51 Accidental Inventions that Changed the World


Kimte Guite - 2019
    The wonderful inventions we now cannot live without—fromhigh-heels to tea-bags, pencils to x-rays, each story is an amazing mix of luck and a whole lot ofperseverance and hard work.Imagine what our hot summers would be without ice-lolly? The horrors of never tasting potatochips!What would we do without our quick-fix Superglue? We hardly give a thought to the manylittle things we use every day. Don’t you think it’s time we learnt about a few stories of origin?Where do they come from? Who invented them and how?Learn about 51 fascinating stories of inventions in a book blending adorable, simple illustrationswith lively text bursting with facts. Who knows, you might accidentally come up with an inventionone day too

Steve Jobs Ek Zapatlela Tantradnya (Marathi)


ATUL KAHATE ACHYUT GODBOLE - 2011
    The PCs, the i- phones, the i-pods, the tablet PCs all will be a constant reminder of the genuine and witty ways that Steve handled and fondled. He was always lost in a world of his own. He hugged the glory and the downfalls with equal aloofness. Not once were his beliefs shattered. Throughout his life, he struggled and dared to bring his dreams come true. His dreams had a silvery lining of consistency, persuasion and intention. He was unique in every way. The life threatening disease of cancer could not prevent him from working till his last breath, literally. Though stubborn and dominant by nature he stood as a magician in the field of technology. Here is a simple gesture to pay him respect and honour. A magnificent journey presented authentically.

A License to Heal: Random Memories of an ER Doctor


Steven Bentley - 2014
    is an American Board of Emergency Medicine certified ED doctor. His journey began in the mid-1970s, when he chose to pursue a career in medicine. In his youthful perspective, he came to regard doctors as the good guys, the ones who healed people and saved lives. He knew he’d be one of those good guys one day. Now, with a career spanning more than thirty years, he works as an emergency-room physician in North Carolina. In A License to Heal: Random Memories of an ER Doctor, Bentley describes the real world of emergency medicine from the viewpoint of a practicing physician. This memoir is filled with real-life stories of the ER, including life and death, triumph and tragedy. Meet a man named Solomon Darby, who spoke to long-dead relatives during his own near-death experience. Bentley also recalls the heartbreaking story of a young widow who desperately needed to understand and cope with the death of her husband. Amid the grief, there are also episodes of great humor and human comedy. In the dynamic world of emergency medicine, there is a great deal of pain, blood, and tragedy, but there is also hope, compassion, and excitement—for both the patients and the staff."

Preparing to Teach in the Lifelong Learning Sector


Ann Gravells - 2008
    This includes further education, adult and community learning, work-based learning, the forces and offender learning and skills. It is easy to read with plenty of practical activities and examples throughout and the content is fully linked to the Teacher Training Standards. Please note: This book has since been updated to reflect the new title of the qualification: The Award in Education and Training.The qualification unit content contained in the appendices has since changed, and some legislation mentioned in the book has been updated.

Built on a Lie: The Rise and Fall of Neil Woodford and the Fate of Middle England’s Money


Owen Walker - 2021
    This is the gripping tale of Britain's top investor's fall from grace and the shattering consequences. The proud owner of a sprawling £14m estate in the Cotswolds, boasting a stable of eventing horses, a fleet of supercars and neighbouring the royal family, Neil Woodford was the most celebrated and successful British investor of his generation. He spent years beating the market; betting against the dot com bubble in the 1990s and the banks before the financial crash in 2008, making blockbuster returns for his investors and earning himself a reputation of 'the man who made Middle England rich'. As famous for his fleet of fast cars and ostentatious mansions, he was the rockstar fund manager that had the lifestyle to match. But, in 2019, after a stream of poorly-judged investments, Woodford's asset management company collapsed, trapping hundreds of thousands of rainy-day savers in his flagship fund and hanging £3.6bn in the balance. In Built on a Lie, Financial Times reporter Owen Walker reveals the disastrous failings of Woodford, the greed and opulence at the heart of his operation, the flaws of an industry in thrall to its star performers and the dangers of limited regulation. With exclusive access to Woodford's inner circle, Walker will reveal the full, jaw-dropping story of Europe's biggest investment scandal in a decade.

