What happened along the evolutionary trail that made humans so unique? In his accessible style, Michael Gazzaniga pinpoints the change that made us thinking, sentient humans different from our predecessors. He explores what makes human brains special, the importance of language and art in defining the human condition, the nature of human consciousness, and even artificial intelligence.

Say hello to new friends, new business opportunities, new love, and new confidence

Okay, so you're shy. Here are 85 proven techniques to help you conquer your shyness and change your life for good. No psychobabble. No nonsense. These tested "ShyBusters" prepare you for that upcoming party, work function, interview, date, and the rest of your life.

As someone who overcame debilitating shyness herself, professional speaker Leil Lowndes used this method to become a confident woman who has been interviewed on hundreds of TV and radio shows and has spoken to crowds of 10,000. You'll soon be making "fearless conversation" with people who used to intimidate you. You'll learn how to win the love you deserve and ask for whatever you want. You will overcome embarrassing stammering, sweating, clamming up, and wishing you were invisible.

Good-Bye to Shy will show you how to: Make a stronger impression at work, at parties, in any situationFeel more relaxed around people, make eye contact, and spark conversationsBoost your career, jump-start your social life, and open your heart to new possibilities

Say Good-Bye to Shy—and hello to the happy, loving, confident person who's been hiding inside you.

Impro ought to be required reading not only for theatre people generally but also for teachers, educators, and students of all kinds and persuasions. Readers of this book are not going to agree with everything in it; but if they are not challenged by it, if they do not ultimately succumb to its wisdom and whimsicality, they are in a very sad state indeed . . . .Johnstone seeks to liberate the imagination, to cultivate in the adult the creative power of the child . . . .Deserves to be widely read and tested in the classroom and rehearsal hall . . .Full of excellent good sense, actual observations and inspired assertions |o CHOICE: Books for College Libraries.

Adam Smith wrote that man has an intrinsic “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” But how did trade evolve to the point where we don’t think twice about biting into an apple from the other side of the world? In this sweeping narrative history of world trade, William J. Bernstein tells the extraordinary story of global commerce from its prehistoric origins to the myriad controversies surrounding it today. He transports readers from ancient sailing ships that brought the silk trade from China to Rome in the second century to the rise and fall of the Portuguese monopoly in spices in the sixteenth; from the American trade battles of the early twentieth century to the modern era of televisions from Taiwan, lettuce from Mexico, and T-shirts from China. Lively, authoritative, and astonishing in scope, A Splendid Exchange is a riveting narrative that views trade and globalization not in political terms, but rather as an evolutionary process as old as war and religion&#8212a historical constant&#8212that will continue to foster the growth of intellectual capital, shrink the world, and propel the trajectory of the human species.

The city of Dubai, one of the seven United Arab Emirates, is everything the Arab world isn’t: a freewheeling capitalist oasis where the market rules and history is swept aside. Until the credit crunch knocked it flat, Dubai was the fastest-growing city in the world, with a roaring economy that outpaced China’s while luring more tourists than all of India. It’s one of the world’s safest places, a stone’s throw from its most dangerous. In City of Gold, Jim Krane, who reported for the AP from Dubai, brings us a boots-on-the-ground look at this fascinating place by walking its streets, talking to its business titans, its prostitutes, and the hard-bitten men who built its fanciful skyline. He delves into the city’s history, paints an intimate portrait of the ruling Maktoum family, and ponders where the city is headed. Dubai literally came out of nowhere. It was a poor and dusty village in the 1960s. Now it’s been transformed into the quintessential metropolis of the future through the vision of clever sheikhs, Western capitalists, and a river of investor money that poured in from around the globe. What has emerged is a tolerant and cosmopolitan city awash in architectural landmarks, luxury resorts, and Disnified kitsch. It’s at once home to America’s most prestigious companies and universities and a magnet for the Middle East’s intelligentsia. Dubai’s dream of capitalism has also created a deeply stratified city that is one of the world’s worst polluters. Wild growth has clogged its streets and left its citizens a tiny minority in a sea of foreigners. Jim Krane considers all of this and casts a critical eye on the toll that the global economic downturn has taken on a place that many tout as a blueprint for a more stable Middle East.  While many think Dubai’s glory days have passed, insiders like Jim Krane who got to know the city and its creators firsthand realize there’s much more to come in the City of Gold, a place that, in just a few years, has made itself known to nearly every person on earth.

