The New York Times bestselling authors of Switch and Made to Stick explore why certain brief experiences can jolt us and elevate us and change us—and how we can learn to create such extraordinary moments in our life and work. While human lives are endlessly variable, our most memorable positive moments are dominated by four elements: elevation, insight, pride, and connection. If we embrace these elements, we can conjure more moments that matter. What if a teacher could design a lesson that he knew his students would remember twenty years later? What if a manager knew how to create an experience that would delight customers? What if you had a better sense of how to create memories that matter for your children? This book delves into some fascinating mysteries of experience: Why we tend to remember the best or worst moment of an experience, as well as the last moment, and forget the rest. Why “we feel most comfortable when things are certain, but we feel most alive when they’re not.” And why our most cherished memories are clustered into a brief period during our youth. Readers discover how brief experiences can change lives, such as the experiment in which two strangers meet in a room, and forty-five minutes later, they leave as best friends. (What happens in that time?) Or the tale of the world’s youngest female billionaire, who credits her resilience to something her father asked the family at the dinner table. (What was that simple question?) Many of the defining moments in our lives are the result of accident or luck—but why would we leave our most meaningful, memorable moments to chance when we can create them? The Power of Moments shows us how to be the author of richer experiences.

During the Civil War era, black and white North Carolinians were forced to fundamentally reinterpret the morality of suicide, divorce, and debt as these experiences became pressing issues throughout the region and nation. In Moments of Despair, David Silkenat explores these shifting sentiments. Antebellum white North Carolinians stigmatized suicide, divorce, and debt, but the Civil War undermined these entrenched attitudes, forcing a reinterpretation of these issues in a new social, cultural, and economic context in which they were increasingly untethered from social expectations. Black North Carolinians, for their part, used emancipation to lay the groundwork for new bonds of community and their own interpretation of social frameworks. Silkenat argues that North Carolinians' attitudes differed from those of people outside the South in two respects. First, attitudes toward these cultural practices changed more abruptly and rapidly in the South than in the rest of America, and second, the practices were interpreted through a prism of race. Drawing upon a robust and diverse body of sources, including insane asylum records, divorce petitions, bankruptcy filings, diaries, and personal correspondence, this innovative study describes a society turned upside down as a consequence of a devastating war.

Moments as projections of an image’s intensity onto a proper polynomial basis can be applied to many different aspects of image processing. These include invariant pattern recognition, image normalization, image registration, focus/ defocus measurement, and watermarking. This book presents a survey of both recent and traditional image analysis and pattern recognition methods, based on image moments, and offers new concepts of invariants to linear filtering and implicit invariants. In addition to the theory, attention is paid to efficient algorithms for moment computation in a discrete domain, and to computational aspects of orthogonal moments. The authors also illustrate the theory through practical examples, demonstrating moment invariants in real applications across computer vision, remote sensing and medical imaging. Key features: Presents a systematic review of the basic definitions and properties of moments covering geometric moments and complex moments. Considers invariants to traditional transforms – translation, rotation, scaling, and affine transform - from a new point of view, which offers new possibilities of designing optimal sets of invariants. Reviews and extends a recent field of invariants with respect to convolution/blurring. Introduces implicit moment invariants as a tool for recognizing elastically deformed objects. Compares various classes of orthogonal moments (Legendre, Zernike, Fourier-Mellin, Chebyshev, among others) and demonstrates their application to image reconstruction from moments. Offers comprehensive advice on the construction of various invariants illustrated with practical examples. Includes an accompanying website providing efficient numerical algorithms for moment computation and for constructing invariants of various kinds, with about 250 slides suitable for a graduate university course. Moments and Moment Invariants in Pattern Recognition is ideal for researchers and engineers involved in pattern recognition in medical imaging, remote sensing, robotics and computer vision. Post graduate students in image processing and pattern recognition will also find the book of interest.

