Retirement risk management must be dramatically overhauled if workers and retirees are to better prepare themselves to meet future retirement challenges. Recent economic events including the global financial crisis have upended expectations about what pension and endowment fund managers can do. Employers and employees have found it difficult to make pension contributions, despite drops in retirement plan funding. In many countries, government social security systems are also facing insolvency. These factors, coupled with an aging population and rising longevity, are giving rise to serious questions about the future of retirement in America and around the world. This volume explores how workers and firms can reassess the risks associated with retirement saving and dissaving, to identify creative adjustments to adapt to these new risks and realities. One area explored is the key role for financial literacy and education programs. In addition, those acting as plan sponsors and fiduciaries must reconsider pension design to help them better address the new realities. Also novel financial products are described that can help with the design of retirement plans. Experts provide new research and offer policy recommendations, illustrating how retirement plans can be amended to better meet the retirement needs of workers and firms. This volume is an important addition to the Pensions Research Council / Oxford Univeristy Press series and to the current debate on retirement security.

Understanding the historical development of pensions is critical to the future of retirement systems around the world. "A History of Public Sector Pensions in the United States" offers a comprehensive assessment of the political and financial dimensions of public sector pensions from the colonial period until the emergence of modern retirement plans in the twentieth century. The authors emphasize how retirement plans can help achieve human resource objectives, how public sector pension policy has sometimes been influenced by other government objectives, and how early pension plans were funded.After discussing the economics of retirement plans, A History of "Public Sector Pensions in the United States" reviews the history of European retirement plans, beginning with their use in the Roman Empire, and then moves on to early American pension systems. The authors explore the development and management of U.S. army and navy pension plans during the nineteenth century, drawing on original records of participants, retirees, and plan finances. They document the struggle to establish a federal civil service retirement system and trace the growth of state and local retirement plans. This history is inextricably linked to broader developments in U.S. financial markets, offering rich insights into political debates, including current debates surrounding plan design and plan funding."A History of Public Sector Pensions in the United States" will be of significant interest to financial market and pension experts, labor and corporate pension sponsors, policymakers, public sector plan participants, and others who want to know how and why pensions emerged.

Colleges and universities across the country face huge challenges as their faculties age, their budgets stagnate, and mandatory retirement becomes a thing of the past. In "To Retire or Not?" the nation's foremost authorities on retirement policy and practice provide a critical assessment of academic labor markets and retirement patterns, explaining how to adjust pension and other incentive programs to ensure proper replenishment of intellectual and human capital. Case studies vividly illustrate how to predict the need for special retirement programs, how to structure voluntary early-out benefit plans, and how age-based retirement incentives work in practice. Recent legal decisions are assessed and critiqued.A recent amendment to the U.S. Age Discrimination in Employment Act ended mandatory retirement for tenured faculty at colleges and universities across the country. This law let individual faculty members enjoy an economic benefit enjoyed by almost all other American workers: they could choose to continue working past age 70 or "sell" the benefit back to their universities in exchange for earlier retirement. At the same time, however, educational administrators were faced with a faculty bulge created by the expansion of the professorate in the 1960s and early '70s, and the so-called "surplus army" of Ph.D.s of the 1980s. Colleges and universities everywhere are now faced with the higher costs of retaining senior professors instead of hiring entry-level replacements at lower salaries.

Building an astronomical telescope offers the amateur astronomer an exciting challenge, with the possibility of ending up with a far bigger and better telescope than could have been afforded otherwise. In the past, the starting point has always been the grinding and polishing of at least the primary mirror, a difficult and immensely time-consuming process. But now that the Internet has brought us together in a global village, purchasing off-the-shelf goods such as parabolic mirrors, eyepieces, lenses, and telescope tubes, is possible. There are also a vast number of used mirrors and lenses out there, and it is now possible to track them down almost anywhere in the world. Online stores and auction houses have facilitated commerce regarding all sorts of useful optical components at a reasonable price. This is a book about making telescopes from available parts. It provides guidance on where to look and what to look for in selecting items useful for telescope making and explains how to assemble these components to produce an excellent instrument on a tight budget. At one time, many amateurs made their own telescopes from home-made parts. In today's rushed world, that has almost become a lost art. The Internet offers a wonderful alternative to either buying a pricey scope fully assembled or making your own from scratch.

