Intermediate Accounting, Chapters 15-25, Working Papers

Customer Reviews:

GREAT BOOK.......2001-09-27

THIS BOOK REALLY HELPED ME WITH MY ACCOUNTING PROBLEM. THE INFORMATION WAS VERY INFORMATIVE. THOSE AUTHORS ARE GREAT. I AM INTERESTED IN PURCHASING CHAPTER 1-14

KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK

SANDRA ROLLE

A useful addition to the textbook........1999-10-16

Useful if you are having trouble with figuring out how the information given becomes the report shown in the textbook. Expands on the subject matter, gives useful hints and methods, and shows you how to do things the right way.

Working Papers for Intermediate Accounting, Volume II, Chapters 15-25

Average customer rating:

Excellent for self study
Wordy and heavy
Accounting can sound less confusing than explained here
boring
Excellent Instruction

Working Papers for Intermediate Accounting, Volume II, Chapters 15-25
Thomas R Dyckman , Roland E Dukes , and Charles J Davis
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill/Irwin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

Study Guide, Volume 1, for use with Intermediate Accounting

ASIN: 0072422467

Customer Reviews:

Excellent for self study.......2006-04-26

The book not only teaches you how to book accounts, but also why to do so, which I rarely found in other comparable accounting books. It helps you understand the logic behind the accounting rules. The author is both a good teacher and good reseacher. I love this book!

Wordy and heavy.......2003-05-28

I have been using this book for an Intermediate Accounting class that I have to take as a pre requisite for a Master's degree. Even though the book is quite complete in explaining accounting principles it is unecessarily wordy and extremely heavy.

The first five chapters (220 pages) provide a review of what accounting is, the accounting information system, the income statement and the balance sheet. Most of the what is written here is either too basic or will be later found in the remaining chapters of the book. These pages could be easily removed without sacrificing the remaining contents and the understanding of accounting.

Later chapters, however, are also wordy and take too much time explaining concepts that could readily be understood in a couple of lines. You end up getting tired of reading the same thing again and again.

In the end, we have to pay the price for so many pages. With 1300 + pages this book is the heaviest one I have ever carried around. Many people in my class have to use a wheeled backpack. I sometimes can't understand the fascination of editors in the US for such heavy books. If you go to Europe, Asia, and South America, books are usually thinner and much, much lighter.

I would recommend the book to be offered in a CD Rom (or e text) format. Carriyng my laptop around makes more sense than carrying the book.

Accounting can sound less confusing than explained here.......2002-08-08

This book for undergraduate accounting classes at the junior level was more confusing to me than the comparable book by Kieso et al. The sequence of the chapters is not entirely logical. More advanced concepts seem to be covered towards the beginning whereas some basic chapters are discussed towards the end of the book. It was especially confusing when not covering the chapter in chronological order - too bad that my class's syllabus was not outlined according to this book's chapter sequence. In a different class - when we used Intermediate Accounting by Kieso - jumping back and forth was not a big problem. This book by Spiceland also seemed to be very wordy. Studying by solving problems at the end of the book seemed to work. However, it is more important to know how your teacher designs the quizzes and exams and then study accordingly. On the CD that comes with it, there is a lot of ballast. The quizzes are the only valuable thing, I felt. There is not really a lot of use complaining about its weight - accounting books always seem to be extremely heavy and pricy. But this certainly holds true for this one as well!!! When I tried to resell the book at the university bookstore, they would not take it back because it was selling badly on a national scale. Very frustrating when you paid [$$$] just a couple of months earlier...

boring.......2002-05-30

This book put me to sleep. It is a very bland book. This is based on the volume one edition chapters 1-14.

Excellent Instruction.......2001-10-19

Straightforward and logical, the material in this text is so well laid out that it is truely possible to learn Intermediate Accounting on your own. An excellent sequential and progressive presentation of a difficult subject! My school has changed texts and is using Kieso's text, but I want to learn the material (all but impossible with Kieso) so this is the text I rely on!

