Jag tycker det är jättebra att sitta här och plugga. Den överlägset bästa studieplatsen på skolan! Det är ljust och luftigt med stora härliga fönster. Om vi grupparbetar går det bra att sitta i studierummen, men sitter jag själv sitter jag helst inne i biblioteket. Jag tycker dock att det finns för lite böcker. Jag önskar lite större utbud, kanske inte alla böcker från kurslitteraturen men åtminstone någon bok i varje kurs.

 I think it´s great to sit here and study. The superior study place at school! It´s ljust and luftigt with lovely large windows. In collaborative work it´s ok to sit in the group rooms, but when I study alone I prefer to sit here in the library. Dock, I would like the library to buy more books. Maybe not all titles in the course literature, but at least some book from each course.

Scholastic has a great interactive house graphic which shows all the areas of your home where you can incorporate reading for your kids. Some of its ideas and information include:

• In the bathroom: reading in the bathtub and using foam letters that stick to the wall in the bathtub
• In the bedroom: drawing and writing are associated with learning to read
• In the kitchen: using a cookbook to find recipes that start with the letter "c"
• In the family room: reading magazine and newspaper articles out loud together

These seem like simple concepts that we all know, but it's a great reminder that reading comes in many forms and that we need to encourage it from the start. View all their tips in the graphic here.

Read my earlier post about American Reading Habits.

[German title: Umfrage zu Ausgaben für Wissensmanagement in 2008 (Translate text to: Deutsch)]

Jim Murphy, Jennifer Hackbush
The Knowledge Management Spending Report, 2007–2008—The Market Hits $73B. 97 pages
AMR Research, 2007

Abstract: Our 2007–2008 spending study, based on a survey deployed to 350 enterprise technology decision makers in the United States and Europe, indicates record-level activity in knowledge management, content management, navigation, search, and retrieval, and collaboration tools and platforms.

This report provides targeted marketing and competitive information on key application markets of Knowledge Management Software. The report lists the top 50 to 100 vendors as well as their revenue, growth, and market share. It also segments them by vertical expertise, customer size, and geography. It also shows the preferred operating systems and databases of these vendor's customers.
This report is useful in answering the following questions:

• How big is the existing/future market?
• Who are the significant vendors that participate in this market?
• Where are growth opportunities in the market: midtier versus large, industries, geographies?

Generic Keywords: application spending, enterprise software research, information technology research, IT analysis, IT research, business integration, outsourcing, cost of outsourcing, IT spending, IT investment, market forecast, quantitative research, global application market, pharmaceutical, discrete manufacturing

Register and purchase the reoprt online. (Price: $4,000.00)
 

© Copyright by AMR Research, Inc.

It is always intriguing to find something hidden in a book. Any fragment can become a clue to a past life, past place and past owner.

This brings me to the business card of a Mr. Noel Monks which was found in a book left for the rubbish tip, on a skip in Richmond, Melbourne. It was rescued before any weather damage could spoil it and brought home to join my reasonably out-of-control library and it has been sitting there ever since with ephemera intact. This ephemera includes a few intriguing keepsakes that hint at this books journey to the present day.

The book is titled The Birth of the Ballet Russes first published in1936 and given as a present in 1937 to a lady name Viva. The business card was inserted at pages p152 -153. I like to think that was where Mr. Monks had read up to as his message states, typed and signed on the back of his card.

World's best city - I like that sentiment. I also love a mystery so I decided to find out a little about Mr. Monks and Viva and the bon voyage.

Noel Monks was an Australian war correspondent and is not to be confused with Noel Monk the Sex Pistols' American tour manager.

Monks reported from Guernica in 1937 when the city was attacked by Nazi planes. He was the first journalist on the scene and he reported the horror of the first city to be wiped out by aerial bombing. The Nazi's, it was later stated by Hermann Goering at his trial for war crimes, used the town to experiment with their bombs and gain practice for WWII. There were casualties and it was an atrocity. The reaction of Pablo Picasso was to paint his nightmarish vision of the tragedy in the painting "Guernica".

Here is a quote from a Noel Monks report of the time, Guernica, 1937.

In the Plaza, surrounded almost by a wall of fire, were about a hundred refugees. They were wailing and weeping and rocking to and fro. One middle-aged man spoke English. He told me: 'At four, before the-market closed, many aeroplanes came. They dropped bombs. Some came low and shot bullets into the streets. Father Aroriategui was wonderful. He prayed with the people in the Plaza while the bombs fell.'..*

Whilst working for the Daily Express Monks met and married a fellow war correspondent named Mary Welsh. Their marriage lasted until Mary fell in love with Ernest Hemingway. She went on to become the fourth and last wife of Mr. Hemingway, after divorcing Monks in 1946. So there is the link between this discarded book in Melbourne, an Australian journalist and one of the most highly esteemed American writers of the last century.

