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.
Amazon.com
Human beings are information omnivores: we are constantly collecting, labeling, and organizing data. But today, the shift from the physical to the digital is mixing, burning, and ripping our lives apart. In the past, everything had its one place--the physical world demanded it--but now everything has its places: multiple categories, multiple shelves. Simply put, everything is suddenly miscellaneous.
In Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger charts the new principles of digital order that are remaking business, education, politics, science, and culture. In his rollicking tour of the rise of the miscellaneous, he examines why the Dewey decimal system is stretched to the breaking point, how Rand McNally decides what information not to include in a physical map (and why Google Earth is winning that battle), how Staples stores emulate online shopping to increase sales, why your children's teachers will stop having them memorize facts, and how the shift to digital music stands as the model for the future in virtually every industry. Finally, he shows how by "going miscellaneous," anyone can reap rewards from the deluge of information in modern work and life.
From A to Z, Everything Is Miscellaneous will completely reshape the way you think--and what you know--about the world.
The Flocking of Information: An Amazon.com Exclusive Essay by David Weinberger
As businesses go miscellaneous, information gets chopped into smaller and smaller pieces. But it also escapes its leash--adding to a pile that can be sorted and arranged by anyone with a Web browser and a Net connection. In fact, information exhibits bird-like "flocking behavior," joining with other information that adds value to it, creating swarms that help customers and, ultimately, the businesses from which the information initially escaped.
For example, Wize.com is a customer review site founded in 2005 by entrepreneur Doug Baker. The site provides reviews for everything from computers and MP3 players to coffee makers and baby strollers. But why do we need another place for reviews? If you're using the Web to research what digital camera to buy for your father-in-law, you probably feel there are far too many sites out there already. By the time you have scrolled through one store's customer reviews for each candidate camera and then cross-referenced the positive and the negative with the expert reviews at each of your bookmarked consumer magazines, you have to start the process again just to remember what people said. Wize in fact aims at exactly that problem. It pulls together reviews from many outside sources and aggregates them into three piles: user reviews, expert reviews (with links to the online publications), and the general "buzz." (For shoppers looking for a quick read on a product, Wize assigns an overall ranking.) When Wize reports that 97 percent of users love the Nikon D200 camera, it includes links to the online stores where the user reviews are posted, so customers are driven back to the businesses to spend their money.
Zillow.com does something similar for real estate. The people behind Expedia.com, Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink, were looking for a new business idea--and were in the market for new homes. After hunting for information, they found that most of it was locked into the multiple listings sites of the National Association of Realtors. Now Zillow takes those listings and mashes them up with additional information that can help a potential purchaser find exactly what she wants. The most dramatic mashup right now is the "heat map" that uses swaths of color to let you tell at a glance what are the most expensive and most affordable areas. At some point, though, Zillow or one of its emerging competitors will mash up listing information with school ratings, crime maps, and aircraft flight patterns.
Wize and Zillow make money by selling advertising, but their value is in the way their sites aggregate the miscellaneous--letting lots of independent sources flock together, all in one place.
We're seeing the same trend in industry after industry, including music, travel, and the news media. Information gets released into the wild (sometimes against a company's will), where it joins up with other information, and the act of aggregating adds value. Companies lose some control, but they gain market presence and smarter customers. The companies that are succeeding in the new digital skies are the ones that allow their customers to add their own information and the aggregators to mix it up, because whether or not information wants to be free, it sure wants to flock.
Customer Reviews:
Pufferry and Propaganda.......2007-10-21
Don't be bamboozled by David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. Puffery on the outside, there's propaganda within.
A booster of Internet-enabled consumer-generated content, Weinberger hails all its new modes--social networks, tagging, folksonomies, wikis, mash-ups etc.--to argue that the Internet enables new bottom-up ways of organizing and creating knowledge. His two theses are irrefutable. First, information is getting chopped into smaller and smaller pieces. Second, the organization of information has escaped physical world constraints and control by experts and their institutions.
The net result: any one can now organize information any way one wants to suit one's own purposes and do so at any time for one's immediate use. From this potential Weinberger foresees though rose-colored glasses an ever-changing array of "useful, powerful and beautiful ways to make sense of our world." Excuse me but such a view has huge problems.
