Interpreting Company Reports And Accounts

Book Description

The one reference tool with the answers you need to do your job better!

Anyone who works with government contracting - whether you are a contractor or a federal contracting professional - knows how tough it is to keep on top of the contracting process.

Now there's a reference that delivers straightforward, easy-to-understand answers to every contracting question you have. Federal Contracting Answer Book is an essential resource that eliminates hours of frustrating, dead-end searches for accurate information and practical guidance.

Over 500 pages - over 200 answers! Every contracting professional will make this an integral part of the contracting process. Always at your fingertips. Always ready to provide you with the answers you need.

Use Federal Contracting Answer Book to

* Get the answers to your contracting questions … quickly & easily with keyword and index search capabilities
* Train new contracting and noncontracting personnel ... by providing answers to the most basic - and critical - questions about contracting
* Support the most seasoned contracting professionals ... by providing answers to questions about special circumstances * Learn what you need to know about federal government contracting ... broaden your knowledge and do your own job better

Book Description

This detailed study of the lived experience of legal academics explores not only the culture of legal academia and the professional identities of law teachers, but also addresses some of the most pressing issues currently facing the discipline of law. Given the diverse nature of contemporary legal scholarship, where does the future lie? With traditional doctrinalism, socio-legal studies or critical scholarship? What does academic law have to offer its students, the legal profession and the wider society? How do legal academics 'embody' themselves as law teachers, and how does this affect the nature of the law they teach and study? In the context of the RAE, the QAA and all the other pressures facing universities, legal academics discuss the realities of contemporary legal academia in the UK.

Amazon.com

Are we alone? As the search for extraterrestrial intelligence comes more and more into the mainstream, scientists like David Darling step up to explain what we know and what's possible. His book Life Everywhere explores the history and current state of the field called, perhaps unfortunately, astrobiology. Devoted neither to organisms skimming the sun's surface nor to possible signs of intelligence among celebrities--though not explicitly rejecting these phenomena--astrobiology is concerned with the basic questions of life: What is a living organism? Is it common, or likely, elsewhere in the universe? Is it worth trying to communicate across light years? Darling, an astronomer and science journalist, has a knack for explaining complexities and fine details that carries his prose forward where other authors have foundered; the reader is swept up in the enthusiasm of the researchers Darling describes. Writing of the astronomical search for signs of life far off in the galaxy, he captures the thrill of this work:

Their efforts will revolutionize astrobiology, more so perhaps than spacecraft parachuting down out of the orange sky of Titan or roving the rock-strewn deserts of Mars. The world-shaking headlines of the next twenty years will likely come from giant instruments, on the ground and in Earth orbit, gazing with far sight at the planetary systems of other stars.

Since most research germane to the field has been done here on Earth, Darling explores such hot topics as heat vents and other geothermal mini-biomes, meteoritic dissection, and, of course, SETI's radio telescope arrays. Mars, Venus, and the moons of the outer planets are all major characters, and their stories will reinvigorate most readers' excitement about the prospects of having neighbors just down the cosmic street. Ending with a set of hypotheses and brief explorations of their ramifications if shown to be true, Life Everywhere is an outstanding and thought-provoking look at what could ultimately be the most world-shaking research ever conducted. --Rob Lightner

Book Description

The scientific story of the coming centurythe inevitable discovery of life on other planets and what it will mean for our understanding of earth.

To many people, the main question about extraterrestrial life is whether or not it exists. But to the scientific community, that question has already been answered: It does. So confident are scientists of the existence of life on other planets that they've invested serious amounts of money, time and prestige in finding and studying it. NASA has started an Institute of Astrobiology, for instance, and the University of Washington, Seattle, began in September 1999 to accept graduate students into its Department of Astrobiology.

Life Everywhere is the first book to lay out for a general reader what the new science of astrobiology is all about. It asks the fascinating questions researchers are asking themselves and one another: --What is life?

--How does it originate?

--How often does life survive once it arises?

--How does evolution work?

--What determines whether complex or even intelligent life will emerge from more primitive forms?

--Informed by interviews with most of the experts in this nascent subject, Life Everywhere introduces readers to one of the most important scientific disciplines of the coming century.

Customer Reviews:

Nice change of perspective from "Rare Earth" .......2006-03-25

I think this is a good book to read after reading "Rare Earth". The writing style is definately more casual and as if you are inside the mind of Darling, compared to the more "here's the information" style of other books. It took a while to get used to it, but in the end it was a nice change to have that type of commentary.

