Interior Design Management: A Handbook for Owners and Managers

Customer Reviews:

Drama and Negativity.......2007-01-10

I was hoping for a really good guide to the business side of Interior Design from an expert. This book was reccomended to me by another professional in the business as the "bible" of the business. I was hoping for insights for a well-run, prosperous, effecient and positive business. I was sorely disappointed. This book is negative, preachy, outdated, and angry. Written in a most uninspired manner and goes so far as to say things like, if you want your own business you better be prepared to give up bridge, tennis, dinner with your family... blah, blah, blah, or quite frankly your contract is to protect you, NOT your client. Hmmm, really, last I checked it is supposed to do both. Maybe it just does not represent the spirit in which I choose to do business. I was hoping for advise from someone who is better at this than I am, someone who may have streamlined the process and knows good time management. All the drama and negativity pulls your energy from whatever good information is present. I can see the wagging index finger of the writer as I read, no thank you.
Stella

The best source of information I have come across!.......1997-07-05

Just by thumbing through this book at the store the other day I could tell it was the book for me! I highly recommend this publication to anyone who needs to learn the in's-n-out's of this business. I learned so much already...I can't wait to finish it

Average customer rating:
Blackboard sketching
Frederick Whitney
Manufacturer: Published by Milton Bradley Co
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

Study & Teaching | Reference | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
General | Drawing | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
Drawing | Instructional & How-To | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
General | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
ASIN: B0008CCN0A

Average customer rating:

This ýbooký is totally useless!

Works for me

Finally a Sketchbook for Animators

High price pack of paper.

It's not e book

Gardner's Storyboard Sketchbook: Story Planning and Character Design Workbook (Gardner's Guide Series) (Gardner's Guide series)
PhD, Garth Gardner
Manufacturer: GGC Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Spiral-bound

Cartooning | Comics & Graphic Novels | Subjects | Books
General | Drawing | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
Animation | Graphic Design | Design & Decorative Arts | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
Drawing | Instructional & How-To | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
General | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

Exploring Storyboarding (Design Exploration Series)

Storyboarding 101: A Crash Course in Professional Storyboarding (Michael Wise Productions)

Prepare to Board! Creating Story and Characters for Animation Features and Shorts

The Art of the Storyboard: Storyboarding for Film, TV, and Animation

Storyboards: Motion in Art, Third Edition

ASIN: 1589650018

Book Description

Gardner's Storyboard Sketchbook is a 200 page 70lb quality drawing workbook for planning/designing an animated story or film. Contains storyboard templates, character drawing sheets, and storyboard example from Pacific Data Image, Academy of Art College and more. Provides an excellent way to organize a project. This book also contains camera and character motion keys that are standard to the industry.

Customer Reviews:

This ýbooký is totally useless!.......2004-06-25

I was really disappointed when I open the package and saw this book, from the Gardner's Series. It definitely doesn't worth a penny. From the 100 pages, 80 is just a bunch of paper for you to draw! Besides, the storyboards examples have no explanations about how they were planned. This "book" is totally useless.

Works for me.......2002-11-17

A book for sketching story ideas. I have been looking for a book of this kind. Perfect for what I needed.

Finally a Sketchbook for Animators.......2002-10-24

I have used my sketchbook to draw out various story Ideas. Excellent book. I love it.

High price pack of paper........2002-04-16

Gardner's Sketchbook is just that a book for YOU to sketch in. The entire text of the book is comprised of only the captions at the bottom of of storyboard illustrations which are only on 16 pages of the book. Instead of buying this book I would go with "The Art of the Storyboard: Storyboarding for Film, TV, and Animation" by John Hart. It is priced the same as this book but it is a more informative text. This book only gives two example templetes one for storyboarding (which can be found along with many other variations on the web at several animation sites) the other for character design (a blank page with the heading of "Charater Design"). This book should be priced as a pack of paper about $[money].

It's not e book.......2001-12-25

It's not a book , it's only white paper

Average customer rating:

Sketching: Planning and Drawing
Valerie Wiffen
Manufacturer: Sterling Pub Co Inc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Instructional & How-To | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

Drawing | Instructional & How-To | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

General | Drawing | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

General | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0806924373

Successful Sketching: Planning & Drawing

Average customer rating:

Way too brief...

Successful Sketching: Planning & Drawing
Valerie Wiffen
Manufacturer: Sterling
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Drawing | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

Pencil | Drawing | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

Drawing | Instructional & How-To | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

General | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0806923504

Book Description

Improve your drawing, skill by skill. Each easy-to-follow exercise teaches one area of expertise. “Presumes a certain level of skill and builds from there. Graphite and charcoal sketching are quickly superseded by the sophisticated color and movement available from oil pastel, aquarelle pencils, and watercolor wash....Recommended.”—Library Journal.