Book Description

This hands-on book tells you how to quickly determine performance needs before investing precious time and resources. When trainers, consultants, and problem-solvers need to figure out what's wrong with an organization--and they need a solution fast--they need this book. Needs assessment is about doing things right; performance analysis guarantees doing the right thing.

Rossett offers extensive guidance on:

Accelerating a performance analysis

Overcoming organizational obstacles

Using technology in analysis

Presenting the results of an analysis . . . and much more!

You'll get job aids, templates, and implementation examples that direct you through the basics of performance analysis. Carefully selected case studies further illustrate the text.

Visit the First Things Fast online coaching and information system and get information about how to encourage analysis in the organization and what strategies are best for doing it. This online information and coaching tool, designed by award-winning author Allison Rossett, offers planning tips and tools to get things done . . . fast!

Customer Reviews:

hands-on guide that is immediately useful.......2001-05-11

Overall, this book is a straightforward examination of performance analysis that explains why p.a. is more practial than traditional "training." It's a godsend for people who have to implement a plan right away because of the abundance of checklists and templates. I have some minor criticisms though since I have read several books in a similar category. 1 -- the author does not write as professionally as others (Rothwell, for example, who wrote Beyond training and Development) and spends too much time touting her earlier books 2 -- often the information borders on the extremely obvious 3 -- the book is overpriced as many textbooks are. P.A. boils down to the fact that it's really a "casing the joint" type of strategy -- get a general idea of the situation before diving in. All this fancy terminology for such a basic idea... still, it can definitely save a company a lot of time and money to do this common sense approach before spending money on training.

Guess who's coming to dinner.......2000-11-30

This book serves as the first course at a performance analysis dinner-it whets the appetite and entices the reader to look further and deeper. It provides the reader with tasty morsels of information without weighing the reader down in the heavier technicalities of performance analysis. First Things Fast is a quick and easy reference for the professional trainer and one that I will keep on hand for future use. It addresses the situation as it is-the way things are-and provides concrete examples and solutions for those involved with the process. Because of the quick and easy reading that characterizes the book, I would recommend this book to those who are seeking a basic understanding of performance analysis without wanting to invest a great deal of time. I would also recommend it to those who want a quick reference for use in their performance analysis work (the templates are an effective starting point for the line of questioning which needs to occur). First Things Fast has the potential to be an extremely useful tool for those individuals who are in the position to decide what needs to be done and why.

An illuminating, practical guide for performance consulting.......1999-09-30

Rossett makes a very useful distinction in this book between performance analysis and training needs analysis. She recommends an action-oriented consulting approach that ensures the real problems and potential solutions are identified before selecting training as an intervention. Her approach is practical and recognizes the time and resource constraints that learning consultants, managers, and their companies operate within. I have ordered copies for all of my staff!

Great guide to quick human performance analysis.......1998-11-05

This book is a great help for anyone who is asked to analyze a performance problem. It provides a series of checklists and job aids to help someone figure out what's going on and how to fix it. It considers lots of problems and teaches you how to decide if the employee needs instruction, motivation or a changed environment. I really enjoyed this very practical and easy to read handbook; it avoids all the theory and jargon and puts the emphasis on analyzing human performance problems in a quick, efficient manner.

Book Description

Contemporary astronomers continue to search for ways to understand the irregular distribution of galaxies in our Universe. This volume describes gravitational theory, computer simulations and observations related to galaxy distribution functions, which is a general method for measuring the distribution of galaxies and their motions. Coverage embeds distribution functions in a broader astronomical context, and includes other contemporary topics such as correlation functions, fractals, bound clusters, topology, percolation and minimal spanning trees. Throughout, theory, computer simulation and observation are carefully interwoven and critically compared, and key results are derived and the necessary gravitational physics provided. The book also shows how future observations can test the theoretical models for the evolution of galaxy clustering at early times in our Universe. This clear and authoritative volume is written at a level suitable for graduate students, and will be of key interest to astronomers, cosmologists, physicists and applied statisticians.

Customer Reviews:

Good book, good experiments.......2007-05-20

The book is not of recent publication but the experiments are good in order to teach and to show the children how beautiful and easy is the chemical experimentation in order to motivate the interest to study sciences.

