It has been my privilege to be much acquainted with the author of this book. Our friendship has been part of our lives. For years, destiny pushed us to different careers and kept us geographically apart, yet the relationship has never diminished. We were also blessed with a similar curiosity to learn more of who we are. After retirement, these questions became more dominant. As time went on without even thinking of publishing, our observations were meant to be for family only. This happened at a time when we were miles apart; we never shared these urgings for writing our historical observations with each other. Mr. Ramirez’s research on this issue started long before we had touched bases with each other. In the meantime, off and on, I was doing the same thing. We navigated the same waters but in different boats. As such, we never compared notes. Later on he confided to me that he still did not feel prepared to share his knowledge with the rest of us. I disagreed! Finally, he started writing and revealing much of our historical data. Our history is replete with toil, sacrifices, and glory; but his opinions are respected. The events narrated in this book add greater clarity to a beautiful past. Its contents are not only stimulating—they also make us proud.
This book provides clear information and guidance on how to do scenario planning to support strategy and public policy. The book describes the Oxford Scenario Planning Approach (OSPA), an intellectually rigorous and practical methodolgy.
The world is increasingly turbulent and complex, awash with disruptions, tipping points and knock-on effects. These range from the impacts of warfare in the Middle East on energy futures, investment and global currencies to the vast and unpredictable impacts of climate change. All this threatens established strategic planning methods.This book is for business and organizational leaders who want and need to think through how best to deal with increasing turbulence, and with the complexity and uncertainty that come with it. The authors explain in clear language how future orientation and, specifically, modern scenario techniques help to address these conditions. They draw on examples from a wide variety of international settings and circumstances including large corporations, inter-governmental organizations, small firms and municipalities. Readers will be inspired to try out scenario approaches themselves to better address the turbulence that affects them and others with whom they work, live and do business. A key feature of the book is the exchange of insights across the academic-practitioner divide. Scholars of scenario thinking and organizational environments will appreciate the authors' conceptual and methodological advances. What has previously remained jargon only accessible to the highest level of corporate and government futures planners here becomes comprehensible to a wider business and practitioner community.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Richard Normann and his colleagues developed an original approach to strategy, based on seeing value as inherently co-produced in systems. Their 'Value Creating Systems' approach was a strong contrast to the idea of 'competitive advantage' that defined strategy at the time. The approach focuses on the design of the 'offerings' that define relationships among co-producers, and which connect actors in fields which transcend traditional industry borders. In the contemporary networked world, where consumers become co-producers, the ideas Normann and his colleagues developed towards strategy are uniquely effective in explaining and guiding practice. Strategy for a Networked World revisits and further develops these ideas. It is co-authored by two long-standing colleagues of Normann, Rafael RamIrez and Ulf Mannervik, who have successfully applied these ideas to their own consultancy practice. This book provides the theoretical basis for strategies of value co-creation, an accessible methodology and practical guidance, case studies of Facebook and the World Economic Forum, and examples of successful collaborations with organisations such as EDF, Scania, SCA and Shell. Designed to advise strategists and business developers working in uncertain, complex and turbulent contexts, it is suitable both for practitioners and for academics, combining theory and the means to turn it into practice. It will also serve as a valuable contribution to MBA classes and towards the development of more effective business strategies.
Every man who enters the custody of the Indiana Department of Corrections does so in the same condition—naked as the day he was born. Under the wary eyes of prison guards, he and fellow inmates must shower and then de-louse one another. Naked, but not alone, they emerge into their new existence as wards of the DOC. Some of these inmates will spend their prison lives behind tall fences with many restrictions on their activities; others may be released to work outside the prison walls and allowed many liberties. Their fate depends upon the nature and extent of their crimes and the availability of space in the appropriate facility. Prison Profiles delineates the profiles of both the prisons and the prisoners who inhabit them. The book describes the classification system used by the Indiana Department of Correction to determine which inmate is assigned to which institution by following six typical male offenders through the process. Portraying a wide variety of criminals and their crimes, Prison Profiles shows how their sentences may be served under vastly different circumstances. Profiling the facilities, the work investigates the great contrast in levels of security and custody maintained at different types of penal institutions. By studying the backgrounds of the six inmates, monitoring their progress through the classification and assignment procedures, and then witnessing their daily lives behind bars, the reader is introduced to the complex issues involved in the administration of the criminal justice system. The timely topics of crime control, inmate treatment, prison overcrowding and cost containment are addressed. A glossary is provided to explain the vocabulary of the professionals and the vernacular of the prisoners. The following chapter summaries describe what readers may expect to encounter as they examine the profiles. Chapter One: The Reception and Diagnostic Center Follow the fortunes of typical prisoners from fumigation to indoctrination. See how an inmate is assimilated into the prison system from the delousing shower to the psychological testing. Learn about the security levels and custody designations which range from open camps to isolated cells. Find out how the Indiana Department of Corrections decides which prisoner goes where. Chapter Two: Classification Meet a Classification Specialist and look over his shoulder as he conducts interviews with and reviews paperwork of three typical offenders—a drunk driver, a troubled teen, and a middle-aged child abuser. See how the specialist considers the nature of the offense, past criminal history, and test results to determine ideal placement of the offender. Learn why most inmates serve only half of their sentences. Chapter Three: Classification Continued Spend another day with the Classification Specialist, this time in the company of three offenders who spell major trouble for the system—a street-wise drug dealer with diabetes, a quiet murderer with a psychosis, and a violent gangster with a trigger-hot temper. Read their psychological records and learn how staff members try to alert one another to the potential problems they pose. Chapter Four: The Farm Follow the drunk driver to one of the state’s oldest prisons. Learn about the history of the penal system in Indiana--how inmates lived in tents while making the bricks to build dor??????? ??? ?????????? ??? ????????? ??? ???? ?? ????? ?????????? ??? ????? ? ??????????? ?????? ?? ?? ??????? ?? ?? ??? ?????? ??????? ?? ??????? ????????? ????????? ??????? ??? ??????????? ?? ??? ???? ????????? ?? ?????? ?????? ??????? ?? ??? ????????? ????????????????? ????? ??? ???????????????? ????? ??????? ?????? ?????????? ???????? ??????? ??? ????? ??????
