New Releases by Tom Roberts

The glittering story of April Ashley, model and trans pioneer, and the divorce case which gripped 1960s Britain and defined transgender rights for a generation. As Britain emerged from post-war austerity in the 1960s, no one embodied its newfound spirit of hedonism and glamour like April Ashley. A fashion model and socialite who rose from poverty in Liverpool to the heights of London society via Le Carrousel nightclub in Paris, she was also one of the first Britons to undergo gender-affirming surgery. Ashley was appointed MBE for services to transgender equality in 2012, but her journey towards acceptance was hard-won and bitterly contested. In 1961, a friend sold her story to a tabloid and she was told that she would never work in the UK again. Her brief marriage to Arthur Corbett, the son of a baron, set off a high-profile divorce battle, resulting in a landmark 1970 decision denying transgender women legal status as women -- and denying Ashley her husband's inheritance. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, award-winning biographers Jacqueline Kent and Tom Roberts tell the full story of April Ashley's extraordinary life at the vanguard of the sexual revolution and the movement for trans equality.

Celebrate the real reason for the season with Santa as he takes time from a busy Christmas Eve to pause and offer a prayer to the Lord. On Christmas Eve, a brother and sister stroll through their town, excitedly discussing the gifts they hope to find under the tree. Then they suddenly spy Santa quietly slipping into the church. They follow him inside, where they witness his humble prayer at the altar crèche and hear his greatest holiday wish: that children understand that Jesus is the focus at Christmas . . . and always.

Rupert Murdoch's extraordinary career has no parallel. His control of Fox news, which so successfully supports the Trump presidency, is a key force in American politics. In the UK, his control of The Sun and The Times leaves politicians scrambling to get him onside. But what do we know about the man himself? This book looks closely at the Murdochs, focusing on Rupert's father Keith, who built the family's media power and cultivated the anti-establishment instincts that his son Rupert is known for. Roberts traces the life of the Murdochs, how Rupert Murdoch's view of the world was formed, and assesses it's impact on the media that influences our politics today.

Protecting organizational information is a top priority for most firms. This reality, coupled with the fact that organizational insiders control much of their organizations' valuable information, has led both researchers and practitioners to acknowledge the importance of insiders' behavior for information security (InfoSec). Until recently, researchers have employed only a few theories to understand these influences, and this has generated calls for a broadened theoretical repertoire. Given this opportunity, we incorporate the framework of emotions developed in the information systems (IS) discipline by Beaudry and Pinsonneault (2010) and add the broaden-and-build theory (BBT) to understand the influence of discrete positive and negative emotions on insiders' precaution-taking activities. Our findings demonstrate that the relationship between both positive and negative emotions and precaution taking is mediated by insiders' (1) psychological capital (PsyCap), a higher-order, work-related construct of positive psychological resource capabilities, and (2) psychological distancing, a coping mechanism characterized by insiders' attempts to detach themselves psychologically from a situation. By considering these factors, our model explains 32 percent of the variance in insiders' precaution taking in organizations. Researchers and practitioners can use these findings to develop effective insider InfoSec training, including emotional appeals that increase insiders' precaution taking.

A New Norm is a poetic tale that is intended to reflect the feelings of those of us who struggle with anxiety, depression, grief, anger, doubt, shame, fear and more, yet provide encouragement that difficulties such as these can be overcome. It expresses how routine thoughts of negativity can sometimes cloud our reality making it difficult to enjoy life, to appreciate what is truly good, to have positive relationships, or to develop to one's full potential. It is a story that reminds us that perception is reality. That if one is willing to look, willing to accept, and willing to try, that there is a light both within and beyond available to not only illuminate, but change our world for the better. Our hope is that this story and the discussion guide that follows will become a springboard for a conversation with ourselves and/or with others to define what our dark clouds are and how we can make efforts to find the light of our new norm.A New Norm is the result of a partnership between Avera Behavioral Health and Children's Home Society of South Dakota in a joint effort to promote mental wellness. Purchases of this book will benefit the mission of helping kids and families served by both of these organizations.

I find that high home-buying costs for a typical household, relative to a cumulative city-level average, help to predict downward pressure on future real house price growth at a 1-year horizon for Canadian cities over the 1980q1 to 2016q2 sample period. This insight is relevant for broader household vulnerabilities because of their interdependence with housing market conditions -- this interdependence is illustrated, for instance, by how a decline in house prices Granger-causes an increase in mortgage arrears. Based on ease of interpretability, relevant historical context, and in- and out-of-sample performance, local housing cost (i.e. affordability) measures may have some advantages for the monitoring of household sector vulnerabilities, versus other common measures such as debt-to-income.

