The answer to remaining competitive and keeping steady growth for your business is not ground-breaking, business-altering innovations, but by simply making one tweak at a time. You are in the business of staying competitive--seeing solid profits, building a strong brand, and keeping steady customers who return again and again. But the market is constantly changing, and competition is fierce. How do you not only keep from losing ground but manage to remain a step ahead? Is a complete overhaul and rebranding every few years necessary to make sure your footprint is still making its mark, reminding consumers of your presence? In The One-Percent Edge, you will learn how to: put energy into profitable areas and trim dead weight, raise prices by selling value instead of things, access new markets by adapting products or services, turn customers into brand ambassadors, and many other subtle yet highly effective strategies for affecting profitable changes to your business. By making incremental adjustments to every aspect of the business--marketing, customer service, finances, products, people--then repeating the process, you will find yourself constantly fixing weaknesses and spotting opportunities for growth. Pull ahead of the pack by constantly evolving, one tweak at a time.

Absolutely must reading for all serious gamblers. Most people who gamble are basically attracted by the action and the excitement that this form of entertainment offers. But a small number of people are quite successful at it. How is this so? What helps these few to make decisions that devastate their opponents? And what do you need to do to become successful at this extremely challenging occupation? This text attempts to answer these questions. You will be introduced to the dynamic concept of non-self-weighting strategies and shown how these strategies apply not only at the "very exciting gaming tables" but in real life as well. In addition, risk and fluctuations are discussed in terms of the standard deviation and their relationship to each other and to your bankroll. Some of the other topics addressed are bankroll requirements, win-rate accuracy, free bets, which blackjack count is best, lottery fallacies, dangerous ideas, poker tournament strategies (including when it is correct to rebuy), settling up in tournaments, pai gow poker, super pan nine, the world's greatest gamblers, and building pyramids.

Zeke walks in to Clark's coffeeshop on opening day. Isn't Zeke... wasn't Zeke... Zippy the Calculator Boy, from back in elementary school? Except he has muscles now. And he's looking Clark up and down like he never did back in elementary school. Clark is straight, but he has to admit: Zeke is gorgeous. And intimidatingly smart, just like he was back in school. Plus those muscles. It's a little too much. Clark wouldn't mind reconnecting with his old buddy Zeke. For friend stuff. They can drive their Ferraris around. Jump off of casino boats. Stuff like that. So why does Clark want to kiss him? Clark is straight. Or so he says. And Zeke doesn't need love. Or so he thinks. Crema is a straight-to-gay romantic comedy with a wacky aunt, unadvised jumps off a casino boat, and a jock and a nerd finding their HEA.

Often described as an emergency, homelessness in America is becoming a chronic condition that reflects an overall decline in the nation's standard of living and the general state of the economy. This is the disturbing conclusion drawn by Martha Burt in Over the Edge, a timely book that takes a clear-eyed look at the astonishing surge in the homeless population during the 1980s. Assembling and analyzing data from 147 U.S. cities, Burt documents the increase in homelessness and proposes a comprehensive explanation of its causes, incorporating economic, personal, and policy determinants. Her unique research answers many provocative questions: Why did homelessness continue to spiral even after economic conditions improved in 1983? Why is it significantly greater in cities with both high poverty rates and high per capita income? What can be done about the problem? Burt points to the significant catalysts of homelessness—the decline of manufacturing jobs in the inner city, the increased cost of living, the tight rental housing market, diminished household income, and reductions in public benefit programs—all of which exert pressures on the more vulnerable of the extremely poor. She looks at the special problems facing the homeless, including the growing number of mentally ill and chemically dependent individuals, and explains why certain groups—minorities and low-skilled men, single men and women, and families headed by women—are at greatest risk of becoming homeless. Burt's analysis reveals that homelessness arises from no single factor, but is instead perpetuated by pivotal interactions between external social and economic conditions and personal vulnerabilities. From an understanding of these interactions, Over the Edge builds lucid, realistic recommendations for policymakers struggling to alleviate a situation of grave consequence for our entire society.

