Best Selling Books by Ryan W

From USA Today Bestseller Ryan W. Aslesen comes the next epic military sci fi volume-three standalone, action-packed stories from the acclaimed War''s Edge: Berserkers series: The Duel, Proven Valor, and Fire and Forget. "The Berserkers series is a gold mine of military sf storytelling...action, heroism, and valor, but also terror, loss, and disillusionment...it''s a sage way of looking at warfare by an author who has experienced it." -Darth Dragonetti: Star Wars VINE VOICE The toughest mercenaries in the galaxy... As the galaxy''s preeminent mercenary force, the Berserkers are equipped with the latest weaponry and hardware, hired by governments and corporations to do jobs deemed too dangerous and difficult for their forces. But it takes more than high-tech weapons to fulfill a contract, it takes men and women with the balls to go into harm''s way and do whatever it takes to get the job done. They aren''t parade soldiers and nobody survives long in this ugly business without getting their hands dirty. If you find yourself fighting them, you better have your affairs in order, because there is no better friend and no greater enemy. Volume 3 includes one novella and two full length novels from the gritty War''s Edge: Berserkers series: The Duel On the desert world of Ramil, Berserker Sergeant Jake Warrick and his crew find themselves locked in daily death duels amid the arid wastelands. Rival warlords employ ever more mercenaries to secure their slice of the oil-rich planet. Warrick''s toughest challenge yet comes when he confronts the deadly Death Deacons, a newly arrived mercenary force with tanks and moxie to match that of the Berserkers. In this high stakes showdown, Warrick must confront his past and make harrowing choices that will determine the fate of his crew-decisions he must live with, if he survives. Proven Valor After spearheading the charge to end a bloody civil war on Boreas-4, the Berserkers of Anvil Company expect some rest. Their battle-scarred commander, Captain Ron Axel, knows better. Hard experience has taught him that victory only brings more battles. His instincts are confirmed when, Lieutenant Colonel Tory Jamison, a ghost from his past, orders Anvil to the sharp end once more, tasked with delivering the final blow to the Karakan Defense Forces. With his men on the brink of annihilation after the UFS forces fail to show, Axel leads a desperate mission while Jamison wages her own battle behind the scenes. Confronted with overwhelming odds, the bonds of duty and friendship are pushed to their breaking point. Fire and Forget Captain Brian Case leads a company of fresh recruits on a mission to deliver crucial supplies to an embattled Berserker battalion on Silva. Expecting to be disbanded upon arrival, he and his untested troops instead embark on a perilous raid deep behind enemy lines. Amidst a battlefield teeming with advanced weaponry and rival mercenary units, Case is thrust into a brutal war that devours both men and machines. The planet''s wealth and natural resources also attract a different kind of adversary-arms dealers exploiting both sides for profit. From war-torn landscapes to Emeria''s opulent capital, Case must unravel a web of deceit to uncover the true motives behind the conflict and decide what is truly worth fighting for. Praised by readers and critics as the toughest military sci fi available, the Berserkers series is a must read for fans of military thrillers and futuristic warfare. If you''re a fan of Hammer''s Slammers, Old Man''s War, or Starship Troopers, this is the book for you.

When the long-standing territorial dispute on Silva-4 went hot, the Republic of Emeria hired the best mercenaries money could buy: the Berserkers. Captain Brian Case leads a company of fresh recruits on a mission to deliver crucial supplies and equipment to an embattled Berserker battalion. Expecting to be disbanded upon arrival, he and his untested troops instead embark on a perilous raid deep behind enemy lines. Amidst a battlefield teeming with advanced weaponry and rival mercenary units, Case is thrust into a brutal war that devours both men and machines. The planet''s wealth and natural resources also attract a different kind of adversary-arms dealers exploiting both sides for profit. Driven to avenge the deaths of his soldiers, Case joins forces with Julia Wilde, the captivating niece of Emeria''s governor-general. Together, they navigate a treacherous trail of blood and betrayal, leading to the highest echelons of power on Silva. From war-torn landscapes to Emeria''s opulent capital, Case must unravel a web of deceit to uncover the true motives behind the conflict. Armed with intelligence that could alter the course of the war, he must decide what is truly worth fighting for. From USA Today Bestseller Ryan W. Aslesen comes an epic military sci-fi story that plunges readers into the chaos and intensity of futuristic warfare, where every decision could mean life or death. Fire and Forget is not just a tale of combat; it''s a gripping saga of vengeance, betrayal, and the psychological toll of war. Part of the critically acclaimed Berserkers series, Fire and Forget is a riveting standalone novel set in the gritty War''s Edge universe. If you''re a fan of Hammer''s Slammers, Old Man''s War, or Starship Troopers, this is the book for you. Warning: This book is intended for a mature audience. Reader discretion is advised.

