The Long Horizon is an extraordinary book. Much more than simply the chronicle of a life spent farming in the Scottish Highlands, it is also a wonderful collection of stories, both factual and fictional, which reflect the changes that have revolutionised Highland life and dramatically affected the natural environment over the centuries. Using the colourful background to the Fraser clan chiefs as a central theme, from the cunning Red Fox through to the sudden death of the Master of Lovat, which set in train the sale of the Fraser empire around Beaufort Castle, Iain Thomson weaves an entertaining narrative that shows how historical events have such a profound effect on what happens today. Throughout the book shines the writer's deep love of the countryside and a respect for the generations before him who have carved their living from the harsh environment of the Highlands. It is a marvellous celebration both of the farming way of life and one of the most beautiful parts of Scotland.

An ambitious young girl in 1914 Oklahoma dreams of a career outside the home. And builds an oil empire!

Travel back in time with Jessie to the exciting 1900's oil boom in wild, beautiful Oklahoma -- to an era when those entrepreneurs BOLD enough to gamble on their dreams amassed fortunes!

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES • NPR • THE GUARDIAN From pole to pole and across decades of lived experience, National Book Award-winning author Barry Lopez delivers his most far-ranging, yet personal, work to date. Horizon moves indelibly, immersively, through the author’s travels to six regions of the world: from Western Oregon to the High Arctic; from the Galápagos to the Kenyan desert; from Botany Bay in Australia to finally, unforgettably, the ice shelves of Antarctica. Along the way, Lopez probes the long history of humanity’s thirst for exploration, including the prehistoric peoples who trekked across Skraeling Island in northern Canada, the colonialists who plundered Central Africa, an enlightenment-era Englishman who sailed the Pacific, a Native American emissary who found his way into isolationist Japan, and today’s ecotourists in the tropics. And always, throughout his journeys to some of the hottest, coldest, and most desolate places on the globe, Lopez searches for meaning and purpose in a broken world.

In August 1956 a young shepherd, his wife, two-year-old daughter and ten-day-old son sat huddled in a small boat on Loch Monar in Ross-shire as a storm raged around them. They were bound for a tiny, remote cottage at the western end of the loch which was to be their home for the next four years. Isolation Shepherd is the moving story of those years. Set against the awesome splendour of some of Scotland's most spectacular scenery, Iain R. Thomson's classic book provides a sensitive, richly detailed account of the shepherd's life through the seasons and recreates the events that shaped the family's life in Glen Strathfarrar before the area was flooded as part of a huge hydro-electric project.

Utopia has been achieved. For centuries, disease, hunger, poverty and war have been things found only in the histories. And applied genetics has given men and women the bodies of athletes and a lifespan of over a century. They should all have been very happy.... But Hamilton Felix is bored. And he is the culmination of a star line; each of his last thirty ancestors chosen for superior genes. Hamilton is, as far as genetics can produce one, the ultimate man. And this ultimate man can see no reason why the human race should survive, and has no intention of continuing the pointless comedy. However, Hamilton's life is about to become less boring. A secret cabal of revolutionaries who find utopia not just boring, but desperately in need of leaders who know just What Needs to be Done, are planning to revolt and put themselves in charge. Knowing of Hamilton's disenchantment with the modern world, they have recruited him to join their Glorious Revolution. Big mistake! The revolutionaries are about to find out that recruiting a superman is definitely not a good idea.... With an all new afterword by Tony Daniel. At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).

A century ago, life expectancy was roughly 40 years, hence all income could be consumed, as for most people, there was no need to save for retirement. Today, things have drastically changed: Life expectancy exceeds 80 years in many countries, and one should expect to live and consume many years after retirement. Thus, we have many investors with various investment horizons, where the length of the investment horizon becomes a crucial factor in determining the best investment diversification.This book analyzes the effect of the investment horizon on the optimal diversification, specifically between stocks and bonds: Should a young investor and an older investor have the same portfolio? Is it recommended to savers for retirement to change the asset allocation between stocks and bonds as they grow older, as life cycle mutual funds do in practice? Is the idiom 'stocks for the long run' backed by scientific evidence? We analyze for which horizons it is recommended to employ the popular Mean-Variance rule and for which horizons employing this rule induces an economic distortion, hence a loss to the investors. It is shown that all relevant parameters for investment choice (means, variances, and correlations) change in a non-linear way with the horizon, a fact that makes the investment horizon crucial for investment choices. Similarly, the popular Sharpe, Treynor, and Jensen performance indices vary with the assumed horizon even in the case of independence over time. To analyze all the above issues, we employ the Mean-Variance rule and Stochastic Dominance rules, as well as direct expected utility calculations.

Imposing cointegration on a forecasting system, if cointegration is present, is believed to improve long-horizon forecasts. Contrary to this belief, at long horizons nothing is lost by ignoring cointegration when the forecasts are evaluated using standard multivariate forecast accuracy measures. In fact, simple univariate Box-Jenkins forecasts are just as accurate. Our results highlight a potentially important deficiency of standard forecast accuracy measures—they fail to value the maintenance of cointegrating relationships among variables—and we suggest alternatives that explicitly do so.

From explorers’ accounts to boys’ adventure fiction, how Arctic exploration served as a metaphor for nation-building and empire in nineteenth-century Britain.