As Weinberger points out, the best grouping and sorting of information into knowledge is done by small groups not only online but also offline, as his own examples demonstrate. The Internet brings nothing special to this process. To be sure, the Internet does make it much easier to form groups and very much easier to form groups that include strangers and groups devoted to narrow topics. But a vast increase in quantity does not necessarily yield any improvement in quality, and although Weinberger is always careful to label such an outcome as "potential," I've yet to see any marked change in our ability to make sense of the world.
Nor is the appetite and aptitude for this activity suited to all. As any teacher who ever graded term papers will confirm, the ability to cut-and-paste information and turn it into knowledge is not innate. Even after some schooling, such a rudimentary skill is very far from universal. It is essential for the new occupational stratum of Information Age employees who manipulate words and numbers for their livings, but such "knowledge workers" are not Everyman. Presenting the abilities and interests of this or any other elite as those of everyone is the essence of ideology and shouldn't fool anyone.
Nor should anyone accept, much less applaud, Weinberger's cavalier dismissal of discipline and authority. He argues that knowledge should not have any shape and that deciding what to believe is now our burden. His laissez-faire alternative would have John and Jane Doe fend for themselves, finding and creating meaning from and among each other--link by link, tag by tag. Fortunately, this cannot happen because humans can only make sense of things, especially disconnected facts, through the frameworks of our inherited arts and sciences. Nor should it happen. The casual indifference to several millennia of human efforts to make sense of the world only leaves John and Jane in the post-modern void, unarmed and aimless.
There's a lot to be said in favor of consumer-generated content but to suggest that the fragmentation of knowledge and the cacophony of cyberspace will improve our ability to make sense and meaning of life is cybertopian bunkum.
deeply deceptive.......2007-09-22
Pseudo-scientific load of crap that attempts to make a profound prediction about how digital data will be organized. The book rambles on and on without much direction. Clearly this book is for fans of Weinberger--of which there appear to be many. However, if you read books because you're in an person's fan club, buy it. But if you buy books because the book is worth reading, don't buy this book.
A magazine article padded out to a not very good book.......2007-08-01
The core conceit of "Everything is Miscellaneous" is the "third-order of order". Here's how it works:
First-order is stuff. You put your stuff in places. Woo hoo. But where is my purple frog pither? DRAT!
Second-order is cataloguing or "stuff about stuff". You pick a few attributes about each bit of stuff and write them down with some location information e.g. a library card catalogue. Ideally so that later you can find bits of stuff with the attribute on the list. Yea team. But it can only be searched the way you made the catalogue. If I only remember the thing is purple and not that it is a pither, I can't look it up. Oh well.
Third-order is every bit of information that you (or anyone or everyone else) can think of about some other bit of information. A bit of reflection tells you that you cannot do this all at once (who'd remember? who wouldn't think of something to add later?) so it isn't suited for paper. So you put it on a computer. Great. Now you can search on "purple" or "frog" or perhaps "pointy" and get a list of things with that attribute.
What's particularly cool about this (and Weinberger doesn't explicitly mention it so maybe it's only cool to me) is that GIVEN cheap computers and GIVEN huge amounts of metadata, THEN the "third-order of order" is an emergent property. It's very useful but it also strikes me as incredibly obvious.
That's my first big problem with the book. It's not a bad book in the sense that it will make you dumber. Rather, it takes an obvious premise (hey! databases and lots of metadata let you organise spontaneously in lots of different ways!) and some useful advice (hey! giving your customers lots of metadata and the ability to manipulate that metadata is probably a good idea!) and covers it in a meandering 200+ page book rather than a focussed 10 page magazine article.
Now, that makes sense for Weinberger as books are more prestigious and (presumably) better paid than magazine articles. But I have a hard time imagining anyone who is already interested in the subject of classifying information learning anything from this book.
My other beef is that there is nothing but cheerleading for the "third-order" concept. It is a great thing (really!) but it isn't a uniformly excellent thing. There is no real discussion in the book about the problems of noise (as in signal-to-noise). There is a brief mention of the "anyone can make stuff up" problem with Wikipedia. But that seems to be it. If he'd spent some time discussing problems of the "third-order of order" and possibly strategies for dealing with it, this would be a much better book.
Disorder adds order--go figure.......2007-07-14
Everything is Miscellaneous articulates and explains what I've felt/known since I started storing real world information on a computer: our methods of organizing and arranging things in our houses, offices, supermarkets, libraries, photo albums etc do not scale to the immense size of collections we keep on our machines. Nor should we be trying to force these methods onto the vast sea of digital information that we try and sift through every day. The nature of the physical world requires that any single item can be in only one place at one time. No such limitation exists in our digital world where the cost of duplicating and storing information is virtually nothing. When dealing with bits and bytes we're able to organize our data into an unbounded group of categories, criteria and classifications. Try that with the Dewey decimal system: you'll need a card catalog to organize your card catalogs.
