Download or read book Mastermind written by Maria Konnikova and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-01-03 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling guide to thinking like literature's greatest detective. "Steven Pinker meets Sir Arthur Conan Doyle" (Boston Globe), by the author of The Confidence Game. No fictional character is more renowned for his powers of thought and observation than Sherlock Holmes. But is his extraordinary intellect merely a gift of fiction, or can we learn to cultivate these abilities ourselves, to improve our lives at work and at home? We can, says psychologist and journalist Maria Konnikova, and in Mastermind she shows us how. Beginning with the “brain attic”—Holmes’s metaphor for how we store information and organize knowledge—Konnikova unpacks the mental strategies that lead to clearer thinking and deeper insights. Drawing on twenty-first-century neuroscience and psychology, Mastermind explores Holmes’s unique methods of ever-present mindfulness, astute observation, and logical deduction. In doing so, it shows how each of us, with some self-awareness and a little practice, can employ these same methods to sharpen our perceptions, solve difficult problems, and enhance our creative powers. For Holmes aficionados and casual readers alike, Konnikova reveals how the world’s most keen-eyed detective can serve as an unparalleled guide to upgrading the mind.
Download or read book The Art of Scientific Investigation written by W.I.B. Beveridge and published by Edizioni Savine. This book was released on 2017-09-25 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elaborate apparatus plays an important part in the science of to-day, but I sometimes wonder if we are not inclined to forget that the most important instrument in research must always be the mind of man. It is true that much time and effort is devoted to training and equipping the scientist's mind, but little attention is paid to the technicalities of making the best use of it. There is no satisfactory book which systematises the knowledge available on the practice and mental skills—the art—of scientific investigation. This lack has prompted me to write a book to serve as an introduction to research. My small contribution to the literature of a complex and difficult topic is meant in the first place for the student about to engage in research, but I hope that it may also interest a wider audience. Since my own experience of research has been acquired in the study of infectious diseases, I have written primarily for the student of that field. But nearly all the book is equally applicable to any other branch of experimental biology and much of it to any branch of science. – (Cambridge, 1957. W.I.B. Beveridge)
Download or read book How to Be a Writer written by Barbara Baig and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-08-30 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Athletes practice. Musicians practice. As a writer you need to do the same. Whether you have dreams of writing a novel or a memoir or a collection of poems, or you simply want to improve your everyday writing, this innovative book will show you how to build your skills by way of practice. Through playful and purposeful exercises, you'll develop your natural aptitude for communication, strengthening your ability to come up with things to say, and your ability to get those things into the minds (and the hearts) of readers. You'll learn to: • Train and develop your writer's powers—creativity, memory, observation, imagination, curiosity, and the subconscious • Understand the true nature of the relationship between you and your readers • Find your writer's voice • Get required writing projects done so you have more time for the writing you want to do • And much more Empowering and down-to-earth, How to Be a Writer gives you the tools you need, and tells you what (and how) to practice so that you can become the writer you want to be.
Download or read book Becoming Sherlock written by Stefan Cain and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2015-12-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Have you ever wished that you had Sherlock Holmes-like observational skills? Would you like to be able to learn how to concentrate better and be more productive in a shorter amount of time? Many people believe that skills like that of observation and concentration are something that a person is born with, that you either have it or you don't and that's it. But, fortunately, this is not the case. Like any other skill, mindfulness can be taught, though some will obviously take to it faster than others. In this book, author Stefan Cain teaches you how to train your brain to work more effectively in a variety of ways using several different exercises and methods. Stefan Cain has studied the human brain for years, particularly in regards to its functionality. His research and experiments have shown him that the brain, like other parts of the body, can be shaped, sculpted, and, eventually, trained in such a way as to promote increased mindfulness. By following the methods outlined in this book, and by coming to understand how the brain works, you will learn how to: -Improve your observational skills-you could be the next Sherlock Holmes! -Improve your memory -Increase your awareness -Become more creative -Make solid deductions -Use critical thinking -Use your intuition By reading, understanding, and then implementing the techniques described in this book, you can be a better, more productive, and less stressed you in no time at all.
