A business parable about how to create a start-up that won't trap you when you want to sell it. According to John Warrillow, the number one mistake... entrepreneurs make is to build a business that relies too heavily on them. Thus, when the time comes to sell, buyers aren't confident that the company-even if it's profitable-can stand on its own. To illustrate this, Warrillow introduces us to a fictional small business owner named Alex who is struggling to sell his advertising agency. Alex turns to Ted, an entrepreneur and old family friend, who encourages Alex to pursue three criteria to make his business sellable: * Teachable: focus on products and services that you can teach employees to deliver. * Valuable: avoid price wars by specializing in doing one thing better than anyone else. * Repeatable: generate recurring revenue by engineering products that customers have to repurchase often.

The sculpted speed of Marion Jones. The grit and agility of Mia Hamm. The slam-dunk style of Lisa Leslie. The skill and finesse of these sports figures... are widely admired, no longer causing the puzzlement and discomfort directed toward earlier generations of athletic women. Built to Win explores this relatively recent phenomenon-the confident, empowered female athletes found everywhere in American popular culture. Leslie Heywood and Shari L. Dworkin examine the role of female athletes through interviews with elementary- and high school-age girls and boys; careful readings of ad campaigns by Nike, Reebok, and others; discussions of movies like Fight Club and Girlfight; and explorations of their own sports experiences. They ask: what, if any, dissonance is there between popular images and the actual experiences of these athletes? Do these images really "redefine femininity" and contribute to a greater inclusion of all women in sport? Are sexualized images of these women damaging their quest to be taken seriously? Do they inspire young boys to respect and admire female athletes, and will this ultimately make a difference in the ways gender and power are constructed and perceived? Proposing a paradigm shift from second- to third-wave feminism, Heywood and Dworkin argue that, in the years since the passage of Title IX, gender stereotypes have been destabilized in profound ways, and they assert that female athletes and their imagery are doing important cultural work to that end. Important, refreshing, and engrossing, Built to Win examines sport in all its complexity. Leslie Heywood is professor of English at Binghamton University. She is the author of Pretty Good for a Girl: An Athlete's Story (Minnesota, 2000), Bodymakers (1998), and coeditor of Third Wave Agenda (Minnesota, 1997). A former track and cross-country runner who is currently a competitive powerlifter, Heywood is a vice president of the Women's Sports Foundation. Shari L. Dworkin is a sociologist and works as a research fellow at the HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies at Columbia University.

Una raccolta di storie tragiche che indagano sui “luoghi oscuri” della coscienza, sui dolori di vite sbagliate, su amare solitudini.La commissaria... Adele Sòfia è una donna ricca di umanità e intuito pur nell’apparente durezza. È lei a indagare su delitti irrisolti ed è grazie al suo desiderio di giustizia che molti di essi trovano una soluzione.Pagine toccanti che raccontano, interpretati da Dacia Maraini, fatti realmente accaduti, storie di “ordinaria follia” in cui le vittime sono i più deboli: donne e bambini.

Here is a practical and mathematically rigorous introduction to the field of asymptotic statistics. In addition to most of the standard topics of an... asymptotics course--likelihood inference, M-estimation, the theory of asymptotic efficiency, U-statistics, and rank procedures--the book also presents recent research topics such as semiparametric models, the bootstrap, and empirical processes and their applications. The topics are organized from the central idea of approximation by limit experiments, one of the book's unifying themes that mainly entails the local approximation of the classical i.i.d. set up with smooth parameters by location experiments involving a single, normally distributed observation.

This biography traces Bukharin's rise to and fall from power, focusing particularly on the development of his theories and programmatic ideas during the... critical period between Lenin's death in 1924 and the ascendancy of Stalin in 1929.

Vivid, classic retellings of the myths of Greece and Rome, along with stories of the Norse gods and heroes. Zeus and Hera, Apollo, Jason and the golden... fleece, the wanderings of Ulysses and Aeneas, the deeds of Thor, many more seminal stories underlying Western culture.

For almost a century and a half, Bulfinch's Mythology has been the text by which the great tales of the gods and goddesses, Greek and Roman antiquity;... Scandinavian, Celtic, and Oriental fables and myths; and the age of chivalry have been known.         The stories are divided into three sections: The Age of Fable or Stories of Gods and Heroes (first published in 1855); The Age of Chivalry (1858), which contains King Arthur and His Knights, The Mabinogeon, and The Knights of English History; and Legends of Charlemagne or Romance of the Middle Ages (1863). For the Greek myths, Bulfinch drew on Ovid and Virgil, and for the sagas of the north, from Mallet's Northern Antiquities. He provides lively versions of the myths of Zeus and Hera, Venus and Adonis, Daphne and Apollo, and their cohorts on Mount Olympus; the love story of Pygmalion and Galatea; the legends of the Trojan War and the epic wanderings of Ulysses and Aeneas; the joys of Valhalla and the furies of Thor; and the tales of Beowulf and Robin Hood. The tales are eminently readable. As Bulfinch wrote, "Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated. . . . Our book is an attempt to solve this problem, by telling the stories of mythology in such a manner as to make them a source of amusement."Thomas Bulfinch, in his day job, was a clerk in the Merchant's Bank of Boston, an undemanding position that afforded him ample leisure time in which to pursue his other interests. In addition to serving as secretary of the Boston Society of Natural History, he thoroughly researched the myths and legends and copiously cross-referenced them with literature and art. As such, the myths are an indispensable guide to the cultural values of the nineteenth century; however, it is the vigor of the stories themselves that returns generation after generation to Bulfinch.

