Download or read book You Are Not So Smart written by David McRaney and published by Avery. This book was released on 2012-11-06 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains how self-delusion is part of a person's psychological defense system, identifying common misconceptions people have on topics such as caffeine withdrawal, hindsight, and brand loyalty.

Download or read book The Nightmare Stacks written by Charles Stross and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accidental vampire Alex Schwartz is busy assessing the cost of renovating a Cold War bunker to be used as the new HQ for Britain s secret counter-occult agency, where he attracts the attentions of a local Goth drama student.

Download or read book The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation written by David Whitley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the second edition of The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation, David Whitley updates his 2008 book to reflect recent developments in Disney and Disney-Pixar animation such as the apocalyptic tale of earth's failed ecosystem, WALL-E. As Whitley has shown, and Disney's newest films continue to demonstrate, the messages animated films convey about the natural world are of crucial importance to their child viewers. Beginning with Snow White, Whitley examines a wide range of Disney's feature animations, in which images of wild nature are central to the narrative. He challenges the notion that the sentimentality of the Disney aesthetic, an oft-criticized aspect of such films as Bambi, The Jungle Book, Pocahontas, Beauty and the Beast, and Finding Nemo, necessarily prevents audiences from developing a critical awareness of contested environmental issues. On the contrary, even as the films communicate the central ideologies of the times in which they were produced, they also express the ambiguities and tensions that underlie these dominant values. In distinguishing among the effects produced by each film and revealing the diverse ways in which images of nature are mediated, Whitley urges us towards a more complex interpretation of the classic Disney canon and makes an important contribution to our understanding of the role popular art plays in shaping the emotions and ideas that are central to contemporary experience.

Download or read book A Reader in Animation Studies written by Jayne Pilling and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1998-05-22 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cartoons—both from the classic Hollywood era and from more contemporary feature films and television series—offer a rich field for detailed investigation and analysis. Contributors draw on theories and methodology from film, television, and media studies, art history and criticism, and feminism and gender studies.

Download or read book Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling written by Sean Guynes and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Star Wars has reached more than three generations of casual and hardcore fans alike, and as a result many of the producers of franchised Star Wars texts (films, television, comics, novels, games, and more) over the past four decades have been fans-turned-creators. Yet despite its dominant cultural and industrial positions, Star Wars has rarely been the topic of sustained critical work. Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling offers a corrective to this oversight by curating essays from a wide range of interdisciplinary scholars in order to bring Star Wars and its transmedia narratives more fully into the fold of media and cultural studies. The collection places Star Wars at the center of those studies' projects by examining video games, novels and novelizations, comics, advertising practices, television shows, franchising models, aesthetic and economic decisions, fandom and cultural responses, and other aspects of Star Wars and its world-building in their multiple contexts of production, distribution, and reception. In emphasizing that Star Wars is both a media franchise and a transmedia storyworld, Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling demonstrates the ways in which transmedia storytelling and the industrial logic of media franchising have developed in concert over the past four decades, as multinational corporations have become the central means for subsidizing, profiting from, and selling modes of immersive storyworlds to global audiences. By taking this dual approach, the book focuses on the interconnected nature of corporate production, fan consumption, and transmedia world-building. As such, this collection grapples with the historical, cultural, aesthetic, and political-economic implications of the relationship between media franchising and transmedia storytelling as they are seen at work in the world's most profitable transmedia franchise.

Download or read book Modern Psychometrics written by John Rust and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-11 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today psychometrics plays an increasingly important role in all our lives as testing and assessment occurs from preschool until retirement. This book introduces the reader to the subject in all its aspects, ranging from its early history, school examinations, how to construct your own test, controversies about IQ and recent developments in testing on the internet. In Part one of Modern Psychometrics, Rust and Golombok outline the history of the field and discuss central theoretical issues such as IQ, personality and integrity testing and the impact of computer technology and the internet. In Part two a practical step-by-step guide to the development of a psychometric test is provided. This will enable anyone wishing to develop their own test to plan, design, construct and validate it to a professional standard. This third edition has been extensively updated and expanded to take into account recent developments in the field, making it the ideal companion for those studying for the British Psychological Society’s Certificates of Competence in Testing. Modern Psychometrics combines an up to date scientific approach to the subject with a full consideration of the political and ethical issues involved in the large scale implementation of psychometrics testing in today’s highly networked society, particularly in terms of issues of diversity and internationalism. It will be useful to students and practictioners at all levels who are interested in psychometrics.

Download or read book Machine Sensation written by Tessa Leach and published by Open Humanities Press. This book was released on 2020-06-24 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emphasising the alien qualities of anthropomorphic technologies, Machine Sensation makes a conscious effort to increase rather than decrease the tension between nonhuman and human experience. In a series of rigorously executed cases studies, including natural user interfaces, artificial intelligence as well as sex robots, Leach shows how object-oriented ontology enables one to insist upon the unhuman nature of technology while acknowledging its immense power and significance in human life. Machine Sensation meticulously engages OOO, Actor Network Theory, the philosophy of technology, cybernetics and posthumanism in innovative and gripping ways.

