Iso 9000: A Legal Perspective

Book Description

This book provides teachers and therapists with a user-friendly bank of practical ideas and suggestions to use in the MSE for pupils with profound and multiple learning difficulties. These include equipment and resources that can be used to engineer the environment to promote particular outcomes; a set of photocopiable, fast, easy to complete observation and assessment forms; a selection of practical strategies and methods that can be used in the MSE; and ideas to help teachers integrate environment, assessment and instruction to maximize individual programs.

Book Description

The Handbook of Metaheuristics provides both the research and practitioner communities with a comprehensive coverage of the metaheuristic methodologies that have proven to be successful in a wide variety of real-world problem settings. Moreover, it is these metaheuristic strategies that hold particular promise for success in the future. The various chapters serve as stand alone presentations giving both the necessary background underpinnings as well as practical guides for implementation. In most settings a problem solver has an option as to which metaheuristic approach should be adopted for the problem at hand. Alternative methodologies typically exist that could be employed to produce high quality solutions. Often it becomes a matter of choosing one of several approaches that could be adopted. The very nature of metaheuristics invites an analyst to modify basic methods in response to problem characteristics, past experiences, and personal preferences. The chapters in this handbook are designed to facilitate this as well. This Handbook consists of 19 chapters. Topics covered include Scatter Search, Tabu Search, Genetic Algorithms, Genetic Programming, Memetic Algorithms, Variable Neighborhood Search, Guided Local Search, GRASP, Ant Colony Optimization, Simulated Annealing, Iterated Local Search, Multi-Start Methods, Constraint Programming, Constraint Satisfaction, Neural Network Methods for Optimization, Hyper-Heuristics, Parallel Strategies for Metaheuristics, Metaheuristic Class Libraries, and A-Teams. This family of metaheuristic chapters provides a state-of-the-art, comprehensive coverage of the major topics and methodologies of modern metaheuristics.

Handbook of Approximation Algorithms and Metaheuristics (CHAPMAN & HALL/CRC COMPUTER & INFORMATION SCIENCE)

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Handbook of Approximation Algorithms and Metaheuristics (CHAPMAN & HALL/CRC COMPUTER & INFORMATION SCIENCE)

Manufacturer: Chapman & Hall/CRC
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Programming | Computers & Internet | Subjects | Books

General | Computers & Internet | Subjects | Books

General | Operating Systems | Computers & Internet | Subjects | Books

General | Computer Science | Computers & Internet | Subjects | Books

General | Science | Subjects | Books

General | Mathematics | Science | Subjects | Books

All Titles | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books
ASIN: 1584885505

Book Description

Delineating the tremendous growth in this area, the Handbook of Approximation Algorithms and Metaheuristics covers fundamental, theoretical topics as well as advanced, practical applications. It is the first book to comprehensively study both approximation algorithms and metaheuristics. Starting with basic approaches, the handbook presents the methodologies to design and analyze efficient approximation algorithms for a large class of problems, and to establish inapproximability results for another class of problems. It also discusses local search, neural networks, and metaheuristics, as well as multiobjective problems, sensitivity analysis, and stability. After laying this foundation, the book applies the methodologies to classical problems in combinatorial optimization, computational geometry, and graph problems. In addition, it explores large-scale and emerging applications in networks, bioinformatics, VLSI, game theory, and data analysis. Undoubtedly sparking further developments in the field, this handbook provides the essential techniques to apply approximation algorithms and metaheuristics to a wide range of problems in computer science, operations research, computer engineering, and economics. Armed with this information, researchers can design and analyze efficient algorithms to generate near-optimal solutions for a wide range of computational intractable problems.

Book Description

This work provides the tools required to help researchers reduce risks and minimize costs, emphasizing the techniques that achieve and improve quality, as well as illustrating the need for change in current laboratory management practices. The book features an in-depth study of the strengths and weaknesses of peer review, with checklist examples from the US office of naval research.;The book is intended for quality, reliability, industrial, design, process, manufacturing, chemical, mechanical, metallurgic and electrical and electronics engineers; cost analysts; physicists; chemists; chief executive officers; laboratory managers and administrators; and upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in these disciplines.

