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Women's Representation in African Politics: Beyond Numbers (African Histories and Modernities)
by Zainab Monisola OlaitanDoes the election of more and more women into political offices mean that women’s interests will be better protected? This question forms the background upon which this book is written as it forms a timely intervention concerning the clamour for increased women’s representation in African politics. The book examines the relationship between gender quotas and gender-focused legislative/policy outcomes in the national Parliaments of South Africa and Botswana. By investigating the utility of gender quotas to ensure the substantive representation of women in African politics, the book engages the assumption that increased women’s political participation will automatically improve the qualitative well-being of African women. The book is intended for both academic and non-academic audiences with differing purposes. It contributes to scholarly debates on the transcending relevance of quotas beyond numbers. For non-academics, it provides opportunities to engage gender quotas as a policy tool to ensure the qualitative well-being of African women.
Nutrition and Traumatic Brain Injury: From Bench to Bedside (Nutritional Neurosciences)
by Wael MohamedThe book provides a comprehensive exploration of the relationship between nutrition and traumatic brain injury (TBI). Divided into two sections, the book covers various aspects of TBI, from its biomechanics and pathophysiological changes to evidence-based clinical guidelines and experimental models. Section I covers the background of TBI, including the definition and biomechanics of TBI, an understanding of pathophysiological changes that occur in the brain, and the importance of evidence-based clinical guidelines for effective TBI management. The section also delves into experimental models of TBI and the role of biomarkers in diagnosing and assessing TBI. Furthermore, it explores early feeding guidelines following TBI, emphasizing the significance of nutrition in the recovery process. Section II focuses on the connection between nutrition and TBI. It examines the concept of resilience and nutri-protection against TBI prior to the injury, highlighting strategies to enhance the brain's ability to withstand trauma. The book then explores the role of various nutrients and dietary components in TBI, such as antioxidants, branched-chain amino acids, choline, creatine, ketogenic diet, magnesium, polyunsaturated fatty acids (EPA and DHA), polyphenols, vitamin D, and zinc. Each topic is explored in depth, considering their impact on TBI outcomes and potential therapeutic applications. Furthermore, this section delves into nutritional interventions for TBI management. It addresses the selection of appropriate nutritional interventions and mechanistic targets for effective treatment. The section also explores the integration of nutrition into clinical practice guidelines for TBI and the emerging field of nutrigenomics, which investigates the interaction between nutrition and the genetic factors involved in TBI. Additionally, the section discusses the role of pharmacognosy in TBI research and provides nutritional recommendations for TBI management, considering the diverse needs of individuals affected by TBI. The book contributes to advancing the understanding and management of TBI by exploring the background, highlighting the importance of nutrition, and offering insights into nutritional interventions with potential implications for both preventive and therapeutic approaches. The book is a great resource for students and brain/neuroscience researchers.
Hydrogen Fuel Cells
by Shengjie PengThis book introduces in detail the different types of hydrogen fuel cells, including alkaline fuel cells, proton exchange membrane fuel cells, solid oxide fuel cells, phosphate fuel cells, molten carbonate fuel cells, direct liquid fuel cells, etc., and discusses their operating principles, performance characteristics and application fields in depth. Readers will be able to comprehensively understand the current status and future development trends of fuel cell technology to provide technical support for hydrogen energy applications. The last two chapters of the book also introduce the automotive application and development of alkaline fuel cells, and the application of hydrogen-powered transportation equipment in the field of national defense. This book is not only suitable as a teaching material or teaching reference book for senior undergraduate and graduate students of relevant majors in colleges and universities, but also suitable for scientific and technological workers engaged in scientific research and technology research and development of new energy materials and devices and related fields.
Extracellular Vesicle: Biology and Translational Application
by Zongjin LiThis book focuses on the applications of extracellular vesicles (EVs) for regenerative medicine. EVs are small, lipid-bound vesicles carrying cargo that can be released by virtually all cell types. Over the past decades, the field of EV research has experienced exponential growth. Once dismissed as mere cellular debris, EVs are now recognized as sophisticated messengers, facilitating the transmission of crucial information between cells and orchestrating a myriad of biological processes. Notably, stem cell-derived EVs hold particular promise in regenerative therapeutic applications. Rich in the functional components of stem cells, these EVs offer an alternative approach to cell therapy for tissue repair and regeneration. The purpose of this book is to provide an overview of EVs on their biology, function, and potential applications. The book starts with exploring the intricate biology of EVs, their cargo, and their unique ability to modulate cellular processes. It discusses the therapeutic potential of EVs in various diseases, as well as the approaches for the bionanotechnological development of artificial EVs for theranostics. Large-scale EV isolation methods and their preclinical applications are also addressed. It will be useful for undergraduate and graduate students in medicine and cell biology, biologist, and others who are interested in such topic.
