Richard West didn't want to be psychic. He tried, over the years, to ignore the voices that he heard, and the gentle prods that he received from a higher place. He became accustomed to a certain "knowing" about people and events before they happened, and used this to good advantage in his life, first as a custom officer and later as a successful businessman. In the end, Richard couldn't avoid the persistent nudging and as his life unfurled, his reticence became less and his inquisitiveness grew. "The Reluctant Psychic. More Case Files " is a follow-on from the first book, giving a more in-detail look at the scope of work that arrives at his door, on a daily basis, as a healer, Dowser and ghost buster. It is a varied, often unexpected mixture of science and the esoteric disciplines, and covers subjects such as remote dowsing and ghost busting at a distance, which will no doubt leave the reader more than a little intrigued In addition to his work as a practical healer, Dowser, and Geopathic Stress consultant, his bulging case files are full of ghost stories, both funny and poignant, that he has collected in the course of his work around the world. This book contains more of these stories, explanations and case studies, that give a glimpse into his special world, of which you will want you to know more

For most Americans, habeas corpus is the cornerstone of our legal system: the principal constitutional check on arbitrary government power, allowing an arrested person to challenge the legality of his detention. In a study that could not be more timely, Justin Wert reexamines this essential individual right and shows that habeas corpus is not necessarily the check that we've assumed. Habeas corpus, it emerges, is as much a tool of politics as it is of law.
In this first study of habeas corpus in an American political context, Wert shifts our collective emphasis from the judicial to the political-toward the changes in the writ influenced by Congress, the president, political parties, state governments, legal academics, and even interest groups. By doing so, he reveals how political regimes have used habeas corpus both to undo the legacies of their predecessors and to establish and enforce their own vision of constitutional governance.

Tracing the history of the writ from the Founding to Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Boumediene v. Bush, Wert illuminates crucial developmental moments in its evolution. He demonstrates that during the antebellum period, Reconstruction, Gilded Age, Great Society, and the ongoing war on terrorism, habeas corpus has waxed and waned in harmony with the interests of majoritarian politics. Along the way, Wert identifies and explains the political context of fine points of law that many political scientists and historians may not be aware of-such as the exhaustion rule requiring that a federal habeas participant must first exhaust all possible claims for relief in state court, a maneuver by which the post-Reconstruction Court abandoned supervision of race relations in the South.

Especially in light of the new scrutiny of habeas corpus prompted by the Guantnamo detainees, Wert's book is essential for broadening our understanding of how law and politics continue to intersect after 9/11. Brimming with fresh insights into constitutional development and regime theory, it shows that the Great Writ of Liberty may not be so great as we have supposed--because while it has the potential to enforce conceptions of rights that are consistent with the best ideals of American politics, it also has the potential to enforce its worst aspects as well.

"Networks of Echoes: Imitation, Innovation and Invisible Leaders" is a mathematically rigorous and data rich book on a fascinating area of the science and engineering of social webs. There are hundreds of complex network phenomena whose statistical properties are described by inverse power laws. The phenomena of interest are not arcane events that we encounter only fleetingly, but are events that dominate our lives. We examine how this intermittent statistical behavior intertwines itself with what appears to be the organized activity of social groups. The book is structured as answers to a sequence of questions such as: How are decisions reached in elections and boardrooms? How is the stability of a society undermined by zealots and committed minorities and how is that stability re-established? Can we learn to answer such questions about human behavior by studying the way flocks of birds retain their formation when eluding a predator? These questions and others are answered using a generic model of a complex dynamic network one whose global behavior is determined by a symmetric interaction among individuals based on social imitation. The complexity of the network is manifest in time series resulting from self-organized critical dynamics that have divergent first and second moments, are non-stationary, non-ergodic and non-Poisson. How phase transitions in the network dynamics influence such activity as decision making is a fascinating story and provides a context for introducing many of the mathematical ideas necessary for understanding complex networks in general. The decision making model (DMM) is selected to emphasize that there are features of complex webs that supersede specific mechanisms and need to be understood from a general perspective. This insightful overview of recent tools and their uses may serve as an introduction and curriculum guide in related courses."

