Reviews for Practical Introduction to Management Science

The average rating for Practical Introduction to Management Science based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-08-28 00:00:00 John Caldwell This is a strange book. It is in its way about as depressing a thing as you can imagine... an enormous litany of incompetence, stretched out over a millennium and a half. I just typed out the entire contents of both flaps of the book jacket, which are as good a summary as I can imagine of the contents of the book except for the hilariously transparent lie, "there is much to be gained from a careful scrutiny of Roman scientific writing," so go read that and ponder just how grim the going is, following a misbegotten excuse for a scientific literature as it churns and plagiarizes itself and loses all sight of its actual sources while continuing to bandy about their names. Yet this book is astoundingly readable...just biting enough to be darkly amusing, and just sympathetic enough to grip me. It certainly astounded me with the quantity of stuff that Stahl offhandedly comments to have been written up to that date about "Greek science," by which he turns out to mean geometry, number theory (arithmetic), the theory of latitude and longitude and map projections and so forth (mathematical geography), and astronomy for the most part; likewise with the sheer volume of authors and (mostly lost) texts, and with the mysterious allusions to Ionian physicists in the centuries before Pythagoras. It gave me an enormous amount of added depth to my sense of what the world of the written word was like in the ancient Mediterranean. It was also interesting, in the late going, to see how Duhem's work on the medievals had held up after another half century of work and criticism in Stahl's opinion. Stahl even hints at a foreboding paradigm of Western intellectual history that goes something like this. Civilization rises out of an era of illiteracy. Its first products are robust and vivid poetry and drama, from Homer to Sophocles, from... ok, I'm groping here, Plautus to Vergil to let us say Horace. In the Greek case, they inserted an unusual fruitful era of philosophical and scientific speculation and argument. Eventually intellectuals degrade into dilettantes and polymaths (understood in the Platte sense of a mile wide and an inch deep) copying and recopying each other's ideas with only the lightest comprehension and redigestion. Western Europe degraded into a Dark Age and started the cycle again. Clearly we are past the stage of good poetry and literature (Dante to Shakespeare to whatever 19th and early 20th century writers you prefer), and our science is degrading into long lists of facts to be worn as badges of faux intellectualism... so goes his paradigm. Not true in general, but too true in some ways.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-11-17 00:00:00 Vance Cook Psychometric tests include personality profiles, reasoning tests, motivation questionnaires, and ability assessments. These tests try to provide objective data for otherwise subjective measurements. ... By using a psychometric test, you make a more objective and impartial judgment.