You d be up to your neck in normal forms before you even had a chance to wade. When Michael J. Hernandez needed a database design book to teach mere mortals like himself, there were none. So he began a personal quest to learn enough to write one. And he did.Now in its Second Edition, Database Design for Mere Mortals is a miracle for today s generation of database users who don t have the background -- or the time -- to learn database design the hard way. It s also a secret pleasure for working pros who are occasionally still trying to figure out what they were taught.Drawing on 13 years of database teaching experience, Hernandez has organized database design into several key principles that are surprisingly easy to understand and remember. He illuminates those principles using examples that are generic enough to help you with virtually any application.Hernandez s goals are simple. You ll learn how to create a sound database structure as easily as possible. You ll learn how to optimize your structure for efficiency and data integrity. You ll learn how to avoid problems like missing, incorrect, mismatched, or inaccurate data. You ll learn how to relate tables together to make it possible to get whatever answers you need in the future -- even if you haven t thought of the questions yet.If -- as is often the case -- you already have a database, Hernandez explains how to analyze it -- and leverage it. You ll learn how to identify new information requirements, determine new business rules that need to be applied, and apply them.Hernandez starts with an introduction to databases, relational databases, and the idea and objectives of database design. Next, you ll walk through the key elements of the database design process: establishing table structures and relationships, assigning primary keys, setting field specifications, and setting up views. Hernandez s extensive coverage of data integrity includes a full chapter on establishing business rules and using validation tables.Hernandez surveys bad design techniques in a chapter on what not to do -- and finally, helps you identify those rare instances when it makes sense to bend or even break the conventional rules of database design.There s plenty that s new in this edition. Hernandez has gone over his text and illustrations with a fine-tooth comb to improve their already impressive clarity. You ll find updates to reflect new advances in technology, including web database applications. There are expanded and improved discussions of nulls and many-to-many relationships; multivalued fields; primary keys; and SQL data type fields. There s a new Quick Reference database design flowchart. A new glossary. New review questions at the end of every chapter.Finally, it s worth mentioning what this book isn t. It isn t a guide to any specific database platform -- so you can use it whether you re running Access, SQL Server, or Oracle, MySQL or PostgreSQL. And it isn t an SQL guide. (If that s what you need, Michael J. Hernandez has also coauthored the superb SQL Queries for Mere Mortals). But if database design is what you need to learn, this book s worth its weight in gold. Bill CamardaBill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks for Dummies, Second Edition.

    You'll discover the power of storytelling and the way to make data a pivotal point in your story. The lessons in this illuminative text are grounded in theory, but made accessible through numerous real-world examples--ready for immediate application to your next graph or presentation.Storytelling is not an inherent skill, especially when it comes to data visualization, and the tools at our disposal don't make it any easier. This book demonstrates how to go beyond conventional tools to reach the root of your data, and how to use your data to create an engaging, informative, compelling story. Specifically, you'll learn how to:Understand the importance of context and audience Determine the appropriate type of graph for your situation Recognize and eliminate the clutter clouding your information Direct your audience's attention to the most important parts of your data Think like a designer and utilize concepts of design in data visualization Leverage the power of storytelling to help your message resonate with your audience Together, the lessons in this book will help you turn your data into high impact visual stories that stick with your audience. Rid your world of ineffective graphs, one exploding 3D pie chart at a time. There is a story in your data--Storytelling with Data will give you the skills and power to tell it!

    2 at WikiLeaks and the organization’s most public face, after Julian Assange. In this book, he reveals the evolution, finances, and inner tensions of the whistleblower organization, beginning with his first meeting with Assange in December 2007. He also describes what led to his September 2010 withdrawal from WikiLeaks, including his disenchantment with the organization’s lack of transparency, its abandonment of political neutrality, and Assange’s increasing concentration of power. What has been made public so far about WikiLeaks is only a small fraction of the truth. With Domscheit-Berg’s insider knowledge, he is uniquely able to tell the full story. A computer scientist who worked in IT security prior to devoting himself full-time to WikiLeaks, he remains committed to freedom of information on the Internet. Today he is working on a more transparent secret-sharing website called OpenLeaks, developed by former WikiLeaks people, to be launched in early 2011.

