Book Description
Getting Organized is a collection of simple ideas that address at least six major issues that could be generating chaos and disorder in your life. These ideas are presented in a simple format, with specific suggestions on how to put each idea to work, so busy people can find the time to read and try them. Simply stated, Getting Organized will help you improve your ability to focus, organize and prioritize.
Getting Organized includes tips, ideas and recommendations that are being successfully taught by corporate trainers and professional organizers in GO System training sessions all over the country. Even if you've tried unsuccessfully to get organized before, consider reading Getting Organized. You'll find effective solutions to your organizing challenges and will enjoy the benefits for years to come.
Customer Reviews:
Practical ideas that produce results.......2007-07-13
You won't get rich from simply reading a "How to Get Rich" book and you won't get organized and productive from just reading any book - you have to take action and implement the ideas.
I have used the principles and ideas outlined in "Getting Organized" for several years and found them to be extremely valuable.
Becoming more organized and productive is not a matter of what type of filing system or PDA you use, it involves making a habit of organized and productive behavior.
This book provides concrete tools for forming those habits. Simply outstanding!
a nice, integrated system.......2007-07-03
Crouch has some very solid ideas here, with practical applications. Worth looking at.
More at: Some thoughts from the book "Getting Organized" by Chris Crouch
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Look at the reviews carefully.......2007-05-10
I wish I would have looked at the reviews carefully before buying this piece of fluff! I now took the time to look at more than the gold stars and actually read those reviews, and it seems that 99.9% of them were written by people who have paid to have this author give seminars at their offices. I have a feeling they got a discount for each 5 star review they gave.
When you can't handle email or incoming/outgoing paperwork, no book OR seminar is going to help you ... perhaps your career path should begin with a McJob!
If you are looking for REAL organization books that apply to your home and office space, I suggest "Organizing From The Inside Out" and "Sink Reflections".
Will only be helpful for a few........2007-04-14
The book was NOT what I was expecting based on prior reviews. This is NOT a guide to life organizing and prioritizing but rather the author's idea of handling office incoming mail, a filing reminder system for phone calls to be made and work to be done, keeping things one needs to share with another individual in a central location, and scheduling and consolidating that sharing. For those who don't need a computer to do their job, have a memory like a sieve, or are super disorganized and don't know where to begin to start, this might be helpful, otherwise, save your money. His ideas are only practical in a low volume paperwork environment and with those who have non-technical professions. Some kind of portable, daily planner or calendar or a computer syncing PDA is much more practical.
Great Ideas to incorporate in everyday situations.......2007-03-18
Although the book was more concise than expected, I learned some values that I will always use. Recommend this book with its witty content.
Book Description
This broad, balanced introduction to organizational studies enables the reader to compare and contrast different approaches to the study of organizations. This book is a valuable tool for the reader, as we are all intertwined with organizations in one form or another. Numerous other disciplines besides sociology are addressed in this book, including economics, political science, strategy and management theory.
Topic areas discussed in this book are the importance of organizations; defining organizations; organizations as rational, natural, and open systems; environments, strategies, and structures of organizations; and organizations and society.
For those employed in fields where knowledge of organizational theory is necessary, including sociology, anthropology, cognitive psychology, industrial engineering, managers in corporations and international business, and business strategists.
Customer Reviews:
Dry, but thorough introduction to organizational behavior.......2007-09-28
If you want a survey of organizational behavior in academic writing style, this is for you.
Review .......2007-09-17
I bought this Organizations and Organizing: Rational, Natural and Open Systems Perspectives a month ago.It come on time.
This is a wonderful book for people who are interested in organizational theories.Very fundanmental.
Textbook review.......2007-09-14
My husband is getting his PHD in Public Affairs. Getting a break on books is a huge bonus. This site has been a great help with saving money.
excellent book for organization researchers.......2007-01-09
This brand new edition has added some new and prospecting materials. Great book for students in management and organization studies.
Book Description
Desk drowning in papers? No room for the car in the garage? Santa still sitting on the roof in May? A less-is-more philosophy is great, but we all still have way too much stuff. The home office swallows up whole rooms, as does the family computer station. Then there's the home gym, the TV room, and the playroom, not to mention our collections - books, CDs, toys. Time management experts agree that when the minor things that take up space in the mind are eliminated, there is room to think about the big things. The same goes for the home. The visual clarity that comes from de-cluttering rooms, finances, and time promotes mental clarity, peacefulness, and contemplation. When everything is organized, it is easier to enjoy the meaningful things in life.
Organizing Plain & Simple is like a course from an expert teacher, grounded in the fundamentals and enriched with philosophy, tips, anecdotes, illustrations - everything necessary to make home and life run more smoothly. Donna Smallin takes a personalized, nonjudgemental approach to explaining how to assess each individual's situation and suggesting where to start organizing - room by room - and then covers how to stay organized. Then she offers advice on organizing time and finances, as well as organizing for the seasons and for special events - the birth of a baby, combining households, a move, kids going off to college, successful downsizing. Smallin presents a broad range of innovative solutions in the running feature "One Challenge, Three Solutions" that includes tips for solving classic organizational issues from a wide range of professional organizers.
Customer Reviews:
Creative Ideas! Good Tips.......2007-07-15
In addition to the valuable information in this book, it is filled with tips and checklists that are well put together. The book begins by talking about organizing in general and then focuses on specific rooms, finances, time, home life, and transitions.
You're Smart, You're Disorganized, Smallin can fix that !.......2007-07-04
Donna Smallin's book delivers ! Organizing Plain and Simple, offers people a reasonable and concrete way to dig out from under the chaos. First, you declutter. Her excellent suggestions on how to finally accomplish this daunting task gives one hope that it can be done. No organizing cliches here, instead, yellow panels of ideas and actions targeted to specific problems appear among the text as quick, handy action steps to move you forward in your efforts.