Book Description

Strategic delegation is a widespread phenomenon in economic and social systems. In many situations the main interested party benefits from appointing a delegate to take action that the principal - were he playing - could not credibly take. This book contributes to the literature studying such a phenomenon, by extending the analysis of its implications for firms' strategy in product markets, by investigating how it may affect the trade union's activity, by studying its dynamic influence on the evolution of strategic interactions that the delegating party is involved in. The welfare effects of strategic delegation turn out to be uncertain and crucially depend on the features of the situation considered, both in static and in dynamic frameworks.

Book Description

In the wilderness, one false step can make the difference between a delightful respite and a brush with death.

On a beautiful summer afternoon in 1998, Dan Stephens, a 22-year-old canoeist, was leading a trip deep into Ontario’s Quetico Provincial Park. He stepped into a gap among cedar trees to look for the next portage—and did not return. More than four hours later, Dan awakened from a fall with a lump on his head and stumbled deeper into the woods, confused.

Three years later, Jason Rasmussen, a third-year medical student who loved the forest’s solitude, walked alone into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness on a crisp fall day. After a two-day trek into a remote area of the woods, he stepped away from his campsite and made a series of seemingly trivial mistakes that left him separated from his supplies, wet, and lost, as cold darkness fell.

Enduring days without food or shelter, these men faced the full harsh force of wilderness, the place that they had sought out for tranquil refuge from city life. Lost in the Wild takes readers with them as they enter realms of pain, fear, and courage, as they suffer dizzying confusion and unending frustration, and as they overcome seemingly insurmountable hurdles in a race to survive.

Customer Reviews:

A cautionary tale.......2007-09-16

The book is a riveting retelling of how two young men (independently) became lost in the boundary waters area. The most useful element of the story is the cautionary tale of how simple mistakes, easily made through carelessness or shortsightedness, can lead quickly to life-threatening situations in the wilderness. Alternating between the experiences of the two campers, and jumping between to the rescue efforts mounted on their behalves, the accounts are woven together ably. That said, the author insists upon describing all the events in the present tense rather than the past tense, i.e. he looks up, he sees the light, he wonders, he goes.... It's a personal gripe that some might not share, but rather than creating a breathtaking atmosphere for me as a reader, I found this writing style annoying in an otherwise well told story.

The book is not a survival primer per se, but there are many lessons of the "I never thought of that" variety to be learned here by those with little experience in the wilderness. For those who have "been there and done that," there are sobering reminders of the consequences of lessons forgotten. Keep your map with you and look at it frequently. Don't lose the compass. Never part with your matches if you walk out of camp. Don't wander out of sight of your camp in thick woods. Don't make a jump you don't need to. Avoid needless risks. Insulation is your friend, moisture your enemy. The fact that this isn't rocket science is what makes the book compelling -- simple mistakes that anyone could make can snowball. It is thought provoking to say the least.

Almost unbelievable ... .......2007-07-31

This book follows two unfortunate souls and for one of them, you will find yourself wondering if the story can be true since it is one bad decision after another. But I guess that is how it goes. I found both stories compelling and gave this book as a gift to two of my friends (one of which read each story through to the end instead of alternating them).

An Amazing Tale of Survival.......2007-06-10

I started this book right after a visit to the area where these events took place. I met one of the rescuers and he casually mentioned the book. I bought it based on that comment but I didn't expect the book to be as well-written or as engrossing as it was. I stayed up well past my bedtime the first night and finished it a few days later in one sitting. It's all I could think about during that time. The author did an excellent job of researching the events so that the reader can feel what it was like to be in the wilderness with the lost men and with the rescuers. It's an amazing story and it's very well told. Highly recommended!

The woods are lovely, dark and deep ..........2006-08-31

Easy to get Lost in this Gripping Narrative....

You may find this book hard to put down once you delve into it. Two parallel narratives of fairly savvy backcountry trekkers who make some mistakes for which they almost pay with their lives. We so rarely encounter The Wild in our urban and suburban lives. It helps to remember sometimes just how fragile the membrane is that separates survival from death.

Gripping Account.......2006-06-14

This fascinating book tells two stories, of two men who lost their way on separate journeys into the north woods. Its structure is engaging: it tells the two stories side by side in alternating chapters. It details their peril, their survival efforts, and the search and rescue operations.

