For all courses in construction accounting and construction finance, and for courses in engineering economics taught in construction management programs. This book helps construction professionals and construction management students master the principles of financial management, and adapt and apply them to the challenge of profitably managing construction companies. It integrates content that has traditionally been taught through separate accounting, finance, and engineering economics texts. Students learn how to account for a construction company's financial resources; how to manage its costs, profits, and cash flows; how to evaluate different sources of funding a company's cash needs; and how to quantitatively analyze financial decisions. Readers gain hands-on experience through 220 example problems and over 390 practice problems, many of them based on situations actually encountered by the author. This edition adds more than 100 new discussion questions, and presents financial equations and accounting transactions more visually to support more intuitive learning.

This book provides a careful examination of the possible influence of birth order on political achievement and behavior. The authors look at American presidents, Supreme Court justices, United States senators and representatives, and the careers of an entire West Point class. For a comparative dimension, they also study British Prime Ministers, U.N. Secretaries General, post-Renaissance popes, leaders of the U.S.S.R., and great generals through the ages. What the authors find is that there is no measurable relationship between birth order (and being first born) and political achievement and behavior. These findings cast considerable doubt on the long standing belief that birth order has an important impact on either achievement or behavior. The authors clarify that very few studies suggesting such a relationship do not stand up under careful scrutiny. This basic conclusion and other curious findings from the study make Birth Order And Political Behavior insightful reading for almost any behavioral scientist. The book will also be relevant to courses in child development, clinical psychology, psychiatry, political science, anthropology, and sociology.

Public finance is crucial to a country's economic growth, yet successful reform of public finances has been rare. Ethiopia is an example of a country that undertook comprehensive reform of its core financial systems, independent of the IMF and the World Bank, and successfully transformed itself into one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa. With Ethiopia's twelve-year reform as its guiding case study, this book presents new analytical frameworks to help governments develop better financial reforms. It shows in detail how four core financial systems-budgeting, accounting, planning, and financial information systems-can be reformed. One of the principal findings presented is that governments must establish basic public financial administration before moving to more sophisticated public financial management. Other key findings include the identification of four strategies of reform (recognize, improve, change, and sustain), the centrality of ongoing learning to the process of reform, and the importance of government ownership of reform. This book will be of interest to researchers and policymakers concerned with public finance, developmental economics, and African studies.

Somit and Peterson seek to explain two apparently contradictory yet well-established political phenomena: First, throughout human history, the vast majority of political societies have been authoritarian. Second, notwithstanding this pattern, from time to time, democracies do emerge and some even have considerable stability. A neo-Darwinian approach can help make sense of these observations. Humans—social primates—have an inborn bias toward authoritarian life, based on their tendency to engage in dominance behavior and the formation of dominance hierarchies. Reinforcing this bias is an impulse toward obedience. These factors are associated with the propensity of humans to accept authoritarian systems. Nonetheless, the authors argue, conditions of material abundance combined with another human characteristic—indoctrinability—can foster the emergence and maintenance of democracies. Somit and Peterson assert that an understanding of human nature from an evolutionary perspective can help to explain how and why political systems have developed. They conclude by pointing to policy implications that might enhance the odds of formation and continuation of democratic forms of government. Students and scholars of political science and philosophy, sociology, and human biology will find this an intriguing study.

The iPhone and iPod touch have provided all software developers with a level playing fielddevelopers working alone have the same access to consumers as multinational software publishers. Very cool indeed To make your application stand out from the crowd, though, it has to have that something extra. You must learn the skills to take your apps from being App Store filler to download chart-topping blockbusters.

Developers with years of experience helped write this book. Spend some time understanding their code and why they took the approach they did. You will find the writing, illustrations, code, and sample applications second to none. No matter what type of application you are writing, you will find something in this book to help you make your app that little bit cooler.