She tells you what to write on labels, how to select storage options, ( disorganized people rarely measure, that's a problem), what to do if you can't seem to discard a particular item and reminds you that what you really want is to be surrounded by what you love. You learn how to keep what is left so you can find it everytime, and not spend money to replace "lost" items.
Donna Smallin is the sensible friend, who knows you and wants you to succeed, and she is guiding you to be able to do it yourself and to understand why and how.
You even get a reward at the end...the organized life you deeply desire...that now has room for better things, personal confidence, career success, pleasant surroundings and the time and ability to share your hospitality with others.
READ THIS SMART, INTELLIGENTLY WRITTEN BOOK AND RELEASE YOURSELF FROM CHAOS, CONFUSION AND CLUTTER FOREVER ! You deserve that joy.
Not worth it.......2007-06-27
A lot of what is in this book is just plain common sense that you probably already know. The reviewer is correct that this book is also lacking in focus - it's all over the place. I did not find this book either helpful or useful.
too much information.......2007-04-13
This shows the importance of finding self-help books that suit your personal needs. Someone who lives alone in an apartment will have different problems from someone who lives in a McMansion with five kids and three dogs. I'm always on the lookout for organizing and decluttering books and my place is always a mess. Fighting clutter is a never ending battle. However, while this may be a great book for some people, it wasn't tailored to what I needed. I feel overwhelmed by it. I don't need to know how to pack for a vacation or organize a move, for example. I'm good at those things. I don't need to know how to run a garage sale (not in this area). I don't need to know how to invest or pay bills or buy things on sale. What I need to do is keep the clutter at home under control without spending a fortune doing it. The book does have some good parts, but I'd say about 50% was useful to me. This doesn't mean I think the author did a poor job or that this book won't be a valuable resource to the next person. I did get it on sale, but I'll warn you that these books need to be carefully selected.
For the plain and simple.......2006-08-24
This book is 'oragnized' into sections - Getting Started, Organizing Room by Room, Organizing Finances, Organizing Time, Organizing Home Life, and Organizing Transitions.
Who needs an entire section telling you the benefits of being organized - isn't that why I bought the book? The author takes 'plain and simple' to new heights...for example - "To organize your refrigerator, start by uncluttering it."
I was hoping for something with more substance. There was nothing in this book that I didn't already know. If you're looking for something very basic as far as what to do in your home...you will like this book.
Book Description
The Council for Social Work Education (CSWE) new Curriculum Policy Standards are thoroughly discussed and incorporated in this new edition of this well-known book. Written from a community organizing and social change perspective, each chapter focuses on a specific community (e.g. Chicanos, Philipino-Americans, Southeast Asians). The chapter authors have followed a common format in applying relevant theories and methods of practice for community organizing to their specific communities, including coverage of child welfare, the Welfare Reform Act, AIDS, and other topics. Also, this new edition includes a discussion of the moral and ethical dilemmas inherent in organizing with communities of color. Social workers.
Book Description
Do you feel as though you are always running behind? You've tried setting your clocks ahead and getting up earlier, yet your days are still filled with last minute dashes to the finish line. Based on psychological studies and extensive research, "Never Be Late Again" reveals that chronic lateness is a surprisingly difficult habit to overcome, and its causes run deeper than just poor time management. In this entertaining and practical book, you'll discover:
- The root causes of lateness and procrastination
- How anxiety, time perception, and adrenaline affect time management
- The most common mistakes late people make
- Tips for overcoming the psychological obstacles that hold you back
- 7 unique and simple secrets to managing your time more effectively.
"Never Be Late Again" is sure to cure even the most dedicated late person. A bonus chapter for earlybirds offers effective tips for dealing with chronically late friends, family members, and employees - a must read for the timely.
Customer Reviews:
Solid, practical advice.......2007-09-05
Ms Delonzor starts by reminding us that bad habits develop because there's something beneficial to us lurking underneath the behaviors we want to change. Her approach is to help the reader find the underlying source of the unfortunate behaviors, and then to help the reader to redirect that energy in more useful ways.
The meat of the book is an examination of 7 different personality types that can lead to the end result of being chronically late. Once you find the type (or types) that ring true for you, you can use the exercises that the author offers for helping get over the punctuality problems they create. For example, I recognized that I fall into the Busy Syndrome trap: I try to over-fill every moment of the day with activity, then I aggravate the problem with ridiculously optimistic estimates for how long the activities will take. The exercises were simple and practical: find out how long your daily activities (showering, shaving, etc) actually take (I was shocked to realize that it takes 45 minutes for me to get from my morning workout to the office - I could have sworn it only took 15 minutes); practice transitions by giving yourself a fixed amount of time for a task before purposefully moving on to another task; and plan to be early.
A Thorough Synopsis.......2007-06-23
I am regarded as a dependable and responsible person, but I have struggled with punctuality for as long as I can remember. I always show up, but it may be 15 minutes after the time we agreed upon. This book addresses different thought processes that contribute to tardiness instead of implying the reader should just get there earlier. I am much more conscious of the effect tardiness has on me and the people associating with me. The author has heightened my awareness of the mistakes I make subconciously in my attempts to make it to appointments early. This is a must read for anyone who is fed up with the habit of tardiness and is ready to do something about it.
This book is great!!.......2007-04-28
This book is wonderful. The existing reviews say it all. It has really helped me. I bought it less than 24 hours ago and am already/only halfway through, but what I've read has already changed me. I'm so glad I found the book and so glad that it is so helpful! I really needed to make a change but never knew how or why I was always running late... always!! :) This morning, I was early to work! It was pretty funny actually, I sat in my car and read the book for 10 minutes.. but there I was, early to work, reading about how not to be late! :) This book is absolutely worth buying if you have a tardiness problem. What I've read and implemented has already improved my confidence and I am looking forward to no longer inconveniencing those around me! Thanks, Diana!!
