How to Rent Vacation Properties by Owner Second Edition. How
How to Rent Vacation Properties by Owner Second Edition.
by: Christine Hrib-Karpinski
publisher: Kinney Pollack Press
, released: 01 January, 2007
price: $17.16 (new)
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Tops-Search-Review of the Day: The Snow Baby - The Arctic Childhood of Admiral Robert E. Peary s Dar
There are topics in this world that lend themselves to children?s non-fiction. Some of these topics are the usual cast of characters. The Titanic. Roanoke. The Molasses Flood of 1919. Other topics are a little less well-known but when you hear of them your jaw drops and you sputter something along the lines of, How did no one think to write this book until now? I would say that Katherine Kirkpatrick?s, ?The Snow Baby? falls squarely into the latter category. Quick and fun, factual and fast-paced, the story of Admiral Peary?s daughter and her years in the frozen north makes for ideal non-fiction reading for kids.
She was born in the far north of Greenland in 1893 in a part of the world where the sun wasn?t to appear again for months. The daughter of the American Arctic explorer Lieutenant Robert E. Peary and his wife Josephine, Marie Ahnighito Peary spent her early years bouncing about the frozen north. Her father was determined to become the first man to reach the North Pole, and once in a while his family joined him part of the way on his expeditions. Marie?s life consisted of Inuit friends, snow as far as the eye can see, and small adventures on the ice. Author Katherine Kirkpatrick traces Marie?s numerous journeys between America and the Arctic, while also charting her father?s dream and the lives of everyone she touched.
Kirkpatrick cleverly limits the length of the story to a mere 50 pages or so. In doing so it?s as interesting to take note of what she does mention as what she doesn?t. For example, Matthew Henson was Peary?s personal aide in the Arctic. He was also an African-American and a true hero in his own right. And Kirkpatrick does eventually sort of mention to this fact by and by, but her focus is squarely on Marie. Mr. Henson?s skin color comes out in degrees more than anything else. She also is exceedingly careful with her facts. At no point does Kirkpatrick ever force her own opinion onto the reader. With an impartiality verging on the distanced, we learn of the two Inuit children Peary fathered when his wife was not around. We hear about how he took three meteorites the Inuits used for making knives and spear points with a quiet, ?Peary saw no reason why he shouldn?t take the meteorites from Greenland. According to him, the Inuit no longer needed the iron meteorites because they could now trade for metal knife blades.? Be that as it may, as we read towards the end of the book the Inuit were ?left without the trade goods they?d grown accustomed to,? after Peary?s departed in 1909. Kirkpatrick is sly. She is certainly allowing the child reader the chance to reach their own conclusions on these subjects without seemingly putting forth her own. Just the same, when she recounts how Peary hired Matthew Henson for his lectures, Kirkpatrick points out that Matt was hired, ?to wear (and perspire in) thick furs.? True enough. You can give facts that damn a man without having actually write, ?What an awful guy!,? on the page. This distance is necessary when discussing the Inuit too. We hear about how Marie?s friend Billy Bah was married at fourteen. Later we see a cheery twelve-year-old with her own baby. Some authors would condemn this practice. Others might try to explain it. Kirkpatrick, however, lays the facts before you and then takes a step back. However you choose to digest this information is up to you and you alone.
One of the first things that really struck me about this book was the number of photographs found here. I count at least sixty-three photographs in this book. Of these, a stunning twenty-eight are of Marie herself. Additionally, each page contains at least one photo, usually with more than one breaking up the text. Considering the time period with which we are dealing (late 19th/early 20th century) the fact that there even were this many photographs taken is impressive in and of itself. And that so many of them were taken of a single girl is just children?s book gold. Kirkpatrick does a remarkable job of showing you images of many of the characters mentioned in the book too. The sole exception, I guess, would have to be Marie?s childhood companion Koodlooktoo who only appears as a very small infant at the beginning of the book. And you can hardly blame the author for not being able to produce his face out of thin air.
And did I mention how exciting it was? One minute Marie?s sliding down a hill and the next thing you know she?s about to skim right over a cliff into the frozen waters below unless Koodlooktoo is able to save her. Ships are constantly getting iced in and trapped. People have to eat dogs. The book?s wild and the fact that it?s so well researched and cited just aids to the pleasure of reading it. Kirkpatrick is careful to include a Bibliography of First and Secondary Sources, a list of Source Notes, an Index, and a long listing of Picture Credits for anyone curious as to where she found all these great shots. Proper credit is given in the text itself to Ms. Peary?s own book, ?The Snowbaby?s Own Story,? though I would hazard a guess that this book is the more honest of the two. Something tells me that Marie probably wouldn?t have mentioned her illegitimate half-brothers and sisters when discussing her much beloved (and absent) father.
