New Methods of Market Research and Analysis prepares readers for the new reality posed by big data and marketing analytics. While connecting to traditional research approaches such as surveys and focus groups, this book shows how new technologies and new analytical capabilities are rapidly changing the way marketers obtain and process their information. In particular, the prevalence of big data systems always monitoring key performance indicators, trends toward more research using observation or observation and communication together, new technologies such as mobile, apps, geo-locators, and others, as well as the deep analytics allowed by cheap data processing and storage are all covered and placed in context. Scott Erickson goes beyond the buzzwords to provide relevant explanations of the meaning and impact of both big data and analytics, placing them in context with traditional marketing research. His engaging subject matter focuses on the practical aspects of big data concepts, precisely defining and illustrating key concepts and providing illuminating real world examples. This approachable style enables marketers to understand what data scientists are doing with big data systems and analytics, giving them a taste of the capabilities of contemporary statistical software and its practical applications. This book can be used as a supplement to a traditional marketing research text or on its own. It will serve as a key reference for graduate students and advanced undergraduates in marketing research, marketing analytics, or business intelligence courses as well as marketing professionals looking to stay up to date with current trends and have them explained in a context they understand.

Are You Ready?Each year, millions of Americans come face-to-face with the daunting task of providing for the care of an aging parent. Unfortunately, many find themselves ill-informed and unprepared. This reversal of roles, from care receivers to care providers, is often filled with conflicting emotions that are extremely tough to cope with amidst this enormous responsibility. Moreover, clashing opinions can quickly leave siblings and other family members at an impasse during a time when unity is crucial.For these newly challenged care providers, the tide has turned. For those who don't know what signs to look for, this can happen without notice. As almost all of us will face this dilemma at some point, Parent Talk is a must read source of expertise and information for any adult child. Throughout this book, the author draws on his years of experience in senior healthcare to assist you in anticipating your parent's decline, understanding the best care options, and making sound decisions. Come gain the invaluable insights revealed through The Nine Conversations as you become your loved one's keeper.

TItis volume is the first effort to compile representative work in the emerging research area on the relationship of disability and physical environment since Barrier-Free Environments, edited by Michael Bednar, was published in 1977. Since that time, disability rights legislation like the Americans, with Disabilities Act in the United States, the worldwide growth of the independent-living move ment, rapid deinstitutionalization, and the maturation of functional assessment methodology have all had their impact on this research area. The impact has been most noticeable in two ways-fostering the integration of environmental vari ables in rehabilitation research and practice, and changing paradigms for environ mental interventions. As the contributions in this volume demonstrate, the relationship of disabil ity and physical environment is no longer of interest primarily to designers and other professionals concerned with managing the resources of the built environ ment. The physical environment has always been recognized as an important variable affecting rehabilitation outcome. Until recently, however, concepts and tools were not available to measure its impact in clinical practic and outcomes research. In particular, lack of a theoretical foundation that integrated environ ment with the disablement process hampered development of both research and clinical methodology. Thus, the physical environment received little attention from the mainstream rehabilitation research community. However, this situation is changing rapidly."

New Methods of Market Research and Analysis prepares readers for the new reality posed by big data and marketing analytics. While connecting to traditional research approaches such as surveys and focus groups, this book shows how new technologies and new analytical capabilities are rapidly changing the way marketers obtain and process their information. In particular, the prevalence of big data systems always monitoring key performance indicators, trends toward more research using observation or observation and communication together, new technologies such as mobile, apps, geo-locators, and others, as well as the deep analytics allowed by cheap data processing and storage are all covered and placed in context. Scott Erickson goes beyond the buzzwords to provide relevant explanations of the meaning and impact of both big data and analytics, placing them in context with traditional marketing research. His engaging subject matter focuses on the practical aspects of big data concepts, precisely defining and illustrating key concepts and providing illuminating real world examples. This approachable style enables marketers to understand what data scientists are doing with big data systems and analytics, giving them a taste of the capabilities of contemporary statistical software and its practical applications. This book can be used as a supplement to a traditional marketing research text or on its own. It will serve as a key reference for graduate students and advanced undergraduates in marketing research, marketing analytics, or business intelligence courses as well as marketing professionals looking to stay up to date with current trends and have them explained in a context they understand.