Uncomplicate Business: All It Takes Is People, Time, and Money


Howard Farran - 2015
    Howard Farran shows that running a business isn’t all that complicated—if, you’re focusing on the right three areas: •People: maximizing the potential of employees, customers, and yourself.•Time: mastering the efficiency that helps a business turn the biggest profit possible.•Money: learning to love the numbers that function as the business’s scorecard.With simplicity, good humor, and plenty of stories Dr. Farran reveals the actions that can lead anyone to bigger profits, happier people, and a more fulfilling life.

Apollo 1: The Tragedy That Put Us on the Moon


Ryan S. Walters - 2021
    All three astronauts were experienced pilots and had dreams of one day walking on the moon, but little did they know, nor did anyone else, that once they entered the spacecraft that cold winter day they would never leave it alive. The Apollo program would be perilously close to failure before it ever got off the ground. But rather than dooming the space program, this tragedy caused the spacecraft to be completely overhauled, creating a stellar flying machine to achieve the program’s primary goal: putting man on the moon. Apollo 1 is a candid portrayal of the astronauts, the disaster that killed them, and its aftermath. In it, readers will learn: How the Apollo 1 spacecraft was doomed from the start, with miles of uninsulated wiring and tons of flammable materials in a pure oxygen atmosphere, along with a hatch that wouldn’t open How, due to political pressure, the government contract to build the Apollo 1 craft went to a bidder with an inferior plan How public opinion polls were beginning to turn against the space control before the tragedy and got much worse after Apollo 1 is about America fulfilling its destiny of man setting foot on the moon. It’s also about the three American heroes who lost their lives in the tragedy, but whose lives were not lost in vain.

Mail Men: The Story of the Daily Mail – the Paper that Divided and Conquered Britain


Adrian Addison - 2015
    Charting the controversy that has always dogged the publication — from its flirtation with fascism in the 1930s to its fractious relationship with celebrities today, Addison explains how the divisive paper has shaped British journalism and, indeed, Britain itself.With colorful portraits of rambunctious life behind the masthead (discover why one corridor is dubbed "scary" by staffers), Mail Men includes fascinating biographical details of key figures in the history of the paper — including idiosyncratic boss Paul Dacre, unrivaled moral arbiter for Middle England and the highest paid newspaper editor in the U.K.Drawing on interviews with over 100 of the paper’s journalists, past and present — as well as fans, victims, and critics — this is the uncut story of the Mail Men who created and ran the paper, and the underlings who were expected to give their lives to this peculiarly British institution.

Red Zone: China's Challenge and Australia's Future


Peter Hartcher - 2021
    

Tesla Motors: How Elon Musk and Company Made Electric Cars Cool, and Sparked the Next Tech Revolution


Charles Morris - 2014
    The most trusted sources in the auto industry have called its Model S the most advanced, safest and best-performing car ever built - and it doesn’t use a drop of gasoline. Tesla has changed the way the public perceives electric vehicles, and inspired the major automakers to revive their own dormant efforts to sell EVs. However, even amidst the avalanche of media coverage that followed the triumph of the Model S, few have grasped the true significance of what is happening. Tesla has redefined the automobile, sparked a new wave of innovation comparable to the internet and mobile computing revolutions, and unleashed forces that will transform not just the auto industry, but every aspect of society. The Tesla story is one part of an ongoing tide of change driven by the use of information technology to eliminate “friction” such as geographic distance, middlemen and outdated regulations. Tesla is simply applying the new order to the auto industry, but the automobile is such a pervasive influence in our lives that redefining how it is designed, built, driven and sold will have sweeping effects in unexpected areas. Just as Tesla built the Model S as an electric vehicle “from the ground up,” it has taken an outsider’s approach to the way it markets its cars. Its direct sales model has drawn legal challenges from entrenched auto dealers, who fear that their outdated business model will be destroyed. Its systems approach to the software and electronics in its cars has highlighted how far behind the technological times the major automakers are. It’s easy to see why readers find Tesla irresistible. CEO Elon Musk is a superstar entrepreneur, a “nauseatingly pro-US” immigrant and the leader of two other cutting-edge companies. Tesla dares to challenge the establishment behemoths and, so far at least, has handily beaten them at their own game. In this history of the 21st century’s most exciting startup, Charles Morris begins with a brief history of EVs and a biography of Tesla’s driving force, Elon Musk. He then details the history of the company, told in the words of the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who made it happen. There are many fascinating stories here: Martin Eberhard’s realization that there were many like himself, who loved fast cars but wanted to help the environment and bring about the post-oil age; the freewheeling first days, reminiscent of the early internet era; the incredible ingenuity of the team who built the Roadster; Tesla’s near-death experience and miraculous resurrection; the spiteful split between the company’s larger-than-life leaders; the gloves-off battles with hostile media such as Top Gear and the New York Times; and the media’s ironic about-face when the magnificent Model S won the industry’s highest honors, and naysayers became cheerleaders overnight. And the story is just beginning: Tesla has breathtakingly ambitious plans for the future.This book was updated May 1, 2015 to include the latest on the Gigafactory and the D package.