Science for Kids 39 Easy Chemistry Experiments (Science for Kids)

Average customer rating:

Science for Kids 39 Easy Chemistry Experiments (Science for Kids)
Robert W. Wood
Manufacturer: Tab Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Chemistry | Science, Nature & How It Works | Children's Books | Subjects | Books

General | Science, Nature & How It Works | Children's Books | Subjects | Books

General & Reference | Chemistry | Science | Subjects | Books

General | Science | Subjects | Books

Book Description

This book looks back at the simpler versions of mental life in apes, Neanderthals, and our ancestors, back before our burst of creativity started 50,000 years ago. When you can't think about the future in much detail, you are trapped in a here-and-now existence with no "What if" and "Why me?" William H. Calvin takes stock of what we have now and then explains why we are nearing a crossroads, where mind shifts gears again. The mind's big bang came long after our brain size stopped enlarging. Calvin suggests that the development of long sentences--what modern children do in their third year--was the most likely trigger. To keep a half-dozen concepts from blending together like a summer drink, you need some mental structuring. In saying "I think I saw him leave to go home," you are nesting three sentences inside a fourth. We also structure plans, play games with rules, create structured music and chains of logic, and have a fascination with discovering how things hang together. Our long train of connected thoughts is why our consciousness is so different from what came before. Where does mind go from here, its powers extended by science-enhanced education but with its slowly evolving gut instincts still firmly anchored in the ice ages? We will likely shift gears again, juggling more concepts and making decisions even faster, imagining courses of action in greater depth. Ethics are possible only because of a human level of ability to speculate, judge quality, and modify our possible actions accordingly. Though science increasingly serves as our headlights, we are out driving them, going faster than we can react effectively.

Customer Reviews:

Savannah spear chucker to Shakespeare.......2004-10-17

Always a lively and informative read, Calvin has capped his many fine works on the human intellect with this book. Never hesitant to propose novel ideas, he incorporates fresh thinking on the cause of our consciousness. "Stories around the campfire" depicts his theme - the campfire for cooking meat and the narratives exchanged among the diners. The meat implies hunting and the conversation implies speech and complex thinking. Only humans engage in these practices - how did that come to be? In this provocative and compelling book, Calvin answers this and other questions with his usual expressive style. Abetted by explanatory diagrams and photographs, he takes us back to a distant time in searching for our origins. We learn what makes us unique among primates and are given a view of possible future paths.

No work in anthropology can ignore our primate relatives. Calvin's opening chapter asks "what is it like to be a chimpazee?" This query raises the point of similarities and differences among primate species. Apes have fair-sized brains and useful "hands". While some hunt, some use tools and all vocalise, only humans developed those capacities fully to create complex societies and learn to write books - or plays and poetry. All fossil evidence, plus genetics, Calvin reminds us, indicate our origins lay close to what chimpanzees exhibit today. How did we change from a forest-dwelling ape to one living in nearly every habitat and babbling expressively?

For Calvin, environment shifts are a major driving force in evolution - perhaps none more so than in the case of human evolution. Variations in climate drives adaptation, and our ape-like ancestors were challenged by some severe, and possibly abrupt, shifts. More than simply more or less frequent rainfall, these changes modified whole habitats. Our ancestors had to relocate, shift lifestyles or both. Calvin argues that the shift meant a new existence, a new diet plus gaining some additional skills.

The new diet was meat. With the human brain consuming 20 per cent of the body's resources just to "tick over", a high protein source is a necessity. Primates are mostly vegetarian, with chimps adding some termites and the occasional monkey for dinner. Shrinking rainforests reduced available fruits and nuts, leaving meat as a more significant diet item for the new ape. There are two ways of obtaining meat - scavenging it or hunting it. Scavenging means waiting for leftovers or chasing away predators. Either is risky. Active hunting is more direct, but requires complex skill sets involving vision, muscle coordination, memory capacity and predictive skills. The act of spear-throwing, which Calvin calls a "structured suite" had to be a "package deal" of muscle functions directed by a developing cortex. To Calvin, the "package deal" implies a sudden rise in evidence for complex human cognition. With bipedalism a foundation, the new ape could build thinking capacity with tool-making, spear throwing for meat to feed the demanding processor of these activities. Only after the mind was able to handle involved thinking could language emerge, adding to the brain's capacity, while furthering more cognitive development.

