Book Description
With the radical changes in information production that the Internet has introduced, we stand at an important moment of transition, says Yochai Benkler in this thought-provoking book. The phenomenon he describes as social production is reshaping markets, while at the same time offering new opportunities to enhance individual freedom, cultural diversity, political discourse, and justice. But these results are by no means inevitable: a systematic campaign to protect the entrenched industrial information economy of the last century threatens the promise of today’s emerging networked information environment.
In this comprehensive social theory of the Internet and the networked information economy, Benkler describes how patterns of information, knowledge, and cultural production are changing—and shows that the way information and knowledge are made available can either limit or enlarge the ways people can create and express themselves. He describes the range of legal and policy choices that confront us and maintains that there is much to be gained—or lost—by the decisions we make today.
Customer Reviews:
This Book Proves the Adage that You See What You Look For.......2007-07-08
I have been hearing about Yochai Benkler's book, "The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedoms," for some time and his exposition around what he (and many others) have called the "networked information economy." Benkler, a Yale law professor, also offers his 527 page (473 in text) book as a free PDF from his web site under a Creative Commons share alike license.
First, let me say, there are a couple of worthwhile insights in the book, which I'll get to in a moment. But mostly, I found the book overly long, often off-subject, and too political for my tastes. In fairness, some of this might be due to the fact it was written in 2005 (published in 2006) and the social and participatory aspects of the Web are now widely appreciated. Yet I fear the broader problem with this polemic is that it proves the adage that you see what you look for.
Benkler's argument is that cheap processors and the Internet have removed the physical constraints on effective information production. This is in keeping with the non-proprietary nature of information as a "nonrival" good, and is also leading to the democratization of information production and the emergence of large-scale peer-produced content. Benkler generally allies himself with the camp of technology optimists. His observations about trends and new developments from Ebay to Wikipedia to SETI@home and open source software are now commonly appreciated.
With the costs of information duplication and dissemination trending to zero, the limiting factor of production becomes human creativity and effort itself. But here, too, with hundreds of millions of Internet users, just a few hours of contributed content from each can easily swamp the ability of even the largest firms to compete. These trends to Benkler presage a "radical decentralization" of information production, and many other changes to the political economy and culture.
That radical changes in the nature of information production and authorship and even the role of traditional publishers or the media are underway is without question. Purposeful collaborations like Wikipedia are now clearly successful and were not forecasted by many.
The lens, however, in which Benkler looks at all of these trends is through the "modern" history of the mass media. Citing Paul Starr's "Creation of the Media," he notes how in 15 years from 1835 to 1850 the cost of setting up a mass-circulation paper increased from $10,000 to over $2 million (in 2005 dollars). In Benkler's view, these cost increases shifted the ability to publish away from the common citizen into the "problem" hands of the mass media. Fortunately, now with the Internet and cheap processors, this evil can be reversed. Though Benkler specifically disclaims that he is not describing "an exercise in pastoral utopianism," the fact is that is exactly what he is describing.
There can be no doubt that the role of mass media and traditional publishers is under severe challenge from the emergence of the Internet. It is also the case that we are witnessing citizen publishers and authors emerge by the millions. These changes are momentous, but they do not involve everyone -- only comparatively small percentages of Internet users blog and still smaller percentages contribute to Wikipedia (about 80,000 at present based on a user base of hundreds of millions). And, as the traditional gatekeepers of printers, publishers and editors lose prominence, new institutions and mechanisms for establishing the authoritativeness and trustworthiness of content will surely need to evolve.
These real trends deserve thoughtful exploration.
However, there is a reason that publishing costs increased so rapidly in that era of the 1800s. Mass publishing and pulp paper were emerging that acted to bring an increasing storehouse of content and information to the public at levels never before seen.
The explosion of information content that occurred at this very same time correlates well with the fundamental historical changes in human wealth and economic growth. Though mass media may prove to be an historical artifact, I would argue that its role in bringing literacy and information to the "masses" was generally an unalloyed good and the basis for an improvement in economic well being the likes of which had never been seen.
By taking a narrow historical horizon and then viewing it through the lens of the vilified "mass media," Benkler is both looking in the wrong direction and missing the point.
The information by which the means to produce and disseminate information itself is changing and growing. These changes in information infrastructure support an inexorable trend to more adaptability, more wealth and more participation. What we are seeing now with the Internet is but a natural continuation of that trend. The "mass media" and the costs of information production of the 1800s was a natural phase within this longer, historical trend. The multiplier effect of information itself will continue to empower and strengthen the individual, not in spite of mass media or any other ideologically based viewpoint but due to the freeing and adaptive benefits of information itself. Information is the natural antidote to entropy and, longer term, to the concentrations of wealth and power.
By trying to push the trends of the Internet through the false needle's eye of political economics, an effort that Benkler also erroneously makes with his earlier analysis of the growth of radio, what are in essence historical forces of almost informational or technological determinism are falsely presented as matters of political choice. Hogwash.
Benkler, however, does observe two useful dimensions for measuring social collaboration efforts: modularity and granularity. By modularity, Benkler means "a property of a project that describes the extent to which it can be broken down into smaller components, or modules, that can be independently produced before they are assembled into a whole." By granularity, Benkler means "the size of the modules, in terms of the time and effort that an individual must invest in producing them."
Benkler's insight is that "the number of people who can, in principle, participate in a project is therefore inversely related to the size of the smallest scale contribution necessary to produce a usable module. The granularity of the modules therefore sets the smallest possible individual investment necessary to participate in a project. If this investment is sufficiently low, then incentives" for producing that component of a modular project can be of trivial magnitude. Most importantly for our purposes of understanding the rising role of nonmarket production, the time can be drawn from the excess time we normally dedicate to having fun and participating in social interactions."
To illustrate this effect of granularity, he contrasts Wikipedia with its simple entries and editing and bounded topics with the far-less successful Wikibooks, which has much larger granularity.
Creators of social collaboration sites are advised to keep granularity small to encourage broader contributions, and if the nature of the site is complex, to increase the number of its modules. Of course, none of this guarantees the magic or timing that also lie behind the most successful sites!
I think that Benkler's arguments could have been more effectively distilled into a 30-page article, with much of the political economy claptrap thrown out. The book is definitely worth a skim.
Phenomenal Book on Information Science and Peer Production.......2007-05-12
I first became familiar with Benkler after reading his paper, "Coase's Penguin" in undergraduate study. I was delighted to hear of the publication of this book. Benkler continues beautifully where he left off in his previous papers and synthesizes an excellent theory of social production in his book.
Benkler begins by describing the economic shape of information - it's non-rival and builds upon itself. He explains the challenges that face information, particularly the Babel Objection. Benkler also covers some legal background on aspects of a "liberal society", such as the role of commons versus private property.
