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Reviews book: The creator of the popular webcomic "xkcd" uses line drawings and just ten hundred common words to provide simple explanations for how things work, including microwaves, bridges, tectonic plates, the solar system, the periodic table, helicopters, and other essential concepts.
Reviews book: From the No. 1 bestselling author of What If? - the man who created xkcd and explained the laws of science with cartoons - comes a series of brilliantly simple diagrams ('blueprints' if you want to be complicated about it) that show how important things work: from the nuclear bomb to the biro. It's good to know what the parts of a thing are called, but it's much more interesting to know what they do. Richard Feynman once said that if you can't explain something to a first-year student, you don't really get it. In Thing Explainer, Randall Munroe takes a quantum leap past this: he explains things using only drawings and a vocabulary of just our 1,000 (or the ten hundred) most common words. Many of the things we use every day - like our food-heating radio boxes ('microwaves'), our very tall roads ('bridges'), and our computer rooms ('datacentres') - are strange to us. So are the other worlds around our sun (the solar system), the big flat rocks we live on (tectonic plates), and even the stuff inside us (cells). Where do these things come from? How do they work? What do they look like if you open them up? And what would happen if we heated them up, cooled them down, pointed them in a different direction, or pressed this button? In Thing Explainer, Munroe gives us the answers to these questions and many, many more. Funny, interesting, and always understandable, this book is for anyone -- age 5 to 105 -- who has ever wondered how things work, and why.
Reviews book: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Controlled Natural Language, CNL 2016, held in Aberdeen, UK, in July 2016. The 11 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 15 submissions. The topics range from natural languages which are controlled, to controlled languages with a natural language flavour; and from more theoretical results to interfaces, reasoning engines and real-life applications of CNLs.
Reviews book: WHAT IF... one man decided to answer all the unanswerable questions, using science. The Sunday Times-bestselling author and xkcd creator, Randall Munroe is here to provide the best answers yet to the important questions you probably never thought to ask. The millions of people around the world who read and loved What If? still have questions, and those questions are getting stranger. Planning to ride a fire pole from the moon back to Earth? The hardest part is sticking the landing. Hoping to cool the atmosphere by opening everyone's freezer doors at the same time? Maybe it's time for a brief introduction to thermodynamics. Want to know what would happen if you rode a helicopter blade, built a billion-storey building, made a lava lamp out of lava, or jumped on a geyser as it erupted? Okay, if you insist. Welcome (back) to the mind-blowing world of What If? Unfazed by absurdity, Randall consults the latest research on everything from swing-set physics to airplane-catapult design to clearly and concisely answer his readers' questions. As he consistently demonstrates, you can learn a lot from examining how the world might work in very specific extreme circumstances. Filled with bonkers science, boundless curiosity, and Randall's signature stick-figure comics, What If? 2 is sure to be another instant classic adored by inquisitive readers of all ages.
Reviews book: This accessible and highly practical book provides an introductory guide to the world of research support in the academic library. Academic libraries have seen huge changes in recent years thanks to the increasing availability of information online but they are now undergoing another shift. As libraries move away from providing access to existing information and towards helping users create new knowledge there is an opportunity for them to develop new services for the research community. To do this successfully libraries need to have a knowledgeable workforce who are equipped to provide the support that researchers need. Information professionals are increasingly being asked to advise their users on issues such as open access and research data management but are often doing so with little or no formal preparation. Outlining the reasons why library staff need to develop a knowledge of research support and guiding them through the key information on each topic, The No-nonsense Guide to Research Support and Scholarly Communication provides an ideal primer for those who seek to work in this area or those who have acquired these responsibilities as part of a wider role. The practical nature of the book means readers can dip into it or read it from cover to cover as needed. It includes practical checklists of knowledge and skills, international case studies by practitioners from around the globe, end of chapter references, how-to sections, activities and links to freely available online training materials. The book covers: - scholarly communication, open research and the research lifecycle - research data management - open access - disseminating research - metrics and measuring impact including the Journal Impact Factor, H-Index and Altmetrics - career paths in research support - why and how library staff at all levels can get involved in the process of doing research and sharing their outputs. The book will be essential reading for academic librarians who have had research support duties added to their role with little or no formal training or those who have taken on a newly created role and are unsure of how best to use their existing skills or develop new ones suitable for a role in research support. The book will also be of interest to public librarians who may be dealing with supporting their own research communities and those who are considering taking on a career in this growing area but are unsure where to turn for guidance including students studying for postgraduate library qualifications and those who have undertaken qualifications in publishing.
