Financial management continues to change at a rapid pace. Advancements are occurring not only in the theory of financial management but also in its real-world practice. One result has been for financial management to take on a greater strategic focus, as managers struggle to create value within a corporate setting. In the process of value creation, financial managers are increasingly supple…
The strategic management process (see Figure 1.1) is the full set of commitments, decisions, and actions required for a firm to achieve strategic competitiveness and earn above-average returns. The firm’s first step in the process is to analyze its external and internal environments to determine its resources, capabilities, and core competencies— the sources of its “strategic inputs.…
Welcome to the first chapter of our journey into the world of data protection through Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM). This chapter will provide you with an overview of DPM. After reading this chapter you will understand what DPM is and the basis of what it can and cannot do. We will go through DPM Architecture, pricing of DPM, DPM downfalls, compare DPM to other back up solutions, DPM …
Given the dramatic advances in the transportation and information technologies that have allowed the world economy to globalize over the last few decades, experts have begun to speculate on whether the world is now “flat” (Friedman 2007) or perhaps “spiky” (Florida 2008). Previous thinkers supposed that globalization would lead to creative workers being drawn to specific cities and regi…
When I first wrote this book, I was living in Houston. After I met Nerissa, I moved to Austin. I then began the process of manifesting our dream home. After a few months, we found a beautiful two-acre, two-story, Hill Country property with wandering wild deer and rabbit, and an outside pool, between Austin and San Antonio, in a small spiritual-artistic community called Wimberley, Texas. …
The Android mobile operating system was first introduced in the fall of 2008 as part of the G1 handset. Android began to gain some momentum as major device manufac- tures like Motorola, HTC, Sony, and Samsung adopted Android to run on their hard- ware. As the number of available devices began to grow (allowing mobile customers a wide range of choices), the number of Android handsets being activ…
IT organizations are realizing the benefits of infrastructure consolidation and virtualiza- tion—cost savings, operational savings, better posture toward disaster recovery—and the challenges associated. Consolidating infrastructure increases the distance between the remote office worker and the tools they need to ensure productivity—applications, servers, content, and more. Application ac…
Universities are increasingly turning to ‘fashionable’ education programs to attract bright, high-quality students to both under-graduate and post-graduate degree programs. Traditional offerings in technology areas, such as Information Systems and Information Technology are being augmented by newer, more marketable degrees in areas such as eCommerce/eBusiness. This paper analyses the eCo…
It’s an old, tired joke among people in the armed services that “military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.” And yet, intelligence in the mili- tary sense — accurate, timely information that can help produce an effective strategy — is more important these days than ever before. As organizations continue to pursue their goals in an economy that seems more like a battle- field, …
Microarray technology has its roots in high-throughput parallel synthesis of biomacromole- cules, combined with combinatorial science. In principle, the preparation of arrays can be performed either by in situ synthesis of biomacromolecules on solid substrates or by spotting of ex situ synthesized biomacromolecules onto the substrate surface. The application of microarrays includes spatial addr…
If each of us could get all the food, clothing, and toys we want without working, no one would study economics. Unfortunately, most of the good things in life are scarce—we can’t all have as much as we want. Thus scarcity is the mother of economics. Microeconomics is the study of how individuals and firms make themselves as well off as possible in a world of scarcity and the consequences o…
This book presents a critical view of the current state of commercial mass media in America. It examines the media through the lens of the public policy debates about limits on the number and type of media outlets that a single firm can own. The focal point is the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) policy that prevents a television station from owning or being owned by a newspaper in …
Our approach in this book will be to use statistics and social science theory to mine social media and we'll use R as our base programming language. We will walk you through many important and recent developments in the field of social media. We'll cover advanced topics such as Open Authorization (OAuth), Twitter's OAuth API, Facebook's graph API, and so on, along with some interesting referenc…
jBPM is a leading open source BPM and workflow platform whose development is sponsored by Red Hat under Apache Software License (ASL) licensing. The jBPM product has been around for almost 10 years; its strongest points rely on flexibility, extensibility, and lightness, and it is a modular, cross-platform pure Java engine that is BPMN2 compliant. It features a robust management console and deve…