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Special Needs Trusts: Protect Your Child's Financial Future
by Kevin Urbatsch Michele Fuller-UrbatchSpecial Needs Trusts shows you how to leave any amount of money to your disabled loved one -- without jeopardizing government benefits. It provides plain-English information and forms you need to create a special needs trust. Funds in a special needs trust can make a big difference in quality of life by paying for: annual independent check-ups personal care attendant or escort vehicles and transportation insurance rehabilitation essential dietary needs materials for recreation trips or vacations entertainment athletic training or competitions, and much more. Special Needs Trusts also provides a formal letter to the trustee, which explains this very important role, and a personal letter to the trustee, which provides crucial information about your loved one. Author Kevin Urbastch gives you an experienced perspective about when to make a special needs trust on your own and when to seek the services of an attorney. This edition has been thoroughly revised to provide: current eligibility requirements for government benefits helpful resources a new chapter on letters of intent a new chapter on ABLE accounts
Special Needs Trusts: Protect Your Child's Financial Future
by Kevin Urbatsch Michele Fuller-UrbatchLeave money to a loved one with a disability—without losing benefits Use a special needs trust to provide financial security for your child (or anyone) with a disability, without jeopardizing important government benefits. Funds in a special needs trust do not count against eligibility for benefits and can be used to improve the quality of your child’s life. This book provides everything you need to know about special needs trusts—whether you make one yourself or have an attorney draft one for you. The authors explain: how special needs trusts work the trustee’s role ways to pass important information to successor trustees the pros and cons of joining a pooled trust, and creating special needs trust with or without a lawyer. This edition is thoroughly updated and includes new chapters on ABLE accounts and letters of intent. All forms are downloadable through a special link in the book.
Special Types of Life Cycle Assessment
by Matthias FinkbeinerThis book presents specialised methods and tools built on classical LCA. In the first book-length overview, their importance for the further growth and application of LCA is demonstrated for some of the most prominent species of this emerging trend: Carbon footprinting; Water footprinting; Eco-efficiency assessment; Resource efficiency assessment; Input-output and hybrid LCA; Material flow analysis; Organizational LCA. Carbon footprinting was a huge driver for the market expansion of simplified LCA. The discussions led to an ample proliferation of different guidelines and standards including ISO/TS 14067 on Carbon Footprint of Product. Atsushi Inaba (Kogakuin University, Tokyo, Japan) and his eight co-authors provide an up-to-date status of Carbon Footprint of Products. The increasing relevance of Water Footprinting and the diverse methods were the drivers to develop the ISO 14046 as international water footprint standard. Markus Berger (Technische Universität Berlin, Germany), Stephan Pfister (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) and Masaharu Motoshita (Agency of Industrial Science and Technology, Tsukuba, Japan) present a status of water resources and demands from a global and regional perspective. A core part is the discussion and comparison of the different water footprint methods, databases and tools. Peter Saling from BASF SE in Ludwigshafen, Germany, broadens the perspective towards Eco-efficiency Assessment. He describes the BASF-specific type of eco-efficiency analysis plus adaptions like the so-called SEEBALANCE and AgBalance applications. Laura Schneider, Vanessa Bach and Matthias Finkbeiner (Technische Universität Berlin, Germany) address multi-dimensional LCA perspectives in the form of Resource Efficiency Assessment. Research needs and proposed methodological developments for abiotic resource efficiency assessment, and especially for the less developed area of biotic resources, are discussed. The fundamentals ofInput-output and Hybrid LCA are covered by Shinichiro Nakamura (Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan) and Keisuke Nansai (National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Japan). The concepts of environmentally extended IO, different types of hybrid IO-LCA and the waste model are introduced. David Laner and Helmut Rechberger (Vienna University of Technology, Austria) present the basic terms and procedures of Material Flow Analysismethodology. The combination of MFA and LCA is discussed as a promising approach for environmental decision support. Julia Martínez-Blanco (Technische Universität Berlin, Germany; now at Inèdit, Barcelona, Spain), Atsushi Inaba (Kogakuin University, Tokyo, Japan) and Matthias Finkbeiner (Technische Universität Berlin, Germany) introduce a recent development which could develop a new trend, namely the LCA of Organizations.
SPECIALISTERNE: Sense and Details
by Jonathan Wareham Javier Busquets Robert D. AustinThree-quarters of Specialisterne's expert software testing staff are diagnosed with some form of Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Usually a handicap, ASD conveys talents especially suited to software testing and other highly repetitive tasks that require very high accuracy. This case describes a growing company struggling with unique challenges as it implements a "social enterprise" business model; it describes the difficulties faced by social entrepreneurs implementing for-profit business models in domains usually populated by non-profits. The case is also useful as an introduction to the business of software testing.