This book has some advantages over other books of adventurist survival. The situations are more accessible, something average people can relate to better than tales of mountain climbers and victims of shipwreck. The tales contrast nicely -- one of the men is seemingly well-prepared but makes some grave errors that put him in the jaws of death; the other is an expert outdoorsman who overestimates his abilities in a fleeting moment.

The author balances the themes of the story very nicely: the narrative details that help us understand all the activity surrounding these incidents, the high emotions of the various players, the natural and social milieu in which the incidents occurred. I do wish that the author had provided a "cast list" summarizing the participants in each story and their roles; it would have made it easier to maintain continuity in the alternating stories. The maps are adequate but merely that: they could have been used better to advance the story.

I enjoyed getting to know both of the protagonists as they developed through the storytelling. The author does not overemphasize their lapses in judgment. Sure, one could berate the one hiker for not checking his map and compass until well into the second day; and the canoe trip leader for the bravado that made him think he could achieve a leap that needn't have been attempted. But pointing out lessons is not the point of the tale. Rather, this book presents a tale of the human spirit in extreme situations, and offers travelog of the north woods into the bargain. He draws their characters vividly, and the reader cheers on their ingenuity in surviving, their inner struggles and breakthroughs. Tears of relief and delight meet their rescues.

Leavenworth Train: A Fugitive's Search for Justice in the Vanishing West

Average customer rating:

A Wonderful Book
A Great Read
An Exciting and Thoughtful Tale of Justice Delayed
Excellent! Buy it today!
Stylish history and an engaging story

Leavenworth Train: A Fugitive's Search for Justice in the Vanishing West
Joe Jackson
Manufacturer: Carroll & Graf
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Murder & Mayhem | True Accounts | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

True Crime | True Accounts | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0786710608

Amazon.com

Renowned for violence and lawlessness, the American frontier was in reality a safe and orderly region, at least by 19th-century standards. Alcoholism and suicide were persistent troubles, and, to be sure, the occasional murder or crime against property troubled the populace. Still, such things did not happen often, and when they did, justice was swift and punishment severe.

Frank Grigware, the protagonist of Joe Jackson's swift-moving Leavenworth Train, learned all this the hard way. Not particularly bright, plagued by hard luck, the young man devoted himself to petty thievery, scratching out a dishonest living in the rough mining towns of the Northwest. His fortunes turned still worse when he fell into the company of a gang of suspected train robbers. Charged as an accomplice to their crimes on what Jackson considers to be less than solid evidence, he was packed off to the Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary to serve a long sentence. He didn't remain behind bars for long, however. He and three fellow convicts escaped by hijacking a supply train, and Grigware kept running until he reached Canada, where he took up residence and lived out a long life. His identity was eventually revealed, and American officials--among them J. Edgar Hoover--demanded to have him returned.

To reveal who won would spoil Jackson's story. In telling it, Jackson relies heavily on imagined dialogue, and his prose is sometimes overly mannered ("instead of a cave of gold, they found a grimy cell," "everyone danced Death's crazy reel"). Still, his tale is full of unlikely twists that keep it moving along nicely, and fans of Western history and true crime alike will enjoy reading it. --Gregory McNamee

Book Description

For twenty-four years Frank Grigware ran from the law. Convicted of a crime he didn’t commit and sentenced in 1909 to life in Leavenworth, America’s first federal penitentiary, Grigware joined five other inmates in a daring escape. The six men hijacked a supply train and rammed it through the prison’s west gate. Investigative journalist Joe Jackson, four-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and 2002 Edgar Award nominee for Best Fact Crime book, follows a young, guileless Grigware in a journey not to fabulous adventure in America’s legendary West but rather to an ill-fated association with train robbers—and to his arrest and soon, imprisonment. Five months later, Grigware would be journeying again, this time in desperate flight across the Canadian border to a new life as a husband, father, and mayor. Grigware’s story is also the story of the Pinkerton detective agency and of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which sought Grigware through the 1920s and ’30s. It culminates in a meticulously documented, revealing examination of criminal justice in two nations, when Grigware is apprehended by Canadian Mounties and the Canadian government refuses to extradite to the United States “the sort of man we want settling our land”—with results more surprising than fiction. Eight pages of photographs complete this tale of America's most elusive fugitive. “A journalistic meditation on frustrated fantasies, crime, punishment, justice and absolution.... Absorbing.... Meticulously documented.”—Washington Post “Gripping.”—The Economist