The Land of Crickets is a historical satire about a boy named Tommy that was born in 1932, on an Indian farm in Oklahoma. This story is told by his supernatural self which is a Lysol Baby that woke up in "The Land of Lysol" at the time of his birth in 1932. The author attempts to show how the standards of human behavior changed during his lifetime. He describes a land where God's children are taught to love rather than hate following what he calls the "The Great Explosion" or the apocalypse.

From the birth of Christianity and with the Christian churches’ separation from Judaism, a tragic misunderstanding of marriage and divorce has occurred. Not only have we lost the understanding of biblical marriage counsel and wisdom, we have also lost the process of marriage and its biblical allowances for separation of man and wife under certain conditions. Christianity often fails to understand the biblical practice of marriage, as well as divorce and remarriage. Our Lord employed rabbinic teaching to uplift the status of women in his temple discourses with Jewish sects, such as the Sadducees and many groups of Pharisees. Unless we understand the Semitic discussion within those groups and properly translate Our Lord’s response to these questions, his teaching is held in tension with that of the epistles of Paul. Jesus and Paul are dealing with different case studies together with different communities of faiths, which affects how we should interpret the general message contained in the text. These misinterpretations of this vital information have needlessly ruined the lives of many innocent victims. It is long overdue for the Christian Church to reevaluate her response to this growing problem. There is a blessing for those who will receive this teaching.

Stock market fundamentals would not seem to meaningfully predict returns over a shorter-term horizon -- yet some economic agents could be particularly concerned about severe tail risk, rather than just mean returns. Motivated by present value logic, and the literature's suggestion that required equity returns have declined over time, I first estimate the cointegrating relationship between the log S&P Composite Index and log earnings over 1871 to 2016. I combine this estimate with smoothed earnings to construct a trend valuation benchmark. The price-versus-benchmark residual reflects, in part, the cyclical component of earnings, and gives an economically and statistically significant estimate of crash risk while improving on alternatives such as the dividend yield and price momentum.

This is the memoir of a man who had everything: family, good job, house. He walked away from it. Why? Tom Roberts learned five years after he just walked away and lost everything he had bipolar disorder II and the reason he left all that he had was because he was in a manic episode. Tom's memoir takes the reader from what appeared to be a comfortable college professor's life to the dirty streets of Hollywood, CA. He was living in a fantasy that he could earn a living as a film actor just as he dreamed when he was in high school. His "escape" as he calls it, was triggered by medical treatment following a horrible depression that had lasted six months by the time he was hospitalized. He was prescribed the new antidepressant Prozac and it turned out to be the worst anti-depressant for a yet undiagnosed manic-depressive. Tom's story begins, however, 30 years earlier in a family dominated by his Father's undiagnosed mental illness and then the sudden death of his 34-year-old Mother. Tom lived through the suicides of his brother and later his step-sister. The end surprisingly, is back in Hollywood as a working voice-over actor with several on-camera film credits. How he got there is the rest of the story and the final destination of his journey that went from nowhere to "now here".

The most significant, demented, politically effective tweets from the world's most important Twitter feed, analysed and explained by the UK's leading expert on political lying. The most unusual feature of Donald Trump's nationalist and populist campaign for the presidency of the USA was his obsessive use of Twitter. Like other social media, this form of communication has often been assumed to encourage the dissemination of liberal values and the circulation of facts. Trump's tweets, by contrast, formed a constant stream of provocations, insults, conspiracy theories, 'alternative facts' and outright lies. And they helped him win power. Peter Oborne, author of The Rise of Political Lying and Not The Chilcot Report , analyses Trump's incendiary mendacity in all its bewildering guises, and shows how this fusion of entertainment and cunningly crafted propaganda has destabilised the world's most powerful democracy.