Download or read book The Delirium Brief written by Charles Stross and published by Tor Books. This book was released on 2017-07-11 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *2018 LOCUS AWARD FINALIST FOR BEST FANTASY NOVEL CATEGORY* “Smart, literate, funny.” —Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians Someone is dead set to air the spy agency’s dirty laundry in The Delirium Brief, the next installment to Charles Stross’ Hugo Award-winning comedic dark fantasy Laundry Files series! Bob Howard’s career in the Laundry, the secret British government agency dedicated to protecting the world from unspeakable horrors from beyond spacetime, has entailed high combat, brilliant hacking, ancient magic, and combat with indescribably repellent creatures of pure evil. It has also involved a wearying amount of paperwork and office politics, and his expense reports are still a mess. Now, following the invasion of Yorkshire by the Host of Air and Darkness, the Laundry’s existence has become public, and Bob is being trotted out on TV to answer pointed questions about elven asylum seekers. What neither Bob nor his managers have foreseen is that their organization has earned the attention of a horror far more terrifying than any demon: a British government looking for public services to privatize. Inch by inch, Bob Howard and his managers are forced to consider the truly unthinkable: a coup against the British government itself. Laundry Files 1. The Atrocity Archives 2. The Jennifer Morgue 3. The Fuller Memorandum 4. The Apocalypse Codex 5. The Rhesus Chart 6. The Annihilation Score 7. The Nightmare Stacks At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Download or read book Wilder Boys written by Brandon Wallace and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-05-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two brothers need all their wilderness skills to survive when they set off into the woods of Wyoming in search of their absent father. Jake and Taylor Wilder have been taking care of themselves for a long time. Their father abandoned the family years ago, and their mother is too busy working and running interference between the boys and her boyfriend, Bull, to spend a lot of time with them. Thirteen-year-old Jake spends most of his time reading. He pores over his father’s journal, which is full of wilderness facts and survival tips. Eleven-year-old Taylor likes to be outside playing with their dog, Cody, or joking around with the other kids in the neighborhood. But one night everything changes. The boys discover a dangerous secret that Bull is hiding. And the next day, they come home from school to find their mother unconscious in an ambulance. Afraid that their mom is dead and fearing for their own safety, the Wilder Boys head off in search of their father. They only have his old letters and journal to help them, but they bravely venture onward. It’s a long journey from the suburbs of Pittsburgh to the wilderness of Wyoming; can the Wilder Boys find their father before Bull catches up with them?

Download or read book The Annihilation Score written by Charles Stross and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2015-07-02 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NOBODY DOES IT BETTER . . . Dr Mo O'Brien is an intelligence agent at the top secret government agency known as 'the Laundry'. When occult powers threaten the realm, they'll be there to clean up the mess and deal with the witnesses. But the Laundry is recovering from a devastating attack and when average citizens all over the country start to develop supernatural powers, the police are called in to help. Mo is appointed as official police liaison, but in between dealing with police bureaucracy, superpowered members of the public and disgruntled politicians, Mo discovers to her horror that she can no longer rely on her marriage, nor on the weapon that has been at her side for eight years of undercover work, the possessed violin known as 'Lecter'. If this wasn't bad enough, a mysterious figure known as Dr Freudstein is committing heists and sending increasingly threatening messages to the police. Who is Freudstein and what is he planning?

Download or read book The Dying Days written by Lance Parkin and published by Virgin Books Limited. This book was released on 1997 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "6 May 1997. The dying days of the twentieth century. On the Mare Sirenum, British astronauts are walking on the surface of Mars for the first time in over twenty years. The National Space Museum in London is the venue for a spectacular event where the great and the good celebrate a unique British achievement. In Adisham, Kent, the most dangerous man in Britain has escaped from custody while being transported by helicopter. In Whitefall, a new Home Secretary is convinced that there is a plot brewing to overthrow the government. In west London, MI5 agents shut down a publishing company that got too close to the top secret organization known as UNIT. And, on a state visit to Washington, the Prime Minister prepares to make a crucial speech, totally unaware that dark forces are working against him. As the eighth Doctor and Professor Bernice Summerfield discover, all these events are connected. However, soon all will be overshadowed. This time, the Doctor is already too late." -- Page 4 of cover.

Download or read book Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction written by P. L. Thomas and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-09-03 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did Kurt Vonnegut shun being labeled a writer of science fiction (SF)? How did Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin find themselves in a public argument about the nature of SF? This volume explores the broad category of SF as a genre, as one that challenges readers, viewers, teachers, and scholars, and then as one that is often itself challenged (as the authors in the collection do). SF, this volume acknowledges, is an enduring argument. The collected chapters include work from teachers, scholars, artists, and a wide range of SF fans, offering a powerful and unique blend of voices to scholarship about SF as well as examinations of the place for SF in the classroom. Among the chapters, discussions focus on SF within debates for and against SF, the history of SF, the tensions related to SF and other genres, the relationship between SF and science, SF novels, SF short fiction, SF film and visual forms (including TV), SF young adult fiction, SF comic books and graphic novels, and the place of SF in contemporary public discourse. The unifying thread running through the volume, as with the series, is the role of critical literacy and pedagogy, and how SF informs both as essential elements of liberatory and democratic education.