Customer Reviews:

A Wonderful Book.......2003-01-01

What a wonderful book! In addition to being a terrifically exciting story, Jackson, the author, vividly creates a sense of time and place. One is transported to America at the turn of the century - a period of transition and change in which Frank Grigware, the protagonist, is innocently and irreparably caught. This book succeeds on every level. Outstanding!

A Great Read.......2002-07-19

I picked this book up on a whim and once started I couldn't put it down. It is a great true story of the real old west. Young men seeking adventure, train robbers, unjust imprisonmemnt, daring escapes and more. You should really give this one a try!

An Exciting and Thoughtful Tale of Justice Delayed.......2002-06-10

In 1906, the twenty year old Frank Grigware announced to his family that he was going to see the world. They had been living in eastern Washington for years, and he wanted to see more of the West than Spokane. His mother understood completely; it is not an uncommon occurrence for a young man to want to roam before settling down to respectable ways. He hooked up with his best friend Frank Golden, and they figured they would do some prospecting in northern Idaho. A tough life loomed, but Grigware had no idea that he would as a result be accused and convicted of a crime he did not commit, incarcerated in the toughest prison in existence, escape from the prison, and remain on the lam from his country for the rest of his life. The astonishing story of Grigware's life is told in _Leavenworth Train: A Fugitive's Search for Justice in the Vanishing West_ (Carroll & Graf) by Joe Jackson, who shows that Grigware was guilty of nothing but naïveté when he associated with train robbers. He was, however, found as guilty as the rest of them, and a quick decision gave all the defendants life imprisonment, at Leavenworth, the first US federal penitentiary.

It was only six months into his sentence that Grigware, who the prisoners could tell was not really one of them, was let in on an escape by four other prisoners. Using the classic ploy of threatening with guns skillfully crafted of wood from one of the shops and blackened with shoe polish, they hijacked a train that regularly supplied the prison. Grigware was the only one not captured quickly, and for the next 24 years was one of America's most wanted men. The trail was long cold, even after President Woodrow Wilson commuted the sentence of the other robbers because the evidence in the case was so lacking. The FBI refused to back down, and it spied on members of Grigware's family, which was sadly fractured by his escape. Grigware in sorrow knew he could communicate with none of them, but set up a respectable life in Canada, becoming a Canadian citizen and a well-liked member of the community of Jasper, Alberta. He was not found until 1934, and what happened afterwards is of great charm. There was a groundswell of Canadian public opinion against any sort of extradition; even the game warden circulated a petition. The mild Grigware had made many friends, and he was the sort of reliable citizen Canadians wanted. Grigware's wife (who had not known of his past), when the press reported her simple statement, "Nothing will ever break up our home," made up the minds of any Canadians that had doubts on the issue. It became an international incident, and a clash of redemptive versus retributive justice.

Grigware was reunited with his family, which had long thought him dead; the meeting with his aging mother could not have been sweeter. But he could not return with her to the US, nor return for her funeral. President Roosevelt waived extradition, but no pardon was ever issued, so if he ever came back to the US, he could land right in Leavenworth again. That result would seem preposterous as the decades went by, but in 1957, J. Edgar Hoover was still sending out directives that insisted that agents monitor Grigware's relatives in case he were to show up. Every FBI memo issued about him screamed that HE WOULD KILL OR BE KILLED RATHER THAN BE RECAPTURED, a rumor that had arisen in 1911 and which still headlined Hoover's directives about Grigware, who was then seventy-one years old. This exciting and frustrating story, crammed with period detail, reminds us that courts are not always right and that as much justice as was available in this case came from the hearts of ordinary women and men.

Excellent! Buy it today!.......2002-03-19

I cannot recommend this book highly enough! I loved every single page, and I hated to see it end. (For me, that's rare.) Action, adventure, excitement, and suspense...all set in, to quote the book's subtitle, "the vanishing west."