From there, he makes his way into peer production. He touches different aspects of this type of production, from open source to distributed content production & filtering (click workers) to the results of the FCC's shift towards commons-based wireless policy. I found chapter 4, where he connects social production to the economic concepts discussed earlier, to be the most interesting chapter of the book.
He moves on to a lengthy discussion of the political effects of network distribution and social production, including a summary of the history of mass media and predictions about the future. From there, he lays down his argument that we ought to continue to encourage open networks and information sharing. He presents a discussion on current legislation and legal challenges to information and provides some examples of solutions.
I read this book coming out of an undergraduate program in Information Science and wished I had read this book perhaps my sophomore or junior year. Benkler essentially lays out, in linear form, the precise message that my professors were teaching. Because of networks, information science in the 21st century will not follow the traditional industrial-style of distribution but rather a distributed and non-proprietary model. Its impact is phenomenal, not only in the realm of economics and science but politics, culture, and interpersonal communication.
This book ought to be required reading for every undergraduate student studying Telecommunications, Media, or Information Science.
Good argumentation.......2007-04-28
I agree when some people say the book is not well edited (even not being english my first language I found some errors within it) but I think the greatest think about it is the attempt to explain something that it is easy to see that is happening today but nobody know why is happening. You know people write in Wikipedia and that most of them do that at their free time, you know that some people participate in great collaborative efforts to develop free software in the Internet, you know people keep blogs to express their point of view. But can you explain why that happens, why do they do that expecting no financial return or acknowledgment? What do they want? Perhaps you may know what you want when you do or don't some of that things but what about the rest of the world, if you care about it? What has changed or is changing or still must be changed in the societies so that happens?
The author doesn't explain it too but he tries to do it, it is an initial attempt to get some answers. His argumentation through the book covers many aspects of our lives, economic, political, social, antropological, legal and I think that at least at the end you will have some new insights on what is all that about.
Connectivization.......2007-04-20
Be forewarned that this brilliantly conceived book is not so brilliantly written, and the reading can be a real slog at times. Yochai Benkler is a perceptive social theorist but his thoughts are bogged down in academic writing that could really use some editing. Expect excessive introducing, foreshadowing, recapping, and summarizing, giving you the often tiresome impression that you will read Benkler's prose again or have read it before. This book also suffers from what business strategists and military tacticians would call "scope creep," as Benkler's broad theories on society and knowledge become so all-inclusive as to border on diffuseness and ineffectiveness - a problem that really slows down the middle section of the book. This is a common difficulty for vast unified theories about information and humanity, so prepare for some difficulty in following the main points that Benkler is trying to make.
But now that those warnings are out of the way, beneath Benkler's ponderous prose are insightful theories about the rise of networked culture, inspired by the digital revolution, in the face of lockdowns from entrenched power players. The initial uses of open networks inspired a megalomaniacal reaction from the industrial and political sectors, which have partially succeeded in forcing technological design changes, and persecution of new cultural behaviors, that threatened their economic and political dominance. For instance, intellectual property laws (patents, trademarks, and copyrights), which were originally meant to encourage cultural production, have been transformed by power players into tools to enforce corporate profitability. And if you think concerns over those trends are merely alarmism, Benkler provides profound evidence that damage really is being done to culture, freedom, and democracy - in ways that are far deeper and more troubling than the (corporate-inspired) popular rhetoric around piracy, rolyalties, and hackers.
Benkler informatively differentiates the types of freedom that are at stake - personal, cultural, social, and political - and ably demonstrates how each are affected by trends in infrastructure development, media behavior, corporate profiteering, and political gamesmanship. One especially winning chapter deals with how the rising network society can promote justice and development in third world areas that are not currently connected and may never be. The corporate and political insistence on regulating the information infrastructure and criminalizing user behaviors may represent a losing battle against the basic human drive to network and create, as can be seen in trends like open source software and community wi-fi. Benkler's main point here (when you're finally able to uncover it) is that humanity may be on the brink of a major change in the way we process culture and information, thanks to the growth in open worldwide networks. The old school power players won't go without a fight, adding unnecessary strife to the process, but Benkler has faith in humanity's ability to transform and rise above [~doomsdayer520~]
Excellent and Insightful Articulation.......2007-01-11
I highly recommend reading Yochai Benkler's book.
It is a balanced articulation of what the Internet and Web 2.0 are enabling in the development of new forms of social collaboration that are not adequately recognized as such by both private/regulated market advocates and welfare advocates. One of the things that struck me most is Benkler's capacity to create a perspective in which he can show that these new forms of collectives are rooted in old practices that have existed forever.
He also shows that these practices can gain major significance if:
1. The neutrality of the web, access to the web, Open Source initiatives, and the General Public Licensing type of legislation are improved,
2. The aggressive move toward Intellectual Property laws and regulations, and control by corporations, is counter-balanced.
Excellent read!
Book Description
This book explores the intuitive appeal of neural networks and the genetic algorithm in finance. It demonstrates how neural networks used in combination with evolutionary computation outperform classical econometric methods for accuracy in forecasting, classification and dimensionality reduction.
McNelis utilizes a variety of examples, from forecasting automobile production and corporate bond spread, to inflation and deflation processes in Hong Kong and Japan, to credit card default in Germany to bank failures in Texas, to cap-floor volatilities in New York and Hong Kong.
* Offers a balanced, critical review of the neural network methods and genetic algorithms used in finance
* Includes numerous examples and applications
* Numerical illustrations use MATLAB code and the book is accompanied by a website
Download Description
This book explores the intuitive appeal of neural networks and the genetic algorithm in finance. It demonstrates how neural networks used in combination with evolutionary computation outperform classical econometric methods for accuracy in forecasting, classification and dimensionality reduction. McNelis utilizes a variety of examples, from forecasting automobile production and corporate bond spread, to inflation and deflation processes in Hong Kong and Japan, to credit card default in Germany to bank failures in Texas, to cap-floor volatilities in New York and Hong Kong.
Customer Reviews:
More Mathematical than Technical.......2006-06-13
Defiantly more of a math book than a programming guide, but that was what I was expecting. This book explains how to use neural networks in the field of finance. It does so very logically and mathematically. You are shown how to apply neural networks to many different financial problems. But you are mostly left to yourself to actually implement the neural networks on a computer system. Some example source code is provided for MathCad, which is an expensive software package you can buy separately.
If you are already comfortable with neural network programming, and are looking to learn to apply neural networks to finance, this book is great. Being a Java programmer I used the open source JOONE package to implement some of the book's examples in Java. Though JOONE is not suited to all examples in the book, it is a good start for a Java programmer.
