TIRED OF YOUR IRA EARNING LOUSY RETURNS IN TRADITIONAL INVESTMENTS?Want to know the secret to increasing returns in your IRA that your investment advisor may not even be aware of?Many people have found great success in investing in real estate over the past few decades but few are aware that you can hold real estate investments within your IRA. Not only can you hold these investments, you can use the power of leverage through non-recourse loans to substantially increase your returns. Within this book you will learn: How self-directed IRAs function. What a non-recourse loan is and how it works. Why your CPA and investment advisor may not be aware of these options. What the IRS has to say about real estate in an IRA. The step-by-step actions to get started earning great returns.You don't have to take the investments offered by your bank or financial institution - you can choose Rather than watching your retirement funds inch slowly forward, put that money to work and live the retirement of your dreams

It's often been said, with some validity, that we teach what we need to know. So, too, we write what we want to read: in this case, the book that I wish someone had written for me when I was a young teacher just starting out. I began teaching in a British-style boys' boarding school: all boys, all boarding-a trial by fire if ever there was one. I was fresh out of university, with a good MA but virtually no teaching experience and only the dimmest idea of why I was joining the profession. I had been told by someone I trusted that I had a natural talent for teaching, felt faint stirrings of vocation, and wanted to give something back after a long and self-indulgent education. Beyond that, I had no idea of what I was getting into or why. It was a strange Darwinian world of bad food, cold showers, harsh discipline, and cross-country runs, with other vestiges of British public school tradition, including bread pudding, corporal punishment, and daily chapel. Paradoxically, despite the strict discipline and institutional formality-the masters were universally referred to as Sir, and the boys addressed by surname-a great fondness grew between staff and students. We were, at the very least, honorable enemies reminiscent of Tom Brown's School Days-at best, a boisterous family marooned together, more like Swiss Family Robinson. Something hilarious happened every day. The boys were irrepressible, despite our best efforts, and the charged, insular atmosphere of the school somehow produced the most extravagantly colorful personalities. I was always amazed at how the boys bounced back after a frozen route march or an exhausting exam week; it was the masters who showed the strain. Partly, we lacked the resiliency of youth. We were older in our bones, and our sinews had lost their elasticity. Partly, we followed an unrelenting schedule since, in addition to our teaching duties (including a half day on Saturday), we were required to patrol the dorms, supervise study hall, and lead all-weather outdoor adventures. Sixty-hour workweeks were standard, rising to eighty hours during peak periods. But we also suffered the natural consequences of an immutable law and a professional handicap, which I will explain.

Internet research spans many disciplines. From the computer or information s- ences, through engineering, and to social sciences, humanities and the arts, almost all of our disciplines have made contributions to internet research, whether in the effort to understand the effect of the internet on their area of study, or to investigate the social and political changes related to the internet, or to design and develop so- ware and hardware for the network. The possibility and extent of contributions of internet research vary across disciplines, as do the purposes, methods, and outcomes. Even the epistemological underpinnings differ widely. The internet, then, does not have a discipline of study for itself: It is a ?eld for research (Baym, 2005), an open environment that simultaneously supports many approaches and techniques not otherwise commensurable with each other. There are, of course, some inhibitions that limit explorations in this ?eld: research ethics, disciplinary conventions, local and national norms, customs, laws, borders, and so on. Yet these limits on the int- net as a ?eld for research have not prevented the rapid expansion and exploration of the internet. After nearly two decades of research and scholarship, the limits are a positive contribution, providing bases for discussion and interrogation of the contexts of our research, making internet research better for all. These 'limits, ' challenges that constrain the theoretically limitless space for internet research, create boundaries that give de?nition to the ?eld and provide us with a particular topography that enables research and investigation.

