and you've just been asked the question you'd been dreading. What do you do now? This work seeks to serve as a guide to answering the toughest questions you'll ever face. Using examples from presidential debates to financial investor meetings, it shows you how to respond with perfect assurance.

    It shows watercolour painters of all levels how to loosen up their paintings and maintain spontaneity by painting simple watercolour studies in no more than 10 minutes.Written by popular artist Hazel Soan, the book is arranged in three parts: the first section explains all about the equipment you will need; the second section covers techniques and shows what can be achieved with watercolour in a short time span; the third section looks at various subjects that are ideal for painting quickly.All the essential techniques are covered, focusing particularly on maximizing brushstrokes and exploring colours, and there is useful advice on deciding what to include and what to leave out. With helpful chapters on painting a wide range of subjects – people, landscapes, seascapes, buildings, gardens, flowers and still life – this little guide is ideal for quick reference when working in the studio or out in the field.

    She is so bored, in fact, that she even considers playing with that slobbering mutt Puppy, who lives in her house. Nah. Instead, she thinks she'll take a nap. That is, until there is a knock on the door . . .Strange Kitty is here to guide both Kitty and Kitty's fans through the world of making comics. Like to draw? Great! Here's your chance to show off your skills! Don't know how to draw? That's okay! Through guided exercises you will learn all about how comics work, including sections on panelling, sound and visual effects, word balloons and so much more!With such fun activities and a hilarious story to boot, this is bound to be a Bad Kitty favorite!

    Working with her made my aches and pains after playing disappear. She is the best.' - David BeckhamRevolutionise the way you approach fitness with yoga expert and celebrity trainer Shona Vertue - in just 28 days!Are you someone who has tried every fitness class out there, but nothing has ever really stuck?Or perhaps you can run a 10k but can barely touch your toes?Heard lifting weights is good, but feel lost in the gym?Keen to calm your racing mind and get the focus you need to train?Shona Vertue's 28-day reset plan will revolutionise the way you approach fitness. Her groundbreaking three-in-one method features a blend of resistance training with weights to build strength, yoga to aid flexibility and lengthen muscles, and a positive, mindful approach to exercise, combined with delicious, nourishing recipes. Get in the best shape of your life, both physically and mentally, and feel stronger, healthier and more flexible - in just 28 days.Features photos of every exercise, complete with food plan and nutritious, energising recipes.

    He’s been bitten by twenty-six venomous snakes, been stung by three stingrays, and survived a near-fatal scorpion sting while deep in the Amazon jungle. He’s received more than four hundred stitches and broken twenty-three bones, including breaking his back in three places, and had to learn how to walk again. But when you research only the venom you yourself have collected, the adventures—and danger—never stop.Imagine a three-week-long first date in Siberia catching venomous water shrews with the daughter of a Russian war hero; a wedding attended by Eastern European prime ministers and their machine-gun-wielding bodyguards and snakes; or leading a team to Antarctica that results in the discovery of four new species of venomous octopi. Bryan’s discoveries have radically reshaped views on venom evolution and contributed to the creation of venom-based life-saving medications. In pursuit of venom, he has traveled the world collecting samples from Indonesia to Mexico, Germany, and Brazil. He’s encountered venomous creatures of all kinds, including the Malaysian king cobra, the Komodo dragon, and the brush-footed trapdoor spider. Bryan recounts his lifelong passion for studying the world’s most venomous creatures in this outlandish, captivating memoir, where he and danger are never far apart.

    Their book is an inspiring guide to current and future school teachers and to college and university professors—indeed to everyone who teaches anything to anyone else.   Arguing that teaching is an art, Banner and Cannon help teachers understand its components. They analyze the specific qualities of successful teachers and the ways in which these qualities promote learning and understanding. Throughout, they illustrate their discussion with sharply etched portraits of fictional teachers who exemplify—or fail to exemplify—a particular quality. Neither a how-to book nor a consideration of the philosophy, methods, or activities of teaching, this book, more precisely, assesses what it takes to teach. It encourages teachers to consider how they might strengthen their own level of professional performance.