Very good identifying different types of latecomers !.......2007-04-20
Reading this book is like attending a good seminar. It tells you exactly what you need, in the proper order. First it tells you why you should care about being late (and no, you didn't know all the reasons yet!). Then it explains how the mechanism works. Finally, it lists what you can do about it, with lots of practical tips for everyday life, and how to keep it up over time.
I particularly liked the chapters that described different types of "punctually challenged" people. I'm the type where discipline is the main problem; my mom is the type who rationalizes away how her tardiness affects others; and my dad is the Absent Minded Professor.
My book came with a personally autographed card by the author, which was kinda cool :)
it's no joke.......2007-01-31
When you've decided to get serious about your lateness problem and the effect it's having on your relationships, career, household, self-respect, dreams (asleep and awake) ... when your life, when you think about it, is really just kind of small and pathetic because you can not be on time, start here first! Make no mistake -- it WILL NOT change your life; only YOU can do that, but this book can point the way. I am not "cured" but this book gave me some great tools and insight! Good luck!
Book Description
Stuart Kauffman here presents a brilliant new paradigm for evolutionary biology, one that extends the basic concepts of Darwinian evolution to accommodate recent findings and perspectives from the fields of biology, physics, chemistry and mathematics. The book drives to the heart of the exciting debate on the origins of life and maintenance of order in complex biological systems. It focuses on the concept of self-organization: the spontaneous emergence of order that is widely observed throughout nature Kauffman argues that self-organization plays an important role in the Darwinian process of natural selection. Yet until now no systematic effort has been made to incorporate the concept of self-organization into evolutionary theory. The construction requirements which permit complex systems to adapt are poorly understood, as is the extent to which selection itself can yield systems able to adapt more successfully. This book explores these themes. It shows how complex systems, contrary to expectations, can spontaneously exhibit stunning degrees of order, and how this order, in turn, is essential for understanding the emergence and development of life on Earth. Topics include the new biotechnology of applied molecular evolution, with its important implications for developing new drugs and vaccines; the balance between order and chaos observed in many naturally occurring systems; new insights concerning the predictive power of statistical mechanics in biology; and other major issues. Indeed, the approaches investigated here may prove to be the new center around which biological science itself will evolve. The work is written for all those interested in the cutting edge of research in the life sciences.
Customer Reviews:
The science book to read. Six stars at least........2002-06-16
Stuart Kauffman has an MD and is a generalist. The book deals primarily with theory and understanding of computer simulations of state driven systems of large numbers of connected nodes. It examines how such systems evolve through mutation and gives a clear understanding of the limited role of natural selection in comparison to the self-organizing forces at work within such systems. It examines the meta-interaction of sub-systems of interacting states (attractor basins) that occur within a system. In English: it gives the first theoretical framework for understanding just how it is that cells which all contain identical DNA express themselves as some number of stable cell types. Normally a cell will react to a perturbation in whatever way will return it to its base stable cycle (attractor loop). One type of cell turns into another type when just the right perturbation kicks the system from one attractor basin into a different attractor basin.
This is heavier reading than his popular science book, At Home in the Universe, but preferable for anyone with the necessary tiny amount of knowledge of genetics and logic operations. There are few equations of any kind. The results apply to more than just biological systems.
The book is long because instead of just presenting a few principles that you can try to remember abstractly, he leads you through all the important steps of his research and gives you a real feel for how complex systems actually evolve and operate. The book raises more questions than it answers, as it should be for a book of such originality and importance.
When you fully grok the contents of this book you'll be so excited you'll want to rush and explain it to someone else, which will be utterly impossible, so you'll probably have to lend them your book, buy them the popular version, or face the fact that you are now relatively alone on a higher plane.
New paradigm shift in biology.......2002-04-14
The Origins of Order will be viewed in the future as a milestone in shifting the existing Darwinian paradigm in biology from a "survival of the fittest" (natural selection) to a new paradigm focused on explaining the "arrival of the fittest" through self-organisation.
Using a boolean (NK) network model and a extensive amount of biological facts, Stuart Kauffman demonstrates in a powerful
way the central role of self-organisation in the creative process of life. His vision that biology seems to operate
as self-organised non-linear dynamical systems at the edge of chaos will have as much influence in biology that a similar vision offered by Nobel prize winner Prigogyne in the field of thermodynamcis. The book connects a web of fundamental ideas from the fields of biology, physics, mathematics and computer sciences and requires a strong background in biology that I unfortunately did not possess. The laborious style, the lack of clarity in the writing and the (unnecessary) length of the book should not stop anyone from reading this amazing book.
Stuart Kauffman combines an intellect and a vision that only very few scientists possess. This book is a must.
Hopeful spontaneity.......2000-11-27
Kauffman believes that spontaneous self-ordering, which both simple and complex systems can exhibit, must be incorporated into evolutionary biology, along with traditional random variation and natural selection. Certain complex systems will be spontaneously self-ordering. Natural selection then tends to push such systems to the edge of chaos. In addition to advancing Kauffman's theories, this reference provides a good overview the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, a review of origin of life theories, a review of genetic regulatory theory, and a review of cell differentiation.
Best book I ever read.......2000-06-18
It took me a whole summer to read this book in 1993 and it is still the most amazing book I have ever read. If you are computer/mathematically inclined, have an interest in biology, and have enough time to digest it, this book will blow you away. It contains the most amazing hypotheses to come out since 1859. Unfortunately, it takes a huge investment in time to really read this book, but an epiphany awaits those who get through it.
Universe a point in 6n space.......2000-02-21
The deep future will see this as a very important book. The first to consider the deepest layer of reality. Anyone interested in GA's or ANN needs to start here. This book is pure foundation. Stand on it and you stand on solid ground.
Amazon.com
The best treatment I have yet encountered about how order emerges naturally -- and possibly even necessarily -- out of chaos. Profoundly important, and considerably more informed than better-known pop-science treatments of chaos theory. Very highly recommended.
