A little boy who loves to find shapes in nature grows up to be one of America’s greatest architects in this inspiring biography of Frank Lloyd Wright. When Frank Lloyd Wright was a baby, his mother dreamed that he would become a great architect. She gave him blocks to play with and he learned that shapes are made up of many other shapes. As he grew up, he loved finding shapes in nature. Wright went on to study architecture and create buildings that were one with the natural world around them. He became known as one of the greatest American architects of all time.
Learning to identify colors is an essential skill in the early elementary classroom. Learning to sort by color takes this aptitude one step further. Through accessible text and helpful photographs, beginning readers will be able to see familiar objects, such as toys and crayons, both mixed up and sorted into their favorite colors. They'll be able to demonstrate their mastery of the concept by this inviting book's end.
We want to be part of the solution, not the problem; but the issues facing us – whether local or global – often seem too hard to tackle. We hope this meaningful, practical and simple book will inspire you to make changes in your everyday life that will quietly reshape our world. Often all it takes is a moment to look beyond the label, under the surface, and do something small, remembering that little things count. They add up and often cost you nothing. They ignite change and make the people around you happier. Small Ways to Shape Our World is an inspiring call to action, a powerful reminder that there's more to life than what you see, and a guide to reshaping our world with small acts of kindness, thoughtfulness and quiet rebellion.
The world is filled with shapes. A bird, a car, the stars in the sky - what shapes can you see? Children will love spotting familiar shapes on every page. With bright illustrations and a heartwarming message about the shape of something very special - love. Brilliantly read by Katy Ashworth. Please note that audio is not supported by all devices, please consult your user manual for confirmation.
Why does the United States pursue robust military invasions to change some foreign regimes but not others? Conventional accounts focus on geopolitics or elite ideology. C. William Walldorf, Jr., argues that the politics surrounding two broad, public narratives—the liberal narrative and the restraint narrative—often play a vital role in shaping US decisions whether to pursue robust and forceful regime change. Using current sociological work on cultural trauma, Walldorf explains how master narratives strengthen (and weaken), and he develops clear predictions for how and when these narratives will shape policy. To Shape Our World For Good demonstrates the importance and explanatory power of the master-narrative argument, using a sophisticated combination of methods: quantitative analysis and eight cases in the postwar period that include Korea, Vietnam, and El Salvador during the Cold War and more recent cases in Iraq and Libya. The case studies provide the environment for a critical assessment of the connections among the politics of master narratives, pluralism, and the common good in contemporary US foreign policy and grand strategy. Walldorf adds new insight to our understanding of US expansionism and cautions against the dangers of misusing popular narratives for short-term political gains—a practice all too common both past and present.
An instant New York Times Bestseller! “Unreasonably entertaining . . . reveals how geometric thinking can allow for everything from fairer American elections to better pandemic planning.” —The New York Times From the New York Times-bestselling author of How Not to Be Wrong—himself a world-class geometer—a far-ranging exploration of the power of geometry, which turns out to help us think better about practically everything. How should a democracy choose its representatives? How can you stop a pandemic from sweeping the world? How do computers learn to play Go, and why is learning Go so much easier for them than learning to read a sentence? Can ancient Greek proportions predict the stock market? (Sorry, no.) What should your kids learn in school if they really want to learn to think? All these are questions about geometry. For real. If you're like most people, geometry is a sterile and dimly remembered exercise you gladly left behind in the dust of ninth grade, along with your braces and active romantic interest in pop singers. If you recall any of it, it's plodding through a series of miniscule steps only to prove some fact about triangles that was obvious to you in the first place. That's not geometry. Okay, it is geometry, but only a tiny part, which has as much to do with geometry in all its flush modern richness as conjugating a verb has to do with a great novel. Shape reveals the geometry underneath some of the most important scientific, political, and philosophical problems we face. Geometry asks: Where are things? Which things are near each other? How can you get from one thing to another thing? Those are important questions. The word "geometry"comes from the Greek for "measuring the world." If anything, that's an undersell. Geometry doesn't just measure the world—it explains it. Shape shows us how.
It's Rashin's first day of school in America! Everything is a different shape than what she's used to: from the foods on her breakfast plate to the letters in the books! And the kids' families are from all over! The new teacher asks each child to imagine the shape of home on a map. Rashin knows right away what she'll say: Iran looks like a cat! What will the other kids say? What about the country YOUR family is originally from? Is it shaped like an apple? A boot? A torch? Open this book to join Rashin in discovering the true things that shape a place called home.
How understanding the signaling within social networks can change the way we make decisions, work with others, and manage organizations. How can you know when someone is bluffing? Paying attention? Genuinely interested? The answer, writes Alex Pentland in Honest Signals, is that subtle patterns in how we interact with other people reveal our attitudes toward them. These unconscious social signals are not just a back channel or a complement to our conscious language; they form a separate communication network. Biologically based “honest signaling,” evolved from ancient primate signaling mechanisms, offers an unmatched window into our intentions, goals, and values. If we understand this ancient channel of communication, Pentland claims, we can accurately predict the outcomes of situations ranging from job interviews to first dates. Pentland, an MIT professor, has used a specially designed digital sensor worn like an ID badge—a “sociometer”—to monitor and analyze the back-and-forth patterns of signaling among groups of people. He and his researchers found that this second channel of communication, revolving not around words but around social relations, profoundly influences major decisions in our lives—even though we are largely unaware of it. Pentland presents the scientific background necessary for understanding this form of communication, applies it to examples of group behavior in real organizations, and shows how by “reading” our social networks we can become more successful at pitching an idea, getting a job, or closing a deal. Using this “network intelligence” theory of social signaling, Pentland describes how we can harness the intelligence of our social network to become better managers, workers, and communicators.
The companion book to a six-part PBS television series beginning April 1, 1991. The series depicts how scientists and explorers throughout the centuries disproved prevailing myths regarding the Earth's shape and geography. Contains some 150 color maps, photographs and illustrations, including a color photograph taken from Apollo 8, which proved that (at least for the time being) the Earth is a sphere traveling in space. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection Together with a crew of other miners and cart-pullers, Hillalum is recruited to climb the Tower of Babylon and unearth what lies beyond the vault of heaven. During his journey, Hillalum discovers entire civilizations of tower-dwellers on the tower—there are those who live inside the mists of clouds, those who raise their vegetables above the sun, and those who have spent their lives under the oppressive weight of an endless, white stratum at the top of the universe. “Tower of Babylon” is a rare gem—a winner of the prestigious Nebula award, the first story Ted Chiang ever published, and the brilliant opening piece to Chiang’s much-lauded first collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, which is soon to be a major motion picture starring Amy Adams. An ebook short.
