Peter Philips

What begins with a hangover, a warm beer problem, and the small matter of a civil war somehow ends with feral dogs, Elvis impersonators, Father Ted obsessives, and the accidental invention of a festival that really shouldn't work - but spectacularly does. TedFest: Nothing but the Truth is the wildly entertaining true story behind TedFest, the much-loved festival celebrating Channel 4's iconic sitcom Father Ted. Written by Peter Philips, one of the festival's co-founders, the book charts how a Welsh writer, an Irish filmmaker, and a succession of terrible ideas collided across Sri Lanka, Wales, Fargo, and the west coast of Ireland to create a cultural phenomenon. Along the way, readers encounter real and faked tsunamis, exploding generators, aggrieved Amtrak guards, political spats, pub arguments, and a truly ridiculous plan to push a decrepit milk float around Ireland for forty days and forty nights. Against all logic, it works. Told with razor-sharp humour, unexpected tenderness, and a deep affection for glorious failure, TedFest: Nothing but the Truth is a celebration of friendship, chaos, civic stubbornness, and the strange magic that happens when people commit wholeheartedly to something utterly daft. Part memoir, part travelogue, and part love letter to Father Ted, festivals, pubs, and joyful resistance, this is a book for comedy fans, festival-goers, and anyone who believes that sometimes the silliest ideas are the most important ones.

Get to grips with the fundamentals of the Ruby programming language and learn how to build your own applications with the help of real-world examples and hands-on activitiesKey FeaturesLearn the fundamentals of Ruby object-oriented programming (OOP)Use the Ruby on Rails framework to build interactive web applicationsDiscover how to quickly build complex programs with fewer lines of codeBook DescriptionThe beauty of Ruby is its readability and expressiveness. Ruby hides away a lot of the complexity of programming, allowing you to work quickly and 'do more' with fewer lines of code. This makes it a great programming language for beginners, but learning any new skill can still be a daunting task. If you want to learn to code using Ruby, but don't know where to start, The Ruby Workshop will help you cut through the noise and make sense of this fun, flexible language.You'll start by writing and running simple code snippets and Ruby source code files. After learning about strings, numbers, and booleans, you'll see how to store collections of objects with arrays and hashes. You'll then learn how to control the flow of a Ruby program using boolean logic.The book then delves into OOP and explains inheritance, encapsulation, and polymorphism. Gradually, you'll build your knowledge of advanced concepts by learning how to interact with external APIs, before finally exploring the most popular Ruby framework ? Ruby on Rails ? and using it for web development.Throughout this book, you'll work on a series of realistic projects, including simple games, a voting application, and an online blog. By the end of this Ruby book, you'll have the knowledge, skills and confidence to creatively tackle your own ambitious projects with Ruby.What you will learnMaster the syntax and features of Ruby to build useful applicationsUse common design patterns to simplify code and improve efficiencyUnderstand how to implement object-oriented programming with RubyExplore ways to fetch, process, and output dataWork with public APIs and create reusable RubyGemsDebug code to troubleshoot application behaviorCreate interactive web applications with Ruby on RailsWho this book is forThe Ruby Workshop is designed for anyone who is new to Ruby and wants a practical introduction to the language. Whether you're completely new to programming, or have experience in another language and want to broaden your skillset, this book will quickly get you up and running.

Prevailing wage laws affecting the construction industry in the United States exist at the Federal and State levels. These laws require that construction workers employed by contractors on government works be paid at least the wage rates and fringe benefits 'prevailing' for similar work where government contract work is performed. The federal law (Davis-Bacon Act) was passed in 1931. By 1969 four fifth of States had enacted prevailing wage legislation. In the 1970s, facing fiscal crises, States considered repealing their laws in an effort to reduce construction costs, and since 1979 nine States have repealed their laws. These repeals at State level along with unsuccessful attempts to repeal the Davis-Bacon Act have pushed prevailing wages to the forefront of public policy and controversy. This book, for the first time, brings together scholarly research in the economics of prevailing wages placed in historical and institutional context.

Prevailing wage laws affecting the construction industry in the United States exist at the Federal and State levels. These laws require that construction workers employed by contractors on government works be paid at least the wage rates and fringe benefits 'prevailing' for similar work where government contract work is performed. The federal law (Davis-Bacon Act) was passed in 1931. By 1969 four fifth of States had enacted prevailing wage legislation. In the 1970s, facing fiscal crises, States considered repealing their laws in an effort to reduce construction costs, and since 1979 nine States have repealed their laws. These repeals at State level along with unsuccessful attempts to repeal the Davis-Bacon Act have pushed prevailing wages to the forefront of public policy and controversy. This book, for the first time, brings together scholarly research in the economics of prevailing wages placed in historical and institutional context.

Designing pension plans to cover workers and provide the necessary retirement funds for them is one of the critical issues of the turn of the century. Written by four experts in the field of pension funds, this work examines the possibilities for pension reform based on a detailed understanding of a successful system, the union pension fund of the Operating Engineers. This type of plan is managed by workers and management trustees, covering workers that do not have secure and predictable jobs. The authors demonstrate just how this pension fund can provide a useful blueprint for executives, pension fund managers, industrial relations professionals, and public policy decision makers.