In the New Economy, intelligence will be essential for firms to gain competitive advantage-not just information or knowledge. Competitive intelligence, or the strategic gathering of knowledge about competitors, climate, trends, new products, has a long and successful history of generating competitive advantage. In this book, Rothberg and Erickson demonstrate how corporations can combine their competitive intelligence gathering with their internal knowledge management gathering into one dynamic system. Using real-world cases from the corporate world, the authors show how the strategic use of this combined system generates measurable competitive advantage. Topics covered include how be develop your strategy for sharing and gathering knowledge across the value chain, sustainable product development and innovation, manufacturing improvement, CRM and marketing, and developing a corporate-wide global knowledge strategy.
*The first book to show how competitive intelligence practices can add value to knowledge management systems
*Written for practitioners, the book is filled with real examples from the corporate world
*Demonstrates how corporations can use internal and external information gathering strategically to gain competitive advantage

To help address the challenges of sustainable development, higher education institutions must transform themselves, bringing together best practice in quality management for tertiary education with best practice in education for sustainable development. This book provides tested strategies and pathways for undertaking this successfully.

Few scientific developments in recent years have captured the popular imagination like the subject of'biodegradable' plastics. The reasons for this are complex and lie deep in the human subconscious. Discarded plastics are an intrusion on the sea shore and in the countryside. The fact that nature's litter abounds in the sea and on land is acceptable because it is biodegradable - even though it may take many years to be bioassimilated into the ecosystem. Plastics litter is not seen to be biodegradable and is aesthetically unacceptable because it does not blend into the natural environment. To the environmentally aware but often scientifically naive, biodegradation is seen to be the ecologically acceptable solution to the problem of plastic packaging waste and litter and some packaging manufacturers have exploited the 'green' consumer with exaggerated claims to 'environmentally friendly' biodegradable packaging materials. The principles underlying environmental degradation are not understood even by some manufacturers of 'biodegradable' materials and the claims made for them have been categorized as 'deceptive' by USA legislative authorities. This has set back the acceptance of plastics with controlled biodegradability as part of the overall waste and litter control strategy. At the opposite end of the commercial spectrum, the polymer manufactur ing industries, through their trade associations, have been at pains to discount the role of degradable materials in waste and litter management. This negative campaign has concentrated on the supposed incompatibility of degradable plastics with aspects of waste management strategy, notably materials recycling."

America grew rapidly after World War II-the national pastime followed suit. Baseball dramatically changed from a 19th century pastoral relic to a continental modern sport. Six Major League clubs relocated to new cities, capped by the coast-to-coast moves of the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants. Four expansion teams were created from thin air. Dozens of black stars emerged after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. The players formed a union-higher salaries materialized. This book tells the story of baseball's metamorphosis 1945-1962, driven by larger-than-life personalities like the bombastic Larry MacPhail, the sage Branch Rickey, the kindly Connie Mack, the quick-witted Bill Veeck and the wily Walter O'Malley-Hall of Famers all. The upheaval they sparked-and sometimes failed to control-would broaden the sport's appeal, setting the stage for tremendous growth in the half-century to come.

This easy-to-use handbook presents a fascinating and fresh take on American presidential elections and makes a wide range of statistics available to serious researchers and political fanatics alike. Counting the Votes: A New Way to Analyze America's Presidential Elections isn't your typical history book about presidential elections. Nor is it like most statistical analyses of election results. What this unusual book does offer is an array of innovative statistics-campaign score (CS), potential index (PI), return on potential (ROP), and equalized vote totals (EV*EQ), among others-that provides a provocative, intriguing, and fresh perspective on past presidential candidates and campaigns. Presenting information that has never been compiled and presented before, author G. Scott Thomas provides reams of statistics for all 57 presidential elections (1789 to the present) as well as essays inspired by those races that explore new interpretations of electoral trends. The book also includes lists of outstanding political performances in 179 statistical categories in addition to complete statistical records for 289 presidential candidates. The unique information and metrics introduced in this book will be invaluable to historians, political scientists, and students who are conducting research into voting trends and will serve as additional tools for their work. Includes a "Record Book of Presidential Politics" that spotlights the best and worst performances by presidential candidates highlighted in 179 statistical rankings, identifying which nominee was the youngest, came from the smallest state, and won by the smallest margin of popular votes Written by an accomplished journalist with more than three decades of experience and who has authored four books focused on national politics Provides an alphabetical directory of the career records of 289 presidential candidates between 1789 and 2012 presented in tabular form for easy reference