The book shows how neural networks can be applied to many real world financial problems. The book pays particular interest to international finance. The book examines Hong Kong and Japan, examining inflation, deflation, currency volatility, and other issues.
I found the book to be very useful in giving me an introduction to neural networks in finance.
The table of contents follows:
Chapter 1: Introduction
Part 1: Econometric Foundations
Chapter 2: What Are Neural Networks?
Chapter 3: Estimation of a Network with Evolutionary Computation
Chapter 4: Evaluation of Network Estimation
Part 2: Applications and Examples
Chapter 5: Estimating and Forecasting with Artificial Data
Chapter 6: Time Series: Examples from Industry and Finance
Chapter 7: Inflation and Deflation: Hong Kong and Japan
Chapter 8: Classification: Credit Card Default and Bank Failures
Chapter 9: Dimensionality Reduction and Implied Volatility Forecasting
Book Description
Once every decade a book comes along that becomes the standard in a field of study, the indispensable reference that every thoughtful practitioner must have on the shelf. Like Samuelson in Economics, Drucker in Management, and Porter in Strategy, Rayport and Jaworski have written what leaders in the New Economy are calling the standard in e-commerce strategy formulation.
e-Commerce presents managers and strategists with road-tested frameworks for competing in the New Economy. This presentation is organized to facilitate the decision-making process for formulating e-commerce enterprise strategy. The text progresses from framing market opportunities to a discussion of New Economy business models, customer interfaces, and communication and branding issues through to implementation, evaluation, and valuation of the online enterprise.
The textbook and companion casebook, E-Commerce and Cases in E-Commerce, are the first volumes produced for the McGraw-Hill/MarketspaceU learning series on e-commerce. McGraw-Hill/MarketspaceU have formed an alliance to develop and deliver exceptional higher education teaching materials on the latest business practices and theories by leading thinkers in the field of e-commerce. McGraw-Hill/MarketspaceU aim to equip present and future executives, managers, and strategists in becoming successful creators of value in the new economy. To accomplish this goal the alliance offers a multi-media suite of cutting-edge tools to help navigate the world of e-commerce. These tools include E-Commerce and Cases in E-Commerce, MarketspaceU.com, the McGraw-Hill Online Learning Center (OLC), and the McGraw-Hill E-Business Power Web.
MarketspaceU is part of Marketspace, a Monitor Group company. Monitor Group is a family of professional services firms linked by shared ownership, management philosophy and assets. Monitor’s roots can be traced back to the Harvard Business School – where a number of its founders studied and taught in the 1980s. Marketspace was founded in 1998. Jeffrey Rayport and Bernie Jaworski (two of its founders) are the principal authors of the first books produced by the McGraw-Hill/MarketspaceU alliance.
e-Commerce has already received early critical acclaim from academic and Internet business leaders:
“Rayport and Jaworski have defined the ‘space’. e-Commerce is a primary weapon in the e-business frontier. Do not let your competitors read this book--buy every copy…” Jeff Taylor, Founder and CEO, Monster.com
“Finally someone has put it all together! These leading thinkers have put in one place a brilliant and comprehensive framework for thinking through, planning, teaching and managing e-Business. And – beyond that – this book is a portal to a stream of the most complete set of online, video, and other resources for e-Business learning to date. Great insights. Powerful tools.” Ralph Oliva, Executive Director of the Institute for the Study of Business Markets and Professor of Marketing, Pennsylvania State University
“e-Commerce is the first textbook to show how firms gain competitive advantage in the New Economy. The authors introduce a number of new and innovative concepts, frameworks, and tools that benefit both students and managers. This book is destined to become the standard New Economy text in leading MBA programs.” John Quelch, Dean, London Business School
“This is a wonderfully designed pedagogical device. The chapters build foundationally, so as to empower the student to deal with unique New Economy concepts, like the DCF approach to valuation etc., towards the end. The chapters are filled with case vignettes, viewpoints, and thought bytes that draws the self-selected reader in, and engages them in a sophisticated debate regarding the Internet economy. The highlight of the book, for me, was the way linkages were provided to existing management concepts. Thus the reader is not left wondering what the connection to the old paradigm is, in fact the reader gets a working dose of those ideas in the book chapters. This makes the book a stand-alone, comprehensive text with a cutting-edge tone and content.” Kastori Rangan, Eliot I. Snider and Family Professor of Business Administration Harvard Business School
Customer Reviews:
Obscure and too expensive.......2002-12-27
As a professor of ecommerce I think that the authors have unnecesarily obscured a subject that deserves a better prose and a more logical thread of reasoning.Theirs is a text written for other academicians and contributors to the HBR, not for students, unless they are candidates to a very high academic degree. ...
Much more than eCommerce.......2001-08-16
This book is about much more than eCommerce. It is the handbook for doing business in the "New Economy". I have taught ecommerce courses in several universities and am familair with most of the titles avialable on this subject: none of them even come close. Read and study this book now before the competiton does.
The Bible of E-Commerce Strategy.......2000-12-22
Comprehensive and clear. A must read for anyone serious about winning in the E-Commerce space.
Amazon.com
Reimagining cities as nodes of an immense network of commercial and political transactions, sociologist Saskia Sassen has transformed Information Age geography. Global Networks, Linked Cities collects research, theory, and case studies examining cities in this context by Sassen and 19 other social scientists, focusing particularly on the recent explosive growth in areas formerly--now inaccurately--called the Third World.
The jargon in Global Networks, Linked Cities can be fairly dense and the style arid, but the essays reward patient readers with insight into the interlinked worlds of finance, geography, communications, and geopolitics. Most of the pieces look closely at individual urban regions: Shanghai, Buenos Aires, and, interestingly, Beirut. All have much to tell us about the organic urban development coevolving with globalized commerce and communications, says editor Sassen. As barriers to free information flow erode, we see mergers between political, business, and academic entities.Global Networks, Linked Cities shows us how this is happening and how to think about what's coming next. --Rob Lightner
Book Description
In her pioneering book The Global City, Saskia Sassen argued that certain cities in the postindustrial world have become central nodes in the new service economy, strategic sites for the acceleration of capital and information flows as well as spaces of increasing socio-economic polarization. One effect has been that such cities have gained in importance and power relative to nation-states.
In this new collection of essays, Sassen and a distinguished group of contributors expand on the author's earlier work in a number of important ways, focusing on two key issues. First, they look at how information flows have bound global cities together in networks, creating a global city web whose constituent cities become "global" through the networks they participate in. Second, they investigate emerging global cities in the developing world-Sao Paulo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Beirut, the Dubai-Iran corridor, and Buenos Aires. They show how these globalizing zones are not only replicating many features of the top tier of global cities, but are also generating new socio-economic patterns as well. These new patterns of development promise to lead to significant changes in the structure of the global economy, as more and more cities worldwide are integrated into globalization's circuitry.
