Found 13107 Contact Books Products.
Two months since the stars fell...Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown. Two months of silence, while a world holds its breath.Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet?You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and the fainter one she'll do any good if she is. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist an informational topologist with half his mind gone as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge.You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find.But you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them...
When it comes to marketing, nothing beats good word of mouth. But how do you get your customers talking? This friendly guide shows you step-by-step how to create and implement an effective public relations strategy for pennies on the dollar compared to the cost of advertising. Public Relations Kit For Dummies gives you all the tools you need to spread the word about your product or service, without a PR agency. All it takes is effort and the straightforward guidelines youâll find in this helpful guide.If youâre a small business owner or manager or an entrepreneur, good PR will give you an advantage over your competition. If youâre a corporate manager or executive, you need an effective public relations program to communicate with your target market without increasing ad spending. In Public Relations Kit For Dummies, youâll discover how to:Map a winning PR strategyGrab attention with press releases, interviews, and eventsCultivate good media relationsGet print, TV, radio, and Internet coverageManage crisesThis book is packed with successful ideas, techniques, and campaigns that really worked â and you can customize them to fit your clientele, product, or service. This friendly guide shows you how PR works, how to brainstorm for creative ideas, how to deliver your message to the media, and how to create buzz. And thereâs more:Developing and stick to a budgetBuilding an in-house PR departmentSpecific PR tactics like contests, surveys, and tie-insCompany newslettersWriting query letters and pitch lettersHandling yourself in interviewsTurning bad press into good publicityDeveloping a contact listSpecific strategies for radio, TV, newspapers, and new mediaHandling crisesMeasuring PR resultsThe book also includes a CD-ROM full of helpful PR forms, checklists, and templates; lists of resources like PR firms and media outlets; and software programs that makes PR simple. If you want people to notice your product or service, Public Relations Kit For Dummies is the only resource you need.
The key to police officer survival is doing the right things, the right way, under extreme stress, every time. Tactical Perfection for Street Cops teaches cops the lifesaving value of perfect repetition during any field situation, stop, radio call or encounter. Police training expert Steve Albrecht shares the secrets of veteran cops who have mastered streetwise ways to handle the variety of situations they face every shift: ringing alarms, domestic violence calls, loud parties, pursued felons, and the drugged, the ganged-up, the violent and the mentally ill. Albrecht breaks down the work into four categories:
?The Stops-Performing traffic stops, pedestrian field interviews, street gang contacts and pursuits in the patrol car and on foot.
?The Calls-Handling calls for domestic violence, robbery, burglary, prowler alerts and the latest and most tragic: school and workplace violence.
?Special Arrests-Dealing with hard-core professional crooks, transients, substance abusers and the mentally ill.
?Tools of the Trade-Searching, handcuffing and transporting suspects, and using nonlethal and lethal force.
In police work, not focusing on the little details can be deadly. Learn from the "street and beat" knowledge of some of the most experienced police officers in the country and maximize your safety and success every time you hit the streets.
This is the key text and reference for engineers, researchers and senior students dealing with the analysis and modelling of structures - from large civil engineering projects such as dams, to aircraft structures, through to small engineered components. Covering small and large deformation behaviour of solids and structures, it is an essential book for engineers and mathematicians. The new edition is a complete solids and structures text and reference in its own right and forms part of the world-renowned Finite Element Method series by Zienkiewicz and Taylor. New material in this edition includes separate coverage of solid continua and structural theories of rods, plates and shells; extended coverage of plasticity (isotropic and anisotropic); node-to-surface and 'mortar' method treatments; problems involving solids and rigid and pseudo-rigid bodies; and multi-scale modelling. * Dedicated coverage of solid and structural mechanics by world-renowned authors, Zienkiewicz and Taylor * New material including separate coverage of solid continua and structural theories of rods, plates and shells; extended coverage for small and finite deformation; elastic and inelastic material constitution; contact modelling; problems involving solids, rigid and discrete elements; and multi-scale modelling * Accompanied by online downloadable software
In REVELATIONS, the final volume of a trilogy, Dr. Jacques Vallee presents startling evidence that well-constructed hoaxes and media manipulations have misled UFO researchers, diverting them from the UFO phenomenon itself. Vallee takes readers step by step into the tangled web of UFOlogy's dark side, in an effort to clear the ever-thickening underbrush that has obscured the real nature of the UFO phenomenon.
