From a blurry eyed, awkward gymnastics failure to a courageous space traveller, 11-year-old Lucy weaves through the chaos created when a portal opens up in her suburban laundry! How was she to know that her mother, a great astronomer, was powering the portal with her bedtime space stories!? Each adventure through the portal to the waiting Hubble Telescope, builds on Lucy’s strength and imagination, while she desperately tries to convince her mother of her Super Powers. Can she prove it, or does the adult brain swiftly swallow up the magic?

School’s out, and Lucy is excited to return to the cosmic laundry room she’s discovered in her house, ready for her next space adventure. The portal opens when her mother tells Lucy stories about her work as a space scientist. Now she wants Mum to tell her about the International Space Station, in the hope that the portal will take her there. But then Dad arrives in a run-down motorhome called Madeline, and announces that the family are going on a road trip. Not only are Lucy’s space adventure plans foiled, she’s also expected to share a cramped old van with her smelly brother Zac! Will she survive and find some magic during this trip, or will sharing with Zac lead to disaster? International Outhouse is the second book in the Loopy Lucy series.

" ... Concise explanations and descriptions - easily read and readily understood - of what we know of the chain of events and processes that connect the Sun to the Earth, with special emphasis on space weather and Sun-Climate."--Dear Reader.

Now in widespread use, generalized additive models (GAMs) have evolved into a standard statistical methodology of considerable flexibility. While Hastie and Tibshirani's outstanding 1990 research monograph on GAMs is largely responsible for this, there has been a long-standing need for an accessible introductory treatment of the subject that also emphasizes recent penalized regression spline approaches to GAMs and the mixed model extensions of these models. Generalized Additive Models: An Introduction with R imparts a thorough understanding of the theory and practical applications of GAMs and related advanced models, enabling informed use of these very flexible tools. The author bases his approach on a framework of penalized regression splines, and builds a well-grounded foundation through motivating chapters on linear and generalized linear models. While firmly focused on the practical aspects of GAMs, discussions include fairly full explanations of the theory underlying the methods. Use of the freely available R software helps explain the theory and illustrates the practicalities of linear, generalized linear, and generalized additive models, as well as their mixed effect extensions. The treatment is rich with practical examples, and it includes an entire chapter on the analysis of real data sets using R and the author's add-on package mgcv. Each chapter includes exercises, for which complete solutions are provided in an appendix. Concise, comprehensive, and essentially self-contained, Generalized Additive Models: An Introduction with R prepares readers with the practical skills and the theoretical background needed to use and understand GAMs and to move on to other GAM-related methods and models, such as SS-ANOVA, P-splines, backfitting and Bayesian approaches to smoothing and additive modelling.

A compilation of 3M voices, memories, facts and experiences from the company's first 100 years.

In this unique volume, an international cast of leading scholars from several disciplines offers a comprehensive assessment of the current status of space-based weaponry. Regional and technical experts offer their analysis of the major powers' special interests in space and also examine the broader issues of ICBM proliferation, testing, monitoring, and verification as well as possible opportunities for cooperation between states with a stake in space power.