David Weinberger effectively describes the many flaws and limitations that arise when we try to use the "world of atoms" as a metaphor for arranging the "world of bits". This book has changed both the way I use my computer(s) and the way I arrange my "stuff". The writing style is easy and flows nicely; one might expect (and even desire) a more formal and academic presentation of the material but this book was great as an evening snack consumed over the course of a week.
Everything is Miscellaneous.......2007-06-27
Although the book is a bit disorganized and the author's stance is hard to extract at times (though that might be because he is trying to be a truly neutral medium), I really enjoyed the book. The author is both clever and knowledgeable.
This book may just change the way you think about the world, especially if you either work in an information-related job (I'm being vague on purpose!) or if you find innovative technology and ideas interesting.
Be prepared to expand your scope of what you consider information and organization. You'll encounter numerous examples from across the whole band of human knowledge systems- not just internet applications.
Book Description
The future of computing-the future of business
Rapid technological innovation is moving us towards a world of ubiquitous computing-a world in which we are surrounded by smart machines that are always on, always aware, and always monitoring us. These developments will create a world virtually without secrets in which information is widely available and analyzable worldwide. This environment will certainly affect business, government, and the individual alike, dramatically affecting the way organizations and individuals interact. This book explores the implications of the coming world and suggests and explores policy options that can protect individuals and organizations from exploitation and safeguard the implicit contract between employees, businesses, and society itself. World Without Secrets casts an unflinching eye on a future we may not necessarily desire, but will experience.
Customer Reviews:
A collection of snippets of other people's thinking.......2006-11-14
This book, published a scant four years ago, was old before its time.
Authors who have to create new words to discuss their oh-so-advanced concepts always strike me as self-aggrandizing, pretentious and usually silly. Author Hunter borrows and invents words like "Mentat" and "I-filters" to describe mundane, everyday concepts. Mentat is taken from Frank Herberts "Dune": a Mentat is essentially a human computer. The bottom line is that we rely on others to help us in reaching decisions and - surprise - those others may not have our best interests at heart and may, in fact, be using our "secrets", like our music preferences, to influence our decisions.
This is not news.
Hunter not only likes movies, he draws life lessons from them. There are dozens of references to movies in this book.
Hunter has a few schmaltzy rules that he has created, like "When everything is known, no one knows everything." Ponder that. But don't expect to get paid for it.
Ultimately this wandering book of nostrums, recycled newspaper stories and references to Hollywood movies as sources of wisdom comes down to a muffled sales pitch for Gartner, "the world's largest technology research firm." "Lots of systems administrators aren't taking these basic steps now, and that's a prime reason why their systems get cracked." But fear not is the implied message, Gartner can help save you! "Any credible vulnerability assessment will find two out of three Web servers connected to the Internet are vulnerable to simple attacks that can ar least result in changing the contenrt of the Web server," my Gartner colleague said . . . Get the message?
Ultimately the hyper-ventilated theme is that there are no secrets. Moreover, the author fears deep ". . . surveillance of ordindary citizens." Excuse me, but in a nation where your income sources, bank accounts, spending patterns, medical histories and everything else have been closely scruitinized for decades, what are you concerned with?
The message is fear-mongering about a situation that has been with us for a long time. Hunter brings nothing new to the table, except a penchant for quoting from movies as if they were brothers and sisters to Socrates.
Jerry
New York Times April 28, 2002, Book Review?.......2006-03-14
Fascinating book. Fascinating man. Why didn't Amazon reprint the New York Times review of this book (William J. Holstein, NYT April 28, 2002)?
Don't support this guy.......2005-01-03
This book sounds like an intelligent read, full of insights on technological breakthroughs, etc.. It's not. Do you have that one guy at work, let's say, that just complains all of the time? The guy that sounds so darn whiny that you just want to slap him? That's this author, and that's this book. I mean, really, dude, who doesn't support non-lethal weapons? You're trying to sound so smart and informed about the subject. When's the last time you were standing in from of a crowd of fifty somewhere outside Balad? Moron. Just another one of those Fox News "military analysts". I'm glad I went war to support your right to publish such drivel.
Good & bad view of Digital Technology.......2004-07-14
Easy to read review of what digital technology is going to promise us in the future - both good & bad.
