Setting Standards for Financial Reporting: FASB and the Struggle for Control of a Critical Process

Book Description

The book begins with an overview of how and why the present self-regulatory arrangement for setting standards for financial reporting in the private sector came about in 1973. A brief description of the new structure is followed by a discussion of the essential elements of meaningful self-regulation. A schism emerged between advocates of neutrality and objectivity in standard setting and those who think the primary concern should be for possible economic and social consequences. Early clashes between traditional views and newer insights are described, setting the stage for an account of serious resistance to change. Powerful interests mount determined efforts to thwart the standard setters, undercutting not only self-regulation, but also the intent of the federal securities acts of 1933 and 1934. The practical and philosophical bases for the opposing views are examined, and recommendations are presented for ensuring continuation of private-sector standard setting despite the intensity of these views.

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Study Guide: Project and Contract Management (Professional Study Guide)

Manufacturer: Chartered Institute of Purchasing & Supply
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Purchasing & Buying | Industries & Professions | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 1861240899

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Study Guide: Project and Contract Management (Professional Study Guide)

Manufacturer: Chartered Institute of Purchasing & Supply
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Purchasing & Buying | Industries & Professions | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 1861240783

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Study Guide: Project Management and Contract Management for Purchasing and Supply
M. Moore
Manufacturer: Chartered Institute of Purchasing & Supply
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 1861241186

Book Description

Since the first edition of The World Trading System was published in 1989, the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations has been completed, and most governments have ratified and are in the process of implementing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). In the Uruguay Round, more than 120 nations negotiated for over eight years, to produce a document of some 26,000 pages. This new edition of The World Trading System takes account of these and other developments. Like the first edition, however, its treatment of topical issues is grounded in the fundamental legal, constitutional, institutional, and political realities that mold trade policy. Thus the book continues to serve as an introduction to the study of trade law and policy.

Two basic premises of The World Trading System are that economic concerns are central to foreign affairs, and that national economies are growing more interdependent. The author presents the economic principles of international trade policy and then examines how they operate under real- world constraints. In particular, he examines the extremely elaborate system of rules that governs international economic relations. Until now, the bulk of international trade policy has addressed trade in goods; issues inadequately addressed by policy include trade in services, intellectual property rights, certain investment measures, and agriculture.

The author highlights the tension between legal rules, designed to create predictability and stability, and the governments need to make exceptions to solve short-term problems. He also looks at weaknesses of international trade policy, especially as it applies to developing countries and economies in transition. He concludes with a look at issues that will shape international trade policy well into the twenty-first century.

China in the World Trading System - Defining the Principles of Engagement

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China in the World Trading System - Defining the Principles of Engagement
Frederick Abbott , and Frederick M. Abbott
Manufacturer: Springer
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Business Law | Reference | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

Commercial | Business | Law | Subjects | Books

General | Law | Subjects | Books

General | Taxation | Law | Subjects | Books

General | International Law | Law | Subjects | Books

International Law | Law | Professional & Technical | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 9041106316

Book Description

China's constructive integration into the world trade and economic system is of the utmost importance to the people of Asia, to the United States and other OECD countries, and to the international community as a whole. The Chinese economy of decades past -- under the rigid domination of state planners and isolated from the outside world -- is substantially transforming to market orientation and openness to trade. The future path of the Chinese economy, now the second largest in the world, will strongly influence the path of economic development in the Asia-Pacific region, and with it the path of the world trading system. This book brings together leading international trade law and economics experts, government officials responsible for the formulation and implementation of trade policy with China, and business executives at firms with significant interests in China, to consider the future of trade policy for and with China. The World Trade Organization (WTO) stands firmly as the third pillar of the system of international institutions designed to promote a world of peace, financial stability, and economic development. This book focuses on China's prospective accession to the WTO -- a step that would commit China to following the rule of law in international trade. The terms of China's accession will provide guideposts for accessions by other former command economy countries, including Russia. Bringing China into the WTO system is vital to the WTO and to the future of world trade. So too is assuring that the accession is accomplished in a way that preserves the open character and rule orientation of the system.

