The Rounded-up Average of 5 + 0 stars
356911
The authors receive 5 stars for their clear, thought-provoking and humorous written style to bring to the front and explain in 'almost' concise English language the issue of animal- and human sense-perception (and its relation to manifestations of consciousness) through describing mind-opening personal experiences and also by explaining various scientific experiments and principles.
The authors receive 0 stars for their apparent lack to include any (of the many) scientific experiments that also show a thought-provoking manifestation of consciousness in plant sense-perception. I propose it is because they still use in the text the concept of "our consciousness", in stead of realising, as Dr. Gustav Barnard would put it, that "Human beings does not have consciousness, consciousness has, amongst other things, human beings." Wow!
And please, do not discard the manifestation of consciousness in 'gravel' (inert matter) when scientific experiments with Biocentrism as base is devised and conducted.
4642254
This movie, by any reasonable standard, is a one- or two-star effort. The plot is a complete mess that jumps from one random scene to another and the ending feels like it was written by a group of preschoolers. It's far and away the weakest entry of the series (and to qualify that, in my view Rise of the Lycans is the best, followed by the original). I was really annoyed by just how awful and pointless this movie was.

Now, as for these ridiculous 5-star reviews, you'll note that IMDB also gives this movie four to five stars, almost certainly by the same people that are writing these Amazon reviews. If you want to get a reality check, go to rotten tomatoes, which contains legitimate reviews by professional reviewers, and you'll see that the movie gets 1-2 stars.

Cue the flabbergasted movie studio employees telling me that I'm wrong.
1522800
EDIT - I have created a more detailed explanation/follow up of my review in the associated comments section. There I go into more detail as to why I consider the 24>16 thing to be a giant waste of time.  Feel free to chime in!

This review is coming from someone who has both the Beatles USB box set and the Stereo Box Set released a few months earlier.  I purchased the USB box set though I KNEW deep down that the simple differences between a 24-bit recording and the 16-bit dithering from that recording would be completely undetectable to human ears.  Now owning both, I can say with full confidence that I shouldn't have bothered.

Here's the thing - we humans are naturally suggestible. It's called expectation bias, placebo effect, whatever you want to call it. We will almost always think wine from a nice bottle with a high price tag will taste better than the SAME wine from a 7-11 with a twist off top. It's not that we're idiots, we're human. Our brain decides what it SHOULD like better and then makes it happen for us.  When it comes to audio these tendencies are amplified. People waste millions on superfluous junk WANTING to believe that it makes their audio experience richer. When they pay the bill and plug it in, their brain justifies the purchase.

Releasing the 24-bit FLAC files of the Beatles remastered stereo catalog is a shameless attempt at double-dipping the same people who bought the Stereo Box Set a few months earlier. Other customers have verified that these are from the same masters used to cut the 16 bit stereo disc.  The fact is, in double blind tests, people simply CANNOT TELL THE DIFFERENCE between 16 bit resolution (~65,536 bit step values) and 24-bit (16,777,216 step values.) Again, we see the numbers, we WANT to believe they sound better, but to ask your speakers or heck, your eardrums to REALLY sense that level of microscopic difference is a pipe dream.

I know other reviewers have claimed to score 100% on double blind tests discerning these 24 bit files from the 16 bit equivalents.  Either they're using horribly-configured tests, or they're exaggerating things, I promise you.  For an EXPERT listener to discern a difference on even a small percentage of these recordings, they would need to be listening at absolute ear-bleeding volume levels, lest the differences be totally obliterated in the analog "dithering" process imposed by your volume knob.

So if you have yet to take the plunge on the Beatles remasters, go for the USB.  It's compact and it sounds great.

If you already have the Stereo set, skip this.  It sounds just as great.  That is, unless you like purposefully paying more for wine out of a nice bottle.
2358716
Unfortunately, it seems even the best of critics begin to doubt themselves when they are asked to review a phenomenally successful product (it is perhaps uncommon to refer to a literary work as a product, but when you look at the global economic impact of the Harry Potter franchise, then it does seem appropriate). One begins to doubt one's own self in the face of the mind-boggling statistics of so many miilions of units sold in matter of hours etc. So, I would say that there hasn't been an unbiased review of the HP books since the release of book 5, the first "ordinary" book of an otherwise extraordinary series.
Our household has HP readers from the age of 6 to 43. And all I have to do to support my view is to look at the appearences of all of our books. The first three books are badly worn out, the third book being in the worst condition, because of the hundreds of re-reads they have undergone. The books 4 to 6 are in much better condition, and we can probably re-sell the 5th book. I am afraid the final book will join the latter group and not the former.
Am I the only one who thinks that J K Rowling's literary magic has diminished in quality significantly in the latter books? I ask you - think about the Troll attack in the first book, or the night bus episode in the third book or the description of the Quidditch games. Didn't it seem like you can see the whole thing right before your eyes? And tell me, do you feel the same about the battle in the ministry of magic in the 5th book, or Dumbledore's last adventure with Harry in the 6th book?
Coming back to the 7th book, the first myth to be broken about the 7th book is, no, it didn't answer all the hanging questions. If it did, then it would have to answer a hanging question in every page. It also contains many incidents spanning several pages that have very little relevance - a major character's departure from the "team" and coming back is an example. And, it was painful to read about characters that had such big roles to play in the previous volumes curtly disposed off - Harry merely notices their bodies lying around - and it makes you rethink the real importance of those characters. And no, I wasn't impressed about the finale; it seemed more of a whimper than a bang.
The series still stands out as a great literary work, but mainly because of the first few outstanding volumes.
329427
Dave Markowitz, I simply cannot believe your  comments to the one-star reviews!

