The Weekend Effect


Book Description

Encroaching work demands—coupled with domestic chores, overbooked schedules, and the incessant pinging of our devices—have taken a toll on what used to be our free time: the weekend. With no space to tune out and recharge, every aspect of our lives is suffering: our health is deteriorating, our social networks (the face-to-face kind) are dissolving, and our productivity is down. The notion of working less and living more, once considered an American virtue, has given way to the belief that you must be “on” 24/7. Award-winning journalist Katrina Onstad, pushes back against this all-work, no-fun ethos. Tired of suffering from Sunday night letdown, she digs into the history, positive psychology, and cultural anthropology of the great missing weekend and how we can revive it. Onstad follows the trail of people, companies, and countries who are vigilantly protecting their time off for joy, adventure, and most important, purpose. Filled with personal and professional inspiration, The Weekend Effect is a thoughtful, well-researched argument to take back those precious 48 hours, and ultimately, to save ourselves.




The Snowball Effect


Book Description

Dylan and his friends snowball cars for entertainment on the weekend. When they don't get enough reaction from passing cars, they put rocks in the middle of their snowballs. Their first attack with the loaded snowballs causes a car crash. His friends flee, but Dylan goes to the scene of the accident to make sure the driver is okay. He runs off when he knows help is on the way. Dylan is sighted, and rather than being punished, he is lauded as a hero. As his lies pile up, so does the hype about his heroics, and along with it, Dylan's guilt. This short novel is a high-interest, low-reading level book for middle-grade readers who are building reading skills, want a quick read or say they don’t like to read! The epub edition of this title is fully accessible.




The Weekend That Changed Wall Street


Book Description

A first-person account of the white-knuckle weekend that brought the financial world to its knees, from one of America's most famous business reporters. As bankers and government officials scrambled to keep the economy from total collapse during the weekend of September 12-14, 2008, top CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo was taking frantic phone calls from the most powerful players on Wall Street and in Washington. Through these intimate conversations, she had an unequaled perspective on the crisis and its aftermath, the personalities involved, and the emotions at work. Now she draws on her high-level network to provide an eyewitness account of the biggest events of the financial crisis, including lengthy interviews with former treasury secretary Henry Paulson, former AIG chairman Hank Greenberg, and former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain, among many others. Writing with both authority and dramatic flair, Bartiromo also tackles the big questions: how did an unmatched period of market euphoria and growth turn sour, catapulting the economy into a dangerous slide? And in the long run, how will the near catastrophe really change Wall Street?




The Buddha Pill


Book Description

Millions of people meditate daily but can meditative practices really make us ‘better’ people? In The Buddha Pill, pioneering psychologists Dr Miguel Farias and Catherine Wikholm put meditation and mindfulness under the microscope. Separating fact from fiction, they reveal what scientific research – including their groundbreaking study on yoga and meditation with prisoners – tells us about the benefits and limitations of these techniques for improving our lives. As well as illuminating the potential, the authors argue that these practices may have unexpected consequences, and that peace and happiness may not always be the end result. Offering a compelling examination of research on transcendental meditation to recent brain-imaging studies on the effects of mindfulness and yoga, and with fascinating contributions from spiritual teachers and therapists, Farias and Wikholm weave together a unique story about the science and the delusions of personal change.




Structured Finance in Latin America


Book Description

Structured Finance in Latin America explores how structured finance mechanisms can channel pension savings to support projects in underserved sectors, deepen capital markets, and contribute to investment and economic growth. Private pension funds have been accumulating assets rapidly in the wake of pension system reforms in many Latin American countries. Strict investment regulations to protect workers' savings have limited their investment in highly creditworthy domestic securities, yet pension fund demand for new securities has outstripped issuance of eligible traditional corporate debt instruments. This has contributed to a high concentration of pension fund assets in public debt. Innovative structured finance mechanisms can help bring to the market a new set of creditworthy securities backed by pools of loans to small borrowers, mortgage loans or the expected proceeds of large infrastructure projects. These mechanisms create new investment opportunities for pension funds, while establishing additional sources of funding for underserved market segments. Policy makers and regulatory authorities have a catalytic role to play in the development of structured finance securities by establishing a conducive legal, regulatory, and tax framework. Structured Finance in Latin America serves as a practical guide for development practitioners, policy makers, and others working in government, international or nongovernmental organizations, and financial institutions, who focus on finance and investment; infrastructure, transport, and urban development; housing finance; small and medium-sized enterprise development; and pension reform.




A Monthly Effect in Stock Returns


Book Description

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.




That Weekend


Book Description

"A bold and expertly plotted page-turner." --Courtney Summers, New York Times bestselling author of Sadie From the author of The Cheerleaders, comes a thriller about best friends on a weekend getaway that goes horribly, dangerously wrong. THREE BEST FRIENDS, A LAKE HOUSE, A SECRET TRIP -- WHAT COULD GO WRONG? It was supposed to be the perfect prom weekend getaway. But it's clear something terrible happened when Claire wakes up alone and bloodied on a hiking trail with no memory of the past forty-eight hours. Now everyone wants answers--most of all, Claire. She remembers Friday night, but after that . . . nothing. And now Kat and Jesse--her best friends--are missing. What happened on the mountain? And where are Kat and Jesse? Claire knows the answers are buried somewhere in her memory. But as she's learning, everyone has secrets--even her best friends. And she's pretty sure she's not going to like what she remembers.




How Happy to Be


Book Description

How Happy to Be captures the life of a disillusioned entertainment journalist as she heads into a downward spiral of ritual substance abuse and empty punditry. Along this path of self-destruction, her past on a West Coast commune, both comic and poignant, keeps intruding. It isn’t until her indiscretions catch up with her that she realizes she must face that past if she is to have any chance of finding where her happiness lies. Onstad’s ability to blend satire with a moving story of coming to terms with life’s deepest wounds makes How Happy to Be a wholly satisfying and striking novel.




Every Other Weekend


Book Description

A debut novel about an imaginative girl in the year following her parents' divorce, and what happens when her creeping premonition that something terrible will happen comes true in the most unexpected of ways. The year is 1988, and America is full of broken homes. Every Other Weekend drops us into the sun-scorched suburbs of southern California, amid Bret Michaels mania and Cold War hysteria, with Nenny, a wildly precocious, nervous nelly of an eight-year-old, as our guide to the newly rearranged life she finds herself leading after her parents split. Nenny and her mother and two brothers have just moved in with her new stepfather and his two kids. Her old life replaced by this new configuration, Nenny's natural anxieties intensify, and both real and imagined dangers entwine: earthquakes and home invasions, ghosts of her stepfather's days in Vietnam, Gorbachev knocking down the door of her third grade class and recruiting them all into the Red Army. Knock-kneed and a little stormy-eyed, she is far too small for the thoughts that haunt her, yet her fears are not entirely unfounded. Indeed, tragedy does come, but it comes at her sideways, in a way she never had imagined. With an irresistible voice, Summerfield has managed to tap the very truth of what it is to have been a child of her generation, bottle it, and serve it up in devastating, hilarious, heartfelt doses. Every Other Weekend beautifully and unsettlingly captures the terrible wisdom that children often possess, as well as the surprising ways in which families fracture and reform.




Beyond the Random Walk


Book Description

In an efficient market, all stocks should be valued at a price that is consistent with available information. But as financial expert Singal points out, there are circumstances under which certain stocks sell at a price higher or lower than the right price. Here he discusses ten such anomalous prices and shows how investors might--or might not--be able to exploit these situations for profit.