Playboy Alex Stanton likes his relationships short and without strings. But his fiery fling with Gwen Wright left him craving more. So when a holiday weekend getaway provides an opportunity for another taste of the tantalizing woman, he grabs it. Only, things have changed since their last encounter…. Besides being noticeably pregnant, Gwen insists she's sworn off men. As if the challenge weren't tempting enough, Gwen's enticing new curves have made the sexy spitfire even more appealing. But how can the footloose bachelor hang on to his heart when he can't stop longing for the soon-to-be mama?
From the New York Times bestselling authors of Sprint comes “a unique and engaging read about a proven habit framework [that] readers can apply to each day” (Insider, Best Books to Form New Habits). “If you want to achieve more (without going nuts), read this book.”—Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit Nobody ever looked at an empty calendar and said, "The best way to spend this time is by cramming it full of meetings!" or got to work in the morning and thought, Today I'll spend hours on Facebook! Yet that's exactly what we do. Why? In a world where information refreshes endlessly and the workday feels like a race to react to other people's priorities faster, frazzled and distracted has become our default position. But what if the exhaustion of constant busyness wasn't mandatory? What if you could step off the hamster wheel and start taking control of your time and attention? That's what this book is about. As creators of Google Ventures' renowned "design sprint," Jake and John have helped hundreds of teams solve important problems by changing how they work. Building on the success of these sprints and their experience designing ubiquitous tech products from Gmail to YouTube, they spent years experimenting with their own habits and routines, looking for ways to help people optimize their energy, focus, and time. Now they've packaged the most effective tactics into a four-step daily framework that anyone can use to systematically design their days. Make Time is not a one-size-fits-all formula. Instead, it offers a customizable menu of bite-size tips and strategies that can be tailored to individual habits and lifestyles. Make Time isn't about productivity, or checking off more to-dos. Nor does it propose unrealistic solutions like throwing out your smartphone or swearing off social media. Making time isn't about radically overhauling your lifestyle; it's about making small shifts in your environment to liberate yourself from constant busyness and distraction. A must-read for anyone who has ever thought, If only there were more hours in the day..., Make Time will help you stop passively reacting to the demands of the modern world and start intentionally making time for the things that matter.
“No matter how much I enjoyed parenthood, I found myself having to accept its fundamental truth: that nothing ever turns out quite as you’d expect.” It was a journey that most parents would hope to avoid: a son born with a congenital heart defect, a fateful decision to take a family trip abroad, and an emergency hospitalization that left them stranded on the other side of the world with no obvious way home. Despite these difficult circumstances, More Than We Expected is not a tragedy. Instead, this memoir offers valuable lessons about the privilege of parenthood and the practice of medicine: the mysterious ways in which the body forms and grows, giving life; how we find the faith to live with our decisions, even if the consequences are beyond our control; and a family’s extraordinary capacity—when something goes wrong—to compensate and heal. More Than We Expected is a story of finding strength in the most unexpected places. Our children have a special ability to reveal the goodness in the world—their eyes a window to a life full of wonder. Like them, this book is a vivid reminder of what it means to be human—a miraculous, inexplicable gift, however fleeting.