This paper investigates the impact of customer compatibility – the degree of fit between the needs of customers and the capabilities of the operations serving them – on customer experiences and firm performance. We decompose the variance of 58,294 face-to-face retail banking transactions, quantifying the relative importance of customer, employee, process, location, and market-level effects on customer satisfaction. In our models, which explain roughly a quarter of the aggregate variance in customer satisfaction, differences among customers account for 96-97% of this variance. Further analysis reveals that customers report relatively consistent satisfaction across transactions, but that some customers are habitually more satisfied than others. An empirical investigation of the satisfaction of 149,389 customers interacting with 166 banks over a five-year period provides evidence that these customer-level differences are explained in part by customer compatibility. Customers whose needs diverge more starkly from those of their bank’s average customers report significantly lower levels of satisfaction on a broad range of operating dimensions. Consistently, banks that serve customer bases with more dispersed needs receive lower satisfaction scores than banks serving customer bases with less dispersed needs. Finally, a longitudinal analysis of the deposit growth of all federally insured banks in the United States from 2006-2017 reveals that customer compatibility affects financial performance. Branches with more divergent customers grow deposits more slowly than branches with less divergent customers. Institutions serving customer bases with more dispersed needs have branches that exhibit slower deposit growth than those of institutions serving customer bases with less dispersed needs.

With the rise of mobile computing and an increasing need for ubiquitous high speed data connections, Internet-in-the-sky solutions are becoming increasingly viable. To reduce the network overhead of one-to-many transmissions, the multicast protocol has been devised. The implementation of multicast in these Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellations is a critical component to achieving an omnipresent network environment. This research examines the system performance associated with two terrestrial-based multicast mobility solutions, Distance Vector Multicast Routing Protocol (DVMRP) with mobile IP and On Demand Multicast Routing Protocol (ODMRP). These protocols are implemented and simulated in a six plane, 66 satellite LEO constellation. Each protocol was subjected to various workload,to include changes in the number of source nodes and the amount of traffic generated by these nodes. Results from the simulation trials show the ODMRP protocol provided greater than 99% reliability in packet deliverability, at the cost of more than S bits of overhead for every 1 bit of data for multicast groups with multiple sources. In contrast, DVMRP proved robust and scalable, with data-to-overhead ratios increasing logarithmically with membership levels. DVMRP also had less than 70 MS of average end-to-end delay, providing stable transmissions at high loading and membership levels. Due to the fact that system performance metric values varied as a function of protocol, system design objectives must be considered when choosing a protocol for implementation.

Diatoms were collected from three stations in a Massachusetts salt marsh. From II collections 151 diatom taxa representing 44 genera were identified. The habitat is marginal for both freshwaters and marine forms. The most abundant diatoms were Synedra tabellata, Melosira jürgensii and, Amphipleura rutilans. Extracellular diatom polysaccharides may aid in diatom nutrition and environment adjustment.

This study examined the ways in which a pair of Spanish/English dual language bilingual education preschool teachers--one teacher who was designated as the model of Spanish and the other teacher the model of English--enacted their bilingualism as they worked cohesively and simultaneously to work toward common instructional goals. Dual language bilingual education is an instructional model wherein bilingualism is promoted among all students regardless of their level of bilingual proficiency, and in which students are instructed a significant amount of the day in a language other than English (García, 2013). Methodologically, I drew on classroom video data, field notes, and other relevant artifacts collected weekly during shared reading activity in the focal classroom over the course of one academic year to document the interactions in which teachers engaged with each other and students. An initial pass of the data allowed me to explore and map out the ways that the teachers coordinated their practices by identifying the instructional targets and instructional strategies that characterized those practices. A subsequent pass of the data aided in characterizing the ways that the teachers drew on their bilingualism within instances of coordinated practice to support their instructional goals. Guided by a translanguaging framework (García, 2009a, 2009b), findings indicate that teachers not only made expected choices about their language practices (i.e., they maintained their designated language), but that other times they also made choices that departed from the expectations of the school''s language policy (e.g., at least one of the teachers used bilingual speech). As such, teachers drew on their own and each other''s bilingualism, manifested through both monolingual and bilingual individual speech and collaborative talk, and a mutual understanding of each language. Teachers'' use of dynamic bilingualism (e.g., drawing on their own and students'' full linguistic repertoires) supported the coordination of their instructional targets and instructional practices. These instances of coordinated practice show teachers taking on multiple discursive roles--ones that support meaning making between the two of them and ones that support meaning making for students. Engaging in, and therefore modeling, dynamic bilingualism provided students with an authentic bilingual experience and may support their meaning making in ways that languaging monolingually could not afford.

