THE SOLD-OUT SERIES RETURNS with a muchanticipated new chapter! Bent on avenging the death of his queen, game character King Heremoth seeks vengeance against Dana, an unwitting tamale delivery girl. Meanwhile, strange things are afoot in future Los Angeles as a police standoff at a fish market reveals a homicidal robot armed only with seafood. Artist/writer NATE SIMPSON outdoes his beautiful and multi-layered debut with an even more ambitious
From the #1 Best-Selling author, Jeff Ashworth, comes the latest addition to The Game Master series, with more than 500 NPCs ready to populate your campaign whenever you need them! As is often the case in tabletop roleplaying games, players often venture into locales or look for answers in places and among people busy Game Masters simply didn’t anticipate. Or, just as often, an adventure won't have fully fleshed out characters in place for the locations and encounters outlined for gameplay. The Game Master's Book of Non-Player Characters solves these issues and more by providing Game Masters with the information they need to “fill in the holes” in their campaign play. It will enable GMs to instantly add depth, color, motivation and unique physical characteristics at a moment's notice to unexpected or underwritten characters as they pop up during gameplay, ensuring every session is a memorable one for players and GMs alike. This edition also includes more than 50 hand-drawn illustrations of select NPCs detailed in the book, 3 bonus one-shot adventures, and a foreword by online influencer Jasmine Bhullar.
The 21st edition of this classic guidebook from NIRSA provides the latest rule changes in flag and touch football. NIRSA supports leaders in collegiate recreation, with a membership serving over eight million students. 2023 & 2024 NIRSA Flag & Touch Football Rules Book & Officials’ Manual highlights all the rules that have changed since the previous edition, making it easy to locate what is new or changed. Updated information for officials includes changes to penalty enforcement and a method for the touchdown-scoring team to retain possession of the ball, called the onside conversion. The pocket size makes the guide easy to consult at games, whether you’re a coach, instructor, official, player, or fan of flag and touch football. The manual also offers summaries of fouls and penalties, youth football rules, and 4 on 4 football rules, and it presents the 10 commandments for clinicians and observers. It contains detailed explanations of the rules regarding equipment, time factors, team possession, scoring, player conduct, and more. The officials’ portion is then presented in seven sections that outline officiating basics and responsibilities, game administration, and other relevant topics. This easy-to-read rule book and officials’ manual reflects NIRSA’s continuing commitment to the development of flag and touch football and the organization’s efforts to keep training and officials’ manuals current and relevant. As such, this pocket guide is an essential resource for officials, coaches, and players connected to flag and touch football in various settings, from youth levels through collegiate levels.
This book presents the fundamental theoretical notions of supervised machine learning along with a wide range of applications using Python, R, and Stata. It provides a balance between theory and applications and fosters an understanding and awareness of the availability of machine learning methods over different software platforms. After introducing the machine learning basics, the focus turns to a broad spectrum of topics: model selection and regularization, discriminant analysis, nearest neighbors, support vector machines, tree modeling, artificial neural networks, deep learning, and sentiment analysis. Each chapter is self-contained and comprises an initial theoretical part, where the basics of the methodologies are explained, followed by an applicative part, where the methods are applied to real-world datasets. Numerous examples are included and, for ease of reproducibility, the Python, R, and Stata codes used in the text, along with the related datasets, are available online. The intended audience is PhD students, researchers and practitioners from various disciplines, including economics and other social sciences, medicine and epidemiology, who have a good understanding of basic statistics and a working knowledge of statistical software, and who want to apply machine learning methods in their work.
The second edition of this book brings together a cutting edge international team of contributors to critically review the current knowledge regarding the effectiveness of training interventions designed to improve cognitive functions in different target populations. Since the publication of the first volume, the field of cognitive research has rapidly evolved. There is substantial evidence that cognitive and physical training can improve cognitive performance, but these benefits seem to vary as a function of the type and the intensity of interventions and the way training-induced gains are measured and analyzed. This book will address the new topics in psychological research and aims to resolve some of the currently debated issues. This book offers a comprehensive overview of empirical findings and methodological approaches of cognitive training research in different cognitive domains (memory, executive functions, etc.), types of training (working memory training, video game training, physical training, etc.), age groups (from children to young and older adults), target populations (children with developmental disorders, aging workers, MCI patients etc.), settings (laboratory-based studies, applied studies in clinical and educational settings), and methodological approaches (behavioral studies, neuroscientific studies). Chapters feature theoretical models that describe the mechanisms underlying training-induced cognitive and neural changes. Cognitive Training: An Overview of Features and Applications, Second Edition will be of interest to researchers, practitioners, students, and professors in the fields of psychology and neuroscience.
