Global Markets and Financial Crises in Asia: Towards a Theory for the 21st Century

Book Description

Khan presents a new theory of financial crises in the age of globalization from an evolutionary perspective and suggests policies that may be necessary for averting or managing new financial crises. Starting with the Asian financial crises, he identifies new types of financial crises that result from a combination of liberalization, weak domestic institutions for economic governance and a chaotic global market system without global governance institutions. Suggested solutions involve building new institutions for global and domestic governance and domestic and international policy reforms.

Book Description

In Using Technical Analysis author Clifford Pistolese shows average investors how they too can reap the benefits of technical analysis. Well-organized and easy-to-understand, this book explains a variety of approaches to analyzing and interpreting stock market charts. This edition includes chapters on moving averages and accumulation/distribution analysis.

Topics include:

Basic and complex chart patterns
Analyzing trading volume
Identifying long-term trends
Market timing tactics
Self-teaching exercises

Glossary of terms

Customer Reviews:

Simple, Concise, Powerful Read.......2003-10-08

If you have never read a technical analysis book then I highly recommend this above everything else. For startes it's barely over 200 pages short, with more than half those pages dedicated to charts. Simply put you only read about 100 pages.

The beauty is those 100 pages are powerful and geared perfectly for the beginner. After reading this book I was bitting at the bit to apply my new knowledge, and no longer regard picking stocks as a crap-shoot.

You CAN educate yourself to financial freedom, and this book will help you do that.

A Practical Book Written By An Investor.......1998-10-04

This is a practical book about Technical Analysis written by an investor with over 30 years of experience who has "been there and done it". The book has a section with exercises. If I had a complaint, it would be that the patterns shown in the example charts are too clear; things are not that crystal clear in real life. Anyone who reads this book should also read "Trading The Plan" by Robert Deel. Both are very practical.

Basics for the Beginning Technician-It's All Here.......1998-09-01

I really like this book as it covers the basics and has examples where you have to use what you've learned to do the exercises. The reading is pretty dry but I still refer back to the book often when I'm trying to remember what a "double bottom" means or what an "ascending triangle" helps you predict.

Using Technical Analysis : A Step-by-Step Guide to Understanding and Applying Stock Market Charting Techniques; Revised Edition

Average customer rating:

Using Technical Analysis : A Step-by-Step Guide to Understanding and Applying Stock Market Charting Techniques; Revised Edition
Clifford Pistolese
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000KXFGWE

Book Description

In this provocative work, a distinguished philosopher and a leading neuroscientist outline the conceptual problems at the heart of cognitive neuroscience.Writing from a scientifically and philosophically informed perspective, the authors provide a critical overview of the conceptual difficulties encountered in many current neuroscientific and psychological theories, including those of Blakemore, Crick, Damasio, Edelman, Gazzaniga, Kandel, Kosslyn, LeDoux, Penrose and Weiskrantz. They propose that conceptual confusions about how the brain relates to the mind affect the intelligibility of research carried out by neuroscientists, in terms of the questions they choose to address, the description and interpretation of results and the conclusions they draw.The book forms both a critique of the practice of cognitive neuroscience and a conceptual handbook for students and researchers.

Customer Reviews:

practical guidance for research scientists.......2007-05-19

I concur with the reviews below. I would also like to advise reading Peter Munz's "Critique of Impure Reason" and "Beyond Wittgenstein's Poker" as prerequisites or complements to this book.

In addition, I would like to underscore the kind of practical guidance this book has to offer. For example, on page 134 (paperback), the authors state--

"We are not suggesting that these considerations settle the a priori question of whether colours (and other secondary qualities) are objective qualities of objects or subjective modifications of our sensibility. The arguments are complex and ramified. [footnote here] What we are suggesting is that cognitive neuroscientists should not adopt a non-scientific, metaphysical doctrine of questionable philosophical ancestry, which is supported by philosophical arguments of questionable validity. This recommendation is by no means trivial, since the seventeenth-century conception of reality, of what is objective and what is subjective, of the nature of perception and its objects, has profoundly affected the ways in which brain scientists currently conceive of their investigations. This particular philosophical doctrine is not necessary for coherent, successful neuroscientific investigation, and neuroscientists' reports of the results of their investigations would benefit, not suffer, from bypassing this contentious conceptual matter."

If you would prefer bypassing the futile attempt to conduct twenty-first century research using seventeeth-century metaphysics, then you will appreciate this kind of guidance.

And the book is a treasure trove rich with examples of this kind of sage and practical guidance.

