(Ukulele). This collection features 18 of today's hottest singles arranged for ukulele, including: All Too Well (Taylor Swift) * Cold Heart (PNAU Remix) (Elton John and Dua Lipa) * Easy on Me (Adele) * Fancy Like (Walker Hayes) * Heat Waves (Glass Animals) * Shivers (Ed Sheeran)* Smokin' Out the Window (Silk Sonic) * Stay (The Kid LAROI feat. Justin Bieber) * Take My Breath (The Weeknd) * We Don't Talk About Bruno (from Encanto ) * You Should Probably Leave (Chris Stapleton) * and more.
A riveting exposé of a permanent financial dystopia, its causes, and real-world consequences It is abundantly clear that our world is divided into two very different economies. The real one, for the average worker, is based on productivity and results. It behaves according to traditional rules of money and economics. The other doesn’t. It is the product of years of loose money, poured by central banks into a system dominated by financial titans. It is powerful enough to send stock markets higher even in the face of a global pandemic and threats of nuclear war. This parting from reality has its roots in an emergency response to the financial crisis of 2008. “Quantitative Easing” injected a vast amount of cash into the economy—especially if you were a major Wall Street bank. What began as a short-term dependency became a habit, then a compulsion, and finally an addiction. Nomi Prins relentlessly exposes a world fractured by policies crafted by the largest financial institutions, led by the Federal Reserve, that have supercharged the financial system while selling out regular citizens and leading to social and political reckonings. She uncovers a newly polarized world of the mega rich versus the never rich, the winners and losers of an unprecedented distortion that can never return to “normal.”
For decades, this book has served as a guide to organizations that document their continuous improvement efforts using Baldrige Award-type management systems. Readers will learn what each area of the system means for organizations and how the synergy between process-oriented parts—leadership; strategy; customers; measurement, analysis, and knowledge management; workforce; and operations—can lead to excellent performance results. This book provides a valuable, step-by-step approach to help identify and put in place properly focused continuous improvement systems. Seven types of information are provided in this book for each of the Items in Categories 1 through 7 of the 2021–2022 Baldrige Framework and Performance Excellence Criteria: 1. The actual language of each Item, including Notes 2. A plain-English explanation of the requirements and rationale for each Item 3. A table showing the similar requirements of the Criteria 4. A summary of the requirements of each Item in flowchart form 5. The key linkages between each Item and other Items 6. An explanation of some potential adverse consequences 7. Examples of effective practices Features of this edition include: A stakeholder matrix table of contents that identifies relevant material within the book for key stakeholder groups: senior leaders, examiners, performance excellence initiative leaders, application writers, and program administrators Tables for each Criteria Item showing the similar expectations of the Criteria award (and award program administrators) presented only once at the scoring level where the expectation first appears to help examiners determine at what level an expectation belongs Online resources, including scoring calibration guides for education, healthcare, and business/nonprofit/government organizations, a guide to self-assessment of organizations and management systems, and a guide to the alignment of Baldrige, Six Sigma, Lean, and Balanced Scorecard A new crosswalk between Baldrige and ISO standards and a set of global performance excellence best practices Information on other award programs throughout the world such as the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM), which has undergone significant changes in the 2020 model, and the China Association for Quality
An urgent examination of how disruptive politics, technology, and art are capsizing old assumptions in a great wave of change breaking over today’s world, creating both opportunity and peril—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic and author of the New York Times bestseller The Death of Truth. “In this dazzling and brilliant book, Michiko Kakutani explains the cascading chaos of our era and points to ways that we can regain some stability.”—Walter Isaacson, author of Elon Musk The twenty-first century is experiencing a watershed moment defined by chaos and uncertainty, as one emergency cascades into another, underscoring the larger dynamics of change that are fueling instability across the world. Since the global financial crisis of 2008, people have increasingly lost trust in institutions and elites, while seizing upon new digital tools to sidestep traditional gatekeepers. As a result, powerful new voices—once regarded as radical, unorthodox, or marginal—are disrupting the status quo in politics, business, and culture. Meanwhile, social and economic inequalities are stoking populist rage across the world, toxic partisanship is undermining democratic ideals, and the internet and AI have become high-speed vectors for the spread of misinformation. Writing with a critic’s understanding of cultural trends and a journalist’s eye for historical detail, Michiko Kakutani looks at the consequences of these new asymmetries of power. She maps the migration of ideas from the margins to the mainstream and explores the growing influence of outsiders—those who have sown chaos and fear (like Donald Trump), and those who have provided inspirational leadership (like Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky). At the same time, she situates today’s multiplying crises in context with those that defined earlier hinge moments in history, from the waning of the Middle Ages to the transition between the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era at the end of the nineteenth century. Kakutani argues that today’s crises are not only signs of an interconnected globe’s profound vulnerabilities, but also stress tests pointing to the essential changes needed to survive this tumultuous era and build a more sustainable future.