Calvin recognises the sudden apparent rise in complex thinking of fifty thousand years ago as a given. Many recent fossil finds, plus weapons, cave paintings and linguistic analysis support the notion. While it has taken some time for anthropologists to accept that sudden burst in symbolic thought, it is now the consensus view. The causes of "the Great Leap Forward" remain obscure and debateable. Calvin's proposal will assuredly add to that debate. Not the least of his critics will be the "gender feminists" who abhor biological causation in any form. Yet it's clear his scenario suggests males, as hunters, drove the "cognitive explosion". He anticipates the strident chorus that will greet his proposal, but dismisses it easily. With his engaging style and solid experience in neurobiology, this book will bring new focus to our intellectual roots.
[stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Ontario]

NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME.......2004-09-18

For a short book, (fewer than 200 pages), Dr. Calvin provides a wealth of information from a wide variety of scientific disciplines, and a HUGE bibliography. He approaches evolutionary cognitive development from the standpoint of a neurobiologist.

He has excellent, entertaining quotes to begin and finish many chapters, and nice illustrations. He provides brief (one paragraph) chapter summaries in the Table of Contents. I read that first, and reread individual chapter summaries before and after each chapter. In chapter 8, he discussed this structured, obsessive, pattern-seeking behavior of mine.

Here is the plot: 7 million yrs ago, we emerged from the apes. Bt 160,000 yrs ago, we were homo sapien. By 50,000 yrs ago, we were homo sapien sapien - same physique, same sized brain, just soft-wired more elegantly. Dr. Calvin says, "It's just in the last 1% of that up-from-the-apes period that human creativity & technological capabilities have really blossomed. It's been called 'The Mind's Big Bang'."

How did this happen?

On page 153, he listed 5 candidates, all of which he said were probably operative, but he has a favorite. (Interestingly, he leaves out Matt Ridley's favorite from THE RED QUEEN; that it's all about the battle between the sexes.) In Dr. Calvin's theory, "Evo-Devo," he relies on syntax development and spear-throwing skills as catalysts to the "Mind's Big Bang," and spends a lot of of time explaining his thoughts. He is obviously very well informed about language development. I won't try to explain this complex theory here, but I did think it had merit. I thought, however, that for the crown jewel of his book, it was not presented clearly enough.

I began to wonder where gene change was going to fit in. As I read, I searched for indications that the current brand of natural selection was in play. In one segment, he suggested what sounded exactly like vertical transmission of memes, although he didn't call them memes. He extrapolated this into the future, saying, "a number of present day human abilities have some potential for future elaboration even without natural selection." I couldn't help but wonder what Richard Dawkins would think about this. It sounded awfully Lamarckian to me.

As the plot unfolded, the existing product (our minds) was shown to be jury-rigged and unfinished, in evolution's usual fashion...so, as humans, we have tendencies to misinterpret in our own favor, rationalize, use faulty logic, wage war, etc. In short, we are "NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME."

This book is well-written, extensively researched, and entertaining, about a subject in which informed speculation appears to be the state of the art. Too bad we don't have hard evidence for the "how" of evolutionary cognitive function such as what mitochondrial DNA is to geneology.

I recommend this book highly, and am inspired to read more on the subject, probably from books he mentions. Because his charts in chapter 8 were unclear, I give him a 4.

The rise of "beyond the apes" intelligence.......2004-08-25

The central event in this book is the human mind's so-called "big bang" which occurred some 90,000 to 50,000 years ago.

(These are neurobiologist William Calvin's numbers from page 111 where he notes that "it now appears that humans were behaviorally modern before the last great Out of Africa" which is now understood as taking place between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago, as determined by the latest tweaking of the mitochondrial DNA dating data.)