Reissued to tie in with a new production of Flight adapted by Ron Hutchinson and performed at the Olivier, Royal National TheatreMikhail Bulgakov was... one of the Soviet Union's finest playwrights, whose work was often at odds with the Soviet State. This volume brings together his major dramatic achievements, including The White Guard, Madame Zoyka, Flight, Molière, Adam and Eve and The Last Days.Bulgakov is a much-studied author by schools, colleges and universities.

Welcome to Bullet Park, a township in which even the most buttoned-down gentry sometimes manage to terrify themselves simply by looking in the mirror.... In these exemplary environs John Cheever traces the fateful intersection of two men: Eliot Nailles, a nice fellow who loves his wife and son to blissful distraction, and Paul Hammer, a bastard named after a common household tool, who, after half a lifetime of drifting, settles down in Bullet Park with one objective—to murder Nailles's son. Here is the lyrical and mordantly funny hymn to the American suburb—and to all the dubious normalcy it represents—delivered with unparalleled artistry and assurance.

Step-by-step guide reveals best practices for enhancing Web sites with Ajax A step-by-step guide to enhancing Web sites with Ajax. Uses progressive... enhancement techniques to ensure graceful degradation (which makes sites usable in all browsers). Shows readers how to write their own Ajax scripts instead of relying on third-party libraries. Web site designers love the idea of Ajax--of creating Web pages in which information can be updated without refreshing the entire page. But for those who aren't hard-core programmers, enhancing pages using Ajax can be a challenge. Even more of a challenge is making sure those pages work for all users. In Bulletproof Ajax, author Jeremy Keith demonstrates how developers comfortable with CSS and (X)HTML can build Ajax functionality without frameworks, using the ideas of graceful degradation and progressive enhancement to ensure that the pages work for all users. Throughout this step-by-step guide, his emphasis is on best practices with an approach to building Ajax pages called Hijax, which improves flexibility and avoids worst-case scenarios.

Fabrics that are not only stain resistant but actually clean themselves. Airplane wings that change shape in midair to take advantage of shifts in wind... currents. Hypodermic needles that use tiny serrations to render injections virtually pain free.Though they may sound like the stuff of science fiction, in fact such inventions represent only the most recent iterations of natural mechanisms that are billions of years old—the focus of the rapidly growing field of biomimetics. Based on the realization that natural selection has for countless eons been conducting trial-and-error experiments with the laws of physics, chemistry, material science, and engineering, biomimetics takes nature as its laboratory, looking to the most successful developments and strategies of an array of plants and animals as a source of technological innovation and ideas. Thus the lotus flower, with its waxy, water-resistant surface, gives us stainproofing; the feathers of raptors become transformable airplane wings; and the nerve-deadening serrations on a mosquito’s proboscis are adapted to hypodermics.With Bulletproof Feathers, Robert Allen brings together some of the greatest minds in the field of biomimetics to provide a fascinating—at times even jaw-dropping—overview of cutting-edge research in the field. In chapters packed with illustrations, Steven Vogel explains how architects and building engineers are drawing lessons from prairie dogs, termites, and even sand dollars in order to heat and cool buildings more efficiently; Julian Vincent goes to the very building blocks of nature, revealing how different structures and arrangements of molecules have inspired the development of some fascinating new materials, such as waterproof clothing based on shark skin; Tomonari Akamatsu shows how sonar technology has been greatly improved through detailed research into dolphin communication; Yoseph Bar-Cohen delves into the ways that robotics engineers have learned to solve design problems through reference to human musculature; Jeannette Yen explores how marine creatures have inspired a new generation of underwater robots; and Robert Allen shows us how cooperative behavior between birds, fish, and insects has inspired technological innovations in fields ranging from Web hosting to underwater exploration.A readable, yet authoritative introduction to a field that is at the forefront of design and technology—and poised to become even more important in the coming decades as population pressures and climate change make the need for efficient technological solutions more acute—Bulletproof Feathers offers adventurous readers a tantalizing peek into the future, by way of our evolutionary past.

A hero without adversity is just a person, and stories without bad guys simply don't exist. From unlikable protagonists and dark heroes to bullies and... mischief makers to villains and arch nemeses, Bullies, Bastards & Bitches shows you how to create nuanced, three-dimensional bad guys who are indispensable to the stories in which they appear. Through detailed instruction and examples from contemporary bestsellers and classic page-turners, this book delineates the moral continuum of protagonists and antagonists; explores the connections between opposition, adversity, and evil; and illuminates a bad guy's many purposes in a successful story. Morrell also explores the rise in popularity of anti-heroes, how anti-heroes possess some of the same qualities of villains but with the soul of a hero, and how these complicated characters reflect contemporary society.

A Civil War drama told in sixteen voices, this ‘is a heartbreaking and remarkably vivid portrait of a war that remains our nation’s bloodiest... conflict.… Fleischman’s artistry is nothing short of astounding.’ —Publishers Weekly. ‘Fleischman has done what he does best—create a unique piece of fiction with echoes of his poetry throughout.’ —H. ‘Outstanding… unforgettable as historical fiction… an important book for every library.’ —SLJ. Notable Children's Books of 1994 (ALA)1994 Best Books for Young Adults (ALA)1994 Fanfare Honor List (The Horn Book)Best Books of 1993 (SLJ)1993 Books for Youth Editors' Choices (BL)1994 Teachers' Choices (IRA)Notable 1994 Childrens' Trade Books in Social Studies (NCSS/CBC)1994 Notable Trade Books in the Language Arts (NCTE)1994 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction for Children1993 Choices: The Year's Best Books (Publishers Weekly)Children's Books of 1993 (Library of Congress)1994 Books for the Teen Age (NY Public Library)100 Books for Reading and Sharing 1994 (NY Public Library)1994 Silver Medal for Literature (Commonwealth Club of California)1994 Anne Izard Storytellers' Choice Award Winner (Westchester, NY Library System)