Adipose Tissue: Endocrine Functions, Health Implications, and Future Perspectives (Contemporary Endocrinology)
by Dimiter AvtanskiThis book provides a comprehensive overview of adipose tissue as an endocrine organ and examines its complex biology and clinical significance. It explores the interaction between adipose tissue and various physiological systems and sheds light on how adipose dysfunction contributes to the pathogenesis of metabolic diseases that affect millions of people worldwide. It aims to clarify how the endocrine functions of adipose tissue maintain health and contribute to various metabolic and cardiovascular diseases. With obesity rates escalating globally, understanding the role of adipose tissue and its clinical implications has become critical. Adipose Tissue: Endocrine Functions, Health Implications, and Future Perspectives covers topics ranging from basic science to its clinical significance. It provides a comprehensive view of the clinical manifestations of adipose tissue dysfunction, such as obesity, diabetes, and metabolic syndrome. The book demonstrates the clinical complications associated with adipose tissue dysfunctions and the importance of early detection and intervention. Cutting-edge advancements in adipose tissue research technology and, more importantly, how these findings can translate into clinical practice are discussed, thus offering novel perspectives for future therapeutic strategies. This timely and relevant book targets medical practitioners, clinical researchers, basic scientists, students, and everyone interested in understanding the complex biology of the human body and how a tissue once seen as mere fat storage is now at the forefront of endocrine research and therapy.
Termofluidodinamica dei deflussi turbolenti: Fondamenti e modellazione
by Michele CiofaloIl testo fornisce i fondamenti teorici della turbolenza e una panoramica completa dei modelli di turbolenza, dai più semplici ai più avanzati, tra cui la simulazione diretta e la simulazione Large Eddy. Si concentra principalmente sui problemi di modellazione e calcolo e fornisce informazioni sulla teoria dei sistemi dinamici e sulle loro biforcazioni. Esamina anche aspetti della turbolenza che non sono trattati nella maggior parte dei libri esistenti su questo argomento, come la turbolenza in convezione libera e mista, la turbolenza transitoria e la transizione alla turbolenza. Il libro adotta la notazione tensoriale, che è la più appropriata per trattare quantità intrinsecamente tensoriali come le sollecitazioni e i tassi di deformazione, e per coloro che non hanno familiarità con essa viene fornita un'appendice sull'algebra tensoriale e sulla notazione tensoriale.
Captive City: Meditations on Slavery in the Urban South
by Jennie Lightweis-GoffExplores the legacies of slavery in Southern cities along the Gulf and Atlantic coastsCities are fraught sites in the national imagination, turned into identity markers when “urban” and “rural” indicate tastes rather than places. Cities bring chaos, draining the lifeblood of the nation like a tick draws blood from its host, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson’s anti-urban polemics, which might have been written during any election year—centuries or months ago. Racism and anti-urbanism were born conjoined during the Revolution. Like their Atlantic coastal counterparts in the US North, Southern cities —similarly polyglot and cosmopolitan—resist the dominant, mutually inclusive prejudices of the nation that fails to contain them on its eroding, flooding coasts.Captive City explores the paths of slavery in coastal cities, arguing that captivity haunts the “hospitality” cultures of Charleston, New Orleans, Savannah, and Baltimore. It is not a history of urban slavery, but a literary reflection that argues for coastal cities as a distinct region that scrambles time, resisting the “post” in postindustrial and the “neo” in neoliberalism. Jennie Lightweis-Goff offers a cultural exploration bound by American literature, especially life-writing by the enslaved, as well as compelling reassessments of works by canonical writers such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Hector St. John de Crevecoeur.Lightweis-Goff reveals how the preserved yet fragile landscapes of these cities are haunted—not simply by the ghost tours that are signature stops for travelers in their historic districts—but by the echoes of slavery in their economies and built environments.
Reconfigurable Obfuscation Techniques for the IC Supply Chain: Using FPGA-Like Schemes for Protection of Intellectual Property (Synthesis Lectures on Digital Circuits & Systems)
by Zain Ul Abideen Samuel PagliariniThis book explores the essential facets of security threats arising from the globalized IC supply chain. Contemporary semiconductor companies navigate a globalized IC supply chain, exposing them to various threats such as Intellectual Property (IP) piracy, reverse engineering, overproduction, and malicious logic insertion. Several obfuscation techniques, including split manufacturing, design camouflaging, and Logic Locking (LL), have been proposed to counter these threats. This book describes a new security method for the silicon industry, the Tunable Design Obfuscation Technique, which uses a reconfigurability feature in the chip to make it harder to understand and protect it from rogue elements.
