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At the end of the Peloponnesian War in 404 BC, Sparta reigned supreme in Greece. Having vanquished their rival Athens and quickly dismantled the wealthy and powerful Athenian Empire, Sparta set its sights on dominating the Mediterranean world and had begun a successful invasion of the vast Persian Empire under their legendary king Agesilaus II. But with their victory over Athens came the inheritance of governing Athens's empire - and Sparta desperately lacked both a cogent vision of empire and the essential economic and trade infrastructure to survive in the role of hegemon. Sparta's overextension of empire compounded with internal political conflict to antagonize the rest of Greece with heavy-fisted and uneven interventionism. Soon the unlikely confederacy of Athens, Corinth, Thebes, Argos, and Persia united against Sparta in a war that, despite a Spartan victory, had devastating ramifications for their empire.The Corinthian War (395 - 387 BC) was a fascinating entanglement of clashing empires, complex diplomatic alliances and betrayals, and political fissures erupting after centuries of tension. Situated between the great Peloponnesian War and the Theban-Spartan War, the Corinthian War is often overlooked or understood as an aftershock of the civil war Greece had just endured. But the Corinthian War was instead a seminal conflict that reshaped the Greek world, illustrating the limits of Sparta's newfound imperial experiment as they grappled with their own internal cultural conflicts and charted the rise - and fall - of their newfound hegemony and the future of Greece.

Addressing 21st-century issues, threats, and opportunities with time-tested principles, this book empowers corporate communications professionals to protect, inspire, and energize organizations in the face of a crisis. Whether due to an external incident or an internal misstep, every major company or institution will find itself scrutinized, its normal operations disrupted, and its reputation and business continuity threatened at some point—and how it prepares for, and reacts to, a crisis can make a critical difference in the ultimate outcome of events. This book focuses on strategic crisis communication as a function of three elements: 1. crisis preparation—establishing a robust and nimble infrastructure and plans, in advance of any crisis 2. crisis management—rapidly gathering information, activating and adjusting plans, making decisions, and relentlessly monitoring outcomes 3. crisis communication—reaching multiple audiences, on multiple platforms, with clear, consistent, and purposeful messages that tell the truth and defend the organization. Bringing together best practices gleaned from hundreds of recent case studies, this book is an unmatched resource enabling corporate communications and PR professionals, and the organizations that employ them, to understand how to weather any reputational storm that may threaten their enterprise.

The great expansion of economic activity since the end of World War II has caused an unprecedented rise in living standards, but it has also caused rapid changes in earth systems. Nearly all types of natural capital—the world's stock of resources and services provided by nature—are in decline. Clean air, abundant and clean water, fertile soils, productive fisheries, dense forests, and healthy oceans are critical for healthy lives and healthy economies. Mounting pressures, however, suggest that the trend of declining natural capital may cast a long shadow into the future.Nature's Frontiers: Achieving Sustainability, Efficiency, and Prosperity with Natural Capital presents a novel approach to address these foundational challenges of sustainability. A methodology combining innovative science, new data sources, and cutting-edge biophysical and economic models builds sustainable resource efficiency frontiers to assess how countries can sustainably use their natural capital more efficiently. The analysis provides recommendations on how countries can better use their natural capital to achieve their economic and environ mental goals.The report indicates that significant efficiency gaps exist in nearly every country. Closing these gaps can address many of the world's pressing economic and environmental problems—economic productivity, health, food and water security, and climate change. Although the approach outlined in this report will entail demanding policy reforms, the costs of inaction will be far higher.

Managers of workforce training programs are often unable to afford costly, full-fledged experimental or nonexperimental evaluations to determine their programs'impacts. Therefore, many rely on the survey responses of program participants to gauge program impacts. Smith, Whalley, and Wilcox present the first attempt to assess such measures despite their already widespread use in program evaluations. They develop a multidisciplinary framework for addressing the issue and apply it to three case studies: the National Job Training Partnership Act Study, the U.S. National Supported Work Demonstration, and the Connecticut Jobs First Program. Each of these studies were subjected to experimental evaluations that included a survey-based participant evaluation measure. The authors apply econometric methods specifically developed to obtain estimates of program impacts among individuals in the studies and then compare these estimates with survey-based participant evaluation measures to obtain an assessment of the surveys'efficacy. The authors also discuss how their findings fit into the broader literatures in economics, psychology, and survey research.