A volume in Research in Public Management Series Editors: Lawrence R. Jones and Nancy C. Roberts, Naval Postgraduate School Volunteer management has many challenges, not the least of which is how we study it and view it. Academics examine it from a variety of disciplines and practitioners experience it in a variety of contexts. However both approaches have limitations. In academia we go to public administration schools to learn about public and nonprofit management, to business schools to apply the principles of private enterprise to nonprofit management, to sociology departments to study the phenomena of volunteerism, to psychology departments to understand the motives of volunteers, and economics departments to examine the value or economic worth of volunteerism. The liability of the academic approach is the segmentation of study and research into departmental areas. The study of volunteers and volunteerism needs to cross all of these organizational and discipline boundaries to be fully appreciated and understood as a field of interest. In contrast, practitioners view volunteer management from their own unique experiences.They try to gauge success in volunteer management based on what they have encountered in particular organizations, towns, cultures, and countries in which they work. As important as these insights are, they are difficult to generalize beyond local settings. Just because an individual has been successful in working with volunteers, it does not mean that the lessons learned in one situation can be translated to others under all conditions. The target audience for this volume is anyone who manages volunteers. The goal of the volume is to demonstrate the breadth of thought on volunteer management, both across disciplines and a wide range of settings in which volunteers work.

This book provides a rigorous and cross-disciplinary analysis of this Melanesian nation at a critical juncture in its post-colonial and post-conflict history, with contributions from leading scholars of Solomon Islands. The notion of 'transition' as used to describe the recent drawdown of the decade-long Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) provides a departure point for considering other transformations - social, political and economic -under way in the archipelagic nation. Organised around a central tension between change and continuity, two of the book's key themes are the contested narratives of changing state-society relations and the changing social relations around land and natural resources engendered by ongoing processes of globalisation and urbanisation. Drawing heuristically on RAMSI's genesis in the 'state- building moment' that dominated international relations during the first decade of this century, the book also examines the critical distinction between 'state-building' and 'state formation' in the Solomon Islands context. It engages with global scholarly and policy debates on issues such as peacebuilding, state-building, legal pluralism, hybrid governance, globalisation, urbanisation and the governance of natural resources. These themes resonate well beyond Solomon Islands and Melanesia, and the book will be of interest to a wide range of students, scholars and development practitioners. This book was previously published as a special issue of The Journal of Pacific History.

This book provides a rigorous and cross-disciplinary analysis of this Melanesian nation at a critical juncture in its post-colonial and post-conflict history, with contributions from leading scholars of Solomon Islands. The notion of 'transition' as used to describe the recent drawdown of the decade-long Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) provides a departure point for considering other transformations - social, political and economic -under way in the archipelagic nation. Organised around a central tension between change and continuity, two of the book's key themes are the contested narratives of changing state-society relations and the changing social relations around land and natural resources engendered by ongoing processes of globalisation and urbanisation. Drawing heuristically on RAMSI's genesis in the 'state- building moment' that dominated international relations during the first decade of this century, the book also examines the critical distinction between 'state-building' and 'state formation' in the Solomon Islands context. It engages with global scholarly and policy debates on issues such as peacebuilding, state-building, legal pluralism, hybrid governance, globalisation, urbanisation and the governance of natural resources. These themes resonate well beyond Solomon Islands and Melanesia, and the book will be of interest to a wide range of students, scholars and development practitioners. This book was previously published as a special issue of The Journal of Pacific History.

This book gathers selected peer-reviewed contributions to the 1st European Congress on Biomedical and Veterinary Engineering, BioMedVetMech 2022, held on October 1–3, 2022, in Zagreb, Croatia. It offers a timely snapshot of  research findings and advances technologies in the area of biomechanics, rehabilitation and surgery. It covers applications of brain-computer interface, virtual reality and functional electrical stimulation, among others.  

Japanese popular culture is constantly evolving in the face of internal and external influence. Popular Culture, Globalization and Japan examines this evolution from a new and challenging perspective by focusing on the movements of popular culture into and out of Japan.

Taking a multidisciplinary approach, the book argues that a key factor behind the changing nature of Japanese popular culture lies in its engagement with globalization. Essays from a team of leading international scholars illustrate this crucial interaction between the flows of Japanese popular culture and the constant development of globalization. Drawing on rich empirical content, this book looks at Japanese popular culture as it traverses international borders flowing out through such forms as manga consumption in New Zealand and flowing in through such forms as foreigners writing about Japan in Japanese and how American influences affected the formation of Japan's gay identity.

Presenting current, confronting and sometimes controversial insights into the many forms of Japanese popular culture emerging within this global context, Popular Culture, Globalization and Japan will make essential reading for those working in Japanese studies, cultural studies and international relations.

