Buy from our bookstore and 25% of the cover price will be given to a school of your choice to buy more books. *15% of eBooks.
Audiobooks Narrated by Perry Daniels
Browse audiobooks narrated by Perry Daniels, listen to samples and when you're ready head over to Audiobooks.com where you can get 3 FREE audiobooks on us
Multiple Shingo Award-winning management and operations expert Jeffrey K. Liker provides a deep dive into Toyota's world-changing processes, showing how you can learn from it to develop your own improvement program that fits your conditions. Thanks in large part to this book, managers across the globe are creating workforces and systems that produce the highest-quality products and services, establish and retain customer loyalty, and drive business profitability and sustainability. Now, Liker has thoroughly updated his classic guide to include: completely revised data and updated information about Toyota's approach to competitiveness in the new world of mobility and smart technology; illustrative examples from manufacturing and service organizations that have learned and improved from the Toyota Way; a fresh approach to leadership models; the brain science and skills for learning to think scientifically; and how Toyota applies Hoshin Kanri, a planning process that aligns objectives at all levels and marries them to business strategy.
Organized into thematic sections covering the various aspects of the Toyota Way-including Philosophy, Processes, People, and Problem Solving-this unparalleled guide details the fourteen key principles for building the foundation of a powerful improvement system and managing it for ultimate competitive advantage.
For weeks, the body count of sexually violated, brutally murdered young women escalated. With increasing alarm, Los Angeles newspapers headlined the deeds of a serial killer they named the Hillside Strangler. The city was held hostage by fear. But not until January 1979, more than a year later, would the mysterious disappearance of two university students near Seattle lead police to the arrest of a security guard-the handsome, charming, fast-talking Kenny Bianchi-and the discovery that the strangler was not one man but two.
Compellingly, O'Brien explores the symbiotic relationship between Bianchi and his cousin Angelo Buono, their lust for women as insatiable as their hate, before examining the crimes they remorselessly perpetrated and the lives of the unsuspecting victims they claimed. Equally riveting is O'Brien's account of the trial-one of the longest and most controversial criminal court cases in American history-with the defense team parading, one after another, expert witnesses who had been effectively duped by Bianchi's impersonation of a man suffering multiple personality disorder. It's one way a man might contrive to get away with murder.
Darcy O'Brien weds the narrative skill of an award-winning novelist with the detailed observations of an experienced investigator to unravel this chilling true-crime story.
When Adam Cain's old bounty-hunting friends, Summer, Monty, and Tidus, show up searching for the most-wanted fugitive in the galaxy, their efforts are thwarted by another old friend, Copernicus Smith. The deep-cover spy has his own reason for finding the fugitive, and it's not to earn the million-credit bounty offered for his capture. The elusive alien absconded with billions of credits from his homeworld just before the Mad Aris Kracion irradiated the planet. And now it seems as though the entire galaxy is looking for him.
What no one knows is that the stolen money is earmarked for a deadly plan to finance a new threat to the galaxy, one more covert, more diabolical, more insidious than any before it. And now that Adam's old friends are involved that means he is, too, whether he likes it or not.
Once again, it's a mad-dash race to find the treasure, stop the bad guys and save the galaxy. Sounds daunting, doesn't it. In reality, it's just another day in the lives of our heroes, Adam Cain, Sherri Valentine, and Riyad Tarazi.
How to concentrate in a world of beeping smartphones, channel surfing, live-tweeting, pop-up ads, and other distractions.
We are in the midst of an attention crisis-caused in large part by our smartphones. There's a constant stream of information that we are powerless to withstand because it shows up in our notifications. More and more of us are finding it harder and harder to concentrate.
