Wondering how the euro zone got into such a mess? A new e-book from Reuters Breakingviews provides some insight. Download Eurogeddon: The first two and a half years of the crisis edited by Hugo Dixon.

Find out:

• Which countries were fit for the single monetary policy
• If it might be better to abandon the single currency
• Whether the euro zone can solve its troubles

Hugo said: “Eurogeddon, a compilation of stories written as the crisis unfolded, charts the twists and turns of this unhappy tale. The final chapter sketches out a way forward.”

Reuters Breakingviews is the world’s leading source of agenda-setting financial insight. Every day, we comment on the big financial stories as they break. Our expert analysis is provided by a global team of 30 correspondents based in New York, Washington, London, Hong Kong, Madrid, Dubai and Mumbai.

You can download the PDF here. Also, be on the lookout for the print edition of “Eurogeddon: The first two and a half years of the crisis” coming out in late August.

Providing a view into the private world of a sitting judge on one of the highest benches, and in one of the world’s most famous cities, Judge Frederic Block gives a personal account of his experiences with controversial legal topics such as the death penalty, racketeering, terrorism, discrimination and foreign affairs in his new book. In DISROBED: An Inside Look at the Life and Work of a Federal Trial Judge, Judge Block illuminates this sometimes mysterious branch of government, sharing a behind-the-scenes look into his life and some of the trials of a federal court judge.

The federal bench is presided over by men and women who adhere to the traditional standard of judicial lock-jaw where nearly all of the communication outside of their courtroom is through formal written opinions and scholarly journals. Judge Block breaks that mold by taking readers on his own personal journey to the bench, a journey riddled with political potholes, and bares some of the most intimate details surrounding several landmark cases of our time. (more…)

Rob Cox and Breakingviews columnists discuss how investors are rationalizing the hype over Facebook’s IPO.

Don’t forget to check out the Breakingviews eBook: “Facebook: A Like Story – Why Investors Shouldn’t Fall in Love”

Anyone who has their eyes on the markets is eagerly awaiting the $100 billion Facebook IPO.  Will Facebook live up to the hype?  Will Mark Zuckerberg turn into Rupert Murdoch?  Will businesses that are riding its coattails benefit as much as they expect?  A new book from Reuters Breakingviews gives investors clear insight into why Zuckerberg’s dorm room creation may be a game-changer, but a risky investment.

“Facebook: A Like Story – Why Investors Shouldn’t Fall in Love” is a compilation of two dozen columns that illustrates “Facebook’s trajectory and increasing importance – from a site used by college students to a business approaching a billion users and potentially worth more than $100 billion.” Breakingviews has led the agenda on Facebook’s story since the beginning, writing its first piece when the social network had just 9 million collegiate users.

The Breakingviews ebook hits on three important themes:

• Valuation: The social network is aiming for an IPO at $28-$35 a share, for a value of up to $95 billion. But as a Breakingviews analysis shows, sanity resides at the low end of the valuation scale.

• Governance: It could take decades or only a few years but the overwhelming control investors are ceding to the 27-year-old Facebook founder will eventually cease to be in their best interest.

• Dependence: It’s not just social networking junkies that are hooked on the firm. Businesses such as Zynga have been created on its back. Bankers are pegging their careers on floating the firm. And California needs the impending IPO to help close its yawning budget gap.

For the first time, customers can buy the Breakingviews ebook for their iPad, Kindle or Nook. Give it a read and let us know what you think…

By Dan Bennett, VP of Technology, Thomson Reuters

One of the underlying premises of ProView, Thomson Reuter’s eBook platform, is that unlike the other eReaders, we’ve designed it from the ground up for professional content. Books for professionals differ in several key ways:

• More complex mark-up: complex tables of taxation rates, many levels of indentation
• Read non-linearly: our books are reference aids, there to answer a question, with a few exceptions, not to be read cover to cover
• Much larger: books in excess of 3,000 pages are the norm

While the first two are fairly easy to demonstrate we’ve always wondered if ProView works better than the others with large books. Thanks to some great work by Thomson Reuter’s Scott Daup, we now have an answer!

Scott rolled up his sleeves and developed a prototype ProView epub converter. As a result, they are able to directly compare ProView app performance with consumer eReader software running on the same device.

We chose two of our larger titles: Westlaw’s Florida Rules of Court Volume 3 and Carswell’s Practioners Income Tax Act to compare.  The titles vary greatly in composition: The court rules are generated from our Novus document repository/search engine and comprise very small documents with exceptionally clean mark-up. By contrast, PITA was generated from source SGML with more challenging mark-up and larger document sizes.

We chose two large and popular eReading iPad software applications to compare against ProView. We’ll call them Commercial eReader software I and II.

In general, software II did a much better job than C software I with the large book: the UI was far more responsive and actions complete in a reasonable amount of time. However, this comes at a cost: a rather lack luster UI and very poor search.

While we have some work to do on some aspects of UI performance, how can ProView be so much faster for some operations?

1. We chose not to constrain ourselves to the ePub format. This allows us to do some server side pre-computation: the resulting maps are shipped along with the book and utilized by the app.
2. We have much worse test cases to work with, and the team have done excellent work in optimizing the app.
3. Our secret weapon: Novus: the teams in Eagan and Bangalore did a great job  cramming a full query parser and search results logic into an iOS library. We’ve built this into the ProView app.

The Novus team are now hard at work on delivering libraries for Windows, Mac and Android that they’ll use for upcoming ProView releases on these platforms.

Watch the ProView background video.

Progress has been made in the quest for workforce equality for women. But has that glass ceiling truly been shattered? The latest analysis from Thomson Reuters based on ASSET4 environmental, social and governance information, says a big “no.”

Our e-Book analysis, bolstered by a number of Datastream charts data is designed to give you a complete overview of the latest gender equality trends within global large and mid-cap publicly-traded corporations.

KEY FINDINGS:
Improved reporting: From fiscal year 2005 to fiscal year 2010, the number of companies that provide quantitative information on the percentage of women in their workforce, increased by 13%.

Big gains in financial services: In 2005, women made up an average of 28% of managers in the financial services sector. By 2010, that rate had jumped to 33%.

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Valuable insights like these are just some of the benefits of your Thomson Reuters Datastream subscription. And one more way we’re getting the right information in your hands, so you can achieve some amazing things.