Richard West didn't want to be psychic. He tried, over the years, to ignore the voices that he heard and the gentle prods he received from a higher place. However, he always wondered why his hands got warm when he was near someone unwell. He also became accustomed to a certain sense of knowing about people and events before they happened and used this to good advantage in his life, first as a customs officer and later as a successful businessman. In the end, Richard couldn't avoid the persistent nudging. As his life unfurled, his reticence shrank and his inquisitiveness grew. The Reluctant Psychic is the story not only of how he eventually came to terms with his abilities but also regarding how he puts those abilities to good use as a healer, dowser, and ghostbuster. His bulging case files are full of ghost stories, both funny and poignant, that he has collected in the course of his work around the world. The stories are informative and interesting, and they give valuable insight into the work of a dowser and psychic operating with a foot in both worlds. This book provides comfort and reassurance to all of us who have encountered things that go bump in the night, and it explains in detail how places can affect us in a variety of ways.

The adventures of a young customs officer who leaves his close knit community to find himself in an alien world of smuggling and international intrigue. The book details his adventures on his journey, in the 1960s, from a "wet behind the ears" rookie, to an experienced revenue man.

What has been the impact of this age of transformation on women's lives in China? This wide ranging and interdisciplinary collection brings together scholars from China and the West to examine the many dimensions of debate around gender issues in contemporary China. The experiences of women in education, employment, marriage and the family, in rural and urban areas are analyzed and assessed. Published at a time when there is more open acknowledgement in China of the discrepancy between the language of equality, and experiences of discrimination and inequality.

A nonsimple (complex) system indicates a mix of crucial and non-crucial events, with very different statistical properties. It is the crucial events that determine the efficiency of information exchange between complex networks. For a large class of nonsimple systems, crucial events determine catastrophic failures - from heart attacks to stock market crashes.This interesting book outlines a data processing technique that separates the effects of the crucial from those of the non-crucial events in nonsimple time series extracted from physical, social and living systems. Adopting an informal conversational style, without sacrificing the clarity necessary to explain, the contents will lead the reader through concepts such as fractals, complexity and randomness, self-organized criticality, fractional-order differential equations of motion, and crucial events, always with an eye to helping to interpret what mathematics usually does in the development of new scientific knowledge.Both researchers and novitiate will find Crucial Events useful in learning more about the science of nonsimplicity.

This book discusses the application of the concepts of fractals and chaos to biomedical phenomena. In particular, it argues against the outdated notion of homeostasis; using biomedical data sets and modern mathematical concepts, the author attempts to convince the reader that life is at least a homeodynamic process with multiple states - each being capable of survival. Although relying heavily on the new mathematical ideas, the author has attempted to make the book self-contained. The mathematics is developed in a biological context and mathematical formulation for its own sake is avoided. In this book, the phenomena to be explained motivate the mathematical development rather than the other way round.

This book discusses the application of the concepts of fractals and chaos to biomedical phenomena. In particular, it argues against the outdated notion of homeostasis; using biomedical data sets and modern mathematical concepts, the author attempts to convince the reader that life is at least a homeodynamic process with multiple states - each being capable of survival. Although relying heavily on the new mathematical ideas, the author has attempted to make the book self-contained. The mathematics is developed in a biological context and mathematical formulation for its own sake is avoided. In this book, the phenomena to be explained motivate the mathematical development rather than the other way round.

Complexity increases with increasing system size in everything from organisms to organizations. The nonlinear dependence of a system's functionality on its size, by means of an allometry relation, is argued to be a consequence of their joint dependency on complexity (information). In turn, complexity is proven to be the source of allometry and to provide a new kind of force entailed by a system's information gradient. Based on first principles, the scaling behavior of the probability density function is determined by the exact solution to a set of fractional differential equations. The resulting lowest order moments in system size and functionality gives rise to the empirical allometry relations. Taking examples from various topics in nature, the book is of interest to researchers in applied mathematics, as well as, investigators in the natural, social, physical and life sciences. Contents Complexity Empirical allometry Statistics, scaling and simulation Allometry theories Strange kinetics Fractional probability calculus

You'll never find a book that can provide specific solutions to every managerial problem, but you can prepare yourself by reading "Management Basics A to Z."