Financing the Race to Space: How to Value, Invest, and Explore the Universe
by Armen V. PapazianThis book examines the monetary and financial foundations for actively pursuing outer space exploration, development, and settlement. It offers the keys to unlocking the massive investment programs needed to invent, manufacture, deploy, and maintain the new habitats of the future. The book discusses what is currently holding us back and how we can transcend our limitations. It addresses the shortcomings of our financial value framework, financial mathematics, and monetary architecture and introduces the key transformations necessary to unleash our spatial potential. An unprecedented discussion at the intersection of finance and outer space, it is a must-read for policymakers, industry leaders, entrepreneurs, bankers, and investors.
Self and Affect: Philosophical Intersections
by Stefan Lang Maik NiemeckThe self, self-awareness and emotions are central subjects within contemporary philosophy of mind but comparatively little attention has been paid to the relationships between them. This volume brings together philosophers from different specialisms to explore these relationships from three different angles. First, whether a theory of self-awareness can contribute to a theory of emotion, including how different aspects and kinds of self-awareness are related to different emotions. Second, from the opposite direction, whether research into emotions can help achieve a better understanding of self-consciousness. Finally, the book considers how emotions are involved in the nature and development of selves. Self and Affect is essential reading for all scholars and researchers of the philosophy of mind, especially those focussing on emotions and self-awareness.
Database Systems for Advanced Applications: 29th International Conference, DASFAA 2024, Gifu, Japan, July 2–5, 2024, Proceedings, Part III (Lecture Notes in Computer Science #14852)
by Yoshiharu Ishikawa Yongxin Tong Jae-Gil Lee Chuan Xiao Sihem Amer-Yahia Makoto Onizuka H. V. Jagadish Kejing LuThe seven-volume set LNCS 14850-14856 constitutes the proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications, DASFAA 2024, held in Gifu, Japan, in July 2024. The total of 147 full papers, along with 85 short papers, presented together in this seven-volume set was carefully reviewed and selected from 722 submissions. Additionally, 14 industrial papers, 18 demo papers and 6 tutorials are included. The conference presents papers on subjects such as: Part I: Spatial and temporal data; database core technology; federated learning. Part II: Machine learning; text processing. Part III: Recommendation; multi-media. Part IV: Privacy and security; knowledge base and graphs. Part V: Natural language processing; large language model; time series and stream data. Part VI: Graph and network; hardware acceleration. Part VII: Emerging application; industry papers; demo papers.
Building W. B. Yeats's Later Poetry: The Tower Poems
by Tomoko IwatsuboThis book explores Yeats’s later poetry through the metaphor of the poetic tower, where different kinds of ‘building’ – architectural, textual, political and symbolic – were closely interrelated. It chronologically examines Yeats’s tower poems, composed during a period of dramatic personal and national transformation, from 1915 to 1932. Within a year after the Easter Rising in Dublin, Yeats acquired a half-ruined Norman tower in County Galway, Ireland, which had enthralled him for the past two decades, and textually and architecturally constructed it into a focus of his life and work. Interweaving the account of the renovation of the actual building and the textual construction in the socio-historical contexts, the book reveals the evolution of Yeats’s multiplex tower as an organizing principle of his later poetry. Using the archive of correspondence and manuscript materials of relevant poems, including those which have thus far escaped close attention, the book offers close textual-genetic analyses and a diachronic view of Yeats’s tower poetry, which, with its foundations laid decades earlier, he built in the collections from The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) to The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933). Highlighting the delicate exchange between poetry and biography as well as between the textual architecture and the actual one, identifying a turning point in the making of each tower-oriented poem and proposing some draft-dating revisions, this first book-length systematic study on the process of Yeats’s creation of the tower casts an unfamiliar light on a familiar yet underexplored landmark in modern poetry and makes his step-by-step construction work come alive.