If I were placed in charge of marketing this book, you know the first thing I would have mentioned in the bookflap/press releases/what-have-you would be the fact that its subject (deep breath), Marie Ahnighito Peary Stafford Kuhne, was a children?s author in her own right. You may have stumbled on her Little Tooktoo stories at some point in your travels. In any case, with its short length and young subject, ?The Snow Baby? might pair very well with other non-fiction titles like, ?The Cat With the Yellow Star? by Susan Goldman Rubin. And for those people wishing to do a unit on polar exploration, you might want to consider also taking a look at, ?Onward: A Photobiography of African-American Polar Explorer Matthew Henson,? by Delores Johnson. All in all, consider this a really spectacular non-fiction choice for any given year. A non-fiction read that comes across as a true pleasure.
Notes on the Cover: Well, it looks cool. And an adorable tiny child wrapped in furs is hard to beat. Just the same, there?s a picture of Marie, one of the very first in the book, where she?s seven and wearing warm Inuit clothing. One foot is placed in front of the other, and she looks (not to put too fine a point on it) like a badass. I did seriously appreciate that the images of snowflakes that appear on the cover are from W.A. Bentley. Remember the Caldecott Award winning picture book ?Snowflake Bentley? by Jacqueline Briggs Martin? That guy?s photographs are nicely reproduced here as blue on white rather than white on black. It?s very nicely done. And, to be honest, adorable babies wrapped in fur are going to sell a lot more books to parents, teachers, and librarians than badass seven-year-olds who look like they could take down a walrus if you asked them to.
Note: Do not be led astray by the incorrect publication date given by Amazon.com. According to WorldCat and the book?s very publication page, this title came out in 2007 rather than November of 2006. You are safe in including it in your 2007 best book lists (hint hint) as it officially came out in January.
Author?s Note from Her Website:
While I was working on The Snow Baby, I greatly enjoyed touring the Peary family?s home on Eagle Island. To view some of my photographs from that trip, click on Eagle Island Scrapbook. To plan your own visit to the house, see Peary?s Eagle Island. And to learn more about Robert E. Peary, please visit the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum.
Researchers interested in the published writings and personal papers of Marie Stafford Peary Kuhne and Josephine Diebitsch Peary, may view them by appointment at the Maine Women Writers Collection.
Previously Reviewed By: MadChatter.
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DHS Awards US Genomics $8.6M SBIR for Biosensor Development (GenomeWeb News)
GenomeWeb Daily News You are not logged in. Existing subscribers login here . New to GenomeWeb Daily News? Register quickly here for your free subscription. more
When looking on the World Health Organisation website i came across an interesting article on the International collaborative research on craniofacial anomalies project, a project which is supported by WHO. The Research project was established to create an international network for the purpose of encouraging research in this area under the four
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CHICAGO & IPSWICH, Mass.”-New England Biolabs , a world leader in the production and supply of reagents for the life science industry, has licensed the ERGO bioinformatics software developed and maintained by Integrated Genomics. more
There have been 30 news stories since your last update. Jobs International SEMATECH agrees to locate headquarters at UAlbany UAlbany s CNSE May 14, 2007 Governor Eliot Spitzer, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno announced today that International SEMATECH,
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NEW YORK, May 14, 2007 ” Wall Street Reporter Magazine has just published exclusive interviews with executives from INNOVIVE Pharmaceuticals , DNAPrint Genomics Inc. , and GangaGen Inc. ” all companies that are poised to take their businesses to the next level. more
Pathwork Diagnostics, a genomics-based diagnostics company focused on oncology, today announced it has expanded its executive team to help prepare for commercialization of its first product and grow the company. W. more
How to Find Your Ideal Country Home: A Comprehensive Guide.
by: Gene GeRue
publisher: Warner Books
, released: 01 July, 1999
price: $8.89 (used)
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Cruise Vacations with Kids, Revised 2nd Edition (Cruise Vacations with Kids).
by: Candyce H. Stapen
publisher: Prima Lifestyles
, released: 09 June, 1999
price: $1.66 (used)
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Fodor s Italy 2007 (Fodor s Gold Guides).
by: Fodor s
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IRS biz rules scrutiny nears completion
IRS biz rules scrutiny nears completion
Rule engines could help bridge the worlds of business and programming
BY David Perera
Published on Aug. 29, 2005
|
The Internal Revenue Service is almost ready to decide which programming strategy best fits its centerpiece modernization effort, the Customer Account Data Engine (CADE).
An eight-month pilot program set to deliver analytical results around September will enable the agency to select between two choices: the dependable but hard to modify path of C++ or possibly Java, or the dynamic but uncertain way of business rule engines. Unlike pure computer code, business rule engines match near-English conditional statements to data and translate that coupling into action.