Amazon Best of the Month, May 2008: On August 17, 1988, Pak One, the airplane carrying Pakistani dictator General Zia and several top generals, crashed, killing all on board --and despite continued investigation, a smoking gun--mechanical or conspiratorial--has yet to be found. Mohammed Hanif's outrageous debut novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, tracks at least two (and as many as a half-dozen) assassination vectors to their convergence in the plane crash, incorporating elements as diverse as venom-tipped sabers, poison gas, the curses of a scorned First Lady, and a crow impaired by an overindulgence of ripe mangoes. The book has been aptly compared to Catch-22 for its hilarious (though not quite as madcap) skewering of the Pakistani military and intelligence infrastructure, but it also can trace its lineage to Don DeLillo, doing for Pakistan what Libra did for JFK conspiracy theory, and Kafka's The Trial, with its paranoid-but-true take on pathological bureaucracy. Recent events pushing Pakistan into the worst kind of headlines make A Case of Exploding Mangoes a timely and entertaining read, and when a mysterious bearded man called "OBL" makes an appearance at a Fourth of July party for U.S. military brass, we're coolly reminded of the fickleness of opportunistic policy in unpredictable lands. --Jon Foro Mohammed Hanif on his experience in the Pakistan Air Force Academy Once upon a time, when I was eighteen, I found myself locked up in Pakistan Air Force Academy's cell along with my friend and partner-in-crime, Khalid Saifullah. We had thought we were doing charity work but the Academy officers obviously didn't share our ideals. We had been caught trying to help another classmate pass his chemistry exam, something he had failed to do twice already and this was his last chance to save himself from being expelled. The logistics of our rescue effort involved a wireless set improvised in the Sunday Hobbies Club, a microphone concealed in a crap bandage around the left elbow of our academically challenged friend, and a Sanyo FM radio receiver. We were running our operation from the roof top of a building next to the examination hall. We were caught red-handed whispering reversible chemical equation into the transistor. We were in breach of every single standard operating procedure in the Academy rule book, and faced certain expulsion. We had just started our glorious careers and now we faced the prospect of being sent home and having to explain to our parents how, instead of training to become gentlemen-officers, we were running an exam-cheating-mafia from the rooftop of the most well-disciplined training institute in the country. For two days, while we waited in that cell to find out about our fate, we planned our future. Khalid, always the world-wise in this outfit, immediately decided that he was going to join the merchant navy and travel the world. I tried hard to think what I would do. I came from a farming family where even the most adventurous members of our clan had only managed to branch out into planting sugarcane instead of potatoes. Education, jobs, careers were absolutely alien concepts. The Academy was supposed to be my escape from a lifetime that revolved around wildly fluctuating potato crop cycles. And here I was, already a prisoner of sorts, facing a journey back to a life I thought I had left behind. "Maybe Ill become a teacher," I said vaguely. The farmers in my village used to show some vague respect to teachers in the primary school I attended. "Or a mechanic." I was a member of the car-maintenance club in the hobbies club after all. It was considered an elite club since there was no car to maintain. It was basically a hobbies club for people who hated hobbies. "You cant even change a bloody tire," Khalid reminded me. We managed to stave off the impending expulsion through a combination of confession and denial: we lied (we were listening to cricket commentary on the transistor radio), we grovelled (we were ashamed, ashamed, ashamed of our unofficer like behaviour) and we pleaded our undying passion for defending the borders of our motherland. They looked at our relatively clean record, our sterling academic achievements and let us off the hook and awarded us a punishment considered just short of expulsion. We were barred from entering the Academys TV room--and from walking. For forty-one days. During the punishment period, we had to stay in uniform from dawn till dusk and when ever we were required to go from point a to b we had to run. Khalid went on to become a fairly good marathon runner (before, years later, dying in an air crash, while trying to pull a spectacular but impossible manoeuvre in Mirage fighter plane). I discovered Academy's library. I had barely noticed that the college had a very well-stocked library. We knew it was there, we occasionally used it as a quiet corner to hatch conspiracies but I had never noticed that the long rambling hall was lined with cupboards full of books. All the cupboards were locked, but you could see pristine untouchable books behind their glass doors. The librarian, an eagle-nosed old civilian, walked around with a large bunch of jangling keys although his wares were not in any danger of being stolen. I was to find out later that he was quite a professional. The library was immaculately catalogued. You could of course go to