The book does a good job of covering the various areas of astrobiology, however, I think Rare Earth probably does a better job in talking about a few things. This is one reason why I recommend reading Rare Earth first. The other reason obviously being the critique of the Rare Earth hypothesis, and one section that totally rips apart Guillermo Gonzalez's "hidden agenda" as he calls it. The two books are kind of like listening to a debate, and both seem to have good arguments in some place but slightly unreasonable arguments in other places. Overall it gives you a good feel for where we stand today in our knowledge and what we can reasonably assume about the possibility of life elsewhere (microbial or complex).

At times I did feel like Darling was being a bit unfair to the Rare Earth authors - attacking them or the book a bit too much. But in the end he settled down.

Overall a good book that complements Rare Earth well.

Includes a blistering critique of the "rare earth" hypothesis.......2006-01-12

Two things have happened in recent years to persuade most scientists that life beyond earth is not just possible, but likely. Indeed some people, including myself, believe there is, as the title of David Darling's book has it, "Life Everywhere."

Well, not in the center of the sun or on the surface of a neutron star--at least not life as we know it.

"Life as we know it." This is an important phrase that comes up again and again in discussions about astrobiology. "Life as we know it" means life with a carbon base and liquid water. David Darling considers silicone-based life and even life forms so bizarre that we wouldn't recognize them if we saw them, but basically he sticks with life as we know it in this very interesting answer to those who think that life in the universe is rare.

The two things:

(1) The discovery of extremophiles, bacteria that live in sulfurous hot springs, deep inside the earth, and at the bottom of deep oceans. Instead of deriving their energy from the sun, they are able to use heat coming from within the earth to metabolize.

(2) The discovery of scores of planets (albeit not earth-sized planets--yet) revolving around other stars.

What the first discovery means is that life doesn't have to exist or begin in conditions such as there are or have been on the surface of the earth, but can thrive in places previous thought hostile to life. That opens up a whole lot of the universe to life including parts of our solar system previously thought inimical to life, such as in an ocean under the icy crust of Europa or beneath the inhospitable surface of Mars. And the fact that planets are now clearly plentiful means that there are numerous places for life to develop.

Darling, who is an unusually lucid writer and a man who gets to the bottom of things, begins with the nitty-gritty problem of just how to define life. If you haven't been introduced to this strangely knotty problem, this book may open your eyes. Do we consider reproduction, metabolism, growth, etc. in our definition? And which of these elements are essential and which are not? The postmodern definition now preferred by most people I have read is "undergoes Darwinian evolution." Is that adequate? Is that the essence? Darling puts all the cards on the table and lets you decide.

Next Darling recapitulates ideas about how life began. The main new idea is that life may be an inevitable consequence of the nature of matter and energy. It appears that matter is self-organizing. Darling reviews the ideas of how lifeless matter might replicate and how cells might develop from various molecules and water. These "leaky membranes" could be the precursors of the first biological cells. (p. 40)

He goes on to make the case for a universe with abundant life. But along the way he presents a blistering critique of Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe (2000) by Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee, in which it is argued that the circumstances that allow life are rare and that those circumstances as seen on earth are unlikely to be replicated anywhere else. Darling not only utterly destroys their argument, point by point, but even shows that part of the reason that it was advanced was because they were under the influence of one Guillermo Gonzalez, professor of astronomy at the University of Washington, who is also a creationist with the usual supernatural agenda.

This was bombshell to me. But Darling shows that nearly every argument that Gonzalez makes is designed (pun intended) to discredit the idea that there is life anywhere but on earth. On page 112, Darling refers to an article entitled "Live Here or Nowhere" co-authored by Gonzalez for a publication called "Connections" published by Reasons to Believe, Inc. of Pasadena, California, whose mission is "to communicate the uniquely factual basis for belief in the Bible." The article concludes, "The fact that the sun's location is fine-tuned to permit the possibility of life--and even more precisely fine-tuned to keep the location fixed in that unique spot where life is possible--powerfully suggests divine design."

A couple more points:

First, Darling argues that life forms on other worlds, however dissimilar their chemistry, are likely to be familiar to us in the sense that if there is an atmosphere, some will have wings, and if there is an ocean, some with have fins, if there is a solid ground to walk upon, some will walk and run, and if there is light to see, some with have eyes. This idea of "convergence" is dictated by the laws of physics which requires evolutionary adaptations to take forms that work efficiently within certain environments. Of course if the life forms we eventually discover exist in great dust clouds, their adaptations may be very dissimilar and surprising. Even on solid ground here on earth some run and some hop, some crawl and some slither.

Second, since it is now known that bacteria spores can exist more or less indefinitely (some have been revitalized after hundreds of millions of years of dormancy: see page 150), the once discredited idea of panspermia, namely that life originated elsewhere in the universe and arrived here as spores, has been rejuvenated. Personally, I've always liked this idea championed by Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe; however this book has convinced me that life could arrive from without or develop from within. Either way (or both) seem likely to me.

