In The Secret Handshake, top corporate consultant and USC management professor Kathleen Reardon explores and reveals the hidden rules on the ins and outs of corporate politics that you won’t find outlined in any employee handbook. Based on hundreds of candid interviews with executives at Fortune 500 companies who have achieved their goals and joined the inner circle, The Secret Handshake lays bare the unstated conventions that govern and shape corporate hierarchies. Taking readers inside boardrooms to learn firsthand how the top decision-makers view and assess the employees under them, it offers invaluable advice on such career-building tactics and skills as getting noticed, networking, persuading others, knowing which battles to fight, and mastering the art of the quid pro quo. For all those who aspire to be part of the decision-making body of their organization, The Secret Handshake is the ultimate intelligence report on whom to trust and whom to watch out for, how to manage the inevitable conflicts that will arise, and how to read between the corporate lines.

Larry does not like it when his loud, flashy grandmother comes to visit, especially when she talks about taking him to Tanzania or the South Seas one day, but after a huge summer storm damages their home and valley, he sees another side of Grammy Lamby.

In The Secret Handshake, top corporate consultant and USC management professor Kathleen Reardon explores and reveals the hidden rules on the ins and outs of corporate politics that you won’t find outlined in any employee handbook. Based on hundreds of candid interviews with executives at Fortune 500 companies who have achieved their goals and joined the inner circle, The Secret Handshake lays bare the unstated conventions that govern and shape corporate hierarchies. Taking readers inside boardrooms to learn firsthand how the top decision-makers view and assess the employees under them, it offers invaluable advice on such career-building tactics and skills as getting noticed, networking, persuading others, knowing which battles to fight, and mastering the art of the quid pro quo. For all those who aspire to be part of the decision-making body of their organization, The Secret Handshake is the ultimate intelligence report on whom to trust and whom to watch out for, how to manage the inevitable conflicts that will arise, and how to read between the corporate lines.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Information Security Practice and Experience Conference, ISPEC 2009, held in Xi'an, China in April 2009. The 34 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 147 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on public key encryption, digital signatures, system security, applied cryptography, multimedia security and DRM, security protocols, key exchange and management, hash functions and MACs, cryptanalysis, network security as well as security applications.

"A collection of ten short stories that all take place in the same day about kids walking home from school"--

“The Bars represent me finding my people. We were like a tribe. Together we are strong whereas before we felt weak and ostracized.” Barred for Life is a photo documentary cataloging the legacy of Punk Rock pioneers Black Flag, through stories, interviews, and photographs of diehard fans who wear their iconic logo, The Bars, conspicuously tattooed upon their skin. Author Stewart Ebersole provides a personal narrative describing what made the existence of Punk Rock such an important facet of his and many other people’s lives, and the role that Black Flag’s actions and music played in soundtracking the ups and downs of living as cultural outsiders. “The Bars say ‘I’m not one of them,’ and it also lets the right people know that I am one of them.” Stark black-and-white portraits provide visual testimony to the thesis that Black Flag’s factual Punk-pioneering role and their hyper-distilled mythology are now more prevalent worldwide then when the band was in service. An extensive tour of North America and Western Europe documents dedicated fans bearing Bars-on-skin and other Black Flag iconography. Nearly four hundred “Barred” fans lined up, smiled/frowned for the camera, and issued their stories for the permanent record. “It is the black flag of anarchism, and that is the opposite of the white flag of surrender.” Barred for Life expands its own scope by presenting interviews with former Black Flag members and those close to the band. Interviews with alumni Dez Cadena, Ron Reyes, Kira Roessler, Keith Morris, and Chuck Dukowski, as well as photographers Glen E. Friedman and Ed Colver, and the man responsible for tattooing The Bars on more than a few Black Flag players, Rick Spellman, round out and spotlight aspects of Black Flag’s vicious live performances, forward-thinking work ethic, and indisputable reputation for acting as both champions and iconoclastic destroyers of the Punk Rock culture they helped to create. “When I see The Bars I think ‘Black Flag the band,’ but they also represent an entire movement of people that are not going to conform. They are part of a culture of people that stand up for themselves.”

In the warped world of prescription drug pricing, generic drugs can cost more than branded ones, old drugs can be relaunched at astronomical prices, and low-cost options are shut out of the market. In Drugs, Money and Secret Handshakes, Robin Feldman shines a light into the dark corners of the pharmaceutical industry to expose a web of shadowy deals in which higher-priced drugs receive favorable treatment and patients are channeled toward the most expensive medicines. At the center of this web are the highly secretive middle players who establish coverage levels for patients and negotiate with drug companies. By offering lucrative payments to these middle players (as well as to doctors and hospitals), drug companies ensure that inexpensive drugs never gain traction. This system of perverse incentives has delivered the kind of exorbitant drug prices - and profits - that everyone loves except for those who pay the bills.

Listen up, kid. My name is Dr. Cecil H.H. Mills. I’m the author of this book and many other ones that you might not have heard of. This book is about two idiot wannabe detective-types. Their names are J.J. and Valentine Watts, but I’m not sure if they’re actually brothers or not. They make a friend; her name is Trudi de la Rosa. She’s a wannabe detective-type too, but honestly, she’s less of an idiot than the brothers. The three of them team up to solve a mystery that takes place in a snowy chateau up in the mountains. It gets more complicated around chapter 11, but now you’ve got the main gist of it. The story’s full of intrigue and adventure and puzzles and light violence and some swear words. It’s really entertaining. Just buy the book and start reading. You’ll understand everything about the Ghost Hunters Adventure Club very soon.

The aim of the book is to provide latest research findings, innovative research results, methods and development techniques from both theoretical and practical perspectives related to the emerging areas of Web Computing, Intelligent Systems and Internet Computing. As the Web has become a major source of information, techniques and methodologies that extract quality information are of paramount importance for many Web and Internet applications. Data mining and knowledge discovery play key roles in many of today’s prominent Web applications such as e-commerce and computer security. Moreover, the outcome of Web services delivers a new platform for enabling service-oriented systems. The emergence of large scale distributed computing paradigms, such as Cloud Computing and Mobile Computing Systems, has opened many opportunities for collaboration services, which are at the core of any Information System. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an area of computer science that build intelligent systems and algorithms that work and react like humans. The AI techniques and computational intelligence are powerful tools for learning, adaptation, reasoning and planning. They have the potential to become enabling technologies for the future intelligent networks. Recent research in the field of intelligent systems, robotics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence and cognitive sciences are very important for the future development and innovation of Web and Internet applications.