Computation of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: First International Conference, ICCAIML 2024, Jaipur, India, January 18–19, 2024, Proceedings, Part II (Communications in Computer and Information Science #2185)
by Milan Tuba Amit Kumar Bairwa Varun Tiwari Santosh Kumar Vishwakarma Thittaporn GanokratanaaThe two-volume set, CCIS 2184-2185, constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Computation of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, ICCAIML 2024, held in Jaipur, India, in January 18–19, 2024. The 60 papers included in these volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from 645 submissions. These papers focus on various subject areas within the field of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, such as Neural Networks and Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, Reinforcement Learning, Data Mining and Big Data Analytics, AI in Healthcare and Biomedical Applications, Autonomous Systems and Robotics, AI Ethics and Fairness, AI in Finance and Eco-nomics.
Alfred Tarski on Scientific Semantics (Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science #62)
by David Hitchcock Magda StroińskaThis book tells the story of the landmark event in modern logic whereby Alfred Tarski became “the man who defined truth”. Alfred Tarski’s classic monograph on truth became known internationally in 1935, when he presented its ideas in German at an international conference and collaborated in preparation of its German translation. This book provides the first English translation of the Polish version of Tarski’s conference paper, which for purposes of comparison is printed side-by-side with a new exact English translation of the German version. It offers for the first time a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the paper, and for the first time a description and analysis of the discussion of the paper immediately after its presentation. It discusses 22 substantive differences between the two versions. The book also extracts from recently discovered correspondence about the German translation of the truth monograph how it was decided to produce such a translation, the process of vetting and changing the translation, changes requested by Tarski, objections to the appeal to intuition in the Polish original (supported by a list of those appeals with their replacements in the German and English translations), other translational issues, discrepancies other than those concerning appeals to intuition between the Polish original and its German translation, the “Keystone cops” saga of Tarski’s off-prints, and monetary matters. It lists from Tarski’s journal his skiing, mountaineering and tourist trips in 1935, and describes his companions on those trips. An electronic supplement translates or summarizes the complete correspondence, with comments, and includes images from Tarski’s journal of his itineraries of his 1935 trips, with the editors' explanatory comments.
Natural Language Understanding in Conversational AI with Deep Learning
by Yan Li Josiah Poon Soyeon Caren Han Henry Weld Jean LeeThis book provides a comprehensive introduction to conversational spoken language understanding and surveys recent advances in conversational AI. It guides the reader through the history, current advancements, and future of natural language understanding (NLU) in human-computer interactions. To this end, the book is structured in seven chapters: Introduction to Natural Language Understanding lays the foundation by tracing the evolution of NLU from early human communication to modern human-computer interactions. Prerequisites and Glossary for Natural Language Understanding then serves as a foundational resource, consolidating essential prerequisites and key terminologies relevant across the book. Single-Turn Natural Language Understanding looks at Single-Turn NLU, focusing on tasks that involve interpreting and processing user inputs in a single interaction, while Multi-Turn Natural Language Understanding moves on systems for extended interactions with users and explores techniques for managing dialogues, using context and integrating external knowledge bases. Next, Evaluating Natural Language Understanding discusses the annotation of datasets and various performance assessment methods, covering different levels of understanding from intent recognition to slot filling and domain classification. Applications and Case Studies in Natural Language Understanding subsequently shows real-world applications of NLU in finance, medicine, and law. Eventually Challenges, Conclusions and Future Directions explores the core obstacles hindering the advancement of NLU, including ambiguity, domain adaptation, data scarcity, and ethical concerns. By understanding these challenges, this chapter highlights the ongoing work needed to advance NLU. This book mainly targets researchers, PhD students, and professionals who are entering this field and look for a state-of-the-art introduction to NLU applied in conversational systems such as chatbots, large language models, or educational systems.
Sound and Sense in Contemporary Theatre: Mad Auralities
by Matthew TomkinsonThis book is among the first to consider the subject of mad auralities in theatre and performance, asking: what does it mean to hear and listen madly? Drawing widely upon mad studies, critical disability studies, theatre studies, sound studies, queer studies, and critical race theory, it seeks to explore the theatrical relationship between sound and mental health differences by examining a range of case studies in which audience members are immersed in auditory simulations of madness. Ultimately, however, this critical study investigates the shortcomings of simulation as a representational practice, in keeping with the critical tradition of disability studies and mad studies.