Book Description
A major scientific revolution has begun, a new paradigm that rivals Darwin's theory in importance. At its heart is the discovery of the order that lies deep within the most complex of systems, from the origin of life, to the workings of giant corporations, to the rise and fall of great civilizations. And more than anyone else, this revolution is the work of one man, Stuart Kauffman, a MacArthur Fellow and visionary pioneer of the new science of complexity. Now, in At Home in the Universe, Kauffman brilliantly weaves together the excitement of intellectual discovery and a fertile mix of insights to give the general reader a fascinating look at this new science--and at the forces for order that lie at the edge of chaos. We all know of instances of spontaneous order in nature--an oil droplet in water forms a sphere, snowflakes have a six-fold symmetry. What we are only now discovering, Kauffman says, is that the range of spontaneous order is enormously greater than we had supposed. Indeed, self-organization is a great undiscovered principle of nature. But how does this spontaneous order arise? Kauffman contends that complexity itself triggers self-organization, or what he calls "order for free," that if enough different molecules pass a certain threshold of complexity, they begin to self-organize into a new entity--a living cell. Kauffman uses the analogy of a thousand buttons on a rug--join two buttons randomly with thread, then another two, and so on. At first, you have isolated pairs; later, small clusters; but suddenly at around the 500th repetition, a remarkable transformation occurs--much like the phase transition when water abruptly turns to ice--and the buttons link up in one giant network. Likewise, life may have originated when the mix of different molecules in the primordial soup passed a certain level of complexity and self-organized into living entities (if so, then life is not a highly improbable chance event, but almost inevitable). Kauffman uses the basic insight of "order for free" to illuminate a staggering range of phenomena. We see how a single-celled embryo can grow to a highly complex organism with over two hundred different cell types. We learn how the science of complexity extends Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection: that self-organization, selection, and chance are the engines of the biosphere. And we gain insights into biotechnology, the stunning magic of the new frontier of genetic engineering--generating trillions of novel molecules to find new drugs, vaccines, enzymes, biosensors, and more. Indeed, Kauffman shows that ecosystems, economic systems, and even cultural systems may all evolve according to similar general laws, that tissues and terra cotta evolve in similar ways. And finally, there is a profoundly spiritual element to Kauffman's thought. If, as he argues, life were bound to arise, not as an incalculably improbable accident, but as an expected fulfillment of the natural order, then we truly are at home in the universe. Kauffman's earlier volume, The Origins of Order, written for specialists, received lavish praise. Stephen Jay Gould called it "a landmark and a classic." And Nobel Laureate Philip Anderson wrote that "there are few people in this world who ever ask the right questions of science, and they are the ones who affect its future most profoundly. Stuart Kauffman is one of these." In At Home in the Universe, this visionary thinker takes you along as he explores new insights into the nature of life.
Customer Reviews:
At home in the universe, A New Proposal..........2007-04-05
In this book, Stuart Koaffman opens new doors to us. Through the theory of the chaos, proportions fractals and their networks boulinas, give an interesting speculation us on the origin of the life, the complex systems and the societies. It is hour to be on the awares and to try to focus to us in new horizons. This book took to him of the hand by these new horizons. It is hour to know our house in the universe...
Proposals to Unanswered Questions.......2006-09-16
Stuart Kaufman's At Home in the Universe is a lay redaction his scientific hypotheses from his Origins of Order, a rich, fascinating, sophisticated, and complementary set of hypotheses added to Darwin's theories of evolution. For the moment, at least, they are the promising fruit of speculative or theoretical biological hypotheses (with physics, chemistry, geology, paleontology, mathematics, game theory, and economics thrown in), but they go a long way to filling in many of the gaps that strict Darwinists seem content to ignore. And some of his hypotheses, he readily admits, are heretical.
One of the obvious problems, if not primary one, that Kaufman sets to answer, Is how can natural selection work, culling the fittest to survive, without something to act on? In other words, natural selection operates on the already existent (i.e., regressive engineering), not in the formation of the entity itself. Another problem is that 4 billion years, long as that is, is still not sufficient time for natural selection to have acted through a totally random, step-by-step process in determining today's survivors. Even 100 billion years would not be enough. Another problem is how could so many species have come into existence and failed to survive (99.9%), leaving a mere 100 million for the present, in the span of a mere 4 billion years (mathematically impossible on Darwin's theories alone).
The central theme of Kaufman's work is Self-organized Criticality, a scientific twist on the notion of irreducible complexity (from the Discovery Institute's lexicon, no less), where a minimal degree of inherent complexity in a subcritical-supercritical phase transition is what spontaneously orders the animate world and generates and sustains life in accord with other, as yet, unknown, but implicit laws. From the moment that a sufficiently critical diversity of molecules reached the ideal phase transition, life itself was "spontaneously generated" as inevitable, not by accident. Once life appeared, the acts of natural selection, adaptation, coevolution, evolution of coevolution, cellular, morphological, and physiological differentiation, ontogeny, niches, populations, stable cum-chaotic dynamics, etc., could operate, but in addition to forces beyond natural selection. And while speculative, apparently many scientists share Kaufman's intuitions, inferences, and insights.
But the "other" force or forces is not mystical, much less divine, even if they may be truly awesome. Rather, it is in the nature of the universe, and more particularly in our evolving earth, that these implicit laws work in tandem with Darwin's laws. At this point, these laws are posited from the empirical knowledge we do have, but have not yet demonstrated in the scientific manner to make them even hypotheses. But Kaufman's speculative biology is not a whimsical or arbitrary metaphysics, but logical inferences based on laws and facts already in place. Having done the easy work (thinking the notions of what these other general laws of nature must be like), now science must work in earnest to confirm or reject his speculative hypotheses.
