“I’ve done complicated. It’s complicated.” Residential and commercial buildings account for 17% of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions. In the United States, that figure is roughly 29%. Net Zero homes, which produce at least as much energy as they consume, will play a key role in the current global climate crisis by drastically reducing energy consumption in the housing sector. Doug Tarry is a leading international authority on Net Zero homes. His company, Doug Tarry Homes Limited, has certified more Net Zero / Net Zero Ready homes (over 500 and counting) than any other builder in Canada. The title of Doug’s book, “From Bleeding Edge to Leading Edge: A Builders Guide to Net Zero Homes”, refers to his complicated and sometimes painful journey to Net Zero. Throughout the book, Doug offers his first-hand experience on what has worked and what hasn’t in building Net Zero homes, along with expert advice from some of the industry’s leading builders, building scientists and energy consultants. Much has been written about the technical details of building high-performance homes – the “what”. This book goes further and deals with the “why” and the “how”, discussing topics such as holistic design, embodied carbon, the Four Principals of Modern Design, the 100-year home, and climate resiliency. Written in plain language and infused with humor and storytelling, this book is a must-read for builders, renovators, architects, municipal officials, industry stakeholders and home buyers - anyone interested in the future of home building. It will help builders and their teams get to Net Zero in less time, with far less cost and pain.

Ajax, the archetypal Greek warrior, has over the years been trivialized as a peripheral character in the classics through Hollywood representations, and by the use of his name on household cleaning products. Examining a broad range of sources--from film, art and literature to advertising and sports--this study of the "Bulwark of the Achaeans" and his mythological image redefines his presence in Western culture, revealing him as the predominant voice in The Iliad and in myriad works across the classical canon.

Speak for Yourself Do you yearn for a book to disambiguate words and phrases commonly used in business settings, your workplace, and in life in general? Do you wish the kimono would open on idioms and clichés that stretch the bandwidth of understanding and make you wonder if your career is scalable? What are you really saying when you go against the grain and are aboveboard? What do you hear when your colleague wants face time or to move the needle? The BS Dictionary: Uncovering the Origins and True Meanings of Business Speak provides the real-world definitions to about 300 of the world's most commonly-used business terms and gives you the origin story (who coined the term? when did it start to be used figuratively in the business world?) for each one. Get the language clarity you need and have fun learning the full etymology of favorite phrases. Read humorous commentary about how phrases might be misused or misunderstood. If you are interested in language, business speak, writing, and trivia knowledge, this book is for you! Get The BS Dictionary and impress your friends with your newfound wealth of phrases and their history.

In Facilitating Evaluation, Michael Quinn Patton recounts stories of his experiences as an evaluation facilitator. Evaluation facilitation applies and adapts general facilitation knowledge and techniques to the specialized challenges of working with stakeholder groups involved in program evaluation. The purpose of such facilitation is to enhance the relevance, credibility, meaningfulness, and utility of evaluations. Michael Quinn Patton outlines five evaluation facilitation principles that are the organizing framework for addressing how to work with stakeholders to generate evaluation questions, make decisions among methods, interpret findings, and participate in any and all aspects of evaluation, from initial determination of purpose through design and data collection, and on through follow-up to ensure and enhance use. His between-chapter portages are an opportunity to hear different voices and encounter diverse perspectives on evaluation facilitation. In each case, he invited colleagues to write about anything they thought was important to understand and yet neglected in the evaluation literature. The book will be required reading for advanced courses in program evaluation and become an indispensable resource for practitioners in the field.

Mankind has invested vast resources (time, manhours, computer machinery sunk costs, maintenance, building space, heating, venting, cooling, and so on) into software for all kinds of digital and analog hardware for over sixty years. Far longer if you consider punched cards, and so on. In the end, most of the source code ends in the waste heap of history. Old code gets forgotten, rub- bished, and a new wave of developers is forced to recreate new versions of old ideas. People get promoted, graduate from college, and leave to get married; before they do they don’t have time, don’t believe in the priority, and don’t place the code where others can find it to make an important curation of their software; and by this donate it to future generations, worldwide, the society at large. If organizations, at the other end of the spectrum, would realign software for a legacy of centuries instead of product runs, mankind can preserve the sunk costs, speed up advancement, and make software impact far wider when it’s made in a reusable form. People move to a new job, and remake linked lists, factory classes, or ring buffers in the new language of the day, or within the design paradigm of the latest fad management. It’s kind of insane when you think about it, people spend many years getting a consumer product working, finely tuned and profitable. Then two companies merge, product lines are unified or obsoleted, and some or all of the intellectual property gets forgotten in a corner as one team is merged and the others retire to golf, or the pool. While filling in cardboard boxes of stuff as they leave, does anyone drag out the old tapes and floppies to make sure the new guys aren’t starting by reinventing the wheel?

In an era when IT budgets are being cut as indiscriminately as they were once increased, this book offers the first systematic guide to measuring the true impact of IT spending--and making rational decisions about which projects to fund.