All managers, whether brand-new to their positions or well established in the corporate hierarchy, can use a little brushing-up now and then. The skills-based Briefcase Books Series is filled with ideas and strategies to help managers become more capable, efficient, effective, and valuable to their corporations. As customer loyalty increasingly becomes a thing of the past, customer relationship management (CRM) has become one of today's hottest topics. Customer Relationship Management supplies easy-to-apply solutions to common CRM problems, including how to maximize impact from CRM technology, which data warehousing techniques are most effective, and how to create and manage both short- and long-term relationships.

This book translates knowledge about persuasion into evidence-based principles. Useful knowledge about persuasion has been obtained over the last 100 years from the experience of advertising experts and from empirical studies in advertising and other fields including psychology, consumer behavior, law, mass communication, politics, and propaganda. The principles in Persuasive Advertising provide understandable and easy-to-access guidance for all types of advertising. Including still media such as print and Internet, and motion media such as TV, streaming video, Internet, and radio. They also apply to other types of persuasive communications such as management reports, speeches, and press releases. Wharton School Professor J. Scott Armstrong spent over 16 years on this book. In recent years, he was assisted by Gerry Lukeman, Chairman Emeritus of Ipsos-ASI and Sandeep Patnaik, Research Director at Gallup and Robinson. Altogether, more than 80 people contributed to Persuasive Advertising by obtaining relevant studies, analyzing data, editing and reviewing, and surveying researchers to ensure that the book correctly summarizes their findings. Persuasive Advertising summarizes findings from about 3,000 empirical studies and 50 books. It also presents new findings from previously unpublished studies. Along with the AdPrin Audit software on AdPrin.com, Persuasive Advertising enables advertisers as well as agencies to quickly and inexpensively identify ways to improve ads – or to determine which of a set of ads will be most effective. For example, it typically requires about an hour for an experienced user to obtain a persuasiveness index for a print ad along with a list of ways to improve the ad., By using these principles, advertisers can improve their creativity and effectiveness.

For over a century, Africa has experienced a violent cycle of warfare. First came the wars of colonial conquest, then the armed struggles for independence, and fi nally a series of civil wars. These civil wars have many causes, including the struggle over artifi cial frontiers inherited from colonialism, friction and rivalry among different ethnic and religious groups, and the crude desire for power of some African leaders. During the Cold War, the situation was further exacerbated by intervention or “aid” from the former colonial powers and new superpowers. Although it has not been easy to prevent or contain these wars, increasingly efforts are being made by the United Nations, other international organizations, and African organizations such as the African Union to provide peacekeeping and provide care for refugees. For a continent that is poorly known and badly misunderstood to begin with, it is often hard to fi nd useful information about underlying situations, groups and people involved, and even the course of wars—which is why this Historical Dictionary of Civil Wars in Africa is such an important book. The chronology tracks when civil wars erupted or were resolved, and which ones still continue; the introduction puts the warfare into historical, political, and geographical context; the dictionary provides a wealth of information on each of the wars, the more prominent leaders involved (both those who make war and those who try to bring peace), liberation movements, and political parties and organizations; and the substantial bibliography presents indispensable information for those who want to know more.

Love Between Women examines female homoeroticism and the role of women in the ancient Roman world. Employing an unparalleled range of cultural sources, Brooten finds evidence of marriages between women and establishes that condemnations of female homoerotic practices were based on widespread awareness of love between women. "An extraordinary accomplishment. . . . A definitive source for all future discussion of homoeroticism and the Bible."—Mary Rose D'Angelo, Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review "[Brooten's] convincing analysis . . . not only profoundly reshapes our understanding of the past, but it should also shape the way in which that past, particularly the early Christian texts with their immense normative weight, will be used for the future."—Anne L. Clark, Journal of Lesbian Studies "Love Between Women gives contemporary debates on sexuality a carefully delineated past. It boldly insists upon a different future, one informed by history but not tyrannized by it."—Susan Ackerman, Lambda Book Report "Fascinating, provocative and lucid. . . . Brooten has made a fundamental contribution to women's and gender studies, gay and lesbian studies, and classics."—Elizabeth A. Castelli, Women's Review of Books Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Studies Book, 1997

Conflict, bullying and harassment can destroy the foundations of the most enterprising organisations. Bullying is now a key complaint received by HR departments. Destructive conflict creates stress, which can lead to poor morale and performance, increased staff turnover and an overall decline in organisational effectiveness. The good news is destructive conflict can be reduced – but this is a sensitive issue, requiring managers to call on tried and tested techniques. Published for HR and line managers, IRS Managing Conflict in the Workplace will help employers to recognise and resolve destructive conflict issues more effectively, enabling them to become more positive, productive and efficient. It gives invaluable advice on conflict prevention, mediation and negotiation; it explains how to manage conflict in a wide variety of situations; and includes guidance on the new statutory requirements for disciplinary and grievance procedures.