    He solidified his standing as the nation's foremost political forecaster with his near perfect prediction of the 2012 election. Silver is the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight.com. Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data. Most predictions fail, often at great cost to society, because most of us have a poor understanding of probability and uncertainty. Both experts and laypeople mistake more confident predictions for more accurate ones. But overconfidence is often the reason for failure. If our appreciation of uncertainty improves, our predictions can get better too. This is the "prediction paradox": The more humility we have about our ability to make predictions, the more successful we can be in planning for the future.In keeping with his own aim to seek truth from data, Silver visits the most successful forecasters in a range of areas, from hurricanes to baseball, from the poker table to the stock market, from Capitol Hill to the NBA. He explains and evaluates how these forecasters think and what bonds they share. What lies behind their success? Are they good-or just lucky? What patterns have they unraveled? And are their forecasts really right? He explores unanticipated commonalities and exposes unexpected juxtapositions. And sometimes, it is not so much how good a prediction is in an absolute sense that matters but how good it is relative to the competition. In other cases, prediction is still a very rudimentary-and dangerous-science.Silver observes that the most accurate forecasters tend to have a superior command of probability, and they tend to be both humble and hardworking. They distinguish the predictable from the unpredictable, and they notice a thousand little details that lead them closer to the truth. Because of their appreciation of probability, they can distinguish the signal from the noise.

    IT WILL CHANGE WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN. IT HAS ALREADY BEGUN. What if you could remember everything? Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell draw on their experience from their MyLifeBits project at Microsoft Research to explain the benefits to come from an earth-shaking and inevitable increase in electronic memories. In 1998 they began using Bell, a luminary in the computer world, as a test case, attempting to digitally record as much of his life as possible. Photos, letters, and memorabilia were scanned. Everything he did on his computer was captured. He wore an automatic camera, an arm-strap that logged his bio-metrics, and began recording telephone calls. This experiment, and the system they created to support it, put them at the center of a movement studying the creation and enjoyment of e-memories.Since then the three streams of technology feeding the Total Recall revolution—digital recording, digital storage, and digital search, have become gushing torrents. We are capturing so much of our lives now, be it on the date- and location-stamped photos we take with our smart phones or in the continuous records we have of our emails, instant messages, and tweets--not to mention the GPS tracking of our movements many cars and smart phones already do automatically. We are storing what we capture either out there in the “cloud” of services such as Facebook or on our very own increasingly massive and cheap hard drives. But the critical technology, and perhaps least understood, is our magical new ability to find the information we want in the mountain of data that is our past. And not just Google it, but data mine it so that, say, we can chart how much exercise we have been doing in the last four weeks in comparison with what we did four years ago. In health, education, work life, and our personal lives, the Total Recall revolution is going to change everything. As Bell and Gemmell show, it has already begun.Total Recall provides a glimpse of the near future. Imagine heart monitors woven into your clothes and tiny wearable audio and visual recorders automatically capturing what you see and hear. Imagine being able to summon up the e-memories of your great grandfather and his avatar giving you advice about whether or not to go to college, accept that job offer, or get married. The range of potential insights is truly awesome. But Bell and Gemmell also show how you can begin to take better advantage of this new technology right now. From how to navigate the serious question of privacy and serious problem of application compatibility to what kind of startups Bell is willing to invest in and which scanner he prefers, this is a book about a turning point in human knowledge as well as an immediate practical guide.Total Recall is a technological revolution that will accomplish nothing less than a transformation in the way humans think about the meaning of their lives.Watch a Video

    General introductions by Janet Murray and Lev Manovich, along with short introductions to each of the texts, place the works in their historical context and explain their significance. The texts were originally published between World War II--when digital computing, cybernetic feedback, and early notions of hypertext and the Internet first appeared--and the emergence of the World Wide Web--when they entered the mainstream of public life.The texts are by computer scientists, artists, architects, literary writers, interface designers, cultural critics, and individuals working across disciplines. The contributors include (chronologically) Jorge Luis Borges, Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, Ivan Sutherland, William S. Burroughs, Ted Nelson, Italo Calvino, Marshall McLuhan, Billy Kl?Jean Baudrillard, Nicholas Negroponte, Alan Kay, Bill Viola, Sherry Turkle, Richard Stallman, Brenda Laurel, Langdon Winner, Robert Coover, and Tim Berners-Lee. The CD accompanying the book contains examples of early games, digital art, independent literary efforts, software created at universities, and home-computer commercial software. Also on the CD is digitized video, documenting new media programs and artwork for which no operational version exists. One example is a video record of Douglas Engelbart's first presentation of the mouse, word processor, hyperlink, computer-supported cooperative work, video conferencing, and the dividing up of the screen we now call non-overlapping windows; another is documentation of Lynn Hershman's Lorna, the first interactive video art installation.

