Thrust into the horrible hallways of pain at a tender young age, Johannes Adendorff begins a journey that immediately takes him into the cruel chambers of a reality that beats his spirit down with the hands of heartless lessons. Broken but not defeated he battles through one painful bruise and wound after another only to end up at a brick wall, which leads to destructive and dangerous addictions including drugs, loose relationships, and alcohol. Educated, brilliant and brave, Johannes elevates his outward appearance onto a level of high success, while on the inside spiraling downward into a dark pit of misery and sorrow that haunts his every step. Perceived as a man of promise and confidence to the world, Johannes secretly hides his inner pain as he struggles through one day to the next, alone, and invisible to hope. Then Jesus steps into Johannes life and begins lifting him up in ways that astound Johannes. He begins to see miracles take place right before his very eyes while accepting a healing love he never knew possible. Captured by a past scarred with pain and hurt, Johannes is thrust forward into a future filled with hope and a promise that is alien to him. Will Johannes dark past defeat the powerful steps that Jesus created for him to walk, or will he take the powerful hand of faith and overcome his addictions, pain, nightmares, and agony? Will the love of one special woman finally lead him away from the arms of others? Will faith lead him away from drugs and alcohol? Will Jesus heal his tormented heart? Or will the past yank Johannes down into a bottom dark pit?

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • At last, a book that shows you how to build—design—a life you can thrive in, at any age or stage • “Life has questions. They have answers.” —The New York Times Designers create worlds and solve problems using design thinking. Look around your office or home—at the tablet or smartphone you may be holding or the chair you are sitting in. Everything in our lives was designed by someone. And every design starts with a problem that a designer or team of designers seeks to solve. In this book, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show us how design thinking can help us create a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of who or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are. The same design thinking responsible for amazing technology, products, and spaces can be used to design and build your career and your life, a life of fulfillment and joy, constantly creative and productive, one that always holds the possibility of surprise.

This practical book introduces readers to the essential business aspects of innovation and new product planning. The product planning process is discussed across two broad themes: product development and product management. Importantly, the book emphasizes the 21st-century strategic and creative mindset necessary to drive business innovation activities in a concise, yet comprehensive manner. The book delves into the front end of innovation and formal product development activities, examining the topics of opportunity identification, concept generation and evaluation, technical development, product design, testing, launch strategies, product management, life cycle management, brand management, and vital elements for international success. There are stand-alone notes that serve to apprise readers on related topics such as the use of agile product development methodologies, the formation of business entities, and recommended best practices for new product development. The book excels at providing relevant examples and applied tools that augment the concepts to offer valuable connections to real-world product planning efforts. This book is particularly useful as a guide to learning the fundamental concepts and strategies associated with innovation and new product planning. Among student audiences, upper-level undergraduate and first-year graduate students are likely to benefit as the book embraces its position to serve as a primer on product development and management.

Search computing, which has evolved from service computing, focuses on building the answers to complex search queries by interacting with a constellation of cooperating search services, using the ranking and joining of results as the dominant factors for service composition. The field is multi-disciplinary in nature and takes advantage of contributions from other research areas such as knowledge representation, human-computer interfaces, psychology, sociology, economics, and legal sciences. This book, the second in the Search Computing series, describes the evolution of theories, technologies, and methods related to search computing. The book has been divided into eight parts, reflecting the main research directions within the Search Computing project. The parts focus on: search as an information exploration task; interaction design issues when dealing with multi-domain search results; modeling and semantic description of search services; the rank-join problem; query processing techniques and architectures; tools and mashups for application development; the application of search computing to bio-informatics; and the exploitation potentials of project results.

Millions of state and local gov¿t. employees are promised pension benefits when they retire. There is a fed. interest in ensuring that all Americans have a secure retirement. Recently, new accounting standards have called for the reporting of liabilities for future retiree health benefits. It is unclear what actions state and local governments may take once the extent of these liabilities becomes clear, but such anticipated fiscal and economic challenges have raised questions about the unfunded liabilities for state and local retiree benefits. This is a report on: (1) the current structure of state and local gov¿t. pension plans and how pension benefits are protected and managed; and (2) the current funded status of state and local gov¿t. pension plans. Charts.