Includes contributions from:Linda Garcia, Patrice Riemens, Geert Lovink, Peter Taylor, David Smith, Michael Timberlake, Stephen Graham, Sueli Schiffer Ramos, Christoff Parnreiter, Felicity Gu, David Meyer, Pablo Ciccolella, Iliana Mignaqui, Eric Huybrechts, Ali Parsa
Customer Reviews:
Outsourcing, in a broader context.......2004-05-10
With the ever decreasing fall in the cost of communication, both digital and analog, this book speculates that a new global phenomenon may be emerging. A few years ago, during the height of the dot com boom, others suggested that the Web might give rise to the disaggregation of cities or cultural hubs, because cheap communications might let creative individuals work from virtually anywhere with a fast bandwidth connection to the Internet.
But as many major cities in developing countries achieve this thick connection, another possibility emerges, as suggested by this book. It is now possible for some of these cities to parlay this connection and a well educated workforce into a globally prominent role. In part by assuming some of the functionality hitherto almost exclusively taken by first world cities. Think for example on how Silicon Valley is outsourcing some of its work to Mumbai or Bangalore.
The book's suggestions of future global cities is intriguing. Though when they suggest this of Hong Kong, one might argue that it is already a global city by any reasonable measure of how plugged in it is into the global economy.
Book Description
Technical analysis¿the analysis of price, volume, and supply/demand imbalance br>has been a staple of serious traders for decades. Now, The Day Trader¿s Guide to Technical Analysis shows traders already familiar with charts and charting how the well-known, time-honored rules of technical analysis can help uncover tremendous profit opportunities in today¿s fast-action, wide-open electronic day trading environment. Trading professional Chris Lewis illustrates his methods through a week of sample trades, explaining what wins, what loses, and why. Details covered include: ¿ In-depth explanation of Nasdaq Level II screens and time of sales ¿ Strategies to get the best price for any trade¿buy or sell ¿ Discussion of trading psychology, with proven rules for maintaining discipline Chris Lewis (Hastings on Hudson, NY) is Vice President of International Operations for ILX Systems. A professional trader, Lewis previously worked as a trading systems engineer for UBS Fixed Income, Henderston Administration, and Reuters.
Download Description
The Day Trader's Guide to Technical Analysis shows traders already familiar with charts and charting how the well-known, time-honored rules of technical analysis can help uncover tremendous profit opportunities in today's fast-action, wide-open electronic trading market.
Customer Reviews:
Great book with rare insight.......2006-04-20
The chapter on level 2 alone is worth the price of the book. Yes the markets have changed and will continue to change, but you can always apply the general principles. Example: accumulation is accumulation regardless of what the market conditions are. Chris points out how to spot accumulation on level 2 and T&S, and if you grasp the idea, you should be able to spot them in any market with the tools available.
Very useful, if somewhat out of date..........2002-02-17
There is much useful material, along with a thoughtful approach to creating a daytrading discipline, in this book. I don't fully agree with (and wouldn't expect to) all of Lewis' statements, and, as you might expect, given the changes in the trading environment over the last couple of years, many of his methods and observations are arguably already out of date, but others still apply, and his overall philosophy, perspective, and attitude are probably more important, in my opinion, than the particulars of his personal approach as practiced in and around late 2000. The text includes numerous clear, concrete, and detailed examples, though you may have to look past an L2 screen with a stack of QCOM buyers at 343 13/16 (I just never get over mania-market prices) to receive the message.
SOMEONE SUCCESSFULL WITH THE SAME INTERESTS AS US FINALLY TA.......2001-09-08
SOMEONE SUCCESSFUL WITH THE SAME INTEREST AS OURS REVEALS TO US HIS SYSTEM. CLEAR, THRUTFUL AND CONCISE. THIS BOOK WAS THE ULTIMATE REVELATION FOR ME. GOT ALL MY IDEAS CLEAR ON MY OWN APPROACH AND PERMIT ME, COMBINED WITH DIFFERENT MOMENTUM CONCEPTION TO GAIN MASTERY IN TRADING. MY DREAM HAS BECOME REALITY AFTER 10 MONTHS.
THANK YOU A LOT Mr. LEWIS for your GENEROSITY AND plain english FOR TREATING SUCH COMPLEX MATTERS.
(OTHER PARALLEL READINGS TO GET TO THE ULTIMATE RESULT:
STAN WEINSTEIN/ WILLIAM O'NEIL (TRADING PHILOSOPHY!!
ALAN FARLEY (ORIGINAL SWING TRADING CONCEPTION
JOSH LUKEMAN (MARKET MAKERS MENTALITY
& ARI KIEV (PSYCHOLOGY ASPECTS FOR TRADING
These strategies don't work.......2001-05-24
I lost money using these strategies. Buy Steve Nison book if you want a good book on TA. This one just doesn't measure up.
All in all, a rather decent book.......2000-11-16
The good points: first, the book's emphasis is on trading the open, offering a straight forward strategy for playing momentum type gaps. Second, the book has a thorough review of TA basics filtered by practical and experienced advice. Third, there were several odds and ends (like NASDAQ having two data feeds, do the S&P Futures really say anything, etc) that were indeed helpful.
The not so good points: while, its all there, you have to really read the text carefully to extract what you need - meaning it could have been better organized for flow in some chapters. Second, a week in the life "Trading Week" would have been more satisfying if it had been two weeks long and not one (the author might disagree).
All in all, a rather decent book that I value for its level-headed, lets stick to the basics, here's what really works kind of thinking.
Amazon.com
You may be only six degrees away from Kevin Bacon, but would he let you borrow his car? It depends on the structures within the network that links you. When the power goes out, when we find that a stranger knows someone we know, when dot-com stocks soar in price, networks are evident. In Six Degrees, sociologist Duncan Watts examines networks like these: what they are, how they're being studied, and what we can use them for. To illustrate the often complicated mathematics that describe such structures, Watts uses plenty of examples from life, without which this book would quickly move beyond a general science readership. Small chapters make each thought-provoking conclusion easy to swallow, though some are hard to digest. For instance, in a short bit on "coercive externalities," Watts sums up sociological research showing that:
"Conversations concerning politics displayed a consistent pattern .... On election day, the strongest predictor of electoral success was not which party an individual privately supported but which party he or she expected would win."
