Books about Re engineering from Amazon.com

Analytic philosophers once pantomimed physics: they tried to understand the world by breaking it down into the smallest possible bits. Thinkers from the Darwinian sciences now pose alternatives to this simplistic reductionism.

In this intellectual tour--essays spanning thirty years--William Wimsatt argues that scientists seek to atomize phenomena only when necessary in the search to understand how entities, events, and processes articulate at different levels. Evolution forms the natural world not as Laplace's all-seeing demon but as a backwoods mechanic fixing and re-fashioning machines out of whatever is at hand. W. V. Quine's lost search for a "desert ontology" leads instead to Wimsatt's walk through a tropical rain forest.

This book offers a philosophy for error-prone humans trying to understand messy systems in the real world. Against eliminative reductionism, Wimsatt pits new perspectives to deal with emerging natural and social complexities. He argues that our philosophy should be rooted in heuristics and models that work in practice, not only in principle. He demonstrates how to do this with an analysis of the strengths, the limits, and a recalibration of our reductionistic and analytic methodologies. Our aims are changed and our philosophy is transfigured in the process.

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Price: $39.84 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Reengineering the Corporation  has swept through corporate America with a force unprecedented in recent years. Hailed by Business Week as "the best-written, most well-reasoned business book for the managerial masses since In Search of Excellence," the book has appeared on virtually every bestseller list, including a six-month run on The New York Times list. Reengineering has become a part of everyone's business vocabulary. It is undoubtedly the business concept of the nineties.

In The Reengineering Revolution, Michael Hammer and Steven Stanton build on this foundation to share with readers their experiences in successfully implementing reengineering in companies around the world. In an easy-reading, anecdotal style, the book offers behind-the-scenes stories of reengineering successes and failures; practical techniques for key aspects of reengineering, from breaking long standing assumptions to managing change; and insights into the new ways of thinking that reengineering requires.

Just as Reengineering the Corporation shot to the top of the bestseller charts, so has The Reengineering Revolution. It is the practical guide for which business people have been waiting to help them achieve the dramatic improvements -- in speed, productivity, quality, service and profits -- that reengineering promises..
Price: $0.91 [Notify me when price goes down.]

When two Scottish scientists successfully cloned a sheep in July 1996, the news sparked fierce scientific, ethical, theological, and philosophical debate, momentarily pulling biotechnology from the laboratories and thrusting it onto the front pages. With living proof that such advancements are no longer the stuff of science fiction, a whole new world of possibilities--and dangers--presented itself. Jeremy Rifkin is more concerned with the dangers of this technology, and in The Biotech Century , he presents numerous compelling reasons why we should be, too. Many of these dangers revolve around the seemingly inevitable commercialization of genetically engineered life forms that would come if corporations battled for the rights to patents on new or modified species of plants, animals, or even human beings. Rifkin warns that "designer" babies and genetically perfect humans, along with any other artificial creations, would wreak havoc with the gene pool and the natural environment. While he concedes that there are benefits to biotechnology, he makes it clear that the risks far outweigh the rewards at this time, urging for greater restraint and responsibility before opening what could be a Pandora's box. .
Price: $0.90 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In this groundbreaking work, authors and data warehousing visionaries Ralph Kimball and Richard Merz explore a next-generation Web site architecture that exploits the unique nature of the Web's interactivity to dramatically improve an organization's understanding of its relationship with users. The Data Webhouse Toolkit isn't a how-to manual; it is a high-level look at an ambitious new approach to system design.

The foundation of the concept of Webhouses is the "clickstream"--the plethora of information that can be gleaned if only a system could capture and accurately analyze all of the interaction (or lack thereof) that occurs between Web users and the sites they access. The authors take a careful look at all of the valuable information in the clickstream and point out the complications of compiling this precious information from various gathering sources such as the user's machine, ISP, and Web site.

The book argues strongly for the application of data warehousing and dimensional analysis to the clickstream to radically improve the strategic knowledge of customer motives and actions. While there are no real-life case studies yet to illustrate the concept, this book is bound to whet the appetites of creative entrepreneurs and system architects. --Stephen W. Plain

Topics covered: "Clickstream" concept, opportunities and barriers to information, Web site user tracking, clickstream-driven decisions, clickstream data marts, user interface design, data mining, international concerns, scalability, and project management..
Price: $33.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Hankey addresses the kinetic theory of gases and the prediction of vehicle trajectories during re-entry, including a description of the Earth's atmosphere. He discusses the fundamentals of hypersonic aerodynamics as they are used in estimating the aerodynamic characteristics of re-entry configurations, re-entry heat transfer for both lifting (Space Shuttle) and ballistic (Apollo) configurations, thermal protection systems, and the application of high-temperature materials in design. .
Price: $54.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This is the second edition of the Michael Orloff’s successful practical introduction to TRIZ (Theory of Innovative Problem Solving) - a strategy and method for breaking out of rigid thought patterns to achieve truly creative engineering solutions. Gerry Altshuller, originator of TRIZ in the former Soviet Union, devoted his career to convincing engineers that TRIZ turns inventing into a controllable and systematic process. In this book, Michael Orloff , Altshuller’s former student, continues its algorithmic development and shows how to put TRIZ into action. Enabling readers to search for and find solutions efficiently, this book is of extreme practical importance to development engineers and planners in all areas of modern technology. Orloff not only explains the power and simplicity inherent in classical TRIZ, he further develops the methods with computer-aided innovations and Navigator refinements. The author's design firm is a rich source of the application of TRIZ in many technical fields.

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Price: $67.43 [Notify me when price goes down.]

ARIS (Architecture of Integrated Information Systems) is a unique and internationally renowned method for optimizing business processes and implementing application systems. This book enhances the proven ARIS concept by describing product flows and explaining how to classify modern software concepts. The importance of the link between business process organization and strategic management is stressed. Bridging the gap between the different approaches in business theory and information technology, the ARIS concept provides a full-circle approach - from the organizational design of business processes to IT implementation. Featuring SAP R/3 as well, real-world examples of various standard software solutions illustrate these concepts..
Price: $55.93 [Notify me when price goes down.]