The Front Steps Project


Book Description

People magazine's top reason for Hope in America. Curated from a grassroots social movement, The Front Steps Project is an inspiring, uplifting portrait series capturing how people coped with living in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Front Steps Project™ demonstrates that even in the most challenging of circumstances, kindness, love, courage, and hope exist to build, bind, and connect communities around the globe. Created on March 18, 2020, The Front Steps Project™ began when friends Kristen Collins and Cara Soulia sought out to unite their neighbors through photographs of life in quarantine. In addition to incorporating work from other local photographers, the women traveled to neighborhoods around Needham, Massachusetts to photograph residents in front of their homes in exchange for donations to their local food pantry. Within days, #TheFrontStepsProject became a grassroots social mission, connecting thousands of people across the globe and raising over $3,250,000 for vital non-profit organizations and local businesses including food pantries, frontline workers, homeless and animal shelters, hospitals and so much more. Through their noble efforts, hundreds of thousands of images and stories of love, sacrifice, compassion, kindness, perseverance, and – ultimately hope – flooded social media. Featured on Good Morning America, The Today Show, People Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe and more, The Front Steps Project brings communities together virtually, despite being – and maybe feeling – isolated. The Front Steps Project contains over 400 photographs and dozens of stories of families during the COVID-19 pandemic. This heartwarming keepsake commemorates a massive effort of courage, unity, and goodwill. As a tribute to the good work of The Front Steps Project, a portion of book sales will be donated to The United Way to help people impacted by the pandemic.




Dear Data


Book Description

Equal parts mail art, data visualization, and affectionate correspondence, Dear Data celebrates "the infinitesimal, incomplete, imperfect, yet exquisitely human details of life," in the words of Maria Popova (Brain Pickings), who introduces this charming and graphically powerful book. For one year, Giorgia Lupi, an Italian living in New York, and Stefanie Posavec, an American in London, mapped the particulars of their daily lives as a series of hand-drawn postcards they exchanged via mail weekly—small portraits as full of emotion as they are data, both mundane and magical. Dear Data reproduces in pinpoint detail the full year's set of cards, front and back, providing a remarkable portrait of two artists connected by their attention to the details of their lives—including complaints, distractions, phone addictions, physical contact, and desires. These details illuminate the lives of two remarkable young women and also inspire us to map our own lives, including specific suggestions on what data to draw and how. A captivating and unique book for designers, artists, correspondents, friends, and lovers everywhere.




Ultralearning


Book Description

Now a Wall Street Journal bestseller. Learn a new talent, stay relevant, reinvent yourself, and adapt to whatever the workplace throws your way. Ultralearning offers nine principles to master hard skills quickly. This is the essential guide to future-proof your career and maximize your competitive advantage through self-education. In these tumultuous times of economic and technological change, staying ahead depends on continual self-education—a lifelong mastery of fresh ideas, subjects, and skills. If you want to accomplish more and stand apart from everyone else, you need to become an ultralearner. The challenge of learning new skills is that you think you already know how best to learn, as you did as a student, so you rerun old routines and old ways of solving problems. To counter that, Ultralearning offers powerful strategies to break you out of those mental ruts and introduces new training methods to help you push through to higher levels of retention. Scott H. Young incorporates the latest research about the most effective learning methods and the stories of other ultralearners like himself—among them Benjamin Franklin, chess grandmaster Judit Polgár, and Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman, as well as a host of others, such as little-known modern polymath Nigel Richards, who won the French World Scrabble Championship—without knowing French. Young documents the methods he and others have used to acquire knowledge and shows that, far from being an obscure skill limited to aggressive autodidacts, ultralearning is a powerful tool anyone can use to improve their career, studies, and life. Ultralearning explores this fascinating subculture, shares a proven framework for a successful ultralearning project, and offers insights into how you can organize and exe - cute a plan to learn anything deeply and quickly, without teachers or budget-busting tuition costs. Whether the goal is to be fluent in a language (or ten languages), earn the equivalent of a college degree in a fraction of the time, or master multiple tools to build a product or business from the ground up, the principles in Ultralearning will guide you to success.




Front Porch Portraits


Book Description

Front Porch Portraits - Staying Apart Together is an 8 x 12," 116-page, hardbound book, that includes approximately 230 images. The book documents people at home, on their front porches, during this historic period of COVID-19 quarantine in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota. It is a limited-edition of 500 books, all of which will be signed and numbered.




Academic Ableism


Book Description

Places notions of disability at the center of higher education and argues that inclusiveness allows for a better education for everyone




