Books about Evaluations from Amazon.com

A rare look inside the world of hedge funds from one of this country’s top investors

David Einhorn is one of the investment community’s fastest rising stars. He founded his hedge fund, Greenlight Capital, at the age of 27, and now has $5 billion under management. In Fooling Some of the People All of the Time, Einhorn offers readers insights into the battles surrounding hedge funds.

In 2002, Einhorn spoke publicly about Allied Capital–a leader in the private finance industry–presenting it as an excellent short opportunity. This book will describe the incredible events that followed Einhorn’s speech and how Allied and the investment community attacked him to protect the company–and its stock price. Informative and intriguing, Fooling Some of the People All of the Time details how the current environment on Wall Street not only allows for such behavior, but how it protects the companies and attacks those who attempt to uncover them..
Price: $16.75 [Notify me when price goes down.]

How much money are you losing because of poor landing page design? In this comprehensive, step-by-step guide, you’ll learn all the skills necessary to dramatically improve your bottom line, including identifying mission critical parts of your website and their true economic value, defining important visitor classes and key conversion tasks,   gaining insight on customer decision-making, uncovering problems with your page and deciding which elements to test, developing an action plan, and avoiding common pitfalls. Includes a companion website and a detailed review of the Google Website Optimizer tool..
Price: $16.11 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Hervé This (pronounced "Teess") is an internationally renowned chemist, a popular French television personality, a bestselling cookbook author, a longtime collaborator with the famed French chef Pierre Gagnaire, and the only person to hold a doctorate in molecular gastronomy, a cutting-edge field he pioneered. Bringing the instruments and experimental techniques of the laboratory into the kitchen, This uses recent research in the chemistry, physics, and biology of food to challenge traditional ideas about cooking and eating. What he discovers will entertain, instruct, and intrigue cooks, gourmets, and scientists alike.

Molecular Gastronomy, This's first work to appear in English, is filled with practical tips, provocative suggestions, and penetrating insights. This begins by reexamining and debunking a variety of time-honored rules and dictums about cooking and presents new and improved ways of preparing a variety of dishes from quiches and quenelles to steak and hard-boiled eggs. He goes on to discuss the physiology of flavor and explores how the brain perceives tastes, how chewing affects food, and how the tongue reacts to various stimuli. Examining the molecular properties of bread, ham, foie gras, and champagne, the book analyzes what happens as they are baked, cured, cooked, and chilled.

Looking to the future, This imagines new cooking methods and proposes novel dishes. A chocolate mousse without eggs? A flourless chocolate cake baked in the microwave? Molecular Gastronomy explains how to make them. This also shows us how to cook perfect French fries, why a soufflé rises and falls, how long to cool champagne, when to season a steak, the right way to cook pasta, how the shape of a wine glass affects the taste of wine, why chocolate turns white, and how salt modifies tastes.

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Price: $18.73 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The U.S. health care system is in crisis. At stake are the quality of care for millions of Americans and the financial well-being of individuals and employers squeezed by skyrocketing costs--not to mention the stability of state and federal government budgets.

In Redefining Health Care, internationally renowned strategy expert Michael E. Porter and innovation expert Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg reveal the underlying and largely overlooked causes of the problem and provide a powerful prescription for change. The authors argue that participants in the health care system have competed to shift costs, accumulate bargaining power, and restrict services rather than create value for patients. This zero-sum competition takes place at the wrong level--among health plans, networks, and hospitals--rather than where it matters most: in the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of specific health conditions.

In spite of competition among these systems, the patient care cycle is poorly coordinated. The fractured system undermines both efficiency and quality of outcomes.

Redefining Health Care lays out a breakthrough framework for redefining health care competition based on patient value over the full cycle of care—from prevention and diagnosis through recovery or long-term disease management. With specific recommendations for hospitals, doctors, health plans, employers, and policy makers, this book shows how to move to value-based competition on results that will unleash stunning improvements in quality and efficiency..
Price: $8.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A leading expert on mental illness outlines the tragic consequences of deinstitutionalization and sounds the call for reform.

Beginning in the 1960s in the United States, scores of patients with severe psychiatric disorders were discharged from public mental hospitals. At the same time, activists forced changes in commitment laws that made it impossible to treat half of the patients that left the hospital. The combined effect was profoundly destructive. Today, among homeless persons, at least one-third are severely mentally ill; among the incarcerated, at least one-tenth. Of those individuals living in our communities, many are the victims of violent crime. Other untreated individuals commit crimes, including murder and assault. In The Insanity Offense, E. Fuller Torrey takes full stock of this phenomenon, exploring the causes and consequences as he weaves together narratives of individual tragedies in three states with sobering national data on our failure to treat the mentally ill. In the book's final chapters, Torrey outlines what needs to be done to reverse this ongoing—and accelerating—disaster..
Price: $12.47 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This book is your most complete source for in-depth information about Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007!

System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed is a comprehensive guide to System Center Operations Manager (OpsMgr) 2007. Like its MOM 2005 predecessor, OpsMgr 2007 helps you implement operations management, but with a far different and more holistic approach from MOM 2005’s focus on individual servers.

This book guides you through designing, deploying, and configuring OpsMgr 2007. You will find detailed information and hands-on experience on topics such as estimating database sizes and designing redundant OpsMgr configurations. You learn how to tackle challenges such as setting up ACS, establishing client monitoring, using and creating synthetic transactions and distributed applications, and developing management packs and reports.

