Every place has its unique sensibility; a flavour that makes it special. Whether one is going somewhere new or discovering the secrets that make the familiar seem foreign, where you are matters as much as when you’re there. The stories in this fifth collection from Plan B Magazine occur at the intersection of the familiar and the strange, the rise of the unexpected and the twist in the road. Let’s take a journey to the unknown. Table of Contents: "Honeymoon Sweet" by Craig Faustus Buck "Broad Daylight" by Eve Fisher "This Land of the Strange" by Math Bird "Please Wait" by Robert Dawson "Fill In The Blanks" by Stephen D. Rogers "The Double Iron Cross" by William E. Wallace "Red Bait" by Edd Vick & Manny Frishberg "Broken Hearts" by Laird Long "Intimate Knowledge" by Suzanne Baginskie "The Asshat Fund" by Todd Morr "Mysterious Private Investigations" by Peter DiChellis "Coffee and Killings" by Simon Maltman "The Good Neighbor" by Lawrence Buentello

You have a new venture in mind. And you've crafted a business plan so detailed it's a work of art. Don't get too attached to it. As John Mullins and Randy Komisar explain in Getting to Plan B, new businesses are fraught with uncertainty. To succeed, you must change the plan in real time as the inevitable challenges arise. In fact, studies show that entrepreneurs who stick slavishly to their Plan A stand a greater chance of failing-and that many successful businesses barely resemble their founders' original idea. The authors provide a rigorous process for stress testing your Plan A and determining how to alter it so your business makes money, solves customers' needs, and endures. You'll discover strategies for: -Identifying the leap-of-faith assumptions hidden in your plan -Testing those assumptions and unearthing why the plan might not work -Reconfiguring the five components of your business model-revenue model, gross margin model, operating model, working capital model, and investment model-to create a sounder Plan B. Filled with success stories and cautionary tales, this book offers real cases illustrating the authors' unique process. Whether your idea is for a start-up or a new business unit within your organization, Getting to Plan B contains the road map you need to reach success.

Provides alternative solutions to such global problems as population control, emerging water shortages, eroding soil, and global warming, outlining a detailed survival strategy for the civilization of the future.

Why has Facebook been so limber, evolving so successfully even after a number of stumbles, while Myspace stalled and lost ground? Why was Wal-Mart able to expand so successfully into new offerings, such as groceries, while H&R Block dramatically failed to expand into offering financial services? The answer, David Murray reveals, is that Facebook and Wal-Mart both started with business models that empowered them to effectively adapt their plans as they executed them. The failure of detailed strategic plans that have taken a great deal of time and money to develop is one of the worst problems in business, and it’s ever more urgent as the pace of change in business continues to accelerate. Murray, author of the acclaimed Wall Street Journal bestseller Borrowing Brilliance, argues that valiantly sticking to even a well-thought-out Plan A is the road to disaster. The greatest success comes to those who know how to construct and implement an adaptive Plan A that has within it the means of evolving into a superior Plan B by responding to problems confronted, discoveries made, changing market conditions, and the competition. Writing in a lively, engaging voice and using a series of specific examples drawn from companies including IBM, Intel, Facebook, American Express, and Kaiser Permanente, as well as from the art of war, including the Battle of Gettysburg and the D-Day invasion, and even from the space program, Murray presents powerful methods for constructing a plan that has the mechanisms for adaptation built in. Drawing on a wealth of research, he explains why we are fairly good at short-term predictions but why, in our ever more rapidly changing business world, even the best laid plans will eventually go astray. He then introduces the best techniques for creating an optimal original plan that takes into account our limited ability to predict, showing that vital to this process is that it be constructed so that we are alerted in time to make the right changes. In a brilliant discussion of strategy and tactics, he shows that the core of this adaptability is making sure that your strategy and tactics are well aligned with one another and that you have established the right metrics for measuring results. He then details precisely how to adapt throughout the execution process by constantly monitoring and assessing results, developing worst-case scenarios, and recognizing unanticipated opportunities. Plan B is an essential guide to harnessing the forces of change to achieve long-lasting success despite the most vexing challenges.

