With little effort and expense, you can hide cash, armaments and even family from the menacing eyes of burglars, terrorists or anyone. Learn how to construct dozens of hiding places right in your house and yard. Here are small hiding places for concealing money and jewelry and large places for securing survival supplies or persons. More than 100 drawings show how to turn ordinary items into extraordinary hiding places.

Advanced Topics in Information Resources Management features the most current research findings in all aspects of information resources management. From successfully implementing technology change to understanding the human factors in IT utilization, this important volume addresses many of the managerial and organizational applications to and implications of information technology in organizations. Volume three will prove to be instrumental in the improvement and development of the theory and practice of information resources management while educating organizations on how they can benefit from and improve their information resources and all the tools utilized to gather, process, disseminate, and manage this valuable resource. *Note: This book is part of a new series entitled "Advanced Topics in "Information Resources Management". This book is Volume Three within this series (Vol. III, 2004).

Spaceships travel through time at lightspeed, piloted by human clones and talking animals. Serious injuries are healed with the wave of a medical gizmo. The media makes it all look easy. Can scientists hope to accomplish such amazing feats in the real world, or are they merely flights of fancy? This book is a fun look at what can, and can't, be achieved with current technology in today's laboratory experiments. Fans of the Jetsons, Star Trek, and Star Wars will learn the facts behind the fiction through entires that describe the scientific inventions and procedures on the screen, and how they differ from the reality. Van Riper shows us who innovators like Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, and Isaac Newton really were before they were mythologized. He discusses how animals such as chimpanzees, dolphins, and elephants are portrayed in books and films, and what we really know about animal intelligence. This book lifts the curtain on science fiction, revealing how and where scientific laws have been discarded for the sake of a good plot.

For years, companies have accepted the underlying principles that define the customer-driven paradigm–that is, using customer "requirements" to guide growth and innovation. But twenty years into this movement, breakthrough innovations are still rare, and most companies find that 50 to 90 percent of their innovation initiatives flop. The cost of these failures to U.S. companies alone is estimated to be well over $100 billion annually. In a book that challenges everything you have learned about being customer driven, internationally acclaimed innovation leader Anthony Ulwick reveals the secret weapon behind some of the most successful companies of recent years. Known as "outcome-driven" innovation, this revolutionary approach to new product and service creation transforms innovation from a nebulous art into a rigorous science from which randomness and uncertainty are eliminated.

Based on more than 200 studies spanning more than seventy companies and twenty-five industries, Ulwick contends that, when it comes to innovation, the traditional methods companies use to communicate with customers are the root cause of chronic waste and missed opportunity. In What Customers Want, Ulwick demonstrates that all popular qualitative research methods yield well-intentioned but unfitting and dreadfully misleading information that serves to derail the innovation process. Rather than accepting customer inputs such as "needs," "benefits," "specifications," and "solutions," Ulwick argues that researchers should silence the literal "voice of the customer" and focus on the "metrics that customers use to measure success when executing the jobs, tasks or activities they are trying to get done." Using these customer desired outcomes as inputs into the innovation process eliminates much of the chaos and variability that typically derails innovation initiatives.

Most people have been conditioned to believe that business communication must be clear, rational, and objective, with no place for emotion or subjective thinking. Yet the most powerful, persuasive communication has a human element…often delivered simply and personally through the telling of stories.

This book shows readers how to use personal stories to get their ideas across and create meaningful connections between themselves and their audience. Moving beyond the usual speech-openers or ice-breakers, the book gives readers a process for finding, developing, and using their own stories, including how to:

* gain people's trust
* use six different kinds of stories
* shift from everyday thinking into story thinking
* help shape group decisions and actions.

Filled with enlightening anecdotes, this practical guide gives readers the tools they need to persuade, inspire, and influence others through the power of story.

Filled with case studies and anecdotes, this book demystifies the most critical aspect of customer service: conversations employees have every day with customers. It outlines a proven system based on the authors' MAGIC customer service training program - MAGIC, stands for Make A Great Impression on the Customer.

Author Description:

Diane Berenbaum, a senior vice president and owner of Communico Ltd., has helped foster and build strong, long-lasting client relationships for the company. Diane has authored numerous articles and has delivered training and coaching services to both senior leadership teams and front-line associates for over twenty-five years.
Tom Larkin, a senior vice president and owner of Communico Ltd., is an authority on customer service initiatives and customer relations training and development. His work in the training and education field spans more than thirty years. He continues to work with senior leadership teams in a variety of industries.

This book integrates a historical and linguistic exploration of world English, documenting the emergence of the language as a contested site of linguistic encounters. It revises the understanding of English spread during the colonial period, emphasizing the agency of non-mother-tongue English speakers. The book contends that English owes its existence as a world language in large part to the struggle against imperialism but not to imperialism alone. To explain English varieties, the book introduces a new linguistic model of second language acquisition by speech communities: macroacquisition.

An excellent successor to Hennessy and Patterson’s Computer Organization and Design, this book presents computer architecture and design as something quantitative that can be studied in the context of real running systems rather than in an abstract format. The concepts are again grounded in real machine architectures and many of the examples are contemporary architectures, such as PowerPC chips and Intel 80×86. Computer Architecture follows the same outline as its predecessor, but covers information in more depth, moving rapidly from introductory discussions to issues just shy of computer design research. The format again includes an excellent mix of exercises and historical background. This book is recommended for people with some experience in digital design–or people who have read and understood the authors’ first text.

Once in a great while, a landmark computer-science book is published. Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, Second Edition, is such a book. In an era of fluff computer books that are, quite properly, remaindered within weeks of publication, this book will stand the test of time, becoming lovingly dog-eared in the hands of anyone who designs computers or has concerns about the performance of computer programs.

Network Calculus is a set of recent developments that provide deep insights into flow problems encountered in the Internet and in intranets. The first part of the book is a self-contained, introductory course on network calculus. It presents the core of network calculus, and shows how it can be applied to the Internet to obtain results that have physical interpretations of practical importance to network engineers. The second part serves as a mathematical reference used across the book. It presents the results from Min-plus algebra needed for network calculus. The third part contains more advanced material. It is appropriate reading for a graduate course and a source of reference for professionals in networking by surveying the state of the art of research and pointing to open problems in network calculus and its application in different fields, such as mulitmedia smoothing, aggegate scheduling, adaptive guarantees in Internet differential services, renegotiated reserved services, etc.

The Microsoft .NET Framework is exactly what its name implies: A general system onto which a lot of application-specific technologies are stuck. Essential ASP.NET With Examples in C# assumes you know something about the .NET way of doing things, and want to know more about how you can use its ASP.NET facet to implement robust and stylish Web applications. Fritz Onion, in a manner typical of this series, introduces key ASP.NET concepts logically, and with lots of code listings that make it clear how the concepts should be translated into reality. The truth be told, Onion excels at combining conceptual information with practical examples. This is unusual among writers of technical books, who tend to be good at (at best) one or the other.

Typically, the author approaches a capability of ASP.NET–validation of submitted form data, say–by presenting a quick summary of the problem and then attacking it (or components of it) with code. The code segments (which tend not to be too long, and so relatively easy to trace and comprehend) are then dissected, and special attention called to details of particular interest to the local problem. It's a great way to learn if you already have a grasp of the basics, as you can either go hands-on with your own system or absorb the author's wisdom through the book alone.