The good news, attention expert Stefan Van der Stigchel reports, is that we now know more about brain and behavior than ever before, and he draws on the latest scientific findings in his account of concentration. He explains, among other things, that the battle for our attention began long before the digital era; why our phones are so addictive; the importance of working memory (responsible for executing complicated tasks) and how to increase its capacity; and why multitasking is bad for our concentration, but attention rituals help it. He describes the 2017 Oscars debacle (when the Best Picture presenter was given the wrong card) as a failure of multitasking and shows that the presence of a passenger in a car reduces the risk of an accident. He explains the positive effects of taking 'tech breaks', meditation, and even daydreaming. We can win the battle for our attention, Van der Stigchel argues, if we have the knowledge and the tools to do it.
Futurists insist that AI will soon eclipse the capacities of the most gifted human mind. What hope do we have against superintelligent machines? But we aren't really on the path to developing intelligent machines. In fact, we don't even know where that path might be.
Erik Larson takes us on a tour of the landscape of AI to show how far we are from superintelligence, and what it would take to get there. Ever since Alan Turing, AI enthusiasts have equated artificial intelligence with human intelligence. This is a profound mistake. AI works on inductive reasoning, crunching data sets to predict outcomes. But humans don't correlate data sets: we make conjectures informed by context and experience. Human intelligence is a web of best guesses, given what we know about the world. We haven't a clue how to program this kind of intuitive reasoning, known as abduction. Yet it is the heart of common sense. That's why Alexa can't understand what you are asking, and why AI can only take us so far.
Larson argues that AI hype is both bad science and bad for science. A culture of invention thrives on exploring unknowns, not overselling existing methods. Inductive AI will continue to improve at narrow tasks, but if we want to make real progress, we will need to start by more fully appreciating the only true intelligence we know-our own.
Austin Fletcher, a disturbed young Vietnam War vet, is willed a small house deep in the woods of northern Maine. He comes to own it by the generosity of a brother-in-arms-a fellow soldier and confidante, Maynard Whittier, killed in action by a wayward mortar shell. The rugged landscape of Maine is an intoxicating blend of claustrophobic interiors and endless frozen wastelands. Little by little, the mysterious force in the house asserts itself until Austin isn't exactly sure what is in his mind and what is real. And just when our hero's had enough and is ready to quit the place, a blizzard arrives and the real haunting begins.
For many years, Britain tried to impose its own laws on the peoples it conquered, and English common law usually followed the Union Jack. But the common law became less common after Britain emerged from the Seven Years' War as the world's most powerful empire. At that point, imperial policymakers adopted a strategy of legal pluralism: some colonies remained under English law, while others retained much of their previous legal regimes.
As legal historian Christian R. Burset argues, determining how much English law a colony received depended on what kind of colony Britain wanted to create. Policymakers thought English law could turn any territory into an anglicized, commercial colony; legal pluralism, in contrast, would ensure a colony's economic and political subordination. Britain's turn to legal pluralism thus reflected the victory of a new vision of empire-authoritarian, extractive, and tolerant-over more assimilationist and egalitarian alternatives. Among other implications, this helps explain American colonists' reverence for the common law: it expressed and preserved their equal status in the empire. This book, the first empire-wide overview of law as an instrument of policy in the eighteenth-century British Empire, offers an imaginative rethinking of the relationship between tolerance and empire.
An unprecedented look inside the world of baseball scouting and evaluation from Fangraphs' lead prospect analysts
For the modern major league team, player evaluation is a complex, multi-pronged, high-tech pursuit. But far from becoming obsolete in this environment. But far from becoming obsolete in this environment-as Michael Lewis's Moneyball once forecast-the role of the scout in today's game has evolved and even expanded. Rather than being the antithesis of a data-driven approach, scouting now represents an essential analytical component in a team's arsenal.
Future Value is a thorough dive into the world of the contemporary scout-a world with its own language, methods, metrics, and madness. From rural high schools to elite amateur showcases, from the back fields of spring training to major league draft rooms, FanGraphs' Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel break down the key systems and techniques used to assess talent. It's a process that has moved beyond the quintessential stopwatches and radar guns to include statistical models, countless measurable indicators, and a broader international reach. Practical and probing, discussing wide-ranging topics from tool grades to front office politics, this is an illuminating exploration of how to watch baseball and see the future.
Adam Cain is an Alien with an Attitude . . .