Well worth the money and well worth reading. In fact, I think I'll read it a second time.

Stylish history and an engaging story.......2001-09-08

Veteran Virginia crime journalist Jackson strips bare a capricious justice system as "the servant of time and place and ambition." In that, this book is a philosophical sequel to his Pulitzer-nominated "Dead Run," a contemporary exploration of Death Row.

Book Description

This is the first historical account of the significant role played by Russian social scientists in nineteenth-century Western economic and social thought. In an era of rapid Western colonial expansion, the Russian quest for the "right" Western economic model became more urgent: Was Russia condemned to the fate of India if it did not become an England? In the 1900s, Russian liberal economists emphasized cultural difference and historical context, while Marxists and prerevolutionary government reformers declared that inexorable economic laws doomed peasants and their "medieval" communities. On the eve of 1917, both the tsarist regime and its leading critics agreed that Russia must choose between Western-style progress or "feudal" stagnation. And when peasants and communes survived until Stalin's time, he mercilessly destroyed them in the name of progress. Today Russia's painful modernizing traditions shape the policies of contemporary reformers, who seem as certain as their predecessors that economic progress requires wholesale obliteration of the past.

Download Description

This ground-breaking work documents Russian efforts to appropriate Western solutions to the problem of economic backwardness since the time of Catherine the Great. Entangled then as now with issues of cultural borrowing, educated Russians searched for Western nations, ideas, and social groups that embodied universal economic truths applicable to their own country. Esther Kingston-Mann describes Russian Westernization--which emphasized German as well as Anglo-U.S. economics--while she raises important questions about core values of Western culture and how cultural values and priorities are determined. This is the first historical account of the significant role played by Russian social scientists in nineteenth-century Western economic and social thought. In an era of rapid Western colonial expansion, the Russian quest for the "right" Western economic model became more urgent: Was Russia condemned to the fate of India if it did not become an England? In the 1900s, Russian liberal economists emphasized cultural difference and historical context, while Marxists and prerevolutionary government reformers declared that inexorable economic laws doomed peasants and their "medieval" communities. On the eve of 1917, both the tsarist regime and its leading critics agreed that Russia must choose between Western-style progress or "feudal" stagnation. And when peasants and communes survived until Stalin's time, he mercilessly destroyed them in the name of progress. Today Russia's painful modernizing traditions shape the policies of contemporary reformers, who seem as certain as their predecessors that economic progress requires wholesale obliteration of the past.

Customer Reviews:

Economics and the peasant commune in late Tsarist Russia.......2000-09-08

Under what is perhaps the most misleading cover I have ever seen is a study of late tsarist Russia's attitudes toward the peasant commune, and an analysis of the western economic influences on Russia prior to 1905. Kingston-Mann traces the western examples of England, France, Denmark, and Germany in their agricultural modernization and attitudes toward the peasantry, and shows how Russia's economists borrowed from these. Common to the western-oriented economists she looks at is an anti-commune attitude, viewing the basic peasant institution as backward, "asiatic," and an opponent to modernization. She also gives examples of thinkers and schools of though, from the Slavophiles to the later writings of Marx, that had a more positive view of the commune, but were largely suppressed or decried as romantic and reactionary by the anti-peasant "westernizers." Ending with modern parallels in contemporary Russia, Kingston-Mann pleads that contemporary advocates of Russian economic reform consider the effects of their ideas on the populace, and resist the drive to "over-westernize."

While her scholarship is very thorough, Kingston-Mann is too concerned with the attitudes and representation of the peasantry to consider their actualities, and the book suffers somewhat for this. There is little consideration of the entrepreneurialism and role of the serf and post-emancipation peasant. She also disregards the pro-commune attitude of the Tsarist government post-emancipation, and has little to say about the peasant oriented Socialist Revolutionary party. But aside from these objections, this book is a strong example of economic and intellectual history in late tsarist Russia.

