Most Popular Books by James Jacobs

Reflection of how the world has changed in the last century, from a personal perspective.

What lies beyond the gate? On the night of the Missing Moment, thousands stepped through portals across Golarion, seemingly against their will. When they returned, these so-called gatewalkers possessed strange, paranormal powers but no memory of where they had gone. Can the heroes unravel the mystery of the Missing Moment before the source of their new-found power consumes them? This 288-page hardcover compilation includes a complete Pathfinder campaign for characters level 1-10. This updated and remastered edition of the campaign has been adjusted to work perfectly with the latest edition of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, and includes updates and improvements based on player feedback. It also presents a meaty rules appendix that offers feats, monsters, and magic items designed to support this world-spanning, mindbending campaign! This deluxe special edition is bound in faux leather with metallic deboss cover elements and a bound-in ribbon bookmark.

The heroes of the Stolen Lands can use all the help they can get! The Kingmaker Companion Guide presents seven fully detailed companions inspired by the Kingmaker video game, ready to provide all sorts of assistance, each accompanied by a fully detailed personalized adventure to go along with their story. Notes on how an additional six companions can aid your adventures, extensive rules for camping and cooking strange and even magical meals to bolster your characters' abilities, and a fully detailed system to incorporate weather and hazards like blizzards, flash floods, tornadoes, supernatural storms, and more into your campaign make the Kingmaker Companion Guide a must-have expansion for your Kingmaker Adventure Path or indeed any Pathfinder campaign! Each companion character introduces a plethora of new character options to further enhance and bolster your characters' abilities and options, including over a dozen feats, nearly a dozen spells, ten new alchemical and magical items, three dozen new exploration and downtime activities, and much, much more! This deluxe special edition is bound in faux leather with metallic deboss cover elements and a bound-in ribbon bookmark.

Evil schemes are afoot in Cauldron, a metropolis of merchants built into the caldera of a long-dormant volcano. Driven by the dreams of an insane demon prince, bizarre cultists known as the Cagewrights scheme from ancient tunnels beneath the volcano, stoking it once more to terrible life. To prevent their agenda, your band of adventurers must brave haunted jungle ruins, slay mighty dragons, and bind themselves to a layer of the infinite Abyss. Will their swords and spells be enough to save the Shackled City? From new DBD publisher Paizo Publishing!

The heroes of the Stolen Lands can use all the help they can get! The Kingmaker Companion Guide presents seven fully detailed companions inspired by the Kingmaker video game, ready to provide all sorts of assistance, each accompanied by a fully detailed personalized adventure to go along with their story. Notes on how an additional six companions can aid your adventures, extensive rules for camping and cooking strange and even magical meals to bolster your characters' abilities, and a fully detailed system to incorporate weather and hazards like blizzards, flash floods, tornadoes, supernatural storms, and more into your campaign make the Kingmaker Companion Guide a must-have expansion for your Kingmaker Adventure Path or indeed any Pathfinder campaign! Each companion character introduces a plethora of new character options to further enhance and bolster your characters' abilities and options, including over a dozen feats, nearly a dozen spells, ten new alchemical and magical items, three dozen new exploration and downtime activities, and much, much more!

The Virginia Tech massacre and the Tucson rampage led many commentators to demand that firearms be kept out of the hands of the dangerous mentally ill. The fact is that individuals who have been "adjudicated as mentally defective" or "committed to a mental hospital" have not been eligible to purchase firearms from federally licensed firearms dealers since the 1968 Gun Control Act. Those statutory terms are somewhat confusing and both over inclusive and under inclusive, but an even bigger problem is that that the states have been unable and/or unwilling to provide information to the National Instant Check System (NICS), the FBI's database of persons ineligible to purchase firearms. The 2007 NICS Improvement Act, passed after the Virginia Tech massacre, sought to improve the situation, but its success is dubious.

While promoting postsecondary credential completion is a national priority intended to help graduates secure good jobs, the value of credentials in the labor market from the perspective of employers is not well understood. Specifically, more attention is needed to understand how credentials align with employer needs. Through in-depth interviews with managers responsible for hiring information technology technicians, we examined their perceptions of associate and bachelor's degree holders in two contrasting labor markets: Detroit and Seattle. The study led to several key findings. First, across the two labor markets, employers expected some common qualities in both associate and bachelor's degree holders, including technical skills and knowledge, thinking skills, communication skills, and discipline. Second, while they expected some positive qualities in associate degree holders that were distinctive to this credential, many hiring managers also expected negative characteristics, such as a lack of academic ability, initiative, or skill. However, while both associate and bachelor's degrees provided relevant information about potential workers, employers did not expect the credentials to provide information about certain key qualities they sought in workers, including competency in customer service and teamwork, and personal interest in technology. Some of the qualities that employers expected in associate degree holders were linked to their local labor markets and their perceptions of the local community colleges. This study provides suggestions on how an understanding of the specific qualities employers expect in credential holders and of the role of the local labor market can help colleges better engage with employers and fine-tune their programs to more effectively meet students' and employer's needs. Descriptions of the Qualities Expected in Credential Holders and Sought in Information Technology Technicians are appended. (Contains 4 tables and 4 footnotes.).