For the philosopher of mind, this is THE start of the road........2006-11-29

*disclaimer: I am writing this as a philosopher of mind so any parts of the book or chapters not related to this are not what I am addressing.*

I do not mean to say that Bennett and Hacker have all the answers, but their "ordinary language" approach, along with their debt to Wittgenstein, Ryle, Kenny and Strawson, says something about their book. Most contemporary philosophers of mind (Sprague, Strawson and Hacker, among others, excluded) have rightly dismissed the soul, but have decided that there is something "mysterious" about consciousness, or perception or emotion, or what have you. In response, Bennett and Hacker have shown what "consciousness" really is: the conscious acts of people existing in the world. This is why we know that other people are conscious actors: they do conscious things such as watch birds, or play chess, or eat ham sandwiches.

If Michael Tye's or David Chalmers' or Colin McGinn's problems of consiousness (e.g. that I can know that you feel the same pain that I feel, or that you see the same color that I see) are indeed problems for you, you should read this book; if it doesn't prove to you that they are not problems at all, at least it will give you a new way of looking at the problems so that you may come to your own interesting conclusions.

"Without language we are naked apes" ??.......2005-06-07

I claim that with language we are nothing-but jabbering naked apes!

Seriously though, this is the best-written exposition of the Anglo-American analytical philosophical view of the current status of conceptualizing going on surrounding the new sciences of "mind and brain." It is written with extreme clarity. It is very readable in that one can start almost anywhere using the table of contents and the annotations throughout to find points of interest. You can almost read it as if it were web enabled after putting away the first chapter or two. The authors succeed in their goal in making the book very easy to use and understand. I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in philosophy of mind, or philosophy of neuroscience. All the arguments are up-to-date. All the major polarizing issues in the field are covered, and all the major players are given coverage. The footnotes and appendices are also well done. The clarity of exposition and good grammar is admirable.

The only problem with the book is that they are completely wrong. The authors' point of view is built almost entirely on a view of meaning that has outlived its usefulness. Ludwig Wittgenstein has the unique distinction of having lead two, going on three, generations of philosophers on two continents into semantic oblivion TWICE in one career, and the authors are bent on continuing that tradition. They criticize neuroscientists (and those philosophers who are tagging along for the ride) primarily for misusing concepts. They have nothing bad to say about the quality of research or the scientific achievements except where the wrong kinds of experiments get done or where results are misconstrued due to continuing conceptual confusion. Nevertheless, they exemplify the extreme unquestioning dedication to a rationalism based on how words are or should be used according to public linguistic norms. (A rule is a rule, right?) The book then amounts to 400 some odd pages of hand-slapping as the philosophers, like English teachers, take it upon themselves to discipline all those unruly slang laden neuroscientists. No wonder analytical philosophers are characterized as pompous or irrelevant all too often. (They give philosophy majors like me a bad name.)

I likewise do not have much enthusiasm for the naïve reductionist views that are prevalent among neuroscientists and the "eliminative" views that support them. I held both views myself some 35 years ago. But I finally outgrew it with good reason upon realizing how badly reductionism was doing explaining our natural world, particularly its failings in accounting for emergent behavior in systems, quantum phenomena and the relationship between them. Another reason was being turned off by all the uncritical go-go-science cheerleading from the sidelines. I worry for what the public will make of all the mind-brain breakthrough bragging going on. Reading this book provided me with a much needed philosophical tune-up and the realization that I'd better be more careful of what I say and how I say it. But it did not convince me that a blind allegiance to the "meaning is use" view will get us any closer to resolution of these issues. This is only going to lead to a stalemate, or worse - the winner will unfortunately be the guy with the most government funding and press time - not the one with the most sensible and meaningful philosophical outlook. The main contribution of the book is to accidently demonstrate how badly a new approach is needed.

To solve these problems and get philosophers and neuroscientists on the same page will require a new view of meaning, what it is, where it comes from, how it evolves, and what exactly it has to do with usage norms. Such a view is, I think, not too far off. Read this book, and then go read everything you can about cognitive semantics and cognitive linguistics by folks like Lakoff, Johnson, Turner, Fauconnier, Elman, Bates, etc, etc. Once the full implications of what this area of research has to say about concepts, language, language games and philosophy itself are known, some new ways of approaching these stale philosophical problems will surface. [OOPs, guess I blew it, areas of research cannot talk, sorry Hacker.] When that happens, I am sure we will all find the words to express it.

Superb critique of how Idealism confuses scientists.......2005-02-02

What are you, a ghost in a machine or a living human being? In this excellent book, the authors, a neuroscientist and a philosopher, answer the question.