The purpose of this publication is two-fold. In the first place it is intended to review progress in the development of practical stabilising systems for a wide range of polymers and applications. A complemen tary and ultimately more important objective is to accommodate these practical developments within the framework of antioxidant theory, since there can be little question that further major advances in the practice of stabilisation technology will only be possible on a firm mechanistic foundation. With the continual increase in the number of commercial anti oxidants and stabilisers, often functioning by mechanisms not even considered ten years ago, there is a need for a general theory which will allow the potential user to predict the performance of a particular antioxidant structure under specific practical conditions. Any such predictive tool must involve a simplified kinetic approach to inhibited oxidation and, in Chapter 1, Denisov outlines a possible mechanistic approach with the potential to predict the most useful antioxidant to use and the limits of its usefulness. In Chapter 2, Schwetlick reviews the current state of knowledge on the antioxidant mechanisms of the phosphite esters with particular emphasis on their catalytic peroxidolytic activity. Dithiophosphate v vi PREFACE derivatives show a similar behaviour but for quite different reasons and, in Chapter 3, AI-Malaika reviews information available from analytical studies, particularly using 31p_NMR spectroscopy, to elucid ate the complex chemistry that leads to the formation of the antioxidant -active agents.

This book tells the story of 1960-a tumultuous, transitional year that unleashed the forces that eventually reshaped the American nation and the entire planet, to the joy of millions and the sorrow of millions more. In 1960, attitudes were changing; barriers were falling. It was a transitional year, during which the world as we know it today was beginning to take shape. While other books have focused on the presidential contest between Kennedy and Nixon, A New World to Be Won: John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and the Tumultuous Year of 1960 illuminates the emerging forces that would transform the nation and the world during the 1960s, putting the election in the broader context of American history-and world history as well. While the author does devote a large portion of this book to the 1960 presidential campaign, he also highlights four pivotal trends that changed life for decades to come: unprecedented scientific breakthroughs, ranging from the Xerox copier to new spacecraft for manned flight; fragmentation of the international power structure, notably the schism between the Soviet Union and China; the pursuit of freedom, both through the civil rights movement at home and the drive for independence in Africa; and the elevation of pleasure and self-expression in American culture, largely as a result of federal approval of the birth-control pill and the increasing popularity of illegal drugs. Photographs of key newsmakers and important events throughout the year A bibliography with a detailed listing of more than 400 sources, including oral histories, government publications, memoirs, and journals A comprehensive index by name and subject Footnotes for the full manuscript

How should religion and ethics be studied if we want to understand what people believe and why they act the way they do? In the 1980s and '90s postmodernist worries about led to debates that turned on power, truth, and relativism. Since the turn of the century scholars impressed by 'cognitive science' have introduced concepts drawn from evolutionary biology, neurosciences, and linguistics in the attempt to provide 'naturalist' accounts of religion. Deploying concepts and arguments that have their roots in the pragmatism of C. S. Peirce, Believing and Acting argues that both approaches are misguided and largely unhelpful in answering the questions that matter: What did those people believe then? How does it relate to what these people want to do now? What is our evidence for our interpretations? Pragmatic inquiry into these questions recommends an approach that questions grand theories, advocates a critical pluralism about religion and ethics that defies disciplinary boundaries in the pursuit of the truth. Rationality, on a pragmatic approach, is about solving particular problems in medias res, thus there is no hard and fast line to be drawn between inquiry and advocacy; both are essential to negotiating day to day life. The upshot is an approach to religion and ethics in which inquiry looks much like the art history of Michael Baxandall and advocacy like the art criticism of Arthur Danto.