    Patrick Smith, airline pilot and author of the web's popular Ask the Pilot feature, separates the fact from fallacy and tells you everything you need to know...-How planes fly, and a revealing look at the men and women who fly them-Straight talk on turbulence, pilot training, and safety-The real story on congestion, delays, and the dysfunction of the modern airport-The myths and misconceptions of cabin air and cockpit automation-Terrorism in perspective, and a provocative look at security-Airfares, seating woes, and the pitfalls of airline customer service-The colors and cultures of the airlines we love to hateCockpit Confidential covers not only the nuts and bolts of flying, but also the grand theater of air travel, from airport architecture to inflight service to the excitement of travel abroad. It's a thoughtful, funny, at times deeply personal look into the strange and misunderstood world of commercial flying.It's the ideal book for frequent flyers, nervous passengers, and global travelers.Refreshed and vastly expanded from the original Ask the Pilot, with approximately 75 percent new material.

    Smoking has gone from doctor recommended to deadly. We used to think the Earth was the center of the universe and that Pluto was a planet. For decades, we were convinced that the brontosaurus was a real dinosaur. In short, what we know about the world is constantly changing.   But it turns out there’s an order to the state of knowledge, an explanation for how we know what we know. Samuel Arbesman is an expert in the field of scientometrics—literally the science of science. Knowl­edge in most fields evolves systematically and predict­ably, and this evolution unfolds in a fascinating way that can have a powerful impact on our lives.   Doctors with a rough idea of when their knowl­edge is likely to expire can be better equipped to keep up with the latest research. Companies and govern­ments that understand how long new discoveries take to develop can improve decisions about allocating resources. And by tracing how and when language changes, each of us can better bridge gen­erational gaps in slang and dialect.   Just as we know that a chunk of uranium can break down in a measurable amount of time—a radioactive half-life—so too any given field’s change in knowledge can be measured concretely. We can know when facts in aggregate are obsolete, the rate at which new facts are created, and even how facts spread.   Arbesman takes us through a wide variety of fields, including those that change quickly, over the course of a few years, or over the span of centuries. He shows that much of what we know consists of “mesofacts”—facts that change at a middle timescale, often over a single human lifetime. Throughout, he of­fers intriguing examples about the face of knowledge: what English majors can learn from a statistical analysis of The Canterbury Tales, why it’s so hard to measure a mountain, and why so many parents still tell kids to eat their spinach because it’s rich in iron.   The Half-life of Facts is a riveting journey into the counterintuitive fabric of knowledge. It can help us find new ways to measure the world while accepting the limits of how much we can know with certainty.

    To its adherents, it is an elegant statement about learning from experience. To its opponents, it is subjectivity run amok.In the first-ever account of Bayes' rule for general readers, Sharon Bertsch McGrayne explores this controversial theorem and the human obsessions surrounding it. She traces its discovery by an amateur mathematician in the 1740s through its development into roughly its modern form by French scientist Pierre Simon Laplace. She reveals why respected statisticians rendered it professionally taboo for 150 years—at the same time that practitioners relied on it to solve crises involving great uncertainty and scanty information (Alan Turing's role in breaking Germany's Enigma code during World War II), and explains how the advent of off-the-shelf computer technology in the 1980s proved to be a game-changer. Today, Bayes' rule is used everywhere from DNA de-coding to Homeland Security.Drawing on primary source material and interviews with statisticians and other scientists, The Theory That Would Not Die is the riveting account of how a seemingly simple theorem ignited one of the greatest controversies of all time.

