Pundits, politicians, and business leaders continually make claims for what standardized tests can do, and those claims go largely unchallenged because they are in line with popular assumptions about what these tests can do, what the scores mean, and the psychology of human motivation. But what most of what these opinion leaders say-and the public believes-about standardized testing just isn't so. However, few members of the general public, not even concerned parents, have the time or the ...

“A lucidly written, shrewdly argued meditation on how democrats and dictators preserve political authority.” —Wall Street JournalBruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith’s canonical book on political science turns conventional wisdom on its head. They start from a single proposition: leaders do whatever keeps them in power. They don’t care about the “national interest”—or even their subjects—unless they must. As Bueno de Mesquita and Smith show, democrac...

The definitive guide to exploring the North of England under paddle power, from the majestic Northumberland coastline to the spectacular landscapes of the Lake District.With countless beautiful lakes, rivers and coastlines, the North of England offers abundant opportunities for paddleboarders, canoeists and kayakers. Written by highly experienced paddleboard instructor Bruce Smith, this guide features 40 routes across the North East, North West, Yorkshire and the H...

Between Eternities reflects on the possibility of political philosophy as an ongoing, architectonic activity that is necessarily linked to both the past and future. Almost all contemporary work in political philosophy either studies the subject with an eye to past tradition_choosing a winner from that tradition and then deducing what follows from the posited premises in a thoroughly modern, constructivist fashion_or else limits itself to drawing out what follows from already accepted premi...

A theory of politics that looks at what did not happen—or non-events—to explain policy change, economic development, democratization, and “autocratization.”Anticipating Instability puts forward a general theory of politics that attempts to explain the very many destabilizing political events in history that did not happen. Although most of us do not pay close attention to what did not occur, research shows that fear of non-events does more to rede...

Just after the close of World War II, America's political and scientific leaders reached an informal consensus on how science could best serve the nation and how government might best support science. The consensus lasted a generation before it broke under the pressures created by the Vietnam War. Since then the nation has struggled to reestablish shared beliefs about the means and goals of science policy. In American Science Policy Since World War II, author Bruce L. R. Smith makes sense ...

2017 Great Northwest Book Festival in the Nature Writing Category2017 WWA Spur Awards, Finalist in Best Western Contemporary NonfictionOver the past four decades, Bruce L. Smith has worked with most big-game species in some of the American West’s most breathtaking and challenging landscapes. In Stories from Afield, readers join Smith on his adventures as a naturalist, sportsman, and wildlife biologist, as he pulls us into the field of learning and discovery across w...

Is the past ever truly forgotten?Fiona Truscott has spent twenty years avoiding the truth about her family's past. But when new evidence surfaces suggesting that her great-grandfather, Finn Beckett, was wrongfully accused of serious crimes in South Africa, she can no longer turn away. With her husband Karl by her side, she embarks on a perilous journey to the heart of Africa, determined to uncover the truth about her ancestors-and about her own parents' mysterious deaths.

Is the past ever truly forgotten?Fiona Truscott has spent twenty years avoiding the truth about her family’s past. But when new evidence surfaces suggesting that her Great-Grandfather Finn Beckett was wrongfully accused of serious crimes in South Africa, she can no longer turn away. With her husband Karl by her side, she embarks on a perilous journey to the heart of Africa, determined to uncover the truth about her ancestors—and about her own parents’ mysterious deaths.Hunt...

Games and elections are fundamental activities in society with applications in economics, political science, and sociology. These topics offer familiar, current, and lively subjects for a course in mathematics. This classroom-tested textbook, primarily intended for a general education course in game theory at the freshman or sophomore level, provides an elementary treatment of games and elections. Starting with basics such as gambling, zero-sum and combinatorial games, Nash equilibria, soc...

When was the last time you saw a miracle?Scratching your head...or maybe you're already skeptical?These pages are full of documented miracles happening everyday-the power of God moving through ordinary men and woman all around the world.Their stories begin with desperation, and the struggle and the perseverance these national translators show is guaranteed to inspire....these are the least of these. Humble people-largely unknown to anyone else in the world. People h...

A behind-the-scenes account of American foreign policymaking in the late twentieth centuryTom Hughes, assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, made an ominous prediction in 1965. In a seminal but less well-known document of the Vietnam War, Hughes predicted that the Democratic Party and the national consensus underlying the nation's foreign policy would break apart if the war escalated.Hughes drafted the memo for his friend and fellow Minne...