The final, posthumous installment of the ground-breaking Harlem Detectives series, a novel of explosive, apocalyptic violence, and a startling vision of the effects of racism in America The roots of racism and persecution in Tomsson Black's ancestry are deep and staggering. In his own lifetime, his misfortunes have become unbearable and, as they mount, serve as an impetus for a final and cataclysmic act of vengeance—the violent overthrow of white society. When acclaimed crime writer Chester Himes died in Spain in 1984, it was rumored that an unfinished story in the Harlem Detective series existed that had all but extinguished his heroes and their fraught city in an explosive paroxysm of racial strife. Completed from his notes by Michel Fabre and Robert E. Skinner, Plan B is that harrowing story. Includes an illuminating introduction by editors Michel Fabre and Robert E. Skinner.

PETROLEUM REFINING With no new refineries having been built in decades, companies continue to build onto or reverse engineer and re-tool existing refineries. With so many changes in the last few years alone, books like this are very much in need. There is truly a renaissance for chemical and process engineering going on right now across multiple industries. This fifth and final volume in the “Petroleum Refining Design and Applications Handbook” set, this book continues the most up-to-date and comprehensive coverage of the most significant and recent changes to petroleum refining, presenting the state-of-the-art to the engineer, scientist, or student. Besides the list below, this groundbreaking new volume describes blending of products from the refinery, applying the ternary diagrams and classifications of crude oils, flash point blending, pour point blending, aniline point blending, smoke point and viscosity blending, cetane and diesel indices. The volume further reviews refinery operational cost, cost allocation of actual usage, project and economic evaluation involving cost estimation, cash flow involving return on investment, net present values, discounted cash flow rate of return, net present values, payback period, inflation and sensitivity analysis, and so on. It reviews global effects on the refining economy, carbon tax, carbon foot print, global warming potential, carbon dioxide equivalent, carbon credit, carbon offset, carbon price, and so on. It reviews sustainability in petroleum refining and alternative fuels (biofuels and so on), impact of the overall greenhouse effects, carbon capture and storage in refineries, process intensification in biodiesel, biofuel from green diesel, acid-gas removal and emerging technologies, carbon capture and storage, gas heated reformer unit, pressure swing adsorption process, steam methane reforming for fuel cells, grey, blue and green hydrogen production, new technologies for carbon capture and storage, carbon clean process design, refinery of the future, refining and petrochemical industry characteristics. The text is packed with Excel spreadsheet calculations and Honeywell UniSim Design software in some examples, and it includes an invaluable glossary of petroleum and petrochemical technical terminologies. Useful as a textbook, this is also an excellent, handy go-to reference for the veteran engineer, a volume no chemical or process engineering library should be without. Written by one of the world’s foremost authorities, this book sets the standard for the industry and is an integral part of the petroleum refining renaissance. It is truly a must-have for any practicing engineer or student in this area.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A gripping new Jack Reacher thriller from Lee Child and Andrew Child “No Plan B is not to be missed. A perfectly plotted, fast-paced thriller, with bigger twists than ever before. It’s no wonder Jack Reacher is everyone’s favorite rebel hero.”—Karin Slaughter ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Reader’s Digest In Gerrardsville, Colorado, a woman dies under the wheels of a moving bus. The death is ruled a suicide. But Jack Reacher saw what really happened: A man in a gray hoodie and jeans, moving stealthily, pushed the victim to her demise—before swiftly grabbing the dead woman’s purse and strolling away. When another homicide is ruled an accident, Reacher knows this is no coincidence. With a killer on the loose, Reacher has no time to waste to track down those responsible. But Reacher is unaware that these crimes are part of something much larger and more far-reaching: an arsonist out for revenge, a foster kid on the run, a cabal of powerful people involved in a secret conspiracy with many moving parts. There is no room for error, but they make a grave one. They don’t consider Reacher a threat. “There’s too much at stake to start running from shadows.” But Reacher isn’t a shadow. He is flesh and blood. And relentless when it comes to making things right. For when the threat is Reacher, there is No Plan B.