    Although dashboards are potentially powerful, this potential is rarely realized. The greatest display technology in the world won't solve this if you fail to use effective visual design. And if a dashboard fails to tell you precisely what you need to know in an instant, you'll never use it, even if it's filled with cute gauges, meters, and traffic lights. Don't let your investment in dashboard technology go to waste.This book will teach you the visual design skills you need to create dashboards that communicate clearly, rapidly, and compellingly. Information Dashboard Design will explain how to:Avoid the thirteen mistakes common to dashboard design Provide viewers with the information they need quickly and clearly Apply what we now know about visual perception to the visual presentation of information Minimize distractions, cliches, and unnecessary embellishments that create confusion Organize business information to support meaning and usability Create an aesthetically pleasing viewing experience Maintain consistency of design to provide accurate interpretation Optimize the power of dashboard technology by pairing it with visual effectiveness Stephen Few has over 20 years of experience as an IT innovator, consultant, and educator. As Principal of the consultancy Perceptual Edge, Stephen focuses on data visualization for analyzing and communicating quantitative business information. He provides consulting and training services, speaks frequently at conferences, and teaches in the MBA program at the University of California in Berkeley. He is also the author of Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten. Visit his website at www.perceptualedge.com.

    Wells to the press releases of NASA, we are awash in clich�d claims about high technology's ability to change the course of history. Now, in The Shock of the Old, David Edgerton offers a startling new and fresh way of thinking about the history of technology, radically revising our ideas about the interaction of technology and society in the past and in the present. He challenges us to view the history of technology in terms of what everyday people have actually used-and continue to use-rather than just sophisticated inventions. Indeed, many highly touted technologies, from the V-2 rocket to the Concorde jet, have been costly failures, while many mundane discoveries, like corrugated iron, become hugely important around the world. Edgerton reassesses the significance of such acclaimed inventions as the Pill and information technology, and underscores the continued importance of unheralded technology, debunking many notions about the implications of the information age. A provocative history, The Shock of the Old provides an entirely new way of looking historically at the relationship between invention and innovation.

    Now, in a tour-de-force narrative twenty years in the making, Ashton leads us on a journey through humanity’s greatest creations to uncover the surprising truth behind who creates and how they do it. From the crystallographer’s laboratory where the secrets of DNA were first revealed by a long forgotten woman, to the electromagnetic chamber where the stealth bomber was born on a twenty-five-cent bet, to the Ohio bicycle shop where the Wright brothers set out to “fly a horse,” Ashton showcases the seemingly unremarkable individuals, gradual steps, multiple failures, and countless ordinary and usually uncredited acts that lead to our most astounding breakthroughs.Creators, he shows, apply in particular ways the everyday, ordinary thinking of which we are all capable, taking thousands of small steps and working in an endless loop of problem and solution. He examines why innovators meet resistance and how they overcome it, why most organizations stifle creative people, and how the most creative organizations work. Drawing on examples from art, science, business, and invention, from Mozart to the Muppets, Archimedes to Apple, Kandinsky to a can of Coke, How to Fly a Horse is a passionate and immensely rewarding exploration of how “new” comes to be.

    Mass starvation, long predicted for the fast-growing population, was about to become a reality. A call went out to the world’s scientists to find a solution. This is the story of the two enormously gifted, fatally flawed men who found it: the brilliant, self-important Fritz Haber and the reclusive, alcoholic Carl Bosch. Together they discovered a way to make bread out of air, built city-sized factories, controlled world markets, and saved millions of lives. Their invention continues to feed us today; without it, more than two billion people would starve.But their epochal triumph came at a price we are still paying. The Haber-Bosch process was also used to make the gunpowder and high explosives that killed millions during the two world wars. Both men were vilified during their lives; both, disillusioned and disgraced, died tragically. Today we face the other un­intended consequences of their discovery—massive nitrogen pollution and a growing pandemic of obesity.The Alchemy of Air is the extraordinary, previously untold story of two master scientists who saved the world only to lose everything and of the unforseen results of a discovery that continues to shape our lives in the most fundamental and dramatic of ways.

    Now, in his first book, written more than two decades after the web was created, Lanier offers this provocative and cautionary look at the way it is transforming our lives for better and for worse.The current design and function of the web have become so familiar that it is easy to forget that they grew out of programming decisions made decades ago. The web’s first designers made crucial choices (such as making one’s presence anonymous) that have had enormous—and often unintended—consequences. What’s more, these designs quickly became “locked in,” a permanent part of the web’s very structure. Lanier discusses the technical and cultural problems that can grow out of poorly considered digital design and warns that our financial markets and sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter are elevating the “wisdom” of mobs and computer algorithms over the intelligence and judgment of individuals. Lanier also shows:How 1960s antigovernment paranoia influenced the design of the online world and enabled trolling and trivialization in online discourseHow file sharing is killing the artistic middle class;How a belief in a technological “rapture” motivates some of the most influential technologistsWhy a new humanistic technology is necessary. Controversial and fascinating, You Are Not a Gadget is a deeply felt defense of the individual from an author uniquely qualified to comment on the way technology interacts with our culture.