His Adventures Continue.
The war with the Sol-Kor within their home galaxy has finally begun, spearheaded by the revenge-seeking Hal'ic, whose massive fleet of warships is commanded by none other than Admiral Andy Tobias.
In the meantime, Adam Cain and his gang are stranded on Kor, trying to survive the battering the planet is taking at the hands of the Hal'ic. But soon they'll find their way to Silana, the second capital of the Sol-Kor, to where Queen J'nae has taken Panur, along with the prototype trans-dimensional starship the Star Panther.
The enemies of the Sol-Kor can win the war, if Adam and his team are able to stop J'nae from building a fleet of Star Panthers, even as the greatest space battles in history are becoming commonplace within this far-distant galaxy. This is epic action, epic heroism, epic adventure on the grandest of scales. And only as Adam Cain and his band of Human wrecking balls can do it.
The very survival of the universe is at stake. If J'nae can build her fleet then no one is safe. Her reign of terror will extend from the mountains of Kor, all the way to the blue skies of planet Earth.
And only Adam Cain can stop her.
You've heard of him. He's Adam Cain, The Alien with an Attitude.
Now he's back . . . in a series of new adventures as a badass Human showing the galaxy who's the boss.
Accompanied by his buddies Riyad Tarazi and Sherri Valentine, Adam is struggling to make ends meet on a distant tropical world running Capt. Cain's Bar & Grill. The problem:They picked the worst place in the galaxy to run a legitimate business . . . smack dab in the middle of lawless Dead Zone. Comprised of a hundred dead worlds left in the wake of one of Adam's old enemies-Kracion-The Zone is a gold-rush-like region of salvagers, pirates and scoundrels,all looking for their piece of the action. And in the center of all this activity is the oasis planet of Liave-3, the home of Capt. Cain's.
After a supply of prototype superweapons goes missing from one of the dead worlds, suspicion falls on Adam and his friends as the thieves. Our heroes find themselves being hunted, kidnapped, and otherwise abused . . . until they say enough is enough. That's when the aliens learn the galaxy's most important lesson: You don't mess with the Humans!
Introducing the most badass team of galactic troubleshooters in the galaxy.
Adam Cain . . . the alien with an attitude is back!
Adam Cain is back as the head of Cain's Crusaders, a small band of super-secret agents working for the head of the galactic Expansion, doing the dirty jobs no one else wants to do. Adam's latest mission is to rescue Arieel Bol, an important religious figure from the planet Formil, who just happens to have supernatural powers, or so it seems. And to top that, she's also is the most beautiful alien in the galaxy. Yet when a 30-million-credit bounty is placed on their heads, Adam and Arieel will have to use all of their combined 'powers' to survive.
Back for another round of space opera adventures are Adam's teammates Riyad Tarazi and Sherri Valentine, along with the arch-villain Nigel McCarthy. And don't forget about the Klin and the Kracori, the two races consumed with an insane desire to destroy the Earth once and for all. They're back and just as nasty as ever.
In this edition . . .
Having placed a bounty on the heads of the alien Klin and Kracori races, Humanity must now face the desperate wrath of mankind's worst enemies, who have once again joined forces for a preemptive strike against the Earth. Their plan is brilliant . . . and only the special abilities of ex-Navy SEAL Adam Cain can save the planet.
It's a frantic race against time, as Adam and Sherri Valentine arrive on Earth just in time to help mount a ragtag defense against the Kracori fleet. But will it be enough?
Meanwhile, Riyad Tarazi is on his own, carrying out the dangerous assignment of verifying the location of the Kracori homeworld of Elision. Riyad soon discovers he's in the middle of a hornet's nest of deadly aliens, every bit the equal of the Human Supermen. Will he succeed, or will he become just another casualty of a galaxy growing ever more hostile to Mankind?
In addition, the evil Englishman Nigel McCarthy is up his old tricks as well, and his actions resurrect the sleeping giant of the Juireans. It's the last thing the Humans need is another deadly alien race devoted to their destruction.
