Books about Pioneering from Amazon.com

From the bestselling author of Waking the Tiger comes an indispensable guide to healing trauma¿now available in paperback .
Price: $8.52 [Notify me when price goes down.]

During his fourteen years as Yale's chief investment officer, David F. Swensen has transformed the management of the university's portfolio Largely by focusing on nonconventional strategies, including a heavy allocation to private equity, Swensen has achieved an annualized return of 16.2 percent, which has propelled Yale's endowment into the top tier of institutional funds. Now, this acknowledged leader of fund managers draws on his experience and deep knowledge of the financial markets to provide a compendium of powerful investment strategies.

Swensen presents an overview of the investment world populated by institutional fund managers, pension fund fiduciaries, investment managers, and trustees of universities, museums, hospitals, and foundations. He offers penetrating insights from his experience managing Yale's endowment, ranging from broad issues of goals and investment philosophy to the strategic and tactical aspects of portfolio management. Swensen's exceptionally readable book addresses critical concepts such as handling risk, selecting investment advisers, and negotiating the opportunities and pitfalls in individual asset classes. Fundamental investment ideas are illustrated by real-world concrete examples, and each chapter contains strategies that any manager can put into action.

At a time when it is becoming increasingly difficult to cope with the relentless challenges provided by today's financial markets, Swensen's book is an indispensable roadmap for creating a successful investment program for every institutional fund manager. Any student of markets will benefit from Pioneering Portfolio Management..
Price: $10.14 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In the years since the now-classic Pioneering Portfolio Management was first published, the global investment landscape has changed dramatically -- but the results of David Swensen's investment strategy for the Yale University endowment have remained as impressive as ever. Year after year, Yale's portfolio has trumped the marketplace by a wide margin, and, with over $20 billion added to the endowment under his twenty-three-year tenure, Swensen has contributed more to Yale's finances than anyone ever has to any university in the country. What may have seemed like one among many success stories in the era before the Internet bubble burst emerges now as a completely unprecedented institutional investment achievement.

In this fully revised and updated edition, Swensen, author of the bestselling personal finance guide Unconventional Success, describes the investment process that underpins Yale's endowment. He provides lucid and penetrating insight into the world of institutional funds management, illuminating topics ranging from asset-allocation structures to active fund management. Swensen employs an array of vivid real-world examples, many drawn from his own formidable experience, to address critical concepts such as handling risk, selecting advisors, and weathering market pitfalls.

Swensen offers clear and incisive advice, especially when describing a counterintuitive path. Conventional investing too often leads to buying high and selling low. Trust is more important than flash-in-the-pan success. Expertise, fortitude, and the long view produce positive results where gimmicks and trend following do not.

The original Pioneering Portfolio Management outlined a commonsense template for structuring a well-diversified equity-oriented portfolio. This new edition provides fund managers and students of the market an up-to-date guide for actively managed investment portfolios..
Price: $23.10 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The Devil's Food Dictionary is a full-blown culinary dictionary parody. Uniquely loony, edgy, and funny, it boasts nearly 1,100 entries, 250 footnotes, an extensive phony bibliography, and 26 illustrations This is the most creative food writing being done anywhere, either in print or online..
Price: $9.56 [Notify me when price goes down.]

High dynamic range (HDR) imaging uses multiple exposures of the same scene to create a single image with a huge range of values between the light and dark areas of a photograph It is an extremely popular and ever-growing niche of photography; a search for "HDR" at Flickr results in over 700,000 uploaded images. In this book by noted photographer and popular digital imaging expert Ben Willmore, you'll learn the best practices for the entire process: from image capture through tone mapping and output. You'll learn how to create stunning HDR images...and you'll go beyond those "basic" techniques to learn exactly how Ben creates his own trademark HDR images, which have a slightly surreal and painterly quality to them. Equally instructive and beautiful, HDR and Beyond will teach and inspire you to create stunning HDR images!.
Price: $34.64 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Web standards are the standard technology specifications enforced by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to make sure that web designers and browser manufacturers are using the same technology syntax. It is important that these implementations are the same throughout the Web, otherwise it becomes a messy proprietary place, and lacks consistency. These standards also allow content to be more compatible with multiple different viewing devices, such as screen readers for people with vision impairments, cell phones, PDFs, etc. HTML, XML, and CSS are all such technologies. This book is your essential guide to understanding the advantages you can bring to your web pages by implementing web standards and precisely how to apply them. Web standards such as XHTML and CSS are now fairly well-known technologies, and they will likely be familiar to you, the web designer—indeed, they are all around you on the Web. However, within web standards still lies a challenge—while the browser's support for web standards is steadily increasing, many web developers and designers have yet to discover the real benefits of web standards and respect the need to adhere to them. The real art is in truly understanding the benefits and implementing the standards efficiently. As a simple example of its power, you can use CSS to lay out your pages instead of nesting tables—this can make file sizes smaller, allowing pages to load faster, ultimately increasing accessibility for all browsers, devices, and web users.

* Use XHTML elements correctly so that your markup is compact and more easily understood.

* Use CSS to style different elements of a web page.

* Lay out pages easily and effectively.

* Compare multiple methods of achieving the same results to make better design choices.