Summary Machine Learning Systems: Designs that scale is an example-rich guide that teaches you how to implement reactive design solutions in your machine learning systems to make them as reliable as a well-built web app. Foreword by Sean Owen, Director of Data Science, Cloudera Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the Technology If you're building machine learning models to be used on a small scale, you don't need this book. But if you're a developer building a production-grade ML application that needs quick response times, reliability, and good user experience, this is the book for you. It collects principles and practices of machine learning systems that are dramatically easier to run and maintain, and that are reliably better for users. About the Book Machine Learning Systems: Designs that scale teaches you to design and implement production-ready ML systems. You'll learn the principles of reactive design as you build pipelines with Spark, create highly scalable services with Akka, and use powerful machine learning libraries like MLib on massive datasets. The examples use the Scala language, but the same ideas and tools work in Java, as well. What's Inside Working with Spark, MLlib, and Akka Reactive design patterns Monitoring and maintaining a large-scale system Futures, actors, and supervision About the Reader Readers need intermediate skills in Java or Scala. No prior machine learning experience is assumed. About the Author Jeff Smith builds powerful machine learning systems. For the past decade, he has been working on building data science applications, teams, and companies as part of various teams in New York, San Francisco, and Hong Kong. He blogs (https: //medium.com/@jeffksmithjr), tweets (@jeffksmithjr), and speaks (www.jeffsmith.tech/speaking) about various aspects of building real-world machine learning systems. Table of Contents PART 1 - FUNDAMENTALS OF REACTIVE MACHINE LEARNING Learning reactive machine learning Using reactive tools PART 2 - BUILDING A REACTIVE MACHINE LEARNING SYSTEM Collecting data Generating features Learning models Evaluating models Publishing models Responding PART 3 - OPERATING A MACHINE LEARNING SYSTEM Delivering Evolving intelligence

The book explores the unique contribution that geographers make to the concept of place attachment, and related ideas of place identity and sense of place. It presents six types of places to which people become attached and provides a global range of empirical case studies to illustrate the theoretical foundations. The book reveals that the types of places to which people bond are not discrete. Rather, a holistic approach, one that seeks to understand the interactive and reinforcing qualities between people and places, is most effective in advancing our understanding of place attachment.

When Mount Auburn opened as the first “rural” cemetery in the United States in 1831, it represented a new way for Americans to think about burial sites. It broke with conventional notions about graveyards as places to bury and commemorate the dead. Rather, the founders of Mount Auburn and the spate of similar cemeteries that followed over the next three decades before the Civil War created institutions that they envisioned being used by the living in new ways. Cemeteries became places for leisure, communing with nature, and creating a version of collective memory. In fact, these cemeteries reflected changing values and attitudes of Americans spanning much of the nineteenth century. In the process, they became paradoxical: they were “rural” yet urban, natural yet designed, artistic yet industrial, commemorating the dead yet used by the living. The Rural Cemetery Movement: Places of Paradox in Nineteenth-Century America breaks new ground in the history of cemeteries in the nineteenth century. This book examines these “rural” cemeteries modeled after Mount Auburn that were founded between the 1830s and 1850s. As such, it provides a new way of thinking about these spaces and new paradigm for seeing and visiting them. While they fulfilled the sacred function of burial, they were first and foremost businesses. The landscape and design, regulation of gravestones, appearance, and rhetoric furthered their role as a business that provided necessary services in cities that went well beyond merely burying bodies. They provided urban green spaces and respites from urban life, established institutions where people could craft their roles in collective memory, and served as prototypes for both urban planning and city parks.These cemeteries grew and thrived in the second half of the nineteenth century; for most, the majority of their burials came before 1910. This expansion of cemeteries coincided with profound urban growth in the United States. Unlike their predecessors, founders of these burial grounds intended them to be used in many ways that reflected their views and values about nature, life and death, and relationships. Emphasis on worldly accomplishments increased with industrialization and growth in the United States, which was reflected in changing ways people commemorated their dead during the period under this study. Thus, these cemeteries are a prism through which to understand the values, attitudes, and culture of urban America from mid-century through the Progressive Era.

William Clark is famous as one of the leaders on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, but he was also a soldier, a politician, and Indian agent. When he was a young boy, America became an independent country and by the time he died, the young country had expanded beyond the Mississippi and more than doubled in size. William served in the Army, explored and mapped new territory, served as governor of the Missouri Territory, and worked to keep the peace between Native Americans and new American settlers moving west as the country expanded. William Clark left his mark on history not only as a leader of the expedition to explore and map the Louisiana Territory, but also as a political leader and a diplomat.

Using a variety of data sources, the contributors explore how performance standards and incentives affect the behavior of public managers and agency employees, their approaches to service delivery, and ultimately, the outcomes for participants.

The estimation of the effects of treatments endogenous variables representing everything from individual participation in a training program to national participation in a World Bank loan program has occupied much of the theoretical and applied econometric research literatures in recent years. This volume brings together a diverse collection of papers on this important topic by leaders in the field from around the world. Some of the papers offer new theoretical contributions on various estimation techniques and others provide timely empirical applications illustrating the benefits of these and other methods. All of the papers share two common themes. First, as different estimators estimate different treatment effect parameters, it is vital to know what you are estimating and to know to whom the estimate applies. Second, as different estimators require different identification assumptions, it is crucial to understand the assumptions underlying each estimator. In empirical applications, the researcher must also make the case that the assumptions hold based on the available data and the institutional context. The theoretical contributions range over a variety of different estimators drawn from both statistics and econometrics, including matching and other non-parametric methods, panel methods, instrumental variables, methods based on hazard rate models and principal stratification, and they draw upon both the Bayesian and classical statistical traditions. The empirical contributions focus mainly on the evaluation of active labor market programs in Europe and the United States, but also examine of the effect of parenthood on wages and of the number of children on child health. It contains both theoretical and empirical contributions. It includes examples from both Europe and the US.