Engine proponents say breaking down business logic into a list of rules and using a rules engine allow organizations to better bridge the divide between the worlds of business and programming. In a technology world governed by business rules, people could start speaking the same language. And when systems transmit computer instructions in a language akin to English, it s easier to change them than when the underlying business logic is broken down into reams of code.
Business rule engines are very, very good in situations where your business rules change a lot, said Richard Spires, the IRS associate chief information officer for business systems modernization.
There are trade-offs, of course. For example, business rule engines require larger, faster computers. Spires said it s questionable whether the tax code changes enough to justify the extra processing cost.
Agency executives thought they had decided in 2003 whether or not to use business rule engines. But that certainty melted when their first business rules technology effort stalled, a major reason for the schedule delays plaguing completion of the database replacement for the old Master File tax processing system.
As a result, programmers abandoned a business rules approach for the first release of CADE, having little choice but to use C++ to program the business rules that govern simple 1040EZ tax return forms.
Since it was first activated last summer, CADE has processed 1.3 million tax returns ” an achievement lauded even by the Treasury Department s Inspector General for Tax Administration ” but still only about 1 percent of individual tax returns filed in the United States.
Future releases of CADE will become even more challenging as the IRS adds capabilities to handle more complicated tax returns, inspectors noted in a recent report.
So with the hardest part yet to come, modernization program officials say they re not going to blindly plunge ahead this time.
In the past, this whole question of business rules in the context of modernization has been looked at in pieces, said Jim Sheaffer, a Computer Sciences Corp. vice president and general manager of the private-sector alliance of IRS modernization contractors. Unlike those first efforts, this pilot project is an end-to-end examination of how business rules are mined, stored, managed and executed, he added.
And whatever the outcome, it isn t something we re going to swap out in five years, given our history, Spires said. We want to make sure that this is technology that s going to be viable over the next few decades.
An organization that considers a business rules engine faces uncertainty within an industry of standards, said Grady Campbell, a senior technical analyst at the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute.
There s probably not any vendor or company that you can be sure that s going to be there in five years, he said. Because each company crafts its own engine standards, an organization cannot be sure that a particular engine methodology will be supported once its manufacturer disappears.
The market is soft partially because engine technology can be deceptively simple, Campbell said.
Engines work by taking structured conditional statements written with a minimum amount of computer code in them and matching them to the available data. For example, a rule, minus the technical references, might be if a single filer s income is between $29,051 and $70,350, then the marginal tax rate is 25 percent, and the data would be a particular person s gross income.
But business rule engine developers need to map out the dependencies and possibilities generated by if-then statements between various conditions, Campbell said. Rule engines don t execute commands in a fixed order, so if the dependencies are not fully understood, it is possible to get a situation where sometimes you can get a different result depending on which order they execute in, he added.
Tax forms lend themselves to rules engine processing because you can do line 37 before line 25 if they aren t dependent on each other, Campbell said. I jump around in my tax form if there s not a dependency between one item and a preceding item because that data happens to be readily available.
But the process of turning abstract business rules into executable commands via an engine is also fairly inefficient, Spires said. If the IRS wants to go with a business rules solution, it must prove that productivity gains offset extra processing costs.
The details of the business rules feed into the cost question. The more the rules resemble English, the easier it is for business owners to directly input changes. But greater abstraction also makes tracking the conditional states harder.
But by writing the rules at a more concrete level ” maybe even mimicking a pseudo-code ” you bypass some of the functionality that business rules technology might give you, Sheaffer said.
Sheaffer added that the problem of industry uncertainty may be overstated. Much of the technology industry suffers from unpredictability. Spires said even though the IRS is unlikely to want to replace CADE in the future, we ought to recognize that systems life in today s technology should not be 40 years long, he added.
Data culled from the pilot project will provide clarity soon, Sheaffer said.
Documentation comes first
Regardless of which solution the Internal Revenue Service selects as the programming approach for the Customer Account Data Engine (CADE), the agency still must document the business logic of tax forms. The two programming choices are a business rule engine or more traditional C++ or Java languages.
Whether business rule engines replace coding or not, it s not as important to me as the methodology and the documentation of the upfront business rules, said Eugene Barbato, director of information technology project services in the IRS IT Services division. By knowing what a computer system should do before developers program it, the IRS can limit mishaps, such as the years-long wait for CADE.
” David Perera
Closing in on biz rules
The Internal Revenue Service took another step toward creating a business rules environment inside the agency by releasing a draft statement of work in early August for a business rules enterprise management system. The IRS will release a request for proposals later for an agencywide business rules capability, according to the draft statement.
The agency intends to allow IRS modernization and business staff to initiate change to information technology systems at the business rule level, the draft statement adds.
” David Perera
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