In this sequel to A Fine Mess! the adventures of hapless Year 9 students Michael Hardy and Woody Decker continue. Michael and Woody have a serious knack for getting themselves into a lot of trouble, from exploding fire trucks to exploding cows, sewage laden willy-willys, kidnapped Harry Potter gnomes, cattle prods, smoking penises and serious wardrobe malfunctions, there's nothing these boys can't stuff up. On the other hand, Michael's alter-ego the uber-cool Dirk Fleming, Junior MI6 Agent, can do no wrong with his feats of danger, daring and high drama. From dreadful delinquent to reluctant hero in just 192 pages - can Michael save the day, win the girl and stay out of the poo?

Do you want to push Ruby to its limits? The Ruby Cookbook is the most comprehensive problem-solving guide to today's hottest programming language. It gives you hundreds of solutions to real-world problems, with clear explanations and thousands of lines of code you can use in your own projects. From data structures and algorithms, to integration with cutting-edge technologies, the Ruby Cookbook has something for every programmer. Beginners and advanced Rubyists alike will learn how to program with: Strings and numbers Arrays and hashes Classes, modules, and namespaces Reflection and metaprogramming XML and HTML processing Ruby on Rails (including Ajax integration) Databases Graphics Internet services like email, SSH, and BitTorrent Web services Multitasking Graphical and terminal interfaces If you need to write a web application, this book shows you how to get started with Rails. If you're a system administrator who needs to rename thousands of files, you'll see how to use Ruby for this and other everyday tasks. You'll learn how to read and write Excel spreadsheets, classify text with Bayesian filters, and create PDF files. We've even included a few silly tricks that were too cool to leave out, like how to blink the lights on your keyboard. The Ruby Cookbook is the most useful book yet written about Ruby. When you need to solve a problem, don't reinvent the wheel: look it up in the Cookbook.

Jack's family is temporarily based on Rottnest Island during WWII, while his father helps build an air field. Jack and his best friend Banjo have the run of the island and a remarkable knack for getting into trouble - but as Jack says, "I'm not that bad, I just get caught a lot!" Dafty, a simple but loveable young boy dotes on Banjo and Jack. When Dafty seeks revenge against the local schoolmaster for a punishment inflicted on Banjo, life becomes suddenly more serious. Norman Jorgenson deftly recreates this period in Australian history from the perspective of a young boy. The poignant, mult-layered text offers young readers a valuable insight into life in Australia during the war, as well as an engaging and entertaining read.

A revised, enlarged, and updated edition of this authoritative and entertaining reference book—named the #2 essential home library reference book by the Wall Street Journal “Shapiro does original research, earning [this] volume a place on the quotation shelf next to Bartlett's and Oxford's.”—William Safire, New York Times Magazine (on the original edition) “The most accurate, thorough, and up-to-date quotation book ever compiled.”—Bryan A. Garner, Los Angeles Review of Books Updated to include more than a thousand new quotations, this reader-friendly volume contains over twelve thousand famous quotations, arranged alphabetically by author and sourced from literature, history, popular culture, sports, digital culture, science, politics, law, the social sciences, and all other aspects of human activity. Contemporaries added to this edition include Beyoncé, Sandra Cisneros, James Comey, Drake, Louise Glück, LeBron James, Brett Kavanaugh, Lady Gaga, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Barack Obama, John Oliver, Nancy Pelosi, Vladimir Putin, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and David Foster Wallace. The volume also reflects path-breaking recent research resulting in the updating of quotations from the first edition with more accurate wording or attribution. It has also incorporated noncontemporary quotations that have become relevant to the present day. In addition, The New Yale Book of Quotations reveals the striking fact that women originated many familiar quotations, yet their roles have been forgotten and their verbal inventions have often been credited to prominent men instead. This book’s quotations, annotations, extensive cross-references, and large keyword index will satisfy both the reader who seeks specific information and the curious browser who appreciates an amble through entertaining pages.

The eighth Dr. Siri Paiboun mystery Dr. Siri never really wanted to be Laos’s national coroner. And now that he is in his mid-70s, he longs to spend some time with his wife before the untimely death that is sure to befall him, according to the local transvestite fortune-teller. But retirement will have to wait (again) until he has completed one last job for the Lao government: supervising an excavation for the remains of a US fighter pilot who went down in the remote northern Lao jungle ten years earlier. And the stakes are high. The presence of American soldiers in Laos is controversial, and the search party includes high-level politicians and scientists. So when a member of the party is found dead, Dr. Siri suspects it may not have been an accident. Can Dr. Siri get to the bottom of the MIA pilot’s mysterious story before the body count rises and the fortune-teller’s prediction comes true?

Robert Powell argues persuasively and elegantly for the usefulness of formal models in studying international conflict and for the necessity of greater dialogue between modeling and empirical analysis. Powell makes it clear that many widely made arguments about the way states act under threat do not hold when subjected to the rigors of modeling. In doing so, he provides a more secure foundation for the future of international relations theory. Powell argues that, in the Hobbesian environment in which states exist, a state can respond to a threat in at least three ways: (1) it can reallocate resources already under its control; (2) it can try to defuse the threat through bargaining and compromise; (3) it can try to draw on the resources of other states by allying with them. Powell carefully outlines these three responses and uses a series of game theoretic models to examine each of them, showing that the models make the analysis of these responses more precise than would otherwise be possible. The advantages of the modeling-oriented approach, Powell contends, have been evident in the number of new insights they have made possible in international relations theory. Some argue that these advances could have originated in ordinary-language models, but as Powell notes, they did not in practice do so. The book focuses on the insights and intuitions that emerge during modeling, rather than on technical analysis, making it accessible to readers with only a general background in international relations theory.