Starbird


Book Description

A stunning book shimmering with shiny silver foil throughout, from the astonishingly talented Sharon King-Chai, illustrator of Animalphabet written by Julia Donaldson. WINNER of the CILIP Kate Greenaway Shadowers' Choice Award 2021. Starbird is a magical story about love, freedom, and the wisdom of children. Starbird's songs weave the richest dreams and delight all who hear him, but when the Moon King traps him in a cage as gift for his daughter, the colour and life in his voice begin to drip away. While the Moon King is blinded by greed and selfishness, his young daughter can clearly see the injustice and cruelty of his actions. A heartfelt, lyrical story that shows the importance of standing up for what is right.




Starbird Murphy and the World Outside


Book Description

In her sixteen years of life, Starbird has never touched a dollar bill. She’s never been in a car. She’s never used a cell phone. That’s because Starbird has always lived on the Free Family Farm, a commune in the woods of Washington State. But all that is about to change. When Starbird gets her “Calling” to be a waitress at the Free Family’s restaurant in Seattle, she decides to leave behind the only home she’s ever known. Nothing could have prepared Starbird for the World Outside, or for what it would teach her about the Family—and herself. From the author of The Sweet Revenge of Celia Door comes this hilarious and poignant story about finding your true calling in life.




Magdalene's Lost Legacy


Book Description

Using New Testament "gematria, " symbolic number values encoded in the Greek phrases, the author reveals that the sacred couple was one of the essential pillars of early Christian teachings, before being denied by the architects of institutional Christianity and obscured by later Church doctrine.




The Woman with the Alabaster Jar


Book Description

Margaret Starbird’s theological beliefs were profoundly shaken when she read Holy Blood, Holy Grail, a book that dared to suggest that Jesus Christ was married to Mary Magdalen and that their descendants carried on his holy bloodline in Western Europe. Shocked by such heresy, this Roman Catholic scholar set out to refute it, but instead found new and compelling evidence for the existence of the bride of Jesus--the same enigmatic woman who anointed him with precious unguent from her “alabaster jar.” In this provocative book, Starbird draws her conclusions from an extensive study of history, heraldry, symbolism, medieval art, mythology, psychology, and the Bible itself. The Woman with the Alabaster Jar is a quest for the forgotten feminine--in the hope that its return will help restore a healthy balance to planet Earth.




Building Engaged Team Performance: Align Your Processes and People to Achieve Game-Changing Business Results


Book Description

Harness the Power of Your Most Valuable Resource—Your Workforce! Process improvement approaches like Six Sigma and Lean Enterprise have worked wonders for countless organizations, but in the drive for true excellence, these approaches are only one important part of the formula. Building Engaged Team Performance explains the next wave of business improvement: driving breakthrough gains by integrating process improvement with “the people side” of performance. Breaking new ground in the world of organizational improvement, performance management expert Dodd Starbird teams up with Roland Cavanagh, coauthor of the bestselling The Six Sigma Way, to present a system for aligning and optimizing processes and the efforts of any organization’s most valuable asset: people. Combining the principles from Total Quality Management (TQM), Six Sigma, Lean, and Socio-Technical Systems, Engaged Team Performance helps you harness the massive potential of human performance that is not captured by process improvements alone. Illustrated through real-life stories, Building Engaged Team Performance offers a stepby- step program that shows you how you can more than double the productivity of your business. The authors’ client examples are a diverse group of transactional and manufacturing organizations that have used Engaged Team Performance to: Increase employee efficiency by 50% and save millions of dollars Consistently deliver on critical customer requirements Provide visual data for instant decision making• Create realistic staffing models for sustainable capacity Establish standards for both team and individual performance Develop leadership that facilitates team ownership of execution Building Engaged Team Performance provides the tools for building a superior system that optimizes effectiveness of outcomes for customers and efficiency of resource usage. Never before have human performance and process improvement been so closely linked in a single, sustainable method. Catch the next wave of business improvement with Engaged Team Performance. Praise for Building Engaged Team Performance “The Engaged Team Performance effort that we undertook has allowed us to reshape our process from start to finish and improve both productivity and the communication among multiple departments.” Art Bacci, President & CEO, Principal Bank “This book provides practical insights on building competencies of change leaders throughout the organization.” Dr. William D. Trotter, Managing Director, Association of Internal Management Consultants (AIMC) “By embedding these concepts into organizational culture, systems, and processes, a group of individuals may become a winning team.” Dan Bell, President, Canon Information Technology Services “When I led a division at GE during the heyday of Six Sigma, process excellence and team performance were both critical; yet they were considered different disciplines, supported by separate infrastructure. Engaged Team Performance combines and aligns the best of both, and it delivers even better results.” C. Lewis Fain, President, Mortgage Payment Protection, Inc. “If your strategic vision includes words like growth, customer loyalty, value creation, responsiveness, quality, expertise, partnership, accountability, efficiency, or best in class, then Building Engaged Team Performance has to be part of the foundation. Without it you’re just creating a house of cards.” Rick Larson, CEO, VFD Technologies




The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking


Book Description

Offers real-life stories, items, and methods that allow for a deeper understanding of any issue, provide the power to use failure as a step toward success, and develop a habit of creating probing questions.




