Reviews

I broke the base on assembly. The globe wouldn't fit into the base on its own so I tried to muscle it (last resort). It snapped and now I have a baseless globe. At least I can hold in my hands to look at. The map itself is good.

The place where the globe attaches does not seem to fit right, but the globe itself is awesome. Many places in great detail, fine colors and very readable place names make it a great investment for educational purposes.

I just received the globe but didn't start the Nat'l Geo subscription so I can't review the second part of this offer. Of the 3 stars reserved to for the globe, it earns 1. The globe is indeed spherical and the continents can be easily identified from the oceans. The globe is somewhat smaller than I expected and the entire layout looks cheap - but what can you expect from something that's made cheaply and hastily in China sweatshop? Little wood pieces came off the base while unpacking it but that's not something a little glue can't fix. Setting the globe on the base was difficult as the globe's axis extension needs to be pushed really hard to fit inside some plastic orifice. After all is done, the entire setup looks quite fragile but it should not fall apart if no one touches it. Looking forward for the magazines now. I hope they didn't outsource those to China too.

Reviews

This was a gift for our child who loves cartooning but wanted to go to the next level - computer and photos. It has been so fun to see what he comes up with and how family photos can be incorporated into his creativitiy.

Reviews

Excellent book that mixes intelligent story telling that offers a layman's peek into the future world of personalized and genomic medicine. The author brings a great human element to the complex molecular world of the human body. I also like the excellent website that accompanies the book, which brings a participatory element to the Experimental Man experience.

The perspective of the human at a genomic level based on data from contemporary analysis began with sequenced DNA clues to health. Then the interaction with environmental toxins at a cellular level was considered. The progression led to a consideration of the brain and mental states. There was an emphasis on the not-yet-there aspect of the techniques and their application to these various levels, particularly at a single individual level. The author is a good writer. Yet, some areas of the book were dull reading because of the terse technical information. All in all a good read.

This book provides a very interesting summary of genetic and chemical testing to estimate disease risk. The discussions of mercury and PDBE levels were especially interesting. The book also covered screening for cancer by CT scans and colonscopy etc. One area that was only briefly covered was diet. I am a physician and the data is now showing more and more that diet is the cornerstone of preventive medicine. Eg. in the past it was argued that a positive FH (family history) implied a genetic risk. More and more,instead of being due to shared genes, this has often been shown due to shared environmental risk factors eg. diet, tobacco, obesity, alcohol etc. This is good news, because, you can't change your genes, but you can change your diet. The good news is that you can take control and improve your life. If you are interested in optimizing your health, I recommend "Prevent & Reverse Heart Disease by Esselstyn" (concise, illustrated, accurate), any book by John McDougall MD and the DVD "Rogers Diet" of which I am the author. The DVD is a convenient way to get an MD's advice on cholesterol, diet, wt loss and prevention of heart attack & diabetes etc.The Rogers Diet

Is Gattaca around the bend? How long until we're all living to be 125 years old? Can a 50 year old have the brain of a 25 year old? Will neurologists and scientists studying chemicals in the environment and geneticists all be able to play nicely together to create my personalized health profile, which will predict which diseases and problems I'll be at risk for? David Duncan explores all of these questions and more-- simplifying a lot of science and testing and theory to accessible language, making for a fascinating read. The answers aren't always conclusive-- in fact, they're quite often not-- but the questions and potential implications are a good starting point nonetheless.

David Duncan has traveled all over the world in the pursuit of learning about the toxins in his own body. He brings a reporters keen eye to the scientific world of medical testing and helps the non-scientific reader understand what it all means. If you're curious what science can tell us about the human body, both the good and the bad, and you want read a first-rate reporter's personal journey to understanding what makes his own body tick, this is the book for you.

Reviews

"Inside Animal Minds" largely reports on Irene Pepperberg's life and experiments with Alex, an African gray parrot that she selected at random from a pet store and worked with for about 30 years. (Also reported in greater detail in her book "Alex and Me.") Dolphin and other animal training experiences are also referenced. "At the Heart of All Matter" exposes readers to the Large Hadron Collider in rural France. Its purpose is to figure out what the universe is made of. Two beams of particles race in opposite directions around a 17 mile tunnel, guided by more than a thousand cylindrical, supercooled magnets. At four locations the beams converge, sending the particles crashing into each other at nearly the speed of light, creating energy which condenses back into particles, some never seen before. At least that's the intent. Some, however, worry that the beam will create a black hole that swallows the earth. "Power Struggle" covers Iceland's choice between exploiting a wealth of clean energy or keeping their landscape pristine. The specific challenge is a proposed aluminum smelter fed by a new dam. "Beyond the Blue Horizon" addresses the puzzle of how seafarers 3,000 some years ago were able to reliable cross the Pacific and settle many of its islands.

National Geographic is my favorite magazine - I've been reading it for 55 years. This issue did not disappoint.

Reviews

The information contained and having all pages of the National Geographic is awesome and I would recommend it to anyone. The Big disappointment comes from the interface used to display the magazine. 1) slow - Distractingly so slow that each page turn is excruciatingly painful and it makes me wonder will i ever get there. 2) Photographed PDF images instead of text. - this is a huge pain on an entirely new level!!! 3) Text is not searchable because of the PDF images 4) Photographs become pixelated when zooming because of the PDF images 5) Text is near impossible to read with out being fatigued because of the old source text. 6) Zooming in is difficult to do and exploring the page is another exercise in frustration. This software could be improved by providing just the pages in PDF form without the stupid software. The software developers could have ran the magazine through google OCR to extract the text or use higher resolution photos. Taking the time to extract the images is a necessity!!!

I was pleasantly surprised to see the depth of information found on the DVD's. The details of the graphs and the photographs were beautiful. The table of contents was simple to use.

I have the earlier CD-ROM version of The Complete National Geographic, and was attracted because this one is not only more up to date but takes up far less space. Surprisingly it is not so good. It takes an interminable time to load. Not only is it much harder to use "SEARCH" but it lacks the facility to rotate pages. The National Geographic throughout its history has printed many of its pictures sideways on the page, and so if you use a desktop, they are extremely dificult to see properly unless you are athletic enough to turn your head to be horizontal to the floor. All right with a laptop because it's easier to rotate the whole thing. But what a crazy omission. I found that one entire issue in the 1950s has been reproduced twice and defied the index. I wrote to the NGM customer help people but they said I was mistaken, and when I wrote back saying that I was not I heard nothing further. So, regard this product as a beta minus, and hope that thay can do better in the future.

For someone who is a huge History/Geography buff, this item is a surefire winner of a gift.

These design guys seems to pay much of the attention to protect their intellectual property rather than to improve user experience. They scan these issues into spectral format which can only be opened by their program. You have to insert DVD to read any part of the magazines. There is no way you can copy the contents on to your hard disk, which makes the reading quite inconvenient. You have to resale the page size each time you turn to a new page. The turning between pages is also slow and involve noisy disc reading. It seems that they want you to read as few times as possible.