Birds of a feather flock together. We're all in the same boat. Great minds think alike. While just figures of speech to some, they reflect a simple truth--it's the company we keep that often determines the level of personal growth and professional success we achieve in life. Business leaders exchange information and ideas. They network to make deals and build partnerships. They work together to optimize best practices, and they reach out to leaders outside their companies to accelerate growth. Simply put, CEOs and business leaders provide value to one another that they can't find anywhere else. In The Power of Peers, authors Leon Shapiro and Leo Bottary introduce peer advantage, a concept that transcends peer influence. This is what CEOs and business leaders experience when they are more selective, strategic, and structured in the way they engage their peers. Peer advantage gives CEOs the insights to compete and the courage to act. The Power of Peers features stories of business leaders from a range of industries to illustrate the five essential factors for peer advantage, how it impacts personal growth and why it has proven so effective in helping leaders identify future opportunities and challenges. It's what top, growth-oriented executives have relied upon for decades to be successful in business and in life.

Peer support and social relationships have a tremendous influence on development, motivation, and achievement for all students, including struggling learners and those with disabilities. This highly practical book is one of the few resources available to guide classroom teachers and special educators in the application of peer-assisted instructional strategies in grades K-12. Expert contributors describe evidence-based approaches for building students' skills in reading, writing, math, and other content areas, as well as social competence and executive functioning. Sample lessons and more than a dozen reproducible tools are provided. Purchasers get access to a Web page where they can download and print the reproducible materials.

The term "peer-to-peer" has come to be applied to networks that expect end users to contribute their own files, computing time, or other resources to some shared project. Even more interesting than the systems' technical underpinnings are their socially disruptive potential: in various ways they return content, choice, and control to ordinary users. While this book is mostly about the technical promise of peer-to-peer, we also talk about its exciting social promise. Communities have been forming on the Internet for a long time, but they have been limited by the flat interactive qualities of email and Network newsgroups. People can exchange recommendations and ideas over these media, but have great difficulty commenting on each other's postings, structuring information, performing searches, or creating summaries. If tools provided ways to organize information intelligently, and if each person could serve up his or her own data and retrieve others' data, the possibilities for collaboration would take off. Peer-to-peer technologies along with metadata could enhance almost any group of people who share an interest--technical, cultural, political, medical, you name it. This book presents the goals that drive the developers of the best-known peer-to-peer systems, the problems they've faced, and the technical solutions they've found. Learn here the essentials of peer-to-peer from leaders of the field: Nelson Minar and Marc Hedlund of target="new">Popular Power, on a history of peer-to-peer Clay Shirky of acceleratorgroup, on where peer-to-peer is likely to be headed Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly & Associates, on redefining the public's perceptions Dan Bricklin, cocreator of Visicalc, on harvesting information from end-users David Anderson of SETI@home, on how SETI@Home created the world's largest computer Jeremie Miller of Jabber, on the Internet as a collection of conversations Gene Kan of Gnutella and GoneSilent.com, on lessons from Gnutella for peer-to-peer technologies Adam Langley of Freenet, on Freenet's present and upcoming architecture Alan Brown of Red Rover, on a deliberately low-tech content distribution system Marc Waldman, Lorrie Cranor, and Avi Rubin of AT&T Labs, on the Publius project and trust in distributed systems Roger Dingledine, Michael J. Freedman, andDavid Molnar of Free Haven, on resource allocation and accountability in distributed systems Rael Dornfest of O'Reilly Network and Dan Brickley of ILRT/RDF Web, on metadata Theodore Hong of Freenet, on performance Richard Lethin of Reputation Technologies, on how reputation can be built online Jon Udell ofBYTE and Nimisha Asthagiri andWalter Tuvell of Groove Networks, on security Brandon Wiley of Freenet, on gateways between peer-to-peer systems You'll find information on the latest and greatest systems as well as upcoming efforts in this book.

Harris takes on the "experts" and boldly questions conventional wisdom of parents' role in their children's lives, asserting that it's not the home environment that shapes children, but the environment they share with their peers.

An awesome awareness on peers' psyche, which is usually found only in psychology books, is presented here for the masses in an easily comprehendible way. Young people strive to fit in and gain social status with their peers. For fear of peer rejection and victimization they give into the threats of popular peers in the group. They develop close friendships, but breakups also occur. The dynamics of peer relationship continues through school days well into adulthood. The quality of peer acceptance provides an important clue to an individual's emotional and intellectual wellbeing. Skills to overcome peer pressure for purposeful achievements begins at home, when children themselves begin to settle their squabbles with siblings, the first peers of any child. Youngsters' unruly behaviour is an outcome of a complex combination of peer harassment and their own strength of mind. Considering the ill effects of disturbed peer relationships on young minds, the earlier they are addressed, the more opportunity there is to set troubled teenagers on the right path. Appropriate knowledge of "psychology of peer dynamics" can help accentuate the positive effects and minimize the negative effects of peer influence. This book imparts that knowledge. It extensively covers relationship issues, including that of sexual harassment and relational aggression, faced by all at some point and at different levels of relationships. Written with both parents and youths in mind, it is a must-read for anyone in search of answers on the subject of peers.

When Robin Chase cofounded Zipcar, she not only started a business but established the foundation for one of the most important economic and social ideas of our time: the collaborative economy. With this important book, she broadens our thinking about the ways in which the economy is being transformed and shows how the Peers Inc model is changing the very nature of capitalism. When the best of people power is combined with the best of corporate power to form "Peers Inc" organizations, a potent creative force is released. The "Inc" in these collaborations delivers the industrial strengths of significant scale and resources, and the "Peers" bring together the individual strengths of localization, specialization, and customization, unlocking the power of the collaborative economy. When excess capacity is harnessed by the platform and diverse peers participate, a completely new dynamic is unleashed. In Peers Inc, Robin Chase brings her provocative insights to work, business, the economy, and the environment, showing: How focusing on excess capacity transforms the economics of what's possible and delivers abundance to all How the new collaboration between the Inc and the Peers enables companies to grow more quickly, learn faster, and deliver smarter products and services How leveraging the Peers Inc model can address climate change with the necessary speed and scale How the Peers Inc model can help legacy companies overcome their shortening life cycle by inviting innovation and evolution Why power parity between the Peers and the Inc is a prerequisite for long-term success How platforms can be built within the existing financial system or outside of it What government can do to enhance economic possibility and protect people working in this new decentralized world Chase casts a wide net, illuminating the potential of the Peers Inc model to address broader issues such as climate change and income inequality, and proves the impact that this innovative economic force can have on the most pressing issues of our time.

How we raise young children is one of today's most highly personalized and sharply politicized issues, in part because each of us can claim some level of "expertise." The debate has intensified as discoveries about our development-in the womb and in the first months and years-have reached the popular media. How can we use our burgeoning knowledge to assure the well-being of all young children, for their own sake as well as for the sake of our nation? Drawing from new findings, this book presents important conclusions about nature-versus-nurture, the impact of being born into a working family, the effect of politics on programs for children, the costs and benefits of intervention, and other issues. The committee issues a series of challenges to decision makers regarding the quality of child care, issues of racial and ethnic diversity, the integration of children's cognitive and emotional development, and more. Authoritative yet accessible, From Neurons to Neighborhoods presents the evidence about "brain wiring" and how kids learn to speak, think, and regulate their behavior. It examines the effect of the climate-family, child care, community-within which the child grows.