Rival's Break

Rival's Break

Author: Carla Neggers

Publisher: MIRA

Published: 2019-08-27

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1488035091

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A wedding weekend in Maine is no vacation for husband-and-wife FBI agents who must locate a devious killer in this romantic suspense series finale. After a shattering loss, husband and wife FBI agents Colin Donovan and Emma Sharpe are grateful for a respite. Celebrating the wedding of Colin’s brother Andy gives them a chance to enjoy a peaceful autumn weekend together on the coast of southern Maine. But the peace is short-lived when Kevin Donovan, a marine patrol officer, is called to check on suspected food poisoning at a party aboard a yacht. Tagging along, Colin is surprised to recognize one of the victims as an undercover British intelligence officer. Meanwhile, a valuable painting by Emma and Colin’s, the Irish artist Aoife O’Byrne, goes missing from the yacht. With a deeply personal, international investigation underway, Emma and Colin realize they are up against a deadly foe who plans to strike again. With the help of their Boston-based FBI team, they must risk everything to foil a devastating attack.


Platform Ecosystems

Platform Ecosystems

Author: Amrit Tiwana

Publisher: Newnes

Published: 2013-11-12

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 0124080545

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Platform Ecosystems is a hands-on guide that offers a complete roadmap for designing and orchestrating vibrant software platform ecosystems. Unlike software products that are managed, the evolution of ecosystems and their myriad participants must be orchestrated through a thoughtful alignment of architecture and governance. Whether you are an IT professional or a general manager, you will benefit from this book because platform strategy here lies at the intersection of software architecture and business strategy. It offers actionable tools to develop your own platform strategy, backed by original research, tangible metrics, rich data, and cases. You will learn how architectural choices create organically-evolvable, vibrant ecosystems. You will also learn to apply state-of-the-art research in software engineering, strategy, and evolutionary biology to leverage ecosystem dynamics unique to platforms. Read this book to learn how to: Evolve software products and services into vibrant platform ecosystems Orchestrate platform architecture and governance to sustain competitive advantage Govern platform evolution using a powerful 3-dimensional framework If you’re ready to transform platform strategy from newspaper gossip and business school theory to real-world competitive advantage, start right here! Understand how architecture and strategy are inseparably intertwined in platform ecosystems Architect future-proof platforms and apps and amplify these choices through governance Evolve platforms, apps, and entire ecosystems into vibrant successes and spot platform opportunities in almost any—not just IT—industry


The Rival's Concord

The Rival's Concord

Author: Samantha Sabian

Publisher: Samantha Sabian

Published: 2014-09-05

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 0988582279

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Raine has always been more of a warrior than a diplomat, but now she must use all of her charisma to bring the rivals of Arianthem together. Her close bonds with the all-female race of the Ha'kan ensure that alliance, but negotiations with the Empire go poorly until they receive an unexpected boost from a sultry ally. The reserved elven leader of the Alfar hints to Raine of cooperation, yet also hints that sexual conquest might be her price.Events seem to sabotage the alliance as the Alfar leader kidnaps an imperial, the daughter of the wealthiest landholder in Arianthem. Raine is baffled by the strange actions of the elven noblewoman, actions that bring the entire land to the brink of war. The concord truly unravels when Skye, the young leader of the Tavinter, manifests magical abilities and unintentionally attracts monumental evil. Raine's only hope is that her dragon lover will return from the Empty Land before all is lost and the evil that stalks Skye comes for her.


Allies, Contacts, Enemies and Rivals

Allies, Contacts, Enemies and Rivals

Author: John Griffiths

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 58

ISBN-13: 095608933X

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Allies, Contacts, Enemies and Rivals continues Spica Publishing's fine tradition of producing high-quality supplementary material for the Traveller RPG, presenting over 60 fully detailed NPCs to help and hinder your players, a PsiTac team, individual Patrons, complete Free Trader, Scout/Courier, and Mercenary Cruiser starship crews and a marine striker platoon! Also included are 48 quick NPC statblocks to use as 'redshirts' in combat situations. Requires the Traveller core rulebook, available from Mongoose Publishing.