    Worth Every Penny encourages business owners to use a different business model, one that is designed to maximize their advantages over the big-box stores and other discounting competitors. They’ll learn how to: - -Create a brand that lets them charge what their offering are worth - -Create products and high-touch customer experiences to achieve healthy margins and an outspokenly happy and loyal client base. - -Use a pricing strategy guaranteed to create demand and attract the right customers instead of discounting to attract new clients. - -Throw traditional advertising to the wind and implement a boutique way of marketing to excel in a competitive business environment. - -Use the relationship-based sales skills needed to close every sale and have their clients clamoring for more.

    This is true both in airplanes and in classrooms--you have to take care of yourself before you can help someone else. If teachers are stressed out and exhausted, how can they have the patience, positive energy, and enthusiasm to provide the best instruction for students? Author Mike Anderson asked that question as a teacher himself, and the answers he found form the basis of The Well-Balanced Teacher. He found that teachers need to take care of themselves in five key areas to keep themselves in shape to care for their students.In addition to paying proper attention to their basic needs for nutrition, hydration, sleep, exercise, and emotional and spiritual refreshment, teachers also needBelonging: Teachers need to feel positive connections with other people, both in school and outside school. Significance: Teachers want to know that they make a positive difference through the work they do.Positive engagement: When teachers enjoy their work, they have great energy and passion for their teaching.Balance: Healthy teachers set boundaries and create routines so that they can have rich lives both in the classroom and at home.Anderson devotes a chapter to each of these needs, describing in frank detail his own struggles and offering a multitude of practical tips to help readers find solutions that will work for them. When teachers find ways to take care of their own needs, they will be healthier and happier, and they will have the positive energy and stamina needed to help their students learn and grow into healthy adults themselves.

    Teaches developers how to build database-driven web applications using two of today's most popular open-source software tools, PHP and MySQL.

    We wonder why, for some people, success seems to come so naturally.Could the secret be how they were parented?This book unveils how parenting helped shape some of the most fascinating people you will ever encounter, by doing things that almost any parent can do. You don't have to be wealthy or influential to ensure your child reaches their greatest potential. What you do need is commitment--and the strategies outlined in this book.In The Formula: Unlocking the Secrets to Raising Highly Successful Children, Harvard economist Ronald Ferguson, named in a New York Times profile as the foremost expert on the US educational achievement gap, along with award-winning journalist Tatsha Robertson, reveal an intriguing blueprint for helping children from all types of backgrounds become successful adults.Informed by hundreds of interviews, the book includes never-before-published insights from the How I was Parented Project at Harvard University, which draws on the varying life experiences of 120 Harvard students. Ferguson and Robertson have isolated a pattern with eight roles of the Master Parent that make up the Formula: the Early Learning Partner, the Flight Engineer, the Fixer, the Revealer, the Philosopher, the Model, the Negotiator, and the GPS Navigational Voice.The Formula combines the latest scientific research on child development, learning, and brain growth and illustrates with life stories of extraordinary individuals--from the Harvard-educated Ghanian entrepreneur who, as the young child of a rural doctor, was welcomed in his father's secretive late-night political meetings; to the nation's youngest state-wide elected official, whose hardworking father taught him math and science during grueling days on the family farm in Kentucky; to the DREAMer immigration lawyer whose low-wage mother pawned her wedding ring to buy her academically outstanding child a special flute.The Formula reveals strategies on how you--regardless of race, class, or background--can help your children become the best they can be and shows ways to maximize their chances for happy and purposeful lives.