A cost-effective way to monitor for ophthalmic complications during prone surgery T Roberts1, D Burckett-St-Laurent2, October 20161.tSpecialist Registrar, Welsh School of Anaesthesia2.tConsultant, Royal Gwent Hospital, Newport, UKAim1. To identify a cost-effective and safe way to monitor patientsu2019 eyes during prone surgery.2. To demonstrate that introducing new equipment into clinical use can be achieved without great difficulty. BackgroundVision loss following spinal surgery is a rare but life-changing complication and has been documented since the early 20th century (1). There are several mechanisms of post-operative vision loss (POVL) associated with surgery in the prone position.Overall, estimates for the incidence of POVL range from 0.028 to 0.2% (2) making it an extremely rare complication, however the devastating nature of the effects on the patient means that prevention of POVL should be a high priority for this patient group. We describe a novel and cost-effective way to monitor for ophthalmic complications during prone surgery.Products such as the Dupaco Proneviewu00ae (3) allow visualisation of the eyes during surgery to guard against external ocular pressure and direct trauma to the eye. However, in some circumstances, particularly in cervical spine surgery, the patient is positioned with their head at the opposite end of the theatre to the anaesthetic machine. The head is often covered in drapes and it can be difficult to gain access to regularly assess the eyes. It was suggested that a more cost-effective way to allow clear, regular monitoring of the eyes could be developed. Dupaco also manufacture a face mask incorporating video monitoring, however the cost is prohibitively expensive for many centres. MethodWe identified a commercially available (non-medical) camera and video monitor which had the ability to focus as close as 5mm, operate in very low light and that could be easily attached to the Proneviewu00ae (or alternative) mask. The total cost of these items was u00a324. The camera itself was u00a37, a low enough cost to be considered a disposable item in case of contamination. Permission to use the equipment was sought from the hospital EBME department (Electrical and Biomechanical Engineering). The equipment was exempt from formal testing as it was battery-powered and was CE marked. Two positions for the positioning of the camera were identified. The camera can either be placed directly underneath the eyes, facing upwards, or can be taped to the side of the Proneviewu00ae face mask, pointing at the mirror below. The equipment was tested using simulated conditions prior to being used on real patients.Users were provided with comprehensive instructions for the setup and use of the device. Individual users could choose to either leave the screen on constantly, or to turn it on to look at the eyes at regular intervals. Evaluation and FeedbackFeedback was sought from a number of consultants and trainees in the local anaesthetic department. In summary:u2022tThere is no benefit in using this equipment routinely for lumbar spinal surgery.u2022tIn situations where the patientu2019s head is positioned away from the machine, particularly for cervical spine surgery, the camera makes it easier to monitor the eyes. u2022tAnaesthetists were likely to check the eyes more regularly when using the camera than they would have done without it. u2022tDiathermy can cause interference when using the monitor. The interference is reduced by shielding the video cable within a 2m length of breathing circuit tubing. In addition, the monitor can be switched off when diathermy is in use.u2022tPlacing the camera directly below the eyes facing upwards is more likely to lead to contamination from blood, cleaning fluid etc. ConclusionFor selected surgical cases where the patient is in the prone position, our equipment has been shown to provide an effective and low-cost method of monitoring for ophthalmic complications. Whilst rare, ophthalmic complications can have a devastating impact on a patientu2019s quality of life and further development of these types of products will contribute to patient safety initiatives. Introducing new equipment can be straightforward and anaesthetists should not be put off by perceived bureaucratic hurdles in the pursuit of innovation. 1.tEcker A. Kneeling position for operations on the lumbar spine. Surgery 1949; 25: 1122.tChang SH, Miller NR. The Incidence of vision loss due to peri-operative ischemic optic neuropathy associated with spine surgery: The John Hopkins Hospital Experience. Spine 2005; 30: 1299-3023. www.dupacoinc.com.

"Stock market fundamentals would not seem to meaningfully predict returns over ashorter-term horizon--instead, the author shifts focus to severe downside risk (i.e., crashes). The author uses the cointegrating relationship between the log S & P Composite Index and log earnings over 1871 to 2015, combined with smoothed earnings, to first construct a counterfactual valuation benchmark. The price-versus-benchmark residual shows an improved, and economically meaningful, logit estimation of the likelihood of a crash over alternatives such as the dividend yield and price momentum. Rolling out-of-sample estimates highlight the challenges in this task. Nevertheless, the overall results support the common popular belief that a higher stock market valuation in relation to fundamentals entails a higher risk of a crash"--Abstract, p. ii.

The go-to guide for new engineers in the motorsport industry. Discover the do's, don't and don't-you-know's of working, surviving and thriving in the Motorsport world.