The goal of this monograph is to answer the question, is it possible to solve the dynamics problem inside the configuration space instead of the phase space? By introducing a proper class of vector field – the Cartesian vector field – given in a Riemann space, the authors explore the connections between the first order ordinary differential equations (ODEs) associated to the Cartesian vector field in the configuration space of a given mechanical system and its dynamics. The result is a new perspective for studying the dynamics of mechanical systems, which allows the authors to present new cases of integrability for the Suslov and Veselova problem; establish the relation between the Cartesian vector field and the integrability of the geodesic flow in a special class of homogeneous surfaces; discuss the importance of the Nambu bracket in the study of first order ODEs; and offer a solution of the inverse problem in celestial mechanics.
It has been my privilege to be much acquainted with the author of this book. Our friendship has been part of our lives. For years, destiny pushed us to different careers and kept us geographically apart, yet the relationship has never diminished. We were also blessed with a similar curiosity to learn more of who we are. After retirement, these questions became more dominant. As time went on without even thinking of publishing, our observations were meant to be for family only. This happened at a time when we were miles apart; we never shared these urgings for writing our historical observations with each other. Mr. Ramirez's research on this issue started long before we had touched bases with each other. In the meantime, off and on, I was doing the same thing. We navigated the same waters but in different boats. As such, we never compared notes. Later on he confided to me that he still did not feel prepared to share his knowledge with the rest of us. I disagreed! Finally, he started writing and revealing much of our historical data. Our history is replete with toil, sacrifices, and glory; but his opinions are respected. The events narrated in this book add greater clarity to a beautiful past. Its contents are not only stimulating they also make us proud.
This book is dedicated to study the inverse problem of ordinary differential equations, that is it focuses in finding all ordinary differential equations that satisfy a given set of properties. The Nambu bracket is the central tool in developing this approach. The authors start characterizing the ordinary differential equations in R^N which have a given set of partial integrals or first integrals. The results obtained are applied first to planar polynomial differential systems with a given set of such integrals, second to solve the 16th Hilbert problem restricted to generic algebraic limit cycles, third for solving the inverse problem for constrained Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanical systems, fourth for studying the integrability of a constrained rigid body. Finally the authors conclude with an analysis on nonholonomic mechanics, a generalization of the Hamiltonian principle, and the statement an solution of the inverse problem in vakonomic mechanics.
It has been called the most dangerous gang in American history. In Los Angeles alone it is responsible for over 100 homicides per year. Although it has fewer than 300 members, it controls a 40,000-strong street army that is eager to advance its agenda. It waves the flag of the Black Hand and its business is murder. Although known on the streets for over fifty years, the Mexican Mafia has flown under the radar of public awareness and has flourished beneath a deep cover of secrecy. Members are forbidden even to acknowledge its existence. For the first time in its history, the Mexican Mafia is now getting the attention it has been striving to avoid. In this briskly written and thoroughly researched book, Tony Rafael looks at the birth and the blood-soaked growth of this criminal enterprise through the eyes of the victims, the dropouts, the cops and DAs on the front lines of the war against the Mexican Mafia. The first book ever published on the subject, Southern Soldiers is a pioneering work that unveils the operations of this California prison gang and describes how it grew from a small clique of inmates into a transnational criminal organization. As the first prison gang ever to project its power beyond prison walls, the Mexican Mafia controls virtually every Hispanic neighborhood in Southern California and is rapidly expanding its influence into the entire Southwest, across the East Coast, and even into Canada. Riding a wave of unchecked immigration and seemingly beyond the reach of law enforcement, the Mexican Mafia is poised to become the Cosa Nostra of twenty-first-century America.
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