The World Trading System - 2nd Edition: Law and Policy of International Economic Relations

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The World Trading System - 2nd Edition: Law and Policy of International Economic Relations
John H. Jackson
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OR3CX6

The World Trading System: Law and Policy of International Economic Relations

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The World Trading System: Law and Policy of International Economic Relations
John H. Jackson
Manufacturer: MIT Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OR8S4O

Book Description

A mesmerizing challenge to orthodox cosmology with powerful implications not only for cosmology itself but also for our notions of time, God, and human nature -- with a new Preface addressing the latest developments in the field.

Far-ranging and provocative, The Big Bang Never Happened is more than a critique of one of the primary theories of astronomy -- that the universe appeared out of nothingness in a single cataclysmic explosion ten to twenty billion years ago. Drawing on new discoveries in particle physics and thermodynamics as well as on readings in history and philosophy, Eric J. Lerner confronts the values behind the Big Bang theory: the belief that mathematical formulae are superior to empirical observation; that the universe is finite and decaying; and that it could only come into being through some outside force. With inspiring boldness and scientific rigor, he offers a brilliantly orchestrated argument that generates explosive intellectual debate.

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Enlightening Contrarian View of the Universe.......2007-06-17

Evidence has been accumulating that suggests The Big Bang DID happen. However that in no way diminishes Eric Lerner's insights here. In fact, this book makes recent discoveries all the more comprehensible and puts them in context. Every subject Lerner touches on, he clarifies by contrast with his own more rebel view.

Then again, Lerner might still be correct even in his basic premise that any signs of a "Big Bang" are just local effects in a universe that's much vaster than we yet understand.

In either case, this book poses the right sorts of questions and presents an alternative to prevailing ideas about how the universe was formed. Lerner elaborates on the theories of Hannes Alven and makes the stunning suggestion that electromagnetic effects might have been more instrumental than gravitational effects in shaping the galaxies. I had always taken it for granted that Newton's large-scale laws of mass and force were the key operators at work. But of course! There are other forces that might have played a role, even in the vacuum of interstellar space, which is really not such a vacuum after all. Lerner opened my mind to a whole new realm of possibility.

One section of his explanation of Alven's work on electromagnetic forces was a little opaque to me. But almost all the rest of this book was clearly written, providing lucid, remarkable insights into some of the great debates and theories of physics and astronomy in general.

For example, Lerner gave me one of the best insights into the value of chaos theory that I've run across. All I'd previously been able to garner about chaos theory was the idea that small effects can produce large, unpredictable consequences - something that seemed self-evident. But Lerner makes the significance of chaos theory clear, showing why it doesn't reduce to just household commonsense.

Then he provides some overall insight into how much of modern physics has become a matter of adjusting "the facts" to conform to the requirements of a priori equations. He demonstrates with specifics how physics has become a matter of building pyramids of mathematical abstraction, then positing reality to be what the highest point of mathematical construction concludes it must be. He suggests this process should be reversed to conform to the original practice of the scientific method. In this traditional method, observation informs the inputs to equations - not the other-way-around. So for example, he criticizes the way in which "dark matter" was considered to be a reality simply because its existence was demanded in order to make the latest round of equations balance.

Along the course of all these discussions, Lerner provides clear historical accounts of discoveries made from Archimedes to Einstein. So right or wrong about The Big Bang, he offers the reader an intelligent, highly accessible grounding in some of the fundamentals of physics and astronomy.

If you like informed, but controversial and contrarian scientific views - you might want to go on to read Elaine Morgan's work on evolution, starting with "The Descent of Woman." She believes that many of the traits that distinguish humans from other apes came about, not as adaptations to a masculine hunting lifestyle, but more as mother-child adaptations to a semi-aquatic habitat.