Specialty Food Business
by The Staff of Entrepreneur MediaFueled by growing consumer demand for new tastes, cleaner ingredients, health benefits, and more convenient ways to shop and eat, the business of specialty food is taking off at full speed. This step-by-step guide tells creative cooks and aspiring entrepreneurs how to make sure they're not left behind.Armed with a detailed overview of the specialty and gourmet food industry including how it differs from other food businesses, today's and tomorrow's trends, important research and statistics, and more, entrepreneurial foodies gain insight into industry growth drivers and opportunities.Covering behind-the-scenes business models and retailing businesses within specialty food, the experts of Entrepreneur help new entrepreneurs determine their best business approach assessing what they need to startup, expected expenses, the market, and competition. Location options, retail or production space, are explored and readers are given a lesson in all things digital.Coached by practicing entrepreneurs, aspiring business owners are also given first-hand insight with tales from the trenches including advice and tips on unique considerations within the food business, and important lessons in planning for the long term.The how-to provided is supported with worksheets, samples, and resource lists.
Specialty Medical Chemicals
by Richard G. Hamermesh Lucinda DoranA new general manager is supposed to rekindle growth. Seven months later, he questions the abilities of his direct reports. An organizational psychologist is brought in to assess his people. The general manager now has to decide who to keep and how to structure his direct report team.
Specification Analysis in the Linear Model (Routledge Library Editions: Econometrics #11)
by Maxwell L. King David E. A. GilesOriginally published in 1987. This collection of original papers deals with various issues of specification in the context of the linear statistical model. The volume honours the early econometric work of Donald Cochrane, late Dean of Economics and Politics at Monash University in Australia. The chapters focus on problems associated with autocorrelation of the error term in the linear regression model and include appraisals of early work on this topic by Cochrane and Orcutt. The book includes an extensive survey of autocorrelation tests; some exact finite-sample tests; and some issues in preliminary test estimation. A wide range of other specification issues is discussed, including the implications of random regressors for Bayesian prediction; modelling with joint conditional probability functions; and results from duality theory. There is a major survey chapter dealing with specification tests for non-nested models, and some of the applications discussed by the contributors deal with the British National Accounts and with Australian financial and housing markets.
Specification Writing and Management
by Max McrobbThis book deals with the fundamentals of specification writing and management. It is useful for anyone concerned with the preparation of standards in a world that is shrinking due to improvement in communication and where many specifications have to hold clarity when translated into other languages.
The Spectacle of Expertise: Why Financial Analysts Perform in the Media
by Alex PredaFinancial experts have become ubiquitous on television, radio, and social media. They provide investment advice, interpret market movements, and explain the implications of political events, wielding a great deal of power and influence through their media presence. How do these experts acquire their authority, and what makes displays of financial expertise persuasive to their audiences?Alex Preda provides an ethnographic exploration of how financial expertise is performed and produced in the media, analyzing its features and how audiences react to it. He examines how analysts, anchors, and producers collaborate in manufacturing financial talk that circulates around the world. Preda emphasizes the significance of talk—as opposed to the written word—in finance, as the fabric of many transactions and a means of capturing capital. Analysts and media figures understand financial talk as requiring a skill set distinct from conducting research or representing facts. Preda demonstrates that analysts and media professionals deploy expertise when they engage with audiences in ways that make it difficult to contest the claims conveyed in their talk.The Spectacle of Expertise is based on close observations of TV and radio studios in Hong Kong, a global financial center and a crucial gateway to China, including interviews with audience members and financial analysts who appear as regular guests. It offers new and global perspectives on the relationship between financial expertise and the media, the making of public-expert talk, and how expertise is used to legitimize financialization.
Spectacular Speculation: Thrills, the Economy, and Popular Discourse
by Urs Staheli Eric SavothSpectacular Speculationis a history and sociological analysis of the semantics of speculation from 1870 to 1930, when speculation began to assume enormous importance in popular culture. Informed by the work of Luhmann, Foucault, Simmel and Deleuze, it looks at how speculation was translated into popular knowledge and charts the discursive struggles of making speculation a legitimate economic practice. Noting that the vocabulary available to discuss the concept was not properly economic, the book reveals the underside of putting it into words. Speculation's success depended upon non-economic language and morally questionable thrills: a proximity to the wasteful practice of gambling or other "degenerate" behaviors, the experience of financial markets as seductive, or out of control. American discourses of speculation take center stage, and the book covers an unusual range of material, including stock exchange guidebooks, ticker tape, moral treatises, plays, advertisements, and newspapers.