This book explores how rising pension and healthcare costs, along with workforce aging, are affecting pension and retirement planning around the world. Many middle-aged workers now realize that they will have to work longer than intended, as they begin to recognize that their retirement resources will be inadequate to finance retirement consumption. Volatile capital markets, rising medical-care costs, and low saving rates make retirement behavior and policy a moving target. Olivia Mitchell, executive director of The Pension Research Council at Wharton, and Robert L. Clark, Professor of Business Management and Economics at North Carolina State University, explore these themes with colleagues, touching on a diverse set of issues ranging from employment trends to pension accounting and investment, to retirement system overhaul. They illustrate how employers are actively reformulating the meaning of work and retirement, seeking to encourage more people to work longer than ever before in the face of projected labor shortages. At the same time, public and private trust in traditional pension offerings is rapidly eroding, as companies alter, amend, and terminate their conventional plans in the face of poor investment performance and new methods of pension accounting. Experts from the UK, the US, Japan, Sweden, and Canada offer international perspectives on the evolving institutions of retirement practice. This book provides readers a range of insights and strategies not available in other volumes, and it represents an invaluable addition to the PRC/OUP series. It will be particularly valuable for managers working toward more efficient pension plans; to scholars and policymakers seeking to maximize pension design and effectiveness; and to actuaries and tax specialists concerned with pension regulation. The Pension Research Council at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania was founded 50 years ago to encourage research and teaching on pensions and retirement security. Council projects address the long-term issues that underlie contemporary concerns and seek to broaden public understanding of these complex arrangements through research into their social, economic, legal, actuarial, and financial foundations of privately and publicly-provided benefits.

This monograph addresses how combined arms organizations should be formed in our Army today. Specifically, it focuses on the question, "what arms, if any, should be combined organically at battalion level?" This issue is important because our AirLand Battle doctrine considers combined arms to be essential to winning on the modern battlefield. Therefore, we should investigate the best means by which to maximize the potential of the organizations. The monograph first examines the theoretical foundation for combined arms. Next, both historical and contemporary evidence are examined to derive a set of criteria that can be used to analyze the four selected arms: infantry, armor, artillery, and engineer in terms of the AirLand battlefield environment. The five selected criteria are frequency of interaction, competence of commander to synchronize the effects of weapon systems, scarcity of resources, cope of tactical missions, and similarity in range and mobility. These criteria are key factors that should be used whenever determining how an organization should be structured organically. Conclusions concerning the structure of a combined arms battalion are drawn from an analysis of these dominant criteria. This monograph concludes that infantry and armor are the only two arms that should be combined organically at battalion level. By combining these two arms permanently, it is almost certain that the combat potential of the organizations will increase.

There are many sources of information on the stock market. The problem is that there is too much information, and that it does not come in the right form. This book teaches how to process information and decide when to buy and sell common stock.

"My Bittersweet Charlie" is shocking. It was intended to be. It is also funny, frightening, poignant, and tender. Above all, it is tragic as only real life can be.
The novel begins with Dr. Doug Larson, a university professor, writing and delivering to Miss Charlie Johnston, an elementary school teacher, an angry and hurtful letter telling her to pick up her furniture from his house and get out of his life. Doug and Charlie met almost three years earlier when she took a graduate class which he was teaching, and the two have lived with each other--off and on--for the past two and one-half years.
Charlie is 25 years of age, beautiful, bright, charming, athletic, competitive, manipulative, sexual, and impulsive. Charlie is also manic-depressive, perhaps with schizophrenic tendencies, and drinks excessively when she is depressed. During her drinking binges, Charlie is quite promiscuous.
In telling Charlie's story, the author delves deeply into Charlie's mental health disorders as they manifest themselves throughout the entire book. Charlie has frequent discussions with Doug about her visits to her different psychiatrists. One of Charlie's psychiatrists from whom Charlie sought treatment and another psychiatrist agreed that "man-woman" relationships with Charlie were like tennis matches. . . his advantage. . . deuce. . . her advantage. . . and win. . . match . . . game over. . . and once Charlie had eliminated all the obstacles, she was then ready to move on to the next relationship. There were two obstacles in Charlie's relationship with Doug: Carole, Doug's estranged wife, and Sheri, his present girlfriend. The conclusion to the story is both dramatic and shocking.
Of equal importance is the beautiful, tender and heart-wrenching love story that is depicted in the book. In addition, the novel is sprinkled with an abundance of humor.
The moon, the rose in the wine bottle, and the lyrics to Kris Kristofferson's song, "For the Good Times" are key elements to this story.
"My Bittersweet Charlie" should be read by those who have known love and given their all in an attempt to help the one they love.
Author's Note: Hopefully this novel will provide readers with a better understanding of two of the most devastating mental health disorders: manic-depression (bipolar) and schizophrenia.

Line by Line comparison of all of the words that have been subtracted and added from the original King James Version of the Holy Bible.

This study aims to identify and describe the principle economic issues associated with individual and population ageing. In addition, the study surveys and assess the existing knowledge - including research by scholars of many countries and different fields in the social sciences - of the economic and social problems associated with ageing. Although the study covers a wide range of issues, it focuses primarily on the economic complexities of individual ageing and the macro-economic problems that arise from age-structure changes in the population. The authors, giving examples from many countries, trace the development of concern for population ageing and examine theoretical concepts and changing demographic conditions. Cross-national econometric studies are cited along with time series and cross-sectional research on individual countries. In assessing the state of the literature on the economic problems of ageing, the authors have attempted to indicate fruitful avenues for further research.