Japanese popular culture is constantly evolving in the face of internal and external influence. Popular Culture, Globalization and Japan examines this evolution from a new and challenging perspective by focusing on the movements of popular culture into and out of Japan. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, the book argues that a key factor behind the changing nature of Japanese popular culture lies in its engagement with globalization. Essays from a team of leading international scholars illustrate this crucial interaction between the flows of Japanese popular culture and the constant development of globalization. Drawing on rich empirical content, this book looks at Japanese popular culture as it traverses international borders flowing out through such forms as manga consumption in New Zealand and flowing in through such forms as foreigners writing about Japan in Japanese and how American influences affected the formation of Japan's gay identity. Presenting current, confronting and sometimes controversial insights into the many forms of Japanese popular culture emerging within this global context, Popular Culture, Globalization and Japan will make essential reading for those working in Japanese studies, cultural studies and international relations.

The keystone of U.S. security in East Asia, Okinawa is a troubled symbol of resistance and identity. Ambivalence about the nature of Okinawan identity lies behind relations between Japan, the United States, and Okinawa today. Fully one-fifth of Okinawa's land is occupied by a foreign military power (the United States), and Okinawans carry a disproportionate responsibility for Japanese and U.S. security in the region. It thus figures prominently in the re-examination of key questions such as the nature of Japan, including the debate over Japanese 'purity' and the nature of Japanese colonialism. Yet underneath the rhetoric of the 'Okinawa problem' lies a core question: who are Okinawans? In contrast to approaches that homogenize Okinawan cultural discourse, this perceptive historical ethnography draws attention to the range of cultural and social practices that exist within contemporary Okinawa. Matthew Allen's narrative problematizes both the location of identity and the processes involved in negotiating identities within Okinawa. Using the community on Kumejima as a focus, the author describes how people create and modify multitextured and overlapping identities over the course of their lives. Allen explores memory, locality and history; mental health and shamanism; and regionalism and tourism in his richly nuanced study. His chapter on the Battle of Okinawa, which opens the book, is a riveting, fresh analysis of the battle in history and memory. His analysis of yuta (shamans) opens new terrain in rethinking the relationship between the traditional and the modern. Based on fieldwork, interviews, and historical research, Allen argues that identity in Okinawa is multivocal, ambivalent, and still very much 'under construction.' With its interdisciplinary focus, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians alike will find this book an important source for understanding broad questions of identity formation in the contexts of national, ethnic, cultural, historical and economic experience.

Dynamics of Coupled Structures, Volume 4:  Proceedings of the 40th IMAC, A Conference and Exposition on Structural Dynamics, 2022, the fourth volume of nine from the Conference brings together contributions to this important area of research and engineering.  The collection presents early findings and case studies on fundamental and applied aspects of the Dynamics of Coupled Structures, including papers on: Transfer Path Analysis Blocked Forces and Experimental Techniques Real-Time Hybrid Substructuring and Uncertainty Quantification in Substructuring Nonlinear Substructuring

Japanese popular culture has developed in many unexpected and fascinating ways. From contemporary pop culture's beginnings in the shadow of the Second World War and the earlier China campaign, Japan's sense of identity has been contested, challenged, reconsidered, restructured, and revived through multiple popular media. Pop culture, though, has always occupied a singular place in Japan's expression of selfhood and otherness, providing vicarious experiences of life within Japan. Today, Japanese popular culture's global influence is felt most keenly in movie culture, animation, television, the Internet, social media, music, fashion, and comics (manga), to name but a few fields and technologies. Indeed, visual culture, specifically television and movies, with a strong emphasis on animation (anime) and manga, led the first wave of Japanese pop-culture exports in the second half of the twentieth century. Since then, academic interest in these exports, both at home in Japan, and overseas, has developed rapidly. The second wave of Japanese popular culture followed the digitization of much of the global media: rapid communications, global connectedness, and the development of new media have provided platforms on which Japanese pop culture has been presented and critiqued, engaged, and transformed. More complex, more hybrid, and more sophisticated, the relationships between Japan and the rest of the world are often given voice through new readings and interpretations of the interconnected popular cultural world. The assembled articles in Volume I of this new Routledge collection of major works provide a comprehensive overview of the postwar history of Japanese popular culture. Topics include the emergence of popular culture as an academic field in Japan; the genesis of manga and anime; analyses of various cultural artefacts and phenomena, such as censorship and popular culture during the postwar occupation; the 1970s origin of kawaii culture; and street fashion in the 1980s. Volumes II and III, meanwhile, focus on the twenty-first century. Over the last decade especially, the transnational presence of Japanese popular culture has accelerated, and with it scholarship on Japanese popular culture has grown in depth and diversity. The themes explored in these volumes include the role of digital technology in popular culture; esoteric cultural artefacts and activities, such as loli fashion, maid cafes, otaku culture, and traditional music reinvented as pop, as well as more conventionally popular products such as anime, TV drama, and shojo manga. Collectively, the volume demonstrates the complex and heterogeneous nature of the Japanese pop-culture landscape in the twenty-first century. The final volume in the collection addresses broader issues associated with Japanese popular culture and globalization. As Japan sought to boost its international 'soft power' via a 'Cool Japan' strategy, the academy began to pay serious attention to the political-economic implications of Japan's pop-culture exports. The soft-power rhetoric has become a significant marker of popular culture in Asia in particular, and Japan's influence regionally has been explored from a number of angles. Along with seminal pieces from Nye, Huat, and Iwabuchi, authors in the first section of Volume IV examine the rise of Japan's pop-culture industry, and investigate the socio-economic and political-economic implications of topics such as 'the Japan Brand', 'Cool Japan', and 'Cute Japan'. In the second section, case studies of soft power are brought to the fore, and analyses of the implications for people and culture are developed. Collectively, the materials gathered in this volume demonstrate the highly mobile and complex nature of the globalization of Japanese popular culture.