It's not intended to scare, nor to defend the undefendable, but it gives a good all round review in an easy entertaining style.
World Without Secrets: Business, Crime and Privacy in the Ag.......2002-11-02
"World Without Secrets: Business, Crime and Privacy in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing" - Reviewed by Stephen Lafferty
The title of Richard Hunter's book refers to the growing availability of information about the personal lives of consumers living in capitalist democratic states. The book begins with the assumption that "very little of consequence can't and won't be known about anyone or anything". Hunter approaches the subject of the erosion of personal privacy from two angles: the business and the governmental/police justifications for retaining information on individuals. His argument, that citizens in democratic countries had better take responsibility for the power of surveillance technologies while they still can, emerges from the discussion of the increasing possibilities for deriving behaviour patterns from recombining archived data.
Hunter's first point, that people adapt at a slower rate than the
introduction of new technologies, is underlined using examples of
Amazon.com and Acme-Rent-A-Car of Connecticut. Neither set of
consumers, when they began relationships with either company, realised that information collected about their shopping habits and movements would be sold to third parties or used for law enforcement purposes.
Hunter then goes on to demonstrate how organisations that create and retail information, such as Microsoft and record companies, are responding to threats being posed by self-organising groups using the Internet to communicate. Hunter calls these groups 'Network Armies' and provides an analysis of how such groups coalesce and fight their cause, using examples of the Open Source software movement and Linux vs. Windows, Napster and digital distribution of music and the anti-capitalist protestors in Seattle and Genoa.
The discussion then moves on to identifying social groups within the 'world without secrets'. Hunter and a team of researchers at Gartner identify four groups: 'Network Armies', the 'Lost and the Lonely', 'Conscientious Objectors' and the 'Engineered Society'. This analysis implies that the world without secrets is inevitable and the area of society to which you belong depends upon whether you support or oppose the authority of the leadership that passes legislation to eliminate barriers to information flow.
The last two chapters are dedicated to discussion of war when all
enemy movements are known; and the possibility of a war in cyberspace.
Parts of this book were written on or after September 11th 2001 and Hunter considers the development of terrorist network armies and the response that an 'engineered society' can make to such attacks. The New York Electronic Crimes Task Force is used as a model network army for terrorist threats from cyberspace, an Internet version of Interpol with intercontinental crime-fighting agreements.
Richard Hunter believes that a world without secrets is inevitable.
He urges his readers to take responsibility for the ways that
technologies are implemented through democratic means, such as
building in limitations for information usage by the authorities.
This book makes a compelling argument for educating both the
authorities and the public about the type and uses of recorded
information and is an excellent introduction to contemporary
attitudes towards and policies of surveillance. Readers who are
interested in the freedoms that they enjoy in their societies should read this along with Simson Garfinkel's 'Database Nation' and Michael Caloyannides 'Desktop Witness' and be careful about to whom they give their personal information.
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- Social Capital Goes Online
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Social Capital: A Theory of Social Structure and Action (Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences)
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Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
ASIN: 0262083310 |
Book Description
The concept of social capital, or the value that can be derived from social ties created by goodwill, mutual support, shared language, common beliefs, and a sense of mutual obligation, has been applied to a number of fields, from sociology to management. It is only lately, however, that researchers in information technology and knowledge management have begun to explore the idea of social capital in relation to their fields. This collection of thirteen essays by computer scientists, sociologists, communication specialists, economists, and others presents a multidisciplinary look at this particular intersection of information technology and social science and the need to adopt a sociotechnical perspective.
For the most part the contributors take a positive view of the interplay of social capital, knowledge sharing, and community building. Some essays look at specific instances, including the on-line and face-to-face relationships of a community of athletes, the building of social capital among Iranian NGOs, and the Internet-based communities created by the open-source movement, while others discuss more general ideas of civic and personal communities. The last four essays examine computer applications that augment social capital, including topic- and member-centered communications spaces such as the Expert Finder and the Loops system and virtual repositories of knowledge such as the Answer Garden and Pearls of Wisdom.
Customer Reviews:
Social Capital Goes Online.......2004-09-04
Marleen Huysman and Volker Wulf have edited a nice book. I think it's the 1st book that links social capital and ICT in the foreground, altho many of us have also done stuff linking the 2 notions.