The key word and concept throughout this humorous, heady, and exacting exposition is "complexity" and within the manifold complexities of lives, environments, and mutually intersecting dynamics is a spontaneous order that arises "for free" that in turn sustains stable and steady systems just at the subcritical-supercrticial phase transition (e.g., horizon, or "edge of chaos"). Another key word and concept is "dynamic." Steady-state and homeostasis are often thought of as a static plateau, but that is mistaken, as such states are actually in a fluctuating dynamic at the phase transition between equilibrium (death) and disequilibrium (disorder). Indeed, on many different levels, living organisms are born, dwell, and die precisely at this phase transition between the subcritical (stasis, moribund) and supercritical (chaotic, disordered) states. And the key thesis is that order ("for free") is embedded in the delicate balancing act precisely at this phase transition.
Kaufman extrapolates some of these implicit biological laws and applies them to human cultural and technological advancement. The "fit" is remarkably uncanny, helping us to understand some of the dynamics of technological improvements (and diminishing returns), innovation, extinction, and spontaneity of the economy. Perhaps the most salient features are the concepts of "dynamic" and "spontaneous."
Moreover, if an analogy can be drawn from the biosphere and ecology to the social and political realms, the overwhelming preponderance of biological evidence screams complexity, diversity, and interdependence of organisms and their environments, which arise spontaneously and reciprocally to each other, in a constant dynamic that is vibrant, active, and always on the threshold of "chaos," but retains some stability through change. It is only those social and political forms that are "adaptive" that are socially and politically the "fittest," and democracy and market economies are obviously the most adaptive mechanisms to adapt to changing human needs.
Frederick Hayek addressed himself to these very issues over 50 years ago, and called the market economy and democracies "spontaneous" associations, in contradistinction to "planned" economies and governments. The former "adapt" to changing environments and circumstances, while the latter lack flexibility, and thus do not easily yield to adaptive mechanisms. "Planned" economies attempt to calculate rationally human desires, motivations, and needs in either an abstract or a priori fashion, then calculate the mode of production, the degree, and whether to accommodate, as if some "Absolute Human Mind" could anticipate all contingencies and changes by a simple mathematical formula. The problem is that bureaucrats are notoriously theory-laden and too calculating to include, much less advance, diversity (think Medicare Part D for "planned" absurdity). In practice, socialisms impede innovation and stifle ingenuity. With no means of adaptation, there is no "fittest," much less any mechanism to adapt to the actual dynamics of the world.
Communism's planned economy is an extreme case of an irrational calculus asserting what the government will allow, applying the lowest-common denominator as a criterion of sufficiency. We all know of the U.S.S.R.'s food lines, limited products, forced housing, inferior merchandise, and minimal labor investment. But even weaker forms of the rational calculus, such as socialism, does not do much better. At least their democracies allow policies to change, even if it becomes years for government to adapt to the new exigencies. Even the most socialized societies have "capitalist" outlets, to provide some barometer of social wants and meeting them. Social insurance makes sense on many fronts, but social or state "planning" of economics has rotted state and worker. Kaufman's biological analogies explain why.
Postscript: Kaufman's book is a provocative, challenging, and fascinating (sometime heady) read. Even if all of his hypotheses in the abstract are found to be untrue, at least he captures the reader's imagination, and asks the questions that most of us non-dogmatic Darwinians have raised for some time. In a time when the "easy" and "orthodox" are all too convenient for slipping under the rug, Kaufman's questions (and suggested answers) go the the very nexus of the difficulties. His suggested answers are at once perhaps too simple, on the other hand, perhaps too complex. What is refreshing, above all, is that he's not afraid to ask, and even less fearful of suggesting solutions. Thank gawd for the Sante Fe Institute, where brave and curious minds still ask questions.
Fascinating Science Applicable to Evolution and Business.......2006-05-17
Stuart brings the science of complexity and complex adaptive systems to a broad range of topics from evolution to business to learning curves. The book is masterly written to allow you to skim over the formulas without lossing the excitement or to dig into the technology to understand its broad application.
A fascinating look at self-organization.......2005-01-18
We see a great deal of order in living systems. Where does this order come from? Is it entirely from natural selection? The author says no. He explains that much of the order we see in the world is spontaneous, such as in the symmetry of snowflakes, and that much of the order needed for the origination of life and in living organisms is of this spontaneous nature.
Kauffman is making a non-trivial point here, as the extent to which spontaneous order is more important than selected order is not entirely obvious. While a snowflake is indeed an example of a system that is highly ordered as it gets synthesized, that's not true of, say, a solar system, in which short-lived bodies quickly depart the scene in favor of long-lived ones. It's clearly significant that disordered entities tend to be shorter-lived and unable to replicate.
The author then addresses theories of the origin of life. Could it have started with RNA? After all, replicating RNA could then produce the needed proteins. Kauffman says no. The amino acid chains one would need would be too long to replicate accurately enough (the "error catastrophe"). I tend to agree. Besides, RNA is awfully fragile (DNA is not fragile). And once one hypothesizes that RNA has a template to keep it safe, one's theory is that templates came first.
Of course, the "error catastrophe" is devastating if the minimum complexity of a living cell is rather large. Kauffman argues that this minimum complexity is indeed large, and that it is no accident that there are hundreds of genes in pleuromona, perhaps the simplest free-living (non-virus) organism.
Spontaneous order also refutes the argument of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe that life could not have arisen on Earth because the chance of creating the 2000 functioning enzymes would be too small: 1 in 10 to the 40,000. Well, given that life does exist here, the Hoyle argument is almost certainly wrong anyway (with a chance that small, the odds would be overwhelmingly small for life to arise anywhere, ever, so the chance that the argument is wrong must be huge, since a correct argument might then give a much higher probability for life to appear).