The Specter of Capital
by Joseph Vogl translated by Joachim Redner Robert SavageIn his brilliant interdisciplinary analysis of the global financial crisis, Joseph Vogl aims to demystify finance capitalism#151;with its bewildering array of new instruments#151;by tracing the historical stages through which the financial market achieved its current autonomy. Classical and neoclassical economic theorists have played a decisive role here. Ignoring early warnings about the instability of speculative finance markets, they have persisted in their belief in the inherent equilibrium of the market, describing even major crises as mere aberrations or adjustments and rationalizing dubious financial practices that escalate risk while seeking to manage it. "The market knows best": this is a secular version of Adam Smith's faith in the market's "invisible hand," his economic interpretation of eighteenth-century providentialist theodicy, which subsequently hardened into an "oikodicy," an unquestioning belief in the self-regulating beneficence of market forces. Vogl shows that financial theory, assisted by mathematical modeling and digital technology, itself operates as a "hidden hand," pushing economic reality into unknown territory. He challenges economic theorists to move beyond the neoclassical paradigm to discern the true contours of the current epoch of financial convulsions.
The Specter Of "the People": Urban Poverty in Northeast China
by Mun Young ChoDespite massive changes to its economic policies, China continues to define itself as socialist; since 1949 and into the present, the Maoist slogan "Serve the People" has been a central point of moral and political orientation. Yet several decades of market-based reforms have resulted in high urban unemployment, transforming the proletariat vanguard into a new urban poor. How do unemployed workers come to terms with their split status, economically marginalized but still rhetorically central to the way China claims to understand itself? How does a state dedicated to serving "the people" manage the poverty of its citizens? Mun Young Cho addresses these questions in a book based on more than two years of fieldwork in a decaying residential area of Harbin in the northeast province of Heilongjiang. Cho analyzes the different experiences of poverty among laid-off urban workers and recent rural-to-urban migrants, two groups that share a common economic duress in China's Rustbelt cities but who rarely unite as one class owed protection by the state. Impoverished workers, she shows, seek protection and recognition by making claims about "the people" and what they deserve. They redeploy the very language that the party-state had once used to venerate them, although their claim often contradicts government directives regarding how "the people" should be reborn as self-managing subjects. The slogan "serve the people" is no longer a promise of the party-state but rather a demand made by the unemployed and the poor.
Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History
by Ian BaucomIn September 1781, the captain of the British slave ship Zong ordered 133 slaves thrown overboard, enabling the ship's owners to file an insurance claim for their lost "cargo. " Accounts of this horrific event quickly became a staple of abolitionist discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. Ian Baucom revisits, in unprecedented detail, the Zong atrocity, the ensuing court cases, reactions to the event and trials, and the business and social dealings of the Liverpool merchants who owned the ship. Drawing on the work of an astonishing array of literary and social theorists, including Walter Benjamin, Giovanni Arrighi, Jacques Derrida, and many others, he argues that the tragedy is central not only to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the political and cultural archives of the black Atlantic but also to the history of modern capital and ethics. To apprehend the Zong tragedy, Baucom suggests, is not to come to terms with an isolated atrocity but to encounter a logic of violence key to the unfolding history of Atlantic modernity. Baucom contends that the massacre and the trials that followed it bring to light an Atlantic cycle of capital accumulation based on speculative finance, an economic cycle that has not yet run its course. The extraordinarily abstract nature of today's finance capital is the late-eighteenth-century system intensified. Yet, as Baucom highlights, since the late 1700s, this rapacious speculative culture has had detractors. He traces the emergence and development of a counter-discourse he calls melancholy realism through abolitionist and human-rights texts, British romantic poetry, Scottish moral philosophy, and the work of late-twentieth-century literary theorists. In revealing how the Zong tragedy resonates within contemporary financial systems and human-rights discourses, Baucom puts forth a deeply compelling, utterly original theory of history: one that insists that an eighteenth-century atrocity is not past but present within the future we now inhabit.
Spectio: A Digital Lighting Company
by Sarah Mcara Rajiv LalSpectio Tech, founded in 2005, developed and implemented intelligent LED lighting solutions for the industrial market. Sensors and wireless connectivity embedded in its LED fixtures not only significantly reduced lighting-related energy use-by up to 90% in some cases-but also served as a tool for the Internet of Things (IoT) to expose powerful insights about facility use. Yet in 2016, few of Spectio's customers were fully embracing the system as an IoT product. Both LED lighting and IoT were rapidly evolving markets, and Spectio had to decide if it should focus on driving down lighting hardware costs to expand its total addressable market or on improving the software controls to enhance the system's IoT functionality.