The SAGE Encyclopedia of LGBTQ Studies, 2nd Edition will be a broad, interdisciplinary product aimed at students and educators interested in an interdisciplinary perspective on LGBTQ issues. This far-reaching and contemporary set of volumes is meant to examine and provide understandings of the lives and experiences of LGBTQ individuals, with attention to the contexts and forces that shape their world. The volume will address questions such as: What are the key theories used to understand variations in sexual orientation and gender identity? How do LGBTQ+ people experience the transition to parenthood? How does sexual orientation intersect with other key social locations (e.g., race) to shape experience and identity? What does LGBTQ+ affirmative therapy look like? How have anti-LGBTQ ballot measures affected LGBTQ people? What are LGBTQ+ people’s experiences during COVID-19? How were LGBTQ+ people impacted by the Trump administration? What is life like for LGBTQ+ people living outside the United States? This encyclopedia will be a unique product on the market: a reference work that looks at LGBTQ issues and identity primarily through the lenses of psychology, human development, and sociology, and emphasizing queer, feminist, and ecological perspectives on this topic. Entries will be written by top researchers and clinicians across multiple fields—psychology, human development, gender/queer studies, sexuality studies, social work, nursing, cultural studies, education, family studies, medicine, public health, and sociology—contributing to approximately 450-500 signed entries. All entries will include cross-references and Further Readings.
The volume contains 75 papers presented at International Conference on Communication and Networks (COMNET 2015) held during February 19–20, 2016 at Ahmedabad Management Association (AMA), Ahmedabad, India and organized by Computer Society of India (CSI), Ahmedabad Chapter, Division IV and Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), Ahmedabad Chapter. The book aims to provide a forum to researchers to propose theory and technology on the networks and services, share their experience in IT and telecommunications industries and to discuss future management solutions for communication systems, networks and services. It comprises of original contributions from researchers describing their original, unpublished, research contribution. The papers are mainly from 4 areas – Security, Management and Control, Protocol and Deployment, and Applications. The topics covered in the book are newly emerging algorithms, communication systems, network standards, services, and applications.
Three thousand years in the future humans descended on the planet Sarax. Over the next fifty years they created technologically advanced cities that were not just cities but beautiful works of art in themselves. Then the creatures came; Goblins, Orcs, Elves and things far worse. Now after untold horrors, disasters, sacrifices and isolation humanity has reverted back to a medieval state desperately fighting to stay alive... Play as adventurers questing to save the world of Sarax from destruction. This game requires one or more players also unlike many other role playing games it requires no gamesmaster or minatures.
This book covers the state-of-the-art in digital games research and development for anyone working with or studying digital games and those who are considering entering into this rapidly growing industry. Many books have been published that sufficiently describe popular topics in digital games; however, until now there has not been a comprehensive book that draws the traditional and emerging facets of gaming together across multiple disciplines within a single volume.
Written by a pioneer of game development in academia, Introduction to Game Physics with Box2D covers the theory and practice of 2D game physics in a relaxed and entertaining yet instructional style. It offers a cohesive treatment of the topics and code involved in programming the physics for 2D video games. Focusing on writing elementary game physics code, the first half of the book helps you grasp the challenges of programming game physics from scratch, without libraries or outside help. It examines the mathematical foundation of game physics and illustrates how it is applied in practice through coding examples. The second half of the book shows you how to use Box2D, a popular open source 2D game physics engine. A companion website provides supplementary material, including source code and videos. This book helps you become a capable 2D game physics programmer through its presentation of both the theory and applications of 2D game physics. After reading the book and experimenting with the code samples, you will understand the basics of 2D game physics and know how to use Box2D to make a 2D physics-based game.