Arlian had never left his home village in the Obsidian Mountains. The green hills, white peaks, and black glass were all he had ever known of life, and though he dreamed of travel and adventure, he knew deep in his heart that he would probably never leave.

Until the dragon weather came. Incredible heat, oppressive humidity, dark and angry clouds . . . and dragons. Dragons with no feelings, no empathy, no use for humans; dragons who destroyed his entire village and everyone in it. Everyone, that is, except Arlian.

Orphaned and alone, Arlian the child is captured by looters and sold as a mining slave. Seven years later Arlian the man escapes, fueled by years of hatred for the dragons, bandits, and slavers that took his youth away—and a personal vow to exact retribution from those who have wronged him.

As Arlian makes his way through life, he is obsessed with the concept of justice, and that obsession informs every task, every decision. Even Black, the man he befriends and grows to love as a brother, has little influence against Arlian's obsession. His entire life has one purpose, and one purpose only: to mete out justice.

But can one righteous man change the entire world for the better? Or is he doomed by his own actions to become as unjust as those he seeks to destroy?

"[An] important, brain-tickling new book.... Laughlin's thesis is intriguing." (New York Times Book Review)

In this age of superstring theories and Big Bang cosmology, we're used to thinking of the unknown as impossibly distant from our everyday lives. But in A Different Universe, Nobel Laureate Robert Laughlin argues that the scientific frontier is right under our fingers. Instead of looking for ultimate theories, Laughlin considers the world of emergent properties-meaning the properties, such as the hardness and shape of a crystal, that result from the organization of large numbers of atoms. Laughlin shows us how the most fundamental laws of physics are in fact emergent. A Different Universe is a truly mind-bending book that shows us why everything we think about fundamental physical laws needs to change.

"I started reading and, clichŽ though it be, I couldn't stop. Despite the Nobel, Laughlin has an appealing, anarchic kind of sanity, and his company through this vivid and entertaining book is inspirational. A Different Universe should be required reading for physics researchers, teachers and students." (New Scientist)

"Peppered with his imaginative illustrations, analogies and anecdotes." (Philadelphia Inquirer)

Pop quiz! Who said what about history?

History is . . .
(a) more or less bunk.
(b) a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.
(c) as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis.

Match your answers:
(1) Stephen Daedalus of James Joyce's Ulysses
(2) Henry Ford
(3) Arthur Schopenhauer

It turns out that the answer need not be bunk, nightmarish, or diseased. In the hands of mental_floss, history's most interesting bits have been handpicked and roasted to perfection. Packed with little-known stories and outrageous—but accurate—facts, you'll laugh yourself smarter on this joyride through 60,000 years of human civilization.

Remember: just because it's true doesn't mean it's boring!

Now with Breaking News

"If You Thought the Last Depression Was Great . . ."

Answers: (a) 2 (b) 1 (c) 3

Cohen the Barbarian.

He's been a legend in his own lifetime.

He can remember the good old days of high adventure, when being a Hero meant one didn't have to worry about aching backs and lawyers and civilization.

But these days, he can't always remember just where he put his teeth...

So now, with his ancient (yet still trusty) sword and new walking stick in hand, Cohen gathers a group of his old — very old — friends to embark on one final quest. He's going to climb the highest mountain of Discworld and meet the gods.

It's time the Last Hero in the world returns what the first hero stole. Trouble is, that'll mean the end of the world, if no one stops him in time.

Humanity has been faithfully serving the Citizens for years, and Kirsten Quinn-Kovacks is among the best and the brightest of the humans. She gratefully serves the race that rescued her ancestors from a dying starship, gave them a home world, and nurtures them still.  If only the Citizens knew where Kirsten’s people came from.

A chain reaction of supernovae at the galaxy’s core unleashes a wave of lethal radiation that will sterilize the galaxy.  The Citizens flee, taking their planets, the Fleet of Worlds, with them.