Three books in one.......2007-04-27

The Big Bang Never Happened is really three books in one: (1) A criticism of the Big Bang (2) A description of the "Plasma Universe", an alternative to the Big Bang (3) A summary of the history of science.

Some of the criticisms of the Big Bang are perhaps a little out of date now, but in general they still stand. One of the earlier reviews is quite wrong: black holes have not been "seen", cannot be seen, and will never be seen. They are inferred. Likewise, dark matter has not been "seen", etc etc. The argument is that the theory fails because hypothetical esoteric physics is required to bolster the theory.

Of course recent observations continue to be consistent with the Big Bang, but hardly a month goes by when astronomers are not surprised by new observations that require yet another ad hoc explanation.

Since The Big Bang Never Happened was first published in 1992, the Plasma Universe theory has continued to receive support among certain plasma physicists. Special issues of the IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science have published articles on the subject in Dec 1992, 2000 (on space weather), 2004, with a forthcoming issue in Aug 2007.

As Lerner points out in his book, the Plasma Universe is based on accepted tried and tested laboratory physics, in contrast to the esoteric theoretical physics of the Big Bang.

While the book is a little dated, recent books such as Don Scott's The Electric Sky bring the subject right up to date, and show that the criticisms still hold, and they Plasma Universe is as valid as ever.

Note that Lerner's criticism of the Big Bang does not automatically mean the the Plasma Universe is correct, but equally, recent observation claimed to support the Big Bang does not automatically mean that the Plasma Universe is incorrect. Sites such [...] is useful for more information.

I can thoroughly recommend this book to all, it will certainly make you think about the subject, rather than relying on the words of others.

A must-read for anyone interested in philosophy of science and its evolution.......2005-08-26

It is not just a most readable book, but the thesis that confronts two ancient hypothesis -according to Lerner- that one of creation ex nihilo and evolution, or, Big Bang and plasma cosmology is really most appealing... to effect such a paradigm shift, to accept plasma cosmology, does not have to do with religion, or philosophy, even less with science, but with money and power... there is too much effort and money inverted in the old paradigm, to expect a change, in spite that all observations have demostrated that the big bang is dead.

My congratulations to the author!

Edgar

This title says the truth.......2005-01-23

I am a theoretical physicist and I can tell you that there is much more truth in the name of title The Big Bang Never Happened, than can be found in the numerous books about the big bang created universe. One may search the Internet for the Cosmology Statement Open Letter to the scientific community, published in New Scientist, May 22-28 issue, 2004, p. 20. This letter was written by a number of scientists from different countries. It has been signed so far by more than 200 researchers from around the world. I can only greatly appreciate Eric Lerner, the author of The Big Bang Never Happened, for showing the fundamental flaws of the current theory. There were no computers, no spacecraft observations, no chaos theory and no fractals by the time the foundations of the big bang theory, i.e. the relativity and quantum mechanics, were made.

One must have this book together with books from Benoit Mandelbrot, Steven Strogatz, Eugene Savov, Tom Van Flandern, Halton Arp and William C Mitchell if one will not like to live in a new dark age, created from a helpless, based on obsolete paradigms, self-serving science.

Seriously outdated.......2004-09-09

As others have mentioned, the alleged discrepancies between standard BB cosmology's predictions and astronomical observation are rather out of date. For exampled, since this book's publication, high resolution CMB data has revealed the predicted fluctuations.

Other reviewers complain that BB cosmology is no longer conceptually simple, and hold this as a great flaw. One even appealed to Occam's Razor! Perhaps an analogy will clarify this: the Copernican, heliocentric model was quite conceptually simple. It's only failing was a lack of predictive power -- in other words, it's predictions failed to match observation. Kepler and Newton came along later and made more accurate predictions about the orbits of the planets -- with a more complicated model. In the 20th century, Einstein's general theory of relativity (a *very* complicated way of looking at the world, compared to Newtonian mechanics) provided even more precise predictions that correctly accounted for the previously unexplainable "anomaly" of Mercury's orbit.