him, fill out a form and request a book. But I never actually saw anybody fill out a form. I spent some afternoons staring at the books from behind the glass doors as my classmates watched videos in the TV room (including the fellow who had scraped through his chemistry exam and survived but would die years later in our current president's General Pervez Musharrafs moronic military adventure in Kargil on India-Pakistan border). How do you ask for a book when you are eighteen and have been brought up in a household where the only book was the Quran and the only reading material an occasional old newspaper left behind by a visitor from the city? "I want that book," I asked the librarian pointing tentatively towards a cupboard which contained a thick volume of something called The Great Escapes. The librarian, relieved at having found a customer, took out his bunch of keys, removed a key and asked me to go get it myself. I took my time and browsed for a long time before filling out the form and borrowing the book. So grateful was I for getting that book that I brought him a samosa and cup of tea next day. That turned out to be a very good investment as the librarian handed me the bunch of his keys as soon as I entered. I browsed randomly, recklessly, reading first paragraphs and author bios, and made naïve judgments. The Cross of Iron wasnt a religious thriller but a war novel. Crime and Punishment had very little crime in it. Was Rushdie related to the famous pop singer Ahmed Rushdie? Mario Puzo and Mario Vargas Llosa. The strange covers of Borges. Abdullah Hussain, I had heard of. A whole shelf devoted to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Chronicle. Was that little book about the wrecked ship really a true story? I didnt know which one was a thriller and which one was literary. As I Lay Dying--sounds like a nice title so lets read it. So does Valley of the Dolls. It is probably not the right way to read. Discovering books was like a discovering a second adolescence. I discovered new sensations in my body. It was even better. It was guilt-free and I could show off. Not that anyone except my librarian friend was impressed. Outside the library, the world revolved around parade square, hockey fields and series of punishments and rewards that didnt seem very different from each other. The vocabulary used to run the Academy life comprised of about fifty words, half of which were variations on the word 'balls.' Every order began or ended with balls, it was used as verb, adjective, qualifier or just simply a howl. Balls to you. Balls to mother, my balls, I'll cut your balls.... Every order, every threat, every compliment was a variation on the same testicular theme. Now that I look back at, it is quite obvious that this place was drowning in its own testosterone. From outside, life could seem orderly. Uniforms were starched, rifles were oiled and sessions on the parade square hard and long. I yearned for that jangling of the keys in the library corridors. Once I was caught in my Navigation class reading Notes from the Underground hidden under a map that I was supposed to be studying. After our second year in the Academy, there were sudden attempts to turn us into good Muslims. Compulsory prayers. Quran lectures. Islamic Studies classes. In the third year we were caught stealing oranges from a neighbourhood orchard and as a punishment we were sent out to a mosque outside the Academy where Muslim cousins of Jehovah's Witnesses taught us how to knock on random doors and preach Islam. "But they are all Muslims," I had protested. "So are you," came the reply. "And look at yourself." At that time I didnt realise that we were an experiment in Islamisation of the whole society. General Zia was a distant presence. He was our commander-in-chief and the permanent president of Pakistan. He thought he was never going to die. So did we. Years later, sitting in the officers' mess of a Karachi air base, we heard about the plane crash that killed him and several other generals. We were sad about the pilots and the crew of the plane. To drown our sorrows we pooled our meagre savings, ordered a bottle of Black Label whiskey, and instead of hiding in our bachelor quarters as we normally did, we opened the bottle in the officers' mess TV room and discussed our future. I left the air force a month later. --Mohammed Hanif
Martial artists require a unique physical training program, one that ensures that powerful attacking and rapid counterattacking techniques can be used in self-defense performed over the full course of any contest or practice. In Fitness for Full-Contact Fighters, trainer, author, and fighter Christoph Delp presents a fitness training program expertly tailored to the martial arts. The book, amply illustrated with spectacular photographs from renowned photographers, details the basics of martial arts fitness training and offers an in-depth description of its various elements: flexibility, stamina, and power. The exercises are described in detail and presented step-by-step by leading martial artists. The book focuses on planning and monitoring oneâs training and includes complete training programs as well as extensive advice on the proper diet. With this guide, martial artists at all skill levels, from newcomers to those at an advanced level, vastly improve their ability to perform in training and competition.