Six Degrees attempts to help readers understand the new and exciting field of networks and complexity. While considerably more demanding than a general book like The Tipping Point, it offers readers a snapshot of a riveting moment in science, when understanding things like disease epidemics and the stock market seems almost within our reach. --Therese Littleton
Book Description
The pioneering young scientist whose work on the structure of small worlds has triggered an avalanche of interest in networks. In this remarkable book, Duncan Watts, one of the principal architects of network theory, sets out to explain the innovative research that he and other scientists are spearheading to create a blueprint of our connected planet. Whether they bind computers, economies, or terrorist organizations, networks are everywhere in the real world, yet only recently have scientists attempted to explain their mysterious workings.
From epidemics of disease to outbreaks of market madness, from people searching for information to firms surviving crisis and change, from the structure of personal relationships to the technological and social choices of entire societies, Watts weaves together a network of discoveries across an array of disciplines to tell the story of an explosive new field of knowledge, the people who are building it, and his own peculiar path in forging this new science. 24 b/w illustrations.
Customer Reviews:
Real-world networks are the result of nonrandom structure.......2007-08-12
Random Graph Theory: Image throwing a box full of buttons on a table and then choosing a pair of buttons at random and connect them with a piece of string. What would the buttons look like over a period of time. "In particular, what features could we prove that all such networks must have?" If you pickup one of the buttons what would be its connected component? "The fraction of the nodes connected in a single component change suddenly when the average number of links per node exceeds one." If we add enough thread so each button has one thread the fraction of the graph that occupied by the largest component suddenly jumps from almost zero to one. A phase transition from unconnected to connected and the point this happens is called the critical point. "Phase transitions of one sort or another occur in many complex systems and have been used to explain phenomena as diver as the onset of magnetization, the explosion of disease epidemics, and the propagation of fads. In the particular case, the phase transition is driven by the addition of a small number of links right near the critical point that have the effect of connecting many very small clusters into a single giant component, which then proceeds to swallow up all the other nodes until everything is connected." "So the presence of a giant component means that whatever happens at one location in the network has the potential to affect any other location." "The line between isolation and connectedness is thus an important threshold for the flow of information, disease, money, innovations, fads, social norms, and pretty much everything else that we care about in the moder society. The global connectivity should arrive not incrementally but in a sudden, dramatic jump tells us something deep and mysterious about the world." Almost everything we know about complex networks tells us that "they are not random." "Nevertheless, if we would like to understand the properties and behavior of real-world networks, the issue of nonrandom structure is one that eventually has to be faced."
Opens up the world.......2007-04-05
We used this book in a doctoral seminar addressing shifting practices of "meaning making" in a networked society. It was the one book that everyone agreed was outstanding in all areas: aside from the depth and level of scholarship in Watts's work, he also has an extremely approachable style, one that will make the book useful to scholars and laymen alike.
Efficient and Excellent!!!.......2007-03-10
No more other words to say, I am really satisfied with the service!
Excellent for its audience.......2006-04-30
I wrote this book review as an assignment for a class. Its intended audience was sociologists unfamiliar with network theory. The intended audience for the book though is much wider. If you want the math, read academic journals.
In the first chapter of Six Degrees Duncan Watts notes that gossip, power outages, epidemics, even properties of the human brain such as consciousness are phenomena that may be understood as emerging from the interaction of their constituent elements. Through such examples, he calls attention to the broad applicability of his subject matter. Having provided this motivation, Watts spends much of first half of the book discussing what he knows best, "small world" networks. In the second half he presents a network perspective for a wide range of topics such as epidemics, externalities, speculation, social decision making, and organizations.
Like many academics marketing books to non-academics, Watts skillfully weaves his personal story with the science. His personal story is not only provided to keep laymen interested. Watts is now a member of the sociology department at Columbia University, but one can't help but wonder whether he identifies as a sociologist? How would other members of the discipline respond to a youngster whose PhD is in theoretical and applied mechanics who may never have read Durkheim? His early collaborators were mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists lodged in appropriate departments. Watts though, has become a strong proponent of interdisciplinary science, and he respectfully acknowledges research that has been done in anthropology, sociology, psychology and economics.
His first foray in the social sciences was inspired by the "small world" phenomenon. When two people are surprised to learn they have mutual acquaintances, someone often says, "It's a small world." In 1967, social psychologist Stanley Milgram decided to investigate how small the world really is. He tasked randomly selected residents of Boston and Omaha with getting a letter to a stockbroker who lived in Massachusetts. The rule was, they could only send the letter to people they knew on a first name basis. Amazingly, the letters that reached their destination usually did it in just 6 steps. This finding was then misconstrued and became the urban legend that there are six degrees of separation between any two people. Despite the widespread interest in the small world phenomena, little progress was made understanding it over the next thirty years.
Watts got interested in this problem when he was a graduate student in theoretical and applied mechanics. He and his advisor, Steven Strogatz, had been trying to understand how crickets' chirping becomes synchronized without a conductor cricket. Watts surmised that the timing of a cricket's chirp must be influenced by where it is located and the other crickets it is listening to. The ability to synchronize may depend on the structure of this network of crickets. The relationship between network structure and network phenomena such as synchronicity suddenly seemed broadly important, and he was surprised to learn how little mathematical attention it had garnered. Recalling the idea of "six degrees of separation," Watts and Strogatz turned to social networks and set about building simple models. Where Milgram had asked, "How small is the world?" they were now asking, "What does it take to make a world small?" This reframing of the problem was fundamental to the contribution they were to make.
Watts and Strogatz settled on modeling just two facets of social networks. One was the "small world" aspect, quantified as average path length (the number of links required to connect two randomly chosen people). The second was clustering, the extent to which my friends overlap with my friends' friends. What makes small world networks surprising is that short path lengths and high clustering are inherently antagonistic. Paul Erd?s and Alfred R?nyi rigorously proved that path lengths are short in networks with no inclination towards increased clustering, a random graph in the parlance of mathematicians. At the opposite extreme, if everyone was friends with all of their friends' friends, short path lengths would be impossible (in fact social groups would be completely disconnected from each other). After countless computer simulations, Watts had two important results. The alpha model captured the small world balance of path length and clustering. The beta model showed that if a network was systematically clustered, to the point of fragmentation, just adding five random links (edges) halves the average path length. He then began acquiring and examining network data sets. Remarkably, Hollywood actor collaborations, the neurology of C. Elegans, the power grid of the Western United States, interlocking boards of directors and the world wide web are all small world networks.
Next Watts reviews the work by L?zl? Barab?si, a physicist at the University of Notre Dame. His major contribution is research on scale free networks. Sociologists have long been concerned with questions surrounding the number of connections (degree) people have. Barab?si realized the importance of the degree distribution in a network. The degree distribution of many networks is approximately Poisson but Barabasi showed that the degree distribution of other important networks follows the highly skewed power-law. The distribution of wealth and the size of cities both fit this model. Furthermore he showed that this distribution will follow if the future growth rate is linearly related to the present size. This has obvious implications for these two examples and calls to mind Merton's Matthew Effect.