Is extraterrestrial life widespread?.......2004-12-22

This book is actually in the form of a long essay defending the hypothesis that life, at least in microbial form, is widespread in the Galaxy.

The author starts by trying to define life. Is it replication? Evolution? Metabolism? Next, he discusses the question of the atmosphere of the early Earth. A reducing atmosphere might produce complex organic molecules in some warm little pond. But the Earth is unlikely to have had such an atmosphere then. That leads to the question of where life originated. Near ocean vents, or on (or just under) the ocean floor? And when life originated. Over 4 billion years ago? When the Earth was still being bombarded by bolides?

The author then discusses meteorites, along with the possibilities for them having brought organic molecules (or even life) to Earth. After that, there's some material on extrasolar planets, including "hot Jupiters," which may migrate right through a stellar system, wiping out all the rest of the planets in it.

A very interesting section is Darling's critique of Ward and Brownlee's book, "Rare Earth." That book contains the view that although microbial life is probably widespread on other worlds, multicellular life (and especially intelligent life) will prove to be rare. Actually, that view, while a minority one, is unremarkable. After all, there is good evidence that unicellular life originated rather quickly on Earth while multicellular life took quite a bit longer. But Ward and Brownlee go further than that, claiming that several things about Earth are special and unusual: the Moon, the exact spacing between catastrophic events, being in the right part of the "habitable zone," having Jupiter to shield it from heavier bolide bombardment, having a high metallicity Sun, having plate tectonics, and being in the right part of the Galaxy! Darling presents interesting rebuttals to these points. And he finishes the chapter by pointing out that a collaborator of Ward and Brownlee, Guillermo Gonzalez, keeps finding signs that the Earth is unique. Darling asks if Gonzalez is letting his religious beliefs influence his scientific views (Gonzalez says that his views that life's origin involved the personal involvement of a supernatural creator have motivated his science and vice-versa). Um, that is a good question. Still, I wonder if that's altogether fair. Ought we ask about Simon Conway Morris, whose religious beliefs support his views on convergence? Or about, say, Fred Hoyle, with his views on panspermia? Or about Freeman Dyson, whose scientific ideas seem rather independent of his religious views? Or about, um, me?

In any case, Darling continues with the debate between Stephen Jay Gould and Simon Conway Morris. Gould argues for divergionism, and says that were we to "replay the tape of life," the odds are that the chordate worm that first incorporated what became the human body plan would have been lost and there would have been no humans. Conway Morris argues for convergionism, and says that no matter what specific species survive, niches tend to get filled. And that means that some creatures very much like humans would have evolved had we replayed that tape. Darling agrees, and adds that even intelligence appears to be convergent.

The author then tells about upcoming space missions to look for life in the solar system and to discover more about extrasolar planets.

Darling concludes that life is a universal phenomenon, life's most important characteristic is to engage in Darwinian evolution, life originates on planets and moons, planets are very common, the evolution of life involves contingency and convergence, and life can be both planet-wide and refugial. But he says that future events may get us to change our minds on some of this. What if we find life on Mars? Or find definitive evidence that Mars has always been sterile? Or find life (or even find complex life) on Europa? What if we spot an atmosphere on an extrasolar planet that suggests life abounds there? What if we find bacteria in interstellar space? What if we find life based on silicon instead of carbon? Or make contact with extraterrestrial artificial life? And while it might be tough to verify it, what if we were to discover that there is no other intelligent life (or no other life) in the universe?

While it wouldn't surprise too many people, the author says it would also be significant were we to verify the existence of a very deep, hot biosphere such as the one Thomas Gold has proposed.

This book is easy to read and informative. I recommend it.

"Politically Correct".......2003-10-17

This is one of eight books on Astrobiology which were rushed out after the publication of Joseph's revolutionary and ground breaking text, in May of 2000. Like the other seven competing volumes, this text differs from Joseph's, in that it strictly holds to the "party" line, as approved by the United States government, and repeats, without any critical analysis, mainstream scientific dogma. Now, don't get me wrong. Although he avoids mentioning Joseph's book--which clearly triggered the writing of his own--Darling does an otherwise good job of provding a "politically correct" overview of the status quo. If you are interested in the views held by mainstream, government funded scientists, this is the book for you.

Must read... but beware..........2002-07-07

I would definitely recommend to buy and read this book, but beware... this book is very thought provocing! I have had a Christian (Catholic) education and although I have always been very interested in exact sciences, I never read a book before that challenges you to reconsider so fundamentally the origin of life. I bought this book from Amazon.com ZShops and even now, 6 weeks later, it is not yet completely finished because I needed time after every chapter to let sink down the information.

This book very clearly explains what astrobiology is about and gives you lots of ideas to think about.
One minor point : the writing style is not always very fluent.
Overall a really good book and a must have !