The Carbon Bubble: What Happens to Us When It Bursts


Jeff Rubin - 2015
         Since 2006 and the election of the 1st Harper government, the vision of Canada's future as an energy superpower has driven the political agenda, as well as the fast-paced development of Alberta's oil sands and the push for more pipelines across the country to bring that bitumen to market. Anyone who objects is labeled a dreamer, or worse--an environmentalist: someone who puts the health of the planet ahead of the economic survival of their neighbours.     In The Carbon Bubble, Jeff Rubin compellingly shows how Harper's economic vision for the country is dead wrong. Changes in energy markets in the US--where domestic production is booming while demand for oil is shrinking--are quickly turning Harper's dream into an economic nightmare. The same trade and investment ties to oil that pushed the Canadian dollar to record highs are now pulling it down, and the Toronto Stock Exchange, one of the most carbon-intensive stock indexes in the world--with over 25 percent market capitalization in oil and gas alone--will be increasingly exposed to the rest of the world's efforts to reduce carbon emissions.     Rubin argues that there is a lifeline to a better future. The very climate change that will leave much of the country's carbon unburnable could at the same time make some of Canada's other resource assets more valuable: our water and our land. In tomorrow's economy, he argues, Canada won't be an energy superpower, but it has the makings of one of the world's great breadbaskets. And in the global climate that the world's carbon emissions are inexorably creating, food will soon be a lot more valuable than oil.

Young Einstein: From the Doxerl Affair to the Miracle Year


L. Randles Lagerstrom - 2013
    In 1905 an unknown 26-year-old clerk at the Swiss Patent Office, who had supposedly failed math in school, burst on to the scientific scene and swept away the hidebound theories of the day. The clerk, Albert Einstein, introduced a new and unexpected understanding of the universe and launched the two great revolutions of twentieth-century physics, relativity and quantum mechanics. The obscure origin and wide-ranging brilliance of the work recalled Isaac Newton’s “annus mirabilis” (miracle year) of 1666, when as a 23-year-old seeking safety at his family manor from an outbreak of the plague, he invented calculus and laid the foundations for his theory of gravity. Like Newton, Einstein quickly became a scientific icon--the image of genius and, according to Time magazine, the Person of the Century.The actual story is much more interesting. Einstein himself once remarked that “science as something coming into being ... is just as subjectively, psychologically conditioned as are all other human endeavors.” In this profile, the historian of science L. Randles Lagerstrom takes you behind the myth and into the very human life of the young Einstein. From family rifts and girlfriend troubles to financial hardships and jobless anxieties, Einstein’s early years were typical of many young persons. And yet in the midst of it all, he also saw his way through to profound scientific insights. Drawing upon correspondence from Einstein, his family, and his friends, Lagerstrom brings to life the young Einstein and enables the reader to come away with a fuller and more appreciative understanding of Einstein the person and the origins of his revolutionary ideas.About the cover image: While walking to work six days a week as a patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland, Einstein would pass by the famous "Zytglogge" tower and its astronomical clocks. The daily juxtaposition was fitting, as the relative nature of time and clock synchronization would be one of his revolutionary discoveries in the miracle year of 1905.