Download or read book Semiotics and Visual Communication written by Evripides Zantides and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-04-11 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the result of selective research papers that were presented at the First International Conference on Semiotics and Visual Communication at the Cyprus University of Technology in November 2011. The conference was structured around the theme from theory to practice, and brought together researchers and practitioners who study and evaluate the ways that semiotic theories can be analysed, perceived and applied in the context of various forms in visual communication. Within a semiotic framework, the book explores research questions under five main thematic areas: Architectural, Spatial Design-Design for Three-Dimensional Products; Design for Print Applications; Design for Screen-Based Media; Pedagogy of Visual Communication; and Visual Arts. This volume will be an asset for people who have an interest in semiotics, not only from a theoretical and historical perspective, but also from an applied point of view, looking at how semiotic theory can be implemented into educational research, design and visual communication practice. The book provides 25 essential contributions that demonstrate how the concepts and theories of semiotics can be creatively adapted within the interdisciplinary nature of visual communication.

Download or read book How Should One Read a Book written by Virginia Woolf and published by Renard Press Ltd. This book was released on 2021-11-24 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First delivered as a speech to schoolgirls in Kent in 1926, this enchanting short essay by the towering Modernist writer Virginia Woolf celebrates the importance of the written word. With a measured but ardent tone, Woolf weaves together thought and quote, verse and prose into a moving tract on the power literature can have over its reader, in a way which still resounds with truth today. I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgement dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards – their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble – the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.”

Download or read book The Necronomicon Files written by Daniel Harms and published by Weiser Books. This book was released on 2003-07-01 with total page 699 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Occult scholars explore how H. P. Lovecraft’s fictional book of magic became a cultural phenomenon and real-life legend in this revised and expanded volume. What if a book existed that revealed the answers to all of life’s mysteries? For those who believe in it, The Necronomicon is exactly that—an eighth-century occult text of immense power. In. fact, The Necronomicon is a creation of science fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, who referred to the work in a number of stories and gave weight to its legend by inventing its own elaborate history. In The Necronomicon Files two occult authorities explore all aspects of The Necronomicon, from its first appearance in Lovecraft’s fiction to its ongoing pervasive appearance in cult and occult circles. The authors show how Lovecraft’s literary circle added to the book’s legend by referring to it in their own writing. As people became convinced of the book’s existence, references to it in literature and film continue to grow. This revised and expanded edition also examines the lengths people have undergone to find the Necronomicon, and the cottage industry that has arisen in response to the continuing demand for a book that does not exist. The Necronomicon Files illuminates the transformations of a modern myth, exposing a literary hoax while celebrating the romance of Necronomicon lore.

Download or read book Quirky written by Melissa A Schilling and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2018-02-13 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The science behind the traits and quirks that drive creative geniuses to make spectacular breakthroughs What really distinguishes the people who literally change the world -- those creative geniuses who give us one breakthrough after another? What differentiates Marie Curie or Elon Musk from the merely creative, the many one-hit wonders among us? Melissa Schilling, one of the world's leading experts on innovation, invites us into the lives of eight people -- Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Elon Musk, Dean Kamen, Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, Thomas Edison, and Steve Jobs -- to identify the traits and experiences that drove them to make spectacular breakthroughs, over and over again. While all innovators possess incredible intellect, intellect alone, she shows, does not create a breakthrough innovator. It was their personal, social, and emotional quirkiness that enabled true genius to break through--not just once but again and again. Nearly all of the innovators, for example, exhibited high levels of social detachment that enabled them to break with norms, an almost maniacal faith in their ability to overcome obstacles, and a passionate idealism that pushed them to work with intensity even in the face of criticism or failure. While these individual traits would be unlikely to work in isolation -- being unconventional without having high levels of confidence, effort, and goal directedness might, for example, result in rebellious behavior that does not lead to meaningful outcomes -- together they can fuel both the ability and drive to pursue what others deem impossible. Schilling shares the science behind the convergence of traits that increases the likelihood of success. And, as Schilling also reveals, there is much to learn about nurturing breakthrough innovation in our own lives -- in, for example, the way we run organizations, manage people, and even how we raise our children.

Download or read book Asian Children s Literature and Film in a Global Age written by Bernard Wilson and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2020-04-27 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides a key analysis of Asian children’s literature and film and creates a dialogue between East and West and between the cultures from which they emerge, within the complex symbiosis of their local, national and transnational frameworks. In terms of location and content the book embraces a broad scope, including contributions related to the Asian-American diaspora, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan. Individually and collectively, these essays broach crucial questions: What elements of Asian literature and film make them distinctive, both within their own specific culture and within the broader Asian area? What aspects link them to these genres in other parts of the world? How have they represented and shaped the societies and cultures they inhabit? What moral codes do they address, underpin, or contest? The volume provides further voice to the increasingly diverse and fascinating output of the region and emphasises the importance of Asian art forms as depictions of specific cultures but also of their connection to broader themes in children’s texts, and scholarship within this field.