Use of a genetic-based analogue of the traditional mark-recapture method (transgenerational genetic mark-recapture, tGMR) is rapidly expanding as a means to estimate total escapement of Pacific salmon. The tGMR approach is similar to the simple Lincoln-Peterson mark-recapture method. In tGMR, adults returning to fresh water to spawn are collected in the first sampling occasion and their juvenile offspring that are migrating out to sea are collected during the second sampling occasion. Recaptures are determined by the number of parent-offspring pairs identified through genetic parentage analysis of the adult and juvenile collections. Two versions of tGMR are currently in use, referred to as the ''with replacement'' and the ''without replacement'' models. For each version, parentage analysis is used to estimate model parameters. I evaluated accuracy of tGMR parameters estimated by genetic parentage analysis by conducting a series of simulations that mimicked application of the approach for estimating escapement of a small northern California coho salmon population. Accuracy was evaluated by comparing known values of the parameters taken from the simulated pedigrees to estimated values based upon parentage analysis of SNP genotypes using the software COLONY. All parentage-based parameter estimates were biased, (ranging from -0.40 to 0.23) indicating improvements in parentage analysis are needed for applications of tGMR. To further evaluate tGMR, I applied this method to coho salmon in two northern California streams resulting in total escapement estimates using the ''with replacement'' and ''without replacement'' models of 576 and 444 (Mill Creek, 2011-2012), 131 and 193 (Mill Creek, 2012-2013), and 430 and 468 (Freshwater Creek, 2012-2013). The tGMR approach shows promise for highly fecund species because the number of individuals captured during the second sampling occasion can greatly exceed the adult population size. This can possibly lead to lower variance in tGMR estimates in comparison to traditional mark-recapture estimators, but improvements in genetic parentage analysis are needed to reduce or eliminate bias from parentage analysis that results in biased estimates of total escapement using tGMR.

The challenge of modeling the organization and function of biological membranes on a solid support has received considerable attention in recent years, primarily driven by potential applications in biosensor design. Affinity-based biosensors show great promise for extremely sensitive detection of BW agents and toxins. Receptor molecules have been successfully incorporated into phospholipid bilayers supported on sensing platforms. However, a collective body of data detailing a mechanistic understanding of membrane processes involved in receptor-substrate interactions and the competition between localized perturbations and delocalized responses resulting in reorganization of transmembrane protein structure, has yet to be produced. This report describes a systematic procedure to develop detailed correlation between (recognition-induced) protein restructuring and function of a ligand gated ion channel by combining single molecule fluorescence spectroscopy and single channel current recordings. This document is divided into three sections: (1) reported are the thermodynamics and diffusion properties of gramicidin using single molecule fluorescence imaging and (2) preliminary work on the 5HT{sub 3} serotonin receptor. Thirdly, we describe the design and fabrication of a miniaturized platform using the concepts of these two technologies (spectroscopic and single channel electrochemical techniques) for single molecule analysis, with a longer term goal of using the physical and electronic changes caused by a specific molecular recognition event as a transduction pathway in affinity based biosensors for biotoxin detection.

Each year approximately 8 million people die from cancer on a global scale. Treatment varies depending on the stage and type of cancer but frequently includes surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. For surgical removal of cancer, it is critical that health care professionals only remove the cancerous portion of tissue and avoid damaging healthy tissue. Imaging modalities are frequently used during surgery but are currently limited in their ability to differentiate between healthy and cancerous tissue. Image processing has the potential to allow surgeons the ability to visualize these differences. This study is aimed to develop an image processing algorithm capable of differentiating between healthy and cancerous tissues from a brain tumor. Fluorescence imaging was utilized to capture grayscale images of a mouse brain tumor samples, marked with green fluorescent protein-labeled biomarker, approximately 10 micro-meters thick. The discrete wavelet transform was then applied in conjunction with a nonlinear mapping function to process the images. Multiple levels of the discrete wavelet transform were applied to further differentiate between the healthy and cancerous tissue. A threshold was then applied and contour maps are shown for clarity. The results indicate both a clear in contrast and a successful segmentation of the tumorous region in each of the input images. This is shown through the statistical texture analysis, a comparison to previous studies, and by visual inspection.