They say that Rene Descartes' ideas still cause many muddles. He thought that we were all ghosts in machines, two things in one. This was because he believed that there were two basic kinds of thing, mind and matter (a theory called dualism), and that what we are depends on what our minds do (idealism).

The authors show that commonsense clears up the muddles. We are all living human beings. "The person ... is a psychophysical entity, not a duality of two conjoined substances, a mind and a body."

The authors show that dualism - the ghost in the machine - can never explain how our minds relate to our bodies. Our minds are not things, so they cannot cause changes by acting on our brains.

Often neuroscientists wrongly ascribe to our brains the activities that Descartes and his followers like John Locke ascribed to our minds. But human beings - not our brains or minds - think, see, decide and feel. "The brain and its activities make it possible for us - not for it - to perceive and think, to feel emotions, and to form and pursue projects."

Too many neuroscientists trap themselves in idealism. For example, Francis Crick wrote, "What we see appears to be located outside our body. ... What you see is not what is really there. ... In fact we have no direct knowledge of the objects in the world."

But the authors reply, "What we see does not appear to be located outside us. What we see is necessarily located outside our body, unless we are looking at ourselves in a mirror, or at our limbs or thorax." We see what is really there, the real world, and we directly know objects in the world, which exist whether we see them or not.

This is materialism, which "in its simplest and warranted form amounts to a denial that there are mental or spiritual substances." Materialism does not mean that our minds are our brains. It does not mean that we explain things, even material things, by studying the matter of which they are made. Materialism does not reduce everything to physics, or reduce our minds to our nervous systems.

Colin Blakemore was wrong to write, "We are machines", Crick wrong to write, "You ... are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." Our goals, motives and reasons - not our cells or molecules - explain our behaviour.

The authors show that scientists and philosophers do two different, useful jobs. Scientists analyse what's true and what's false. They create theories to explain and hypotheses to predict.

Philosophers analyse concepts and the rules for the use of words. They clarify what makes sense and what does not. And these authors have done this job superbly.

Excellent, and controversial, critique of neuroscience.......2004-06-12

Undoubtedly this book contains both excellence in terms of its review thoroughness and controversey by virtue of its conclusions. It is quite clear from the beginning that Hacker's philosophical stance drives most of the conceptual critique in the book. It is a complicated book, given the vast variety of themes and attendant analyses, and a short review will do it little justice. However, Hacker is a later Wittgensteinian, and to appreciate most of the philosophical input the reader should have reasonable knowledge of the contrast between early and later Wittgenstein, and what exactly characterises the core components of the latter.

The primary criticism leveled at neuroscience is that it is a conceptual shambles due to repeatedly confusing functions of 'selves' with functions of organs (the brain of course). Neursoscience is identified with Cartesian dualism by clumsily shifting talk of properties of persons to talk of brain phenomena and assuming them equivalent. The anvil upon which neuroscience is being philosophically temepered is termed the mereological principle (or fallacy - and you can buy the book for an explanation).

Part of the criticism echoes Wittgenstein's 'if a lion could talk we wouldn't understand him', and most significantly recalls previous critiques of private langage arguments (with a nod to Kripke). It turns out, according to Bennet and Hacker, that neuroscience has been secretly keeping private mental objects alive - presumably in ignorance of philosophical canons.

The book concludes with a well argued and welcome broadside against Dennett's intentional stance (a sacred tenet among cognitve neuroscientists) and, unfortunately, a more toothless critique of Searle on intentionality.

Is this a good book? As an exercise in conceptual analysis this is an excellent text to study - and disagree with. However, implicit in the text is a philosophical backcloth that will not be accessible to many readers outside philosophy (e.g. the presentation of neuroscientific concepts as neo-platonic). It is an immensely scholarly work, but personally I believe that readers with an informed understanding of Wittgenstein will follow the threads more easily than others. Nevertheless, I heartily recommend it.

Average customer rating:

Long on sociology. Short on philosophy.

Excellent through ch 4, then loses focus

Very bad and very simplistic

Written by a sociologist for sociologists

Intriguing Viewpoints

The Hacker Ethic
Pekka Himanen , and Linus Torvalds
Manufacturer: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary

A Hacker Manifesto

The Information Society and the Welfare State: The Finnish Model

Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution

Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution (O'Reilly Open Source)

ASIN: 037575878X
Release Date: 2002-02-12

Book Description

You may be a hacker and not even know it. Being a hacker has nothing to do with cyberterrorism, and it doesn’t even necessarily relate to the open-source movement. Being a hacker has more to do with your underlying assumptions about stress, time management, work, and play. It’s about harmonizing the rhythms of your creative work with the rhythms of the rest of your life so that they amplify each other. It is a fundamentally new work ethic that is revolutionizing the way business is being done around the world.