Among the authors/articles are a good intro/review piece by the editors; Anita Blanchard on dispersed virtual communities and F2F social capital; Rob Cross and Steve Borgatti on informaiton flows in corporations; Charles Steinfeld on the (lack of) use of e-commerce in geographically defined business clusters; Mark Ackerman & Christine Halversman on new CSCW directions for social capital. And Anabel Quan-Haase and myself summarizing our research on how the internet may affect social capital in communities online and offline.
Book Description
With the NASDAQ having lost 70 percent of its value, the giddy, optimistic belief in perpetual growth that accompanied the economic boom of the 1990s had fizzled by 2002. Yet the advances in information and communication technology, management and production techniques, and global integration that spurred the âNew Economyâ of the 1990s had triggered profound and lasting changes. Frontiers of Capital brings together ethnographies exploring how cultural practices and social relations have been altered by the radical economic and technological innovations of the New Economy. The contributors, most of whom are anthropologists, investigate changes in the practices and interactions of futures traders, Chinese entrepreneurs, residents of French housing projects, women working on Wall Street, cable television programmers, and others.
Some contributors highlight how expedited flows of information allow business professionals to develop new knowledge practices. They analyze dynamics ranging from the decision-making processes of the Federal Reserve Board to the legal maneuvering necessary to buttress a nascent Japanese market in over-the-counter derivatives. Others focus on the social consequences of globalization and new modes of communication, evaluating the introduction of new information technologies into African communities and the collaborative practices of open-source computer programmers. Together the essays suggest that social relations, rather than becoming less relevant in the high-tech age, have become more important than ever. This finding dovetails with the thinking of many corporations, which increasingly employ anthropologists to study and explain the âlocalâ cultural practices of their own workers and consumers. Frontiers of Capital signals the wide-ranging role of anthropology in explaining the social and cultural contours of the New Economy.
Contributors. Jean Comaroff, John L. Comaroff, Greg Downey, Melissa S. Fisher, Douglas R. Holmes, George E. Marcus, Siobhán O’Mahony, Aihwa Ong, Annelise Riles, Saskia Sassen, Paul A. Silverstein, AbdouMaliq Simone, Neil Smith, Caitlin Zaloom
Book Description
This groundbreaking book analyses the geography of the commercial Internet industry during the dot-com boom. It presents the first accurate map of Internet domains in the world, by country, by region, by city, and for the United States, by neighborhood.Contrary to the predictions of some futurologists, the book demonstrates the extraordinary spatial concentration of the industry and the continued relevance of geography to patterns of economic development in the twenty-first century.Based on in-depth interviews and field work in two key areas - San Francisco Bay Area and New York City - Matthew Zook provides a lucid and theoretically-informed argument supported by appropriate evidence. His book will be of interest to all those concerned about inequalities arising or being perpetuated through unequal access to technology and the factors driving regional economic development.
Customer Reviews:
The Internet is somewhere!.......2005-10-04
I decided to buy/read this book after reading the review. Interesting read for anyone who sees the Internet as everywhere....
[...]
geography still important.......2005-08-13
Zook demonstrates that physical geography continues to be a paramount factor in where a startup is located. His study is from the dot com era, and shows the striking correlation and clumping of US startups. Silicon Valley dominates, unsurprisingly. But then there are also major clusters in Seattle, New York, Austin, Los Angeles and Boston.
The book shows the prediliction of people in any industry to aggregate, even, or perhaps especially, when there is intense competition between companies in that industry. Ultimately, the clumping benefits the industry, by permitting an easier transfer of ideas and people. So that successful ideas and companies can grow.
Book Description
This book presents revised full papers contributed to the Third International Digital Cities Workshop held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in September 2003.
The 25 papers presented together with an introductory overview went through two rounds of reviewing and improvement. They are organized in topical sections on digital cities around the world: case studies; virtual community platforms; knowledge and data modeling for digital cities; participation, design, and monitoring; information and communications technology and social capital.
