A pajama party at the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport inadvertently helped launch R.T. Rybak’s political career (imagine a rumba line one hundred protesters long chanting, “We deserve to sleep, hey!”), but his earliest lessons in leadership occurred during his childhood. Growing up in a middle-class neighborhood, attending private school with students who had much more than he did, spending evenings at his family’s store in an area where people lived with much less, he witnessed firsthand the opportunity and injustice of the city he called home. In a memoir that is at once a political coming-of-age story and a behind-the-scenes look at the running of a great city, the three-term mayor takes readers into the highs and lows and the daily drama of a life inextricably linked with Minneapolis over the past fifty years. With refreshing candor and insight, Rybak describes his path through journalism, marketing, and community activism that led to his unlikely (to him, at least) primary election—on September 11, 2001. His personal account of the challenges and crises confronting the city over twelve years, including the tragic collapse of the I-35W bridge, the rising scourge of youth violence, and the bruising fight over a ban on gay marriage (with Rybak himself conducting the first such ceremony at City Hall on August 1, 2013), is also an illuminating, often funny depiction of learning the workings of the job, frequently on the fly, while trying to keep up with his most important constituency, his family. As bracing as the “fresh air” campaign that swept him into office, Rybak’s memoir is that rare document from a politician: one more concerned with the people he served and the issues of his time than with burnishing his own credentials. As such, it reflects what leadership truly looks like.

This book constitutes revised selected papers from the First International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy, ICISSP 2015, held in Angers, France, in February 2015. The 12 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selection from a total of 56 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: data and software security; privacy and confidentiality; mobile systems security; and biometric authentication. The book also contains two invited papers.

The 2016 election in Iowa City would provide an opportunity that planning faculty have long desired: the opportunity for one of their own to serve as mayor. In this new book, former Iowa City Mayor and Professor Emeritus James A. Throgmorton provides readers a sense of what democratically-elected city council members and mayors in the United States do and what it feels like to occupy and enact those roles. He does so by telling a set of “practice stories” focusing primarily, but not exclusively, on what he, a retired planning professor at the University of Iowa, experienced and learned as a council member from 2012 through 2019 and, simultaneously, as mayor from 2016 through 2019. The book proposes a practical, action-oriented theory about how city futures are being (and can be) shaped, showing that storytelling of various kinds plays a very important but poorly understood role in the co-crafting process, and demonstrating that skillful use of ethically-sound persuasive storytelling (especially by mayors) can improve our collective capacity to create better places. The book documents efforts to alleviate race-related inequities, increase the supply of affordable housing, adopt an ambitious climate action plan, improve relationships between city government and diverse marginalized communities, pursue more inclusive and sustainable land development codes/policies, and more. It will be of great interest to urban planning faculty and students and elected officials looking to collaboratively craft better cities for the future.

The pitfalls and lessons often ignored in relationships cause pain and bitterness to many. Love and relationships are meant to be enjoyed and not endured, as many find themselves in mini-prisons in the name of love. Love starts with loving oneself before being shared with the other partner. Don’t forget to love yourself and allow your partner to take you for granted.

The volume is a collection of high-quality, peer-reviewed research papers presented at the Third International Conference on Mathematical Modeling and Computational Science (ICMMCS 2023), held during 24 – 25 February 2023 in hybrid mode. The topics covered in the book are mathematical logic and foundations, numerical analysis, neural networks, fuzzy set theory, coding theory, higher algebra, number theory, graph theory and combinatory, computation in complex networks, calculus, differential educations and integration, application of soft computing, knowledge engineering, machine learning, artificial intelligence, big data and data analytics, high performance computing, network and device security, Internet of Things (IoT).

I hope that you will find the information helpful, useful and profitable. The information in this ebook on travelling is organized into 16 chapters of about 500-600 words each. I hope that it will interest those who like to travel or who are looking for somewhere to go on the next vacation. As an added bonus, I am granting you permission to use the content on your own website or in your own blogs and newsletter, although it is better if you rewrite them in your own words first. You may also split the book up and resell the articles. In fact, the only right that you do not have is to resell or give away the book as it was delivered to you