Without hackers there would be no universal access to e-mail, no Internet, no World Wide Web, but the hacker ethic has spread far beyond the world of computers. It is a mind-set, a philosophy, based on the values of play, passion, sharing, and creativity, that has the potential to enhance every individual’s and company’s productivity and competitiveness. Now there is a greater need than ever for entrepreneurial versatility of the sort that has made hackers the most important innovators of our day. Pekka Himanen shows how we all can make use of this ongoing transformation in the way we approach our working lives.

Customer Reviews:

Long on sociology. Short on philosophy........2006-01-12

Briefly, as to general flow of the book some reviewers here have already mentioned that the marrow of this book is to be found in the early portions with chapters 5,6, and especially 7 very nearly if not completely skipable. Castells' futurist epilogue while a bit far reaching at times is a welcome respite after the preceeding chapters. Torvalds introduction piece while intended to provide some hacker credentials and tone-setting for the book, I imagine, though fun came across as a bit glib and was essentially unnecessary.

I believe Himanen's main points can be summarized as follows:

1. People are working longer and harder based on an out of date paradigm and find the work they are doing is less rewarding especially in regards to true personal satisfaction.

2. On the other hand hackers can be described as those people who, regardless of the field in which they work, do what they do for personal satisfaction and the inherent rewards of furthering their area of interest and peer recognition.

In other words hackers are much like those who traditionally work in academia, the sciences, and the arts. In fact Himanen acknowledges as much during the course of the book.

None of this is in itself problematic, however given the famaliar ground covered here I kept hoping Himanen would do more than simply conjure (almost arbitrarily) a generic value system and just slap it on a group of people he generally terms hackers.

My real displeasure with this book was its failure to offer any suggestions, in light of the obvious and underlying ethical considerations inherent within his argument, as to how one might create a society of hackers. If his intent was to keep to interesting historical and sociological observations then he could have, possibly, gotten through this without touching on deeper ethical currents. All along though Himanen challenges the presumptions of our current views on work, money, fun, creativity, etc... Nothing wrong with any of that, however such musings, and indeed the title of the book, suggests that at some point he might be inclined to address some deeper questions. Questions such as how does someone with few resources and limited access attain the position that allows him/her to engage in more self fulfilling activies? Whose responsibility is it to ensure the essentials of survival are provided for so that people can pursue their passions? None of this is really given much attention and I suspect it isn't even seriously considered by Himanen. While some might argue that it was not his intent to raise and answer such questions, I believe his book suffers for his failure to delve more deeply into the basics of how to get beyond where we currently are to achieve his lofty but admirable goals.

Another minor source of irritation was his heavy reliance on Weber. Obviously the title acts as a clear indicator of his intent to explore Weber's ideas. Again nothing wrong with going to the well as it were, however at times it felt too much like a retreading of Weber's own work.

I find it interesting, and philosophically useful, when an author provides a dissenting viewpoint to her/his own proposal. Or at least attempts to provide a fair assessment of a viewpoint they wish to discredit. Such attempts also work to lend an air of credibility to the authors stance and help the reader understand the framework of the argument better. Unfortunately Himanen does not do this here.

On the positive side this is a very easy read and can be a nice introduction to more challenging works on the themes mentioned or alluded to througout the text. The author is engaging and playful and doesn't run the risk of scaring off readers who don't typically enjoy trudging through heavy academic works. This ease of read is probably why a major publisher such as Random House picked this up and chose to release it. On the other hand, and for the very same reasons, this is most likely why a more scholarly publisher like the Oxford University Press or the like did not.

In short alot more exploration of his own proposals and presumptions (i.e. the 7 values of the Hacker Ethic, etc...), as well as trimming some of the unnecessary portions (i.e. 10 pages on an imagined Protestant Genesis, etc...), as well as providing some illumination on the other side of the issue, would have made for a much better read.

Excellent through ch 4, then loses focus.......2004-12-20

I bought and read this book because I enjoy reading about hacker history and culture. When I started, I simply read and flipped pages, thinking I wouldn't find much of deep importance. After about 20 pages I was extremely interested in the book and started underlining the author's main points. By chapter 5, and especially in chapter 6, the author lost my attention and I ended up giving this book a three star review.

The valuable core of 'The Hacker Ethic' lies in its comparison with the Protestant work ethic. The author explains that philosophy's roots in monastic life, and contrasts it with the 'hacker ethic' and its roots in academic/scientific practices. As a history major I thought this comparison was fascinating and it made me examine my own work habits more closely. The author's illumination of time-centric vs. task-centric work was especially interesting.