Someone must scout ahead, and Kirsten and her crew eagerly volunteer.  Under the guiding eye of Nessus, their Citizen mentor, they explore for any possible dangers in the Fleet’s path—and uncover long-hidden truths that will shake the foundations of worlds. Fleet of Worlds marks Larry Niven's first novel-length collaboration within his Known Space universe, the playground he created for his bestselling Ringworld series. Teaming up with fellow SF writer Edward M. Lerner, Fleet of Worlds takes a closer look at the Human-Puppeteer (Citizens) relations and the events leading up to Niven's first Ringworld novel.

Richard Mayhew is a plain man with a good heart — and an ordinary life that is changed forever on a day he stops to help a girl he finds bleeding on a London sidewalk.From that moment forward he is propelled into a world he never dreamed existed — a dark subculture flourish in abandoned subway stations and sewer tunnels below the city — a world far stranger and more dangerous than the only one he has ever known...Richard Mayhew is a young businessman with a good heart and a dull job. When he stops one day to help a girl he finds bleeding on a London sidewalk, his life is forever altered, for he finds himself propelled into an alternate reality that exists in a subterranean labyrinth of sewer canals and abandoned subway stations below the city. He has fallen through the cracks of reality and has landed somewhere different, somewhere that is Neverwhere.

The Culture - a human/machine symbiotic society - has thrown up many great Game Players, and one of the greatest is Gurgeh. Jernau Morat Gurgeh. The Player of Games. Master of every board, computer and strategy. Bored with success, Gurgeh travels to the Empire of Azad, cruel and incredibly wealthy, to try their fabulous game...a game so complex, so like life itself, that the winner becomes emperor. Mocked, blackmailed, almost murdered, Gurgeh accepts the game, and with it the challenge of his life - and very possibly his death.

Praise for Iain M. Banks:

"Poetic, humorous, baffling, terrifying, sexy — the books of Iain M. Banks are all these things and more" — NME

"An exquisitely riotous tour de force of the imagination which writes its own rules simply for the pleasure of breaking them." — Time Out

The Hugo Award–nominated novel by “a hard science fiction writer through and through and one of the very best alive.” —The Globe and Mail   Two months have past since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming as they burned. The heavens have been silent since—until a derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet. Something talks out there: but not to us. Who should we send to meet the alien, when the alien doesn’t want to meet?   Send a linguist with multiple-personality disorder and a biologist so spliced with machinery that he can’t feel his own flesh. Send a pacifist warrior and a vampire recalled from the grave by the voodoo of paleogenetics. Send a man with half his mind gone since childhood. Send them to the edge of the solar system, praying you can trust such freaks and monsters with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they’ve been sent to find—but you’d give anything for that to be true, if you knew what was waiting for them. . . .  Peter Watts lives in Toronto, Canada.

The Hugo Award–nominated novel by "a hard science fiction writer through and through and one of the very best alive."—The Globe and Mail

Two months have past since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming as they burned. The heavens have been silent since—until a derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet. Something talks out there: but not to us. Who should we send to meet the alien, when the alien doesn’t want to meet?

Send a linguist with multiple-personality disorder and a biologist so spliced with machinery that he can’t feel his own flesh. Send a pacifist warrior and a vampire recalled from the grave by the voodoo of paleogenetics. Send a man with half his mind gone since childhood. Send them to the edge of the solar system, praying you can trust such freaks and monsters with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they’ve been sent to find—but you’d give anything for that to be true, if you knew what was waiting for them.

"The genius of Blindsight is that its author has been clever enough to build a story that demonstrates [his] case . . . Much of the narrative pleasure of Blindsight comes from a conjoined experience of doubled discovery: as we gradually get to understand the nature of the crew . . . we find ourselves simultaneously beginning to get some sense of the alien species orbiting Ben in something . . . that Watts describes in terms that evoked, for me, some great, granulated, anfractuous rat king of shrikes multiplied a thousandfold from the simple single shrike out of Dan Simmons’s Hyperion, which so goosed my midbrain . . . It is a sign of the pervasive toughness of Blindsight that its human readers can take pleasure in [the] message, because what the scramblers say to us in the end is, ‘Shut up.’"—The New York Review of Science Fiction

"Trained as a marine biologist, Watts is completely at ease using his richly developed characters to spin possibilities and theories on the cutting edge of science. His dense idea storms may slow some readers, but most will sail through the tech-heavy patches purely for the thrill of seeing what happens next."—Gwenda Bond, The Washington Post