The author then asks how we get the large polymers we need. After all, life is basically autocatalysis (that's what I was taught in the 1960s, and that's what Kauffman says as well). How does this big autocatalytic set get into gear? The author makes an analogy to putting connectors between random pairs of entities. At first the length of a connected chain will be small. But once the number of connections is about half the number of entities, the longest chain quickly becomes almost as large as the number of entities. That raises the question of how all these entities can interact, but Kaufmann says that having reactions on a substrate, effectively reducing the region to two dimensions, helps. So does having less water around.
We then get to the question of homeostasis. That requires plenty of order. Is there a way to get that order "for free?" The author says there is, and here is where he makes his most dramatic point. He points out that a network with 100,000 entities (call them "light bulbs") with two states each, has 10 to the 30,000 possible states. One might expect such a network to cycle through the square root of the number of states, or 10 to the 15,000. But it actually tends to cycle through the square root of the number of binary variables, which is only the square root of 100,000 or about 317. That is a huge amount of "order for free!" And it argues strongly for life's origination to be unsurprising. As Kauffman puts it, this changes life on Earth from being "We, the improbable," to "We the expected."
There's plenty more in this fine book. The author discusses order in ontogeny. And he has a chapter on the relationship between the diversity of species in an ecosystem and the diversity of organic molecules added from outside. And there's also plenty of material on "fitness landscapes."
One question that arises in this book is statistical: how long does a species tend to last? That has implications for the question of how long humans will last. It may not be that long. But that doesn't bother me, as long as we're replaced with something better. After all, I'm for progress!
Fantastic and enlightening.......2004-03-21
This particular book is a fantastic revelation and study of the boundary between order and chaos as it applies to the evolution of life, culture, technology and anything else in the universe. Its goal is to seek a universal law regarding the emergence of order in what we've traditionally considered unordered or random sets of fundamental stuff. For example, one of the observations that it makes is that evolution as Darwin revealed it is by itself not a sufficient explanation (scientifically) for why and how creatures like us could be here at all. In other words, natural selection is not sufficient to accomplish what life has accomplished in this world of ours. It needed the help of a very important other "force"... the life force, I might call it, and to which I've alluded many times in many forms through my writings. It's that special something about the nature of the universe that brings about the cooperation of systems, the autocatalytic closure which makes "hanging together" and "existing" some sort of "goal" deeply encoded in the nature of it all. You might be able to see how I might identify these ideas very closely with that term "lifetoward". What goal-oriented force brought life to be and continues to make life strive for ever more order and complexity? This book answers I think very well with: it's not a force, per se, but rather a fundamental aspect of the basic nature of the universe. To quote the book, "We the expected." We as living beings belong here and are an integral part of an incredibly awe inspiring process of creation of meaning and order in a world aching to give birth to it. The book closes with a nice summary, which much like a message I had posted to the lifetoward@yahoogroups.com list some time ago, extols the development of a new and enlightened faith, based on a realization of the wonder of the way the universe deeply is and how we are in it.
In terms of the meaning and importance of this book, I would recommend it to everyone. However, I will warn you that it may be a significant challenge to read. It calls on a deeply considered understanding of a variety of disciplines, including most notably evolutionary biology, organic chemistry, mathematics, anthropology, and economics. It proceeds with an assumption that the reader has realized or can quickly recognize the common ground between these different areas of study. It uses a lot of mathematical models and visualizations of 2, 3 and hyperdimensional spaces to discuss the nature of this common law and its emergence in the world around us.
Book Description
Somehow, no matter how hard some people try to change their messy habits, they just can't seem to keep their homes in any kind of order. Magazines and books and television shows offer all kinds of advice and tactics for keeping a house organized and neat and livable. But what some people need is not more advice but a change in their mindsets. Organizing for Life helps readers understand why they seem to be inherently messy people, exposing the lies they tell themselves and introducing the truth about how they really can have a clean, inviting home. Felton helps readers focus on overcoming the roadblocks that keep them in a permanently messy state in order to change their habits for good.
Customer Reviews:
May take more than 40 days, but definitely worth it!.......2007-08-06
This should actually be "40 STEPS (rather than DAYS) to a Well-Ordered Home and Life." I love the idea of becoming Martha Stewart in less than two months, but, unfortunately, it took me six months to get through the book. (I wanted to implement each chapter before moving on to the next.) And I'm still not Martha Stewart.
This is a great book! The author offers practical and sound advice for behavioral change. It's not a book of "put this here and buy this organizing tool." Rather it is a collection of tiny steps to help people change their behavior toward more organized living. The author doesn't want to give people cleaning schedules; she wants to help people maintain clean and organized homes by encouraging clean and organized habits. The book design is colorful (quite feminine, but I'm a woman, so I didn't mind too much) and easy to read. Sidebars and shoutouts are prevalent. The chapters are short making it perfectly bite-sized reading.
Final Thoughts: Definitely RECOMMENDED.
The Magic is that she was able to write a book at all........2007-04-07
I was considering purchasing this book (no, I have not read it). After reading one of the book reviews below, I was drawn to visit, the author, Sandra Felton's website. I surfed around her website a little until I came across a Teleclass she hosted on Decluttering Your Life. I could only manage to listen for about 10 minutes because I was getting so agitated and annoyed with her inane and repetitive questions of the interviewee. I don't know how the poor interviewee, Marsha Sims, could make it through the interview without screaming?! Not only did the questions Felton was asking appear idiotic, but the whole Teleclass was disorganized and chaotic. I find it hard to believe that I could learn any organizing methods from someone who is more disorganized than I am. After listening to Sandra Felton for 5 minutes, I decided not to purchase any of her books! Marsha Sims had some really interesting ideas (that she was barely able to get through on the interview) and I have decided to see if she has written any books of her own.
waste of money.......2007-02-05
Nowhere near as good as other organizing books. If you do want to get a book on organizing, get: organizing from the inside out and organizing plain and simple. Those 2 combined give you all the info you need...
Step-by-Step to organization.......2007-01-10
As usual, Sandra Felton provides a thoughtful, kind, step by step program for getting out of a mess into a clean, organized home. While this book alone will leave you with some questions, buy it in conjunction with almost any of her other books, and you will have a guide to solving your most pressing home organization problems.