Kingdom of Ants: José Celestino Mutis and the Dawn of Natural History in the New World


Edward O. Wilson - 2010
    Drawing on new translations of Mutis's nearly forgotten writings, this fascinating story of scientific adventure in eighteenth-century South America retrieves Mutis's contributions from obscurity.In 1760, the 28-year-old Mutis—newly appointed as the personal physician of the Viceroy of the New Kingdom of Granada—embarked on a 48-year exploration of the natural world of northern South America. His thirst for knowledge led Mutis to study the region's flora, become a professor of mathematics, construct the first astronomical observatory in the Western Hemisphere, and amass one of the largest scientific libraries in the world. He translated Newton's writings and penned essays about Copernicus; lectured extensively on astronomy, geography, and meteorology; and eventually became a priest. But, as two-time Pulitzer Prize–winner Edward O. Wilson and Spanish natural history scholar José M. Gómez Durán reveal in this enjoyable and illustrative account, one of Mutis's most magnificent accomplishments involved ants.Acting at the urging of Carl Linnaeus—the father of taxonomy—shortly after he arrived in the New Kingdom of Granada, Mutis began studying the ants that swarmed everywhere. Though he lacked any entomological training, Mutis built his own classification for the species he found and named at a time when New World entomology was largely nonexistent. His unorthodox catalog of army ants, leafcutters, and other six-legged creatures found along the banks of the Magdalena provided a starting point for future study.Wilson and Durán weave a compelling, fast-paced story of ants on the march and the eighteenth-century scientist who followed them. A unique glance into the early world of science exploration, Kingdom of Ants is a delight to read and filled with intriguing information.

White Devil: The True Story of the First White Asian Crime Boss


Bob Halloran - 2015
    Willis, according to prosecutors, was “the kingpin, organizer and leader of a vast conspiracy,” all within the legendarily insular and vicious Chinese mafia.It started when John Willis was 16 years old . . . his life seemed hopeless. His father had abandoned his family years earlier, his older brother had just died of a heart attack, and his mother was dying. John was alone, sleeping on the floor of his deceased brother’s home. Desperate, John reached out to Woping, a young Chinese man Willis had rescued from a bar fight weeks before. Woping literally picks him up off the street, taking him home to live among his own brothers and sisters. Soon, Willis is accompanying Woping to meet his Chinese mobster friends, and starts working for them. Journalist Bob Halloran tells the tale of John Willis, aka White Devil, the only white man to ever rise through the ranks in the Chinese mafia. Willis began as an enforcer, riding around with other gang members to “encourage” people to pay their debts. He soon graduated to even more dangerous work as a full-fledged gang member, barely escaping with his life on several occasions.As a white man navigating an otherwise exclusively Asian world, Willis was at first an interesting anomaly, but his ruthless devotion to his adopted culture eventually led to him emerging as a leader. He organized his own gang of co-conspirators and began an extremely lucrative criminal venture selling tens of thousands of oxycodone pills. A year-long FBI investigation brought him down, and John pleaded guilty to save the love of his life from prosecution. He has no regrets.White Devil explores the workings of the Chinese mafia, and he speaks frankly about his relationships with other gang members, the crimes he committed, and why he’ll never rat out any of his brothers to the cops.Told to Halloran from Willis’s prison cell, White Devil is a shocking portrait of a man who was allowed access into a secret world, and who is paying the price for his hardened life.

The LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT 2.0 Discovery Book: A Beginner's Guide to Building and Programming Robots


Laurens Valk - 2010
    The LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT 2.0 Discovery Book is the complete, illustrated, beginner's guide to MINDSTORMS that you've been looking for. The crystal clear instructions in the Discovery Book will show you how to harness the capabilities of the NXT 2.0 set to build and program your own robots. Author and robotics instructor Laurens Valk walks you through the set, showing you how to use its various pieces, and how to use the NXT software to program robots. Interactive tutorials make it easy for you to reach an advanced level of programming as you learn to build robots that move, monitor sensors, and use advanced programming techniques like data wires and variables. You'll build eight increasingly sophisticated robots like the Strider (a six-legged walking creature), the CCC (a climbing vehicle), the Hybrid Brick Sorter (a robot that sorts by color and size), and the Snatcher (an autonomous robotic arm). Numerous building and programming challenges throughout encourage you to think creatively and to apply what you've learned as you develop the skills essential to creating your own robots.Requirements: One LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT 2.0 set (#8547)FeaturesA complete introduction to LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT 2.0 Building and programming instructions for eight innovative robots 50 sample programs and 72 programming challenges (ranging from easy to hard) encourage you to explore newly learned programming techniques 15 building challenges expand on the robot designs and help you develop ideas for new robotsWho is this book for? This is a perfect introduction for those new to building and programming with the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT 2.0 set. The book also includes intriguing robot designs and useful programming tips for more seasoned MINDSTORMS builders.