5G Fixed Wireless Access: Revolutionizing Connectivity in the Digital Age (Synthesis Lectures on Communications)
by Isiaka AlimiThis book explores the transformative potential of 5G technology in delivering high-speed broadband services through wireless means, particularly targeting underserved and rural areas. The book covers several key topics, including high-frequency spectrum bands, advanced transmission schemes, multi-connectivity, adaptive numerology, and Integrated Access and Backhaul (IAB). These elements are critical for enhancing network performance, increasing capacity, and reducing latency. High-frequency spectrum bands, such as those above 24 GHz, are essential for providing the necessary bandwidth to support high data rates and capacity. The book explains how these bands, while offering unprecedented peak rates, present challenges such as limited coverage and penetration, which are addressed through advanced technical solutions. Advanced transmission schemes, including massive beamforming and Multiple-Input Multiple-Output, are explored in detail. These technologies enable the efficient use of the spectrum by allowing multiple user terminals to be served simultaneously on the same frequency resources, thereby increasing the overall network capacity and improving user experiences. Multi-connectivity and adaptive numerology are also key topics. Multi-connectivity allows user equipment to connect to multiple network nodes simultaneously, improving reliability and performance. Adaptive numerology, defined in 3GPP Release 15, supports a flexible range of subcarrier spacing to cater to different services, quality of service requirements, latency needs, and frequency ranges. IAB is another significant topic covered in the book. IAB leverages the same spectrum for both access and backhaul, simplifying deployment and reducing costs. By using the 5G infrastructure to support backhaul, it eliminates the need for extensive fiber installations, making it easier to extend high-speed connectivity to remote and rural areas. These topics are crucial as they collectively address the limitations of traditional wired infrastructure, which is often costly and time-consuming to deploy in rural and hard-to-reach areas. By leveraging 5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA), the book sets out to solve the problem of the digital divide, aiming to make high-speed internet more accessible and affordable. The relevance of these solutions is underscored by the growing global demand for reliable, high-speed internet access. As the book outlines, 5G FWA not only enhances broadband services but also plays a pivotal role in bridging the digital divide, ensuring that more people, regardless of their location, can benefit from the advancements in internet technology. This makes "5G FWA " an essential read for understanding the future of broadband connectivity and the strategic approaches needed to overcome deployment challenges. This book is intended to be a definitive guide for professionals, researchers, policymakers, and anyone interested in understanding the nuances and implications of this transformative technology.
Driving Green Transportation System Through Artificial Intelligence and Automation: Approaches, Technologies and Applications (Lecture Notes in Intelligent Transportation and Infrastructure)
by Alex KhangThis book is designed to help transportation professionals and construction experts to develop and implement successful smart systems, leveraging the current trends, equipment, and advanced technologies to drive the green transportation system development. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a new direction that has opened a revolution in technology and smart applications, and it is also the basis for creating a green environment in the net-zero era. Therefore, machines, devices, self-driving car, and robots controlled by artificial intelligence-based systems are now the model of a smart transportation ecosystem for which all these technologies are referred to as "green" industries. In past years, the idea of making a green environment has been existing and moving on the society 5.0 being as a country strategy, and today, AI technology continues its development on this prototype. Nowadays, AI has begun actions to resemble a person in a real sense, and the idea of human-liked robotics put forward by scientists has started to be realized and will probably complete its development as living machines in the near future. AI has many subsystems and application in various industries, some of which have automation more accurately and are more integrated in modern industries. This book also targets a mixed audience of specialists, analysts, engineers, scholars, researchers, academics, professionals, and students from different communities to share and contribute new ideas, methodologies, technologies, approaches, models, frameworks, theories, and practices to resolve the challenging issues associated with the leveraging of AI and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) in green transportation ecosystem.
Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning: 17th International Conference, LPNMR 2024, Dallas, TX, USA, October 11–14, 2024, Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science #15245)
by Maria Vanina Martinez Gopal Gupta Carmine DodaroThis book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning, LPNMR 2024, held in Dallas, TX, USA, during October 11-14, 2024. The 27 full papers and 3 short papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 48 submissions. They deal with declarative logic programming, non-monotonic reasoning, and knowledge representation, focusing on the design and implementation of logic-based programming languages and database systems.