The book opens with Wolfgang Ante, the developer behind the Frenzic puzzle game, showing how timers, animation, and intelligence are used to make game play engaging. It moves on to Rogue Amoeba's Mike Ash explaining how to design a network protocol using UDP, and demonstrating its use in a peer-to-peer applicationa topic not normally for the faint of heart, but explained here in a way that makes sense to mere mortals. Gary Bennett then covers the important task of multithreading. Multithreading can be used to keep the user interface responsive while working on other tasks in the background. Gary demonstrates how to do this and highlights traps to avoid along the way.

Next up, Canis Lupus (aka Matthew Rosenfeld ) describes the development of the Keynote-controlling application Stage Hand, how the user interface has evolved, and the lessons he has learned from that experience. Benjamin Jackson then introduces two open source libraries: cocos2d, for 2D gaming; and Chipmunk, for rigid body physics (think collisions). He describes the development of Arcade Hockey, an air hockey game, and explains some of the code used for this.

Neil Mix of Pandora Radio reveals the science behind processing streaming audio. How do you debug what you can't see? Neil guides you through the toughest challenges, sharing his experience of what works and what to watch out for when working with audio. Finally, Steven Peterson demonstrates a comprehensive integration of iPhone technologies. He weaves Core Location, networking, XML, XPath, and SQLite into a solid and very useful application.

Software development can be hard work. Introductory books lay the foundation, but it can be challenging to understand where to go next. This book shows some of the pieces that can be brought together to make complete, cool applications. What you'll learn Add multitouch controls to your applications. Detect motion for spatial application interaction. Build applications that use both Wi-Fi and cellular connections. Understand and use GPS information for geo-location. Use the built-in microphone and play sounds and alerts. Optimize your use of limited screen real estate. Who this book is for

All iPhone application developers with any level of experience or coming from any development platform. Table of Contents Designing a Simple, Frenzic-Style Puzzle Game Mike Ash's Deep Dive Into Peer-to-Peer Networking Doing Several Things at Once: Performance Enhancements with Threading All Fingers and Thumbs: Multitouch Interface Design and Implementation Physics, Sprites, and Animation with the cocos2d-iPhone Framework Serious Streaming Audio the Pandora Radio Way Going the Routesy Way with Core Location, XML, and SQLite

Public finance is crucial to a country's economic growth, yet successful reform of public finances has been rare. Ethiopia is an example of a country that undertook comprehensive reform of its core financial systems, independent of the IMF and the World Bank, and successfully transformed itself into one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa. With Ethiopia's twelve-year reform as its guiding case study, this book presents new analytical frameworks to help governments develop better financial reforms. It shows in detail how four core financial systems-budgeting, accounting, planning, and financial information systems-can be reformed. One of the principal findings presented is that governments must establish basic public financial administration before moving to more sophisticated public financial management. Other key findings include the identification of four strategies of reform (recognize, improve, change, and sustain), the centrality of ongoing learning to the process of reform, and the importance of government ownership of reform. This book will be of interest to researchers and policymakers concerned with public finance, developmental economics, and African studies.

Seven decades of the intense Steelers-Browns rivalry.Football historians regard the games between the Cleveland Browns and the Pittsburgh Steelers as the basis for one of the greatest rivalries in NFL history. Authors Richard Peterson and Stephen Peterson, in telling the engaging story of these teams who play only a two-hour drive along the turnpike from each other, explore the reasons behind this intense rivalry and the details of its ups and downs for each team and its fans. The early rivalry was a tale of Browns dominance and Steelers ineptitude. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Browns-led by Hall of Famers ranging from Otto Graham and Marion Motley in the 1950s to Jim Brown, Bobby Mitchell, and Leroy Kelly in the 1960s-won 32 of the first 40 games played against the Steelers. In the 1970s, the Steelers-led by Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris, and the Steel Curtain-finally turned things around. When the AFL and NFL merged in 1970, Art Rooney agreed to move the Steelers only if the Browns also moved into the AFC and played in the same division so that their rivalry would be preserved. Despite the fierce rivalry, these cities and their fans have much in common, most notably the working-class nature of the Steeler Nation and the Dawg Pound and their passion, over the decades, for their football teams. Many fans are able to regularly making the 130-mile trip to watch the games. From the first game on October 7, 1950, where Cleveland defeated the Steelers 30-17, to last season's infamous helmet incident with Mason Rudolph and Myles Garrett, the rivalry remains as intense as ever.