Do you want to . . . • create a rich and vibrant classroom environment? • stimulate your students’ minds in multiple ways? • transform your teaching through incorporating the arts in your mathematics and science curriculums? Then Dance Integration: 36 Dance Lesson Plans for Science and Mathematics is just the book for you! The dance lesson plans in this groundbreaking book infuse creativity in mathematics and science content. Students will gain a wealth of critical knowledge, deepen their critical-thinking skills, and learn to collaborate and communicate effectively. Written for K-5 teachers who are looking for creative ways to teach the standards, Dance Integration will help you bring your mathematics and science content to life as you guide your students to create original choreography in mathematics and science and perform it for one another. In doing so, you will help spark new ideas for your students out of those two curriculums —no more same-old same-old! And in the freshness of these new ideas, students will increase comfort in performing in front of one another and discussing performances while deepening their understanding of the core content through their kinesthetic experiences. The creative-thinking skills that you will teach through these lesson plans and the innovative learning that dance provides are what set this book apart from all others in the field. Dance Integration was extensively field-tested by authors Karen Kaufmann and Jordan Dehline. The book contains these features: • Instructions on developing modules integrating mathematics and science • Ready-to-use lesson plans that classroom teachers, physical education teachers, dance educators, and dance specialists can use in teaching integrated content in mathematics and science • Tried-and-true methods for connecting to 21st-century learning standards and integrating dance into K-5 curriculums This book, which will help you assess learning equally in dance, science, and mathematics, is organized in three parts: • Part I introduces the role of dance in education; defines dance integration; and describes the uses, benefits, and effects of dance when used in tandem with another content area. • Part II offers dance and mathematics lessons that parallel the common core standards for mathematics. • Part III presents dance and science learning activities in physical science, life science, earth and space sciences, investigation, experimentation, and technology. Each lesson plan includes a warm-up, a developmental progression of activities, and formative and summative assessments and reflections. The progressions help students explore, experiment, create, and perform their understanding of the content. The plans are written in a conversational narrative and include additional notes for teachers. Each lesson explores an essential question relevant to the discipline and may be taught in sequence or as a stand-alone lesson. Yes, Dance Integration will help you meet important standards: • Common Core State Standards for Mathematics • Next Generation Science Standards • Standards for Learning and Teaching Dance in the Arts More important, this book provides you with a personal aesthetic realm in your classroom that is not part of any other school experience. It will help you bring joy and excitement into your classroom. And it will help you awaken a community of active and eager learners. Isn’t that what education is all about?
Autonomous AI systems need complex computational techniques for planning and performing actions. Planning and acting require significant deliberation because an intelligent system must coordinate and integrate these activities in order to act effectively in the real world. This book presents a comprehensive paradigm of planning and acting using the most recent and advanced automated-planning techniques. It explains the computational deliberation capabilities that allow an actor, whether physical or virtual, to reason about its actions, choose them, organize them purposefully, and act deliberately to achieve an objective. Useful for students, practitioners, and researchers, this book covers state-of-the-art planning techniques, acting techniques, and their integration which will allow readers to design intelligent systems that are able to act effectively in the real world.
Ema and Bruno, two young people who have their careers as their only refuge in the absence of a successful personal life, meet each other in Romania at the conference of the multinational company they both work for. She works in Bucharest and he in Zurich. Although they meet for business, they start developing feelings for each other, and when they say good-bye in the airport, they both hope they will meet again. This happens sooner than imagined because the air traffic is blocked by a volcanic eruption in Iceland, and Bruno finds himself unable to fly home. The evening they unexpectedly come to spend together is the beginning of a beautiful story. But its thread is broken off by an unfortunate car accident that turns their lives upside down. Exciting, likable characters come into scene with their own secrets, which will eventually come to the surface. Their attempts to properly set the level of their expectations on the frail border between the beauty of their dreams and the fear of losing them and getting hurt take the reader through a story full of unexpected turns, with joy and pain, hope and disappointment, love and restraint.
KI 2008 was the 31st Annual German Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence held September 23–26 at the University of Kaiserslautern and the German Research Center for Arti?cial Intelligence DFKI GmbH in Kaiserslautern, Germany. The conference series started in 1975 with the German Workshop on AI (GWAI), which took place in Bonn, and represents the ?rst forum of its type for the German AI Community. Over the years AI has become a major ?eld in c- puter scienceinGermanyinvolvinga numberof successfulprojects thatreceived much international attention. Today KI conferences are international forums where participants from academia and industry from all over the world meet to exchange their recent research results and to discuss trends in the ?eld. Since 1993 the meeting has been called the “Annual German Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence,” designated by the German acronym KI. This volume contains the papers selected out of 77 submissions, including a number of submissions from outside German-speaking countries. In total, 15 submissions (19%) were accepted for oral and 30 (39%) for poster presentation. Oralpresentationsattheconferenceweresingletrack. Becauseofthis,thechoice of presentation form (oral, poster) was based on how well reviews indicated that the paper would ?t into one or the other format. The proceedings allocate the same space to both types of papers. In addition, we selected six papers that show high application potential - scribing systems or prototypical implementations of innovative AI technologies. They are also included in this volume as two-page extended abstracts.