• Size your OpsMgr databases
• Architect for redundancy and performance
• Install or migrate to OpsMgr 2007
• Secure OpsMgr
• Back up OpsMgr components
• Understand how monitors and rules work
• Manage different aspects, including ACS, client monitoring, synthetic transactions, and distributed applications
• Extend OpsMgr
• Develop management packs and reports

CD-ROM includes:

• Database sizing spreadsheet
• Utilities, management packs, and reports
• Microsoft’s best practices for rule and monitor targeting and PowerShell Cheat Sheet
• Live Links--more than 200 hypertext links and references to materials, connectors, sites, and newsgroups related to OpsMgr

Contents

Introduction 1

Part I Operations Management Overview and Concepts

1 Operations Management Basics 11

2 What’s New 63

3 Looking Inside OpsMgr 97

Part II Planning and Installation

4 Planning Your Operations Manager Deployment 137

5 Planning Complex Configurations 203

6 Installing Operations Manager 2007 233

7 Migrating to Operations Manager 2007 277

Part III Moving Toward Application-Centered Management

8 Configuring and Using Operations Manager 2007 303

9 Installing and Configuring Agents 369

10 Complex Configurations 425

11 Securing Operations Manager 2007 471

Part IV Administering Operations Manager 2007

12 Backup and Recovery 539

13 Administering Management Packs 593

14 Monitoring with Operations Manager 647

Part V Service-Oriented Monitoring

15 Monitoring Audit Collection Services 739

16 Client Monitoring 797

17 Monitoring Network Devices 845

18 Using Synthetic Transactions 903

19 Managing a Distributed Environment 949

Part VI Beyond Operations Manager

20 Automatically Adapting Your Environment 1005

21 Reading for the Service Provider: Remote Operations Manager 1047

22 Interoperability 1095

23 Developing Management Packs and Reports 1141

Part VII Appendixes

A OpsMgr by Example: Configuring and Tuning Management Packs 1229

B Performance Counters 1261

C Registry Settings 1271

D Active Directory and Exchange 2003 Management Pack Parameters 1295

E Reference URLs 1305

F On the CD 1323

Index 1329

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Price: $33.60 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"On dissertation proposals on which I have served, Patton is by far the most cited qualitative research text."

Ian Baptiste, Penn State University

The book that has been a resource and training tool for countless applied researchers, evaluators, and graduate students has been completely revised with hundreds of new examples and stories illuminating all aspects of qualitative inquiry. Patton has created the most comprehensive, systematic, and up-to-date review of qualitative methods available.

"I am dazzled by the extent of the material that this book describes and clarifies. Patton has shifted the focus of the text to qualitative inquiry in general, which includes qualitative evaluation. New examples from his own work and that of others serve to clarify and deepen understanding of qualitative research topics and processes. New discussion of many current issues and debates in qualitative scholarship (autoethnography, ethical issues of informed consent and confidentiality, focus group/group interviews, computer-assisted analysis, the complexity of creating criteria for judging the quality of qualitative research, etc.) will bring readers up-to-date with the variety in perspectives about (and the variety within) qualitative inquiry. Most of the chapters in the book have been substantially reorganized in ways that augment the reader’s understanding. When anyone asks me about conducting qualitative inquiry, I will say: ‘Get Patton’s book’."

Corrine Glesne, author of Becoming Qualitative Researchers

The Third Edition has retained and expanded upon the exhibits, which highlight and summarize major issues, guidelines, the summative sections, tables, and figures as well as the sage advice of the Sufi-Zen master, Halcolm. This revision will help readers integrate and make sense of the great volume of qualitative works published in the past decade.

"Clearly, this is a vastly improved, much more comprehensive, cogently systematic, and timely review-a tour de force, one might say-of the field of qualitative research, in terms of the theoretical, conceptual, methodological, and normative dimensions/foundations of qualitative research. This is one of the strengths of the volume. It seeks to bring together theory and practice/methods without overburdening one or the other--this is as rare as it is commendable, not to mention extremely useful, not only for the professional researcher, but for the "non-professional" as well."

Lester Edwin J. Ruiz, New York Theological Seminar

New to this Edition

• Integrates and makes sense of the great volume of qualitative works published in the past decade

• Offers strategies for enhancing quality and credibility of qualitative findings by presenting a new framework for differentiating five contrasting and competing sets of standards for judging the quality and utility of findings

• Unravels the complexities of mixed methods and triangulation

• Explains the new issues and approaches to fieldwork as well as providing detailed analytical guidelines, including software and computer-assisted options

• Explores, compares and contrasts 16 different theoretical and philosophical approaches to qualitative inquiry

• Examines alternative interviewing strategies and approaches, including focus group interviews, group interviews, and cross-cultural interviews

• Identifies the latest Internet resources

Pedagogical Features to Enhance the Reader’s Understanding of the Material:

• Exhibit Boxes: Summarize and illuminate major points within chapters
• Chapter Opening Stories by Halcolm: Use wit and humor to engage the reader in reflecting upon the puzzles and lessons of qualitative research
• Foundational Questions: Orient the reader to the "meat" of the material being presented
• End of Chapter Appendices: Provide excerpts of detailed examples of particular techniques, such as open-ended interviews, case studies, etc.
• Comparison Tables: Organize, compare and contrast different approaches, strategies, and paradigms
• Original Cartoons:Created from the book’s material, illuminate and poke fun at chapter concepts

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Price: $73.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Tips, techniques, and trends on how to use dashboard technology to optimize business performance

Business performance management is a hot new management discipline that delivers tremendous value when supported by information technology. Through case studies and industry research, this book shows how leading companies are using performance dashboards to execute strategy, optimize business processes, and improve performance.

Wayne W. Eckerson (Hingham, MA) is the Director of Research for The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI), the leading association of business intelligence and data warehousing professionals worldwide that provide high-quality, in-depth education, training, and research. He is a columnist for SearchCIO.com, DM Review, Application Development Trends, the Business Intelligence Journal, and TDWI Case Studies & Solution..
Price: $23.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]