Customer Reviews:

Way too brief..........2004-06-29

"SUCCESSFUL SKETCHING" by Valerie Wiffen:

I rate Valerie Wiffen's book only 1 star. At only 128 pages, the book covers not just "sketching" per se, but everything else related to sketching, but in BRIEF; there's brief architectural sketching, brief flower sketching, brief portraiture, brief figure sketching, and even brief still life. With such cursory treatment of each subject, how could anyone hope for success?

The illustrations were uninspiring, and I found the overall flow of the book to be broken and disjointed from chapter to chapter. It's too short and requires expansion and more illustration. There are other, more thorough books on the market.

Book Description

"Becky brings a unique opportunity to view the world of Bluegrass music from the perspective of love and devotion, admiration, and respect, as well as humor and irony." Alan O'Bryant. "She knows where to be and the exact moment ot snap the shutter." Pete Wernick. Includes over 100 photographs from the personal collection of the author.

Book Description

This book explores the evolution, through the first half of the 20th century, of the key neoclassical concept of rationality. The analysis begins with the development of modern decision theory, covers the interwar debates over the role of perfect foresight and analyzes the first game-theoretic solution concepts of von Neumann and Nash.

The author's proposition is that the notion of rationality suffered a profound transformation that reduced it to a formal property of consistency. Such a transformation paralleled that of neoclassical economics as a whole from a discipline dealing with real economic processes to one investigating issues of logical consistency between mathematical relationships.

Modeling Rational Agents will be of great interest to scholars of the history of economic thought and method, as well as all those working in the field of game and decision theory.

Customer Reviews:

Instructive Review.......2004-09-13

There are several ways to write the history of thought. Giocoli's is a classic ways: describe the subtle transformation of a single concept across time. This is an important endeavor because the individuals involved in the transformation rarely appreciate that the process is occurring, or if they do, they consider the reconceptualization to be a part of the accumulation of knowledge, rather than a shift in what is being explained.

Giocoli's book is a subclass of the "transformation of ideas" approach which adds a critical dimension, claiming that the earlier concept has a richer value than the later, and the supposed scientific advance was at best, purchased by a certain trivialization of the subject, and at worst, no advance at all.

In this case the concept is that of the rational actor. Giocoli sums up his views very early: "We started from the classic notion of a rational agent [who is] a relentless maximizer who aimed at pursuing his/her own goals and desires, and ended with the shrinking of rationality to a formal requirement of consistency, where the notion of agency itself was so stripped down of its human peculiarities as to become an all-purpose concept valid for real individuals as well as for groups or machines." (p. 3)

How could economists have accepted such a move from substance to formalism? Giocolo argues that the transformation of the rational actor was part of a more general movement in neoclassical economics from a substantive system of forces (SOF) approach to a formalistic system of relations (SOR) approach. In
an SOF approach, one attempts to explain real actors as substantive rational actors striving to maximize, whereas in an SOR approach, one attempts to idealize the actor and explain the idealization.

Unlike Giocoli, I very much admire the economic theory that he critiques, although I certainly agree with him that one of its effects is that a good deal of economic theory suffers from a ludicrous "mathematics envy" that would be amusing if it were not such a tragic waste of talent. Indeed, many mathematical economists pride themselves on their ignorance of real economies, and pursue their irrelevant studies with an absurdly inflated self-importance. For instance, von Neumann-Morgenstern-type game theory, with its stable sets, Shapley values and the like, continue to be the object of intensive investigation, despite the fact that the cooperative game theory model has never shown itself to be in the least useful. Simillarly, theorists give each other kudos for proving that a result that holds for a finite number consumers continues to hold with a continuum of consumers. But, in fact, there are only a finite number of consumers, so there is no reason to generalize to the continuous case! Of course, if you cannot prove something
in the finite case but you can in the continuous case, that is a different story. The continuous case may be a simplifying assumption, but it often gives rise to powerfully predictive models.

Each of the theories Giocoli criticizes has been the basis for a staggering variety of empirical findings that are now being used to revise the formalist theory in such a way as to become, once again, substantive. Consider, for instance, decision theory. This became formalist in the hands of Savage, Samuelson, and others, who showed that one could retrieve the maximization
subject to constraints model from a few simple axiomatic consistency assumptions. The resulting model, however, became the key element in the experimental methodology of choice theory in psychology. In the expert hands of Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman and others, this "formalist" decision theory, with its stripped-down concept of rationality, yielded a surfeit of
psychological generalizations that were quite unavailable prior to the "formalist revolution" in decision theory.

Giocoli's treatment of game theory suffers from an excessive attempt to fit things nicely into his overall theory. He praises the cooperative game theory of von Neumann and Morgenstern as being part of the system of forces (SOF) approach which is being abandoned by economists, even though nothing has ever come of the theory in terms of successful models of real social processes, and the main result of their work was the axiomatization of choice under uncertainty (expected utility), which was the underpinning of the formalization of the rationality concept. Giocoli tries to explain why the Nash equilibrium concept was ignored during the 1950's and 1960's, and did not come into its own until the 1980's and later, by saying that Nash's concept of equilibrium is "formalist" and could not be embraced until neoclassical economics itself had become "formalist." I do not accept this explanation at
all.

