Your World, Better


Book Description

Written for the smart and engaged middle school student, Your World, Better looks at how America and the World has changed since the reader's parents and grandparents were young: what has happened to health and wealth, homes, school and work, rights and democracy, war and the environment, happiness and depression. It reports the positive trends, the problems that remain and what we can do about them. All author royalties from sales will be donated to UNICEF.




How to Make a Better World


Book Description

With a foreword by teen Colombian American climate justice activist Jamie Margolin, this fun and empowering guide to making the world a better place is packed with inspiring ideas and tips for kids who want to know how to make a difference. Full of positive encouragement to find something you're passionate about and how to get started on making a big difference through small actions, this brilliant factbook for kids is a treasure trove of information and great advice. There's a lot that can be changed by just one person if you know what to do. If you are a kid with big dreams and a passion for what is right, you just might be a world-changer in the making! Through ideas as small as creating a neighborhood lending library to as important as public speaking and how to talk about politics, How to Make a Better World is a practical guide to activism for children. Well-written and divided into sections on You, Community, Environment, and more, this educational book helps children to look at what they might like to achieve, and the logical approach makes it easy to navigate if you want to tie topics up with school projects. Brightly illustrated inclusive art makes this factbook as visually appealing as its message. You can easily jump around without any loss of comprehension and dip in for short or longer periods. Learn about tricky social interactions like friendship fallouts, or bullying and how to maneuver them, or find out how to go about creating activist campaigns to tackle climate change or social injustice. If kids are to think positive thoughts and be part of movements for positive change, they need to be encouraged to do it. This book is full of wonderful facts about the world, presenting such positivity as cool, sensible, exciting, and achievable. The perfect starter book to activism for kids. Make A Change - Change The World! If you want to create a better world that is equally awesome for everyone, this book is for you. It's packed with tips for how to change the world, one step at a time. You could be an amazing environmental campaigner or a fantastic equal rights champion. Anyone has the power to make a change. Start today, and who knows where your mission to make a better world will lead! Authored by Keilly Swift, the Managing Editor of First News, an award-winning weekly newspaper for children. This kid's educational book teaches children about injustices of the world in a positive way covering topics like: - Finding your cause, discrimination, and spotting fake news - Conservation success and the plastic problem - Animal activism and green living




Making the World Work Better


Book Description

Thomas J Watson Sr’s motto for IBM was THINK, and for more than a century, that one little word worked overtime. In Making the World Work Better: The Ideas That Shaped a Century and a Company, journalists Kevin Maney, Steve Hamm, and Jeffrey M. O’Brien mark the Centennial of IBM’s founding by examining how IBM has distinctly contributed to the evolution of technology and the modern corporation over the past 100 years. The authors offer a fresh analysis through interviews of many key figures, chronicling the Nobel Prize-winning work of the company’s research laboratories and uncovering rich archival material, including hundreds of vintage photographs and drawings. The book recounts the company’s missteps, as well as its successes. It captures moments of high drama – from the bet-the-business gamble on the legendary System/360 in the 1960s to the turnaround from the company’s near-death experience in the early 1990s. The authors have shaped a narrative of discoveries, struggles, individual insights and lasting impact on technology, business and society. Taken together, their essays reveal a distinctive mindset and organizational culture, animated by a deeply held commitment to the hard work of progress. IBM engineers and scientists invented many of the building blocks of modern information technology, including the memory chip, the disk drive, the scanning tunneling microscope (essential to nanotechnology) and even new fields of mathematics. IBM brought the punch-card tabulator, the mainframe and the personal computer into the mainstream of business and modern life. IBM was the first large American company to pay all employees salaries rather than hourly wages, an early champion of hiring women and minorities and a pioneer of new approaches to doing business--with its model of the globally integrated enterprise. And it has had a lasting impact on the course of society from enabling the US Social Security System, to the space program, to airline reservations, modern banking and retail, to many of the ways our world today works. The lessons for all businesses – indeed, all institutions – are powerful: To survive and succeed over a long period, you have to anticipate change and to be willing and able to continually transform. But while change happens, progress is deliberate. IBM – deliberately led by a pioneering culture and grounded in a set of core ideas – came into being, grew, thrived, nearly died, transformed itself... and is now charting a new path forward for its second century toward a perhaps surprising future on a planetary scale.




You Make the World Better


Book Description

We live in a world filled with wonderful things with city lights and favorite places, with fantastic opportunities, grand surprises, and plenty of special moments in between. But these aren't the only things that make our world a delight. And they aren't the only things that make life rich. Because what really brings these wondrous things to life are the people we know the ones who make the adventure worth taking, the ones who turn experiences into memories, the ones who make the world better.




