Government Books - Page 3

Event History Modeling: A Guide for Social Scientists (Analytical Methods for Social Research)

Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier, Bradford S. Jones

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Don't read this book. 2 out of 5 stars.
5 of 14 people found this review helpful.

This book witnesses the long-standing prejudice that non-math or non-stat people would prefer books which drop all the mathematical or logical gimmichks. I could know nothing about the methods from this book. This book does not provide necessary knowledge. Try Lawless or Lee's book. They employ some mathematics. But don't worry. If you are not a statistics major, you just pick up what you should know for your application.

Editorial Review:

Here is an accessible, up-to-date guide to event history analysis for researchers and advanced students in the social sciences. The foundational principles of event history analysis are discussed and ample examples are estimated and interpreted using standard statistical packages, such as STATA and S-Plus. Recent and critical innovations in diagnostics are discussed, including testing the proportional hazards assumption, identifying outliers, and assessing model fit. The treatment of complicated events includes coverage of unobserved heterogeneity, repeated events, and competing risks models. The authors point out common problems in the analysis of time-to-event data in the social sciences and make recommendations regarding the implementation of duration modeling methods.

The Success of Open Source

Steven Weber

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Editorial Review:

Much of the innovative programming that powers the Internet, creates operating systems, and produces software is the result of "open source" code, that is, code that is freely distributed--as opposed to being kept secret--by those who write it. Leaving source code open has generated some of the most sophisticated developments in computer technology, including, most notably, Linux and Apache, which pose a significant challenge to Microsoft in the marketplace. As Steven Weber discusses, open source's success in a highly competitive industry has subverted many assumptions about how businesses are run, and how intellectual products are created and protected.

Traditionally, intellectual property law has allowed companies to control knowledge and has guarded the rights of the innovator, at the expense of industry-wide cooperation. In turn, engineers of new software code are richly rewarded; but, as Weber shows, in spite of the conventional wisdom that innovation is driven by the promise of individual and corporate wealth, ensuring the free distribution of code among computer programmers can empower a more effective process for building intellectual products. In the case of Open Source, independent programmers--sometimes hundreds or thousands of them--make unpaid contributions to software that develops organically, through trial and error.

Weber argues that the success of open source is not a freakish exception to economic principles. The open source community is guided by standards, rules, decisionmaking procedures, and sanctioning mechanisms. Weber explains the political and economic dynamics of this mysterious but important market development.

(20040416)

Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control

Derrick Jensen, George Draffan

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Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Machine-readable identity cards are issued to prisoners, workers, and schoolchildren around the world. Tiny ID chips track every car, shirt, and razor blade purchased from every corporate manufacturer in America. Chips track--and control--humans and other animals. Exoskeleton armor makes soldiers invincible; mind-altering drugs make them incapable of remorse. Scientists design swarms of nanoparticles as weapons to target specific ethnic groups. Governments and multinational corporations gather gigabytes of information on every citizen’s race, family life, credit record, telephone conversations, employment history, buying preferences, favorite TV shows.

Welcome to Western civilization, 2004.

In their new collaboration for the "Politics of the Living" series, Derrick Jensen and George Draffan reveal the modern culture of the machine, where corporate might makes technology right, government money feeds the greed for mad science, and absolute surveillance leads to absolute control--and corruption. Through meticulous research and fiercely personal narrative, Jensen and Draffan move beyond journalism and exposé to question our civilization’s very mode of existence. Welcome to the Machine defies our willingness to submit to the institutions and technologies built to rob us of all that makes us human--our connection to the land, our kinship with one another, our place in the living world.

Welcome to the Machine is part of the "Politics of the Living" series, a collection of hard-hitting works by major writers exposing the global governmental and corporate assault on life.

Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World

Jack Goldsmith, Tim Wu

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Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Is the Internet erasing national borders? Who's really in control of what's happening on the Net--Internet engineers, rogue programmers, the United Nations, or powerful countries?
In this provocative new book, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu tell the fascinating story of the Internet's challenge to governmental rule in the 1990s, and the ensuing battles with governments around the world. It's a book about the fate of one idea--that the Internet might liberate us forever from government, borders, and even our physical selves. We learn of Google's struggles with the French government and Yahoo's capitulation to the Chinese regime; of how the European Union sets privacy standards on the Net for the entire world; and of eBay's struggles with fraud and how it slowly learned to trust the FBI. In a decade of events, the original vision was uprooted, as governments time and time again asserted their power to direct the future of the Internet. The destiny of the Internet over the next decades, argue Goldsmith and Wu, will reflect the interests of powerful nations and the conflicts within and between them.
Well written and filled with fascinating examples, this is a work that is bound to stir heated debate in the cyberspace community.
"A timely look at the ways that governments make themselves felt in cyberspace. Goldsmith and Wu cover a range of controversies, from domain-name disputes to online poker and porn to political censorship. Their judgments are well worth attending."
--David Robinson, Wall Street Journal
"In the 1990s the Internet was greeted as the New New Thing: It would erase national borders, give rise to communal societies that invented their own rules, undermine the power of governments. In this splendidly argued book, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu explain why these early assumptions were mostly wrong. By turns provocative and colorful...an essential read."
--Sebastian Mallaby, Editorial Writer and Columnist, The Washington Post

Collaboration: Using Networks and Partnerships (The Ibm Center for the Business of Government Book Series)

Thomas J. Burlin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Book arive on time and in excelent condition 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 3 people found this review helpful.

One of the better purchases I have made form Amazon considering that I have purchase others that were in horrible condition.

Editorial Review:

As government faces more complex problems, and citizens expect more, the way government delivers services and results is changing rapidly. The traditional model of government agencies administering hundreds of programs by themselves is giving way to one-stop services and cross-agency results. This translation implies collaboration--within agencies; among agencies; among levels of governments; and among the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. The first part of this book describes what networks and partnerships are. The second part presents case examples of how collaborative approaches have actually worked in the public sector, when they should be used, and what it takes to manage and coordinate them.

Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds (Complex Adaptive Systems)

Mitchel Resnick

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

interesting, but describes an old version of the software 3 out of 5 stars.
9 of 10 people found this review helpful.

This is a book describing the research of a team at MIT using a version of the educational language "Logo". Running in a simple graphical environment which supports multiple parallel operation of code in the same shared space. Write a few lines of code for an "ant", then let 1000 of them loose. The current version of this "StarLogo" system is written in Java, and available as a free download for anyone to play with.

The use of Logo is both a strength and a weakness of the approach. The strength is that the code is concise and easy to understand. The weakness is that there is only one source of the software, and anyone wishing to try it is limited to the available download. This would not be such a limitation if the book described the same version, but unfortunately things have moved on a lot since the book was written, and few (if any) of the examples will work without alteration.

As well as the development of the StarLogo system, the book covers experiments in emergent behaviour. Typical sections include how parameter and environment changes can affect the growth and development of simulated ant colonies, and a theoretical basis for those "phantom traffic jams" we have all experienced.

This book is certainly interesting if you are interested in developing parallel software simulations, or if you are interested in marginal computer languages, but don't expect the code to work without effort.

Editorial Review:

How does a bird flock keep its movements so graceful and synchronized? Most people assume that the bird in front leads and the others follow. In fact, bird flocks don't have leaders: they are organized without an organizer, coordinated without a coordinator. And a surprising number of other systems, from termite colonies to traffic jams to economic systems, work the same decentralized way. Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams describes innovative new computational tools that can qhelp people (even young children) explore the workings of such systems—and help them move beyond the centralized mindset.

Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering (Information Revolution and Global Politics)

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Editorial Review:

Many countries around the world block or filter Internet content, denying access to information—often about politics, but also relating to sexuality, culture, or religion—that they deem too sensitive for ordinary citizens. Access Denied documents and analyzes Internet filtering practices in over three dozen countries, offering the first rigorously conducted study of this accelerating trend.