Circles of Resistance: Jewish, Leftist, and Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany analyzes resistance networks of young German Jews and other young dissidents during the Nazi dictatorship. Young German-Jewish radicals created an intellectually and politically vibrant subculture in Berlin, the geographical focus of this study. The youths analyzed here were reacting not only to Nazi oppression: they were also driven to develop new modes of action and politics by their estrangement not only from German society, but also from the traditional left parties and their post-1933 underground organizations, and even from large segments of Berlin's Jewish community, where radical activism was often regarded as counter-productive and needlessly provocative. At the center of this study are the Herbert Baum groups, led by members of Germany's Communist Party (KPD). While the Baum groups were the largest, they were but one of several resistance operations that were situated partially within the milieu created by Communists, Socialists, Trotskyists, and radical Jewish youths. Based on archival research in Germany, Paris, Amsterdam, and Jerusalem, and interviews with veterans of the anti-Nazi resistance, Circles of Resistance analyzes the overlap of these diverse social and political dimensions among dissident circles and offers a reconsideration of traditional thinking on leftist and Jewish resistance and youth subcultures of the Third Reich. Circles of Resistance will be useful for undergraduate as well as graduate courses on Jewish history, Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust, as well as courses devoted to the history of European socialism.

In our industrialized world, we are surrounded by occupational, recreational, and environmental noise. Very loud noise damages the inner-ear receptors and results in hearing loss, subsequent problems with communication in the presence of background noise, and, potentially, social isolation. There is much less public knowledge about the noise exposure that produces only temporary hearing loss but that in the long term results in hearing problems due to the damage of high-threshold auditory nerve fibers. Early exposures of this kind, such as in neonatal intensive care units, manifest themselves at a later age, sometimes as hearing loss but more often as an auditory processing disorder. There is even less awareness about changes in the auditory brain caused by repetitive daily exposure to the same type of low-level occupational or musical sound. This low-level, but continuous, environmental noise exposure is well known to affect speech understanding, produce non-auditory problems ranging from annoyance and depression to hypertension, and to cause cognitive difficulties. Additionally, internal noise, such as tinnitus, has effects on the brain similar to low-level external noise.

The early Christian writer Tertullian first applied the epithet "bride of Christ" to the uppity virgins of Carthage as a means of enforcing female obedience. Henceforth, the virgin as Christ's spouse was expected to manifest matronly modesty and due submission, hobbling virginity's ancient capacity to destabilize gender roles. In the early Middle Ages, the focus on virginity and the attendant anxiety over its possible loss reinforced the emphasis on claustration in female religious communities, while also profoundly disparaging the nonvirginal members of a given community. With the rising importance of intentionality in determining a person's spiritual profile in the high Middle Ages, the title of bride could be applied and appropriated to laywomen who were nonvirgins as well. Such instances of democratization coincided with the rise of bridal mysticism and a progressive somatization of female spirituality. These factors helped cultivate an increasingly literal and eroticized discourse: women began to undergo mystical enactments of their union with Christ, including ecstatic consummations and vivid phantom pregnancies. Female mystics also became increasingly intimate with their confessors and other clerical confidants, who were sometimes represented as stand-ins for the celestial bridegroom. The dramatic merging of the spiritual and physical in female expressions of religiosity made church authorities fearful, an anxiety that would coalesce around the figure of the witch and her carnal induction into the Sabbath.

“The last scan in the pile was strikingly odd. In fact it looked exactly like the most abnormal of the scans I had just been writing about, suggesting that the poor individual it belonged to was a psychopath—or at least shared an uncomfortable amount of traits with one....When I found out who the scan belonged to, I had to believe there was a mistake....But there had been no mistake. The scan was mine.” For the first fifty-eight years of his life James Fallon was by all appearances a normal guy. A successful neuroscientist and medical school professor, he’d been raised in a loving, supportive family, married his high school sweetheart, and had three kids and lots of friends. Then he learned a shocking truth that would not only disrupt his personal and professional life, but would lead him to question the very nature of his own identity. The Psychopath Inside tells the fascinating story of Fallon’s reaction to the discovery that he has the brain of a psychopath. While researching serial murderers, he uncovered a distinct neurological pattern in their brain scans that helped explain their cold and violent behavior. A few months later he learned that he was descended from a family with a long line of murderers which confirmed that Fallon’s own brain pattern wasn’t a fluke. As a scientist convinced that humans are shaped by their genetics, Fallon set out to reconcile the truth about his brain with everything he knew about the mind, behavior, and the influence of nature vs. nurture on our personalities. How could he, a successful scientist and a happy family man with no history of violence, be a psychopath? How much did his biology influence his behavior? Was he capable of some of the gruesome atrocities perpetrated by the serial killers he had studied? Combining his personal experience with scientific analysis, Fallon shares his journey and the discoveries that ultimately led him to understand that, despite everything science can teach us, humans are even more complex than we can imagine.

This book is Volume 13 in the Sydney Symposium of Social Psychology series. Theaim of the Sydney Symposia of Social Psychology is to provide new, integrative insights into key areas of contemporary research. Held every year at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, each symposium deals with an important integrative theme in social psychology, and the invited participants are leading researchers in the field from around the world. Each contribution is extensively discussed during the symposium and is subsequently thoroughly revised into book chapters that are published in the volumes in this series.

Although everyone is familiar with the concept of time in everyday life and has probably given thought to the question of how time began, recent scientific developments in this field have not been accessible in a simple understandable form. This book is important as it presents to readers current ideas about the role of time in theoretical cosmology. Recent observational discoveries, especially that the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating, have revolutionized the understanding of the energy content of the universe. This development leads to new possibilities for the beginning and end of cosmological time. This book emphasizes the notion of entropy and describes how it is theoretically possible that the universe may end in a finite time or that time can cycle and never end. Provided here is twenty-first century scientific knowledge, written by one of the world's most eminent theoretical physicists, that will better enable the public to discuss further the fascinating idea of time. It is ideally suited also for young people considering a career in scientific research. Readership: Professional non-scientists to high school students considering a career in science.