Handbook of Insurance: Volume I
by Georges DionneThe Handbook of Insurance reviews the last fifty years of research developments in insurance economics and its related fields. A single reference source for professors, researchers, graduate students, regulators, consultants, and practitioners, the book starts with the history and foundations of risk and insurance theory, followed by a review of prevention and precaution, asymmetric information, insurance fraud, risk management, insurance pricing, new financial innovations, reinsurance, corporate governance, capital allocation, securitization, systemic risk, insurance regulation, the industrial organization of insurance markets, and other insurance market applications. The new edition covers many topics that have risen in importance since the 2nd edition, such as climate risk, pandemic risk, insurtech, digital insurance, cyber risk, behavioral economics, Solvency II, corporate governance, enterprise risk management, and machine learning. This edition of the Handbook contains 17 new chapters. Each of the chapters is written by leading international authorities in risk and insurance research. All contributions are peer reviewed, and each chapter can be read independently of the others. It is a tour de force to provide to the insurance industry and its stakeholders a structured, complete, intelligent and critical synthesis of insurance economics in the twenty-first century. This is what you have in your hands. This third edition of the Handbook of Insurance should be the bible to anyone who wants to have a deep understanding of the complex challenges faced by insurance and reinsurance markets to create the large social value of risk sharing and risk diversification. Christian Gollier, Director of the Toulouse School of Economics This collective work not only offers a remarkable synthesis of cutting-edge research in insurance economics but also provides a rare resource, both comprehensive and authoritative, for professionals seeking a deeper understanding of insurance industry fundamentals and emerging trends. The content of the Handbook reflects the richness and dynamics of the field and underlines the many facets involved in better understanding how insurance works and contributes to society. Kai-Uwe Schanz, Deputy Managing Director, Head of Research & Foresight, The Geneva Association
Marshmallows for Breakfast
by Dorothy KoomsonKendra Tamale has found two reasons to face up to her pastWhen Kendra Tamale returns to England from Australia she rents a room from Kyle, a separated father of two, and begins a new job. She's looking forward to a fresh start and a simple life.Kyle's six-year-old twins, Summer and Jaxon, have other ideas and quickly adopt Kendra as their new mother - mainly because she lets them eat marshmallows for breakfast. Kendra eventually becomes a part of their lives, even though she's hiding a painful secret that makes her keep everyone -especially children - at arm's length.Then Kendra bumps into the man who shares her awful secret, and everything falls apart: she can't sleep, she can't eat, she's suspended from work, and the kids are taken away by their mother. The only way to fix things is to confess to the terrible mistake she made all those years ago. But that's something she swore she would never do... Marshmallows for Breakfast is a tale of redemption, hope and finding love in unexpected places.(P) 2019 Headline Publishing Limited
The Happy Prince and Other Stories (Puffin Classics)
by Oscar WildePuffin Classics: the definitive collection of timeless stories, for every child Rediscover the Puffin Classics collection and bring the best-loved classics to a new generation - including this charming edition of The Happy Prince and Other Stories.A haunting, magical fairy-tale collection, in which Oscar Wilde beautifully evokes (among others) The Happy Prince who was not so happy after all, The Selfish Giant who learned to love little children and The Star Child who did not love his parents as much as he should. Each of the stories shines with poetry and magic and will be enjoyed by children of every age.
My Best Friend's Girl
by Dorothy KoomsonKamryn Matika has no responsibilities - one birthday card will change that forever...Best friends Kamryn Matika and Adele Brannon though nothing could come between them - until Adele di the unthinkable and slept with Kamryn's fiancé Nate. Worse still, she got pregnant and had his child. When Kamryn discovered the truth about their betrayal she vowed never to see any of them again. Years later, Kamryn receives a letter from Adele asking her to visit her in hospital. Adele is dying and begs Kamryn to adopt her daughter Tegan. With a great job and hectic social life, the last thing Kamryn needs is a five-year-old daughter to disrupt things. Especially not one who reminds her of Nate. But with n on else to take care of Tegan and Adele fading fast, does she have any other choice? So begins a difficult journey that leads Kamryn towards forgiveness, love, responsibility and, ultimately, a better understanding of herself.(P) 2006 Hachette Audio
Governing PG&E
by Lynn Sharp Paine Will HurwitzThe five commissioners of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) listened intently at a public forum in April 2019 as PG&E Corporation's out-going chairman Richard Kelly described the company's proposed new board. PG&E, which provided electricity and natural gas to millions of Californians, had once been recognized for its vision in foreseeing energy's potential to reshape the state and power its economy. But PG&E was now in the crosshairs of investors, regulators, and the public for something else entirely: its role in a series of deadly and destructive wildfires that had ravaged the region and precipitated PG&E's bankruptcy months earlier. Called "the first climate-change bankruptcy," it was the largest utility bankruptcy in U.S. history. The commissioners at the CPUC, PG&E's primary regulator, were particularly concerned about PG&E's governance and had convened the forum to solicit opinions from experts and the public and to hear for themselves what steps the company was taking to improve it. The Commissioners are considering whether to make specific recommendations regarding the board's composition and functioning, including how the board assesses and compensates PG&E's CEO. A principal issue is the use of non-financial metrics to evaluate and reward CEO performance.