Taken from the The Philosophy of the Common Task and Essays, this is a selection of the writings of the Russian mystic philosopher who had an influence on such contemporaries as Tolstoy and Solov'ev. His ideas, once thought far-fetched, are now found to have been prophetic. He lived at a time of intense intellectual controversy, artistic creativity and scientific development in Russia, while at the same time, there was growing world-wide militarism, civic strife and labour unrest. Fedorov was deeply distressed by this state of discord and looked for a means to develop brotherly feeling and ways to divert human energies from war towards dealing more effectively with such natural disasters as floods, droughts, earthquakes and hurricanes.

Essence of Top Tasks is a prioritized list of what matters most to customers. You then continuously improve these top tasks based on evidence of customers trying to complete them. Developed as a result of 15 years of research and practice. Implemented by some of the world's largest organizations: Cisco, Microsoft, NetApp, IBM, Google, European Union, Toyota, Tetra Pak, and hundreds more. More than 300,000 customers have participated in Top Tasks studies in over 40 countries and 30 languages.

The book "RoCKIn - Benchmarking Through Robot Competitions" describes the activities and achievements on the promotion of Robotics research and benchmarking in Europe through robot competitions, carried out within the framework of the RoCKIn ("Robot Competitions Kick Innovation in Cognitive Systems and Robotics") Coordination Action, a project funded by the European Commission (EC) 7th Framework Programme (FP7). RoCKIn was one of the two pioneer projects on robot competitions in Europe funded by the EC, representing the acknowledgment of robot competitions as important tools to advance research on Robotics, besides education and public awareness of Robotics. Two challenges were selected for the RoCKIn competitions due to their high relevance and impact on Europe's societal and industrial needs: domestic service robots (RoCKIn@Home) and innovative robot applications in industry (RoCKIn@Work). Along the book chapters the reader will find details on RoCKIn@Home and RoCKIn@Work, and about the activities carried out during the project lifetime, namely the developed open domain test beds for competitions targeting the two challenges and usable by researchers worldwide; the scoring and benchmarking methods to assess the performance of robot systems and subsystems; and the building up of a community of new teams. The book ends with an assessment by the project industrial partner about the impact of RoCKIn and other robot competitions on the industrial robot markets. The project work was funded by the European Commission (EC) 7th Framework Programme (FP7), under the 9th Call for projects on Information and Communication Technologies. The publishing of this book was funded by the EC FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot programme.

'Leisure and Recreation Management' is essential reading for anyone interested in exploring both the theory and the practicalities of managing leisure and recreational facilities.