Executing Data Quality Projects


Book Description

Executing Data Quality Projects, Second Edition presents a structured yet flexible approach for creating, improving, sustaining and managing the quality of data and information within any organization. Studies show that data quality problems are costing businesses billions of dollars each year, with poor data linked to waste and inefficiency, damaged credibility among customers and suppliers, and an organizational inability to make sound decisions. Help is here! This book describes a proven Ten Step approach that combines a conceptual framework for understanding information quality with techniques, tools, and instructions for practically putting the approach to work – with the end result of high-quality trusted data and information, so critical to today's data-dependent organizations. The Ten Steps approach applies to all types of data and all types of organizations – for-profit in any industry, non-profit, government, education, healthcare, science, research, and medicine. This book includes numerous templates, detailed examples, and practical advice for executing every step. At the same time, readers are advised on how to select relevant steps and apply them in different ways to best address the many situations they will face. The layout allows for quick reference with an easy-to-use format highlighting key concepts and definitions, important checkpoints, communication activities, best practices, and warnings. The experience of actual clients and users of the Ten Steps provide real examples of outputs for the steps plus highlighted, sidebar case studies called Ten Steps in Action. This book uses projects as the vehicle for data quality work and the word broadly to include: 1) focused data quality improvement projects, such as improving data used in supply chain management, 2) data quality activities in other projects such as building new applications and migrating data from legacy systems, integrating data because of mergers and acquisitions, or untangling data due to organizational breakups, and 3) ad hoc use of data quality steps, techniques, or activities in the course of daily work. The Ten Steps approach can also be used to enrich an organization's standard SDLC (whether sequential or Agile) and it complements general improvement methodologies such as six sigma or lean. No two data quality projects are the same but the flexible nature of the Ten Steps means the methodology can be applied to all. The new Second Edition highlights topics such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, Internet of Things, security and privacy, analytics, legal and regulatory requirements, data science, big data, data lakes, and cloud computing, among others, to show their dependence on data and information and why data quality is more relevant and critical now than ever before. - Includes concrete instructions, numerous templates, and practical advice for executing every step of The Ten Steps approach - Contains real examples from around the world, gleaned from the author's consulting practice and from those who implemented based on her training courses and the earlier edition of the book - Allows for quick reference with an easy-to-use format highlighting key concepts and definitions, important checkpoints, communication activities, and best practices - A companion Web site includes links to numerous data quality resources, including many of the templates featured in the text, quick summaries of key ideas from the Ten Steps methodology, and other tools and information that are available online




Agile Retrospectives


Book Description

Project retrospectives help teams examine what went right and what went wrong on a project. But traditionally, retrospectives (also known as “post-mortems”) are only held at the end of the project—too late to help. You need agile retrospectives that are iterative and incremental. You need to accurately find and fix problems to help the team today. Now Esther and Diana show you the tools, tricks and tips you need to fix the problems you face on a software development project on an on-going basis. You’ll see how to architect retrospectives in general, how to design them specifically for your team and organization, how to run them effectively, how to make the needed changes and how to scale these techniques up. You’ll learn how to deal with problems, and implement solutions effectively throughout the project—not just at the end. This book will help you: Design and run effective retrospectives Learn how to find and fix problems Find and reinforce team strengths Address people issues as well as technological Use tools and recipes proven in the real world With regular tune-ups, your team will hum like a precise, world-class orchestra.




Doing Your Qualitative Psychology Project


Book Description

This book is for students who are about to embark on a qualitative research project as part of their psychology degree. While there are a number of books on qualitative psychological research, Doing Your Qualitative Psychology Project is unique as it leads you step-by-step through the process of doing your project and writing your dissertation. The focus throughout is on how to make your project excellent! Editors Cath Sullivan, Stephen Gibson and Sarah C.E. Riley focus on the steps involved in completing a qualitative dissertation and on the decisions that you’ll need to make as you go along.




The Phoenix Project


Book Description

***Over a half-million sold! And available now, the Wall Street Journal Bestselling sequel The Unicorn Project*** “Every person involved in a failed IT project should be forced to read this book.”—TIM O'REILLY, Founder & CEO of O'Reilly Media “The Phoenix Project is a must read for business and IT executives who are struggling with the growing complexity of IT.”—JIM WHITEHURST, President and CEO, Red Hat, Inc. Five years after this sleeper hit took on the world of IT and flipped it on it's head, the 5th Anniversary Edition of The Phoenix Project continues to guide IT in the DevOps revolution. In this newly updated and expanded edition of the bestselling The Phoenix Project, co-author Gene Kim includes a new afterword and a deeper delve into the Three Ways as described in The DevOps Handbook. Bill, an IT manager at Parts Unlimited, has been tasked with taking on a project critical to the future of the business, code named Phoenix Project. But the project is massively over budget and behind schedule. The CEO demands Bill must fix the mess in ninety days or else Bill's entire department will be outsourced. With the help of a prospective board member and his mysterious philosophy of The Three Ways, Bill starts to see that IT work has more in common with a manufacturing plant work than he ever imagined. With the clock ticking, Bill must organize work flow streamline interdepartmental communications, and effectively serve the other business functions at Parts Unlimited. In a fast-paced and entertaining style, three luminaries of the DevOps movement deliver a story that anyone who works in IT will recognize. Readers will not only learn how to improve their own IT organizations, they'll never view IT the same way again. “This book is a gripping read that captures brilliantly the dilemmas that face companies which depend on IT, and offers real-world solutions.”—JEZ HUMBLE, Co-author of Continuous Delivery, Lean Enterprise, Accelerate, and The DevOps Handbook




Proceedings of Government/Industry Forum


Book Description

Recurrent problems with project performance in the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in the 1990s raised questions in Congress about the practices and processes used by the department to manage projects. The 105th Committee of Conference on Energy and Water Resources directed DOE to investigate establishing a project review process. Many of the findings and recommendations in this series of reports identified the need for improved planning in the early project stages (front-end planning) to get the project off to the right start, and the continuous monitoring of projects by senior management to make sure the project stays on course. These reports also stressed the need for DOE to act as an owner, not a contractor, and to train its personnel to function not as traditional project managers but as knowledgeable owner's representatives in dealing with projects and contractors. The NRC Committee for Oversight and Assessment of Department of Energy Project Management determined that it would be helpful for DOE to sponsor a forum in which representatives from DOE and from leading corporations with large, successful construction programs would discuss how the owner's role is conducted in government and in industry. In so doing, the committee does not claim that all industrial firms are better at project management than the DOE. Far from it-the case studies represented at this forum were selected specifically because these firms were perceived by the committee to be exemplars of the very best practices in project management. Nor is it implied that reaching this level is easy; the industry speakers themselves show that excellence in project management is difficult to achieve and perhaps even more difficult to maintain. Nevertheless, they have been successful in doing so, through constant attention by senior management.