For beginning to intermediate courses in construction estimating in two- and four-year construction management programs. A step-by-step, hands-on introduction to commercial and residential estimating Construction Estimating with Excel, 3/e, introduces readers to the fundamental principles of estimating using drawing sets, real-world exercises, and examples. The book moves step-by-step through the estimating process, discussing the art of estimating, the quantity takeoff, how to put costs to the estimate, and how to finalize the bid. As students progress through the text they are shown how Microsoft Excel can be used to improve the estimating process. Because it introduces spreadsheets as a way of increasing estimating productivity and accuracy, the book can help both beginning and experienced estimators improve their skills. The Third Edition gives students a broader understanding of construction estimating with a new chapter discussing the role that estimating plays in different project delivery methods and in the design process and how to use data from RSMeans. To bring the book up to date, the material and equipment costs and labor rates have been updated to reflect current costs, and the discussion of Excel (including the figures) is based on Excel 2016. Additionally, content throughout the book has been updated to align to ACCE and ABET student learning outcomes. Student resources are available on the companion website www.pearsonhighered.com/careersresources/.

This book challenges the conventional idea of what constitutes the physical form of the contemporary city. Observing the absence of extended urban fabrics - the missing urbanism - in the new global cities developed today, it argues that these cities are merely statistical accumulations of density that lack the positive attributes of a genuine urban condition. Cities as urban places cannot be made by individual buildings alone but rather depend on the intertwined combination of an architecture that is bound to the creation of public spaces and streets, and engaged in the structure of urban blocks to form a complex field pattern of interactive solids and voids. Broad in scope, the book explores the nature of the fundamental relationship between architecture and urbanism as one of spatial formation. As an independently designed entity, the city forms the ordering framework in which architecture is partially subordinated to the mutual sustainability of the overall urban fabric. If a new urban architecture is to be an integral constituent of public place making, it must be composed using a radically different paradigm of positive, figurally constructed 'space' rather than the indefinite background of 'anti-space' as exemplified in the chapter on Mies van der Rohe's architectural quest for the ineffable modern void. These two different spatial models are explored in depth in the eponymous article, 'Space and Anti Space,' first published in the Harvard Architectural Review in 1980, which forms the core of the book and postulates that the underlying attitudes toward spatial formation, at both domestic and urban scales, determine our ability to shape place and human experience. In a series of essays, articles and urban projects extensively illustrated by plans, analytic diagrams, and dramatic images, this book makes a visual and verbal argument for the steps that need to be taken to re-urbanise the city in order to achieve an urbanity consisting of multiple discrete places that depend on the essential concept of contained geometrical space. These spatial ideas are illustrated in this book in three proposals: for Rome, in 'Roma Interrotta,' 1979; Paris, the 'Consultation Internationale pour L'Amenagement du Quartier des Halles,' 1980; and New York in the 'World Trade Center Site Innovative Design Study,' 2002.

For beginning to intermediate courses in cost estimating and construction estimation. The only complete, up?-to-?date guide to estimating modern building construction projects Estimating in Building Construction covers all the skills the beginning student needs to estimate simple to moderately complex commercial and residential buildings. Ideal for construction, architecture, and engineering students, the text covers bid preparation from the general contractor's perspective, using a combination of theory and principles, step-?by-?step procedures, instructor resources, and practice problems. The 9th edition aligns the text with the learning outcomes of the major accreditation bodies ABET and ACCE, giving instructors measurable standards for gauging student success. It includes a new chapter on specialty contractors, two rewritten chapters, and reorganized appendices.