Reviews book: Meaning addresses the fundamental question of human language interaction: what it is to mean, and how we communicate our meanings to others. Experienced textbook writer and eminent researcher Betty J. Birner gives balanced coverage to semantics and pragmatics, emphasizing interactions between the two, and discusses other fields of language study such as syntax, neurology, philosophy of language, and artificial intelligence in terms of their interfaces with linguistic meaning. Comics and diagrams appear throughout to keep the reader engaged; and end-of-chapter quizzes, data-collection exercises, and opinion questions are employed along with more traditional exercises and discussion questions. In addition, the book features copious examples from real life and current events, along with boxes describing linguistic issues in the news and interesting and accessible research on topics like swearing, politics, and animal communication. Students will emerge ready for deeper study in semantics and pragmatics – and more importantly, with an understanding of how all of these fields serve the fundamental purpose of human language: the communication of meaning. Meaning is an ideal textbook for courses in linguistic meaning that focus on both semantics and pragmatics in equal parts, with special attention on philosophical questions, related subfields of linguistics, and interfaces among these various areas. Appropriate for both undergraduate and graduate-level courses in semantics, pragmatics, and general linguistics, Meaning is essential reading for all students of linguistic meaning.
Reviews book: A Primer for Teaching Women, Gender, and Sexuality in World History is a guide for college and high school teachers who are teaching women, gender, and sexuality in history for the first time, for experienced teachers who want to reinvigorate their courses, for those who are training future teachers to prepare their own syllabi, and for teachers who want to incorporate these issues into their world history classes. Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks and Urmi Engineer Willoughby present possible course topics, themes, concepts, and approaches while offering practical advice on materials and strategies helpful for teaching courses from a global perspective in today's teaching environment for today's students. In their discussions of pedagogy, syllabus organization, fostering students' historical empathy, and connecting students with their community, Wiesner-Hanks and Willoughby draw readers into the process of strategically designing courses that will enable students to analyze gender and sexuality in history, whether their students are new to this process or hold powerful and personal commitments to the issues it raises.
Reviews book: Engineering degree courses open up a vast range of career options and stable employment prospects. Featuring case studies from current students and insider advice from admissions tutors, this guide gives students detailed advice on how to secure a place on the course of their choice and what career paths are on offer when they graduate.
Reviews book: In this book, you will find two stories, one of comedy and one of tragedy. In The Bathroom Door, follow a man as he discovers a door in his bathroom, and he goes through it to discover a world of wonder (which is not his bedroom, incidentally). In A Generic Zombie Story, follow some teenagers as they try to survive a zombie apocalypse, in a totally original, not done to death theme.
Reviews book: Language is a wild animal: rough, ambiguous, inconsistent in countless ways. But that just makes it all the more tempting to tame it. Many have tried, from sticklers for supposedly correct grammar to inventors of supposedly perfect languages; from software engineers working on machine translation to governments that see language management as politics by another means. But when you enter the lair of a wild beast, you can be lucky to escape with your wits. Join Lane Greene on a journey of discovery into the deep strangeness of language. Learn why grammar rules can never capture the extraordinary variety of ordinary usage. See what happens when you try to design a language that really makes sense. Find out why, for all the talk of decline in English, no language in recorded history has ever gone to the dogs, or ever could. And learn the fate of those bold individuals who, through heroism or ignorance, ventured to teach their tongue some new tricks.