Nir! Read It, Write It, Draw It: Bad Hair Day - Level 21


Book Description

This extension of the award-winning, best-selling series by acclaimed author, Nora Gaydos, engages kids in an entertaining, hands-on reading, writing, and drawing experience! Includes more than 20 stickers. Level 2 - The Reading section mixes short and long vowel words, sight word reinforcement, word endings, simple dialogue. The Writing section teaches penmanship, spelling reinforcement, story sequencing, independently forming uppercase and lowercase letters. The Drawing section allows coloring in major story elements and completing scenes to match the text. No amount of hair care can help Hare's bad hair day!




Hooked


Book Description

Revised and Updated, Featuring a New Case Study How do successful companies create products people can’t put down? Why do some products capture widespread attention while others flop? What makes us engage with certain products out of sheer habit? Is there a pattern underlying how technologies hook us? Nir Eyal answers these questions (and many more) by explaining the Hook Model—a four-step process embedded into the products of many successful companies to subtly encourage customer behavior. Through consecutive “hook cycles,” these products reach their ultimate goal of bringing users back again and again without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging. Hooked is based on Eyal’s years of research, consulting, and practical experience. He wrote the book he wished had been available to him as a start-up founder—not abstract theory, but a how-to guide for building better products. Hooked is written for product managers, designers, marketers, start-up founders, and anyone who seeks to understand how products influence our behavior. Eyal provides readers with: • Practical insights to create user habits that stick. • Actionable steps for building products people love. • Fascinating examples from the iPhone to Twitter, Pinterest to the Bible App, and many other habit-forming products.




Blindsight


Book Description

Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.




Don't Make Me Think


Book Description

Five years and more than 100,000 copies after it was first published, it's hard to imagine anyone working in Web design who hasn't read Steve Krug's "instant classic" on Web usability, but people are still discovering it every day. In this second edition, Steve adds three new chapters in the same style as the original: wry and entertaining, yet loaded with insights and practical advice for novice and veteran alike. Don't be surprised if it completely changes the way you think about Web design. Three New Chapters! Usability as common courtesy -- Why people really leave Web sites Web Accessibility, CSS, and you -- Making sites usable and accessible Help! My boss wants me to ______. -- Surviving executive design whims "I thought usability was the enemy of design until I read the first edition of this book. Don't Make Me Think! showed me how to put myself in the position of the person who uses my site. After reading it over a couple of hours and putting its ideas to work for the past five years, I can say it has done more to improve my abilities as a Web designer than any other book. In this second edition, Steve Krug adds essential ammunition for those whose bosses, clients, stakeholders, and marketing managers insist on doing the wrong thing. If you design, write, program, own, or manage Web sites, you must read this book." -- Jeffrey Zeldman, author of Designing with Web Standards




To the End of the Land


Book Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A stunning novel that tells the powerful story of Ora, an Israli mother, and her extraordinary love for her son, Ofer, in a haunting meditation on war and family. “One of the few novels that feel as though they have made a difference to the world.” —The New York Times Book Review Just before his release from service in the Israeli army, Ora’s son Ofer is sent back to the front for a major offensive. In a fit of preemptive grief and magical thinking, so that no bad news can reach her, Ora sets out on an epic hike in the Galilee. She is joined by an unlikely companion—Avram, a former friend and lover with a troubled past—and as they sleep out in the hills, Ora begins to conjure her son. Ofer’s story, as told by Ora, becomes a surprising balm both for her and for Avram.




Actionable Gamification


Book Description

Learn all about implementing a good gamification design into your products, workplace, and lifestyle Key FeaturesExplore what makes a game fun and engagingGain insight into the Octalysis Framework and its applicationsDiscover the potential of the Core Drives of gamification through real-world scenariosBook Description Effective gamification is a combination of game design, game dynamics, user experience, and ROI-driving business implementations. This book explores the interplay between these disciplines and captures the core principles that contribute to a good gamification design. The book starts with an overview of the Octalysis Framework and the 8 Core Drives that can be used to build strategies around the various systems that make games engaging. As the book progresses, each chapter delves deep into a Core Drive, explaining its design and how it should be used. Finally, to apply all the concepts and techniques that you learn throughout, the book contains a brief showcase of using the Octalysis Framework to design a project experience from scratch. After reading this book, you'll have the knowledge and skills to enable the widespread adoption of good gamification and human-focused design in all types of industries. What you will learnDiscover ways to use gamification techniques in real-world situationsDesign fun, engaging, and rewarding experiences with OctalysisUnderstand what gamification means and how to categorize itLeverage the power of different Core Drives in your applicationsExplore how Left Brain and Right Brain Core Drives differ in motivation and design methodologiesExamine the fascinating intricacies of White Hat and Black Hat Core DrivesWho this book is for Anyone who wants to implement gamification principles and techniques into their products, workplace, and lifestyle will find this book useful.




