Young Jim Endicott has but one dream-- to attend the Solis Space Academy, the gateway to the stars and the far-flung civilization known as the Confederation. But unbeknownst to Jim, he has a secret encoded in his DNA. A secret that threatens an empire.

Inspired by memories of her beloved grandmother, photographer and author Alysia Burton Steele -- picture editor on a Pulitzer Prize-winning team -- combines heart-wrenching narrative with poignant photographs of more than 50 female church elders in the Mississippi Delta. These ordinary women lived extraordinary lives under the harshest conditions of the Jim Crow era and during the courageous changes of the Civil Rights Movement. With the help of local pastors, Steele recorded these living witnesses to history and folk ways, and shares the significance of being a Black woman -- child, daughter, sister, wife, mother, and grandmother in Mississippi -- a Jewel of the Delta. From the stand Mrs. Tennie Self took for her marriage to be acknowledged in the phone book, to the life-threatening sacrifice required to vote for the first time, these 50 inspiring portraits are the faces of love and triumph that will teach readers faith and courage in difficult times.

In Search of Sisterhood is the definitive history of the largest Black women's organization in the United States, and is filled with compelling, fascinating anecdotes told by the Delta Sigma Theta members themselves, illustrated with rare early photographs of the Delta women. This book contains the story of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority (DST), and details the increasing involvement of Black women in the political, social, and economic affairs of America. Founded at a time when liberal arts education was widely seen as either futile, dangerous, or impractical for Blacks—and especially Black women—DST is, in Giddings's words, a "compelling reflection of Black women's aspirations for themselves and for society." Giddings notes that unlike other organizations with racial goals, Delta Sigma Theta was created to change and benefit individuals rather than society. As a sorority, it was formed to bring women together as sisters, but at the same time to address the divisive, often class-related issues confronting Black women in our society. There is, in Giddings's eyes, a tension between these goals that makes Delta Sigma Theta a fascinating microcosm of the struggles of Black women and their organizations. DST members have included Mary McLeod Bethune, Mary Church Terrell, Margaret Murray Washington, Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Jordan, and, on the cultural side, Leontyne Price, Lena Horne, Ruby Dee, Judith Jamison, and Roberta Flack.

Beginning in the 1920s as a lowly crop-dusting operation in Louisiana, Delta Air Lines had, by its fiftieth anniversary, down to become one of the largest companies in the industry and one of the most consistently profitable. First published in 1979, this is a comprehensive account of the growth and development of Delta's strategy and style, the steady expansion of its routes, its relationship with federal regulatory agencies, and the everchanging composition of its fleet. Because the underlying spirit of the Delta enterprise owed so much to its founder, C.E. Woolman, this is also an engaging portrait of the man who came to be classed alongside Eastern's Eddie Rickenbacker and Pan American's Juan Trippe as a pioneer of commercial aviation.

The 2011 Arab Spring protests seemed to mark a turning point in Middle East politics, away from authoritarianism and toward democracy. Within a few years, however, most observers saw the protests as a failure given the outbreak of civil wars and re-emergence of authoritarian strongmen in countries like Egypt. But in Delta Democracy, Catherine E. Herrold argues that we should not overlook the ongoing mobilization taking place in grassroots civil society. Drawing upon ethnographic research on Egypt's nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the wake of the uprisings, Herrold uncovers the strategies that local NGOs used to build a more democratic and just society. Departing from US-based democracy advocates' attempts to reform national political institutions, local Egyptian organizations worked with communities to build a culture of democracy through public discussion, debate, and collective action. At present, these forms of participatory democracy are more attainable than establishing fair elections or parliaments, and they are helping Egyptians regain a sense of freedom that they have been denied as the long-time subjects of a dictator. Delta Democracy advances our understanding of how civil society organizations maneuver under state repression in order to combat authoritarianism. It also offers a concrete set of recommendations on how US policymakers can restructure foreign aid to better help local community organizations fighting to expand democracy.

"From installation to relevance tuning"--Cover.

An introduction to the software package DELTA (DEscription Language for TAxonomy) is given. The contribution consists of step by step instructions into the DELTA Editor and the interactive identification program Intkey. It describes how to record taxonomic character information in a database and maintain these data. Standard output functions are simplified in a new starter database. All used commands are commented and it is marked where changes in the command files are required. The paper explains how to generate text descriptions, interactive identification tools, and how to make keys and species diagnoses.

Delta CX is a refreshing model bringing CX and UX together in task and in name with the key goal of improving the products, services, and experiences (PSE) that we offer our potential and current customers. Rather than following trends or drinking the snake oil, Delta CX presents a time-tested, thorough approach that helps you establish values, vision, strategies, and goals. Great PSE require the right teams and strategies in place to proactively predict and mitigate the risk of delivering wrong or flawed PSE. Adopting Delta CX means we all finally speak the same language, from tasks and deliverables to job titles and required skills to where CX fits into Agile organizations to processes and teams. Calculate the ROI of investing more time and resources into building the right PSE the first time. Save time, money, and sanity. Replace guessing and assumptions with Lean customer research that is planned, conducted, and interpreted by experts. Learn why quality should be our #1 priority, and how to rededicate our organization to our external and internal customers.Target audiences: Managers, workers, practitioners, freelancers, consultants, contractors, execs, stakeholders, and everybody else working in CX, UX, Marketing, Product Management, Engineering, Project Management. Business Analysts (BAs), Data Scientists, Writers, Visual Designers, Information Architects, Interaction Designers, Product Designers, and Researchers.The long and problem-focused version: In an era of faster, faster, faster, our workplaces are sacrificing quality, collaboration, culture, and the customer experience to "just ship it." Business goals don't seem to align with customers' needs. Customers constantly raise their standards and expectations, and they notice when companies are out of touch or get it wrong. Competitors, investors, shareholders, the press, bloggers, social media, and Wall Street also notice. Brands are being surprised when their products, services, and experiences (PSE) are disliked or rejected by customers, or go viral for the wrong reasons. Companies claim they are customer-focused, user-centric, and designing for the needs of real customers. Initiatives to increase the ability to build the right PSE should have meant hiring more CX and UX talent. However, with UX still misunderstood, circumvented, overruled, and excluded at many companies, workplaces that didn't know how to assess CX and UX talent hired anybody who put "UX" on their resume. Poor hiring choices lead to silos and "bad design." Rather than wondering if "UX" workers were unqualified, leadership blamed UX and User-Centered Design (UCD): They must be bloated, outdated, not Lean, not Agile things we don't really need. We started imagining that "everybody can be a designer." Get people sketching in design sprints, and solve our company's biggest challenges. We called for democratization and decentralization of UX and design because perhaps taking some power away from these "high-ego UX people" we hired will fix this. Suddenly, everybody was a design thinker doing design thinking, yet few people can agree on what design thinking is.Everybody became quietly desperate. UX practitioners wanted to evangelize, and invited teammates to UX evangelism presentations, which often backfired. Companies of all sizes and ages, including Fortune 500s, tried methodologies designed for startups. Startups fail roughly 95% of the time. It's so rare that they innovate or build something the public actually wants. Why would we want to emulate a segment with such a high failure rate? We're lost. We need another business transformation, a return to prioritizing the quality of what we ideate, architect, design, test, build, and unleash on the public.(Return to the top for the short and happy version.)