The period from 1950 to 1970 was one in which economic theory was preoccupied with relatively narrow issues concerning economic stabilization (fiscal and monetary policy), the market/state mix (public economics), and development economics, itself stressing physical and human capital formation and
technical change. Game theory has relatively little to say about these subjects. By the mid-1970's, by contrast, economists were fully involved in dealing with such social areas as crime, poverty, substance abuse, gender roles, corruption, the family, and other areas in which game theory excels. The work of Nobel prize winner Gary Becker exemplifies these new concerns,
but many economists have been involved. Noncooperative game theory, and the Nash equilibrium as its organizing concept, have been central to understanding these areas, and game theory has accordingly been admitted to the center of contemporary neoclassical economics.

Nevertheless, Giocoli is correct in saying that the Nash equilibrium concept is "formalist." I say this because the Nash criterion calls something an equilibrium when no single agent can gain by moving from it, whereas in the real world, multiple agents can move at the same time, and even in concert. Of course, such coordinated movement is at the heart of equilibrium notions in cooperative game theory, which may well be why von Neumann rejected Nash's work. It is telling that when the animal behaviorist John Maynard Smith appropriated game theory in the period 1972-1982, he saw fit to correct this weakness in the Nash criterion, developing the notion of an "evolutionarily
stable strategy," which is anything but formalist. The value of evolutionary game theory in biology has been of the highest order, effectively revolutionizing animal behavior theory in the three decades since Maynard Smith and Price wrote their first article on the subject.

Giocoli reveals the weakness of his approach in his treatment of evolutionary game theory. I will not go through the details of his argument, which is quite shabby. The weakness of his approach is simple: when he sees economic theory developing in an incorrect manner, he writes a critique. This is fine for dealing with the past, but when operating in the present, one must look around and see if there are researchers aware of and attempting to develop a better theory. For instance, he does not mention my review of attempts to correct economic formalism in my book Game Theory Evolving (Princeton University Press, 2000), even though this predates his book by three years. Much more surprising is the lack of mention of the contributions of Kahneman and his coworkers. One might infer that Giocoli is as unconcerned with empirical reality as those that he criticizes.

His failure to look for contemporary developments led Giocoli to
underappreciate the salutary effect of "formalist" decision theory and game theory on empirical work and hence on the repair of formalism. All of the competitors of the neoclassical tradition he criticizes have fallen by the wayside, and the neoclassical tradition has been only fortified and strengthened by its critics. Giocoli's critique clearly applies to much overbearing super-formalism in contemporary neoclassical theory, and this book's message will appeal to those opposed to analytical model-building altogether. But, until a better alternative comes along, I will continue to defend evolutionary game theory and other attempts to contribute to the analytical modeling of human behavior.
.
.

Book Description

This work brings together in one volume the background papers on major service sectors prepared by the WTO Secretariat for the WTO's Council for Trade in Services, in preparation for the new round of negotiations which started in January 2000. Following an analysis of the economic effects of services liberalization, 19 chapters on individual service sectors consider the issues which WTO Members need to consider when framing their negotiating positions and objectives for the new round and preparing their industries for a more open trading environment: + the economic importance of the sector; + the manner in which it is regulated and traded; + problems of definition and classification; + the pattern of commitments undertaken by Member governments under the GATS. Many of the papers also identify prevalent forms of trade restriction or discrimination and suggest areas for further work. In addition, the work includes a detailed description of the structure of services commitments as submitted by WTO Members with respect to the four modes of supply which constitute the definition of trade in services under the GATS. The contributions have been provided by experts of the Trade in Services Division of the WTO Secretariat, with responsibility for the services or subjects in question.

Financial Services Liberalization in the WTO.

Average customer rating:

Financial Services Liberalization in the WTO.

Manufacturer: 0
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000ICRQFM

Average customer rating:

Financial Services Liberalization in the WTO.
Wendy Dobson
Manufacturer: see notes for publisher info
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000M482KE

Book Description

This book reviews techniques of dynamic optimization and shows how they can be applied to the management of various resource systems. In addition, it highlights the theory, models, and methods employed in the discipline of resource economics. Professors Conrad and Clark have written this text under the premise that the theory and concepts in this field are more quickly learned and made operational through numerical examples. By working through the problems at the end of each chapter, readers will learn the techniques that may be used in empirical studies of natural resources systems. Specifically, the chapters deal with renewable resources, nonrenewable resources, environmental management, and stochastic resource models, in addition to dynamic optimization.

Natural Resource Economics : Notes and Problems

Average customer rating:

Natural Resource Economics : Notes and Problems
Colin Whitcomb Clark Jon M. Conrad
Manufacturer: NY
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000MUC9HA

Books:

Books Index

Books Home

Recommended Books