You come off defensive and clearly lacking boundaries and respect for others because you cannot refrain from commenting on the reviews. You appear passive-aggressive with your comments and your cutesy smiley-faces. You appear immature and whiny. You are so clearly what I felt when I read your book but had not yet seen these reviews.  When I read your book, I found it superficial and without insight. I gained nothing from it, truly nothing..

I was deeply disappointed with this book and felt that it was trite, simplistic, and a complete waste of money. I felt the author lacked insight, which is why the content was so simplistic. A one-star reviewer states the author seemed egotistical, and I got a bit of that feel as well. I felt the author was presenting himself as someone knowledgeable and wise on the topic, but his content didn't support this. I think this is why the reviewer  said the author sounded like a car salesman and appeared egotistical.

Markowitz's comments to the one-star reviews supports my feeling that he has little self-understanding and thus is not someone I'm going to put my faith in. It's probably, too, why the book is so short. He knows so little about himself and the topic.

I gave the book two stars because if a person has never been introduced to the topic, he or she might get something out of the book. And that's only if the person absolutely hates to read or needs a lot of repetition and can't digest too much. Otherwise, I'd advise against this book and suggest "The Highly Sensitive Person."

I'm appalled at Markowitz's comments to the legitimate one-star reviews. Anyone who gets enmeshed like this is someone to be very, very wary of when he purports to be a healer. I've been immersed in the metaphysical community for decades, so I've seen my share of these types. They project confidence and can sell just about anything to anyone, but they lack the most basic of insight. They read a book and hang out a shingle calling themselves gifted or healers or teachers. Sigh...
1760794
It's a good thing this band has a strong back catalogue, because otherwise this album would be invisible in the mountain of similar generic, unremarkable electronic music made by newbies. I'm sorry, but this is just not good Combichrist. Many of the songs are slow, plodding messes without any hooks or contagious sounds. Not interesting, not powerful, not threatening, just as bland as sonic hands-full of dough. Andy has an awful singing voice--it's weak, it's very much out of tune, and yet he tries and tries to sing on so many tracks! Andy's voice is made for industrial-strength shouting, like in "Sent to Destroy" and "All Pain is Gone"--THOSE are killer songs. Andy's sounding more tired here.

There are a few stabs of harder songs, but they're not actually very interesting. F---machine is an un-creative as they come: heap misogyny and abuse on a woman, tell her she deserves it--that's the whole song. It's crap. It's trite. It's not rebellious, it's typical woman-hating sexism without even the benefit of any interesting music (just a bunch of loops piled on top of each other to accompany Andy's rather wretched and SERIOUSLY disappointing sexism). Hey Andy: abusing women isn't edgy. It's not creative. It's not sexy. It's not fun. It's not even shocking. It makes you seem like a tool. It's just dull.

So there it is--the album I've awaited more eagerly than any other this year, and it's dull. Sure, some Combichrist fans will suck up to it, telling Andy another thousand times how awesome he is, but come on...they know. They *know* this album is weak. The songs are sludgy and so generic that only a couple are even conspicuous. They *know* Andy's singing voice stinks (but apparently nobody was brave enough to tell him that). This sounds like a gazillion other electro-industrial bands you've never heard of because they weren't noticeable, now forgotten in random COP and Cleopatra catalogues of 1994.
881270
Isn't funny how all the people who got one free rated it 5 stars and all the verified purchasers rate this thing as below junk? I wasn't bribed to write this review with an free unit.
68968
Don't bother reading any of the reviews written by "D. Cohen" and "Stephen Hall." Apparently they have nothing better to do than to post multiple 5-star ratings, which as one reviewer stated, has inflated the rating of the 4th generation nano. For that reason I will give it, along with the idiots, one star.
4041912
Please give us the option of negative stars!! Nothing else can do justice to this waste of good trees. I forced myself through it for a book club. Anyone who reads this review probably already grasps the setup - Annie G. Freeman (as she is called over and over and over and over long after we know her name) sends her "best friends" trailing around the country to scatter her ashes in fabulously significant places.