Felton provides her suggestions with more than a little bit of insight into how things got to be this much of a mess to begin with. She is a reforming messie person, and doesn't hesitate to share her experiences with you.
Helpful ideas for those who struggle to organize.......2006-09-08
The Organizer Lady, Sandra Felton, is back with Organizing Magic: 40 Days to a Well-Ordered Home and Life. Actually, Felton explains at the beginning that these are not forty consecutive days because some of the projects require a change of thinking, such as finally feeling that you can invite someone into your home. It's more accurately described as forty projects than forty days.
Felton offers ideas as varied as dealing with the paper crunch, saving time, e-mail, organizing closets, efficient movements, developing a visitor-friendly attitude, and upgrading your home. (No, she doesn't mean blowing it up and starting from scratch as my mom has suggested!) She gives the reader permission to reject whatever projects don't work for you while developing a new style of thinking.
Felton is an engaging writer with a practical, friendly style. She lets readers struggling with clutter not feel guilty. Angry yes, guilty no. Most chapters include several helpful pointers and boxed quotations to encourage you such as, "If you can't move the mountain, move a few stones. If there is a better solution...find it," by Thomas Edison. The book ends with a resource bibliography.
One of the good things about the book is that she provides options for you to consider and suggests you choose one that you feel comfortable with. For instance, in her chapter on making bold judgment calls, she gives you eleven project choices which range from dropping out of a club, giving up addressing Christmas cards by hand, throwing out all mail with a bulk postmark unopened, rotating your visible knickknack collections, using paper plates for quick clean up, and more.
Some of her suggestions sound familiar to me because I've read one or two of her books over the years, so those who have read some of her other books may want to look this one over before purchasing it. Those who are new to the struggle to organize their lives will find her ideas helpful and her writing engaging. - Debbie W. Wilson, Christian Book Previews.com
Amazon.com
When Margaret J. Wheatley's Leadership and the New Science was initially published in 1992, it outlined an unquestionably unique but extremely challenging view of change, leadership, and the structure of groups. Many readers immediately embraced its cutting-edge perspective, but others just could not understand how the complicated scientific tenets it described could be used to reshape institutions. Now Wheatley, an organizational specialist who has since coauthored A Simpler Way, updates the original by including additional material (such as an epilogue addressing her personal experiences during the past decade) and reconstructing some of her more challenging concepts. The result is a much clearer work that first explores the implications of quantum physics on organizational practice, then investigates ways that biology and chemistry affect living systems, and finally focuses on chaos theory, the creation of a new order, and the manner that scientific principles affect leadership. "Our old ways of relating to each other don't support us any longer," she writes. "It is up to us to journey forth in search of new practices and new ideas that will enable us to create lives and organizations worthy of human habitation." --Howard Rothman
Book Description
o
A completely revised and expanded edition of the international bestseller (over 230,000 copies sold)
o This new edition includes an entirely new chapter—"Change: The Capacity of Life"—and the newest developments in the new sciences, updated examples, and even more accessible writing that will appeal to a much broader audience than the first edition
o Leadership and the New Science was named the Best Management Book of the Year by Industry Week magazine, one of the top ten books of the past decade by CIO Magazine, and one of the top ten business books of all time by Xerox Business Services In a completely revised and updated edition of her bestselling classing, Margaret Wheatley shows how the "New Science"—the revolutionary discoveries in quantum physics, chaos theory, and biology that are overturning centuries-old models of science—provides powerful insights for transforming how we design, lead, and manage organizations.
Customer Reviews:
"Science - y " for the Science Type.......2007-08-03
Leadership and the New Science is a hard read unless you are the science type. Each chapter starts out like an introduction to evolution, but the ending (the part that you can actually conprehend) is very thought-provoking.
Signficant and Revolutionary Insights to Human Organizations.......2007-07-02
The insights put forth by this book need not be limited to businesses - though that is the stated perspective (ie applying the insight of the new sciences to business managment theory). I think the insights go far beyond business managment and would be of interest to anyone interested in group dynamics and how humans work together - be it on a local community or national level.
For those who may perceive the book as a slam against newtonian physics (as at least one reviewer simplistically decribed it) I do not believe she was invalidating newtonian physics nor mindlessly framing organization dynamics with simplistic generalizations from the "new sciences". She was quite explicit in her introduction that this book was intended as a reflective piece to see what insights might be gained from applying a new paradigm - legitimized by the insights and advances in physics over the last century - to organizational dynamics. To provide context, she demonstrates how our models for organizational theories have derived from newtonian physics and - just as we have learned that this paradigm is not sufficient to describe all of the natural world - perhaps our perspective into other spheres of human activity can be enhanced by applying the insights of the "new sciences" as well.
In short, this book offers a new way of thinking for any human endeavor and its insight are - I believe - essential for progressing into the next millenium.
Disorganized.......2007-05-26
It's really not my type of book. It was required reading for class. I think it was trying to get at some ideas like field vision and systems theory. I found more substantial info in dalai's books. I think it was called seven ways of Buddhism.
Applies quantum theory to management.......2007-05-12
This book is a challenging read and is a good fit for someone who's both scientifically and management minded. It provides some good links between quantum theory and management, but at times, it is a struggle to understand and one must read the section over several times to fully understand.
The author's work at the Berkana Institute is very interesting which believes that leaders are already present in communities and need to emerge. If you like the book, I encourage you to look up the institute!
Challening, Accessible and Interesting.......2007-04-25
This book is challenging, yet accessible, even if the reader does not posses a scientific background. While Wheatley's observations about organizations and their problems are not unique to her, her approach is, and provides an interesting framework to approach organizational development and design.
Average customer rating:
- A New Frontier in Computational Geometry
- A fresh approach on topographic maps
- A highly innovative but quite specialized angle!
