"Innovate or die. Companies have heard that message loud and clear¿but they still struggle with how to actually make it happen. INNOVATION THAT FITS reveals what works and what doesn't, helping you build a focused, sustainable innovation strategy that fits your business and your marketplace.

Inquiring Organizations: Moving from Knowledge Management to Wisdom assembles into one volume a comprehensive collection of the key current thinking regarding the use of C. West Churchman’s Design of Inquiring Systems as a basis for computer-based inquiring systems design and implementation. Inquiring systems are systems that go beyond knowledge management to actively inquire about their environment. While self-adaptive is an appropriate adjective for inquiring systems, they are critically different from self-adapting systems as they have evolved in the fields of computer science or artificial intelligence. Inquiring systems draw on epistemology to guide knowledge creation and organizational learning. As such, we can for the first time ever, begin to entertain the notion of support for "wise" decision-making. Readers of Inquiring Organizations: Moving from Knowledge Management to Wisdom will gain an appreciation for the role that epistemology can play in the design of the next generation of knowledge management systems: systems that focus on supporting wise decision-making processes.

As autonomous robots expand into the service domain, new solutions to the challenge of operating in domestic environments must be developed. Widespread adoption of service robots demands high robustness to environmental change and operational wear, and minimal reliance on application specific knowledge. As such, rich sensing modalities such as vision will play a central role in their success. This book takes steps towards the realization of domestic robots by presenting an integrated systems view of computer vision and robotics, covering fundamental topics including optimal sensor design, visual servoing, 3D object modelling and recognition, and multi-cue tracking, with a solid emphasis on robustness throughout. With in-depth treatment of both theory and implementation, extensive experimental results and comprehensive multimedia support including video clips, VRML data, C++ code and lecture slides, this book has wide appeal to both theoretical and practical roboticists and stands as a valuable teaching resource.

The Tax Law of Charitable Giving, Third Edition is completely revised, revamped, and updated. Written in plain English, it can help lawyers, managers, and development directors in tax-exempt organizations make sure they are up to date on all current regulations pertaining to charitable gifts, and that they are well prepared to make decisions about their organization's fund-development program.

The implied volatility surface is a key financial variable for the pricing and the risk management of plain vanilla and exotic options portfolios alike. Consequently, statistical models of the implied volatility surface are of immediate importance in practice: they may appear as estimates of the current surface or as fully specified dynamic models describing its propagation through space and time. This book fills a gap in the financial literature by bringing together both recent advances in the theory of implied volatility and refined semiparametric estimation strategies and dimension reduction methods for functional surfaces: the first part of the book is devoted to smile-consistent pricing appoaches. The theory of implied and local volatility is presented concisely, and vital smile-consistent modeling approaches such as implied trees, mixture diffusion, or stochastic implied volatility models are discussed in detail. The second part of the book familiarizes the reader with estimation techniques that are natural candidates to meet the challenges in implied volatility modeling, such as the rich functional structure of observed implied volatility surfaces and the necessity for dimension reduction: non- and semiparametric smoothing techniques.

Thomas D. Schneid / Larry R. Collins, «Disaster Management and Preparedness»
CRC | ISBN: 156670524X | 2000-11-22 | 247 pages | PDF | 2 Mb

This book addresses all the special considerations important in planning for disasters, from natural disasters to acts of terrorism to catastrophic events. It covers all aspects from assessing the risk prior to a disaster to the legal ramifications following a disaster. The text addresses the "how-tos" of avoiding the common mistakes which turn natural and man-made catastrophes into economic disasters. It encompasses not only the tried and true tactics used for decades but also focuses on areas often overlooked during the reactive and post disaster phases. Organizations can be prepared and proactive by using this guide to make a disaster management plan before disaster strikes.

Bernard Lewis / Richard Payant, «The Facility Manager's Emergency Preparedness Handbook»
American Management Association | ISBN: 0814407188 | 1st edition (April 2003) | 400 pages | PDF | 1.3 Mb

Facility managers have to be ready for anything: bomb threats, flooding, labor strikes, workplace violence – the list goes on and on. Since 9/11, efforts toward emergency preparedness have increased substantially. The Facility Manager's Emergency Preparedness Handbook is a definitive reference on facility safety and emergency response planning and management. This timely and potentially life-saving book is filled with proven plans and tools for dealing with all potential problem areas. The book includes comprehensive instructions and checklists for categorizing potential emergencies, identifying the resources to be used, preparing, rehearsing, and testing plans, and establishing training. It is an essential resource for every facility manager.

Bruce Garrison, «Professional Feature Writing (LEA's Communication Series)»
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates | ISBN: 0805847650 | 4 edition (February 10, 2004) | 528 pages | PDF | 2.6 Mb

This text covers the basics of feature writing for newspapers, magazines, and newsletters. It covers basic writing activities, the various types of articles, and writing in different contexts. For students in feature writing/advanced writing courses.

The authors began writing the First Edition of this textbook in early 1988. It took almost 10 years to complete this effort, because they did not want to write an ordinary textbook. Their goal was to write a book that would break new ground in both the understanding and explanation of finance and its practice. They wanted to write a book that would influence the way people think about, teach, and practice finance.

This study analyzes the key issues and constraints - in terms of efficiency, access and safety and soundness - faced by East Asian countries in developing their financial markets which are at different stages of development, drawing on global experience.

You're either a Purple Cow or you're not. You're either remarkable or invisible. Make your choice.
What do Starbucks and JetBlue and KrispyKreme and Apple and DutchBoy and Kensington and Zespri and Hard Candy have that you don't? How do they continue to confound critics and achieve spectacular growth, leaving behind former tried-and true brands to gasp their last?

Every marketer tells a story. And if they do it right, we believe them. We believe that wine tastes better in a $20 glass than a $1 glass. We believe that an $80,000 Porsche Cayenne is vastly superior to a $36,000 VW Touareg, which is virtually the same car. We believe that $225 Pumas will make our feet feel better-and look cooler-than $20 no-names . . . and believing it makes it true.

This book presents applications of semi-Markov processes in finance, insurance and reliability, using real-life problems as examples. After a presentation of the main probabilistic tools necessary for understanding of the book, the authors show how to apply semi-Markov processes in finance, starting from the axiomatic definition and continuing eventually to the most advanced financial tools, particularly in insurance and in risk-and-ruin theories. Also considered are reliability problems that interact with credit risk theory in finance. The unique approach of this book is to solve finance and insurance problems with semi-Markov models in a complete way and furthermore present real-life applications of semi-Markov processes.