Obsidian (at obsidian.md on the web) is a new, free app for helping you build a "second brain" - a place for your ideas to arrive, develop, and stay for the long haul. The Obsidian app is built on open standards that ensures that your second brain will always be your own. It works with familiar files and folders that stay local on your disk, ensuring privacy and longevity. Yes, it's free. This book provides an introduction to the Obsidian app and walks you through a handful of key concepts to help you master the software. And the book presents several techniques shared by the wonderful Obsidian user community that will help new and experienced users alike to master this powerful software.

Obsidian is an innovative app for working with ideas, striving to serve as your second brain. That's an ambitious goal and Obsidian is an ambitious app, which has seen its popularity grow leaps and bounds over the past year. This book brings together tips from Expert Obsidian users who've tweaked and finessed their note-taking and sense-making process in Obsidian. In this book, you'll learn how to: * Learn for the long term by focusing on concepts rather than traditional notes; * Push your creative juices by discovering connections between concepts; * Manage a publishing workflow using a Kanban board, from capturing initial ideas to developing these through to completion; * Plan and organize your day in Obsidian, tracking your regular work and documenting your creative journey; * Work efficiently in Obsidian with shortcuts, templates and several plugins to boost your creative process. This book presents Experts' use of Obsidian. For a ground-up understanding of key concepts and techniques in Obsidian, pick up the related book "Master Obsidian Quickly - Boost Your Learning & Productivity with a Free, Modern, Powerful Knowledge Toolkit" by the same author.

The Apple Pencil unlocks the full potential of the iPad as a digital note taking tool. This guide presents several techniques from experienced users who use the Apple Pencil extensively for note-taking on a range of subjects. In this book, you will learn: * How to write neatly with the Apple Pencil on the smooth iPad glass. * How to cleverly structure your hand-written notes on a page to make revision easier. * A handwriting-led and fun active learning technique to consistently work through your study materials. * How to construct big picture notes on an infinite canvas to make sense of details. * Tackle a PDF-heavy curriculum with annotation tools built into iPadOS, and additional features available in GoodNotes and Notability. * Trace images neatly for a precise yet hand-drawn look, spruced up with an easy shading technique to make a memorable diagram. * Engage "Scribble" with the Apple Pencil to handwrite everywhere, as an alternative to keyboard input, and thus work smoothly on the iPad while note-taking. Readers may also be interested in the book iPad for Students - Be More Productive at School by the same author. The book dives into the broader benefits of using an iPad for school and leveraging excellent apps to make studies more efficient.

"Building a second brain is getting things done for the digital age. It's a ... productivity method for consuming, synthesizing, and remembering the vast amount of information we take in, allowing us to become more effective and creative and harness the unprecedented amount of technology we have at our disposal"--

Anki is a powerful tool for all students and professionals. Anki already has a large following in some student communities, such as in Medicine, where students have to memorize and recall a large volume of factual information. Similarly, flashcards have been popular for learning languages - again an area where rapid recall of vocabulary is a must for developing fluency. This book aims to make it easier for students and professionals to understand how Anki works, and how to use it effectively. When you come across information that you want to memorize for the long term, Anki should be your go-to tool. This book shows you: * Key concepts and precise techniques that makes Anki effective * How to write high quality cards for faster recall * How to adjust Anki settings to suit the content you want to study * How to use Anki add-ons like the Heatmap, Pop-up Wikipedia, Frozen Fields, and Image Occlusion

Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Dr Tainter describes nearly two dozen cases of collapse and reviews more than 2000 years of explanations. He then develops a new and far-reaching theory.

How do we know if we're following our true callings? How do we sharpen our senses to cut through the distractions of everyday reality and hear the calls that are beckoning us? is the first book to examine the many kinds of calls we receive and the great variety of channels through which they come to us. A calling may be to do something (change careers, go back to school, have a child) or to be something (more creative, less judgmental, more loving). While honoring a calling's essential mystery, this book also guides readers to ask and answer the fundamental questions that arise from any calling: How do we recognize it? How do we distinguish the true call from the siren song? How do we handle our resistance to a call? What happens when we say yes? What happens when we say no? Drawing on the hard-won wisdom and powerful stories of people who have followed their own calls, Gregg Levoy shows us the many ways to translate a calling into action. In a style that is poetic, exuberant, and keenly insightful, he presents an illuminating and ultimately practical inquiry into how we listen and respond to our calls, whether at work or at home, in our relationships or in service. Callings is a compassionate guide to discovering your own callings and negotiating the tight passages to personal power and authenticity.

Why are some parts of the world so rich and others so poor? Why did the Industrial Revolution--and the unprecedented economic growth that came with it--occur in eighteenth-century England, and not at some other time, or in some other place? Why didn't industrialization make the whole world rich--and why did it make large parts of the world even poorer? In A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark tackles these profound questions and suggests a new and provocative way in which culture--not exploitation, geography, or resources--explains the wealth, and the poverty, of nations. Countering the prevailing theory that the Industrial Revolution was sparked by the sudden development of stable political, legal, and economic institutions in seventeenth-century Europe, Clark shows that such institutions existed long before industrialization. He argues instead that these institutions gradually led to deep cultural changes by encouraging people to abandon hunter-gatherer instincts-violence, impatience, and economy of effort-and adopt economic habits-hard work, rationality, and education. The problem, Clark says, is that only societies that have long histories of settlement and security seem to develop the cultural characteristics and effective workforces that enable economic growth. For the many societies that have not enjoyed long periods of stability, industrialization has not been a blessing. Clark also dissects the notion, championed by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, that natural endowments such as geography account for differences in the wealth of nations. A brilliant and sobering challenge to the idea that poor societies can be economically developed through outside intervention, A Farewell to Alms may change the way global economic history is understood.