Books about Pioneering from Amazon.com

During his fourteen years as Yale's chief investment officer, David F. Swensen has transformed the management of the university's portfolio Largely by focusing on nonconventional strategies, including a heavy allocation to private equity, Swensen has achieved an annualized return of 16.2 percent, which has propelled Yale's endowment into the top tier of institutional funds. Now, this acknowledged leader of fund managers draws on his experience and deep knowledge of the financial markets to provide a compendium of powerful investment strategies.

Swensen presents an overview of the investment world populated by institutional fund managers, pension fund fiduciaries, investment managers, and trustees of universities, museums, hospitals, and foundations. He offers penetrating insights from his experience managing Yale's endowment, ranging from broad issues of goals and investment philosophy to the strategic and tactical aspects of portfolio management. Swensen's exceptionally readable book addresses critical concepts such as handling risk, selecting investment advisers, and negotiating the opportunities and pitfalls in individual asset classes. Fundamental investment ideas are illustrated by real-world concrete examples, and each chapter contains strategies that any manager can put into action.

At a time when it is becoming increasingly difficult to cope with the relentless challenges provided by today's financial markets, Swensen's book is an indispensable roadmap for creating a successful investment program for every institutional fund manager. Any student of markets will benefit from Pioneering Portfolio Management..
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Researchers have shown that survivors of accidents, disaster, and childhood trauma often endure life-long symptoms ranging from anxiety and depression to unexplained physical pain, fatigue, illness, and harmful "acting out" behaviors reflecting these painful events. Today, millions in both the bodywork and the psychotherapeutic fields are turning to Peter A. Levine's breakthrough Somatic Experiencing™ methods to effectively overcome these challenges. In Healing Trauma, Dr. Levine gives readers the personal how-to-guide for using the theory he first introduced in his highly acclaimed work, Waking the Tiger..
Price: $9.29 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Web standards are the standard technology specifications enforced by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to make sure that web designers and browser manufacturers are using the same technology syntax. It is important that these implementations are the same throughout the Web, otherwise it becomes a messy proprietary place, and lacks consistency. These standards also allow content to be more compatible with multiple different viewing devices, such as screen readers for people with vision impairments, cell phones, PDFs, etc. HTML, XML, and CSS are all such technologies. This book is your essential guide to understanding the advantages you can bring to your web pages by implementing web standards and precisely how to apply them. Web standards such as XHTML and CSS are now fairly well-known technologies, and they will likely be familiar to you, the web designerindeed, they are all around you on the Web. However, within web standards still lies a challengewhile the browser's support for web standards is steadily increasing, many web developers and designers have yet to discover the real benefits of web standards and respect the need to adhere to them. The real art is in truly understanding the benefits and implementing the standards efficiently. As a simple example of its power, you can use CSS to lay out your pages instead of nesting tablesthis can make file sizes smaller, allowing pages to load faster, ultimately increasing accessibility for all browsers, devices, and web users.

• Use XHTML elements correctly so that your markup is compact and more easily understood.
• Use CSS to style different elements of a web page.
• Lay out pages easily and effectively.
• Compare multiple methods of achieving the same results to make better design choices.
• Learn about advanced web design techniques and their important caveats.

Web Standards Solutions is broken down into 16 short chapters, each covering the theory and practice of different web standards concept and showing multiple solutions to given problems for easy learning. You'll learn about multi-column layouts, using image replacement techniques to your best advantage, making the best use of tables and lists, and many more.This highly modular approach allows you to rapidly digest, understand, and utilize the essentials of web standards..
Price: $19.76 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The thrilling story of the brilliant and audacious pioneers who revolutionized cardiovascular medicine

The history of heart surgery is a fascinating saga. In the dark ages of medicine, physicians commonly prescribed blood letting as a treatment for ridding the vascular system of diabolical elements and bizarre medicaments like brain extracts, and until quite recently, the basic treatment for a heart attack was to lie down and bear it. Within the last century, physicians have evolved from fearing to even touch a living human heart to rebuilding and even transplanting hearts with beguiling, if sometimes dangerous wizardry. Not long ago, cardiac surgery was celebrated as akin to miracle working, yet a new therapeutic age has since taken hold. Today heart attacks can often be stopped in their midst, and astonishing non-invasive surgical techniques regularly eliminate any need for a knife, while clearing vital arteries in just minutes.