Professor Calvin leads up to this event by starting with the proto ape that was our ancestor (and the ancestor of modern apes) that lived some seven million years ago. He takes us from that ape's jungle habitat to the woodlands, where our ancestors learned to walk upright, to the savannahs where they ran down, killed and ate large game animals. Somewhere along the way we got smart. But, Calvin wonders, did we get smart enough?

He sees a disconnect between our abilities and the world we have inherited. He asks: "Where does mind go from here, its powers extended by science-enhanced education and new tools--but with its slowly evolving gut instincts still firmly anchored to the ice ages?" Are we just a "rough-around-the-edges prototype, the preliminary version that evolution never got a chance to further improve before the worldwide distribution occurred?" (p. 178)

In other words, are we using Stone Age instincts to cope with Information Age problems? It is interesting to note that in psychologist Keith Stanovich's recent book The Robot's Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin (2004) he is concerned with the same problem from an entirely different point of view. He writes about the "potential mismatches between the cognitive requirements of the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation and those of the modern world."

Of course the problem, as both writers point out, is that cultural evolution out-sprints the biological so that our genotypes are still in the woodlands and on the savannahs as the ice ages come and go while our phenotypes have to deal with traffic jams, weapons of mass destruction, and the paperwork for our HMOs.

One of Calvin's more intriguing ideas comes from his dictum that "behavior invents and...New form follows new function." (p. 159) He argues that the higher intellectual functions of humans came from the development of a "structured suite" of brain machinery that "is shared in part with some nonintellectual functions." (p. 94) He sees "accurate throwing" as part of this structured suite, and argues that learning to hit a moving target (say a small animal), because it involved several parts of the body (hand, wrist, arm, shoulder--and eyes and legs for that matter) in close coordination, several parts of the brain were used simultaneously as well. Consequently a "structured suite" developed in the brain that later was used for the development of symbolic language. What he is saying is that, the syntax of language--that is, the "something" does "something" to "something": the subject-verb-object structure of language that works so magically for us--actually came from the body's experience running down game in Africa.

I think Calvin is on to something here because that syntactic structure which is common to people everywhere, regardless of what language they speak, mirrors the action of the world. What is important in the environment is what is being done or what is happening (the verb), by whom and to whom (or what): the bull gores the lion; the monkey peels the fruit, the wind blows the tree down, etc.

Another of Calvin's pet ideas is that education "perhaps more than any of the imagined genetic changes" is what will best help us cope with the challenges of the modern world. (p. 184) He argues that if children are exposed to "structured stuff" at younger ages, and if they can "softwire their brains to better handle" such stuff, "the more precocious children will soon double the amount of structured speech heard by the next generation." (p. 154)

Of course our brains are still being "softwired" after we leave the womb and for some many months afterwards as our experiences serve to strengthen certain neurons and discard others. It seems, however, that Calvin is getting at something larger here, a kind of quasi-Lamarckian accelerated evolutionary process. Indeed I think he intends this example as a possible explanation for the "big bang" that took place in the Pleistocene. To be honest I have no idea whether he is right or not. Certainly it is an interesting idea.

Interesting is this comment from page 104: "[M]uch of [our] higher intellectual function seems half-baked, what you ordinarily see in a prototype rather than a finished, well-engineered product. Perfection you don't get, not from Darwinian evolution...But culture...can sometimes patch things up, if society works hard enough."

This is my first experience with reading Calvin, and I can say that reading this book is like engaging in a conversation with a wise and learned man who likes to share his ideas.

Interesting to a weekend "scientist".......2004-08-05

Dr. Calvin has done an excellent job detailing the history of how mind development may have transpired over the last several hundred thousand years. While I have no formal education on the subject, I was able to easily comprehend and enjoy most of the book. There are a few chapter towards the middle and the end where he seems to go off on technical tangents that are rather dull and long winded. But the first several chapters concerning early forms of the mind are incredibly enlightening and make for good reading. He also does a commendable job of speculating about future "expansions" of the minds ability, which he believes we are on the brink of. The only other complaint I have is that the good doctor lets his current political opinions taint his message substantially, particularly towards the end of the book. I was disappointed in that. But overall it was a good book, but I will bet there are better on the market, although I haven't had the good fortune to sample any others just yet.

