From ancient megalodons to fearsome Great Whites, this book tells the complete, untold story of how sharks emerged as Earth’s ultimate survivors, by world-leading paleontologist John Long.“Will keep you on the edge of your seat from its first page to its last page.”—Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Guns, Germs, and SteelSharks have been fighting for their lives for 500 million years and today are under dire threat. T...

For most of the past 300 million years, the world’s continents were interlinked as the supercontinents Pangaea and then Gondwana. Around 50 million years ago, Australia tore itself free from Antarctica to become the huge, splendidly isolated island it is today. Over time, its creatures began to evolve in ways not seen anywhere else on Earth, with tree-climbing crocodiles, gigantic venomous lizards, walking omnivorous bats and flesh-eating kangaroos roaming the continent.Prehist...

When Tiddlywink the pixie gets trapped inside a cursed puzzle cube, every attempt to free him fails. All hope now rests on the shoulders of five brave heroes, who must journey all the way to the mysterious Distant Desert for answers before the sands of time run out. But with cacti gladiators, a down-on-her-luck genie and a rebellious magic carpet to contend with, it's not going to be an easy ride!

In "John Long's Journal, 1768-1782," J. Indian Trader Long masterfully captures the nuanced dynamics of trade and cultural exchange between European settlers and Indigenous peoples during a formative period in North American history. Written in a straightforward yet evocative style, Long's journal entries reveal the complexities of frontier life, characterized by both collaboration and conflict. The narrative weaves personal anecdotes with broader historical commentary, offering readers an...

In the summer of 1904, thirty-two men lined up in St. Louis to run twenty-four miles through choking dust and 90-degree heat, past automobiles that nearly killed them and a single water station that failed them entirely. Fourteen finished. One was disqualified for hitching a ride in a car. Another nearly died from the very "medicine" his own trainers gave him to keep him standing. A third, a Cuban postman who'd never trained a day in his life, stopped mid-race to eat green peaches from an ...

Violence, bigamy, race, and a quest for justice—the true crime story of Charles Watkins, his wife's mysterious death, and the chaos that followed.A drama played out in the mountains of southwestern Virginia in 1891 that attracted nationwide attention and held the citizens of the Roanoke Valley spellbound. The tale of the trial of Charles Watkins for the murder of his wife was marked by threats of lynching, a fugitive manhunt, a disappearing witness, mistaken identi...

Process Modeling Style focuses on other aspects of process modeling beyond notation that are very important to practitioners. Many people who model processes focus on the specific notation used to create their drawings. While that is important, there are many other aspects to modeling, such as naming, creating identifiers, descriptions, interfaces, patterns, and creating useful process documentation. Experience author John Long focuses on those non-notational aspects of modeling, which pra...

We all know about the birds and the bees, but what about the ancient placoderm fishes and the dinosaurs?The history of sex is as old as life itself-and as complicated and mysterious. And despite centuries of study there is always more to know. In 2008, paleontologist John A. Long and a team of researchers revealed their discovery of a placoderm fish fossil, known as "the mother fish," which at 380 million years old revealed the oldest vertebrate embryo-the earliest known example of ...

What happens when we let robots play the game of life?The challenge of studying evolution is that the history of life is buried in the past -- we can't witness the dramatic events that shaped the adaptations we see today. But biorobotics expert John Long has found an ingenious way to overcome this problem: he creates robots that look and behave like extinct animals, subjects them to evolutionary pressures, lets them compete for mates and resources, and mutates thei...

This research textbook, designed for young Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers beginning their careers, surveys the research models and methods in use today and offers a general framework to bring together the disparate concepts. HCI spans many disciplines and professions, including information science, applied psychology, computer science, informatics, software engineering and social science making it difficult for newcomers to get a good overview of the field and the available a...

The scope of the book is UX. It presents a comprehensive guide for readers to better engage with the framing of UX design practice. The guide characterises UX as a movement, whose members are developing shared ideas to specify and to implement HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) as UX. The book is based on the analysis of the conduct and reporting of framing UX design practice, contributed by experienced UX practitioners. It surveys the various means by which UX practitioners conduct and repo...

Most of us are possessed of the desire to be somewhere else. Since the dawn of history hordes of men have pressed into new countries. Sometimes the expeditions have been in search of food and plunder, but mixed in with these motives has been the human passion for something better, the hope for sunnier scenes lying over the horizon. Hemmed in by the restrictions of modern business life, people no longer, even in this Western World, move by tribes or companies into new homelands. But the res...