This collection establishes the term 'medical paratexts' as a useful addition to medical humanities, book history, and literary studies research. As a relatively new field of study, little critical attention has been paid to medical paratexts. We understand paratext as the apparatus of graphic communication: title pages, prefaces, illustrations, marginalia, and publishing details which act as mediators between text and reader. Discussing the development of medical paratexts across scribal, print and digital media, the collection spans the medieval period to the twenty-first century. Dissecting the Page is structured in two thematic sections, underpinned by a shared examination of ideas of medical and lay readership and a history of reader response. The first section focuses on the production, reception, and use of medical texts. The second section analyses the role and significance of authority, access, and dissemination in discussions of health, medicine, and illness, for both lay and medical readerships.

The same skills and strategies can propel an aspiring executive to the top of any organization, be it the Podunk High School Student Council, the Acme Xylophone Corporation, or the government of the United States of America. The student council president may be an unpaid volunteer, and the Acme CEO may bark out orders in an office that is rectangular, not oval. But the paths that lead to those positions are remarkably similar to the trail that ends so gloriously at the front door of the White House. Author G. Scott Thomas spent two years examining the lives of nearly two hundred presidential candidates--winners and losers, the famous and the obscure--with an eye for the tactics and qualities that served their careers well or damaged them beyond repair. He has distilled their experiences into a comprehensive guide to success, Advice from the Presidents. Thomas's book offers a wealth of advice, quotations, and anecdotes that are pertinent to any up-and-coming young man or woman. Which strategies for advancement are effective and which are doomed to fail? Which personal traits should be emulated and which are detrimental? Presidential candidates have learned the answers the hard way, earning the education of a lifetime in the gritty, cutthroat arena of national politics, a field as competitive as any to be found in corporate America. And now, for the first time, their valuable knowledge will be made available to ambitious executives and eager students across the country. Readers will learn the seven time-tested steps that can transform a would-be chief executive or U.S. President into the real thing: --Decide upon your long-term goal. --Develop your skills and interests.--Polish your imageand your people skills. --Organize a network of mentors and helpers. --Control your inner demons and your opponents. --Maneuver to improve your position. --Succeed with grace and serenity. In this book, readers will follow the career paths of famous American politicians. There have been smart presidents and unintelligent ones, honest and dishonest ones, diligent and lazy ones. But all of these master politicians-- remarkably different in skills and personality --had one thing in common. They all followed the same seven-step career plan detailed in Advice from the Presidents. And so can any ambitious person in any walk of life.

G. Scott Thomas offers a complete statistical and descriptive guide to the fifty American presidential elections that were held between 1789 and 1984. The book is divided into two major sections, the first dealing with the elections as such and the second with the participation of the candidates, parties, and states. The Pursuit of the White House incorporates more than 450 charts as well as concise summaries supplying comprehensive data on all aspects of presidential elections.

Published in 1998, this book moves away from the basic education of entrepreneurs to new models and methods, often running in cooperation with orthodox management courses in institutes of higher education. The papers in this book develop themes, models and concepts for the education of wealth creating entrepreneurs.

The "next step for those who want to discover angels in their lives, this book goes beyond angelic appearances to a keen new awareness of how angels influence world evolution and one's own psyche. You will explore new research on angels; roles in personal and planetary karma, the heirachy, the origin and destiny of Christ, archangels and fallen angels, and the meaning of angels in the Revelation.

Published in 1998, this book moves away from the basic education of entrepreneurs to new models and methods, often running in cooperation with orthodox management courses in institutes of higher education. The papers in this book develop themes, models and concepts for the education of wealth creating entrepreneurs.

As environmental performance becomes increasingly important, the development of man-made polymers and their associated benefits has been overshadowed by problems relating to their ultimate disposal. In the light of wider acceptance of polymers for use in high technology applications, Polymers and the Environment aims to redress the balance. The book reviews the properties and industrial applications of polymers and discusses their environmental benefits compared with traditional materials. It also addresses the issues of polymer durability, recycling processes to aid waste minimization and biodegradable polymers. This text is intended to introduce the non-specialist reader to the benefits and limitations of polymeric materials from an environmental viewpoint, and will prove a useful book for both students and professionals.