Product Description
History: Fiction or Science? is the most explosive tractate on history ever written - however, every theory it contains, no matter how unorthodox, is backed by solid scientific data. The book is well-illustrated, contains over 446 graphs and illustrations, copies of ancient manuscripts, and countless facts attesting to the falsity of the chronology used nowadays, which never cease to amaze the reader. Eminent mathematician proves that: Jesus Christ was born in 1153 and crucified in 1186 The Old Testament refers to mediaeval events. Apocalypse was written after 1486. Does this sound uncanny? This version of events is substantiated by hard facts and logic - validated by new astronomical research and statistical analysis of ancient sources - to a greater extent than everything you may have read and heard about history before. The dominating historical discourse in its current state was essentially crafted in the XVI century from a rather contradictory jumble of sources such as innumerable copies of ancient Latin and Greek manuscripts whose originals had vanished in the Dark Ages and the allegedly irrefutable proof offered by late mediaeval astronomers, resting upon the power of ecclesial authorities. Nearly all of its components are blatantly untrue! For some of us, it shall possibly be quite disturbing to see the magnificent edifice of classical history to turn into an ominous simulacrum brooding over the snake pit of mediaeval politics. Twice so, in fact: the first seeing the legendary millenarian dust on the ancient marble turn into a mere layer of dirt - one that meticulous unprejudiced research can eventually remove. The second, and greater, attack of unease comes with the awareness of just how many areas of human knowledge still trust the three elephants of the consensual chronology to support them. Nothing can remedy that except for an individual chronological revolution happening in the minds of a large enough number of people.
Customer Reviews:
Has history been tampered with?.......2007-10-23
Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/RAZQNMXM4M9CL Has history been tampered with? Yes, it has! Did events and eras such as the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the Roman Empire , the Dark Ages, and the Renaissance, actually occur within a very different chronology from what we've been told? Yes, they certainly did!
The history of humankind is both drastically shorter and dramatically different than generally presumed.
Why is it so? On one hand, it was usual custom to justify the claims to title and land by age and ancestry, and on the other the court historians knew only too well how to please their masters. The so called universal classic world history is a pack of intricate lies for all events prior to the 16th century. World history as we learn it today was entirely fabricated in the 16th-18th centuries. It's likely that nobody told you before, but
there is not a single piece of firm written evidence or artefact that is reliably and independently dated prior to the 11th century.
Naturally, after what you've learned in school and university, you will not easily believe that the classical history of ancient Rome, Greece, Asia, Egypt, China, Japan, India, etc., is manifestly false.
You will point accusing finger to the pyramids in Egypt, to the Coliseum in Rome and Great Wall of China etc., and claim, aren't they really ancient, thousands of years ancient? Well, there is no valid scientific proof that they are older than 1000 years!
The oldest original written document that can be reliably dated belongs to the 11th century!
New research asserts that Homo sapiens invented writing (including hieroglyphics) only 1000 years ago. Once invented, writing skills were immediately and irreversibly put to the use of ruling powers and science.
The consensual chronology we live with was essentially crafted in the 16th century by the Jesuits.
The world history was compiled from contradictory mix of innumerable copies of ancient Latin and Greek manuscripts and other irrefutable proofs delivered by late mediaeval astronomers that were cemented by the authority of writings of the Church Fathers.
Early in life, we learn about ancient history. Children love the magical lessons of history - they are like fairy tales. Teachers recite breathtaking stories; very soon We learn by heart the names and deeds of brave warriors, wise philosophers, fabulous pharaohs, cunning high priests and greedy scribes.
We learn of gigantic pyramids and sinister castles, kings and queens, dukes and barons, powerful heroes and beautiful ladies, emaciated saints and low-life traitors.
Ancient history is based documents, manuscripts, printed books, paintings, monuments and artefacts - called primary sources.
The problem is that neither these ancient documents, nor events described therein can be irrefutably dated, moreover they contradict each other for the most part.
When a school textbook tells us that Genghis Khan in year X or Alexander in year Y, have each conquered half of the world, it means only that it is so said in some of the written sources.
There are no answers to simple questions:
When were these primary sources written?
Where and by whom were these sources found?
It is wrongly presumed that ancient and medieval chronicles, written by Genghis Khan's or Alexander the Great contemporaries and eyewitnesses, are readily available. Actually, only sources written hundreds or even thousands of years after the events are there, compiled mostly in the 16th 18th centuries, or even later.
As a rule, these sources suffered considerable multiple manipulations, falsifications and distortions by editing. At the same time,
innumerable originals of ancient documents under various pretexts were destroyed in Europe under various pretexts.
The names of persons and geographical sites often changed meaning and location during the course of the centuries.
Geographical locations became clearly defined on maps only with the advent of printing.
This made possible the circulation of identical copies of the same map for purposes of the military, navigation, education and governance tasks.
Historians from Oxford say: "hey, everybody knows that Julius Caesar lived in the first century B.C.
`Julius Caesar' statement is only a point of view as
there is simply no irrefutable documentary proof that Julius Caesar or any other great name of antiquity ever existed.
