It is the winter of 1880, and the future looks promising for Annie and Nate Dawson. Nate’s law practice is taking off. Annie has made the transition from pretend clairvoyant to a successful financial consultant. And they are looking forward to spending their first Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays together. For Robert Livingston, the owner San Francisco’s newest grand emporium, the holidays don’t look so promising. Not if he can’t figure out how to stop whoever is stealing from his department store, the Silver Strike Bazaar. However, when he hires the Dawsons to investigate, they discover that behind the doors of his “Palace of Plenty,” nothing is quite what it seems. Pilfered Promises, a sweet cozy historical mystery, is the fifth novel in the Victorian San Francisco Mystery series featuring Annie and Nate Dawson and their friends and family in the O’Farrell Street boarding house.

Includes excerpt of: The only thing worse than witches.

“Wake Up America…” A look into the future, written a decade ago and so far proven correct, remains IMPORTANT because it’s a fact that our nation remains on track to Perish and it’s VITAL because CHANGE is still possible. Research for “Wake Up America…” was consummated when George Bush was president, when fear of reprisal from his administration was apparent and said fear was instrumental in “Wake Up America…” being reworked and presented as fiction but (although being a bit muddled) the messages remained and predictions in the book continue to unfold . . . Housing and Jobs were two and both continue to plague US as we remain on track to expire in spite of laudable efforts made by president Obama and others to change our nations’ direction. I continue to hope we will change, hence this book, but can’t ignore the inertia keeping us on course (powered mostly by ignorance and greed in America) and moving towards our own demise. The “Rogues,” officials targeted in “Wake Up America…” remain in place and are growing in spite of efforts to quell them or remove them from positions of power (especially those officials who were elected to serve the people), Rogues not serving but servicing the people . . . like a Bull services a Cow. Writing “Wake Up America…” I had the audacity to think Americans would read it and take action needed to identify and recall Rogues who were elected officials and take actions to squeeze out all Rogues in power and save our nation from the transition we currently are experiencing that if continued will definitely lead to an inevitable albeit unspecified, unrecoverable, breakdown. Also, over two decades ago I Researched/Published "Vanishing Mainframes..." in the Journal INTERFACE before IBM split up to prevent going out of business . . . and note IBM and all my colleagues ignored the research and predictions, which was the FIRST such publications looking into the future. GOOGLE, thank you for helping me advertise “Wake Up America…”

This new book is the first to make logical and important connections between trapping and foraging ecology. It develops and describes—both verbally and mathematically--the underlying principles that determine and define trap-organism interactions. More important, it goes on to explain and illustrate how these principles and relationships can be used to estimate absolute population densities in the landscape and to address an array of important problems relating to the use of trapping for detection, population estimation, and suppression in both research and applied contexts. The breakthrough nature of subject matter described has broad fundamental and applied implications for research for addressing important real-world problems in agriculture, ecology, public health and conservation biology. Monitoring traps baited with potent attractants of animals like insects have long played a critical role in revealing what pests are present and when they are active. However, pest managers have been laboring without the tools necessary for quick and inexpensive determination of absolute pest density, which is the cornerstone of pest management decisions. This book spans the gamut from highly theoretical and fundamental research to very practical applications that will be widely useful across all of agriculture.

Includes social cognition in birds and nonhuman primates as well as various aspects of social cognition in human children

In the past decade, the field of comparative cognition has grown and thrived. No less rigorous than purely behavioristic investigations, examinations of animal intelligence are useful for scientists and psychologists alike in their quest to understand the nature and mechanisms of intelligence. Extensive field research of various species has yielded exciting new areas of research, integrating findings from psychology, behavioral ecology, and ethology in a unique and wide-ranging synthesis of theory and research on animal cognition. The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Cognition contains sections on perception and illusion, attention and search, memory processes, spatial cognition, conceptualization and categorization, problem solving and behavioral flexibility, and social cognition processes including findings in primate tool usage, pattern learning, and counting. The authors have incorporated findings and theoretical approaches that reflect the current state of the field. This comprehensive volume will be a must-read for students and scientists who want to know about the state of the art of the modern science of comparative cognition.