It's probably significant that by her mid fifties, all Annie could come up with for best friends were a high school buddy, her boss, her landlady, and her hospice nurse. The cover looks promising, and the first page seems to be setting up a funny, precisely observed minicrisis - the exploding bra. It's all downhill from there. After a brief intro to the four women, we spend the rest of the book reading slop about how they form an undifferentiated fabulous mush of femaleness. No, wait - there are really five of them. And an extra who joins partway through. It doesn't matter. There is only the mush.

Oh, and Annie was fabulous too. And they tell lots of stories showing how fabulous she was, none of which we get to read. Nobody has any individual traits...I don't think the author approves of women being individuals. Nobody has any religious (or antireligious) thoughts about death and its meaning. Every total stranger they encounter is bowled over by their fabulousosity. (Maybe the silliest was the New York cabbie who describes their hotel as "an elegant beauty". No, other reviewers were right, the silliest is having everybody else snowed into the Minneapolis airport join the weepfest. But there's lots of silly to go around.)

But the worst, the very worst, was the repeated, bludgeoning chant that we wimmen spend all our time suffering and giving and suffering and that's what makes us fabulously fabulous. ("We're women and we deal with " (loss) "and we do it in a way that somehow becomes a gift. Isn't that something? Isn't it something how we can take something that is so painful it makes you drop to the floor and turn it into a life lesson that makes you actually glad it happened? That's what women do. We get on with it. It sure is something.") Yeah, it's something - it's the same garbage every girl who grew up in the fifties or before had rammed down her throat - and the whole point is to keep us in our place.

Here you are at amazon - they'll sell you any number of books that are a much better use for your $11, or $8.80, than this trash. DO NOT BUY!
3279409
Okay,this is my very first Amazon review. After ploughing through over 600 pages of unbelievably trite writing and amateurish prose I logged on to Amazon to seek some vindication for my view. And was shocked to find that the average rating for this book STILL stacks up to 3 stars!! So here I am, doing my bit of community service for the day. Hope my 2 stars will go a small way in bringing the average rating down so that some hapless, unsuspecting person out there may be saved a few bucks. ("As soon as he saw her, he felt his heart explode. As soon as she saw him, she felt her heart explode". I kid you not.)

In the hands of a better writer and better editor this could have been redeemed. As it turned out, that didn't happen. It may turn out to be a better movie than a book (which wouldn't be tough considering how low the bar has been set). Wait for the movie, don't bother with the book.
1015170
I struggled to figure out how many stars to award this.  The book/story is awful, the characters are completely unlikeable (everyone is drunk or angry, or both, except for the kid, who's just confused), and much the music is forgettable, with the title track being among the most uninspired stuff I've heard in a while.  Normally, I'd give this production one star.

But.

The way this production came together, it was SO bad, it was fabulous, and for that, I'd give it five stars. So, averaging the one and five, you get the three.

Anyway, PatsFan's review from April 3rd is spot-on with all that is wrong with this production, but I choose to laugh rather than cry.  In fact, it was a struggle for me to contain myself when I saw it in the theater this past February.  As absurdly hilarious as I found many parts, I couldn't assume the few other patrons felt the same way, so I stifled my laughter, only to burst out in fits of it as I shopped in a supermarket after the show.  Good thing it was late at night with few other shoppers around.  (Apparently, a bunch of folks at a screening in NYC didn't restrain themselves and things got heated after the movie.  Go to the blog The Craptacular, do a search using the words Love Never Dies Crazy, and enjoy the post.)

The death scene was absolutely priceless and an excellent example of the horrible writing.

**SPOILER ALERT**

So, after the Phantom, apparently a better composer than psychologist,  fails in his attempt at hostage negotiation with Meg, Christine is shot by Meg.  Gustave, already traumatized by his mother being shot, finds out that the Phantom, of whom he is frightened and from whom he ran away screaming previously, is his real father.  Fabulous timing!

Then, Gustave runs off to find his "father" Raoul, who supposedly has taken off for Europe.  Did Gustave even know that Raoul had left and where he was going?  Come on, now.  Miraculously, Gustave finds Raoul and brings him back, just in time, to Christine's side, where, when Christine gasps her last breath, the Phantom cries, "NOOOOOOOOOOO!" eerily similar to that of Darth Vader in "Revenge of the Sith" when Padme dies.

Oh, I almost forgot - there was NO blood on Christine.  So she was lying there in her death throes, and there was no wound from the gunshot.

