Sharing an affinity for statistics and numbers didn't make for congruence between the Historical School and the mathematical economics of the Keynesian and Neo-Classical schools that today dominate the private sector and university economics worlds.
Differences over logical method fueled a long-running feud between the Austrian School (which favored deduction and abstract theorizing) and the Historical School. Yet the Austrians and the Germans had common currency in that they were both "literary" schools (as opposed to chiefly mathematical). Carl Menger, founder of the Austrian School, dedicated his first book to Wilhelm Roscher, founder of the Historical School. Gustav Schmoller, Menger's greatest public doctrinal opponent thanks to Menger's second book, eventually concluded that induction and deduction were both valid ways of examining social phenomena.
Aside from Max Weber, whose "The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism" made him famous with the general intellectual community, Schmoller became the most renowned member of the school. Considered the founder of the Younger Historical School, Schmoller expanded upon the ideas of Roscher and Karl Knies and adopted the monograph writing style of Bruno Hildebrand, another Older Historical School figure. Sometimes appearing in wide circulation media with an eye toward educating laymen in economics, Schmoller's monographs were highly influential in Berlin political circles, perhaps because his ideas were ones power-seeking politicians wanted to hear. Social legislation created under Schmoller's guidance made him the father of the modern welfare state and opened the door to the rampant statism that characterized much of the 20th century. His "social justice" vocabulary is still employed widely in present-day policy debates.
Some may be tempted to trace the national socialism of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich back to Schmoller's Vereins Fur Sozialpolitik, a professorial association that worked for government-lead social reform. But the path is not a clear one.
Historical School scholars feared violence at both ends of the political spectrum - in liberty (as witnessed in the French Revolution) and in outright socialism preached by Karl Marx. Like some radical liberals, Marx predicted and desired the downfall of institutions including the state. Along the lines of British conservative Edmund Burke, Historical School writers saw the state as a bearer of tradition and guarantor of order. This is what gives Historical School economics its profoundly conservative character.
It's unfortunate that American conservatives have so little knowledge of the Historical School. Russell Kirk linked U.S. conservatism to European forebears but much of the intellectual American Right gravitated toward the native-born synthesis of economic liberalism, religious conservatism, and anti-communism championed by Frank Meyer, an editor at National Review magazine. The synthesis had a number of logical flaws and fissures are still visible today. Unlike Roscher and Schmoller, today's U.S. conservatives don't seem much interested in reviewing history to see if they're right where they belong.
Prof. Balabkins's opening remarks contain a sentence that most economists today wouldn't touch the German method "with a 10-foot pole." That says a good deal about the state of the economics profession with its increasing mathematical nature driving it toward increasing irrelevance. Every Nobel Prize to a mathematical economist seems to push the science further from the social mainstream.
Schmoller's greatest contribution was showing economics is much more about psychology and sociology than it could ever be about mathematics (what's the mathematical symbol for error and how does it behave exactly?). Mathematical pioneers like Leon Walras realized this, using math as only part of their methods of inquiry and explanation. Later generations increasingly lost this distinction. Businesspeople wanting useful advice should go to a university's psychology department. No need to stop in the economics office unless someone needs a good laugh.
Another reason for today's economists eschewing historicism's methodology is presumably the use of normative economics by Roscher, Schmoller and Co. "Normative" economics involves statements of what "ought" to be (its opposite being "positive" economics with its consistently dispassionate analysis). True, normative statements ("opinions") bring with them the danger of sailing off into fantasy. Yet, as one political observer once put it, there's a difference between a yahoo standing on a street corner yelling "Bush is an a--hole" and a student of political science and history surmising from data that the president may be underperforming in certain areas. The German economists were superb analysts, wrote Joseph Schumpeter, whose work was an important bridge between the Austrian and Historical schools with major books including "The History of Economic Analysis" and "The Theory of Economic Development."
Another important difference between the Historical School and the Austrian as well as the Classical School was in giving preeminence to the national economy over the individual. Again, context is crucial. The Historical School grew up in a time of rapid industrialization when Germany was beginning to emerge as a nation-state (mid to late 1800s). The chief task was to determine what would hold the 38 "Little Germanies" (provinces) together into one Prussian-lead whole and make it viable amid European rivals such as France, Britain, and Russia. Thus national economy with its accompanying sozialpolitik became the anthem of the Historical School. Protectionism was a salient feature of national economy. Scholars concerned about the dwindling of the U.S. manufacturing and industrial sectors would do well to study national economy (and the career of Alexander Hamilton, who put early America on the path of national economy and tariffs and rejected Classical School free-trade ideology).