Linux kernel inventor Linus Torvalds wrote the prologue, so the entire book approaches the free/open software world from an overtly Linux perspective. One mention of BSD appears in a citation of Eric S. Raymond's 'Cathedral and the Bazaar.' ESR criticizes the BSD development model ('carefully coordinated... by a relatively small, tightly knit group of people') in comparison with Linux, where 'quality was maintained not by rigid standards or autocracy but by the naively simple strategy of releasing every week and getting feedback.' I think 'naive' is the operative word here. Linux has certainly prospered, but companies like IBM, Novell, and others are playing increasingly bigger roles.

If you can read Linus' prologue and the first four chapters in a book store, I recommend doing so. I believe the author does a nice job making comparisons with the Protestant work ethic, but doesn't quite know where to go next. Reading four chapters should take a couple of hours, and you'll walk away appreciating the keen insights author Pekka Himanen has to offer on 'The Hacker Ethic.'

Very bad and very simplistic.......2003-06-19

A very simplistic work by a minor philosopher (I use this word lightly). Wow, so bad, so dumb, such a waste of time. Those other books you are considering reading first? Go again.

Written by a sociologist for sociologists.......2003-01-30

I originally picked up this book more for amusement than anything else, considering it another one of those books about kids who stay up all night writing radical programs and their nocturnal habits. I was wrong. This book is best decribed in the prologue written by Linus Torvolds himself. He states that when he first met the author it was at a convention of 'sociologists talking about technology'. Well this book is written by just such a person... a sociologist. And one by my observation who decided to write a book about technology without any real knowledge of the spectrum of subcultures in the technology arena. In a way it seems like a sociological report one would make to his peers, who without any real background in the subject would deem well written,as previous reviews above have shown, but for the rest of us, there is much more interesting literature out there. And hopefully sometime in the very near future he will cease his contributing his, at best, amateur opinions on this subject to himself, and allow those with a true insight to document the culture. While I greatly respect Linus Torvalds and his contributions to the world, he only lends credibility to a book that no one else wouldeven consider without his name being mentioned.

Intriguing Viewpoints.......2002-03-28

This book compares the so-called "hacker work ethic" as compared to the old "Protestant work ethic," examining so-called hacker culture and their motivations for working and completing projects, as opposed to the world view of working "because you are supposed to." It makes a number of interesting observations, and points out that in our world, the pressure to "work, work, work" never seems to escape us, in spite of all the technological advances of our world designed to "make life easier."

It also points out that "true hackers" are willing to work at something in order to improve it and are not always motivated to do so by the almighty dollar. I long have worked with engineers who come in to work at 10 or 11 am but stay until almost midnight every day and never quite understood why until now. It's the desire to continue to tinker with and ultimately complete a project.

I will never be a "true hacker," since I lack the aptitude and ultimately patience to sit at a computer screen all hours of the day and night trying to solve programming problems, but books like these give me a much better understanding of the ones who are.

Average customer rating:
The opposite sex
Rose Hacker
Manufacturer: Hart
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

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ASIN: B0007GU9OO

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La ética del hacker.(TT: Hacker's ethics.)(Reseña): An article from: Epoca
Lorenzo Silva
Manufacturer: Difusora de Informacion Periodica, S.A. (DINPESA)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital
ASIN: B0008F4SW8
Release Date: 2005-06-01

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Epoca, published by Difusora de Informacion Periodica, S.A. (DINPESA) on March 29, 2002. The length of the article is 6043 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: La ética del hacker.(TT: Hacker's ethics.)(Reseña)
Author: Lorenzo Silva
Publication: Epoca (Magazine/Journal)
Date: March 29, 2002
Publisher: Difusora de Informacion Periodica, S.A. (DINPESA)
Page: 129

Article Type: Reseña

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Die Personwerdung des Menschen: Zur Ethik Peter Singers (Studien zur interdisziplinaren Thanatologie)

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Die Personwerdung des Menschen: Zur Ethik Peter Singers (Studien zur interdisziplinaren Thanatologie)
Annette Nogradi-Hacker
Manufacturer: Lit
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 3825820556

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Frontiers of international accounting: An anthology (Research for business decisions)

Manufacturer: UMI Research Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

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ASIN: 0835716600

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Frontiers of International Accounting: An Anthology (Research for Business Decisions, No 77)
Frederick D. S. Choi , and Gerhard G. Mueller
Manufacturer: Umi Research Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0835716880

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