"This is a a very ambitious story, very successfully done. As a novel, it’s gripping enough that my last-weekend glance to fill in details became a complete rereading. Rare that, but this is a rare book."—The San Diego Union-Tribune

"A brilliant piece of work, one that will delight fans of hard science fiction, but will also demonstrate to literary fans that contemporary science fiction is dynamic and fascinating literature that demands to be read."—The Edmonton Journal

"Challenging . . . fascinating and rewarding. Watts’ all-but-declared literary ambition is to be a first-class hard science fiction writer on the sophisticated literary level of Gregory Benford or Arthur C. Clarke. And with Starfish, Maelstrom, Behemoth, and now Blindsight, he demonstrates that he can achieve it."—Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine

"Watt’s dark, suspenseful, nightmarish vision of intelligent life in a hostile universe is remorseless in its outlook and unflinching in its conclusions."—SF Site

"Extremely thought-provoking, taking its premise to the ultimate conclusion, showing that the alien without might by closely related to the alien within."—Interzone

"A first-contact novel notable for the utter remorselessness of it commitment to its central premise."—Vector

"A fascinating first-contact tale. This is a provocative exploration of the nature of human consciousness and what it means to be human."—Romantic Times BOOKreviews

"A swarm of Fireflies lighted alien objects in the sky now orbits Earth, speaking among themselves and ignoring human attempts at communication. In desperation, a group consisting of a linguist with multiple personality disorder, a biologist more machine than man, a paleogenetic vampire, and a pacifist is sent to confront this unfathomable alien presence. Watts (aehemoth) continues to challenge readers with his imaginative plots and superb storytelling. A good choice for most sf collections."—Library Journal

"Alien-contact tale in which humans are at least as weird as the aliens. Eighty years from now, denizens of Earth become aware of an alien presence when the sky fills with bursts of light from dying Fireflies, tiny machines that signal to a supergiant planet far beyond the edge of the solar system. With orders to investigate, the vessel Theseus carries an artificial intelligence as its captain, along with expedition leader Jukka Sarasti, a brooding, sociopathic and downright scary vampire; Isaac Szpindel, a biologist so mechanized he can barely feel his own skin; the Gang of Four, a schizophrenic linguist; curiously passive warrior Major Amanda Bates; and observer-narrator Siri Keeton, a synthesist with half a brain (the remainder destroyed by a virus) enhanced by add-ons and advanced algorithms. They meet a huge alien vessel that calls itself Rorschach and talks eagerly but says nothing of consequence. Indeed, the Gang of Four suspects that the alien voice isn't truly sentient at all. As Keeton begins to hallucinate, Sarasti orders a team to break into the alien vessel despite its lethal radiation levels. Still unable to decide whether the aliens are hostile, Sarasti devises a plan to capture one of the creatures that apparently thrive within Rorschach's peculiar environment. They succeed in grabbing two specimens. These scramblers, dubbed Stretch and Clench, resemble huge, bony, multi-limbed starfish. They have no brains but show evidence of massive information-processing capability, which brings Theseus' crew to the crucial question: Can intelligence exist without self-awareness? Watts carries several complications too many, but presents nonetheless asearching, disconcerting, challenging, sometimes piercing inquisition."—Kirkus Reviews

"Canadian author Watts explores the nature of consciousness in this stimulating hard SF novel, which combines riveting action with a fascinating alien environment. In the late 21st century, when something alien is discovered beyond the edge of

Computers are already approving financial transactions, controlling electrical supplies, and driving trains. Soon, service robots will be taking care of the elderly in their homes, and military robots will have their own targeting and firing protocols. Colin Allen and Wendell Wallach argue that as robots take on more and more responsibility, they must be programmed with moral decision-making abilities, for our own safety. Taking a fast paced tour through the latest thinking about philosophical ethics and artificial intelligence, the authors argue that even if full moral agency for machines is a long way off, it is already necessary to start building a kind of functional morality, in which artificial moral agents have some basic ethical sensitivity. But the standard ethical theories don't seem adequate, and more socially engaged and engaging robots will be needed. As the authors show, the quest to build machines that are capable of telling right from wrong has begun.

Moral Machines is the first book to examine the challenge of building artificial moral agents, probing deeply into the nature of human decision making and ethics.