Factfulness


Book Description

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “One of the most important books I’ve ever read—an indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world.” – Bill Gates “Hans Rosling tells the story of ‘the secret silent miracle of human progress’ as only he can. But Factfulness does much more than that. It also explains why progress is so often secret and silent and teaches readers how to see it clearly.” —Melinda Gates "Factfulness by Hans Rosling, an outstanding international public health expert, is a hopeful book about the potential for human progress when we work off facts rather than our inherent biases." - Former U.S. President Barack Obama Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts. When asked simple questions about global trends—what percentage of the world’s population live in poverty; why the world’s population is increasing; how many girls finish school—we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess teachers, journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers. In Factfulness, Professor of International Health and global TED phenomenon Hans Rosling, together with his two long-time collaborators, Anna and Ola, offers a radical new explanation of why this happens. They reveal the ten instincts that distort our perspective—from our tendency to divide the world into two camps (usually some version of us and them) to the way we consume media (where fear rules) to how we perceive progress (believing that most things are getting worse). Our problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know, and even our guesses are informed by unconscious and predictable biases. It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might think. That doesn’t mean there aren’t real concerns. But when we worry about everything all the time instead of embracing a worldview based on facts, we can lose our ability to focus on the things that threaten us most. Inspiring and revelatory, filled with lively anecdotes and moving stories, Factfulness is an urgent and essential book that will change the way you see the world and empower you to respond to the crises and opportunities of the future. --- “This book is my last battle in my life-long mission to fight devastating ignorance...Previously I armed myself with huge data sets, eye-opening software, an energetic learning style and a Swedish bayonet for sword-swallowing. It wasn’t enough. But I hope this book will be.” Hans Rosling, February 2017.




Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller


Book Description

An internationally renowned energy expert has written a book essential for every American–a galvanizing account of how the rising price and diminishing availability of oil are going to radically change our lives. Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller is a powerful and provocative book that explores what the new global economy will look like and what it will mean for all of us. In a compelling and accessible style, Jeff Rubin reveals that despite the recent recessionary dip, oil prices will skyrocket again once the economy recovers. The fact is, worldwide oil reserves are disappearing for good. Consequently, the amount of food and other goods we get from abroad will be curtailed; long-distance driving will become a luxury and international travel rare. Globalization as we know it will reverse. The near future will be a time that, in its physical limits, may resemble the distant past. But Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller is a hopeful work about how we can benefit–personally, politically, and economically–from this new reality. American industries such as steel and agriculture, for instance, will be revitalized. As well, Rubin prescribes priorities for President Obama and other leaders, from imposing carbon tariffs that will increase competition and productivity, to investing in mass transit instead of car-clogged highways, to forging “green” alliances between labor and management that will be good for both business and the air we breathe. Most passionately, Rubin recommends ways every citizen can secure this better life for himself, actions that will end our enslavement to chain-store taste and strengthen our communities and timeless human values.




Welcome to Your World


Book Description

One of the nation’s chief architecture critics reveals how the environments we build profoundly shape our feelings, memories, and well-being, and argues that we must harness this knowledge to construct a world better suited to human experience Taking us on a fascinating journey through some of the world’s best and worst landscapes, buildings, and cityscapes, Sarah Williams Goldhagen draws from recent research in cognitive neuroscience and psychology to demonstrate how people’s experiences of the places they build are central to their well-being, their physical health, their communal and social lives, and even their very sense of themselves. From this foundation, Goldhagen presents a powerful case that societies must use this knowledge to rethink what and how they build: the world needs better-designed, healthier environments that address the complex range of human individual and social needs. By 2050 America’s population is projected to increase by nearly seventy million people. This will necessitate a vast amount of new construction—almost all in urban areas—that will dramatically transform our existing landscapes, infrastructure, and urban areas. Going forward, we must do everything we can to prevent the construction of exhausting, overstimulating environments and enervating, understimulating ones. Buildings, landscapes, and cities must both contain and spark associations of natural light, greenery, and other ways of being in landscapes that humans have evolved to need and expect. Fancy exteriors and dramatic forms are never enough, and may not even be necessary; authentic textures and surfaces, and careful, well-executed construction details are just as important. Erudite, wise, lucidly written, and beautifully illustrated with more than one hundred color photographs, Welcome to Your World is a vital, eye-opening guide to the spaces we inhabit, physically and mentally, and a clarion call to design for human experience.




You Can Change the World


Book Description

You Can Change the World empowers kids to make changes in their lives and communities with the powerful message that anyone can make a difference in the world. This colorfully illustrated book is packed with information, ideas, and activities for everyday sustainability—like mending clothes, composting, and avoiding single-use plastics. Interspersed throughout are features on children around the globe who are making a difference, such as Greta Thunberg or Solli Raphael, reminding kids that ordinary people can spark extraordinary change.




You Are the Earth


Book Description

This lively collection of fascinating facts and fables, colorful cartoons, and dynamic illustrations explains how everything on Earth is connected. Since its original publication, concern for the environment has grown, and although environmental damage has increased, so too have "green" strategies. This new edition reflects these changes, with expanded discussion of environmental issues and new technologies, as well as many more activities. New sidebars offer extra facts, tips, and real-life examples of things other budding ecologists have done to make the world a better place.




Change Your World


Book Description

Whatever the desires of your heart, Change Your World will guide you through the entire process to take action and start making an impact today right where you are. You can bring about positive, lasting change in the world and you don’t have to be rich and famous or lead a big organization to do it. Global leadership icons and bestselling authors John C. Maxwell and Rob Hoskins provide the inspiring and practical roadmap to get started being the change you want to see – in your community and beyond. Learn from the firsthand experiences shared by the authors from their work helping to transform communities, businesses, and millions of lives around the world. In Change Your World, Maxwell and Hoskins will show you how to: Identify your cause Live out the values that make a difference Become a catalyst for change Join the right team or recruit one of your own Work together with others to make a difference Measure your impact and keep improving For many of us, the world we live in feels broken yet change is easier than we think. You’ll not only be encouraged to make a difference based on the needs you see around you, but you’ll be equipped to implement change immediately.