He’s a rock star wanted by millions. She’s a wife willing to fight for their love. Rock star Dash Kingston is finishing the last leg of his band’s U.S. tour. Exhausted and ready to be home, he can’t wait to see his girl. Time zones, show times, and the demands of his career have made married life harder than expected. Even knowing the rock star life wouldn’t make their relationship easy. Cassidy Kingston thought she was ready to handle being married to a man idolized by women everywhere. She believes in their love even though the separations when the band is on tour can be torture. But the paparazzi and media don’t make their time apart easier and the gossip headlines hit her harder than they should. She trusts her husband even if she misses him like crazy. When rumors surface that Dash is seeing someone, what’s a girl to do? Surprise her husband and remind him of what he’s been missing. Except you know what they say about the best laid plans.

From the experts who created SparkPeople.com, America’s #1 diet and fitness site, comes The Spark. This groundbreaking book outlines the best of what has worked for millions of members who have lost weight, kept it off, and reached other goals. Driven by positive energy and proven results, The Spark outlines a breakthrough formula that combines nutrition, exercise, goal setting, motivation, and community, which has helped people change their lives beyond the scale. Discover the 27 Secrets of Success—the best action steps, foods, and proven medical advice that have helped tens of thousands of members lose from 2 to 200 pounds. Special tips from people who lost 100 pounds or more—see what these people had in common and what they did and didn’t do to make huge transformations in their lives. A step-by-step 28-day program that brings together the most effective, medically accepted nutrition and fitness practices from SparkPeople experts in an easy-to-follow plan, including flexible mix-and-match meal plans, fully illustrated workout programs, full-color before-and-after success stories, and more! And, new to this edition! Breakthrough survey results have been used to create a Strong Start Guide to help you jumpstart your weight-loss efforts. Based on what tens of thousands of successful SparkPeople members did to lose weight and change their lives, this guide tells you what to do in the first two weeks to make you five times more likely to reach your ultimate weight-loss goal! Whether you want to fit into your "skinny jeans," improve your health and fitness levels, change your outlook and mood, or reach all new goals, The Spark can help you transform your body and your life. What are you waiting for? Spark your life today!

Learn the right cutting-edge skills and knowledge to leverage Spark Streaming to implement a wide array of real-time, streaming applications. This book walks you through end-to-end real-time application development using real-world applications, data, and code. Taking an application-first approach, each chapter introduces use cases from a specific industry and uses publicly available datasets from that domain to unravel the intricacies of production-grade design and implementation. The domains covered in Pro Spark Streaming include social media, the sharing economy, finance, online advertising, telecommunication, and IoT. In the last few years, Spark has become synonymous with big data processing. DStreams enhance the underlying Spark processing engine to support streaming analysis with a novel micro-batch processing model. Pro Spark Streaming by Zubair Nabi will enable you to become a specialist of latency sensitive applications by leveraging the key features of DStreams, micro-batch processing, and functional programming. To this end, the book includes ready-to-deploy examples and actual code. Pro Spark Streaming will act as the bible of Spark Streaming. What You'll Learn Discover Spark Streaming application development and best practices Work with the low-level details of discretized streams Optimize production-grade deployments of Spark Streaming via configuration recipes and instrumentation using Graphite, collectd, and Nagios Ingest data from disparate sources including MQTT, Flume, Kafka, Twitter, and a custom HTTP receiver Integrate and couple with HBase, Cassandra, and Redis Take advantage of design patterns for side-effects and maintaining state across the Spark Streaming micro-batch model Implement real-time and scalable ETL using data frames, SparkSQL, Hive, and SparkR Use streaming machine learning, predictive analytics, and recommendations Mesh batch processing with stream processing via the Lambda architecture Who This Book Is For Data scientists, big data experts, BI analysts, and data architects.

Illuminates transgender activists’ successful strategies to organize for social and political change in the US. In recent years, gender-variant people—including those we now call transgender people—have won public policy victories that had previously seemed unwinnable: the American Psychiatric Association replaced the term “gender identity disorder” with “gender dysphoria” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the Department of Justice announced that discrimination on the basis of gender identity constituted sex discrimination, and the Department of Health and Human Services decided that it would no longer stop Medicare from covering gender reassignment surgery. What accounts for these and other victories? Anthony J. Nownes argues that a large part of the answer lies in the rise of transgender rights interest groups in the United States. Drawing on firsthand accounts from the founders and leaders of these groups, Organizing for Transgender Rights not only addresses how these groups mobilized and survived but also illuminates a path to further social change. Nownes shows how oppressed and marginalized people can overcome the barriers to collective action and form viable organizations to represent their interests even when their government continues to be hostile and does not. “The book traverses several fields, but it is primarily situated in and speaks to the political science literature on interest-group formation. It makes an important contribution by revisiting and revising pluralist and relative deprivation approaches to interest-group formation that have fallen out of favor in recent years.” — Stephen Valocchi, author of Social Movements and Activism in the USA

Did you know you can take your Flash skills beyond the browser, allowing you to make apps for Android, iOS and the BlackBerry Tablet OS? Build dynamic apps today starting with the easy-to-use Android smartphones and tablets. Then, take your app to other platforms without writing native code. Pro Android Flash is the definitive guide to building Flash and other rich Internet applications (RIAs) on the Android platform. It covers the most popular RIA frameworks for Android developers—Flash and Flex—and shows how to build rich, immersive user experiences on both Android smartphones and tablets. You'll learn how to incorporate multimedia, animation, and special effects into your apps for maximum visual appeal. You'll also cover advanced topics, including input methods, hardware inputs, deployment, and performance optimization.

Not Just Another Cowboy by Carol Finch released on Feb 22, 1999 is available now for purchase.