Josh K. Stevens masterfully draws a hit man’s underground world of bullets, sex, death, money, and betrayal in his mile-a-minute debut of dark modern noir. Levi Maurice has always had his eye on the money in his career as a hit man. A chain-smoking alcoholic with a penchant for all the wrong women, Levi is never short of improvised plans and smart-assed remarks to ensure he makes it to the next paycheck. But when the tables are turned and a hit is put out on him, he suddenly finds himself fighting for his life. Along with his crooked cop neighbor, Jacks, and his radical protester little sister, Chenille, Levi has to find out who has it out for him before he finds himself six feet under. Not helping are the mysterious mint green envelopes appearing on his doorstep, asking for his help just when Levi himself needs it most, and Megan, his sexy new girlfriend, who may not be as honest as she looks. Bullets Are My Business is a bloody, fast-paced, darkly humorous ride into the life of a hired gun who finds himself on the wrong side of a hit — and may not make it out alive.

Blackstone focuses on the career of William F. Buffalo Bill Cody during the years in which he organized, promoted, and starred in his celebrated Wild West show. Basing her research on primary sources such as photographs, programs, route books, and scrapbooks of newspaper clippings kept by Cody and other participants in the show, Blackstone provides a vivid history of the famed extravaganza. Included in her discussion are the logistics of touring a huge show, the performers and their origins, semiotic analysis of each performance event, and the treatment of Indians and other minorities. Blackstone also deals with the iconography of the show and the way in which it instilled in the public consciousness a mythic image of the American West that has survived to the present day. Blackstone's conclusions help to put Buffalo Bill's Wild West into proper historical and cultural context. The volume includes numerous photographs, most of which have never been published before, and a bibliography containing original listings of primary source information.

A guide to using Microsoft PowerPoint describes how to use stories to create effective business presentations.

Start with What Works helps you to create new growth opportunities using the resources you already have at hand. It sounds obvious but frequently, managers discount the value of their familiar resources, and instead, they look outside for something new. This can demotivate employees and be costly in terms of money and time. It’s often a lot quicker, cheaper and safer to see your existing resources with fresh eyes. This book shows you how to recognise overlooked potential in existing resources, and how to flip the right switches to activate that potential. Covering ten lessons you can use for a variety of situations, each will feature a case study and a new mindset to adopt. With practical tools and templates, each will trigger fruitful discussions and insights for your organisation. You’ll learn how to apply them to the situations you face, so that you can identify new opportunities, and turn those opportunities into action.

Business Intelligence: The Savvy Managers Guide, Second Edition, discusses the objectives and practices for designing and deploying a business intelligence (BI) program. It looks at the basics of a BI program, from the value of information and the mechanics of planning for success to data model infrastructure, data preparation, data analysis, integration, knowledge discovery, and the actual use of discovered knowledge. Organized into 21 chapters, this book begins with an overview of the kind of knowledge that can be exposed and exploited through the use of BI. It then proceeds with a discussion of information use in the context of how value is created within an organization, how BI can improve the ways of doing business, and organizational preparedness for exploiting the results of a BI program. It also looks at some of the critical factors to be taken into account in the planning and execution of a successful BI program. In addition, the reader is introduced to considerations for developing the BI roadmap, the platforms for analysis such as data warehouses, and the concepts of business metadata. Other chapters focus on data preparation and data discovery, the business rules approach, and data mining techniques and predictive analytics. Finally, emerging technologies such as text analytics and sentiment analysis are considered. This book will be valuable to data management and BI professionals, including senior and middle-level managers, Chief Information Officers and Chief Data Officers, senior business executives and business staff members, database or software engineers, and business analysts. - Guides managers through developing, administering, or simply understanding business intelligence technology - Keeps pace with the changes in best practices, tools, methods and processes used to transform an organization's data into actionable knowledge - Contains a handy, quick-reference to technologies and terminology

Given his line of work in the employ of a psychotic Brooklyn crime boss, Trent finds himself on the wrong end of too many bullets. Yet each time he's killed, he wakes a few minutes later completely healed of his wounds but with no memory of his past identity. What's worse, each time he cheats death someone else dies in his place. Sent to steal an antique box from some squatters in an abandoned warehouse near the West Side Highway, Trent soon finds himself stumbling into an age-old struggle between the forces of good and evil, revealing a secret world where dangerous magic turns people into inhuman monstrosities, where impossible creatures hide in plain sight, and where the line between the living and the dead is never quite clear. And when the mysterious box is opened, he discovers he has only twenty-four hours to save New York City from certain destruction, in Dying Is My Business by Nicholas Kaufmann.