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First Lieutenant Jeremy Burke, a reservist from the 80th Division (Institutional Training), served on a military transition team (MiTT) in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Normally a company executive officer acting as a company commander, he was the advisor to the intelligence and operations officers in a brigade-level advisory team. Between reporting for duty and the beginning of mobilization training, Burke was moved to a different team three times. "It was kind of like a fantasy football league draft and a lot of us were getting bumped to other teams," says Burke. "There was a lot of confusion as to where we were going and what team we were going to be on." Regarding the mobilization training at Camp Atterbury, he states, "There was no discussion of what MiTT-specific training we would get.... We only got very basic training on crew-served weapons and driving a Humvee because they didn't think we needed to know how to do all that." By contrast, the training he received in Kuwait was much different, saying, "It was refreshing. It was something we needed for our morale. It let us know that we may actually survive this mission because, based on the last three months of training we had at Camp Atterbury, we didn't think we'd make it back alive." Information sharing with the teams they would replace varied greatly, and in Burke's case, "they had recently lost two guys from their brigade team so they were a little reluctant to share." The actual handoff consisted of a vague understanding of their day-to-day experience, leaving much unexplained. The introduction with their Iraqi counterparts went well, including a formal dinner to mark the change of MiTTs. When they arrived, their unit was in the process of moving to Tall Afar, and Burke was sent to be the liaison officer to Tiger Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. He saw a fundamental problem with the way partnered US units were dealing with Iraqi units, explaining, "If you asked the US commander, Colonel McMaster, he would say, 'That guy works for me. He takes orders from me, and if he takes orders from the division commander it's because I told the division commander to do that.' But these guys didn't follow that." Other challenges encountered included sensitivity training, soldiers refusing to socialize with Iraqis, desertions, theft, frustration with Iraqi counterparts, lack of planning for MiTTs, an inability to receive logistical support, and corruption. Speaking of the Iraqis, "When it really came down to it, they could execute."

Stand Up, Fight Back is the story of little 9 year old boy in 4th grade being terrorized by bullies every day. It started on the school bus with verbal taunts by the bullies to all the kids. Everyday they systematically made their way around the bus teasing everyone. When it was my turn for ridicule, I tried to ignore them and hoped they would just go away. Eventually the bullies would push further and be more aggressive with their attacks to get a reaction. As they increased pressure, I would try to retreat further into my dark hole of emptiness to get away. This drove them more and more to hurt me. Eventually I caved and started to cry. It was a huge victory for the bullies to get someone to cry. As months went on the attacks became more frequent and also became physical. They would slap my head, flick my ears, punch and poke me. They would pull my shoes off and even throw them out the bus window. And the bullying made it's way off the bus and into school, the schoolyard and even out in public places. I couldn't get away. This book details the dark plight of bullying and abuse that goes on every day in schools all over the country. You hear all the details about how that little boy was systematically broken down into the darkest lows where his soul could go. I discuss the failures of the system along the way as I was being bullied. From the Bus Driver that saw it all, to the principal that heard first hand from my mother about how I looked getting off the bus being beaten to finally the bully's parents denying any wrong doing of their son. Many adults knew what was going on but none did much about it. I conclude the book with some details on how to fix this epidemic. It won't be easy and we'll never wipe it out completely. But we can take a stand against bullying, but we have to do it together. And we have to start now. The first step begins with the parents and ends with the child being bullied. Stand Up, Fight Back.

As business interests have commercialized the American West and publishers and studios have created compelling imagery, the expectations of readers and moviegoers have influenced perceptions of the cowboy as a hero. This book describes the evolution of the cowboy hero as a mythic persona created by dime novels, television and Hollywood. Much of our concept of the cowboy comes to us from movies and the book's main focus is his changing image in cinema. The development of the hero image and the fictional West is traced from early novels and films to the present, along with shifting audience expectations and economic pressures.

This book showcases cutting-edge research on city form revealing that urban design features--such as topology, morphology, entropy and scale--have massive implications to the quality of life for a city’s residents. The Aretian team, a spin off company from the Harvard Innovation Lab, has developed a city science methodology to evaluate the relationship between city form and urban performance. This book illuminates the relationship between a city’s spatial design and quality of life it affords for the general population. By measuring innovation economies to design Innovation Districts, social networks and patterns to help form organization patterns, and city topology, morphology, entropy and scale, to create 15 Minute Cities, are some of the frameworks presented in this volume. Therefore, urban designers, architects and engineers will be able to successfully tackle complex urban design challenges by using the authors’ frameworks and findings in their own work. Case studies help to present key insights from advanced, data-driven geospatial analyses of cities around the world in an illustrative manner. This inaugural book by Aretian Urban Analytics and Design will give readers a new set of tools to learn from, expand, and develop for the healthy growth of cities and regions around the world.