Intense partisanship is a familiar part of the contemporary United States, but its consequences do not stop at the country’s borders. The damage now extends to U.S. relations with the rest of the world. Too often, political leaders place their own party’s interest in gaining and keeping power ahead of the national interest. Paul R. Pillar examines how and why partisanship has undermined U.S. foreign policy, especially over the past three decades. Placing present-day discord in historical perspective going back to the beginning of the republic, Beyond the Water’s Edge shows that although the corrupting effects of partisan divisions are not new, past leaders were often able to overcome them. Recent social and political trends and developments including the end of the Cold War, however, have contributed to a surge of corrosive partisanship. Pillar demonstrates that its costs range from the prolongation of war and crisis to the intrusion of foreign influence and the undermining of democracy. He explores the ways other governments respond to inconsistency in U.S. foreign policy, the consequences of domestic division for U.S. global leadership, and how the corruption of American democracy also weakens democracy worldwide. Pillar considers possible remedies but draws the sobering conclusion that entrenched political sectarianism makes their adoption unlikely. Offering insightful analysis of the decline of U.S. foreign relations, Beyond the Water’s Edge is an important book for all readers concerned about the state of the American political system.

In his most challenging work to date, journalist and author Tom Coffman offers readers a new and much-needed political narrative of twentieth-century Hawaii. The Island Edge of America reinterprets the major events leading up to and following statehood in 1959: U.S. annexation of the Hawaiian kingdom, the wartime crisis of the Japanese-American community, postwar labor organization, the Cold War, the development of Hawaii's legendary Democratic Party, the rise of native Hawaiian nationalism. His account weaves together the threads of multicultural and transnational forces that have shaped the Islands for more than a century, looking beyond the Hawaii carefully packaged for the tourist to the Hawaii of complex and conflicting identities--independent kingdom, overseas colony, U.S. state, indigenous nation--a wonderfully rich, diverse, and at times troubled place. With a sure grasp of political history and culture based on decades of firsthand archival research, Tom Coffman takes Hawaii's story into the twentieth century and in the process sheds new light on America's island edge.

Leading environmental thinkers investigate the complexities of boundary formation and negotiation at the heart of environmental problems.

This book concentrates on the field of health education which is of prime importance in a rapidly changing world where computers and the internet make the possibilities almost limitless. The areas of dynamic impact include education and training of health professionals, patients, medical and other institutions of other higher learning, families of ill people, and the public at large. It is an invaluable addition to the literature.

Contains six sections discussing probability, poker, blackjack, other casino games, sports betting, and general gambling concepts. This book contains some of the most sophisticated gambling ideas that have ever been put into print. Included is perhaps the best discussion of the basic mathematics of gambling, yet it is written so that even the most non-mathematical of readers can understand it. Many of the ideas discussed are those that the author himself has successfully used during his career. Topics include expectation, combinations, Baye's Theorem, the eight mistakes in poker, checking in the dark, playing tight, The Key Card Concept, casinos and their mistakes, crapless craps, betting sports, hedging and middling, knowing what's important, the Law of Averages and Other Fallacies, and much more.

When the ruthless aliens attack the outer reaches of the Federation, Humankind is forced to retreat haphazardly from dozens of conquered systems. The only chance to delay the advance of the enemy is to create hundreds of fake colonies. If that doesn’t work, the Fleet will be forced to face the ma’lahn in a series of open battles, which can lead to its annihilation. Politicians, however, do not care about the consequences. Their goal is to preserve power, even at the cost of billions of lives. The headquarters of the third metasector must meet the requirements of the Council on the one hand, and prevent the destruction of the only force that is able to defend Humankind on the other. But this war has another—human and personal—dimension: Major Darski must fight to save the colonists that he left on Ulietta…. Edge of Extinction is book three in The Fields of Long-Forgotten Battles series.