Have you ever been stitched up to the national press by your best mate? Or unintentionally upset a band with a slip of the tongue on a live TV show? Or ruined a dinner party by transforming everything alcoholic into water? Hello. I’m Richard Bacon and this is A Series of Unrelated Events. All of the stories are true. All of them happened to me. I’ve made the mistakes so you don’t have to (you’re welcome). So now, if you should ever find yourself sobbing on top of a box of gherkins in the stockroom of a Mansfield McDonald’s... having a Twitter conversation with your mum while she’s pretending to be an illiterate dog... performing stand-up to an audience who are funnier than you are... or just letting down all of the children of Great Britain... ...you’ll know exactly what to do.

The role of factors outside the province of the physical and biological sciences in the onset of illness has long been a source of speculation. While early efforts in psychosomatic medicine focused on the relationship between mental states and illness, the effects of personal status and social circumstances on physical health are only now receiving the attention they merit. By integrating current theory, methodology, and research, this ground-breaking volume advances the study of life events and disease to a new stage. George Brown and Tirril Harris are ideal editors for such an undertaking. George Brown has long been known for his path-breaking work on intensive clinical assessment and designing measures that capture the real complexity of social situations, assigned meanings, and personal response to crisis. He brought to light the importance of ``expressed emotion,' the differential role of life events in schizophrenia and depression, and most recently, produced a seminal work on the social etiology of depression with Tirril Harris. As David Mechanic notes in his Foreword, the defining characteristics of these efforts, which are also reflected in this volume are a ``sensitivity to clinical material and capitalizing on serendipity; self-consciousness about methods and methodological advances; and focus on theory with careful efforts to specify intervening processes and the links between macro events and personal meanings.' Along with their collaborators, these eminent editors bring together an impressive range of theoretical thought and empirical study organized around the Life Events and Difficulties Schedule (LEDS). Their examination of the origins of life events and difficulties and the notion of ``conveyor belts' to continuing adversity capture the immutable uncertainties of life and help to link concerns with life events and disease to larger issues of human development. The authors' innovative approach to establishing the relationship between ``attitudes' and psychiatric and physical disorders fully utilizes the wealth of data elicited by the LEDS, and demonstrates how the comprehensiveness of this data matches the sophistication and complexity of the theoretical ideas it serves. Addressing fundamental questions on the whether the specific nature of life events and vulnerability factors differ in different disorders, the authors conclude by providing a perspective on psychodynamic etiology which emphasizes the specificity of crucial links. It integrates social, psychological, and biological factors around the notion that specific types of cognitive-affective experience are linked to specific types of illness. While significantly advancing our understanding of how individuals define and deal with adversity, LIFE EVENTS AND ILLNESS also fosters a greater appreciation of the methodological tools available for examining these processes. For all clinicians, researchers, and students in the behavioral sciences, this timely work not only provides a comprehensive review of the literature and a critical examination of current research models but also points the way for future investigations.

Experts aim to understand and document the intricacies of youth who have been involved in political violence. They argue that the assumption that youth are automatically debilitated by this violence is too simplistic: effective care must include an awareness of motives and beliefs, roles they played in the conflict, relationships, et cetera.

We are living in a Golden Age of physics. With the mind of a scientist and the skill of a journalist, bestselling author and renowned physicist Frank Close gives us an insider's look at one of the most inspiring - and challenging - scientific breakthroughs of our time: the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. About 40 years ago, 3 brilliant, yet little-known scientists made breakthroughs that later inspired the construction of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva: a 27-kilometre-long machine which has already cost $10 billion, taken 20 years to build and now promises to reveal how the universe itself came to be. The Infinity Puzzle is the inside story of those 40 years of research, breakthrough and endeavour. The work of Peter Higgs, Gerard 't Hooft and James Bjorken is explored here, played out across the decades against a backdrop of high politics, low behaviour and billion-dollar budgets. In The Infinity Puzzle, eminent physicist and award-winning author Frank Close writes from within the action and draws upon his close friendships with those involved.

Elementary-school students need to learn to write explanatory/informational, argument, and narrative text types and respond to literature, both for standardized tests and, more importantly, real-world writing. With a balanced literacy approach, Wolfe provides core instruction, teaching strategies, and mini-lessons on these text types, each of which can be delivered across content areas or as a complete unit of instruction. Mini-lessons are provided for grades 3-5 and include materials lists, overviews, planning tips, procedures (including modeling, guided practice, and independent practice opportunities), reading connections, formative assessments, and reproducible graphic organizers for scaffolding. Prerequisite skill overviews and rubrics--both analytic for formative assessments and holistic for summative assessments--are also provided for each unit to simplify your teaching and ensure student success.

This is the story of a losing baseball team that became a 1970s dynasty, thanks to the unorthodox strategies and stunts of two very colorful men. When Charlie Finley bought the A's in 1960, he was an outsider to the game—a insurance businessman with a larger-than-life personality. He brought his cousin Carl on as his right-hand man, moved the team from Kansas City to Oakland, and pioneered a new way to put together a winning team. With legendary players like Reggie Jackson, Catfish Hunter, and Vida Blue, the Finleys' Oakland A's won three straight World Series and riveted the nation. Now Carl Finley's daughter Nancy reveals the whole story behind her family's winning legacy—how her father and uncle developed their scouting strategy, why they employed odd gimmicks like orange baseballs and "mustache bonuses," and how the success of the '70s Oakland A's changed the game of baseball.

Praise for the First Edition "This is a well-written and impressively presented introduction to probability and statistics. The text throughout is highly readable, and the author makes liberal use of graphs and diagrams to clarify the theory." - The Statistician Thoroughly updated, Probability: An Introduction with Statistical Applications, Second Edition features a comprehensive exploration of statistical data analysis as an application of probability. The new edition provides an introduction to statistics with accessible coverage of reliability, acceptance sampling, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, and simple linear regression. Encouraging readers to develop a deeper intuitive understanding of probability, the author presents illustrative geometrical presentations and arguments without the need for rigorous mathematical proofs. The Second Edition features interesting and practical examples from a variety of engineering and scientific fields, as well as: Over 880 problems at varying degrees of difficulty allowing readers to take on more challenging problems as their skill levels increase Chapter-by-chapter projects that aid in the visualization of probability distributions New coverage of statistical quality control and quality production An appendix dedicated to the use of Mathematica® and a companion website containing the referenced data sets Featuring a practical and real-world approach, this textbook is ideal for a first course in probability for students majoring in statistics, engineering, business, psychology, operations research, and mathematics. Probability: An Introduction with Statistical Applications, Second Edition is also an excellent reference for researchers and professionals in any discipline who need to make decisions based on data as well as readers interested in learning how to accomplish effective decision making from data.

East meets West in this fresh, modern take on a timeless challenge: how to find contentment and meaning in life. In Radically Happy, a meditating Silicon Valley entrepreneur teams up with a young, insightful, and traditionally educated Tibetan Rinpoche. Together they present a path to radical happiness—a sense of well-being that you can access anytime but especially when life is challenging. Using mindfulness techniques and accessible meditations, personal stories and scientific studies, you’ll get to know your own mind and experience how a slight shift in your perspective can create a radical shift in your life.

Neville Price presents a major breakthrough in our understanding of the subject of plate tectonics in this new book. In this ambitious look at the importance of impacts of objects from space on the earth, he challenges the fundamentals of the theory on which geoscience has rested for the past 25 years. In the latter half of the 20th century