Spectio: A Digital Lighting Company
by Rajiv Lal Sarah McaraSpectio Tech, founded in 2005, developed and implemented intelligent LED lighting solutions for the industrial market. Sensors and wireless connectivity embedded in its LED fixtures not only significantly reduced lighting-related energy use-by up to 90% in some cases-but also served as a tool for the Internet of Things (IoT) to expose powerful insights about facility use. Yet in 2016, few of Spectio's customers were fully embracing the system as an IoT product. Both LED lighting and IoT were rapidly evolving markets, and Spectio had to decide if it should focus on driving down lighting hardware costs to expand its total addressable market or on improving the software controls to enhance the system's IoT functionality.
Spectral Feature Selection for Data Mining (Chapman And Hall/crc Data Mining And Knowledge Discovery Ser.)
by Zheng Alan Zhao Huan LiuSpectral Feature Selection for Data Mining introduces a novel feature selection technique that establishes a general platform for studying existing feature selection algorithms and developing new algorithms for emerging problems in real-world applications. This technique represents a unified framework for supervised, unsupervised, and semisupervise
Spectral Theory of Value and Actual Economies: Controllability, Effective Demand, and Cycles (Evolutionary Economics and Social Complexity Science #24)
by Nikolaos Rodousakis George Soklis Theodore MariolisThis book develops a unified treatment of the income distribution–capital–value problems with respect to actual economies, and then gradually turns to the issues of effective demand and capitalist accumulation fluctuations from both political economy and economic policy perspectives. That treatment, on the one hand, places produced means of production, positive profits, and capital accumulation at the centre of the analysis and, on the other hand, is analytically based on the modern control theory. Hence, the authors’ investigation is concerned with input–output representations of actual single and joint production, heterogeneous labour, and open economies; zeroes in on the characteristic value distributions of the system matrices; and, finally, derives meaningful theoretical results consistent with the empirical evidence, and vice versa. The main topics addressed are the uncontrollable/unobservable aspects of the real-world economies, the powerful low-order spectral approximations and reconstructions of the inter-industry structure of production–value–distributive variables relationships, the critical-constructive appraisal of both “mainstream” and “radical” theories of value, the matrix demand multipliers and demand-switching policies in heterogeneous capital worlds, and the circular inter-actions amongst income distribution, effective demand, accumulation, and technical conditions of production. Written on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the publication of both Piero Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities and Rudolf E. Kalman’s paper “On the general theory of control systems”, this book provides a consistent and comprehensive framework for theoretical, empirical, and economic policy research.
Spectrum Auctions and Competition in Telecommunications
by Gerhard Illing Ulrich KlühThis book collects essays on this topic by leading analysts of telecommunications and the European auction experience, all but one presented at a November 2001 CESifo conference; comments and responses are included as well, to preserve some of the controversy .
Spectrum-Aware Mobile Computing: Convergence of Cloud Computing and Cognitive Networking (Signals and Communication Technology)
by Seyed Eman Mahmoodi Koduvayur Subbalakshmi R. N. UmaThis book presents solutions to the problems arising in two trends in mobile computing and their intersection: increased mobile traffic driven mainly by sophisticated smart phone applications; and the issue of user demand for lighter phones, which cause more battery power constrained handhelds to offload computations to resource intensive clouds (the second trend exacerbating the bandwidth crunch often experienced over wireless networks). The authors posit a new solution called spectrum aware cognitive mobile computing, which uses dynamic spectrum access and management concepts from wireless networking to offer overall optimized computation offloading and scheduling solutions that achieve optimal trade-offs between the mobile device and wireless resources. They show how in order to allow these competing goals to meet in the middle, and to meet the promise of 5G mobile computing, it is essential to consider mobile offloading holistically, from end to end and use the power of multi-radio access technologies that have been recently developed. Technologies covered in this book have applications to mobile computing, edge computing, fog computing, vehicular communications, mobile healthcare, mobile application developments such as augmented reality, and virtual reality.
Spectrum Equity Investors, L.P.
by Jeffry A. Timmons Rebecca Voorheis Elise MartinBrion Applegate and Bill Collatos had already started a fund-raising campaign for their new venture-capital fund when the principals of a prestigious Wall Street investment bank asked them to become the two senior partners of an in-house $150 million fund. The case analyzes: (1) the venture capital investing process, (2) the experience, networks, and timing of starting a specialized fund, (3) the written prospectus of the new fund, and (4) the decisions and issues confronting Applegate and Collatos.