Better than that - extremely rare sources that can be reliably dated back to the 10th-14th centuries A D, do not show the polished picture of classical history.
They show a picture both contradictory and confusing.
All methods of dating of ancient sources and artefacts are erroneous:
Radio-carbon C14 method produces dating with exactitude of plus minus 1500 years, therefore it is too crude for dating of events in historical timeframe!
The Almagest tractate, which lies as corner stone contemporary chronology, compiled in the 2nd century A D by Ptolemy, the founding father of astronomy, contains astronomical data of 9th to 16th century!
The Bronze Age,that has supposedly began 5000 years ago. Bronze is made of 90% copper and 10% tin, but the technology for tin extraction dates back to 14th century A D!.
All eclipses contained in manuscripts, like Thucydides one, relating 'ancient' events have exclusively medieval dating. All horoscopes cut in stone or painted in Egyptian temples, like Dendera have exclusively early medieval dating solutions.
Not quite what you have learned in school? Open your eyes, and, you will find sufficient proof to reach step by step the inevitable conclusion that the classical chronology is false and therefore, that the history of ancient and medieval world universally accepted today, is also false. Have a fresh outlook on everything said or printed about "ancient" and "enigmatic" Roman, Greek and Egyptian, medieval as well as all other "lost and found" civilizations.
Antiquity and Dark Ages are phantoms invented in the 16th 18th and polished in 19th 20thcenturies. Human civilization is in fact barely 1000 years old!
This book will change your perception of History forever!
What if Ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt were invented during Renaissance?
What if The Old Testament was a rendition of events of the Middle Ages?
What if Jesus Christ was born in 1053 and crucified in 1086 AD?
Sounds Unbelievable?
Not after you've read "History: Fiction or Science?" by Anatoly Fomenko, the genius mathematician.
Armed with astronomy and computers Anatoly Fomenko turns History into a rocket science.
Calculations are only as good as your numbers.......2007-08-03
Yes, we can all agree that mainstream history is nearly 100% BS due to politics, economics, ego, problems with dating techniques, and various conspiracies. Agreed. But, I've been researching the distinct possibility that human history (in terms of civilizations) are much more ancient than we've been told, so coming across this book was very interesting to me. I wondered how Fomenko could be wrong (if at all) because he is very persuasive in his presentations. Then it dawned on me. If at previous times in prehistory, due to the various catastrophies that are well documented (comets, asteroids, planetary disruptions, plasma discharge, pole reversals, etc) the Earth was in a different position in relation to the sun, different tilt on its axis, different orbit, different rotation (in terms of velocity and DIRECTION), and the continents were in different positions, then would this not cause the ancients to see the sky (constellations) differently? In other words, is Fomenko making erronious assumptions about the physics of the Earth in pre-history, which then corrupt his data with regards to dating the relevant astrology? The last event to seriously disrupt our planet occured roughly 3500 years ago, according to other good researchers, so is it possible Fomenko has been confused by this? The vastly different physics of our planet in the not so distant past may explain this confusion, which is not to say the "mainstream" version of history is correct; on the contrary. I am not an expert in these fields, but wanted to see if this idea could spark discussion.
Pants on fire?.......2007-07-19
Will people ever read before spamming? Yes, Jesuits could not rewrite world history alone, they had help. Anyway, Dr Prof Acad A.Fomenko does not point to jesuits as the driving force of world wide history manipulation in published volumes 1,2,3;, actually he barely mentions the poor devils. Check it with 'Search inside' feature, please. China is rarely mentioned either, in fact, Dr Fomenko is completely eurocentric. Right, his theory contradicts all mainstream schools of history, because in their actual state they are all built on blatantly erroneus chronology. You don't need a mysterious cabal (conspiracy) to falsify history, the falsification is its modus operandi. It is inherent to history(ians) to falsify (distort) events, as it is inherent to humans to boast as it is inherent to power (authority) to legimize itself by referrring to glorious past made to its own order. Dr Prof Fomenko and team have identified scores of instances of such manipulation in Russian, European, etc.. history, and delivered valid statistical proof thereof. His own 'reconstruction' is completely another story. Forget c14 as a valid method of dating. W.Libby has initially discovered a brilliant method of INDEPENDENT dating. Too bad, c14 method has become a joke after a forced marrige with dendrochronology with consensual chronological scale inbuilt. Radiocarbon method can't stand blind tests, but is so very productive as a rubberstamp.