Download or read book How to think like Sherlock written by Daniel Smith and published by Michael O'Mara Books. This book was released on 2012-10-11 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear.' Such were the words of the master detective Sherlock Holmes to Dr Watson, as he noted how his friend failed to implement Holmes's techniques. In How to think like Sherlock you will learn how to increase your powers of observation, memory, deduction and reasoning using the tricks and techniques of the world's most famous detective, Sherlock Holmes. The book incorporates the latest techniques and theories across a range of topics: NLP, memory mapping, body language, information shifting and speed reading - this is a supremely practical book that will make you look at the world in a new light, and more importantly, impress those around you. Packed full of case studies, quotes and trivia from Arthur Conan Doyle's original novels and short stories, the book also includes a series of fun tasks and games for you to complete that will ensure that when you reach the end of the book you will be thinking like Sherlock Holmes, the master of the science of deduction. You will never look at a shirt cuff, trouser hem or scuff of dirt on a shoe in the same way again!
Download or read book Observing the Sun written by Jamey L. Jenkins and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-07-19 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Observing the Sun” is for amateur astronomers at all three levels: beginning, intermediate, and advanced. The beginning observer is often trying to find a niche or define a specific interest in his hobby, and the content of this book will spark that interest in solar observing because of the focus on the dynamics of the Sun. Intermediate and advanced observers will find the book invaluable in identifying features (through photos, charts, diagrams) in a logical, orderly fashion and then guiding the observer to interpret the observations. Because the Sun is a dynamic celestial body in constant flux, astronomers rarely know for certain what awaits them at the eyepiece. All features of the Sun are transient and sometimes rather fleeting. Given the number of features and the complex life cycles of some, it can be a challenging hobby. “Observing the Sun” provides essential illustrations, charts, and diagrams that depict the forms and life cycles of the numerous features visible on the Sun.
Download or read book Observing by Hand written by Omar W. Nasim and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-01-06 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today we are all familiar with the iconic pictures of the nebulae produced by the Hubble Space Telescope’s digital cameras. But there was a time, before the successful application of photography to the heavens, in which scientists had to rely on handmade drawings of these mysterious phenomena. Observing by Hand sheds entirely new light on the ways in which the production and reception of handdrawn images of the nebulae in the nineteenth century contributed to astronomical observation. Omar W. Nasim investigates hundreds of unpublished observing books and paper records from six nineteenth-century observers of the nebulae: Sir John Herschel; William Parsons, the third Earl of Rosse; William Lassell; Ebenezer Porter Mason; Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel; and George Phillips Bond. Nasim focuses on the ways in which these observers created and employed their drawings in data-driven procedures, from their choices of artistic materials and techniques to their practices and scientific observation. He examines the ways in which the act of drawing complemented the acts of seeing and knowing, as well as the ways that making pictures was connected to the production of scientific knowledge. An impeccably researched, carefully crafted, and beautifully illustrated piece of historical work, Observing by Hand will delight historians of science, art, and the book, as well as astronomers and philosophers.
Download or read book Spellbinding Sentences written by Barbara Baig and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-07-10 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elevate Your Writing From So-So To Spectacular! Great writing requires more than an original idea, compelling characters, or a scintillating plot. An author needs all of these to be successful, but writing--and writing well--also demands an entirely different skill set. Spellbinding Sentences arms you with the tools you need to master the power of the English language. In this book, you'll learn the different qualities of words and the many ways those words can be combined to create sentences that hook readers. You'll emulate sentences from your favorite writers, practice proven techniques, and develop your skills one step at a time. The result? Your ability to craft excellent sentences will become second nature--and those sentences will hold your readers spellbound, page after page. "Barbara Baig's Spellbinding Sentences is a tribute to the pleasure and vitality of the English language. Never prescriptive and always clear, this enlightening book is sure to help all those wishing to add grace and strength to their writing." --Jane Brox, award-winning author of Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, one of TIME magazine's top ten nonfiction books of 2010 "Spellbinding Sentences is sophisticated and down-to-earth at the same time. Barbara Baig has distilled decades of experience into this wise book." --Edward Dolnick, New York Times best-selling author of The Rescue Artist: A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece
Download or read book Troublemakers written by Carla Shalaby and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A radical educator's paradigm-shifting inquiry into the accepted, normal demands of school, as illuminated by moving portraits of four young "problem children" In this dazzling debut, Carla Shalaby, a former elementary school teacher, explores the everyday lives of four young "troublemakers," challenging the ways we identify and understand so-called problem children. Time and again, we make seemingly endless efforts to moderate, punish, and even medicate our children, when we should instead be concerned with transforming the very nature of our institutions, systems, and structures, large and small. Through delicately crafted portraits of these memorable children—Zora, Lucas, Sean, and Marcus—Troublemakers allows us to see school through the eyes of those who know firsthand what it means to be labeled a problem. From Zora's proud individuality to Marcus's open willfulness, from Sean's struggle with authority to Lucas's tenacious imagination, comes profound insight—for educators and parents alike—into how schools engender, exclude, and then try to erase trouble, right along with the young people accused of making it. And although the harsh disciplining of adolescent behavior has been called out as part of a school-to-prison pipeline, the children we meet in these pages demonstrate how a child's path to excessive punishment and exclusion in fact begins at a much younger age. Shalaby's empathetic, discerning, and elegant prose gives us a deeply textured look at what noncompliance signals about the environments we require students to adapt to in our schools. Both urgent and timely, this paradigm-shifting book challenges our typical expectations for young children and with principled affection reveals how these demands—despite good intentions—work to undermine the pursuit of a free and just society.