Historical School writers saw greater danger in radical individualism than in unchecked statism. The Schmoller program, instituted by the government of Otto von Bismarck, was aimed at giving workers on the lower end of the economic ladder a feeling of being invested in the system. Left isolated by and in individualism, the worker might channel discontent into revolutionary movements that threatened public safety and order.
The Historical School largely accepted the Marxist analysis of social evolution and class conflicts. They even adopted most of the policy program of the socialists (in much the way that most U.S. Republicans came to accept Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal). So how were the historicists better or different from the socialists? Again, context comes to the rescue.
The historicists surmised that the German character with its pride in hard work and personified by the nation's able civil service could navigate Germany between the rocks of radical liberalism and radical socialism. Cultural cohesion was strong - the major division being the country's religious makeup (2/3 Protestant, 1/3 Roman Catholic, and a Jewish minority). Yet all three religions were thoroughly Germanized, judging long stretches on the public dole as shameful. Given this, the historicists would have been the last to suspect the German state could become a force for destruction. But destroy it did (see World War II).
Fanning the flames of militarism and imperialism was probably the Historical School's greatest failing. Ludwig von Mises, leader of the modern Austrian School, said this was rooted in a "vicious" problem of epistemology (the philosophy dealing with the nature of knowledge and presuppositions). This problem took the form of viewing the separation of politics and economics as artificial thus undesirable (this idea was held in common by the historicists, the Nazis, and Marxists). In other words, Historical School scholars, so adept at explaining the psychology of the economy, made a fundamental psychological error in examining the boundaries of the social order.
The issue has relevance for our own time and in our own country (the U.S.) because, as Mises (see his book "Problems of Epistemology in Economics") wisely discerned, this error was/is not particular to Germany or the Historical School.
Looking out the window of post WWII history, taking account of Ludwig Erhard's "economic miracle" of 1950s West Germany (accomplished without a large-scale government sector) and mass immigration, one wonders would the historicists (were they alive today) be even half as enthusiastic about the welfare state. Mass immigration has destroyed the cultural consensus in the U.S. and many European countries. The contemporary state, as French writer Frederic Bastiat observed a good many years earlier, is the fiction by which everybody tries to live off everybody else. What is to be done?
Conditions have changed, an historical analysis will readily show, but doesn't mean a green light for classical liberalism/libertarianism. Most Westerners exhibit no desire to jettison large portions of the nanny state. Statism has bloomed again in Germany and American Ron Paul's 2008 run for president was another in a long line of anti-statist political campaigns that flopped with electorates on both sides of The Pond. Even if libertarians were successful at the ballot box, dismantling the welfare state would be a difficult matter. Personal libertinism and decadent culture alongside increasingly ineffective (yet growing) government has caused a loss of communal compassion, as Rabbi Mayer (Craig) Schiller once wrote me in a letter. Many well-meaning folks would regard the abolition of welfare programs as a gigantic blow to communal compassion. For better or for worse, welfarism is sewn to modern nation-states like an internal organ is attached to the human body.
Were Prof. Balabkins to add a third disc to his fine "German Historical School, Welfare Capitalism Begins" he should elaborate on the school's influence on social science and politics at large:
-- Schumpeter's work in innovation and economic analysis built on ideas put forward by Schmoller and Werner Sombart. Roscher's most famous book ("Principles of Political Economy") was subtitled "The Evolution of Capitalism." The study of evolutionary economics is the chief purpose of the Augsburg, Germany-based International Joseph A. Schumpeter Society.
-- Thorstein Veblen's Institutionalism science borrowed liberally from the German canon.
-- Schmoller helped rid communism of its unrealistic belief in management-by-proletariat, correctly forecasting real-world socialism would have to be statist and bureaucratic in order to function.
-- An update on German economics and politics since the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification would also be welcome.
Dr. Balabkins's current presentation neglects to describe the outlook of Historical School scholars on a common theme in economics - the short run vs. the long run. One might conjecture that historicists would view laissez-faire as most effective in the short run with welfare legislation guaranteeing long-run stability. If that sentiment exists in German Historical School writings, much of which still remain untranslated into English, then some enterprising scholar should get that concept before the public - shnell! Also, the translation of Schmoller's encyclopedic "Grundiss," with special emphasis on its six tools of analysis, should be completed. The reemergence of such profundities could shake the cobwebs off the economics profession and set off a new wave of interest in the bleeding-heart conservatives of the German Historical School, developments that are long overdue.