Accepted History & Chronology Must Be Changed. .......2007-04-09
There is no doubt that history as most know it is a sham, & institution's version of History both University & Church is fradulent & inaccurate. Everything was established with an agenda, The real "Dark Ages" are now when we have access to incredible amounts of information past authorities & more important 'common folk' didn't have but our institutions & educators are slow to evolve because of what has ignorantly & arrogantly been taught for too long. This is on many subjects not just Chronology.
For anyone to question "Why would a Mathematician have anything credible to say of History?" The answer is from Dr. Fomenko's preface in the book: "It would be worthwhile to remind the reader that in the XVI-XVII century Chronology was considered to be a subdivision of Mathematics." These volumes could possibly be some of the most important works to date & should be read by everyone with an interest in History, especially professors & educators who have a duty to the public. I have read both books & must say that 'Chronology 1' has some very eye opening & revolutionary information. Even if these volumes are part true the implications are profound & opens the doors to further investigations & questions which must be done. I speak several different lanquages & must say the logic Dr. Fomenko uses with "inflection" of words & words being read from left to right in one region & right to left in another then written backwards, the removal of vowels & get down to basics of words, or different cities & locations having the same name etc. is correct. Vowel usage has always been optional & varied, actually complicating linquistics & study. The first thing one has to understand is that words never had a fixed spelling in history like we do now, the spelling of words was mutable & regional, as well as names & titles of people were vast, varied & changed, NOTHING WAS FIXED or understood linear. Matters of Life & Death as well as financial profiteering yesterday & today were & are made with ignorant, illogical & conspiratorial views of history & reality, it's time people get closer to the Truth & society collectively grow up.
Very Interesting.......2007-03-07
It is a good proposal and I believe it will mature into something even better in the future. I think it deserves to be read.
Book Description
The "modern times" of the early twentieth century saw the rise of the assembly line and the belief that standardization would make the world a better place. Yet along with greater production efficiency came dehumanization, as the division of labor created many jobs requiring mindless repetition rather than conscious involvement with work.
In our own modern times, a comparable revolution has been wrought by information technology. In Our Modern Times, Daniel Cohen traces the roots of this revolution back to the uprisings of 1968, when the youth of the industrialized world rejected the bourgeois values of their parents and the general situation of the workers. Students raised in the anti-establishment culture of the 1960s were able to shatter the world of standardization created by their parents. By the end of the twentieth century, information technology had created decentralized work structures that encouraged autonomy and personal initiative. But with this greater flexibility came the psychic stress and burnout of "24/7." Cohen explores the many ways that the new technology has changed our work and personal lives, our very conceptions of family and community. He argues compellingly that the present era represents a revolution that will be completed only when the importance of human capital is no longer overshadowed by the cost-saving efficiencies demanded by financial capital.
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European Policies For A Knowledge Economy
Maria Joao Rodrigues , and
Maria Joao Rodrigues
Manufacturer: Edward Elgar Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 1845420942 |
Book Description
In 2000, the European Union adopted an overall strategy to effect transition to a knowledge economy. After coordinating the preparation of the Lisbon European Summit which launched this ten year strategy, Maria João Rodrigues provides a unique insight into the renewal of European economic and social policies.
European Policies for a Knowledge Economy explores the information society and research and education policies which are being combined to build a stronger knowledge base, and enhance the growth potential of Europe via economic reforms, enterprise and innovation policies. The author ascertains that the European social model should be reformed by investing in people, improving welfare provision and fighting new forms of social exclusion. She goes on to argue that macroeconomic policies will help to advance these structural changes.
The critical issues and underpinning debates that are highlighted include, among others:
• reforms targeting the creation of more growth potential
• macroeconomic policies which vitalize employment and structural change
• policies for the information society aimed at improving standards of living
• new priorities for national education policies towards lifelong learning
• reforms of the labor markets for more and better jobs
• implications of the Lisbon Strategy for the institutional reform of the European Union.
Illustrating the challenges of a new strategic goal for European policies, this highly accessible book will be essential reading for a wide-ranging audience - scholars, public administrators, business people and anyone else with an interest in European policies and their implications for national agendas.
Books:
- Going Solo in the Kitchen
- Handbook on Ontologies (International Handbooks on Information Systems) (International Handbooks on Information Systems)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
Books Index
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- Grass Beyond the Mountains: Discovering the Last Great Cattle Frontier on the North American Contine
The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo.
Cities in a World Economy (Sociology for a New Century Series)
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