Books about Spanning from Amazon.com

Spanning a century of screen wizardry-from the early innovations of the pioneering French fantasist Georges Méliès to the first synthetic TRON images to the cutting-edge technology used in the most recent Star Wars and The Matrix-this fabulous volume pays homage to dazzling visual pyrotechnics and the artists of illusion who created them. This detailed look at the history of these great illusions is presented through interviews with 37 international masters of the art and science of special effects and more than 1,000 spectacular illustrations, nearly all in color.

The monster spewing flames in Godzilla, the flying bicycle in E.T. , the rampaging dinosaurs in Jurassic Park-these are just a few of the cinematic magic moments that have held audiences spellbound over the years. The inventors of such screen legerdemain reveal the huge variety of techniques they employ, from animation, animatronics, makeup, and model-making to the most astounding computer trickery possible today. The book encompasses not only film and television but also theme parks and attractions. As a bonus, the author includes his selection of DVDs with not-to-be-missed special effects. AUTHOR BIO: Pascal Pinteau is a journalist, screenwriter, and special effects designer who has created special effects for commercials, TV shows, and theme parks. Since 1985, he has visited with special effects masters throughout the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Australia..
Price: $15.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Much of the modern-day vision of Santa Claus is owed to the Clement Moore poem "The Night Before Christmas " His description of Saint Nicholas personified the "jolly old elf" known to millions of children throughout the world. However, far from being the offshoot of Saint Nicholas of Turkey, Santa Claus is the last of a longline of what scholars call Wild Men who were worshipped in ancient European fertility rites and came to America through Pennsylvania's Germans. This pagan creature is described from prehistoric times through his various forms "Robin Hood, The Fool, Harlequin, Satan and Robin Goodfellow"into today's carnival and Christmas scenes. In this thoroughly researched work, the origins of Santa Claus are found to stretch back over 50,000 years, jolting the foundation of Christian myths about the jolly old elf..
Price: $29.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Henry Petroski's lyrical history of bridge builders in America is organized around five engineers: James Eads (inventor of the diving bell, which bridged Mississippi at St. Louis); Theodore Cooper (railroad bridge engineer and designer of the ill-fated Quebec Bridge); Gustav Lindenthal (Hell Gate Bridge, New York); Othmar Ammann (George Washington and Verrazano-Narrow bridges); and David Steinman (Mackinac bridge). Petroski's opening and closing chapters, "Imagine" and "Realize," remind us how a bridge starts out as a dream of engineering, but ends as a reality of compromise and maintenance. Edward Tenner says that "The profound contribution of Engineers of Dreams is to remind us that communication across generations may be the most important bridge of all.".
Price: $8.25 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Powerful product, country, and functional silos are jeopardizing companies' marketing efforts. Because ofsilos, firms misallocate resources, send inconsistent messages to the marketplace, and fail to leverage scale economies and successes--all of which can threaten a company's survival.

As David Aaker shows in Spanning Silos, the unfettered decentralization that produces silos is no longer feasible in today's marketplace. It's up to chief marketing officers to break down silo walls to foster cooperation and synergy.

This isn't easy: silo teams guard their autonomy vigorously. As proof of their power, consider the fact that the average CMO tenure is just twenty-three months. How to proceed? Drawing on interviews with CMOs, Aaker explains how to:

• Strength your credibility with silo teams and your CEO
  
• Use cross-functional teams and other strategic linking devices
  
• Foster communication across silos
  
• Select the right CMO role-- from facilitator to strategic captain
  
• Develop common planning processes
  
• Adapt your brand strategy to silo units
  
• Allocate marketing dollars strategically across silos
  
• Develop silo-spanning marketing programs
  

In this age of dynamic markets, new media, and globalization, getting the different parts of your organization to collaborate is more critical--and more difficult--than ever. This book gives you the road map you need to accomplish that feat..
Price: $19.77 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This pioneering work bridges the long-standing gap between biblical studies and theology In BETWEEN TWO HORIZONS nine prominent scholars constructively discuss the relationship of biblical studies to the task of doing theology in our contemporary context. Though serving as an excellent text in its own right, this volume also introduces the forthcoming Two Horizons Commentary series--a completely new kind of commentary on the New Testament designed to reintegrate biblical studies with contemporary theology in the service of the church.

Contributors--Stephen E. Fowl, John Goldingay, Joel B. Green, Trevor Hart, Steve Motyer, John Christopher Thomas, Max Turner, Robert W. Wall, and N.T. Wright..
Price: $16.41 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Network flow optimization analyzes optimization problems on networks; hence, network optimization is reflected in many application fields including transportation, telecommunication, computer networking, financial planning, logistics and supply chain management, energy systems, etc. However, to date, most network optimization problems that have been studied are static network optimization problems. But "real world networks" are time-varying in essence, and therefore any flow within a network must take a certain amount of time to traverse an arc. Moreover, the parameters of "real world networks" may change over time. Problems such as how to plan and control the transmission of flow becomes very important, because waiting at a node, or traveling along a particular arc with different speed, may allow one to catch the best timing along the path; thus, achieving the objective and changing the decision making process. It should be noted that there are a host of decision making problems in practice that should be formulated as optimization models on time-varying networks.

The express purpose of TIME-VARYING NETWORK OPTIMIZATION is to describe, in a unified and self-contained manner, a series of models, propositions, and algorithms developed in recent years on time-varying networks. References and discussions on relevant problems and studies that have appeared in the literature are integrated in the book. The book consists of eight chapters, in which the following problems are formulated and examined: (1) the shortest path problem, (2) minimum-spanning tree problem, (3) maximum flow problem, (4) minimum cost flow problem, (5) maximum capacity path problem, (6) quickest path problem, (7) multi-criteria problem, and (8) the generalized flow problem. The time-varying traveling salesman problem and the Chinese postman problem are presented in a chapter together with the time-varying generalized problem. While these topics will be described all within the framework of time-varying networks, our plan is to make each chapter relatively self-contained so that each can be read separately.

The book will be useful for researchers, practitioners, graduate students and senior undergraduates, as a unified reference and textbook on time-varying network optimization. While the book describes the structure of the algorithms, the authors also have developed the software that implements the algorithms. This software can be made available for academic study purposes upon request.

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Price: $62.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Insights into how practitioners, consultants, and faculty can derive theories from actual experience and use them to solve real world problems .
Price: $45.60 [Notify me when price goes down.]