Internet filtering takes place in at least forty states worldwide including many countries in Asia and the Middle East and North Africa. Related Internet content control mechanisms are also in place in Canada, the United States and a cluster of countries in Europe. Drawing on a just-completed survey of global Internet filtering undertaken by the OpenNet Initiative (a collaboration of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University, and the University of Cambridge) and relying on work by regional experts and an extensive network of researchers, Access Denied examines the political, legal, social, and cultural contexts of Internet filtering in these states from a variety of perspectives. Chapters discuss the mechanisms and politics of Internet filtering, the strengths and limitations of the technology that powers it, the relevance of international law, ethical considerations for corporations that supply states with the tools for blocking and filtering, and the implications of Internet filtering for activist communities that increasingly rely on Internet technologies for communicating their missions.

Reports on Internet content regulation in forty different countries follow, with each country profile outlining the types of content blocked by category and documenting key findings.

Contributors: Ross Anderson, Malcolm Birdling, Ronald Deibert, Robert Faris, Vesselina Haralampieva, Steven Murdoch, Helmi Noman, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, Mary Rundle, Nart Villeneuve, Stephanie Wang, and Jonathan Zittrain

Digital Crossroads: American Telecommunications Policy in the Internet Age

Jonathan E. Nuechterlein, Philip J. Weiser

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

With a new preface for the paperback edition

Telecommunications policy profoundly affects the economy and our everyday lives. Yet accounts of important telecommunications issues tend to be either superficial (and inaccurate) or mired in jargon and technical esoterica. In Digital Crossroads, Jonathan Nuechterlein and Philip Weiser offer a clear, balanced, and accessible analysis of competition policy issues in the telecommunications industry. After giving a big picture overview of the field, they present sharply reasoned analyses of the major technological, economic, and legal developments confronting communications policymakers in the twenty-first century.

Since the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, when Congress fundamentally reoriented the existing regulatory scheme, no book has cogently explained the intricacies of telecommunications competition policy in the Internet age for general readers, students, and practitioners alike. Digital Crossroads meets this need, focusing on the regulatory dimensions of competition in wireline and wireless telephone service; competition among rival platforms for broadband Internet service and video distribution; and the Internet's transformation of every aspect of the telecommunications industry, particularly through the emergence of "voice over Internet protocol" (VoIP). The authors explain not just the complicated legal issues governing the industry, but also the rapidly changing technological and economic context in which these issues arise. The book includes extensive endnotes and tables that cover relevant court decisions, FCC orders, and academic commentaries; a glossary of acronyms; a statutory addendum containing the most important provisions of federal telecommunications law; and two appendixes with information on more specialized topics. Supplementary materials for students are available at http://spot.colorado.edu/~weiserpj.

Modern Public Information Technology Systems: Issues and Challenges

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Editorial Review:

The nature of governance is rapidly changing, due to new technologies which expand public sector capabilities. Modern Public Information Technology Systems: Issues and Challenges examines the most important dimensions of managing information technology in the public sector. It explores the impact of information technology on governmental accountability and distribution of power, the implications of privatization as an IT business model, and the global governance of information technology. Modern Public Information Technology Systems: Issues and Challenges provides a fresh look at the evolution of federal technology and political accountability in governmental information systems. Descriptions of general policy and technical applications, as well as practical implementation guidelines make this book a must-have for professors, students, and practitioners.

Terror on the Internet: The New Arena, the New Challenges

Gabriel Weimann

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Terrorists fight their wars in cyberspace as well as on the ground. However, while politicians and the media have hotly debated the dangers of terrorists sabotaging the Internet, surprisingly little is known about terrorists’ actual use of the Internet.

In this timely and eye-opening volume, Gabriel Weimann reveals that terrorist organizations and their supporters maintain hundreds of websites, taking advantage of the unregulated, anonymous, and accessible nature of the Internet to target an array of messages to diverse audiences. Drawing on a seven-year study of the World Wide Web, the author examines how modern terrorist organizations exploit the Internet to raise funds, recruit members, plan and launch attacks, and publicize their chilling results. Weimann also investigates the effectiveness of counterterrorism measures and warns that this cyberwar may cost us dearly in terms of civil rights.

Illustrated with numerous examples taken from terrorist websites, Terror on the Internet offers the definitive introduction to this emerging and dynamic arena. Weimann lays bare the challenges we collectively face in confronting the growing and increasingly sophisticated terrorist presence on the Net. A publication of the United States Institute of Peace, distributed by Potomac Books, Inc.