    In the last five years alone, the bit rate of commercial point-to-point links has grown from 2.5 Gb/s to 40 Gb/s-and that figure is expected to more than double over the next two years! Such astonishing progress can be both inspiring and frustrating for professionals who need to stay abreast of important new developments in the field. Now Fiber-Optic Communication Systems, Second Edition makes that job a little easier. Based on its author's exhaustive review of the past five years of published research in the field, this Second Edition, like its popular predecessor, provides an in-depth look at the state of the art in fiber-optic communication systems. While engineering aspects are discussed, the emphasis is on a physical understanding of this complex technology, from its basic concepts to the latest innovations. Thoroughly updated and expanded, Fiber-Optic Communication Systems, Second Edition: * Includes 30% more information, including four new chapters focusing on the latest lightwave systems R&D * Covers fundamental aspects of lightwave systems as well as a wide range of practical applications * Functions as both a graduate-level text and a professional reference * Features extensive references and chapter-end problem sets.

    The author’s special and distinct style is simple, appealing, happy, and cute and offers artists, crafters, and art enthusiasts—with and without experience—the instruction and inspiration to draw in the Japanese character style. This book is for artists and crafters of all skill levels that want to bring their own illustration to their work. It offers both entertaining and fun drawing instruction and techniques along with inspiring and sweet unique-style characters and elements.

    Bibi, the first male in twelve generations of Browns not to have taken his own life, has a furious crush on a beautiful nine-fingered woman and an unbearable urge to understand the meaning of Time, the Universe, and America. So Bibi begins his quest--careening through a world of bizarre cults, gravity-defying crones, and lunatics of every stripe--all for a chance to meet his long-lost uncle Otto, a legendary junk-dealer who lives on the Hope Valley Hubcap Ranch. Because in a world that is spinning a little too fast, and a little too wildly, Bibi’s destiny is to find the essence of hope, the beauty of hubcaps, and the meaning of life in the Valley of the Hubcap King....With a touch of Candide, a dash of Don Quixote, and healthy dose of Zen, Sean Murphy’s wondrous, riotous novel is the story of an ordinary man searching through a hilariously off-kilter world--for the truths that might just save us all.From the Paperback edition.

    Everything Aris does with his runners—male and female alike—is new and extraordinary, and he has created a new American running dynasty. The cross-country runners of Fayetteville-Manlius, or F-M, in upstate New York have dominated high school running for 15 years, sweeping boys’ and girls’ titles at the Nike Cross Nationals championships (NXN) in 2014 in an unprecedented achievement.The girls’ team, empowered by Aris’ unique, unwavering brand of gender equity, has won 11 of the last 13 NXN titles, some by margins of over 100 points. The boys’ team has the best cumulative national record of NXN podium performances. F-M domination has shocked the sport for its defiance of accepted running principles and limitations. One year at NXN, the F-M girls defeated the all-star field of top teams by an average of 59 seconds per girl in the 5k race.Another year, the girls ran faster than their teenage Kenyan counterparts, who competed in the Portland, Oregon event as an international showcase. Across the country, coaches awed by F-M and unaware of the team’s methods and discoveries, whispered, “How do they do it?”From adopting long-forgotten “Stotan” creeds—combining the rigors of a Spartan and stoic lifestyle—to delving into teenage developmental psychology and gender-blindness in training, Amazing Racers is a must read for millions of runners and the millions more who strive for better performance.

    And thrilling. Often, that's the same thing!Lloyd Camp takes you on an evocative journey through some of the wildest places in Africa as he re-lives colourful vignettes from his adventurous childhood and long career as a safari guide. This is a charming, funny, thoughtful and often hair-raising series of short stories that illustrate Lloyd's enthusiastic delight in leading his clients into the wilderness areas of Africa. Forthright yet light-hearted, Lloyd's suspenseful narrative emphasises both his love of the African bush and the courage and resilience of the Africans that he encounters in his odysseys. In the vein of Peter Allison's "Whatever you do, don't Run", these camp-fire tales are the perfect accompaniment to your own journey into Africa or simply as a series of highly engaging stories from the comfort of your own armchair at home.