I did like Ben Lewis' voice, though.  It's deeper, darker and older in sound than Ramin Karimloo's and much more as I'd expect the Phantom's voice to sound.  I'd like to see Mr. Lewis in another production with a good plot and better direction.  I do like Ramin Karimloo and his Phantom interpretation from what I've seen of it, but the Phantom is not supposed to be a hot young dude; it takes away from the tragedy of the Phantom's life.  As fantastic as Ramin's voice is, its youth came through so clearly in anniversary performance and was a bit jarring for me, and as the Phantom in LND, he's supposed to be 10 years older than he was in the original show.

Bottom line, watch this without taking it too seriously and you might enjoy it, even if not in the way ALW would have wanted you to do so.
4814107
I may be being generous with 2 stars. This is NOT an advanced book. By any means! I guess definition is all subjective, I guess. Also subjective: the arrangements; didn't care for them at all. Nothing special about any of them.
4321261
I was so hopeful about this book - the premise sounded cool.  And 5,000 ratings with an average of nearly 5 stars?  Nobody gets that type of rating. This is going to be the new book of the year.

Nope.  Not. Even. Close.

So...those ratings must be FAKE.  There's no way 5.000 people read this and gave it an average of nearly 5 stars.  The writing in this book is very unsophisticated and the characters are so cookie cutter and stereotypical, it was painful to read about the things they said and did.  There are way too many well written novels out there to waste your time on this.  This doesn't even read like a YA book.  I don't know how else to describe it.  I feel bad, the author must be paying someone somewhere to give her very positive ratings every day or so.  There is just NO way that these ratings are real.

So, I find that annoying.  Honestly, I probably would have liked the book a lot better if there wasn't the fake review issue.  But I was so annoyed I therefore took the time to give it a real rating, from someone who reads a lot.
2997040
I keep banging up against sloppy editing, "Independent estimates of the clusters' total mass is possible..." and disjunctions that suggest wholesale cutting-down of the manuscript's length without any corresponding attempt to provide new transitions.  The discussion of the cosmic microwave background is one example: you really can't refer to "that 'last scattering surface'" if you haven't mentioned, much less defined, ANY "last scattering surface" previously. And in fact he never does bother to define it or explain why it's called that. (The diagram on page 45 seems oddly drawn, as well: why don't both legs of the triangle that represents our field of vision reach the last scattering surface?  Isn't the point that THAT is what we're looking at in the illustrations that follow?  Or am I missing something?  Since the whole discussion is about the geometry of the straight lines beams of light travel, this really isn't completely trivial.)  The odd shift in topic at the top of the fourth page of Chapter 5 is another bothersome example, with the author suddenly working "to put a lower limit on the age of these stars," referring to stars which have not been mentioned anywhere in the preceding discussion.  I suppose Krauss is referring to Type 1a supernovas, but the disjunction is jarring and unnecessary.

Most of the anecdotes are meaningless morsels, and the overabundance of exclamation marks seems intended to instill an ingratiating, but false, sense of insider-ness.  I appreciate the often successful attempt to provide an introduction to a subject that is barely conceivable, much less comprehensible, but the execution is disturbingly ramshackle.
4320236
People say that 5 star review systems skew ratings by encouraging people who already like a product or service to lazily give something what is effectively a "thumbs up" without creating anything approaching useful information that the uninitiated can use to determine if said product of service is worthy of their ever decreasing supply time and discretionary income.

I contend that those people have never watched an episode of Incognito Cinema Warriors XP, and will likely be the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes.
2793675
Worth noting on these that as of May 1, 2015 all ten 5-star reviews were from accounts with exactly 1 review (this item) on Amazon. So you have to take them with a grain of salt...
3438705
Someone at Amazon screwed up and detached my original review from this book, so I'm reproducing it below.  You can find a more thorough review of this book at ChessCafe dot com, click on Archives, then Book Reviews.  They are in alpha order by title.
--------------------------------------------
Original review:

Although the games in this book are of course excellent games, they are available in many other sources, such as Smyslov's 125 games, Fischer's 60 memorable games, and so on. Furthermore, the author appears to have exerted remarkably little effort to analyze these games or give insightful annotations. Most of the games contain at least one other complete game, with no annotations (just a string of moves followed by 1-0) as a note. Many contain three to five complete games as notes. One contains seven complete games in the notes. These are un-annotated games, mind you: just filling space and teaching almost nothing. And the annotations that are present appear to be cribbed from other authors about half the time -- possibly more, if one searches in books I do not own.

The upshot is that, if you have a relatively small library of chess books and want to get a sampling of these great players, this would probably be a three-star book. You'd be better off getting a games collection from any one of these players, especially the self-annotated collections by Smyslov, Fischer, or Anand, but if you bought this book and studied it you probably wouldn't hate yourself. By contrast, if you have a fairly well-developed library already, this is a one-star book; it adds almost nothing you don't already know. Average: two stars.