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Monday, June 13, 2011

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Tuesday June 14, 2011

Mermaid: A Twist on the Classic Tale

By Carolyn Turgeon
ISBN: 9780307589972
 

The Princess

It was a gloomy, overcast day, like all days were, when the princess first saw them. The two of them, who would change her life. There was nothing to herald their appearance, no collection of birds or arrangement of tea leaves to mark their arrival. If anything, the convent was more quiet than usual. The nuns had just finished the midmorning service and scattered to their cells for private prayer. The abbess was shut in her chamber.

Only the princess was out in the garden, wandering along the stone wall that overlooked the sea. Here, near the old well, the wall dipped down to her knees, and an ancient gate led to a stairway that curved to the rocky ...

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Ever-Flowing Streams: Christ, Reiki, Reincarnation & Me

By Dana Taylor
ISBN: B004W3FZB0
 

PROLOGUE

The Adventure Begins…

I sat down for lunch that summer day of 2005 feel-ing perfectly fine. Gazing out my dining room window, I enjoyed watching a pair of squirrels frolic along the fence between the giant oaks in my Oklahoma back-yard. In the living room, the television hummed a Sunday afternoon football game. My husband would soon be snoring. I read a book and munched a few po-tato chips with my sandwich.

With no warning, pain shot up my neck and into my jaw. Ignore it. I took another bite. More pain, in-stant swelling below my ear.

Great, just what I need, I thought. Another attack.

Though I hadn’t experienced a ...

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Today's Business & Economics Chapter

 
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Business & Investing
Tuesday June 14, 2011
The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business (Collins Business Essentials)
by Clayton M. Christensen
 

How Can Great Firms Fail? Insights from the Hard Disk Drive Industry

When I began my search for an answer to the puzzle of why the best firms can fail, a friend offered some sage advice. "Those who study genetics avoid studying humans," he noted. "Because new generations come along only every thirty years or so, it takes a long time to understand the cause and effect of any changes. Instead, they study fruit flies, because they are conceived, born, mature, and die all within a single day. If you want to understand why something happens in business, study the disk drive industry. Those companies are the closest things to fruit flies that the business world will ever see."

Indeed, nowhere in the history of business has there been an industry like disk drives, where changes in technology, market structure, global scope, and vertical integration have been so pervasive, rapid, and unrelenting. While this pace and complexity might be a nightmare for managers, my friend was right about its being fertile ground for research. Few industries offer researchers the same opportunities for developing theories about how different types of change cause certain types of firms to succeed or fall or for testing those theories as the industry repeats its cycles of change.

This chapter summarizes the history of the disk drive industry in all its complexity. Some readers will be interested in it for the sake of history itself. But the value of understanding this history is that out of its complexity emerge a few stunningly simple and consistent factors that have repeatedly determined the success and failure of the industry's best firms. Simply put, when the best firms succeeded, they did so because they listened responsively to their customers and invested aggressively in the technology, products, and manufacturing capabilities that satisfied their customers' next-generation needs. But, paradoxically, when the best firms subsequently failed, it was for the same reasons-they listened responsively to their customers and invested aggressively in the technology, products, and manufacturing capabilities that satisfied their customers' next-generation needs. This is one of the innovator's dilemmas: Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.

The history of the disk drive industry provides a framework for understanding when "keeping close to your customers" is good advice-and when it is not. The robustness of this framework could only be explored by researching the industry's history in careful detail. Some of that detail is recounted here, and elsewhere in this book, in the hope that readers who are immersed in the detail of their own industries will be better able to recognize how similar patterns have affected their own fortunes and those of their competitors.

How Disk Drives Work

Disk drives write and read information that computers use. They comprise read-write heads mounted at the end of an arm that swings over the surface of a rotating disk in much the same way that a phonograph needle and arm reach over a record; aluminum or glass disks coated with magnetic material; at least two electric motors, a spin motor that drives the rotation of the disks and an actuator motor that moves the head to the desired position over the disk; and a variety of electronic circuits that control the drive's operation and its interface with the computer. See Figure 1.1 for an illustration of a typical disk drive.

The read-write head is a tiny electromagnet whose polarity changes whenever the direction of the electrical current running through it changes. Because opposite magnetic poles attract, when the polarity of the head becomes positive, the polarity of the area on the disk beneath the head switches to negative, and vice versa. By rapidly changing the direction of current flowing through the head's electromagnet as the disk spins beneath the head, a sequence of positively and negatively oriented magnetic domains are created in concentric tracks on the disk's surface. Disk drives can use the positive and negative domains on the disk as a binary numeric system--1 and 0--to "write" information onto disks. Drives read information from disks in essentially the opposite process: Changes in the magnetic flux fields on the disk surface induce changes in the micro current flowing through the head.