This is the memoir of a man who had everything: family, good job, house. He walked away from it. Why? Tom Roberts learned five years after he just walked away and lost everything he had bipolar disorder II and the reason he left all that he had was because he was in a manic episode. Tom's memoir takes the reader from what appeared to be a comfortable college professor's life to the dirty streets of Hollywood, CA. He was living in a fantasy that he could earn a living as a film actor just as he dreamed when he was in high school. His "escape" as he calls it, was triggered by medical treatment following a horrible depression that had lasted six months by the time he was hospitalized. He was prescribed the new antidepressant Prozac and it turned out to be the worst anti-depressant for a yet undiagnosed manic-depressive. Tom's story begins, however, 30 years earlier in a family dominated by his Father's undiagnosed mental illness and then the sudden death of his 34-year-old Mother. Tom lived through the suicides of his brother and later his step-sister. The end surprisingly, is back in Hollywood as a working voice-over actor with several on-camera film credits. How he got there is the rest of the story and the final destination of his journey that went from nowhere to "now here."

Formative modelling of latent constructs has produced great interest and discussion among scholars in recent years. However, confusion exists surrounding the ability of researchers to validate these models especially with covariance-based structural equation modelling (CB-SEM) techniques. This manuscript helps to clarify these issues and explains how formatively modelled constructs can be assessed rigorously by researchers using CB-SEM capabilities. In particular, we explain and provide an applied example of a mixed-modelling technique termed multiple indicators and multiple causes (MIMIC) models. Using this approach, researchers can assess formatively modelled constructs as the final, distal dependent variable in structural models, which modelling is traditionally impossible due to the mathematical identification rules of CB-SEM. Moreover, we assert that researchers can use MIMIC models to assess the content validity of a set of formative indicators quantitatively -- something considered conventionally only from a qualitative standpoint. Our research example used in this manuscript involving protection-motivated behaviors (PMBs) details the entire process of MIMIC modelling and provides a set of detailed guidelines for researchers to follow when developing new constructs modelled as MIMIC structures.

"Return to the Farm- A Christmas Journey" is the fourth story in a collection of Christmas books by Tom Roberts produced as a benefit for Children's Home Society. It is a sentimental journey of his childhood memories of Christmas on his family farm south of Ipswich, SD. Beautifully depicted in the form of a family scrapbook with photographs, illustrations and graphics that will conjure many fond recollections for anyone who has grown up on a farm.

Organizational insiders have considerable influence on the effectiveness of information security efforts. However, most research conducted in this area fails to examine what these individuals believe about organizational security efforts. To help bridge this gap, this study assesses the mindset of insiders regarding their relationship with information security efforts and compares it against the mindset of information security professionals. Interviews were conducted with 22 ordinary insiders and 11 information security professionals, which effort provides insight into how insiders gauge the efficacy of recommended responses to information security threats. Several key differences between insiders' and professionals' security mindsets are also discussed.

BEAT to a PULP Hardboiled 2 follows the blood-soaked trail left behind by the 2011 award-winning collection, edited by David Cranmer and Scott D. Parker, and pumps out another thirteen knuckle-breaking, crime tales. With writers from the 1930s and 40s golden era of pulp (Paul S. Powers and Charles Boeckman) and modern hardboiled masters (Robert J. Randisi and Wayne D. Dundee), this wild bunch is set to blaze a rat-a-tat sweep across the pulp fiction landscape. Keeping the body count high are top-shelf stories from Jedidiah Ayres, Eric Beetner, Jen Conley, Matthew C. Funk, Edward A. Grainger, BV Lawson, Tom Roberts, Kieran Shea, and Jay Stringer.

This manuscript examines the unintended consequences that organizational computer monitoring can foster within the firm. We apply justice and reactance theories to explain why monitoring can actually increase the occurrence of detrimental organizational behaviors. Our model suggests monitoring activities that invade employees' privacy lead to perceived injustices, which provoke destructive behavior by employees. Empirical results obtained from 439 survey respondents employed in the banking, finance, and insurance industries provide support for most of our hypotheses. Computer monitoring was found to increase internal computer abuse but not antisocial behaviors. Privacy invasions resulting from the monitoring activities were related to perceptions of procedural injustice, which in turn influenced distributive injustice perceptions. Both injustices acted as direct precursors to internal computer abuse, but only distributive injustice was a significant antecedent to antisocial behavior. We discuss these findings and their limitations in the context of modern organizations that are inundated with information-security responsibilities.

The Little Lost Sock is a simple yet poignant story of hope, the power of faith, and how true friendship can make a positive difference in the life of another. It is a poetic, pun-filled fable about a lonely misplaced sock searching for purpose. After an unsuccessful attempt to receive help from other lost souls, the sock finds meaning through friendship with a book - a very special book! Illustrated by Jim Brummond.

An assessment of the state of the Catholic Church today and the shape of the future to come.