Thought provoking yet personable .......2004-08-03

This is a thought provoking yet personable survey of the evolution of our species' mental abilities. I read it after I'd written my book, "Concept: A ProtoTheist Quest for Science-Minded Skeptics", else I might have used some of his ideas in my chapters eight and nine (I do reference two of his earlier books). He elaborates and illustrates many of the concepts (tho' sometimes he uses `concept' were I'd use `percept'). However he largely ignores the functions of the pre-, sub- and un-conscious, yet speculates on "The Future of the Augmented Mind." Also, while he mentions on pages 171-2 "the evolutionary trajectory we've been on," he doesn't elaborate (as I do in chapter eleven) and thus has difficulty sustaining his optimism about our future.

A Brief History Of The Mind : From Apes To Intellect And Beyond

Average customer rating:

A Brief History Of The Mind : From Apes To Intellect And Beyond
William H. Calvin
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OKSOIQ

Average customer rating:

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE MIND from Apes to Intellect and Beyond
William H. Calvin
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000JV9XUI

The Brief History of the Mind: From Apes to Intellect and Beyond.

Average customer rating:

The Brief History of the Mind: From Apes to Intellect and Beyond.
William H. Calvin
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OKFYJI

Customer Reviews:

Things Change Prayer.......2004-02-11

"The Prayer Amendment" is a seamless read that little betrays its status of "first novel." It is not a long book, but the rich character development in the space available makes me wish the book perhaps were a little longer, for the purpose of knowing more about the believable and for-the-most-part likeable people created by Dennis S. Hale. The plot unfolds efficiently and economically. It is, as I believe Hale intended, a cautionary tale for our time, lifted from Alabama politics and culture with disturbing faithfulness.

In the book a conservative, feckless governor endorses a law requiring the recitation of a Christian prayer in Alabama schools. School children--with the faith of children--begin praying in earnest, and things for which they pray begin coming to pass. Hilarity and more serious consequences ensue.

Are the prayers being answered? They seem to be. Is this good? People are getting well, and dictators are abdicating. Aside from the obvious breach of the separation of church and state, what is the downside? Fat Cats in the defense and health industries are getting restless and laying people off in the face of declining demand for their products and services. So, the repentant governor becomes one of the book's heroes by leading the fight to repeal his own problematic law. I'm positive Hale regards this as a good turn, yet the governor's motivation is the rescue of those who profit from suffering.

This created confusion for me. It seems in "The Prayer Amendment" the good guys win for the wrong reasons, and, conversely, the bad guys lose but under less-than-satisfying circumstances. And the governor's epiphany, to me, was not convincing unless taken from the charitable view that, indeed, with God all things are possible.

A Baptist missionary and a Unitarian Universalist pastor, Dennis S. Hale is, I suspect, attempting to present all sides of the issues he raises, while championing personal faith and secular government equally. "The Prayer Amendment" is a wonderful book for those who love to begin a conversation with, "What if...".

A must read fable!.......2004-02-01

Hale manages to take us into a surreal world where the nature of prayer is questioned, both as an expression of religious faith and as a bargaining chip for politicians. At the same time he weaves a delightfully wonderful and humorous tale. Hale's own faith in human nature shines through and where other writers might have been tempted to create villains, Hale presents to us a very human cast of characters in which all too often we catch glimpses of ourselves.

The Prayer Amendment review.......2003-08-02

Very interesting story of the innocence of children and the life of those around them. What would happen in our world if the prayers of our children were so clearly fulfilled as they are in this book? Although this book is occasionally "preachy", and not in the manner one would expect, the story itself is very intriguing and the characters are captivating. Susie and Emma, two school-aged girls around whom the story centers, keep the reader enthralled with their heartfelt prayers and the other characters jumping through hoops. It's a great read!

Books:

Books Index

Books Home

Recommended Books