    Who knew that he also was a pivotal figure in the development of the airplane, the hydrofoil, genetic engineering, and more? Charlotte Gray does, and she tells us how and why she brought to life the passionate mind and heart of the man behind so many amazing ideas and innovations. --Lauren Nemroff Some Questions for Charlotte Gray [image] 1. Most people picture Alexander Graham Bell as that grandfatherly looking man with a long white beard who invented the telephone. What's wrong with that image? The image of Alexander Graham Bell as a kindly Santa Claus figure is the one we all know: It is as familiar as the one of Einstein with his hair in a frizzy grey mass. But when Alexander Graham Bell was struggling to invent the telephone, he was a skinny, clean-shaven, neurotically intense young man and a hypochondriac, with obsessive work habits and a very volatile nature. Reading his letters and journals, I was shocked to discover how often he would ricochet between euphoria and depression. Invention was Alexander Graham Bell's passion, but I frequently wondered whether, if he had not had an early success and the right wife, his difficult personality would have prevented him achieving anything. I think it is important to revise the grandfatherly stereotype of Bell in order to show that invention is difficult, and inventors are not easy, placid people to live with. 2. In what way does Bell's genius different from other inventors of his age, such as Thomas Edison or the Wright brothers? The wonderful thing about the inventions of such nineteenth century giants as Bell, Edison and the Wright brothers is that, with a little bit of effort, even those of us who never did Grade 12 physics can actually understand how their inventions worked. One could never say that about today's microelectronic technology. Intuition and imagination were all crucial for the breakthroughs made by Edison, the Wright brothers and Bell. However, what sets Bell apart from Edison and the Wright brothers was that he didn't have an entrepreneurial bone in his body. He was more like a holdover from the eighteenth century Enlightenment, while the others were go-getting twentieth-century hustlers. Edison was always looking for financial backers; he announced his breakthroughs before he had even built working prototypes; he was one of the first inventors to put together a real R and D team at a purpose-built laboratory, at Menlo Park. He understood that invention is, in his own words, "One percent inspiration, ninety percent perspiration." Similarly the Wright Brothers were eager to make money out of their flying machines. They refused to share their technological breakthroughs, guarded their patents fiercely, and wouldn't give any demonstrations to the public of their biplanes. Bell was the opposite--totally absorbed in extending the frontiers of knowledge, and completely careless about commercial exploitation of his ideas. 3. Is it true that "necessity is the mother of invention" or is it something else? Invention has many mothers - the right materials, a widespread understanding that this will improve the world in some way, the right individual to pursue the elusive dream. In the case of the telephone, one can argue that there was no overwhelming necessity for a new form of communication: the telegraph had been working well for 30 years, and only a few people realized that a device that could carry the human voice, rather than the Morse code, would pull people together in a revolutionary way. As soon as telephones appeared in the market, their advantages were obvious. But there was still incredible resistance. In Britain, the upper classes were slow to acquire telephones because they posed a class issue: who should answer them? Everybody knew that, in a house with servants, the servant answered the door when the telegraph boy rang the bell. But should master or servant speak on the phone? The democratic nature of the telephone--anybody could use it, not just qualified operators--also shackled its spread. In Russia after the revolution, Stalin is said to have vetoed the idea of a modern telephone system. "It will unmake our work," the dictator decreed. "No greater instrument for counter-revolution and conspiracy can be imagined." So did necessity drive the invention of the telephone? No--when Bell first started speculating on its impact, people thought he was mad. But it quickly became a total necessity…imagine life without electronic communication today! 4. It was amazing to learn that Bell's mother and his wife were both deaf, and that from an early age he was immersed in research on the nature of sound and oral communication. How important were these personal relationships in shaping his outlook and inventions? One of my greatest surprises when I started research for Reluctant Genius was the discovery that Bell's first ambition was to be a teacher of the deaf, and that he remained committed to the cause of improved education for the hearing impaired throughout his life. I had no idea of this side of him, or of his long relationship with Helen Keller. The fact that the two most important women in his life, his mother and his wife, were deaf was of crucial importance both to his own work, and to his attitude to others. His respect for their intelligences and