Topology Through Inquiry


Book Description

Topology Through Inquiry is a comprehensive introduction to point-set, algebraic, and geometric topology, designed to support inquiry-based learning (IBL) courses for upper-division undergraduate or beginning graduate students. The book presents an enormous amount of topology, allowing an instructor to choose which topics to treat. The point-set material contains many interesting topics well beyond the basic core, including continua and metrizability. Geometric and algebraic topology topics include the classification of 2-manifolds, the fundamental group, covering spaces, and homology (simplicial and singular). A unique feature of the introduction to homology is to convey a clear geometric motivation by starting with mod 2 coefficients. The authors are acknowledged masters of IBL-style teaching. This book gives students joy-filled, manageable challenges that incrementally develop their knowledge and skills. The exposition includes insightful framing of fruitful points of view as well as advice on effective thinking and learning. The text presumes only a modest level of mathematical maturity to begin, but students who work their way through this text will grow from mathematics students into mathematicians. Michael Starbird is a University of Texas Distinguished Teaching Professor of Mathematics. Among his works are two other co-authored books in the Mathematical Association of America's (MAA) Textbook series. Francis Su is the Benediktsson-Karwa Professor of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College and a past president of the MAA. Both authors are award-winning teachers, including each having received the MAA's Haimo Award for distinguished teaching. Starbird and Su are, jointly and individually, on lifelong missions to make learning—of mathematics and beyond—joyful, effective, and available to everyone. This book invites topology students and teachers to join in the adventure.




The Feminine Face of Christianity


Book Description

Even though feminine values have always been at the core of Christianity, its long history has often ignored or marginalized women’s key role in it. Margaret Starbird’s unique view from the feminine perspective serves the need many are feeling to search their traditional faith for fresh meaning and inspiration in these difficult times. Could Mary Magdalene have been Jesus’ wife? Starbird explores this possibility and the “sister-brides” who accompanied male disciples to forge a new understanding of gender-based faith and of sacred marriage with the Divine. She also gives us the rich heritage of stories about women’s generous service and encouragement for the inner journey, ranging all the way from little-known early saints to Mother Theresa. She points out that fundamental Christian values such as compassion, reconciliation, and the healing of crippled bodies and broken hearts are all strongly feminine in nature. Her view, though, is cooperative rather than contentious: She aims, not to discredit the masculine, but to right the missing gender balance she finds inherent in the faith. Distribution is limited to North America.




Mary Magdalene, Bride in Exile


Book Description

An in-depth investigation of the facts and mythology surrounding the historical Mary Magdalene • Reveals new details about the life of the beloved of Jesus • Illustrated with rare and unusual imagery depicting Mary’s central role in Christianity • By the author of the bestselling The Woman with the Alabaster Jar The controversy surrounding Mary Magdalene and her relationship to Jesus has gained widespread international interest since the publication of Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code, which specifically cites Margaret Starbird’s earlier works as a significant source. In Mary Magdalene, Bride in Exile Starbird examines the many faces of Mary Magdalene, from the historical woman who walked with Jesus in the villages of Judea to the mythic and symbolic Magdalene who is the archetype of the Sacred Feminine. Starbird reveals exciting new information about the woman who was the most intimate companion of Jesus and offers historical evidence that Mary was Jesus’ forgotten bride. Expanding on the discussion of medieval art and lore introduced in her bestselling book The Woman with the Alabaster Jar, Starbird sifts through the layers of misidentification under which the story of the Lost Bride of Christ has been buried to reveal the slandered woman and the “exiled” feminine principle. She establishes the identity of the historical female disciple who was the favored first witness of the Resurrection and provides an interpretation of Mary’s true role based on prophecy from the Hebrew scriptures and the testimony of the canonical gospels of Christianity. Balancing scholarly research with theological reflection, she takes readers deeper into the story and mythology of how Magdalene as the Bride embodies the soul’s own journey in its eternal quest for reunion with the Divine.




Distilling Ideas


Book Description

Introduction -- Graphs -- Groups -- Calculus -- Conclusion.