"Living in the Cloud: Lessons From the Streets by John (Johnny) Crowe is a fun-filled and intriguing story about growing up in small town America in the '60's. John's hometown of St. Cloud, Florida is the featured venue where the people living in St. Cloud at this time in American History seem to come alive in the heart and mind of the reader as the storyline unfolds." Foreword by Dale McCullars John's wife, Betty, aptly calls the book a love letter to John's hometown. "I tried to capture the best of times I experienced in the Cloud, and how the lessons learned during that time shaped my life." John Crowe author."If you are like me, you will have flashbacks to your personal experiences and adventures." says Glenn Knapp, classmate.No matter your age, when or where you grew up, you will enjoy and relate to John's stories andyou will remember your growing up during a particular time in America's history.

The long-awaited second collection by a central literary figure, Columbia University professor, and poetry editor of the Boston Review.

"Noah Keller has a pretty normal life until one wild afternoon when his parents pick him up from school and head straight for the airport, telling him on the ride that his name isn't really Noah and he didn't really just turn eleven in March ... As Noah, now 'Jonah Brown,' and his parents head behind the Iron Curtain into East Berlin, the rules and secrets begin to pile up so quickly that he can hardly keep track of the questions bubbling up inside him: who, exactly, is listening--and why?"

The militarized legacy of the digital cloud: how the cloud grew out of older network technologies and politics. We may imagine the digital cloud as placeless, mute, ethereal, and unmediated. Yet the reality of the cloud is embodied in thousands of massive data centers, any one of which can use as much electricity as a midsized town. Even all these data centers are only one small part of the cloud. Behind that cloud-shaped icon on our screens is a whole universe of technologies and cultural norms, all working to keep us from noticing their existence. In this book, Tung-Hui Hu examines the gap between the real and the virtual in our understanding of the cloud. Hu shows that the cloud grew out of such older networks as railroad tracks, sewer lines, and television circuits. He describes key moments in the prehistory of the cloud, from the game “Spacewar” as exemplar of time-sharing computers to Cold War bunkers that were later reused as data centers. Countering the popular perception of a new “cloudlike” political power that is dispersed and immaterial, Hu argues that the cloud grafts digital technologies onto older ways of exerting power over a population. But because we invest the cloud with cultural fantasies about security and participation, we fail to recognize its militarized origins and ideology. Moving between the materiality of the technology itself and its cultural rhetoric, Hu's account offers a set of new tools for rethinking the contemporary digital environment.

The clouds will put on a pageant for you with their ever-changing shapes and sizes. This book reveals some fascinating science behind these beautiful displays.

An entertaining, fact-packed introduction to the science of night. What happens when we go to sleep at night? Kids can find out in this fun exploration of the world after dark. This nonfiction book covers the surprising amount of activity going on at night with animals, plants, celestial objects and even our own bodies! Here are answers to all the questions kids have about nighttime — and many they have never thought of! — including: Why do we dream? How do bats use echolocation? What blooms in the moonlight? Why do stars twinkle? There’s so much here to investigate, kids will be up all night!

A 1959 classic 'hard' science-fiction novel by renowned Cambridge astronomer and cosmologist Fred Hoyle. Tracks the progress of a giant black cloud that comes towards Earth and sits in front of the sun, causing widespread panic and death. A select group of scientists and astronomers - including the dignified Astronomer Royal, the pipe smoking Dr Marlowe and the maverick, eccentric Professor Kingsly - engage in a mad race to understand and communicate with the cloud, battling against trigger happy politicians. In the pacy, engaging style of John Wyndham and John Christopher, with plenty of hard science thrown in to add to the chillingly credible premise (he manages to foretell Artificial Intelligence, Optical Character Recognition and Text-to-Speech converters), Hoyle carries you breathlessly through to its thrilling end.

The conventional wisdom on how technology will change the future is wrong. Mark Mills lays out a radically different and optimistic vision for what’s really coming. The mainstream forecasts fall into three camps. One considers today as the “new normal,” where ordering a ride or food on a smartphone or trading in bitcoins is as good as it’s going to get. Another foresees a dystopian era of widespread, digitally driven job- and business-destruction. A third believes that the only technological revolution that matters will be found with renewable energy and electric cars. But according to Mills, a convergence of technologies will instead drive an economic boom over the coming decade, one that historians will characterize as the “Roaring 2020s.” It will come not from any single big invention, but from the confluence of radical advances in three primary technology domains: microprocessors, materials, and machines. Microprocessors are increasingly embedded in everything. Materials, from which everything is built, are emerging with novel, almost magical capabilities. And machines, which make and move all manner of stuff, are undergoing a complementary transformation. Accelerating and enabling all of this is the Cloud, history’s biggest infrastructure, which is itself based on the building blocks of next-generation microprocessors and artificial intelligence. We’ve seen this pattern before. The technological revolution that drove the great economic expansion of the twentieth century can be traced to a similar confluence, one that was first visible in the 1920s: a new information infrastructure (telephony), new machines (cars and power plants), and new materials (plastics and pharmaceuticals). Single inventions don’t drive great, long-cycle booms. It always takes convergent revolutions in technology’s three core spheres—information, materials, and machines. Over history, that’s only happened a few times. We have wrung much magic from the technologies that fueled the last long boom. But the great convergence now underway will ignite the 2020s. And this time, unlike any previous historical epoch, we have the Cloud amplifying everything. The next long boom starts now.

Maybe it was a professor, a friend or an uncle. A mentor who understood you and guided you to understand your own life. For Jake Newfield that person was Kal, his Grandfather. Perhaps you, like Jake, lost track of life's meaning as you progressed in your career and developed as an adult. Perhaps you wish now you could go back and have the chance to speak with that mentor. As Jake learned, Kal's life wasn't easy; he grew up in extreme poverty in Manhattan during the height of the depression, and he lost his only son. When Kal and his wife Ethel moved into an assisted living facility near Boston, Jake realized that Kal was in the final stages of his life and began visiting Kal every Sunday evening. The weekly meetings continued for almost three years, and changed the lives of both Kal and Jake. While cleaning out Kal's old apartment, Jake found a journal that Kal had written over fifty years ago while in a psychiatric hospital. The journal entries, combined with Kal's own recollections, enabled Jake to get a clear understanding of Kal's past. In doing so, Jake was able to understand his own life more fully, and reach conclusions about life's meaning. Not everyone spends time thinking about what they want out of life. Instead, they live it, look back, draw conclusions about what they did right or wrong, and close the curtain. Through his discussions, Jake learned Kal's past, his regrets, and his secrets, which made a significant impact on how he views relationships and life.

Working at a less-than-inspiring office job, Tony, a gay man struggling with grief and mental illness, attempts to make a connection with younger, flamboyant and free-spirited artist named Antonio. Cloud Cover captures the experience of love and loss-of others and of oneself-amidst past trauma, modern expectations and inner turmoil.