This third volume of the best-selling "Data Model Resource Book" series revolutionizes the data modeling discipline by answering the question "How can you save significant time while improving the quality of any type of data modeling effort?" In contrast to the first two volumes, this new volume focuses on the fundamental, underlying patterns that affect over 50 percent of most data modeling efforts. These patterns can be used to considerably reduce modeling time and cost, to jump-start data modeling efforts, as standards and guidelines to increase data model consistency and quality, and as an objective source against which an enterprise can evaluate data models.Praise for The Data Model Resource Book, Volume 3"Len and Paul look beneath the superficial issues of data modeling and have produced a work that is a must for every serious designer and manager of an IT project."âBill Inmon, World-renowned expert, speaker, and author on data warehousing and widely recognized as the "father of data warehousing""The Data Model Resource Book, Volume 3: Universal Patterns for Data Modeling is a great source for reusable patterns you can use to save a tremendous amount of time, effort, and cost on any data modeling effort. Len Silverston and Paul Agnewhave provided an indispensable reference of very high-quality patterns for the most foundational types of datamodel structures. This book represents a revolutionary leap in moving the data modeling profession forward."âRon Powell, Cofounder and Editorial Director of the Business Intelligence Network"After we model a Customer, Product, or Order, there is still more about each of these that remains to be captured, such as roles they play, classifications in which they belong, or states in which they change. The Data Model Resource Book, Volume 3: Universal Patterns for Data Modeling clearly illustrates these common structures. Len Silverston and Paul Agnew have created a valuable addition to our field, allowing us to improve the consistency and quality of our models by leveraging the many common structures within this text."âSteve Hoberman, Best-Selling Author of Data Modeling Made Simple"The large national health insurance company I work at has actively used these data patterns and the (Universal Data Models) UDM, ahead of this book, through Len Silverstonâs UDM Jump Start engagement. The patterns have found their way into the core of our Enterprise Information Model, our data warehouse designs, and progressively into key business function databases. We are getting to reuse the patterns across projects and are reaping benefits in understanding, flexibility, and time-to-market. Thanks so much."âDavid Chasteen, Enterprise Information Architect"Reusing proven data modeling design patterns means exactly that. Data models become stable, but remain very flexible to accommodate changes. We have had the fortune of having Len and Paul share the patterns that are described in this book via our engagements with Universal Data Models, LLC. These data modeling design patterns have helped us to focus on the essential business issues because we have leveraged these reusable building blocks for many of the standard design problems. These design patterns have also helped us to evaluate the quality of data models for their intended purpose. Many times there are a lot of enhancements required. Too often the very specialized business-oriented data model is also implemented physically. This may have significant drawbacks to flexibility. Iâm looking forward to increasing the data modeling design pattern competence within Nokia with the help of this book."âTeemu Mattelmaki, Chief Information Architect, Nokia"Once again, Len Silverston, this time together with Paul Agnew, has made a valuable contribution to the body of knowledge about datamodels, and the act of building sound data models. As a professional data modeler, and teacher of data modeling for almost three decades, I have always been aware that I had developed some familiar mental "patterns" which I acquired very early in my data modeling experience. When teaching data modeling, we use relatively simple workshops, but they are carefully designed so the students will see and acquire a lot of these basic "patterns" â templates that they will recognize and can use to interpret different subject matter into data model form quickly and easily. Iâve always used these patterns in the course of facilitating data modeling sessions; I was able to recognize "Ah, this is just like . . . ," and quickly apply a pattern that Iâd seen before. But, in all this time, Iâve never sat down and clearly categorized and documented what each of these âpatternsââ actually was in such a way that they could be easily and clearly communicated to others; Len and Paul have done exactly that. As in the other Data Model Resource Books, the thinking and writing is extraordinarily clear and understandable. I personally would have been very proud to have authored this book, and I sincerely applaud Len and Paul for another great contribution to the art and science of data modeling. It will be of great value to any data modeler."âWilliam G. Smith, President, William G. Smith & Associates, www.williamgsmith.com"Len Silverston and Paul Agnewâs book, Universal Patterns for Data Modeling, is essential reading for anyone undertaking commercial datamodeling. With this latest volume that compiles and insightfully describes fundamental, universal data patterns, The Data Model Resource Book series represents the most important contribution to the data modeling discipline in the last decade."âDr. Graeme Simsion, Author of Data Modeling Essentials and Data Modeling Theory and Practice"Volume 3 of this trilogy is a most welcome addition to Len Silverstonâs two previous books in this area. Guidance has existed for some time for those who desire to use pattern-based analysis to jump-start their data modeling efforts. Guidance exists for those who want to use generalized and industry-specific data constructs to leverage their efforts. What has been missing is guidance to those of us needing guidance to complete the roughly one-third of data models that are not generalized or industry-specific. This is where the magic of individual organizational strategies must manifest itself, and Len and Paul have done so clearly and articulately in a manner that complements the first two volumes of The Data Model Resource Book. By adding this book to Volumes 1 and 2 you will be gaining access to some of the most integrated data modeling guidance available on the planet."âDr. Peter Aiken, Author of XML in Data Management and data management industry leader VCU/Data Blueprint
Do you come away from contact with your parent with unbearable feelings of rage, low self-esteem and depression?Is your parent hypercritical, manipulative, and/or controlling?Do you feel unsafe when you are with your parent because of verbal abuse, negligence, or inappropriate behavior?No matter how much you do for your parent, is it never enough?No one should have to endure an abusive, unhealthy relationship that threatens his or her well-being -- even if that relationship is with a parent. In this ground-breaking book, Beverly Engel draws on her own personal experience, as well as the stories and letters of other adult children, to offer a complete guide to why, when and how to divorce a parent. Engel discusses good and bad reasons for taking this step, when to stop trying to reconcile, and how to prepare yourself emotionally for the actual divorce, including such alternatives as temporary separation. If you do decide that parental divorce; how to handle negative pressure from others; how to come to terms with your own grief and guilt; what to tell your own children, and how to deal with their relationships with their grandparents; how to cope with holidays; how to divorce a parent after his or her death; and what to do if you change your mind and want to reconcile.
Top Search
Last Search