Barab?si's book, Linked, is similar to Six Degrees in that is geared to the general public and reviews many of the most important advances in network scholarship. Do Watts and Barab?si overstate their case? Rather than get bogged down in the semantic debate that is likely to arise from the claim to a "new" science, we should appraise the value of this line of research. It clearly has potential but Watts himself sometimes alludes to the difficulties in achieving that potential. Watts' work is mostly theoretical. Six Degrees offers a thought provoking network perspective on many topics but little help harnessing the theory in empirical work. Appropriate data may be hard to come by. Perhaps Watts has provided ideas that creative empiricists will find ways to exploit, but there are methodological challenges that may prove to be stubborn.
Despite some important exceptions such as Granovetter's Strength of Weak Ties sociologists have tended to take one of two approaches. One was to focus on the relationship between social structure and network structure. The other was to view network ties as sources of information or influence. This means exploring the association between position in a network, and a node's identity or power. Watts is right to call attention to the fact that these approaches usually ignored dynamics: changes in the network structure (changes in network connections), and what individuals do on the network (search for information, spread rumors, make decisions). Network data that captures these dynamics may be harder to come by.
Furthermore, large detailed datasets may be limited by the computational power available. Even simple computer simulations can be very computationally demanding. Threshold models of decision making, discontinuous phase transitions and cascades - many of the fundamental concepts in the study of networks are nonlinear. Proving the existence of causal relationships is always a challenge but these complex systems make a hash of everything. The measured effect of an independent variable, on average or at the margin, tells us little about the importance of that variable.
Despite a reasonable display of humility and respect, Watts should be criticized for the sociology he leaves out. Neither space limitations, nor a rush to publication can justify the gaps in his otherwise helpful recommendations for further reading. For example, Blau, Burt, Coleman, Homans, Laumann, Marwell and Oliver are conspicuously absent from the list. Perhaps this observation should not be overanalyzed but it does brings us back to how Watts will be received by sociologists and what impact he and scholars outside the discipline will have on sociology. It is hard for this reviewer to understand how anyone who reads this book could come away uncertain of the value of mathematics for theory development as well as empirical analysis. Model building can simplify and clarify, enhancing our intuition. Watts would never argue that all sociologists should drop what they're doing and begin running computer simulations, just that we should be open to such approaches. As he points out, "For any complex system, there are many simple models we can invent to understand its behavior. The trick is to pick the right one. And that requires us to think carefully, to know something about the essence of the real thing." Sociologists know something about the real thing. That's why we can't leave all the modeling to physicists and economists.
"Six Degrees" - A Reaction to Professor Watts' Seminal Work.......2006-01-13
The book is not a user's guide to social networking. This is not "Networking for Dummies"! It is a thoughtful treatment by an academic of a fascinating topic - or to be more precise - an intriguing network of interrelated topics.
In presenting the material in his book, Dr. Watts tells two stories in parallel. At one level, he describes the evolution of his work and that of his colleagues in trying to solve the problem of modeling and understanding the dynamics within a wide variety of types of networks. The networks described include electric power grids, social networks, AIDS and Ebola virus epidemics, hierarchical organizational charts in Fortune 500 firms and financial markets. At another level, Watts uses the story of the arc of his research as a case study to describe the emergence of a whole new branch of science: the science of networks. In one sense, as I made my way through the ten chapters of this book, I felt I had been invited into a microbiology laboratory to view the results of experiments in which Watts and his gifted colleagues has served as human Petri dishes that had hosted the incubation of germs of ideas that had been cultured from a wide variety of disciplines and streams of thought.
As a recruiter and an avid practitioner of social networking, I found much to ponder in these chapters. Chapter 5, "Search in Networks," is particularly relevant to the problem of how best to think about finding the right person via directed searches or broadcast searches. I also found enlightening Watt's tracing of the development of the popular concept of "Six Degrees of Separation" from its inception in 1967 the research of social psychologist Stanley Milgram into the "small-world problem." through its current level of cachet in popular parlance.
As a Renaissance Soul who believes firmly in the value of helping companies to discover and to hire broadly educated leaders, I was particularly encouraged by Chapter 9, "Innovation, Adaptation, and Recovery." Standing on the shoulders of two MIT professors, Chuck Sabel and Michael Piore, whose 1984 book, The Second Industrial Divide, warned of a sea change in industrial organization, Watts surveys the challenges of organizational structure and communication in an age of ambiguity. Implicit throughout this book is a point that he makes explicit in this chapter: the only way to function effectively in this world of growing complexity and ambiguity is to utilize strategies of collaboration across traditional boundaries. This principle is true in facing the challenges of creating a new science of networking. Boundaries had to be crossed and chasms bridged that had traditionally separated scientists in their own fiefdoms of physics, economics, mathematics, sociology in order to be able to begin to model network behaviors and dynamics. I see the same dynamics at work in the nascent field of nanotechnology, in which biologists, physicists, material scientists, electrical engineers, optics specialists and software engineers are all working together to solve problems and grasp emerging opportunities.
In much the same way, the only reasonable approach to resolving complex challenges within organizations is to create collaboration strategies that connect individual and teams that traditional have done their work in isolation from one another. As a compelling case in point, Watts dissects the Toyota-Aisin crisis of 1997 and its stunning resolution.
I am more convinced than ever before that the challenges of complexity and ambiguity in the world of business will be faced most successfully by companies that have the vision to hire as leaders Renaissance Men and Women who understand at the very core of their being the value and power of collaboration across traditional boundaries of thought, academic discipline and functional role within an organization.
I am grateful to Dr. Watts for taking his experience from academic work and making it applicable and accessible to those of use practicing outside the world of academia.
Amazon.com
Building relationships with customers has been a buzz phrase in many business circles for years. Now John Hagel and Arthur Armstrong declare that's not enough. They make a strong case that business success in the very near future will depend on using the Internet to build not just relationships, but communities. The payoff, they maintain, will be phenomenal customer loyalty and high profits. But, they warn, this race will definitely go to the swift. Here's a cyberspace book that could make your business future. Not everyone agrees with Hagel and Armstrong, but with stakes so high they deserves a serious reading.
Book Description
Net Gain identifies where the next level of value lies on the Internet and lays out the first economic model to quantify the revenue potential and the investment required to build a successful virtual community. From the offerings of commercial online services such as the Motley Fool Investment group to Internet communities of book lovers, Net Gain offers a multitude of real-world scenarios and lessons for building value and creating competitive edge. The authors clearly show that in order to compete in the online economy, you must establish an entirely new approach to product development, marketing, customer service, and distribution, and rethink your company's relationships to customers, suppliers, and competitors. And they show you how to do it.
