This is a comprehensive guide to all types of natural and man made disasters and their effect on buildings. It gives overall guidance and a basic technical understanding of prevention, mitigation and management of disaster, and outlines a checklist of preventive design elements for each situation. Every category is illustrated with a case study which pin points the essential information that is crucial to architects and engineers in designing buildings with disaster prevention in mind. The aim of the book is to give a clear understanding of the nature of events and problems, and to enable readers to respond with knowledge to the unique demands placed on their designs.

Are you blogging for your real estate business? Realty Blogging shows you how to fully utilize this powerful, direct-communication marketing tool, giving you all the know-how you need to capture the interest and business of local homeowners, buyers, and sellers.

YouTube For Dummies takes the classic Dummies tact in helping tech novices get a handle on a popular technology that more tech-savvy audiences consider "simple." With so much content on YouTube getting media attention, more first-timers are jumping on the site and they need help. The book also helps the next step audience of users looking to add content to YouTube.

Marketers must look to the Web for new ways to find and communicate with customers, rather than at them. From MySpace and YouTube to blogs, social media on the Internet is the most promising new way to reach customers. Marketing to the Social Web helps marketers and their companies understand how to engage customers, build customer communities, and maximize profits in a time of marketing confusion. Author and social media guru Larry Weber describes newly available tools and platforms, and shows readers how to apply them to see immediate results and growth.

This book is the first to deal with the important topic of the fire behaviour of fibre reinforced polymer composite materials. Composites are used in almost every conceivable application, although the high flammability and poor fire resistance of these materials remains a critical issue. The book covers all of the key issues on the behaviour of composites in a fire, including thermal degradation mechanisms, thermal softening, fire damage mechanics, and deterioration of mechanical properties. Also covered are fire protection materials for composites, fire properties of nanocomposites, fire safety regulations and standards, fire test methods, and health hazards from burning composites. This book will be of great interest to professionals in the composites industry, fire safety engineers, researchers in the fire properties of materials, and the users of composites in the aerospace, marine, civil infrastructure and automotive industries.

Though there are historical narratives about fire, several by Pyne, a former firefighter and a professor at Arizona State University, few deal with fire policy. Here Pyne argues that firefighting policy is influenced by national traditions and that it is a cultural construct just like art or architecture. There are four ways to deal with fire: do nothing, suppress, prescribe burn, or change the combustibility of the landscape. Focusing on federal lands, Pyne catalogs the evolution of fire policy, tracing unusual influences ranging from FDR's New Deal to the cold war to the culture of protest in the 1960s. While the text sometimes veers toward hyperbole (the 2003 California fires are "an intifada of nature") and hard-to-prove theses (Pyne feels Star Trek influenced fire policy in the 1960s), the author's arguments are frequently thought-provoking. Ultimately, Pyne warns that the U.S. has gone from a "fire-flushed country to a fire-starved one" and calls for reform in wildfire management.

The Asset Protection and Security Management Handbook is a must for all professionals involved in the protection of assets. For those new to the security profession, the text covers the fundamental aspects of security and security management providing a firm foundation for advanced development. For the experienced security practitioner, it provides the tools necessary for developing effective solutions and responses to the growing number of challenges encountered by today's security professionals. Based on the ASIS asset protection course, the text provides information vital to security planning and operational requirements. It addresses the most comonly recognized issues in the field and explores the future of asset protection management. The authors examine the latest in crime detection, prevention, and interrogation techniques. The Asset Protection and Security Management Handbook will not only help you to explore effective security training and educational programs for your organization, but will also help you discover proven methods of selling your security program to top management.

The Asset Protection and Security Management Handbook is a must for all professionals involved in the protection of assets. For those new to the security profession, the text covers the fundamental aspects of security and security management providing a firm foundation for advanced development. For the experienced security practitioner, it provides the tools necessary for developing effective solutions and responses to the growing number of challenges encountered by today's security professionals. Based on the ASIS asset protection course, the text provides information vital to security planning and operational requirements. It addresses the most comonly recognized issues in the field and explores the future of asset protection management. The authors examine the latest in crime detection, prevention, and interrogation techniques. The Asset Protection and Security Management Handbook will not only help you to explore effective security training and educational programs for your organization, but will also help you discover proven methods of selling your security program to top management.

The culminating achievement of the research doctorate, the dissertation, can be a virtually insurmountable obstacle for graduate students who, having taken on the biggest intellectual challenge of their lives, are mystified about what is expected of them. Barbara Lovitts does much to demonstrate the importance of clearly communicating discipline-based faculty expectations to students who need to understand the purpose, standards, and scope of the dissertation research and writing processes

This book is designed to help readers to make the transition from a first degree or from the workplace to a postgraduate course. It focuses on the management of the processes involved in gaining a postgraduate qualification, rather than just outlining the mechanics of the studying and research. International in its approach, the book encourages readers to assess, in a systematic way, the transferable skills that they can develop as part of their course, an area of personal development that is of increasing importance.

Authoring a PhD involves having creative ideas, working out how to organize them, writing up from plans, upgrading text, and finishing it speedily and to a good standard. It also involves being examined and getting work published. This book provides a huge range of ideas and suggestions to help PhD candidates cope with both the intellectual issues involved and the practical difficulties of organizing their work effectively.

With its homespun drawings and offerings of architectural wisdom for lay readers, this book is like a Whole Earth Catalog building course. In this update of his 1980 edition, however, Allen (architecture, Yale) manages to explain with brevity and common sense "how buildings work." In the opening pages, he places the Earth in the solar system and defines our place on the planet. He then offers analyses of the effects of sun, wind, and cold on building design and location. By focusing primarily on housing, Allen lets readers clearly understand everything from lighting, comfort, and quiet to the basics of making a sturdy structure. He offers occasional but well-placed examples of non-Western design as well. And the illustrations, which look like 1970s instructions for macrame, somehow work.

"Your Writing Coach" is a 248-page book filled with a wealth of practical knowledge, industry insights, writing exercises, and coaching tips that will teach and encourage writers at all levels to write, persist, and sell better. It's smartly divided into four parts with 18 chapters that covers a remarkable range of issues and topics all writers face somewhere along the spectrum.

Ideal for writing a short story, essay, review, or report, this guide provides beginning writers with the hands-on direction they need to improve their writing techniques and ability. Using a six-step approach to writing, this resource covers brainstorming ideas, choosing a topic, outlining, drafting, revising, and editing. The tone is casual, the advice is straightforward, and the whole approach makes writing a skill that anyone can learn. Illustrations reinforce the ideas visually and help to break up the text into bite-sized chunks. An example section with worked examples of two kinds of writing—a creative writing piece and an essay—takes readers through the six steps, so they can watch writing develop from a blank page to a finished piece. Ideal for high school students but also appropriate for writers of all ages, this book also includes tips on user-friendly grammar, a table of different types of text, and a quick night-before-the-exam summary.

This book will assist journalists and Flash developers who are working together to bring video, audio, still photos, and animated graphics together into one complete Web-based package. This book is not just another Flash book because it focuses on the need of journalists to tell an accurate story and provide accurate graphics.