Spectrum of Success: How Embracing Neurodiversity Can Revolutionize Your Business
by Thomas Duncan BellUnlock the full potential of neurodiverse people and create a more inclusive, supportive and adaptive business with Spectrum of Success.20% of the global population is neurodivergent, but the world isn't built for them. Their incredible talent becomes wasted when they don't have the opportunity to succeed. Spectrum of Success uncovers how we can create a more accessible work culture that champions neurodiversity and promotes allyship and collaboration.Through fascinating research and inspiring interviews with neurodiverse business leaders, mental health expert Thomas Duncan Bell uncovers how we can support and champion neurodiversity at work and beyond. Drawing upon his own experiences with ADHD and bipolar disorder, the book also offers an enlightening insight into how neurodiverse individuals can thrive in the modern world.
Speculate This!
by Uncertain CommonsA short, timely manifesto critiquing predatory modes of financial speculation that seek to minimize uncertainty and risk, while advocating speculative practices that embrace uncertainty, spur radical change, and enable alternative futures.
Speculation by Commodity Index Funds: The Impact on Food and Energy Prices
by Professor Scott H. Irwin Professor Dwight R. SandersCommodity futures prices exploded in 2007-2008 and concerns about a new type of speculative participant in commodity futures markets began to emerge. The main argument was that unprecedented buying pressure from new "commodity index" investors created massive bubbles that resulted in prices substantially exceeding fundamental value. At the time, it was not uncommon to link concerns about speculation and high prices to world hunger, food crises, and civil unrest. Naturally, this outcry resulted in numerous regulatory proposals to restrict speculation in commodity futures markets. At the core, these assertions raised major economic questions about the efficiency of price discovery in commodity futures markets. Moreover, these so-called remedies did not come without a potential cost. Burdensome regulations would increase compliance and risk sharing costs across the global food system, lowering prices for producers and increasing costs to consumers. This book presents important research on the impact of index investment on commodity futures prices that the authors conducted over the last fifteen years. The eleven articles presented in the book follow the timeline of our involvement in the world-wide debate about index funds as it evolved after 2007. We also include an introductory chapter, new author forewords for each article chapter, and a lessons learned chapter to round out the book. Policy-makers, researchers, and market participants will find the book not only functions as useful documentation of the debate; but, also as a natural starting point when high commodity prices inevitably create the next speculation backlash.
The Speculation Economy: How Finance Triumphed Over Industry (Bk. Currents Ser.)
by Lawrence E. MitchellAmerican companies once focused exclusively on providing the best products and services. But today, most corporations are obsessed with maximizing their stock prices, resulting in short-term thinking and the kind of cook-the-books corruption seen in the Enron and WorldCom scandals. How did this happen? In this groundbreaking book, Lawrence E. Mitchell traces the origins of the problem to the first decade of the 20th century, when industrialists and bankers began merging existing companies into huge "combines"--today's giant corporations--so they could profit by manufacturing and selling stock in these new entities. He describes and analyzes the legal changes that made this possible, the federal regulatory efforts that missed the significance of this transforming development, and the changes in American society and culture that led more and more Americans to enter the market, turning from relatively safe bonds to riskier common stock in the hopes of becoming rich. Financiers and the corporations they controlled encouraged this trend, but as stock ownership expanded and businesses were increasingly forced to cater to stockholders' "get rich quick" expectations, a subtle but revolutionary shift in the nature of the American economy occurred: finance no longer served industry; instead, industry began to serve finance. The Speculation Economy analyzes the history behind the opening of this economic Pandora's box, the root cause of so many modern acts of corporate malfeasance.
Speculation, Trading, and Bubbles (Kenneth J. Arrow Lecture Series)
by José A. ScheinkmanAs long as there have been financial markets, there have been bubbles—those moments in which asset prices inflate far beyond their intrinsic value, often with ruinous results. Yet economists are slow to agree on the underlying forces behind these events. In this book José A. Scheinkman offers new insight into the mystery of bubbles. Noting some general characteristics of bubbles—such as the rise in trading volume and the coincidence between increases in supply and bubble implosions—Scheinkman offers a model, based on differences in beliefs among investors, that explains these observations. Other top economists also offer their own thoughts on the issue: Sanford J. Grossman and Patrick Bolton expand on Scheinkman's discussion by looking at factors that contribute to bubbles—such as excessive leverage, overconfidence, mania, and panic in speculative markets—and Kenneth J. Arrow and Joseph E. Stiglitz contextualize Scheinkman's findings.