Peak Encounters


Book Description

Does experiencing creation invite you into a deeper, healthier relationship with yourself, with others, or with God? Peak Encounters is a collection of life changing experiences from men and women who share their stories of trials, triumphs, fears, and courage as they encountered God through natural creation. God led them from obstacles to opportunities, transforming their lives from the outside in! Surfing a monstrous wave reminded Jeremiah to be bold and step out in faith. Gardening showed Chiara how to give what she received from God's tender care. And the author shares how canyoneering taught her that God protects-no matter where you land. Heather Makowicz is a certified Spiritual Director, counselor, retreat director, and the founder of Peak Encounter Ministries. With her background in clinical social work, she has a deep desire to integrate our natural, complex human experience in life with our spiritual life with God. She and her husband are the proud parents of three grown children, one of whom has special needs.




Digital Encounters


Book Description

To understand the creative fabric of digital networks, scholars of literary and cultural studies must turn their attention to crowdsourced forms of production, discussion, and distribution. Digital Encounters explores the influence of an increasingly networked world on contemporary Latin American cultural production. Drawing on a spectrum of case studies, the contributors to this volume examine literature, art, and political activism as they dialogue with programming languages, social media platforms, online publishing, and geospatial metadata. Implicit within these connections are questions of power, privilege, and stratification. The book critically examines issues of inequitable access and data privacy, technology’s capacity to divide people from one another, and the digital space as a site of racialized and gendered violence. Through an expansive approach to the study of connectivity, Digital Encounters illustrates how new connections – between analog and digital, human and machine, print text and pixel – alter representations of self, Other, and world.




The Finest Peaks


Book Description

This book challenges the precedent that a mountain's worth scales with height. It is a rational synthesis of new concepts that compel one to reassess the popular "heightist mindset". The concept of prominence, loosely defined as a mountain's vertical relief, is a stiff competitor to summit height for assessing a mountain's stature and relative worth for innumerable purposes. The community of prominence theoreticians, list builders, and climbers has reached critical mass - suggesting publication of a book dedicated exclusively to prominence. Revolutions are not overnight. The heightist mindset has minimally a 100 year head start. Eventually the climbing community will embrace prominence. For the mountaineer a prominence-based peak list provides fresh goals guaranteed to satisfy. A prominence-based peak list, regardless of geographic region, incorporates the most awe inspiring and diverse mountains. Chapter I introduces prominence, being defined and contrasted with altitude as peak list generator. Chapters II and III concern peak list production. Chapter IV reviews the history of prominence, including a compendium of prominence list builders and their lists. Chapter V is about prominence oriented peakbaggers and their accomplishments. Chapter VI entails prominence-derived mountain measures - submarine prominence, inverse prominence, proportional prominence, and dominance. Chapter VII concerns the advanced, prominence-derived concepts of parentage, divide trees, lineage cells, and more. Chapter VIII concerns alternative, objective mountain measures: isolation measure; peakedness and prominence density; and height / steepness combination measures - drop measure, cliff measure, spire measure, and ruggedness measure. Spire measure quantifies a mountain's subjective impressiveness due to great angularity. Chapter IX is a search for the largest prominence unclimbed mountain - grand goal of a future, summit-discovering expedition. Appendices A to G cover various subtopics, the glossary defines over 300 terms. 48 pages of illustrations are included, with full-color versions on-line at http://www.cohp.org/prominence/publication_2005_illustrations/main.html A beautiful, hardcover edition with color illustrations is available, and is highly recommended by book reviewers. ? E-mail the author for pricing and purchase information.




Wildlife Tourism, Environmental Learning and Ethical Encounters


Book Description

This book outlines the status quo of worldwide wildlife tourism and its impacts on planning, management, knowledge, awareness, behaviour and attitudes related to wildlife encounters. It sets out to fill the considerable gaps in our knowledge on wildlife tourism, applied ecology, and environmental education, providing comprehensive information on and an interdisciplinary approach to effective management in wildlife tourism. Examining the intricacies, challenges, and lessons learned in a meaningful and rewarding tourism niche, this interdisciplinary book comprehensively examines the major potentials and controversies in the wildlife tourism industry. Pursuing an insightful, provocative and hands-on approach, it primarily addresses two questions: ‘Can we reconcile the needs of the wildlife tourism industry, biodiversity conservation, ecological learning and animal ethics issues?’ and ‘What is the Future of the Wildlife Tourism Industry?’. Though primaril y intended as a research text, it also offers a valuable resource for a broad readership, which includes university and training students, researchers, scholars, tourism practitioners and professionals, planners and managers, as well as the staff of government agencies.







Encounters with the Archdruid


Book Description

The narratives in this book are of journeys made in three wildernesses - on a coastal island, in a Western mountain range, and on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. The four men portrayed here have different relationships to their environment, and they encounter each other on mountain trails, in forests and rapids, sometimes with reserve, sometimes with friendliness, sometimes fighting hard across a philosophical divide.




Searching for Presence


Book Description

Yves Bonnefoy's writings have won him praise not only from readers and critics of French poetry, but also, thanks to translations into many other languages, from readers and critics of poetry far beyond the francophone world. Indeed, Bonnefoy may be the most admired poet to have emerged in France since World War II. Yet his art criticism, dazzling in its scope, possibly as original as his poetry, is yet to receive the attention it deserves. Searching for Presence: Yves Bonnefoy's Writings on Art undertakes to fill that lacuna. Elusive, skirting the ineffable, the notion of presence has haunted Bonnefoy for decades. Central to the notion for the poet is the fleeting experience of mutuality between self and other, of lightning transaction in a transient world, of a shared mortal destiny, hence a plenitude within finitude. In an age when so many of his contemporaries seem to view any form of art as wallpaper spanning a void, Bonnefoy's faith in presence is all the more welcome. Focusing on his art criticism, the aspect of the poet's oeuvre in which the notion of presence is the most salient, this study tries to do justice to that fidelity.




Proceedings RMRS.


Book Description




Evaluation of Effects of High-altitude Turbulence Encounters on the XB-70 Airplane


Book Description

A turbulence response investigation was conducted with the XB-70 airplane. No special turbulence penetration techniques, speeds, or other restrictions were specified for the investigation, nor were any flights made solely to obtain turbulence data. During 79 flights, turbulence was encountered, and recorded on a VGH recorder, 6.2 percent of the total flight distance at supersonic speeds above an altitude of 12,192 meters (40,000 feet). Geographical locations are given for selected turbulence encounters. For 22 flights the airplane was instrumented to measure true gust velocities and the structural acceleration response to turbulence. The turbulence intensities measured were very low in comparison with those measured at high altitudes in other investigations. Acceleration response spectra, frequency response transfer functions, and coherence functions were computed from three turbulence encounters at Mach numbers of 0.88, 1. 59, and 2.35. Results are compared with calculated studies. Frequencies from the vertical and lateral structural modes, dominant in the airplane acceleration responses, were compared with the natural frequencies of the human body in the vertical and lateral directions.




NASA Technical Note


Book Description