The Heart of Man


Book Description

After coming through the blizzard that almost cost them everything, Jens and the boy are far from home, in a fishing community at the edge of the world. Taken in by the village doctor, the boy once again has the sense of being brought back from the grave. But this is a strange place, with otherworldly inhabitants, including flame-haired Álfheiður, who makes him wonder whether it is possible to love two women at once; he had believed his heart was lost to Ragnheiður, the daughter of the wealthy merchant in the village to which he must now inexorably return. Set in the awe-inspiring wilderness of the extreme north, The Heart of Man is a profound exploration of life, love and desire, written with a sublime simplicity. In this conclusion to an audacious trilogy, Stefánsson brings a poet's eye and a philosopher's insight to a tale worthy of the sagasmiths of old.




Jerks at Work


Book Description

A practical and hilarious guide to getting difficult people off your back, for anyone pulling their hair out over an irritating colleague who's not technically breaking any rules From open floor plans and Zoom calls to Slack channels, the workplace has changed a lot over the years. But there’s one thing that never changes: you’ll always encounter jerks. Jerks at Work is the definitive guide to dealing with—and ultimately breaking free from—the overbearing bosses, irritating coworkers, and all-around difficult people who make work and life miserable. Social psychologist Tessa West has spent years leveraging science to help people solve interpersonal conflicts in the workplace. What she discovered is that most of our go-to tactics don’t work because they fail to address the specific motivations that drive bad behavior. In this book, she takes you on a rollicking deep dive of the seven jerks you’re most likely to encounter at the office, drawing on decades of original research to expose their inner workings and weak points—and ultimately deliver an effective game plan for stopping each type before they take you down with them. Jerks at Work is packed with everyday examples and clever strategies, such as how to: • Stop a Bulldozer from gaining influence by making sure they're not the first to speak up in meetings • Report a Kiss Up/Kick Downer to a manager who idolizes them without looking like the bad guy • Protect your high-achieving team from Free Riders without stifling collaboration • Use a Gaslighter’s tactics to beat them at their own game For anyone who’s said “I can’t stand that jerk!” more times than they’d like to admit, Jerks at Work is the ultimate playbook you wish you didn’t need but will always turn to.




Ignition!


Book Description

This newly reissued debut book in the Rutgers University Press Classics Imprint is the story of the search for a rocket propellant which could be trusted to take man into space. This search was a hazardous enterprise carried out by rival labs who worked against the known laws of nature, with no guarantee of success or safety. Acclaimed scientist and sci-fi author John Drury Clark writes with irreverent and eyewitness immediacy about the development of the explosive fuels strong enough to negate the relentless restraints of gravity. The resulting volume is as much a memoir as a work of history, sharing a behind-the-scenes view of an enterprise which eventually took men to the moon, missiles to the planets, and satellites to outer space. A classic work in the history of science, and described as “a good book on rocket stuff…that’s a really fun one” by SpaceX founder Elon Musk, readers will want to get their hands on this influential classic, available for the first time in decades.




Dream Teams


Book Description

Award-winning entrepreneur and journalist Shane Snow reveals the counterintuitive reasons why so many partnerships and groups break down--and why some break through. The best teams are more than the sum of their parts, but why does collaboration so often fail to fulfill this promise? In Dream Teams, Snow takes us on an adventure through history, neuroscience, psychology, and business, exploring what separates groups that simply get by together from those that get better together. You'll learn: * How ragtag teams--from soccer clubs to startups to gangs of pirates--beat the odds throughout history. * Why DaimlerChrysler flopped while the Wu-Tang Clan succeeded, and the surprising factor behind most failed mergers, marriages, and partnerships. * What the Wright Brothers' daily arguments can teach us about group problem solving. * Pioneering women in law enforcement, unlikely civil rights collaborators, and underdog armies that did the incredible together. * The team players behind great social movements in history, and the science of becoming open-minded. Provocative and entertaining, Dream Teams is a landmark work that will change the way we think about people, progress, and collaboration.