Average customer rating:

Anyone living in California should read this book

Rising in The West: The True Story of an "Okie" family in Search of the American Dream
Dan Morgan
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books
General | United States | Americas | History | Subjects | Books
Pacific Northwest | State & Local | United States | Americas | History | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0679745939
Release Date: 1993-09-28

Customer Reviews:

Anyone living in California should read this book.......1996-12-11

This is a fascinating book on the migration of people from the Midwestern Dustbowl during the Great Depression and what happened to them once they got to California. It is extremely well written. It makes reading the newspaper in California much more interesting because many of these people have gone on to shape current events

IN SEARCH OF THE TRUE WEST; CULTURE, ECONOMICS, AND PROBLEMS OF RUSSIAN DEVELOPMENT

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IN SEARCH OF THE TRUE WEST; CULTURE, ECONOMICS, AND PROBLEMS OF RUSSIAN DEVELOPMENT

Manufacturer: Princeton University Press Princeton, NJ
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000IAO1IO

The search for nitre, and the true nature of guano: Being an account of a voyage to the south-west coast of Africa : also a description of the minerals ... the guano islands in that part of the world

Average customer rating:

The search for nitre, and the true nature of guano: Being an account of a voyage to the south-west coast of Africa : also a description of the minerals ... the guano islands in that part of the world
T. E Eden
Manufacturer: R. Groombridge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

Namibia | Africa | Travel | Subjects | Books

Book Description

View the Table of Contents. Read the Prologue.

"Tunnell has written an insightful volume that is clearly written, well organized, informative, and interesting."—Choice

"Pissing on Demand presents a wide-ranging and thought-provoking discussion of the contemporary erosion of civil liberties. No one can read this fine book without being infuriated and alarmed, challenged and—ultimately—enlightened. A real contribution to democratic discourse."
—Philip Jenkins, author of href="http://www.nyupress.org/product_info.php?cPath=&products_id=2533">Beyond Tolerance: Child Pornography on the Internet

"Offers a critical view of both the detox titans, who Tunnell sees as snake-oil purveyors, and the drug testers themselves."
—The Chronicle

Drug testing has become the norm in many workplaces. In order to get a job, potential employees are required to provide their urine for testing. Pissing on Demand examines this phenomenon along with the resulting rise of the anti-drug testing movement, or the "detox industry," that works to beat these tests. Strategies include over-the-counter products like "body flushers" that sound innocent but are really designed to mask the presence of illegal drugs to kits advertised in pro-drug publications like High Times that make no bones about their real purpose. The first exposé of the detox industry in all its manifestations, this book is required reading for anyone concerned with social control, privacy, and workers' rights.

Book Description

Creating and delivering superior customer value is essential for organizations operating in today's competitive environment. This applies to virtually any kind of organization. It requires a profound understanding of the value creation opportunities in the marketplace, choosing what unique value to create for which customers, and to deliver that value in an effective and efficient way. Strategic marketing management helps to execute this process successfully and to achieving sustainable competitive advantage in the market place.
Creating Customer Value Through Strategic Marketing Planning discusses an approach that is both hands-on and embedded in marketing and strategy theory. This book is different from most other marketing strategy books because it combines brief discussions of the underlying theory with the presentation of a selection of useful strategic marketing tools. The structure of the book guides the reader through the process of writing a strategic marketing plan. Suggestions for using the tools help to apply them successfully. This book helps students of marketing strategy to understand strategic marketing planning at work and how to use specific tools. Furthermore, it provides managers with a practical framework and guidelines for making the necessary choices to create and sustain competitive advantage for their organizations.

Book Description

Environmental issues continue to rise up political, business, and social agendas around the world, spawning opportunities for business development. This book explores the emerging discipline of environmental risk management from a lending perspective, providing a clear analysis of the inherent risk across major legal jurisdictions worldwide. The author guides you through developing an effective strategy, addressing legalities, and assessing direct risk. He then explores the indirect (credit) risks, the risks of financing an environmentally unstable project and environmental risk on the project. The book also contains detailed appendices covering code listings, international environmental risks, environmental clauses on loans, and more. Envrionmental Risk Management and Corporate Lending is a practical guide, using case studies to illustrate the issues, and providing a wealth of information and 'tools' for risk appraisal and mitigation. Features

Average customer rating:

Disappointing read

Excellent info, tone too chatty

Building an Information Security Awareness Program
Mark B. Desman
Manufacturer: AUERBACH
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