Shaping the Normative Landscape

Shaping the Normative Landscape

Author: David Owens

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012-09-20

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 0191654965

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Shaping the Normative Landscape is an investigation of the value of obligations and of rights, of forgiveness, of consent and refusal, of promise and request. David Owens shows that these are all instruments by which we exercise control over our normative environment. Philosophers from Hume to Scanlon have supposed that when we make promises and give our consent, our real interest is in controlling (or being able to anticipate) what people will actually do and that our interest in rights and obligations is a by-product of this more fundamental interest. In fact, we value for its own sake the ability to decide who is obliged to do what, to determine when blame is appropriate, to settle whether an act wrongs us. Owens explores how we control the rights and obligations of ourselves and of those around us. We do so by making friends and thereby creating the rights and obligations of friendship. We do so by making promises and so binding ourselves to perform. We do so by consenting to medical treatment and thereby giving the doctor the right to go ahead. The normative character of our world matters to us on its own account. To make sense of promise, consent, friendship and other related phenomena we must acknowledge that normative interests are amongst our fundamental interests. We must also rethink the psychology of agency and the nature of social convention.


Laws of Creation

Laws of Creation

Author: Ronald A. Cass

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2013-01-01

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 0674067649

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Cass and Hylton explain how technological advances strengthen the case for intellectual property laws, and argue convincingly that IP laws help create a wealthier, more successful, more innovative society than alternative legal systems. Ignoring the social value of IP rights and making what others create “free” would be a costly mistake indeed.


The Dangerous Passion

The Dangerous Passion

Author: David M. Buss

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2000-02-14

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 0684867869

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Why do men and women cheat on each other? How do men really feel when their partners have sex with other men? What worries women more -- men who turn to other women for love or men who simply want sexual variety in their lives? Can the jealousy husbands and wives experience over real or imagined infidelities be cured? Should it be? In this surprising and engaging exploration of men's and women's darker passions, David Buss, acclaimed author of The Evolution of Desire, reveals that both men and women are actually designed for jealousy. Drawing on experiments, surveys, and interviews conducted in thirty-seven countries on six continents, as well as insights from recent discoveries in biology, anthropology, and psychology, Buss discovers that the evolutionary origins of our sexual desires still shape our passions today. According to Buss, more men than women want to have sex with multiple partners. Furthermore, women who cheat on their husbands do so when they are most likely to conceive, but have sex with their spouses when they are least likely to conceive. These findings show that evolutionary tendencies to acquire better genes through different partners still lurk beneath modern sexual behavior. To counteract these desires to stray -- and to strengthen the bonds between partners -- jealousy evolved as an early detection system of infidelity in the ancient and mysterious ritual of mating. Buss takes us on a fascinating journey through many cultures, from pre-historic to the present, to show the profound evolutionary effect jealousy has had on all of us. Only with a healthy balance of jealousy and trust can we be certain of a mate's commitment, devotion, and true love.


The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes

The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes

Author: Graeme Davis

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2019-06-04

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 1643131850

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This masterful collection of seventeen classic mystery stories, dating from 1837 to 1914, traces the earliest history of popular detective fiction. Today, the figure of Sherlock Holmes towers over detective fiction like a colossus—but it was not always so. Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin, the hero of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” anticipated Holmes’ deductive reasoning by more than forty years. In A Study in Scarlet, the first of Holmes’ adventures, Doyle acknowledged his debt to Poe—and to Émile Gaboriau, whose thief-turned-detective Monsieur Lecoq debuted in France twenty years earlier. If Rue Morgue was the first true detective story in English, the title of the first full-length detective novel is more hotly contested. Among the possibilities are two books by Wilkie Collins—The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868)—Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Trail of the Serpent (1861) or Aurora Floyd (1862), and The Notting Hill Mystery (1862-3) by the pseudonymous “Charles Felix.” As the early years of detective fiction gave way to two separate golden ages—hard-boiled tales in America and intricately-plotted “cozy” murders in Britain—and these new sub-genres went their own ways, their detectives still required the intelligence and clear-sightedness that characterized the earliest works of detective fiction: the trademarks of Sherlock Holmes, and of all the detectives featured in these pages.


Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value

Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value

Author: D. Graeber

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2001-12-13

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 0312299060

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Now a widely cited classic, this innovative book is the first comprehensive synthesis of economic, political, and cultural theories of value. David Graeber reexamines a century of anthropological thought about value and exchange, in large measure to find a way out of ongoing quandaries in current social theory, which have become critical at the present moment of ideological collapse in the face of Neoliberalism. Rooted in an engaged, dynamic realism, Graeber argues that projects of cultural comparison are in a sense necessarily revolutionary projects: He attempts to synthesize the best insights of Karl Marx and Marcel Mauss, arguing that these figures represent two extreme, but ultimately complementary, possibilities in the shape such a project might take. Graeber breathes new life into the classic anthropological texts on exchange, value, and economy. He rethinks the cases of Iroquois wampum, Pacific kula exchanges, and the Kwakiutl potlatch within the flow of world historical processes, and recasts value as a model of human meaning-making, which far exceeds rationalist/reductive economist paradigms.