Download or read book Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences written by Jacob Cohen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-13 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Statistical Power Analysis is a nontechnical guide to power analysis in research planning that provides users of applied statistics with the tools they need for more effective analysis. The Second Edition includes: * a chapter covering power analysis in set correlation and multivariate methods; * a chapter considering effect size, psychometric reliability, and the efficacy of "qualifying" dependent variables and; * expanded power and sample size tables for multiple regression/correlation.
Download or read book The 48 Laws of Power written by Robert Greene and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-10-31 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this multi-million-copy New York Times bestseller is the definitive manual for anyone interested in gaining, observing, or defending against ultimate control – from the author of The Laws of Human Nature. In the book that People magazine proclaimed “beguiling” and “fascinating,” Robert Greene and Joost Elffers have distilled three thousand years of the history of power into 48 essential laws by drawing from the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and Carl Von Clausewitz and also from the lives of figures ranging from Henry Kissinger to P.T. Barnum. Some laws teach the need for prudence (“Law 1: Never Outshine the Master”), others teach the value of confidence (“Law 28: Enter Action with Boldness”), and many recommend absolute self-preservation (“Law 15: Crush Your Enemy Totally”). Every law, though, has one thing in common: an interest in total domination. In a bold and arresting two-color package, The 48 Laws of Power is ideal whether your aim is conquest, self-defense, or simply to understand the rules of the game.
Download or read book Field Notes on Science and Nature written by Michael R. Canfield and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-09 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once in a great while, as the New York Times noted recently, a naturalist writes a book that changes the way people look at the living world. John James Audubon’s Birds of America, published in 1838, was one. Roger Tory Peterson’s 1934 Field Guide to the Birds was another. How does such insight into nature develop? Pioneering a new niche in the study of plants and animals in their native habitat, Field Notes on Science and Nature allows readers to peer over the shoulders and into the notebooks of a dozen eminent field workers, to study firsthand their observational methods, materials, and fleeting impressions. What did George Schaller note when studying the lions of the Serengeti? What lists did Kenn Kaufman keep during his 1973 “big year”? How does Piotr Naskrecki use relational databases and electronic field notes? In what way is Bernd Heinrich’s approach “truly Thoreauvian,” in E. O. Wilson’s view? Recording observations in the field is an indispensable scientific skill, but researchers are not generally willing to share their personal records with others. Here, for the first time, are reproductions of actual pages from notebooks. And in essays abounding with fascinating anecdotes, the authors reflect on the contexts in which the notes were taken. Covering disciplines as diverse as ornithology, entomology, ecology, paleontology, anthropology, botany, and animal behavior, Field Notes offers specific examples that professional naturalists can emulate to fine-tune their own field methods, along with practical advice that amateur naturalists and students can use to document their adventures.
Download or read book On Looking written by Alexandra Horowitz and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-01-17 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You are missing at least eighty percent of what is happening around you right now. You are missing what is happening in your body, in the distance, and right in front of you. In marshalling your attention to these words, you are ignoring an unthinkably large amount of information that continues to bombard all of your senses. This ignorance is useful: indeed, we compliment it and call it concentration. It enables us to not just notice the shapes on the page, but to absorb them as intelligible words, phrases, ideas. Alas, we tend to bring this focus to every activity we do. In so doing, it is inevitable that we also bring along attention's companion: inattention to everything else. This book begins with that inattention. It is not a book about how to bring more focus to your reading of Tolstoy; it is not about how to multitask, attending to two or three or four tasks at once. It is not about how to avoid falling asleep at a public lecture, or at your grandfather's tales of boyhood misadventures. It is about attending to the joys of the unattended, the perceived 'ordinary'. Even when engaged in the simplest of activities - taking a walk around the block - we pay so little attention to most of what is right before us that we are sleepwalkers in our own lives. This book is about that walk around the block, and how to rediscover the extraordinary things that we are missing in our ordinary activities.