In this guidebook, a longtime manager who rose up the ranks of the Pepsi-Cola Albany Bottling Co. and other companies shares practical advice for aspiring managers, entry-level managers, and others who've had little or no formal training in the art of management.

No matter what size company you work for, the advice and strategies in this easy-to-read reference will help you

-focus on your primary responsibilities -hire and fire the right people -keep your boss happy -read financial statements -excel at customer service

As a new manager, it's critical that you avoid mistakes, exude confidence, and recognize that whoever gave you a chance to manage believes in your ability. That person made it up the corporate ladder, and you can too--and it starts with learning basic management principles, concepts, and philosophies.

Ron J West (ronjwest.com) has been inspiring corporate transformation for more than 25 years, in in companies large and small. He wrote Corporate Caterpillars - How to Grow Wings to provide a kind of "blueprint" you can use to create your own individual and corporate transformation to move from limited to limitless. The book is not modeled on a single analogy like the transformation from caterpillar to butterfly, nor does it reduce the concept to a set of simple steps. But it does strive to recognize the richness of reasons why we often seem to be left with few choices.

Everything shows up exactly when it is supposed to, just like this book You are holding this book perhaps because you feel that either you or your company is stuck in some way. As an individual, maybe you have caught yourself repeating a pattern to sabotage your efforts to get to where you want to be. Perhaps you are a CEO, CFO, President, Vice President, Department Manager, or Project Leader. You are probably a business leader in a position to affect change in your organization; maybe your enterprise is a small family business or an international conglomerate. It matters not whether your company is a for-profit or a not-for profit, a public or a private enterprise, this book will show how to move from a world of limited options to a realm of limitless possibilities, transforming both you and your company.

African Spirituality in Black Women s Fiction: Threaded Visions of Memory, Community, Nature and Being is the nexus to scholarship on manifestations of Africanisms in black art and culture, particularly the scant critical works focusing on African metaphysical retentions. This study examines New World African spirituality as a syncretic dynamic of spiritual retentions and transformations that have played prominently in the literary imagination of black women writers. Beginning with the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, African Spirituality in Black Women s Fiction traces applications and transformations of African spirituality in black women s writings that culminate in the conscious and deliberate celebration of Africanity in Hurston s Their Eyes Were Watching God. The journey from Wheatley s veiled remembrances to Hurston s explicit gaze of continental Africa represents the literary journey of black women writers to represent Africa as not only a very real creative resource but also a liberating one. Hurston s icon of black female autonomy and self realization is woven from the thread work of African spiritual principles that date back to early black women s writings.

This exceptional book is concerned with the application of fractals and chaos, as well as other concepts from nonlinear dynamics to biomedical phenomena. Herein we seek to communicate the excitement being experienced by scientists upon making application of these concepts within the life sciences. Mathematical concepts are introduced using biomedical data sets and the phenomena being explained take precedence over the mathematics.In this new edition what has withstood the test of time has been updated and modernized; speculations that were not borne out have been expunged and the breakthroughs that have occurred in the intervening years are emphasized. The book provides a comprehensive overview of a nascent theory of medicine, including a new chapter on the theory of complex networks as they pertain to medicine.

This invaluable book captures the proceedings of a workshop that brought together a group of distinguished scientists from a variety of disciplines to discuss how networking influences decision making. The individual lectures interconnect psychological testing, the modeling of neuron networks and brain dynamics to the transport of information within and between complex networks. Of particular importance was the introduction of a new principle that governs how complex networks talk to one another - the Principle of Complexity Management (PCM). PCM establishes that the transfer of information from a stimulating complex network to a responding complex network is determined by how the complexity indices of the two networks are related. The response runs the gamut from being independent of the perturbation to being completely dominated by it, depending on the complexity mismatch.

