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Book Summary

Who Moved My Cheese?

A best-seller book by Spencer Johnson.

Here is a link to the book in Google books.

In my humble opinion, this book is worth reading and can be bought as cheaply as 16.99 $ from Google books.
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"Who moved my cheese" is a great short story by Spencer Johnson, the co-writer of "1-Minute Manager," and several other books. The book is written in big print on 94 pages, which can be read in less than 2 or 3 hours.

"Who moved my cheese?," is a book about and around the concept of "CHANGE". "Cheese," is a metaphor for goals in life.  This manuscript is a brief parable for those who want to step back for some moments and analyze the effect of change in their life. Spencer Johnson nicely answered an important question, "What would you do if you weren't afraid of change?!". Fear is the main hindrance to change, he has pointed out this fact in the book.

The author used animal metaphors as well as humans to form the four characters of the story. Two mice named, Sniff and Scurry and two little men Hem and Haw, the same size of mice. The author used these characters to represent different approaches people choose to achieve their goals.

The four characters all live in a maze, each having a different journey looking for cheese. Sniff as the name indicates, is good at sniffing, always looking for new opportunities. Scurry is good on working on the newly discovered cheese. He rushes toward the opportunities which have been already found by others. On the other hand, Haw and Hem are of more analyzing minds. They treat changes and new opportunities more philosophically. Although Haw is more comfortable with sticking to the old habits, but still ready to put the past attitude away and accept changes when necessary. Hem however strongly resist to changes.

At first, all of the four characters are putting a good amount of efforts searching through the maze to find cheese. Eventually, they all find a room full of cheese. They used to go there day after day to eat cheese. However, one day, they came to the room and found no more cheese there. Their different approaches in dealing with this new situation forms the main theme of the story. Sniff and Scurry soon decided to go back, searching in the maze for new cheese, however, Haw and Hem started analyzing the situation and stayed in the room. They came every day to the empty room with the hope that the cheese would be back. They became hungrier and hungrier everyday. At some point Haw realized that waiting for the cheese to come back is of no benefit. So he decided to start his journey alone in the maze in pursuit of new cheese, when he couldn't convince Hem to accompany him in the journey.
Sniff and Scurry end up with a room full of different cheese. Haw eventually joined them with some delay, however Hem was still not there because of his tendency to reject changes.
The concluding points are:

• It is a fact: Change happens, so you need to evaluate it, adapt to it, accept it and then enjoy the change and be ready for change once again and again and again.

Review the Literature: Citation Theories Example

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Citations are widely recognized as being an important and distinctive property of academic texts. As a consequence, the presence or absence of citations allows the casual reader to get an immediate sense of whether a text is an “academic” or “popular” one. Because citation is such an obvious surface phenomenon, it has been much discussed in the academic world. Indeed, there are several theories about the role and purpose of citations in academic texts. 

There are many different theories why citation is needed. Some of these theories are listed below according to their importance from blogger's point of view: 

The most important of all, citations are used to recognize and acknowledge the intellectual property rights of authors. They are a matter of ethics and a defense against plagiarism. Citations are also used to create a research space for the citing author. By describing what has been done, citations point the way to what has not been done and so prepare a space for new research (Swales, 1990). It is also worth mentioning that citations are tools of persuasion; writers use citations to give their statements greater authority (Gilbert, 1977). From a different aspect, citations are used to show respect to previous scholars. They recognize the history of the field by acknowledging previous achievements. A less common theory is that citations are used to supply evidence that the author qualifies as a member of the chosen scholarly community; citations are used to demonstrate familiarity with the field (Bavelas, 1978). Another weak theory is that citations operate as a kind of mutual reward system. Rather than pay other authors money for their contributions, writers “pay” them in citations (Ravetz, 1971).

  

A summary of Jared Diamond's speech on why societies collapse

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You can find the complete speech here.

This is a summary of Jared Diamond TED speech on why and how societies collapse.

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Jared findings are focused on the mystery of societies which have collapsed, the reasons behind fragility of societies and the tips which can be used to avoid it.  

First, what is understood from his speech is that, there is no single factor which would cause society's collapse, but there s a set of different factors. Jared's findings summarizes these factors as a five- point checklist as follows:

1. Human impact on the environment in destroying the resources
2. Climate change
3. Relations with neighboring friendly societies.
4. Relations with hostile societies.
5. Political, economical, social and cultural factors in society that determines the society's capability to solve the environmental problems.

Based on his speech, the three main common themes behind different collapses are:
First, rapidity of collapse after a society reaches its peak. Second, environmental factors that make some societies more brittle than others. And the third theme is divided into two main factors: Conflicts between short-terms interests of decision-makers, and long-term interests of society, strongly held values which are misused in irreverent situations.

To help avoiding these problems, we should work towards understanding those things we don't know and to work towards putting in action, those things we have understood so far.

Summarized by M.Goli, February 11, 2013

IEEE Citation Reference [1]

Citation standards for IEEE publication varies slightly for different resources. Here are some examples for IEEE citation format:

• Book 

Basic format: 
[#] J. K. Author, “Title of chapter in the book,” in Title of His Published Book, xth ed. City of Publisher, Country if not USA: Abbrev. of Publisher, year, ch. x, sec. x, pp. xxx–xxx. 
- Examples
[1] B. Klaus and P. Horn, Robot Vision. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986. 
[2] E. F. Moore, “Gedanken-experiments on sequential machines,” in  Automata Studies (Ann. of Mathematical Studies, no. 1), C. E. Shannon and J. McCarthy, Eds. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965, pp. 129-153.

• Handbook

Basic format: 

[#] Name of Manual/Handbook, x ed., Abbrev. Name of Co., City of Co., Abbrev. State, year, pp. xx-xx. 

- Example

[1] Transmission Systems for Communications, 3rd ed., Western Electric Co., Winston-Salem, NC, 1985, pp. 44–60.

• Conference Technical Articles

Basic Format: 
[#] J. K. Author, “Title of paper,” in Unabbreviated Name of Conf., City of Conf., Abbrev. State (if given), year, pp.xxx-xxx. 

   1. Periodicals

"NOTE: When referencing IEEE Transactions, the issue number should be deleted and month carried. 
Basic Format", [1]: 
[#] J. K. Author, “Name of paper,” Abbrev. Title of Periodical, vol. x, no. x, pp. xxx-xxx, Abbrev. Month, year. 
- Example: 
[1] R. E. Kalman, “New results in linear filtering and prediction theory,” J. Basic Eng., ser. D, vol. 83, pp. 95-108, Mar. 1961.

   2. Theses (M.S.) and Dissertations (Ph.D.) 

Basic Format: 
[#] J. K. Author, “Title of thesis,” M.S. thesis, Abbrev. Dept., Abbrev. Univ., City of Univ., Abbrev. State, year. 
[#] J. K. Author, “Title of dissertation,” Ph.D. dissertation, Abbrev. Dept., Abbrev. Univ., City of Univ., Abbrev. State, year. 
- Example: 
[1] J. O. Williams, “Narrow-band analyzer,” Ph.D. dissertation, Dept. Elect. Eng., Harvard Univ., Cambridge, MA, 1993.

Reference:

[1] D. Graffox. (2009, Sept.). IEEE Citation Reference [Online]. Available: http://www.ieee.org/documents/ieeecitationref.pdf