It is amazing what you can trace from a forgotten card in a book. I tried to search, so far in vain, for Viva and establish her relationship with Mr. Monks. In some ways she is far more interesting to me being an unknown. It was her book on the ballet she loaned to Noel Monks to read. That the book is her's is clear from the inscription inside the cover and other pieces of ephemera that remain. It is interesting that she kept his note in the book or did she forget about it? When did she and her book part company?

As for the bon voyage...his note suggests that she was overseas at one point and was to return home to Melbourne hence "Bon voyage....My love to Melbourne, world's best city/".

Important things and trivial things find their way between the pages of a book. Tram tickets as bookmarks, photos and hidden documents - I like to carry on this tradition and leave things between the pages now and then only to be surprised by them, sometimes years later. I have lost things this way too.

I regret leaving behind a bunch of four leaf clovers which I pressed in a book that belonged to my partner of the time. They were given to me by an old lady who had found them growing in a laneway. She walked into where I was working and handed them to me as though it was the most normal thing to find so many rare four leaf clovers in an undisclosed laneway nearby. She gave them to me because I was young, because she thought I might like them. Now they are gone.They were forgotten in the rush to move on with life. Maybe someone will open his book sometime in the future and speculate on their lucky find.

*Guernica, 1937," EyeWitness to History, www.eyewitnesstohistory.com (2005).

The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.

Mark Twain

They hitch a ride in London, England.

Prospectus writes: "After sustaining injuries while hiking in Canada and being chased across church rooftops in Santa Barbara, China Lake and Mission Canyon are forced to commandeer Jesse Blackburn's chair..."

This must have been after Jesse commandeered a Jaguar XK8 and took off across London...

إضغط على الشكل أعلاه لرؤية صورة مفصلة لغلاف الكتاب

مازال البحث جارياً عن ناشر للكتاب الذي يتألف من 400 صفحة مقسمة الي سبعة فصول تحتوي على الموضوعات التالية:

1.  -مقدمة
2.  -بناء قاعدة البيانات الجغرافية لدعم التخطيط الاقليمي والعمراني
3. -إدخال وتحويل البيانات المكانية والجدولية
4.  -استخدام بيانات الاستشعار عن بعد كمصدر اساسي لقاعدة البيانات الجغرافية
5.  -تحليل البيانات الجغرافية وبناء نماذج المحاكاة
6.  -إنتاج الخرائط والتقارير والمخططات
7.  -الأتجاهات المستقبلية

وكانت شركة إيزري الأميركية قد تسلمت نسخة من الكتاب لمراجعته والنظر في إمكانية نشره (برغم عدم نشرها لأي كتب باللغة العربية في الماضي) الا انه لم يصلني حتى الآن أي رد برغم مرور أكثر من شهرين على تسلمهم النسخة للمراجعة.

I got a copy of this for only Php 99 last week.  I've been planning to buy a copy since I started to collect  the Vampire Chronicles. It's among my "things to do before I die" list to complete the chronicles. I saw a copy of this with a very unique cover three years ago. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough money at that time. When I came back, it's gone. So since then it became my frustration to find the same cover. That's why I didn't bother to buy a copy until last week. I wasn't also that excited about this book because the author is not the Vampire Lestat anymore. It's written through David Talbot's point of view. I wasn't that excited to grab a copy unlike the other ones.

Anyway, while filing my application form to the civil service office last Friday, I've had this very strong urge to check out the National Bookstore branch in Quezon Avenue. Because my boss went to Katiklan, I had the day off, and so I decided to satisfy my urge. And, lo, I found a very good buy--a hardbound copy of Merrick for only 99 pesos! It's not the unique version that I wanted to buy three years ago, but it's okay. For an Anne Rice fan, this is a very rare chance, at least based on my experience. And so, I'm happy.

'Glasshouse' and 'Accelerando'

A few years ago I saw 'The Magic Flute' (I think that's what it was, I could be wrong) and there was a quite enchanting set-piece: large, angled rocks to illustrate a bluffs area and a thin, wiry tree. Something about the setup really struck me. The same could be set of Charles Stross' 'Glasshouse': the set upon which the story plays out is enchanting. The difference between 'The Magic Flute' and 'Glasshouse' is that the set of the latter is much more interesting than the characters who appear on it. I was impressed with the 'Flute' set design, my focus was always on the characters and the story. I'm sorry to say this, but the Glasshouse of 'Glasshouse' is more fascinating than Reeve or Sam or Sanni; the universe of both 'Accelerando' and 'Glasshouse' are deeper and more interesting than the one-sentence descriptions Stross sees fit to whet our appetites with.

