"The attraction of balanced scorecards is to help translate strategy into the stories, business logic and tasks that grab people's imaginations and so result in purposeful action. Yet, too often, it hasn't worked that way. In a refreshingly honest and pragmatic way, the authors analyse both the successes and failures of companies using scorecards and present a practical approach for all top executives facing up to today's challenge of providing a corporate purpose that will live in people's minds." Lynda Gratton Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School and Dean of the full-time MBA Programme

"Very well worth reading, re-reading and studying. An excellent and simple system to measure and challenge the performance of businesses and their people." Belmiro de Azevedo President of Sonae SGPS, S.A.

About the Author

Nils-Göran Olve is Adjunct Professor at Linköping University. He works extensively in management training and has co-authored two previous Wiley books: Performance Drivers - A Practical Guide to Using the Balanced Scorecard (1999) and Virtual Organizations and Beyond (1997). The former has been published in ten languages and has sold over 70,000 copies. As a senior partner in The Concours Group in Stockholm, his work concentrates on management control issues, in particular the Balanced Scorecard and management of IT.

Carl-Johan Petri holds a PhD from Linköping University and is now a partner in The Concours Group in Stockholm. As a management consultant he has more than seven years' experience of working with strategy and management control projects, especially implementing strategies using balanced scorecards. Dr Petri is also a frequently invited speaker at conferences and seminars on the issues of strategy, management control and knowledge management.

Jan Roy is a senior partner in The Concours Group and head of its European consulting, based in Stockholm. He previously worked as CEO of several Swedish companies, especially in the retail industry. As a consultant, he mainly deals with strategic change processes. He also co-authored Performance Drivers - A Practical Guide to Using the Balanced Scorecard (Wiley, 1999).

Sofie Roy is a PhD Student in the School of Business at Stockholm University. The main focus of her thesis is on knowledge and how the balanced scorecard has been used to manage knowledge and drive change. For her PhD she has conducted an in-depth study of Skandia's work with their equivalent to the balanced scorecard, the Skandia Navigator.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the design and analysis of Learning Classifier Systems (LCS) from the perspective of machine learning. LCS are a family of methods for handling unsupervised learning, supervised learning and sequential decision tasks by decomposing larger problem spaces into easy-to-handle subproblems. Contrary to commonly approaching their design and analysis from the viewpoint of evolutionary computation, this book instead promotes a probabilistic model-based approach, based on their defining question "What is an LCS supposed to learn?". Systematically following this approach, it is shown how generic machine learning methods can be applied to design LCS algorithms from the first principles of their underlying probabilistic model, which is in this book  for illustrative purposes  closely related to the currently prominent XCS classifier system. The approach is holistic in the sense that the uniform goal-driven design metaphor essentially covers all aspects of LCS and puts them on a solid foundation, in addition to enabling the transfer of the theoretical foundation of the various applied machine learning methods onto LCS. Thus, it does not only advance the analysis of existing LCS but also puts forward the design of new LCS within that same framework.

Real-time functionality is the latest challenge facing high performance digital signal processors and DSP applications. Its successful deployment requires a thorough understanding of DSP theory as well as mastery of skills in real-time DSP design and implementation techniques. With this in mind Real-time Digital Signal Processing offers readers a hands-on tutorial approach, using the latest Texas Instruments TM320C55x processor in illustrative experiments and field applications.

Features include:

• A wealth of lab-exercises and experiments using MATLAB, C and the TMS320C55x assembly language, covering everything from basic concepts to telecommunications applications.

• A review of the fundamentals of real-time DSP theories in practice, plus programming examples using the Code Composer Studio development environment.

• Guidance on the selection of DSP chips to suit a variety of applications along with a consideration of real-time constraints, hardware options and fixed and floating point devices.

• Accompanying website providing software for use with the end-of-chapter experiments detailed throughout the book.

This practical guide will prove a valuable tool for students of digital signal processing and a self-contained reference for practising engineers and systems programmers developing new DSP applications.