Emergence of the Earliest Disk Drives

A team of researchers at IBM's San Jose research laboratories developed the first disk drive between 1952 and 1956. Named RAMAC (for Random Access Method for Accounting and Control), this drive was the size of a large refrigerator, incorporated fifty twenty-four-inch disks, and could store 5 megabytes (MB) of information (see Figure 1.2). Most of the fundamental architectural concepts and component technologies that defined today's dominant disk drive design were also developed at IBM. These include its removable packs of rigid disks (introduced in 1961)...

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For Author's Only: Compelling Press Release 101

 
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Author Update
Tuesday June 14, 2011
 

Simple Steps to Writing a Compelling Press Release

Christy Anderson

Write a press release as compelling as your book

A press release is an announcement of your new book. The trick is making the announcement as compelling as your book is, and that takes a slightly different touch.

It’s a simple formula merely to put together a proper press release for your book.

In the first paragraph, include the following:
• Title
• ISBN number
• Publisher
• Author
• Price

Then in the body of the release, include the following:
• Brief summary of the book
• Picture of the jacket

But all that doesn’t make it compelling.

If you do nothing else with your “proper” press release, you must give it a headline that hooks the recipient who is looking through a pile of unopened emails—in many cases, emails about someone else’s new book. If your headline catches a reader’s eye such that they open your email—you are halfway to getting publicity for your book.

Effective headlines may mimic a news story. “Amish principles work for today’s family.” “[Famous Person] reacts to frightening statistic.” If you’re lucky, your newsy headline will reflect a current event: “Journalist finds strength in captivity.”

Brainstorm a bunch of these and since the main headline will be the subject header of your email, keep the length on the short side. Use a subhead to elaborate.

When composing your headline, consider your target audience. If your book is niche, your niche reviewers will love seeing a mention of it up front, such as love for romance readers. War reference or historical character for history buffs. God for religious reviewers. Your target audience may get excited about a new author—mention it, if you think that would move them.

Now that your release has been opened, you have the first few paragraphs to lure the reader into reading the whole thing. These paragraphs will contain a summary of the plot or content. If your publisher has written summaries for you, utilize their wordsmithing. There is a fine line between going on too long and getting to the point too quickly. Find the middle ground that engages the reader but doesn’t waste his or her time. Don’t be redundant just to add verbiage, and be mindful of the length of your release. If it seems too long at a glance, the reader may prejudge the content as too much trouble.

Now create a quote about how you feel about a character or your motivation behind writing the book. That’ll be your next paragraph. Sum up, and make a final captivating statement about your book.

The rest of your release will include a brief biographical paragraph about the author and a handful of suggested interview questions for reviewers who might like to feature an interview with you. This way you take all the work out of someone giving you free publicity. Questions could cover motivation, research, characters, genre, or personal information.

Have you received endorsements or critical acclaim? Use them! They are very versatile. Depending on their inherent value, they could be part of a headline or a subheading. You could work part of a quote into the body. Otherwise, list the best written ones after the main body of the release. Don’t be afraid to edit quotes for length and impact.

And never forget your call to action: “To request a review copy of My Best Book Ever, schedule So-And-So for an interview, or for more information, please contact ________.”

A good press release is within your grasp as a good writer. You already know your recipients want to read the book—you just have to tell them.

About the Author:
Christy Anderson is a media specialist at Litfuse Publicity Group in Seattle, Wash., a firm that provides a wide variety of services for authors, ranging from blog tours, media PR, social media launch parties, interactive websites, blog development, personal assistants, direct mail, event planning, marketing, and more. Learn more at www.LitfuseGroup.com.

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Today's Cartoon: Bumpy Ride

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Updated Monday, April 13, 2009, at 2:48 PM ET

Cartoon by Steve Sack.

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Today in Slate: Is Web Personalization Turning Us Into Solipsistic Twits? Plus, A Short History of the Hairless Chest

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Today: June 13, 2011

Too Gay To Judge?

Too Gay To Judge?

The preposterous, appalling effort to disqualify Vaughn Walker from judging the California gay marriage case because he is gay.

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America Has the American Dream. Does Belgium Have a Belgian Dream? Is There a Chinese Dream?

America Has the American Dream. Does Belgium Have a Belgian Dream? Is There a Chinese Dream?

David Mamet on Sarah Palin: "I Am Crazy About Her"

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