Where Medicine Went Wrong explores how the idea of an average value has been misapplied to medical phenomena, distorted understanding and lead to flawed medical decisions. Through new insights into the science of complexity, traditional physiology is replaced with fractal physiology, in which variability is more indicative of health than is an average. The capricious nature of physiological systems is made conceptually manageable by smoothing over fluctuations and thinking in terms of averages. But these variations in such aspects as heart rate, breathing and walking are much more susceptible to the early influence of disease than are averages.It may be useful to quote from the late Stephen Jay Gould's book Full House on the errant nature of averages: "... our culture encodes a strong bias either to neglect or ignore variation. We tend to focus instead on measures of central tendency, and as a result we make some terrible mistakes, often with considerable practical import." Dr West has quantified this observation and make it useful for the diagnosis of disease.

With a focus on the connected spiritual legacy of the black Atlantic, Literary Expressions of African Spirituality leads the way to more comprehensive trans-geographical studies of African spirituality in black art. With essays focusing on African spirituality in creative works by several trans-Atlantic black authors across varying locations in the Ameri-Atlantic diaspora, this collection reveals and examines their shared spiritual cosmology. Diasporic in scope, Literary Expressions of African Spirituality offers new readings of black literatures through the prism of spiritual memory that survived the damaging impact of trans-Atlantic slaving. This memory is a significant thread that has often been missed in the reading and teaching of the literatures of the African diaspora. Essays in this collection explore unique black angles of seeing and ways of knowing that characterize African spiritual presence and influence in trans-Atlantic black artistic productions. Essays exploring works ranging from turn-of-the-century African American figure W.E.B. DuBois, South African novelist Zakes Mda, Haitian novelists Edwidge Danticat and Jacques Roumain, as well as African belief systems such as Voudoun and Candomble, provide a scope not yet offered in a single published volume. This collection explores the deep and often unconscious spiritual and psychosocial connectedness of people of African descent in the African and Ameri-Atlantic world.

This book is not a text devoted to a pedagogical presentation of a specialized topic nor is it a monograph focused on the author's area of research. It accomplishes both these things while providing a rationale for why the reader ought to be interested in learning about fractional calculus. This book is for researchers who has heard about many of these scientifically exotic activities, but could not see how they fit into their own scientific interests, or how they could be made compatible with the way they understand science. It is also for beginners who have not yet decided where their scientific talents could be most productively applied. The book provides insight into the long-term direction of science and show how to develop the skills necessary to successfully do research in the twenty-first century.

The subject of homosexuality, and especially male homosexuality, has received a great deal of publicity in England and America. The furor began with Kinsey's famous reports on sexual behavior, which brought out the fact that a far higher proportion of the population than was commonly supposed deviated from accepted standards of normality and morality. Taking courage from the apparent safety of large numbers, the sexually unorthodox and their sympathizers began to challenge the criteria of normality, and to question whether sexual habits that were widespread and so deeply entrenched could justifiably be written off as immoral. D.J. West's "Homosexuality" dissects the myths and paranoia surrounding this topic by examining the nature and roots of homosexuality.The politico-legal controversy has tended to overshadow the more fundamental psychological questions concerning the nature and causes of homosexuality. In this field, no striking discoveries have resulted from the increased public interest. Nevertheless, a body of factual data has accumulated, and a number of theories are available. The author's main purpose is to summarize as clearly as possible what is known, to draw what practical conclusions may be possible, and to point out where we are still groping and ignorant.This book deals mainly with male homosexuality because in men the condition causes more clear cut social problems and has been studied more intensely by psychiatrists. Unfortunately, though strongly held opinions abound, hard facts about homosexuality and its possible causes are difficult to obtain. Even now, serious medical and sociological investigations in this subject are scandalously few considering the importance of the questions in human terms. This resistance becomes acutely apparent when a social until a large section of the public is prepared to face the facts squarely and rationally and to support adequate research, our knowledge will remain rudimentary. This book clears away the debris of myth and misunderstanding in a vital area of social concern.