The FBI has recently reported that violent crime has increased for the second straight year across the nation. In particular, the FBI's report demonstrates that in major metropolitan areas, such as Philadelphia, homicides have increased by 6.7%. In the midst of this upsurge in violent crime, Professors James B. Jacobs, of New York University, and David Kairys, of Temple University, reengage with America's long-running debate over the effectiveness of gun (specifically handgun) control regulation. Professor Jacobs initiates the debate by asking whether it is realistic to pursue a strategy of enhanced regulation of firearms in a country in which there are 300 million firearms in civilian hands, and the large majority of firearms used in crime... are either stolen or purchased on the black market. After providing a number of critiques of what he believes to be a shifting target set by pro-gun-control advocates, Professor Jacobs concludes that gun control offers no magic bullet for reducing crime, suicide, or accidental deaths and injuries. In contrast, Professor Kairys does not consider the current amount of handgun regulation to be nearly enough to satisfy what common sense should tell us is necessary to adequately ensure that handguns are not easily available to criminals and youth. He specifically notes that any emphasis on the black market in handguns overshadows the disturbing reality that any person without a record can buy large quantities of cheap, easily concealed handguns and sell them to others indiscriminately, often without violating any law. At a deeper level, both Professor Jacobs and Professor Kairys agree that the debate on handgun control at its core is [related to] a personal, cultural, and political identification of guns with personal selfworth..., freedom, liberty, and... God and country. Whereas Professor Jacobs accepts this as a political reality and uses it as an anchor from which to engage in this discussion, Professor Kairys steadfastly disagrees: The best hope for emerging from our disgraceful state of denial is to respectfully engage and challenge the cultural and political identification of guns with our nation's highest ideals and the deadly legacy of that identification as it is currently conceived.

This report presents the findings of exploratory research designed to identify the characteristics of the outsourcing of instruction at community colleges and the forces that promote or block its spread. It is the second in a series of reports by the National Center for Postsecondary Improvement and the Community College Research Center on the relationship between for-profit higher education and community colleges (Bailey, Badway, & Gumport, 2002). The report is based on information gathered from interviews with community college administrators and representatives of contracting firms. Interviews were conducted with the persons responsible for managing contracts with outside organizations for instructional services at eleven community colleges. With one exception, all of the administrators interviewed are responsible for non-credit occupational programs. However, two oversee both non-credit and credit programs and three have joint appointments as faculty in college-credit divisions. Senior managers were also interviewed from two firms that provide instructional services under contract to community colleges: Alamo Learning Systems and I/Tech. An in-depth case study of I/Tech was conducted because it is the best example of a full-service contracting model--where the contractor provides a wide range of services to the college--and provides some insights into the potential for the most ambitious efforts to contract out instruction. As a result of the many difficulties faced by community colleges in their attempts to outsource instruction, and the hesitance of some vendors to become involved in partnerships that might not be profitable, it seems unlikely that the subcontracting of instruction will be used extensively in community colleges, although it will remain a factor in the non-credit sector. However, the underlying factors that make contracting attractive will still be present in community colleges: the difficulty that faculty has in staying up-to-date in their fields, the great variation in the quality of curricula and instruction, and the inflexibility of the conventional approach to teaching and organizing instruction. These factors, more than direct competition from private vendors, are likely to provide the greatest impetus for change in teaching and learning at community colleges specifically, and in higher education institutions more generally. Appended are: (1) Interview Guides; and (2) Case Study of I/Tech. [Report produced by Community College Research Center.].

Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMRI) has been proven to be a valuable source of diagnostic information concerning heart health. One application, myocardial blood flow (MBF) quantification using first-pass contrast-enhanced myocardial perfusion, has aided the detection of coronary artery disease and provides an accurate evaluation of myocardial ischemia, an identifier of coronary artery stenosis. However, the image processing and analysis requires tedious user interaction, increasing the time and effort required to utilize it. In addition, it can introduce subjectivity and variability into the data analysis, which further limits the potential use of the modality. This dissertation presents several automated image processing algorithms to increase the accuracy, consistency, and efficiency of CMR image processing, and validates them on large, clinical datasets. First, an automated method is proposed to measure the arterial input function (AIF) from the left ventricle (LV), which is required for the accurate quantification of MBF. The proposed algorithm consists of several automated image processing steps including motion correction, intensity correction, detection of the LV, independent component analysis, and LV pixel thresholding to calculate the AIF signal. The method was validated in 270 clinical studies by comparing automated results to manual reference measurements using several quality metrics. Additionally, the MBF was calculated and compared in a subset of 21 clinical studies from healthy volunteers using the automated and manual AIF measurements. The proposed method successfully processed 99.63% of the image series. Manual and automatic AIF measurement showed strong agreement, and the automated method effectively selected bright LV pixels, excluded papillary muscles, and required much less processing time than the manual approach. No significant difference was found in MBF estimates between manually and automatically measured AIFs. Second, this dissertation presents an automated method for segmenting the myocardium from MBF maps, making segmental analysis faster and easier to achieve. The proposed method employs active contours for myocardial segmentation, and landmark detection for the anchoring of sector-wise analysis. These methods were validated in a group of 91 clinical perfusion studies against a manual reference standard. The proposed method processed 100% of the studies successfully and results agreed with the manual reference standard, both in terms of segmented area and measurements from sector-wise analysis. Together, these automated methods form a fully automatic MBF quantification pipeline for first-pass contrast-enhanced myocardial perfusion imaging. These advancements make the modality more readily available and applicable to a larger number of patients and centers throughout the field.