Climate change, increasing population, food-versus-fuel economics, pandemics, etc. pose a threat to food security to unprecedented levels. It has fallen upon the practitioners of agriculture and technologists of the world to innovate and become more productive to address the multi-pronged food security challenges. Agricultural innovation is key to managing food security concerns. The infusion of data science, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced analytics, satellites data, geospatial data, climatology, sensor technologies, and climate modeling with traditional agricultural practices such as soil engineering, fertilizers use, and agronomy are some of the best ways to achieve this. Data science helps farmers to unravel patterns in fertilizer pricing, equipment usage, transportation and storage costs, yield per hectare, and weather trends to better plan and spend resources. AI enables farmers to learn from fellow farmers to apply best techniques that are transferred learning from AI to improve agricultural productivity and to achieve financial sustainability. Sensor technologies play an important role in getting real-time farm field data and provide feedback loops to improve overall agricultural practices and can yield huge productivity gains. Advanced Analytics modeling is essential software technique that codifies farmers’ tacit knowledge such as better seed per soil, better feed for dairy cattle breed, or production practices to match weather pattern that was acquired over years of their hard work to share with worldwide farmers to improve overall production efficiencies, the best antidote to food security issue. In addition to the paradigm shift, economic sustainability of small farms is a major enabler of food security. The book reviews all these technological advances and proposes macroeconomic pricing models that data mines macroeconomic signals and the influence of global economic trends on small farm sustainability to provide actionable insights to farmers to avert any financial disasters due to recurrent economic crises.
By 2050, Africa will host one-quarter of the world’s population. Its growing economic importance can be traced back to the fact that the largest reserves of cobalt, diamonds, platinum and uranium in the world are found in this continent. Africa has furthermore the world’s largest free trade area (AfCFTA) and thus an enormous potential for global economic growth. This has brought along an increasing engagement of China in the continent. The aspects of Chinese African relations range from pure economic transactions and massive infrastructure investment to language policy. The varieties and possible geostrategic considerations accompanying the Sino-African partnership are examined in more detail throughout the following paper. The main question guiding the analysis is, therefore: what is the role of geostrategic considerations in China’s foreign policy toward the African continent?
This inspirational and dazzlin’ story of Dolly Parton—noted singer, songwriter, and humanitarian—follows her rise to fame, from her beginnings in East Tennessee to performing to thousands at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. Dolly is a little girl with a BIG voice. Music fills Dolly’s heart so plumb full she has to let it out! She’ll even sing to her cornhusk dolls or a pen full of pigs. She makes her own drum from a pot and her own guitar from a broken mandolin. But what Dolly dreams of is performing for a real audience—people who would hear her sing, and applaud! And when she gets her big break at age ten, the soul-singin’ and big-dreamin’ Dolly discovers she’s scared to sing on stage in front of all those people. Will she summon up all of her courage and make it to the stage of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville? Young readers will learn about Dolly’s early history, her endless creativity, and her plucky perseverance in this entertaining picture book that’s perfect for fans of all ages.
The one-hit wonder has a long and storied history in popular music, exhorting listeners to dance, to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, to ponder mortality, to get a job, to bask in the sunshine, or just to get up and dance again. Catchy, memorable, irritating, or simply ubiquitous, one-hit wonders capture something of the mood of a time. This collection provides a series of short, sharp chapters focusing on one-hit wonders from the 1950s to the present day, with a view toward understanding both the mechanics of success and the socio-musical contexts within which such songs became hits. Some artists included here might have aspired to success but only managed one hit, while others enjoyed lengthy, if unremarkable, careers after their initial chart success. Put together, these chapters provide not only a capsule history of popular music tastes, but also ruminations on the changing nature of the music industry and the mechanics of fame.