Praise for The Financial Numbers Game

"So much for the notion 'those who can, do-those who can't, teach.' Mulford and Comiskey function successfully both as college professors and real-world financial mercenaries. These guys know their balance sheets. The Financial Numbers Game should serve as a survival manual for both serious individual investors and industry pros who study and act upon the interpretation of financial statements. This unique blend of battle-earned scholarship and quality writing is a must-read/must-have reference for serious financial statement analysis."
--Bob Acker, Editor/Publisher, The Acker Letter

"Wall Street's unforgiving attention to quarterly earnings presents ever increasing pressure on CFOs to manage earnings and expectations. The Financial Numbers Game provides a clear explanation of the ways in which management can stretch, bend, and break accounting rules to reach the desired bottom line. This arms the serious investor or financial analyst with the healthy skepticism required to drive beyond reported results to a clear understanding of a firm's true performance."
--Mark Hurley, Managing Director, Training and Development,
Global Corporate and Investment Banking, Bank of America

"After reading The Financial Numbers Game, I feel as though I've taken a master's level course in financial statement analysis. Mulford and Comiskey's latest book should be required reading for anyone who is serious about fundamentally analyzing stocks."
--Harry Domash, San Francisco Chronicle investing columnist and investment newsletter publisher

About the Author

CHARLES W. MULFORD is Invesco Chair and Professor of Accounting and EUGENE E. COMISKEY is Callaway Chair and Professor of Accounting in the DuPree College of Management at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Both have doctorates in accounting and are professionally qualified as Certified Public Accountants. They also actively consult with lenders at commercial banks in the United States and abroad. Professors Mulford and Comiskey have published numerous articles on financial reporting and analysis issues in leading academic and professional journals. Their other books include Financial Warnings and Guide to Financial Reporting and Analysis.

This book walks through clear, step-by-step instructions to build a custom theme for the WordPress open-source blog engine. The author provides design tips and suggestions and covers setting up your WordPress sandbox, and reviews the best practices from setting up your theme's template structure, through coding markup, testing, and debugging, to taking it live. The last three chapters cover additional tips, tricks, and various cookbook recipes for adding popular site enhancements to your WordPress theme designs using 3rd-party plugins as well as creating API hooks to add your own custom plugins. Whether you're working with a pre-existing theme or creating a new one from the ground up, WordPress Theme Design will give you the know-how to effectively understand how themes work within the WordPress blog system enabling you to have full control over your site's design and branding.

This book guides you through the design and implementation decisions necessary to create a working architecture for a PHP5-based content management system. Each of the major areas and decision points are reviewed and discussed. Code examples, which take advantage of PHP5's object oriented nature, are provided and explained. They serve as a means of illustrating the detailed development issues created by a CMS. In areas where the code is too voluminous to be reproduced in detail, the design principles are explained along with some critical pieces of code. A basic knowledge of PHP is assumed.

All of the code samples are taken from a frozen version of the Aliro development project, and you can visit a site running on that version at http://packt.aliro.org. Apart from being a demonstration of the code in action, the site provides access to the whole of the code both through a class browser, built using Doxygen and a code repository, powered by Subversion.

This book is for web developers who want to see how to build a complete site with Web 2.0 features, using the power of a proven and popular development system, but do not necessarily want to learn how a complete framework functions in order to do this. Readers need a basic knowledge of Python development but no knowledge of Django is expected. Django is a high-level Python web framework that is designed to promote rapid development and clean, pragmatic design and lets you build high-performing, elegant web applications rapidly. Django focuses on automating as much as possible and adhering to the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle. This book will show you how to assemble Django's features and leverage its power to design, develop, and deploy a fully-featured website. It will walk you through the creation of an example web application, with lots of code. Each chapter will add new features to the site, and show what parts of Django to work on to build these features.

About the Author

Ayman Hourieh

Ayman Hourieh holds a bachelor degree in Computer Science. He joined the engineering team at Google in January 2008. Prior to that, he worked with web application development for more than two years. In addition, he has been contributing to several Open Source projects such as Mozilla Firefox. Ayman also worked as a teaching assistant in Computer Science courses for one year. Even after working with a variety of technologies, Python remains Ayman's favorite programming language. He found Django to be a powerful and flexible Python framework that helps developers to produce high-quality web applications in a short time.