We explore the conditions under which service competition leads to customer defection from an incumbent and which customers are most vulnerable to its effects. We find that customers defect at a higher rate from the incumbent following increased service competition only when the incumbent offers high quality service relative to existing competitors in a local market. We provide evidence that this result is due to a sorting effect whereby the incumbent attracts service (price) sensitive customers in markets where it has supplied relatively high (low) levels of service quality in the past. Furthermore, we show that it is the high quality incumbent''s most valuable customers, those with the longest tenure, most products, and highest balances, who are the most vulnerable to superior service alternatives. Along the way, we also show that firms trade-off price and service quality and that when the incumbent offers relatively low service quality in a local market, it is susceptible to the entry or expansion of inferior service (price) competitors. Our results appear to have long run implications whereby sustaining a high level of service relative to local competitors leads the incumbent to attract and retain higher value customers over time.

Black and Latino men, particularly in metropolitan areas, are heavily recruited into military service, often told that enlisting in the armed forces will provide the means for both social and economic mobility. While all military enlistees experience relatively equal access to opportunities and resources while in the service, questions remain as to how racial and ethnic minority veterans, particularly those of the Global War on Terror, fare after leaving the service. This dissertation examines two life processes-the job application process and remarriage-to examine how such outcomes might differ for minority veterans. Chapter 2 and 3 use results from a conjoint survey experiment administered to a nationally representative sample of hiring authorities to examine how racial minority veterans are perceived by employers in the low-wage labor market. Chapter 2 focuses on Black men, and specifically compares military service to the educational credential of an associate degree. In Chapter 3, the focus shifts to Latino veterans, further exploring how military service not only affects employers'' perceptions of Latinos, but also how such perceptions might change based on one''s place of birth. The results of the survey experiment show that military veterans experience a premium in the job application process and are more likely to be recommended for a follow-on interview; this premium is greatest for some groups that are traditionally the most disadvantaged in the application process, such as immigrants and GED holders. Chapter 4 turns its attention to the family, and examines the marital transition of remarriage, an outcome unexplored in previous work. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, I find that the gap in remarriage rates found between Black and White men in the United States disappears in the military context. Such results suggest that socioeconomic prospects are the culprit for differences in remarriage rates found at large, and that the relatively equal socioeconomic standing of service members, irrespective of race and ethnicity, help promote remarriage rates. Taken together, my research helps update and expand our understanding of the impact of military service on the life course specifically for racial and ethnic minorities, and what these differences might imply for social stratification and inequality.

"White sturgeon (Acipenser transmontanus) in the upper Columbia River have been in decline for over 60 years and are listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Annual spawning produces dispersing larvae; however, recruitment into the juvenile age class has not occurred since the early 1970s. One hypothesis to explain this failure in recruitment is that larvae may not find adequate prey. Little is known about diet and prey availability for white sturgeon larvae, especially in Lake Roosevelt, a reservoir of the Columbia River. The Spokane Tribe of Indians collected littoral and mid-channel benthic drift samples annually at 9 locations in Lake Roosevelt from 2007 to 2010. Zooplankton dominated drift samples in both littoral and thalweg zones, while excluding zooplankton, Hydra dominated the drift. Overall, the mean density and biomass of invertebrates within the flow was highest in littoral sites and highest in years with the greatest flow. Littoral and thalweg sites had no impact on drifting benthic macroinvertebrate diversity, richness, or evenness. To determine the feeding ecology, 590 larvae were collected in July 2015. A total of 14 prey items were found in 9 stomachs, mainly Dipteran larvae and Temoridae. Our results suggest that prey scarcity could be limiting white sturgeon recruitment in Lake Roosevelt"--Leaf 4.

This book offers a reconsideration of early Byzantine apocalypticism and its use to reshape Roman identity in the sixth and seventh centuries and provide hope in a period of crisis and loss.