* Learn about advanced web design techniques and their important caveats..
Price: $19.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

An amazing journey into the beliefs of the Findhorn Community. "A beautiful book, including about 100 wondrous photographs."--Library Journal.
Price: $17.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The six women portrayed in this book--Maria Merian (b.1647), Anna Comstock (b.1854), Frances Hamerstrom (b.1907), Rachel Carson (b.1907), Miriam Rothschild (b.1908) and Jane Goodall (b.1934--all grew up to become award-winning scientists, writers and artists, as comfortable with a pen as with a magnifying glass. Often they were discouraged from getting dirty, much less pursuing careers in science. But they all became renowned scientists, frequently the only women in their fields. They overcame opposition and found ways to pass on their vision of how all lives in nature are beautifully connected. Their stories remind us to look and to look harder and then to look again. Under rotten logs or in puddles, there are amazing things to see. .
Price: $3.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The thrilling story of the brilliant and audacious pioneers who revolutionized cardiovascular medicine

The history of heart surgery is a fascinating saga. In the dark ages of medicine, physicians commonly prescribed blood letting as a treatment for ridding the vascular system of diabolical elements and bizarre medicaments like brain extracts, and until quite recently, the basic treatment for a heart attack was to lie down and bear it. Within the last century, physicians have evolved from fearing to even touch a living human heart to rebuilding and even transplanting hearts with beguiling, if sometimes dangerous wizardry. Not long ago, cardiac surgery was celebrated as akin to miracle working, yet a new therapeutic age has since taken hold. Today heart attacks can often be stopped in their midst, and astonishing non-invasive surgical techniques regularly eliminate any need for a knife, while clearing vital arteries in just minutes.

Journey Into the Heart traces this epic quest involving a cast of thousands who struggled to solve medical complexities that long boggled the most brilliant minds on earth. David Monagan tells their story as never before, for the first time paying tribute to the daring tactics and outsized personalities of scarcely appreciated pioneers from Oregon to East Germany. The risks some took were hard to fathom: when a promising therapy seemed far too dangerous to perform on a patient, charismatic doctors experimented on themselves. Meanwhile, a multi-billion dollar business involving angioplasty and countless related knifeless procedures charged into life, often overshadowing the noble quest for innovation with a race for profit. The great figures behind these advances have been little chronicled, but their lives encompassed all the triumph and anguish of the last century.

Andreas Gruentzig, an East German "child of the rubble," took center stage in revolutionizing cardiovascular care, developing the first tiny balloon-tipped probes in his Zurich apartment. Despite harsh skepticism, Gruentzig demonstrated that his gadgets could transform the lives of millions. His findings catapulted him to worldwide fame, and he was nominated for the Nobel Prize. After being lured to Emory University, Gruentzig’s career escalated to dizzying heights, and then concluded tragically with an Icarus- like ending. Journey Into the Heart is a compelling biography and a multi-faceted tale of medical discovery and business intrigue, all centered on the seat of human life. The twentieth century journey to understand the human heart was a saga on par with the race to the moon..
Price: $7.91 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In America's long march toward racial equality, small acts of courage by men and women whose names we don't recall have contributed mightily to our nation's struggle to achieve its own ideals. This moving book details the story of one such little-noted chapter.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, as Jackie Robinson changed the face of baseball, a group of African-American businessmen -- twelve at its peak -- changed the face of American business by being among the first black Americans to work at professional jobs in Corporate America and to target black consumers as a distinct market.

The corporation was Pepsi-Cola, led by the charismatic and socially progressive Walter Mack, a visionary business leader. Though Mack was a guarded idealist, his consent for a campaign aimed at black consumers was primarily motivated by the pursuit of profits -- and the campaign succeeded, boosting Pepsi's earnings and market share. But America succeeded as well, as longstanding stereotypes were chipped away and African- Americans were recognized as both talented employees and valued customers. It was a significant step in our becoming a more inclusive society.

On one level, The Real Pepsi Challenge, whose author is an editor and writer for The Wall Street Journal, is a straightforward business book about the birth of niche marketing. But, as we quickly learn, it is a truly inspirational story, recalling a time when we as a nation first learned to see the strength of our diversity. It is far more than a history of marketing in America; it is a key chapter in the social history of our nation.

Until these men came along, typical advertisements depicted African-Americans as one-dimensional characters: Aunt Jemimas and Uncle Bens. But thereafter, Pepsi-Cola took a different approach, portraying American blacks for what they were increasingly becoming -- accomplished middle-class citizens. While such portrayals seem commonplace to us today, they were revolutionary in their time, and the men who brought them into existence risked day-to-day professional indignities parallel to those that Jackie Robinson suffered for breaking baseball's color line. As they crossed the country in the course of their jobs, they faced the cruelty of American racial attitudes. Jim Crow laws often limited where they could eat and sleep while on the road, and they faced resistance even within their own company. Yet these men succeeded as businessmen, and all went on to success in other professions as well, including medicine, journalism, education, and international diplomacy.

Happily, six of these pioneers lived to tell their stories to the author. Their voices, full of pride, good humor, and sharp recollection, enrich these pages and give voice to the continuing American saga..
Price: $1.73 [Notify me when price goes down.]