From an award-winning historian, a “vivid” (Wall Street Journal) account of the revolution that created the modern world The French Revolution’s principles of liberty and equality still shape our ideas of a just society—even if, after more than two hundred years, their meaning is more contested than ever before. In A New World Begins, Jeremy D. Popkin offers a riveting account of the revolution that puts the reader in the thick of the debates and the violence that led to the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of a new society. We meet Mirabeau, Robespierre, and Danton, in all their brilliance and vengefulness; we witness the failed escape and execution of Louis XVI; we see women demanding equal rights and Black slaves wresting freedom from revolutionaries who hesitated to act on their own principles; and we follow the rise of Napoleon out of the ashes of the Reign of Terror. Based on decades of scholarship, A New World Begins will stand as the definitive treatment of the French Revolution.

A history of political thought in France from the French Revolution of 1789 to the present day.

The introduction of automatic enrollment (AE) features into employer sponsored defined contribution plans has greatly increased retirement plan participation by automatically enrolling employees into their employers’ plans. We analyze administrative data provided by Vanguard on approximately 100,000 newly hired employees who are eligible for 206 unique plans featuring automatic enrollment. We find that most participants will at some point take an “active” stance towards their retirement savings by choosing either a different contribution rate or investment portfolio than that specified by their plan’s default settings. Among our sample of over 95,000 newly hired employees participating in their employer’s AE plan, we find that 59 percent elect a different contribution rate, investment portfolio, or both within the first few years of participation. Selecting a different contribution rate is considerably more common than selecting different investments: 57 percent of participants choose a contribution rate different than the default, while only 17 percent elect a different investment portfolio. Moreover, among those that select a different contribution rate, roughly two thirds increase their contribution rate above that specified by their plan while another third decreases their contribution rate below the plan default. When examining what characteristics are predictive of becoming an active participant, we find that women are slightly more likely than men to choose a contribution rate different than the default, and do so by reducing their contribution levels on average. Conversely, participants with higher incomes are more likely to select contribution rates above the default than their lower- income peers. Plan-level characteristics are also important predictors of choosing a contribution rate different than the default. In particular, participants are more likely to actively increase their contribution rates if they are in plans that offer immediate vesting of employer contributions, or if they face a default contribution rate this is too low to receive the maximum possible employer match. Conversely, participants are more likely to reduce their contributions below the default rate if they participate in plans that feature default enrollment in automatic escalation (a plan feature under which a participant’s contribution rate automatically increases over time), or plans that initially have a default deferral percentage above 3 percent (the median default contribution rate in our data). When it comes to choosing a different investment portfolio than the default, we find that men, those with higher incomes, and participants in plans that feature immediate vesting of employer contributions are more likely to choose their own investment portfolio.

The Ashes of Around Twenty-Three Strangers is a Tor.com original science fiction story from Jeremy Packert Burke. The world doesn't make sense. All rain has moved indoors--wrecking houses from the inside out while the skies remain cloudless. With ever greater devotion, people worship giant, inert, humanoid bodies as gods as civilization falls apart. Lucy has never been religious, but her brother becomes more and more sucked into the church. She has no way to properly mourn him after his untimely death. Now, a year later, with the help of her best friend Carve, who was once himself a believer, she will travel south on a makeshift pilgrimage, trying to find peace and some better means of understanding the world. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Trust plays an important role in financial decision-making, particularly regarding financial advice. In fact, investors cite “trust” as the most important determinant in seeking a financial service professional for advice (Hung et al., 2010). In this paper, we explore the relationships between financial trust and behaviors, attitudes, knowledge and preferences related to utilizing professional financial advice. Using survey and experiment data from the RAND-USC American Life Panel, we find that financial trust is correlated with advice usage and likelihood of seeking advisory services. Analysis of the experiment shows that trust is an important predictor of who chooses to receive advice, even after controlling for demographic characteristics and financial literacy. However, providing unsolicited advice has little impact on behavior, even for individuals with high levels of trust.

Abstract: There is little evidence on how the large market for credit score improvement products affects consumers or credit market efficiency. A randomized encouragement design on a standard credit builder loan (CBL) identifies null average effects on whether consumers have a credit score and the score itself, with important heterogeneity: those with loans outstanding at baseline fare worse, those without fare better. Selection, treatment effect, and prediction models indicate the CBL reveals valuable information to markets, inducing positive selection and making credit histories more precise, while keeping credit scores' predictive power intact. With modest targeting changes, CBLs could work as intended