William of Occam laid forth the idea that when choosing between two theories *that give equally accurate predictions*, one generally prefers the simplest. The choice between Copernicus' theory and Kepler's Laws is not such a case -- Kepler's Laws made better predictions. The choice between Newtonian and Relativistic mechanics is not such a case -- Einstein's theory is more precise.

Just because a theory is complicated, doesn't mean it's wrong!

Book Description

Welcome to Silicon Valley -- where fortunes are fast, dating's dysfunctional, and computer geeks rule. Meet Paul Armstrong, a late-twenties computer "consultant" who sits in his cubicle at TeraMemory wondering where it all went horribly wrong.

"Well, I wasn't always a nerd. I started out as a liberal-arts type in college -- though I aggressively concealed this on my resume. Hiring managers don't like it. Non-technical outside interests. Bad sign."

Watch him order a latte from the of?ce coffee cart and poke at his Chinese lunch special while his longtime pal Steve Hall, hacker extraordinaire, accuses him of selling out to The Man.

"When the money dries up, this place will be just like anywhere else. It was never the place, anyway -- that's what The Man will never understand."

Meet The Man himself: Barry Dominic, the ?amboyant, lecherous, millionaire founder of TeraMemory. He insists they're poised to revolutionize networking with a cutting-edge technology, appropriately called WHIP.

"Nobody fucks with Barry Dominic."

That's where Liz Toulouse comes in. A Stanford English Lit grad and TeraMemory marketing associate, she accidentally cc's the entire company a snide e-mail about The Man's bad grammar on her very ?rst day....

"If only I'd had any idea. I'd have stayed in school. I'd have changed majors. Gotten a master's. Anything."

Welcome to Silicon Follies, a hilarious dot.comedy of ambition and disillusionment in a land of luck, loss, and sometimes even love.

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Welcome to Silicon Follies, a hilarious dot.comedy of ambition and disillusionment in a land of luck, loss, and sometimes even love.

Customer Reviews:

Extremely funny and well-observed novel.......2006-08-08

Silicon Follies is an extremely funny and well-observed novel that, in the wake of the [...] meltdown, reads like prophecy. This is the book Michael Lewis and Po Bronson wanted to write. But as a longtime Silicon Valley software engineer turned author, Scoville has the real goods. While this could have been one more screed against those naughty dot.coms, Scoville writes about the Valley with a manifest good humor and wit reminiscent of Tom Wolfe in his "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" period. Scoville does an excellent job of capturing the messianic, "we-can-do-no-wrong" attitude that pervaded the Silicon Valley during the go-go 1990s. The book provides a timely answer to the question posed by a recent New York Times article on the deflation of the dot.com boom: "How Did So Many Get It So Wrong?" By putting you inside the heads of characters like corporate CEO Barry Dominic, Scoville shows how intelligent people get trapped by their own hype and by a tight-knit social environment built around work, in which no can seem to think "outside the box" of their business models. The book is particularly funny and accurate in describing what it's really like to be a programmer; the episode "Programming in Vampire Mode" garnered rave reviews from programmers when it was released on Salon.com. Programmers are the heroes of the book, and Scoville gives them the best lines--many of them had me laughing so hard I was gasping for breath. Scoville manages to flesh out and humanize programmers in a way that I've never seen in any medium. But while the novel focuses on a software company, it also provides a much broader picture of the Silicon Valley, including the many nearly-forgotten people who are either not involved in computing, or refuse to go corporate. For example, Scoville offers excellent and amusing portraits of the plight of liberal arts majors in the Valley--doomed to low-paying, low-autonomy jobs in marketing, if they make it onto the corporate bandwagon at all. Scoville is perhaps most effective in portraying the talented hackers who populate the Valley and who attempt to keep the original spirit of creativity and craft alive in software, despite the dumbing-down influence of corporations. Like a heat-seeking missile, Silicon Follies locates the most satire-worthy aspects of life in the Valley--crazy corporate behavior, megalomaniac "visionaries," the devaluation of anyone and anything not involved in producing or selling computer products, and the generally inhumane environment. But the large dose of expertly-deployed humor Scoville employs means his message goes down sweet rather than bitter.