Journey Into the Heart traces this epic quest involving a cast of thousands who struggled to solve medical complexities that long boggled the most brilliant minds on earth. David Monagan tells their story as never before, for the first time paying tribute to the daring tactics and outsized personalities of scarcely appreciated pioneers from Oregon to East Germany. The risks some took were hard to fathom: when a promising therapy seemed far too dangerous to perform on a patient, charismatic doctors experimented on themselves. Meanwhile, a multi-billion dollar business involving angioplasty and countless related knifeless procedures charged into life, often overshadowing the noble quest for innovation with a race for profit. The great figures behind these advances have been little chronicled, but their lives encompassed all the triumph and anguish of the last century.

Andreas Gruentzig, an East German “child of the rubble,” took center stage in revolutionizing cardiovascular care, developing the first tiny balloon-tipped probes in his Zurich apartment. Despite harsh skepticism, Gruentzig demonstrated that his gadgets could transform the lives of millions. His findings catapulted him to worldwide fame, and he was nominated for the Nobel Prize. After being lured to Emory University, Gruentzig’s career escalated to dizzying heights, and then concluded tragically with an Icarus- like ending. Journey Into the Heart is a compelling biography and a multi-faceted tale of medical discovery and business intrigue, all centered on the seat of human life. The twentieth century journey to understand the human heart was a saga on par with the race to the moon..
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Your Spiritual Lineage: Researching the Genealogy of Your Soul

—Pioneering a New Understanding of the Origins of Personality Development—

Traditional psychology proposes that personality development begins at birth. Instead this new study proposes that each of us has subconscious memories of past lives that form a much earlier origin. A child prodigy may be selectively “remembering” talents, skills, and accomplishments from a previous lifetime that he is building on early in this one. We are drawn to professions we are familiar with because we’ve done them before, and may choose places to live, visit or vacation because they are pleasant and familiar to us from a past life—walking on our own faded footprints without realizing it.

When one of his students, in conversation, began quoting poetry of Arthur Rimbaud without knowing it, author William E. Bray, began exploring the possibility that his student might have been Rimbaud in a past lifetime. Subsequent research led him to develop a lineage chart showing that the spiritual lineage of Rimbaud stretched back through Andre Breton, Virgil and Alexander the Great. He shows how the adventures of Aeneas would have been based on VirgilÂ’s subconscious memories of his own exploits when he would have been Alcibiades in a past life.

Each chapter leads the reader through an exciting search to discover the past lives of some of the worldÂ’s most important figures. The book is also written as a guide to help the reader learn how to research his own past lives.

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The six women portrayed in this book--Maria Merian (b.1647), Anna Comstock (b.1854), Frances Hamerstrom (b.1907), Rachel Carson (b.1907), Miriam Rothschild (b.1908) and Jane Goodall (b.1934--all grew up to become award-winning scientists, writers and artists, as comfortable with a pen as with a magnifying glass. Often they were discouraged from getting dirty, much less pursuing careers in science. But they all became renowned scientists, frequently the only women in their fields. They overcame opposition and found ways to pass on their vision of how all lives in nature are beautifully connected. Their stories remind us to look and to look harder and then to look again. Under rotten logs or in puddles, there are amazing things to see. .
Price: $4.62 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The cliché is that those who do not learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them. But Thabiti Anyabwile contends that it is not the mistakes we must study; it is the people who have overcome them. So he presents three of the most influential African-American pastors in American history who can teach us what faithful ministry entails..
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Many people who experience psychotic episodes have extreme spiritual encounters: for one person, it may be a sense of a tree's spirit speaking its truth aloud; for others, it could be the sensation of energy beaming from their bodies and communicating with dolphins on a far-off coast. Modern psychiatry usually categorizes these visions as evidence of psychosis, to be treated with antipsychotic medication. But what if these visions were actually extensions of legitimate spiritual encounters or glimpses into the deeper dimensions of the soul?

Author Russell Shorto (Gospel Truth) dares to ask these questions. He even offers evidence of a new movement in psychiatry, in which established doctors are assuming a more holistic approach to psychotic episodes and taking the patient's soul into account. This is not a cavalier dismissal of all that can be gained from appropriate diagnoses of (and medications for) mental illness; rather, it is an impressively researched argument for opening up to the idea of spiritual visions. Citing extensive research and numerous case studies, Shorto helps readers consider the possibility that grandiose spiritual visions aren't necessarily symptoms of mental illness. --Gail Hudson.
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An amazing journey into the beliefs of the Findhorn Community. "A beautiful book, including about 100 wondrous photographs."--Library Journal.
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