In summer of 2010, the first author (HL) visited the second author (XL) at Lanzhou University, China, and chaired the dissertation defense for XL’s two graduating doctoral students. During the visit, we discussed that a large reliability meeting (MMR2011) was scheduled to be held in Beijing in the summer of 2011 and that the meeting would attract some stochastic inequality people, including…
Risk assessment and management are core issues in social work across a range of settings and contexts. Responding to the risks posed by others, reducing risks to vulnerable persons and managing risks to themselves are all in a day’s work for busy practitioners. Managers and practitioners are routinely confronted with risk decisions, and such decisions are often central to the allocation of re…
The most well-known social software applications are weblogs, wikis, social networking sites and instant messaging. Social networking at a high level is described as the convergence of technologies that make it possible for individuals to easily communicate, share information, and form new communities online. But the big question today is not what social networking is, but rather what it means …
As of this writing, we (Brad, Ozh, and Justin), have publicly released 50 plugins, which have been downloaded nearly one million times, and that ’s not counting private client work. This is a precious combined experience that we are going to leverage to teach you how to code your own plugins for WordPress by taking a hands - on approach with practical examples and real life situations you wi…
This chapter identified SharePoint 2010 as an extremely flexible solution platform that is capable of replacing several legacy document management systems. However, before that can happen, careful planning should take place to ensure that the end user experience is improved, not degraded. Also, the path for migrating content from a legacy solution to SharePoint 2010 should be identified beca…
Globalization has played a crucial role in the expansion of supply chains across countries and continents into ever-changing worldwide networks. Manufacturers, driven by the desire to produce cost-effective, high-quality products are continuing to extend their supply-demand chains, introducing new challenges to these networks. This seismic shift has lead to the phasing out of internal logistic…
Workforce development is an overarching term used to describe a wide range of education, training and professional development activities carried out in the workplace. In this series of two books, we have endeavoured to follow the emergence of workforce development from initial concept to final application. In our first book, Workforce development: Perspective and issues, we brought together a …
Sovereign debt markets have demonstrated incredible resil- ience despite a century of dramatic political and economic up- heaval. Among the most remarkable aspects of the contemporary debt regime is the degree to which expectations of borrowers remain rela- tively uniform even in the face of such major shifts. These basic expecta- tions resolve into one background rule: sovereign borrowers mus…
In 2009, I published an article I thought would amuse me and no one else: a mathematical model of zombies. The idea was to examine a hypothetical zombie apocalypse through the lens of disease modelling: that is, using the same types of differential equations I use every day to examine the spread of infections such as HIV, malaria, human papillomavirus and a variety of tropical diseases. What …
Actuarial Science is a discipline with a fascinating blend of traditional approaches, developed over many decades of experience, and modern techniques which are available thanks to the fast development of statistical, computational, and mathematical tools, new insights into dependence modeling, analysis of big data, financial engineering, risk management, and insurance economics. At the same ti…
Information is the lifeblood of any organization. Without good information, poor decisions are made, risks are not recognized and communicated, and valuable information is lost or stolen. Cyber risks are increasing, and these risks are seriously impacting organizations. Without good information risk management, customer trust and loyalties as well as the organization’s reputation and brand ar…
All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and Karl S. Pister and Rita Olsen Pister,dated January 15, 2002, and August 28, 2002, respectively. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript,including the right to publish,are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the Univers…
Today, many global supply chains in process industries are neither equipped nor orchestrated to cope effectively with the new VUCA world we are facing. VUCA—volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity—is an acronym that originated in the military back in the late 1990s and was quickly adapted to the business environment. It describes precisely the conditions of increasing variability…
When I studied at Novosibirsk State University (Russian) I was lucky to have such brilliant teachers in mathematics as M.A. Lavrentyev, S.L. Sobolev, A.I. Mal’tsev, Yu.G. Reshetnyak and others. But it were L.V. Ovsyannikov’s lectures in Ordinary differential equations, Partial differential equations, Gas dynamics and Group properties of differential equations that were of the most benefit f…
Many projects fail because of the simplest of causes. You don’t have to be a genius to deliver a project on time, nor do you have to be steeped a mystical project management methodology to be a project manager. If an averagely competent person can’t deliver a project successfully after reading this then I will run buck naked through Times Square on my 75th birthday. See if I don’t!
We decided to get this book published to help the larger audience make sense of the discussion on climate change and its implications for economic growth in In- dia. Issues linking climate change and economic growth are now at the centre of discussions regarding climate friendly development strategies which are increas- ingly becoming a necessity rather than an option for late-industrialising c…
There are a lot of personal productivity and self help methods out there but where do they all fit in and which one should I choose? I have found that none of these techniques cover all aspects of becoming an effective person and I think there is a good reason for that. Personal effectiveness is a huge topic and requires a variety of skills. In this mini book I will step back and introduce the…
Peninsular Malaysia, then known as the Federation of Malaya, gained independence from Britain in 1957. An expanded federation of Malaysia was formed in September 1963 by federating the Federation of Malaya with the former Straits Settlements island colony of Singapore to the south of Malaya, Sabah (previously run by the British North Borneo Company, set up by royal charter) and the former Bro…