Source document for Silicon Valley culture.......2004-11-01

Say what you want about the prose, plot, or author's intentions. Fact is, this book has been used in a number of business school curricula, cited in Andrew Ross' book, _No Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Discontents_, made into a television pilot by Ron Howard's Imagine Television (starred Judy Greer in the role of Liz), and discussed widely in academic circles. Surely it touched some kind of nerve -- whether you agree with it or not.

not deep, but funny.......2002-11-10

I've read the previous reviews, and I agree that the characters are two dimensional, but I enjoyed the book a lot anyway. The descriptions ARE funny and engaging. The characters aren't really the POINT of the book, it's about a lifestyle, and I had trouble putting it down. I disagree with the reviewer that found the writing poor; I think the writing is great for what it is, the choice of wording ofter perfect. Comedies don't usually examine character in depth!

Where's the art?.......2002-06-20

Silicon Follies is like a diamond in the rough; the plot is structured and well thought out, but the prose, narrative tone, the simple art of telling a story, these things are neglected. In other words, the novel has a compelling story, but it is not told well. This is more like an Idiot's Guide to Silicon Valley, where the narrator has to fill you in will a couple of paragraph's of back story, just so you will know, or so that you, the reader, might actually get the inside joke. All this explanation makes the reading quick. Skim through this one, you'll need to in order to get to the action.

Silicon Follies reads more like a documentary than it does a work of fiction. Elements of art and craft are absent. This novel reads like a polished first draft, like Scoville's personal notes, copy edited and spell-checked. Some to the scenes are contrived, obvious devices, where his characters can take a few pages to explain the last few months. Some scenes only exist so that Scoville can make a joke or lash out at one of his characters. The novel becomes a pastiche of scenes constructed so that Scoville can level one or two sarcastic remarks at these too-dimensional characters. This is the kind of writing that is reminiscent of Salon.com's Survivor commentary, funny on the web in four or five page doses and when you have already seen the episode on TV, but this style does not work in this novel. Here, the narrator works to distance the reader from the characters, to keep us away from their lives.

Most of the book is narrative summary, glossed over as quickly as possible. Through out the novel, the characters do not develop much, especially the main characters; they just burn out, get sick of the place or fall of the back of the boat. There is a lot of potential here. Alas, if only the writing was better.

Very Amusing Portrayal of an Era........2002-04-05

People who worked in the high tech industry are going to love this book! I've never worked in Silicon Valley (even though I have worked in NYC's Silicon Alley), but still, this book rang so true. The book doesn't really have a main character, but instead focuses on the tales of a few people. Paul Armstrong: a programmer, Liz Toulouse: the liberal arts graduate who tries to work in high tech, Steve Hall: the free bits hacker (Free Bits = Open Source), and Barry Dominic: the CEO of a multinational technical company, TeraMemory. The plot covers a period in the life of these characters in the crazy events which took place around 1999-2000 - the internet bubble era. As part of the story we get to see the environment, coworkers, workplaces of the main characters - the author has truly captured the essence of these. But more than just a very accurate portrayal of the time, "Silicon PFollies" is simply a funny book!

I guess people who have never worked in high tech might not get all the inside jokes (I'm not sure I got all of them either), but I believe they will still enjoy a very amusing book - and get some of what it meant to be a part of the internet craze - I couldn't help but feel a bit nostalgic as I read about the CEO's "motivational speeches"..

The dot.com period might've been an illusion, but it still was quite an experience for me - and I think this book relays that feeling quite well. Highly recommended!

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Silicon Follies
Thomas Scoville
Manufacturer: Pocket
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000O6IHPK

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