Download Description
Hagel and Armstrong argue that a new business model is emerging in cyberspace, constructed around the notion of "electronic communities" whose value lies in their aggregation potential--the ability to recognize, configure, and collect seemingly disparate groups into communities with particular commercial and collaborative interests. Not only do these electronic communities constitute a new way to structure the profusion of information that characterizes the Internet, but they force organizations to rethink their approaches to a whole host of business processes--product development, brand identity, customer service, advertising and marketing, merchandising, and channel management--and the organizations' relationships to their customers, suppliers, and competitors.
Customer Reviews:
Prospering in the Virtual Community - Where Are We Going?.......2006-06-20
Both authors are from the esteemed McKinsey & Company. Even though released in 1997, this book has pretty much mapped out where we are now, and possibly to where the web will evolve regarding Virtual Communities. A community is started with an initial investment - a learning curve investment - then receives the positve network effects. The web is used for three basic purposes, to find content, to interact and to complete transactions. They discuss the 'critical mass' of memebers that a community must acheive before it becomes self-sustaining. They project a curve of this new web envirinoment of villages, constellations, coalitions, to finally infomediaries (a state yet to be achieved).
There are four factors of initial growth: the size of the potential community, the value of being online, the intensity of commerce, and the fractal depth of the community. The fractal depth is the number of possible sub-communities that can be developed through time.
Consumer-based communites are either geographical, demographic or topical. Business-focused communites are either vertical (same industry), functional, geographical, or in a particular business category that meets the needs of other businesses. The authors discuss the virtues of each of these.
A fast start-up would be aided by a strong brand name, established customer relationships, or content to keep browsers interested. Skills to get and retain members are key.
The first emphasis is on generating traffic, then concentrating traffic - convincing the browsers to spend time there - you must always be expanding the offerings and creating excitement through participation. One must then lock-in traffic. This can be done by fostering a relationship between members, improving community functions, and tayloring resources to individual members. Keep the sub-communities small. Give them resources to start additional sub-communites.
Sounds like they are right on track.
Five Stars
Amazon.com.......2006-05-10
New cultures have been emerging in the world computer network. Among these cultures are Amazon.com, eBay, Yahoo, and google. Amazon provided a computer communication network allowing members to read other members reviews. Amazon track individual preferences and buying patterns and offerred products appealing to those interests. There are pitfalls in mixing technology with human relationship. Amazon avoids some of the pitfalls by customizing a portal for their members allowing them to create lists, private and public reviews, and a network of friendship. The member has the option to communicate with the outside world or remain semi secluded. Amazon and eBay virtual community services bring enormous leverage to the ordinary citizen at extremely low costs. The latent technology must be used intelligently and deliberately by an informed public. The power of the virtual community is the ability to communicate through a public medium in some sort of dispersed decision making process. Net Gain is about the conceptual framework of this communication medium.
A forerunner on how to create profitable on-line communities.......2003-08-01
Notwithstanding the many new books on on-line communities, I still keep this book on my bookshelf as a useful reminder of the conceptual framework around which many new businesses - failed or otherwise - were subseqently developed.
It has been nearly six years since I attended a seminar organized by the consulting company McKinsey at which the two authors (both McKinsey consultants)presented their book and what seemed, at that time, to be its somewhat radical proposition about profitably developing self-organizing on-line communities around the passionate interests of their memberships.
As I become more familiar with Amazon and how it is organizing the community through which you are reading this and other reviews, I am reminded about the fundamental concepts that Hagel and Armstrong laid out in their book regarding the economics of virtual communities. Amazon attracts member-generated content which is a key part of its business model which uses the passionate interests of its own customer base to increase its business value. Many doubted the vailidity of this proposition when this book came out, but the evidence does appear to increasingly support it.
Arguably, many might now say that this book is dated, on-line businesses having mushroomed and failed since this book appeared, yielding new lessons that this book could not have foreseen. Many of its claims now seem overhyped.
While this and other criticims may all be well and true, I suspect that this book will come to be regarded in future business histories of the on-line business as one of the seminal pieces of strategic business thinking in the late 1990s. I shall keep it for posterity, if not profitability. In any case, there must now be enough second-hand copies for you not to have to make the investment at the full original cost!
Virtual Communities = Real Prosperity.......2002-03-05
Hagel has co-authored two especially important books (with Arthur G. Armstrong III and Marc Singer, respectively), the other being Net Worth "which builds on a number of the themes originally developed" in this volume. As Hagel and Armstrong point out, Net.Gain "systematically [analyzes] the economic drivers for value creation that exist on networks. It [uses] one particular business model -- the virtual community -- to illustrate the unique capabilities of digital networks and how these might be harnessed to create a substantial business with very attractive economics." The material is carefully organized within three Parts: The Real Value of Virtual Communities, Building a Virtual Community, and Positioning to Win the Broader Game. Hagel and Armstrong also provide a "Management Agenda", followed by excellent suggestions for further reading.
In the Preface, Hagel and Armstrong acknowledge three inevitable limitations in writing Net.Gain: "The first arises from the profound uncertainties associated with evolving electronic networks and the myriad business models emerging in the primordial brew known as cycberspace....Second, the need to be concise has led us to make some generalizations about the likely evolution of virtual communities and the key principles for success....Third, we do not expect virtual communities to be the only 'form of life' on public networks. Indeed, many other commercial and non-commercial formats (including dictionaries, market spaces, 'web'zines,' corporate sites and game areas) will thrive on these networks as well." Working within these limitations, Hagel and Armstrong succeed admirably when describing the power and potential of the virtual community concept. Also, when explaining (a) how to target the kind of community to start-up; (b) the principles of a successful entry strategy, emphasizing the need to generate, engage, and lock in traffic over time; (c) characteristics of community organizations; and (d) criteria by which to select the right technology. Then in Part Three, Hagel and Armstrong shift their attention to explaining the fundamental ways in which the emergence and spread of virtual communities will alter traditional business.
My strong recommendation is that this book be read first, then Net Worth. My further recommendation is that both books be used to formulate the agenda for a workshop or what is generally referred to as an "executive retreat" (preferably for two days and located offsite) with all participants required to read both books in advance. In their Epilogue, Hagel and Armstrong suggest that "the most radical potential impact of the virtual community may well be its impact on the way individuals manage their lives and companies manage themselves. Communities will serve to connect, much like the postage system and telephone before them. But they will go several steps further than the telephone or fax, as they help the individual to seek out and find. Souls in search of relationship, colleagues in search of teamwork,, customers in search of products, suppliers in search of markets: the virtual community might have a place for them after all." Those who share my high regard for Hagel's two books (co-authored with Armstrong and Singer, respectively) are urged to check out Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline as well as O'Dell and Grayson's If Only We Knew What We Know. Both can also help with the planning and implementing of the off-site workshop recommended earlier.