Download or read book Visual Intelligence written by Amy E. Herman and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engrossing guide to seeing—and communicating—more clearly from the groundbreaking course that helps FBI agents, cops, CEOs, ER docs, and others save money, reputations, and lives. How could looking at Monet’s water lily paintings help save your company millions? How can checking out people’s footwear foil a terrorist attack? How can your choice of adjective win an argument, calm your kid, or catch a thief? In her celebrated seminar, the Art of Perception, art historian Amy Herman has trained experts from many fields how to perceive and communicate better. By showing people how to look closely at images, she helps them hone their “visual intelligence,” a set of skills we all possess but few of us know how to use properly. She has spent more than a decade teaching doctors to observe patients instead of their charts, helping police officers separate facts from opinions when investigating a crime, and training professionals from the FBI, the State Department, Fortune 500 companies, and the military to recognize the most pertinent and useful information. Her lessons highlight far more than the physical objects you may be missing; they teach you how to recognize the talents, opportunities, and dangers that surround you every day. Whether you want to be more effective on the job, more empathetic toward your loved ones, or more alert to the trove of possibilities and threats all around us, this book will show you how to see what matters most to you more clearly than ever before. Please note: this ebook contains full-color art reproductions and photographs, and color is at times essential to the observation and analysis skills discussed in the text. For the best reading experience, this ebook should be viewed on a color device.
Download or read book Landscape Painting written by Mitchell Albala and published by Watson-Guptill. This book was released on 2011-11-15 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Because nature is so expansive and complex, so varied in its range of light, landscape painters often have to look further and more deeply to find form and structure, value patterns, and an organized arrangement of shapes. In Landscape Painting, Mitchell Albala shares his concepts and practices for translating nature's grandeur, complexity, and color dynamics into convincing representations of space and light. Concise, practical, and inspirational, Landscape Painting focuses on the greatest challenges for the landscape artist, such as: • Simplification and Massing: Learn to reduce nature's complexity by looking beneath the surface of a subject to discover the form's basic masses and shapes.• Color and Light: Explore color theory as it specifically applies to the landscape, and learn the various strategies painters use to capture the illusion of natural light.• Selection and Composition: Learn to select wisely from nature's vast panorama. Albala shows you the essential cues to look for and how to find the most promising subject from a world of possibilities. The lessons in Landscape Painting—based on observation rather than imitation and applicable to both plein air and studio practice—are accompanied by painting examples, demonstrations, photographs, and diagrams. Illustrations draw from the work of more than 40 contemporary artists and such masters of landscape painting as John Constable, Sanford Gifford, and Claude Monet. Based on Albala's 25 years of experience and the proven methods taught at his successful plein air workshops, this in-depth guide to all aspects of landscape painting is a must-have for anyone getting started in the genre, as well as more experienced practitioners who want to hone their skills or learn new perspectives.
Download or read book Discipline and Punish written by Michel Foucault and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-04-18 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant work from the most influential philosopher since Sartre. In this indispensable work, a brilliant thinker suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.
Download or read book Phenomena of Power written by Heinrich Popitz and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-25 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Phenomena of Power, one of the leading figures of postwar German sociology reflects on the nature, and many forms of, power. For Heinrich Popitz, power is rooted in the human condition and is therefore part of all social relations. Drawing on philosophical anthropology, he identifies the elementary forms of power to provide detailed insight into how individuals gain and perpetuate control over others. Instead of striving for a power-free society, Popitz argues, humanity should try to impose limits on power where possible and establish counterpower where necessary. Phenomena of Power delves into the sociohistorical manifestations of power and breaks through to its general structures. Popitz distinguishes the forms of the enforcement of power as well as of its stabilization and institutionalization, clearly articulating how the mechanisms of power work and how to track them in the social world. Philosophically trained, historically informed, and endowed with keen observation, Popitz uses examples ranging from the way passengers on a ship organize deck chairs to how prisoners of war share property to illustrate his theory. Long influential in German sociology, Phenomena of Power offers a challenging reworking of one of the essential concepts of the social sciences.