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Faithful Representations and Topographic Maps: From Distortion- to Information-Based Self-Organization
Marc M. Van Hulle
Manufacturer: Wiley-Interscience
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Book Description
A new perspective on topographic map formation and the advantages of information-based learning The study of topographic map formation provides us with important tools for both biological modeling and statistical data modeling. Faithful Representations and Topographic Maps offers a unified, systematic survey of this rapidly evolving field, focusing on current knowledge and available techniques for topographic map formation. The author presents a cutting-edge, information-based learning strategy for developing equiprobabilistic topographic maps—that is, maps in which all neurons have an equal probability to be active—clearly demonstrating how this approach yields faithful representations and how it can be successfully applied in such areas as density estimation, regression, clustering, and feature extraction. The book begins with the standard approach of distortion-based learning, discussing the commonly used Self-Organizing Map (SOM) algorithm and other algorithms, and pointing out their inadequacy for developing equiprobabilistic maps. It then examines the advantages of information-based learning techniques, and finally introduces a new algorithm for equiprobabilistic topographic map formation using neurons with kernel-based response characteristics. The complete learning algorithms and simulation details are given throughout, along with comparative performance analysis tables and extensive references. Faithful Representations and Topographic Maps is an excellent, eye-opening guide for neural network researchers, industrial scientists involved in data mining, and anyone interested in self-organization and topographic maps.
Customer Reviews:
A New Frontier in Computational Geometry.......2000-08-05
This is the first monograph devoted to an extremely important aspect of how nature organizes the sensory surfaces in the higher vertebrates. As this work points out, all sensory surfaces in mammals exist as two dimensional maps which project (or map) onto the (folded) two dimensional surface of the cerebral cortex. Previous authors have pointed out that in the case of the visual system, the retinal surface projects onto area V1 in the occipital cortex in a manner which approximates a "quasi-conformal" complex logarithmic function. Other authors have demonstrated that the cochlear basilar membrane also maps onto the auditory cortex in a similar quasi-conformal fashion. And most obviously, the mechano-receptors in our skin map onto the their corresponding cortical sensory areas in a manner which preserves local order of the projection. The important thing to note here is that this mapping of one 2-D surface onto another 2-D surface preserves the local orthogonality of the map coordinates (defn of quasi-conformal). (In the case of the retinal coordinates, they are the simple R, theta coordinates of the visual field and, in the case of the aural (auditory) map, the coordinates appear to be sound intensity (loudness) and frequency (pitch)). Van Hulle (Kohonen, et al.) describes, in vivid detail, how several "self-organizing" algorithms can make this mapping possible. THIS IS THE IMPORTANT POINT CONVEYED IN THIS MAGNIFICENT WORK. "The underlying INFORMATION coordinates of the data being processed by these 2-D onto 2-D mappings is what 'organizes' or defines the form of the mapping." The only point which the author does not address, is the global nature of these mappings. If we consider how the edges of these 2-D maps project onto eachother, there are three possible projections. One forms an ordinary torus and, unfolded looks like the raster scan of a TV set. This mapping is what has been assumed to be what would be followed in the neural projections of the retina onto area V1, but admits an indeterminacy in that there are two "normal" directions to approach the target surface. The second type of projection, when unfolded, resembles a Mobius strip (or Klein bottle for a closed surface). The importance of this type of projection is that there is only one way for neurons to project onto this surface which removes the ambiguity of the first mapping. (This surface is said to be non-orientable and of genus one in topological terms.) If this is in fact how nature chooses to wire the retino-topic projection, then she must also admit one singular point for each "patch" of map. (Consider what happens when you "squish" a Mobius strip made out of a paper strip between two flat surfaces. There is always a "fold".) About seven years ago, when the color distribution in the mammalian visual cortex was illucidated, it was found that the projection areas were made up of a "patch work quilt" of surfaces each with a singular point about which a set of color strips was splayed (like a peacock tail). Perhaps this is the necessary singular point for this type of retinotopic map. I would hope that the author, in his next book (or edition of this book) might address the global issues of these fascinating 2-D onto 2-D mappings, both natural and computational. (Just for closure, the third possible type of 2-D onto 2-D projection forms a hyperbolic surface whose physical significance is far from clear.)
If this review makes any sense to you, Please BUY THIS BOOK! I'm sure that you will be absolutely fascinated by it's content. However, be forwarned, it would be most helpful to have read Kohonen's "Self Organizing Maps", SV, 1995 before diving into this work. It is written in a "bottom up" fashion so a careful review of the Preface and Table of Contents will help in planning a reading strategy.
A fresh approach on topographic maps.......2000-03-30
The book presents a fresh approach on Topographic Maps, emphasizing ``equiprobabilistic'' topographic maps in which all representational units participate with the same probability in the representation. However, the text goes far beyond a monograph on this particular type of topographic maps and provides an excellent exposition of the topic of self-organizing map models in general, discussing their biological motivation and explaining in depth their connections with important statistical concepts such as vector quantization, non-parametric regression and density estimation. The practicioner will find detailed performance comparisons and psoudo code listings that tremendously facilitate an implementation of the described methods. The potential of the newly introduced equiprobabilistic topographic maps is amply demonstrated with detailed treatments of a broad range of application topics. I am convinced that this book marks an important contribution to the field of topographic map representations and that it has the potential to become a major reference for many years.
A highly innovative but quite specialized angle!.......2000-03-22
For those familiar with the technology and terminology of Kohonen's self-organizing maps, this book is a highly recommendable asset. The insights on the deficiencies of various previously developed techniques and how to improve them are brilliant. Although the matter is presented in a very bottom-up fashion, it is sometimes hard to keep focusing on the big picture while all the different aspects are in-depth explored. This makes the book sometimes hard to understand. Although it was probably never intended to be easily understandable, this is the reason why I didn't give it the full 5 stars.
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