I welcome other people that want to discuss the content of this book with me : send me an e-mail !

Product Description

This long-awaited biography of Fritz Haber, now abridged by the author and translated into English, illuminates the life of one of the most gifted yet controversial figures of the 20th century. Haber was a pioneer in electrochemistry and thermodynamics and won the Nobel Prize for his synthesis of ammonia, a process essential for both fertilizer and explosives. His dedication to work spurred his efforts to increase support for scientific study in Germany; yet it also helped cause the breakdown of his two marriages. His ardent patriotism led him to develop chemical weapons for World War I and to try to extract gold from seawater, to help pay for Germany's huge war reparations. Yet Haber, a Jew by birth, was exiled from his homeland in 1933 by the Nazi party and died shortly after.

Customer Reviews:

an excellent biography.......2006-10-04

Fritz Haber was one of the great chemists. This biography, written by the son of one of his co-workers is magnificent in that it is thorough, informative, extremely well-researched, replete with references to additional literature.

Well worth reading by anyone interested by the First World War - the allies went into the war thinking that if worst came to worst, Germany would run out of nitrates, which were then the only known source for the nitrogen needed to make gunpowder, and ergo gunpowder, and be forced to surrender. Little did they reckon with Fritz Haber's genius - he devised a method to extract nitrogen out of the air - and the war tragically continued. Stoltzenberg devotes some thought to what sense this accomplishment made, but other authors may have devoted more pages to this subject. This book will appeal to any reader fascinated by German history, or by the history of chemistry.

Great book on a complex man.......2004-04-27

This biography illuminates the life of one of the most gifted yet controversial figures of the 20th century. Haber was a pioneer in electrochemistry and thermodynamics and won the Nobel Prize for his synthesis of ammonia, a process essential for both fertilizer and explosives. Haber's work has helped feed billions of people, but he is often remembered for his role in the poison gas attacks of World War I. Despite his ardent patriotism, Haber, a jew by birth, was exiled from his homeland in 1933 by the Nazi party.

Book Description

The contributions gathered in this volume provide introductions to current problems in geospace electromagnetic radiation, guides to the associated literature and tutorial reviews of the relevant space physics. Students and scientists working on various aspects of the terrestrial aurora or magnetospheric and near-Earth heliospheric high-frequency waves will find this volume an indispensable companion for their studies.

Book Description

Twain's classic tale of the "Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County: is in three parts: the original tale published in 1865, the first French translation of the story, and Twain's tongue-in-cheek verbatim retranslation into English.

Customer Reviews:

The Jumping Frog.......2006-03-09

Mark Twain's "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calavaras County" is a story of the crusty Jim Smiley, a man who so loved to bet on animals - horses, dogs, cocks, etc. - that he trained a frog to be the strongest jumper in the county. This illustrated edition of Twain's classic tale is in three parts: the original tale published in 1865, the first French translation of the story, and Twain's tongue-in-cheek verbatim translation "to the English after maryrdom in the French."

Throughout, Twain's broad yet graceful humor is beautifully complemented by the elegant woodcuts of Alan James Robinson. Finely reproduced, these illustrations bring Twain's comic tale to life.
--- from book's back cover

Book about the perils of translation.......2006-02-27

The Jumping Frog is an interesting tale, but this book is more about the difficulties of translations than about the Jumping Frog itself. You can probably find the Jumping Frog in other collection of Twain's books, so don't bother to buy this book if you are only interested in the tale. It is only a three-page tale.

To make a long story short, the Jumping Frog was translated into French with the objective of demoralizing Twain's humor. Obviously, the humor in this tale was more in between the lines and in the form it was written than about the story itself (which was silly and not funny.)

As Twain says, however, the translator "has not translated it at all; he has simply mixed it all up; it is no more like the Jumping Frog when he gets through with it than I am like a meridian of longitude." To prove his point, Twain proceeded to translate the French translation "back into a civilized language" [i.e. English] to show that the French translation did not do justice to his work.

This book has the original tale in the first pages, then the French translation, and then the English version of the French translation.

It is more a personal vendetta from Twain than a work of literature. But it is an interesting work for those interested in translation.

Book about the perils of translation.......2006-02-27

Mahhvelous Dahhlink!.......2000-07-22

This is a super book, to read aloud or for kids to try on their own. The pictures are fun and Twain is (of course) delightful. You won't regret buying this book.

The Jumping Frog. In English, Then in French, Then Clawed Back Into a Civilized Language Once More By Patient, Unremunerated Toil.

Average customer rating:

The Jumping Frog. In English, Then in French, Then Clawed Back Into a Civilized Language Once More By Patient, Unremunerated Toil.
Mark TWAIN
Manufacturer: Harper & Brothers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000MEB6L6

Books:

Books Index

Books Home

Recommended Books