This comparative history of the military helicopter doctrines of the major powers since World War II focuses on the last twenty years. This unusual analysis of the decision-making process associated with the use of helicopters in conventional air-land warfare should provoke interest and controversy among students and experts concerned with military strategy. This substantial research study is intended for academics, professionals, policy makers, and all interested in the development of helicopters over the last fifty years. Matthew Allen examines military helicopter doctrines in the United States, former Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France. He describes changes and innovations in the use of helicopters in air-land battle. He also assesses how decisions are made and innovations develop. An appendix summarizes the technical characteristics of helicopters and photographs bring them to life. A bibliography points out the most significant sources for further research; figures clarify the complex decision-making process, and tables provide additional data. A full index makes this rare history accessible.

Internet research spans many disciplines. From the computer or information s- ences, through engineering, and to social sciences, humanities and the arts, almost all of our disciplines have made contributions to internet research, whether in the effort to understand the effect of the internet on their area of study, or to investigate the social and political changes related to the internet, or to design and develop so- ware and hardware for the network. The possibility and extent of contributions of internet research vary across disciplines, as do the purposes, methods, and outcomes. Even the epistemological underpinnings differ widely. The internet, then, does not have a discipline of study for itself: It is a ?eld for research (Baym, 2005), an open environment that simultaneously supports many approaches and techniques not otherwise commensurable with each other. There are, of course, some inhibitions that limit explorations in this ?eld: research ethics, disciplinary conventions, local and national norms, customs, laws, borders, and so on. Yet these limits on the int- net as a ?eld for research have not prevented the rapid expansion and exploration of the internet. After nearly two decades of research and scholarship, the limits are a positive contribution, providing bases for discussion and interrogation of the contexts of our research, making internet research better for all. These 'limits,' challenges that constrain the theoretically limitless space for internet research, create boundaries that give de?nition to the ?eld and provide us with a particular topography that enables research and investigation.

This book, first published in 1995, is about the underside of Japan's economic miracle. It is an account of people who have been forgotten in Japan's push to industrialise in the post-war era: the coal-miners of Chikuho on Japan's southernmost island. The dirty and neglected character of Chikuho is in stark contrast with Japan's prevailing image as an international leader in technology and an affluent, socially cohesive country. As coal industries in industrialised nations around the world are closed down, regions like Chikuho embody the concept of underdevelopment within highly developed societies. Matthew Allen challenges the concepts of industrial harmony, economic foresight, cultural homogeneity and caring political management that dominate much of the literature on Japan. He describes how the people of the coalfields see themselves, providing insights into an aspect of Japanese society that is rarely encountered.

This book is about the underside of Japan's economic miracle. It is an account of people who have been forgotten in Japan's push to industrialize in the postwar era: the coalminers of Chikuho on Japan's southernmost island. The dirty and neglected character of Chikuho is in stark contrast with Japan's prevailing image as an international leader in technology and an affluent, socially cohesive country. The book challenges the concepts of industrial harmony, cultural homogeneity and caring government that dominate much of the literature on Japan.