A Prophetic Anointing for Today Defining Moments is a fascinating look at the remarkable ways in which God has used ordinary people to change history. But it is about more than history alone—it illuminates the present and unveils the future. Prophetic in nature, the book reveals how God wants to work in each of our lives to fulfill His purposes—today, tomorrow, and in the years to come. The stories in this collection of God-encounters carry a prophetic anointing for all who have ears to hear. Author Bill Johnson highlights the significant traits and contributions of many well-known revival leaders, including John Wesley, Charles Finney, Dwight L. Moody, Maria Woodworth-Etter, Carrie Judd Montgomery, Smith Wigglesworth, John G. Lake, Evan Roberts, Rees Howells, Aimee Semple McPherson, Kathryn Kuhlman, Randy Clark, and Heidi Baker. He explains the impact these leaders can have on us today as we respond to the life-changing truths revealed through their life stories. There is power in knowing the testimonies of men and women who experienced God in a defining moment and said yes to His unique call on their lives. It is a power that inspires us to hunger for God in such a way that we, too, will have an encounter with Him that launches us into the world of the “impossible,” enabling us to fulfill a greater measure of our destiny. Read this book with a sense of readiness, and watch what happens.

A Simple Moment. A chance Meeting. An Extraordinary Experience in which You'll discover you are never JUST anything !

In life we get opportunities to make decisions that will either change our lives for the better or pose problems for years to come. Exploring these "hinge moments," Gordon College president Michael Lindsay shares faith-based stories of success and failure from his ten-year study of other leaders, providing both practical and spiritual insights for making the most of each stage of life.

Moments of Impact is a book on a mission: to eradicate time-sucking, energy-depleting workshops and meetings. In our fast-changing world, organizations have important challenges and opportunities to address—and no time to waste. Moments of Impact delivers the single most useful resource for managers and leaders who need better strategic conversation—now—to shape the future of their organizations. Moments of Impact is an essential guide for ambitious leaders who get assigned the hardest and most vexing strategic issues in their organizations, for entrepreneurs trying to manage board expectations, for social change agents pioneering new business models for community impact, for hopeful educators and healthcare practitioners trying to transform slow-to-change industries, and for enterprising students committed to tackling global challenges. Drawing on decades of combined experience as innovation strategists, Ertel and Solomon articulate the purpose, principles, and practices of well-designed strategic conversations. They weave together a lively and compelling mix of social science theories and research, interviews with more than 100 thought leaders, organization leaders, and practitioners, as well as dozens of anecdotes and practical cases from diverse organizations. The book also includes a sixty-page Starter Kit with diagnostic questions, best practices, tips and suggestions, and recommended readings to enable you to put the ideas to work immediately.

In Disrupt Yourself, innovator and digital media expert Jay Samit reveals how to achieve your goals and permanently alter the status quo through the art of self-disruption. In today's ever-changing and often-volatile business landscape, adaptability and creativity are more crucial than ever. Samit describes how specific strategies that help companies flourish - challenging assumptions, pinpointing one's unique value, and identifying weaknesses in the structure of current industries - can be applied at an individual level. Incorporating stories from his own experience and anecdotes from other innovators and disruptive businesses - including Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, YouTube, the BBC, Virgin Media and many more - Samit shows how personal transformation can reap entrepreneurial and professional rewards. Disrupt Yourself offers clear and empowering advice for anyone looking to break through a creative barrier; anyone with a big idea but no idea how to apply it; and for anyone worried about being made irrelevant in an era of technological transformation. This engaging, perspective-shifting book demystifies the mechanics of disruption for individuals and businesses alike.

As a kid, Tom Hart lacked confidence, and never felt like he belonged, until he started working in a convenience store and met his manager, John. John gave him purpose, and when Tom went to work he felt the confidence he lacked in other parts of his life. Along the way, Tom met many more influential people in his life and approached new challenges in business. Through the power of grit, he conquered his fears and went from a stock clerk at a local corner store to chief operating officer of a multi-million dollar company, to eventually starting his own business. Life In Moments is a story about the people in Tom's life and their moments together-the lessons they taught him, how they lifted him up at his lowest points, and how he used those lessons to build a better business and life. These moments happen to everyone, and they are powerful, even if they're not realized in the moment itself.