The identification of specific markers of psychopathology in social media data has the potential to provide new tools for the research and practice of clinical psychology, thus augmenting and addressing many of the limitations of existing self-report measures. This project sought to detect relationships between Facebook activity, interaction, word-use and self-reported depressive symptoms. Additionally, it extended the existing literature to examine multiple disorders by examining self-reported worry and social anxiety. These analyses were completed in both college student- and internet-based samples. Self-reported depressive symptoms were found to be associated with social media activity, interactions, and language in both samples. Self-reported depressive symptoms were associated with increased activity on Facebook, including posting more frequently to Facebook and documenting more life events. However, these symptoms were also associated with fewer and more negative interactions with other Facebook users, such as liking and commenting on less content produced by others, receiving fewer likes and tags, and receiving more negative reactions. There were also associations between self-reported depressive symptoms, emotional word use, and pronoun use in participants'' posts to Facebook. The pattern of increased Facebook activity and decreased Facebook interaction was also shared with measures of worry and social anxiety, including posting more content, having fewer reactions to other''s content, and receiving fewer tags. Additionally, social anxiety was associated with having a greater number of life events and receiving more negative reactions. There were fewer associations between social anxiety, worry, and Facebook language use, with worry being associated with decreased positive word use, and no associations were found with social anxiety. The tripartite model (Clark & Watson, 1991) was used to generate a hypothesized pattern in emotion word use across depression, worry, and social anxiety, which was not supported by the results. Additionally, groups of LIWC categories (Pennebaker, Boyd, Jordan, & Blackburn, 2015) thought to be relevant to worry and social anxiety were not found to be associated with these measures. The patterns and magnitude of the associations observed in this project did not support the use of these markers in the reliable prediction of depression, worry, or social anxiety using Facebook data, or the discrimination between them using Facebook data. Thus, while this project found associations between Facebook activity, interaction, and language and self-reported depressive symptoms, worry, and social anxiety, caution is warranted before these methods are applied to the detection of mental health symptoms.

It is a well-established result in social psychology that when people feel anxious, they seek advice from others. However, increasingly companies that operate in high-anxiety settings (like financial services, health care, and education) are deploying self-service technologies (SSTs), through which anxious customers transact without human contact. The impact of customer anxiety on service relationships is neither well understood, nor consistently factored into service design. In this paper, two laboratory experiments and one field experiment, conducted in financial service contexts, document the negative effects of anxiety on customer choice satisfaction, firm trust, and long-term engagement and explore the impact of giving self-service consumers the option to interact with a person. Participants engaged in an online investing simulation who are made to feel anxious due to market downturns are less satisfied with their choices and report lower levels of trust in the firm. Providing participants with the opportunity to interact with an expert, or even another participant, dampens anxiety’s negative effects on choice satisfaction and, by extension, firm trust. Interestingly, we find that very few participants who are offered the option to interact with a person take advantage of the opportunity, which is consistent with the idea that it is the mere availability of human contact that mitigates anxiety’s deleterious effects. Finally, in a field experiment conducted with a credit union’s self-service term loan approval process, the incorporation of access to human contact increased customer loan acceptance by 16%, suggesting that access to human contact can improve long-term service engagement.

Since the 1890s, American federalism has been perceived as being unique in the world by having two different levels of government operating within the same jurisdiction without influencing one another. Modern scholars call into question the validity of this basic assumption, but few have published quantitative evidence to reject its application. Furthermore, even some of these theorists continue to suggest that national government programs established under the interstate commerce clause may resist influence from state counterparts. This study tests this suggestion by examining how selected outcomes of the national wetland regulatory program may be influenced by similar statute-based state programs. In the process, three other voids in the wetland management literature are filled. First, wetland regulatory units are described for the first time as consequential components of the regulatory landscape. Second, relationships between the outcomes of the national wetland regulatory program and local socioeconomic and landscape conditions such as population size and growth rates, income, wetland abundance, and program funding levels are quantified. Finally, a model describing the amount of wetland fill permitted and the number of permits issued by the national government is constructed from these relationships. The accomplishment of these tasks produces new evaluative tools that may be used by state and national government wetland managers to more efficiently and effectively implement their programs. The results reveal that some, but not all measures of the national wetland regulatory program''s outcomes are influenced by state programs. There is no evidence that the amount of wetland fill permitted by the national government differs measurably in accordance with the presence of any type of active state wetland regulatory program. There is, however, strong evidence that the number of permits issued is directly related to the presence of statute-based state programs. Furthermore, these programs exhibit the same relationship to the national program as do state programs that are empowered solely through federal authorizations. Therefore, when it comes to wetland regulation, the traditional assumption of American federalism is inadequate. The United States does have two different levels of government operating within the same jurisdictions, however, their programs exhibit measurable influence upon one another.

Tilled inter-row areas led to a larger mean increase (from May to September, 2005) in shoot lengths, diameters, and plant spreads than for the inter-row sod treatments. Biological yield of rose hips was also significantly lower in inter-row sod treatments when compared to tilled treatments in experiment #2. Inter-row sod increased plant uptake of P in both experiments, but was not as effective at promoting plant growth and rose hip yields as the tilled inter-row treatment used in this study.