Good Ideas that can hold in 10 pages.......2000-10-16
Excellent ideas on Internet marketing and business strategies but did not need to write a book, ten pages would have been enough. Read a well condensed summary is less time consuming for the same amount of great information provided by the author.
Average customer rating:
- Fuzzy Math
- Disappointed! Too simple, sometimes naive
- So simple, so good...
- Compleat Guide to Day Trading Stocks
- ANSWERS, ANSWERS AND MORE ANSWERS
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The Compleat Guide to Day Trading Stocks
Jake Bernstein
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ASIN: 0071361251 |
Book Description
Day trading is Wall Street’s hottest trend and, in The Compleat Guide to Day Trading Stocks, famed futures trader and author Jake Bernstein turns his attention, knowledge, and experience to the exciting world of stock trading. Bernstein covers timing systems, trend following systems, breakout systems, and more—all illustrated with chart examples based on intra-day time frames, and supported by results from his meticulous, historically accurate back testing.
Basic enough for novice traders—yet with enough detail for the most demanding market veterans—Bernstein’s book gives day traders the tools they need to succeed in this fast-paced, relentless market. Special attention is given to:
• Day trading the technology sector
• Risk management and diversification
• Little-known nuances of order placement Jake Bernstein (Northbrook, IL) publishes MBH Weekly, a newsletter covering the commodities and futures markets. Author of The Compleat Day Trader and Strategies for the Electronic Futures Trader, Bernstein is a popular speaker at trading seminars and regularly appears on radio and television.
Customer Reviews:
Fuzzy Math.......2004-06-06
Although there is much informative basic material in this book, I cannot stand the fuzzy math this author uses. The percentage gains he reports in some of his examples are blatantly deceptive. An example is Fig. 5-10, where he shows the possible gains achievable using the "gap" method. He quotes a profit potential of $21062, which I dont dispute. However, there is no mention of the actual money necessary to make the trades shown, which is probably somewhere around $30,000 (minimum). This would yield a profit of around 67%. The figure, however, quotes a profit return of almost 700%!! Whether or not these figures are his, or if he borrowed them from another source does not matter. He should know better! This sort of misleading "fluff" does nothing but confuse the amatuer and leads to the expectation of gains much better than realistically possible with a small account balance. Throughout the book, math like this is used to over exagerate possible gains from day trading.
Disappointed! Too simple, sometimes naive.......2002-09-16
This is the second Jake book I had read up till now. The first one is "Investment Quotient" which I gave my highest rating. That does not lead to my negative comment on this one because of over expectation. It's just that the content and quality of this so named guide just cannot be described as compleat.
In one single book of only 200 pages, Jake tried to discuss many important elements of day trading, including history, mechanism, player characteristics, market structure and even sophisticated technical tools like Stochastics, MACD, Momentum, various forms of Moving Average and even AI. The problem is: he tried to cover so many things that the whole book becomes very shallow and far from what is needed for this highly risky game.
I dont understand why many reviewers gave this book such high ratings. I am afraid that many amateurs had already been lured to enter the game under the false illusion that they became better, if not well equipped, after reading this book, and had already fallen prey to the market crocs.
So simple, so good..........2002-04-03
Jake has writed no news about trading world, but all that the traders need is into this book. Sometimes we read a bit of trading system, a bit of psicological approach, etc. Jake said that the book is dedicated to day traders and aspiring day traders the world over. Doing day trading is arduous: the challenge immense. The promise of victory and lure of wealth inspire you daily to confront the odds of success. Jake give us this book in the hope that his efforts, research, suggestions, systems, and methods will help us achieve our goals.
Great buy!
Compleat Guide to Day Trading Stocks.......2002-03-18
The Compleat Guide to Day Trading Stocks is just that: one of the most complete and very best books ever written on the subject of day trading. Its highly regarded author, Jake Bernstein takes the reader from the very basics such as realistic risk/reward considerations, the essential mechanics of trend-following systems, fundamental vs. technical analysis, timing indicators, stochastics and charts, all the way to clear and precise systems and methods as well as the Psychology of Day Trading. He goes out of his way to make sure that the reader is absolutely aware of all aspects of day trading before making a commitment - including the long and painful learning curve that is inevitable - and clearly states who should not undertake day trading. Having said that, if the reader understands this, and is still firmly committed to making day trading a success, Mr. Bernstein gives his utmost support by going deeply into the nuts and bolts of the art by providing a solid foundation with proven strategies that can be thoroughly back-tested. This is really the most beneficial part of the book for the experienced investor, and is that which sets it apart from the many more general works on the subject. The reader is encouraged to learn and test these methods and systems and to incorporate the ones that are best suited to his/her own investment style. Pitfalls are clearly stated and the writing is extremely fluid and easy to understand. Best of all, the reader subconsciously develops the proper attitude that is so essential to succeed - that day trading should be treated as a serious business which can and will only be successful if done with the proper frame of mind, diligence, hard work, and risk management as well as a dedication to discipline. I highly recommend it!
ANSWERS, ANSWERS AND MORE ANSWERS.......2002-02-17
THIS IS A GREAT BOOK TO GET ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS ABOUT SHORT-TERM AND DAY TRADING. THIS BOOK TELLS YOU WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW AND IT EXPLAINS HOW TO GET WHERE YOU WANT TO GO. THE AUTHOR DOES NOT TELL YOU ONE METHOD OF TRADING. HE LAYS THEM ALL OUT FOR YOU TO DECIDE WHICH METHOD BEST SUITS YOU; WHICH IS THE KEY TO SUCCESS IN ANY ENDEAVOR. MR BERSTEIN IS A VETERAN AND HE TELLS YOU WHAT HE THINKS. TO ME THAT MEANS A LOT.
THE WEALTH OF INFORMATION IS ASTOUNDING.
A MUST READ.
Book Description
Introduction to Online Competitive Intelligence Research gives you the tools you need to stay ahead of your competitor's moves. Numerous research problem scenarios and cases with suggested search strategies are included. Step-by-step methodology takes you through the CI research process, including planning and direction, data collection, analysis and dissemination. One section provides insight into how your firm might protect itself from the unwanted CI efforts of competitors. Like all the titles in the Business Research Series, this book contains a number of business research applications that can be used for both in-house research training and reference. Internet research can be quick, easy, and 
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