MIS | Industries & Professions | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books
Encryption | Security & Encryption | Web Development | Computers & Internet | Subjects | Books
General | Networks, Protocols & APIs | Networking | Computers & Internet | Subjects | Books
General | Computers & Internet | Subjects | Books
All Titles | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books
Similar Items:

The Privacy Papers: Managing Technology, Consumer, Employee and Legislative Actions

The CERT(R) Guide to System and Network Security Practices (The SEI Series in Software Engineering)

The Information Systems Security Officer's Guide: Establishing and Managing an Information Protection Program, Second Edition

Managing an Information Security and Privacy Awareness and Training Program

Secure Electronic Commerce: Building the Infrastructure for Digital Signatures and Encryption (2nd Edition)

ASIN: 0849301165

Book Description

In his latest book, a pre-eminent information security pundit confessed that he was wrong about the solutions to the problem of information security. It's not technology that's the solution, but the human factor-people. But even infosec policies and procedures are insufficient if employees don't know about them, or why they're important, or what can happen to them if they ignore them. The key, of course, is continuous awareness of the problems and the solutions. Building an Information Security Awareness Program addresses these concerns. A reference and self-study guide, it goes step-by-step through the methodology for developing, distributing, and monitoring an information security awareness program. It includes detailed instructions on determining what media to use and where to locate it, and it describes how to efficiently use outside sources to optimize the output of a small staff. The author stresses the importance of security and the entire organizations' role and responsibility in protecting it. He presents the material in a fashion that makes it easy for nontechnical staff members to grasp the concepts. These attributes render Building an Information Security Awareness Program an immensely valuable reference in the arsenal of the IS professional.

Customer Reviews:

Disappointing read.......2003-10-20

Having read the cover blurb about this being a cookbook with step-by-step methods and techniques, I bought "Building an Information Security Awareness Program" with high hopes of learning some practical tips for planning and running a security awareness program. Unfortunately, I struggled to find anything of much value.

There are two main reasons that led me to this conclusion. Firstly, the book focuses primarily on information security rather than security awareness per se. The book is written in the sense of giving sage advice to someone who has recently joined a fairly large company as Chief Information Security Officer rather than Head of Information Security Awareness. A selection of awareness topics are covered, of course, but it is almost as if these aspects have been added on to the main text about information security. One could argue that somebody new to security awareness might not have the grounding in information security and would need to learn more. The coverage in this book is so unstructured and incomplete, however, that it cannot honestly be recommended as a primer either on information security or on security awareness.

Secondly, and by far the biggest barrier to understanding, is the author's consistently bad writing style. Others have described it as "chatty" - excessively wordy and turgid are closer to the truth. Grammatical and punctuation errors do not help. There are sentences on virtually every page that are so convoluted and obscure that all meaning is lost. This is somewhat ironic given the author's insistence that security awareness materials should be written "for 9th graders". The text often meanders into side topics and then loses its way in the detail. A good editor should have pruned these asides `back to the green wood' in order to maintain the flow of the text. Indeed, it is entirely possible that the editor's red pen has already trimmed out a lot of dead branches, but I kept wishing that more savage cuts had been made. The author clearly has strong feelings about certain pet hates. He attacks concepts such as organizational culture, for example, in cynical language ("idealistic mumbo jumbo" is one choice phrase!). Highly biased coverage of statistics in Chapter 18, probably the worst chapter in the book, completely undermines the author's otherwise good points about the need to measure an awareness program.

That said, the book will remain on my bookshelf because of the useful chapter summaries and a handful of good ideas that surfaced from the text. I liked the suggestion to interview managers to explore their security priorities, thereby drawing them into the awareness program. Gathering and sifting through pre-existing security awareness materials seems well worthwhile. As an ex-auditor, I appreciated the emphasis on working with the auditors to address their information security concerns. So there we are, the book's best parts covered in three short sentences. If only the author had been so succinct.

Excellent info, tone too chatty.......2002-04-12

This book has great information for the person who has been tasked with creating an Information Security Awareness program at a business which has never previously had one. Good tips on developing Info Security policies, and getting management backing for the policies and awareness program. It would be a great tool for someone wanting to learn how to assess the corporate culture of a new job, if you're not a people person. The only quibble I have is the tone is way too chatty and informal, which gets annoying at times. But well worth the read!

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