In 1951, young Paolo figures there must be more money hidden where his dog has found a $20 bill. Along with his deaf cousin, Billy, and his younger brother, Georgie, Paolo ends up in the monsignor's garden behind the Cathedral of San Joaquin to search for a stash of cash.

In a funny, moving, and lyrical story, three boys learn a thing or two about the way a person relates to his fellow man, and along the way they grow up, just a little, despite their best efforts not to.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century the Agricultural Revolution revolutionized farming. Centuries-old methods were discarded and widespread improvements were made. One of the most notable changes was the replacement of draught oxen with the more versatile special heavy breeds of horses. The Victorian ingenuity of the Industrial Revolution produced an enormous range of horse-drawn agricultural machinery. Fields had been ploughed by draught animals for centuries, but suddenly new horse-drawn machinery included not just ploughs, but grubbers, cultivators, harrows, rollers, drills, reapers, binders, root lifters, manure spreaders and rakes. This book describes and illustrates these machines, the horses and their harness, inventors and manufacturers and lists the places where the machines can be seen today.

The rapid growth in use of programmable technology, in nearly all sectors of Engineering, is a well-known established trend and one which there is every reason to believe will continue into the foreseeable future. The drivers of this trend include cost, flexibility, rich functionality and certain reliability and safety advantages. However, as explained in this book, these advantages have to be carefully weighed against a number of dis advantages which, amongst other things, have fundamental implications for reliability and safety. Ideally, a programmable system would be viewed as a fusion of hardware, software and user (or 'skinware'), operating under a set of environmental conditions. To date, such a unifying model does not exist and so hardware, software and human factors are still considered largely as three separate disciplines, albeit with certain interdependencies. Established techniques are available which enable the engineer to develop systems comprising purely hardware components to a prescribed reliability and performance. Software, however, is fundamentally different in a number of ways, and does not lend itself to equivalent analysis. A major problem with software is its poor 'visibility', and consequently the great difficulty in understanding and predicting its behaviour in all cir cumstances. This results in the ever-present software design flaws, or 'bugs', which have plagued the software industry from its beginnings.

How to Use This Book The primary purpose of this book is to assist small companies, involved in both hardware and software, to devise and evolve their own quality systems. There are a number of national and now international standards which outline the activities for which procedures and records need to be specified. They are described and compared in Chapter 2, and the subsequent guidance in the book is intended to assist in meeting them. Although, at first sight, the operations of a hardware equipment developer may seem very different from those of a software house, the basic requirements of a quality system, such as the BS 5750 and ISO 1987 series of documents, are the same. For this reason the same standard can be called for in both areas and it will be seen, in Part 2, that suitable procedures can be derived to meet both types of operation. Quality standards (BS 5750, AQAP, ISO 9000 series) distinguish between companies carrying out, on the one hand, both design and manufacturing fixed functions and, on the other hand, those who only manufacture to specifications. In practice, the lesser requirements (those applying to manufacture to fixed specifications) are common to both levels of standard and the additional controls pertaining to design are added to obtain the higher standard. Chapter 2 explains the differences in detail.