Beginning in the early 1840's, a group of German university professors denounced the abstract theories of classical economists, rejecting theoretical analysis in favor of a historical approach. They believed that theories only express what happens in a simplified world, not what happens in the real world. They believed economic theories offered little to solve pressing social problems, and sought to find a middle ground between laissez faire and Marxian revolution. The Germans enthusiastically supported active government intervention in the economy, and recommended an expansive body of social welfare legislation. These efforts became a model for later efforts in Scandinavia, the United States and other countries. from the Great Economic Thinkers audio collection.

Item arrived quickly and in great shape. Very professional business relations. I recommend this buyer and this book.

We made a dozen Friendship Brownies for my daughters (3 1/2) teachers for Christmas and they loved them! My daughter loved layering the white and brown chocolate chips the best. We cut out fabric circles for the tops, and I made our own recipe tags on the computer instead of using the ones included. They turned out very cute!
Not only was it something inexpensive to give but my daughter could help out as well. My only advice would be to mash things down a bit as you go...we got to the end and the last big ingredient overflowed the jar otherwise.
Great little book!

Knowledgeably compiled and deftly edited by Buzz Poole, Green Design by is an amazing and enthusiastically recommended showcase of eco-friendly products ranging from vinyl records recycled into bowls ideal for dry good storage, to stylish bags crafted from discarded boat sails, to traditional chabah sandals handmade by locals at a fair wage, and so much more. Full-color photography displays the innovative, inventive, practical, and beautiful creations, while the text describes recycling or creation processes tailored to avoid waste, pollutants, or the use of unfair or inhumane practices. A marvelous treasury of ideas, suggestions, and recommendations for the consumer searching for products not created through harmful or overly consumptive practices. Indeed, Green Design is virtually an artbook given the distinctive visual flair of the ordinary, useful household items it showcases.

GREEN DESIGN is not only a very beautifully designed book, rich with full color photographs, clever and creative design elements, and informative witty and thoughtful writing, it is a book as important as any published in the arena of sensitivity to ecology issues.

Based on the concept of exploring companies who use recycled goods to create their products, the six essays on the various environmental friendly arenas (written with expert quality writing style!) provide insights into the world famous companies such as Lego that respect the environment and utilize intensive research and techniques to create their product in a finely tested, ecologically sensitive manner.

The results of the photography and writing are an eye-opening experience - one that creates a sense of respect for those who successfully create products that are not destined to poison the planet as well as a fine demonstration by visuals of just how creative business can be. It is a beautiful book to read and enjoy, a much-needed big statement about ecology's importance in manufacturing, and as fine a design demonstration as is currently available on the market! Highly recommended for all readers. Grady Harp, September 06