personalities meant that, unlike many of his contemporaries, he never assumed that deafness was linked to intellectual disability. Moreover, his scientific interest in their condition informed his telephone research. Because he knew why their ears didn't work, he understood how sound should reach the brain in a hearing person's ear, through the ear drum. None of his competitors made that intuitive leap. Their early attempts to build working telephones were foiled because they didn't include the diaphragm that mimicked the action of the ear drum, and which was the key feature of Bell's first phone. Lastly, Bell was also fascinated by the intergenerational transmission of deafness. This led to his research on genetics in general - and the program he initiated at his summer home, in Cape Breton, to breed a flock of "super sheep" that would always have twin births. 5. Bell's wife, Mabel Hubbard Bell, was a remarkable person in her own right. Why was it so important to tell her story? Too often, biographies of "Great Men" suggest they achieved everything by their own efforts. A few did, of course, but most depended on the support and encouragement of others--parents, partners, associates--to provide the right environment in which they could achieve their goals. Behind every great man….This was the case with Alexander Graham Bell. He would always have had his "Eureka Moment", in the summer of 1874, when he realized how a "talking telegraph" might work. But without Mabel, we probably would never have heard of him. He would not have patented the invention or found the business partners who helped him moved his invention from the laboratory to the market place. Mabel's father, Gardiner Hubbard, was his patent lawyer: Mabel herself ensured that he went to the Philadelphia Exposition, in 1876, to demonstrate his new apparatus. In later years, Mabel provided all kinds of other practical help, in ensuring that her exasperating husband could focus on his inventions. She handled the financial side of their marriage: she found qualified young men who could help him work on his flying machines: she was always cheering him up and stroking his ego when he got depressed. And she created, along with their two daughters, a warm family environment which gave balance to Bell's life - and which so many of his contemporaries, including Thomas Edison, never enjoyed. I was determined to give Mabel her due in the story of Bell. I found her such an attractive and intriguing figure. She was stone deaf, ten years younger than her husband, and their relationship began as a teacher-student one. It would be easy to assume that this brilliant, world famous man would be the dominant figure in the relationship. In fact, the reverse is true. 6. What do you think Bell would think of cell phones, the internet and other wireless means of communication? Bell himself anticipated "electric communication": he was very frustrated by how long it took for a letter from Nova Scotia to reach Europe. I'm sure he would be delighted by the internet. However, he would be appalled by the constant buzz of other technological advances, and the way we've allowed them to trump all other forms of human intercourse. This is a man who wouldn't have a telephone in his own study, because its ring would disturb his train of thought. He was a gracious, well-mannered man who would have been horrified by the way many of us let our cell phones to interrupt our face-to-face conversations. And if somebody pulled out a Blackberry and started punching into it while Bell was speaking of him--well, Alec would have muttered, "Shee-e-esh" (the nearest he ever got to swearing) and stomped out of the room. 7. What was the most exciting research discovery that you made? As a biographer, I have to say that my most exciting discovery was the wealth of material I had to work with. Because Alexander Graham Bell could never speak to his wife on the telephone, he and Mabel exchanged long, intimate, colourful letters whenever they were apart--and that was often. I was thrilled to discover, at the Alexander Graham Bell Historic Site in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, 180 three-ring binders of family correspondence (another set is housed at the Library of Congress, Washington.) These letters let me explore the inner-workings of the mind of a genius, and of a remarkable marriage, in a way that I had hardly dared hope for. I was also amazed at the range of Bell's activities. The telephone, the photophone (which sent sounds down beams of light), an early iron lung, a desalination process for salt water, flying machines, hydrofoils, genetic experiments…his scientific interests were enormously varied. And at the same time, he was doing so much else, for example with the Smithsonian Institute, and the National Geographic Society. And throughout his career, there was his long-running commitment to deaf education. It was hard not to be overwhelmed! 8. What are you working on right now? Yes, I'm already launched on my next biography. (In fact, I find it very hard not to start my next book before the previous one is even in the stores--I have a psychological need to live both my own life and someone else's!) My next project is a short biography of Nellie McClung, the Canadian author and political activist.