'Glasshouse' is a good book. It has an interesting story, its share of surprises, a bit of action, a veritable wealth of quotable descriptions, musings and utterances... but it could have been so much more. Stross has at his disposal a gloriously architectured world in which literally anything is possible, and he barely scratches the surface. Instead of delving into the vast possibilities of the 27th century, nine-tenths of the book (starting on digital page 129 of 1060) are spent inside a 'simulation' detailing pre-Singularity human society - the latter half of the 20th century in one of the developed countries. Want a visual example? Imagine a Star Trek movie where the first 10 minutes are spent aboard the ship, and the rest of the film happens in faux-Indianapolis during the 1950's, with the entire crew forced to abide by the rules and societal norms of the times. That means no phasers, no androids (sorry Data), no spaceships, no inter-racial or same-sex romance (are there same-sex relationships in Star Trek now?) and, please, no talking about any of this - it ruins the realism. It means that Troi spends her days shopping, gossiping with Crusher and trying to get pregnant, while Riker and Picard work in a fake insurance company, shuffling papers across a desk for the sake of appearances. That is exactly what's happening in the book. Boring? Yeah, somewhat. Why do we have to spend time on a character shopping in a department store when we can explore the underlying concepts of transport- and assembly-gates, brain uploads, habitats orbiting brown dwarfs, achievable immortality, memory-erasing viruses, post-singularity society, humanity's self-imposed exile from the Solar System, the freedom to be who and what you want to be (Want to be a four-armed woman? OK. Want to be a blue hermaphrodite centaur with chain-mail hauberk and no pants? Fine.), and, last but in no way least, the social implications of everything I have just mentioned. Which do you suppose I would like to read about?!

In this sense, Stross really reminds me of 'The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy'. Sure, Douglas Adams didn't bother to cover in depth many of the concepts he mentioned, but his work was a comedy long before being science-fiction.

If Stross has a failing, it is his inability to stop writing future-set soap operas. 'Singularity Sky', 'Iron Sunrise', 'Accelerando' and 'Glasshouse' all exhibit the same weakness: were the story set in a duller environment, it would be shelved alongside John Grisham and Dan Brown. The only sci-fi element is often-times the setting, and the concepts beneath that are skimmed oh-so-carefully so as not to disturb the giants laying dormant.

'Singularity Sky' and 'Iron Sunrise'

The novels are both good, but, as I mentioned above, they barely touch upon the science and instead spend most of the time simply in the fiction end of the pool. There is a fair amount of political intrigue, a bit of romance, some disturbing imagery to illustrate the depravity of the antagonists and the perils of technology and, this is sort of strange, very little shoot-em-up action. What small amount of action scenes Stross does present us with, they're mostly rather bland and are over entirely too quickly.

'Singularity Sky' is a story of an out-dated societal model (early Soviet-era Communists) attempting to stop a Singularity. At times the novel hits very close to home, reminding so much of the old country. Overall a good, light read.

'Iron Sunrise' is a sequel to 'Singularity Sky', only now it has left the Communists and moved on to the Nazis. I'm not kidding: the bad guys are trying to purify humanity, change them to fit a specific mold. They go around referring to each-other using names like "Oberkommando der Wehrmacht". Like, but not quite: I can't find the actual names they use, but they are long and contain an insane number of consonants.

Read Stross. I don't hesitate to recommend anything written by Charles Stross. Sure, I'll mention that you'll be getting less science than 'Rendezvous with Rama', but it's certainly more than Heinlein has ever dished out. I guess it's somewhere in the middle. A very good place to be, actually.

Tonight the Ilkely Literature Festival starts and its headline opener is Alistair Campbell. He will be talking about 'The Blair Years' diaries and hopefully answering questions from the audience and yes I'm going. I think I'll re-read the section from the summer of 2003 when Andrew Gilligan triumphantly announced that the Iraq dossier had been 'sexed up' on the Today programme which tragically lead to Dr Kelly's suicide, the Hutton Report and Campbell's eventual resignation. This is obviously an on-going and bitter row between the two men as Gilligan has a strong attack on Campbell today on Comment is Free, part of the Guardian. I'm sure the audience at Ilkely will have some questions to ask about this. I also wonder if he can be persuaded to talk of stuff that is not in the diaries, the Tony/Gordon relationship.

A final note, I received a request to join a Facebook group supporting the monks of Burma. If you haven't yet signed up it is here. Over 78,000 members so far and growing fast.