A guide for parents on the latest kid craze. Wildly popular, Webkinz® are the must-have toy for every five- to twelve-year-old. Presented in a highly intuitive, handbook-style organization, here is the first guide on this sought after stuffed animal. It enables parents to quickly and efficiently find the critters they’re looking for, learn the ins and outs of the Webkinz® website, and understand what their kids are doing online. In this Complete Idiot’s Guide®, you get: • Simple steps that will make the “adoption” process a breeze. • Expert tips on getting the most out of Webkinz® from the seven-year-old point of view. • Easy access to information on everything your child needs to know to get the most out of the online experience. • Smart strategies for keeping your child’s Webkinz® happy and healthy.

Think outside the borders. Global economics affects every aspect of our lives. Free trade agreements, tariffs, terrorism, trade deficits, international debt, global warming, OPEC, outsourcing, and sweat shops are just some of the forces driving our world, food supply, jobs, and future. The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to Global Economics provides the key to understanding the various facts, figures, policies, and practices that offer insight into this dynamic subject.

Small creatures of great importance. Microbiology, the branch of biology that studies microorganisms and their effects on humans, is a key part of medical training curriculum. Written by a top professor of microbiology and an experienced science writer, this book is a basic microbiology course that can be understood by anyone, including medical students, professionals wanting to bone up on the subject, and laypersons wanting to know about the topic. • Includes coverage on microbes and their relationship with each other, the body’s immune system, infectious diseases, biotechnology, and bioterrorism

The author shares his misadventures in parenting two daughters, a journey that pitted his over-the-top personality against such challenges as boyfriends, birth control, and inappropriate teachers.

“The bitingly hilarious, heartfelt This May End Badly takes your favorite fake dating trope and adds plenty of downright delightful shenanigans that’ll have readers tearing through the pages.”—Emma Lord, New York Times bestselling author of You Have a Match Pranking mastermind Doe and her motley band of Weston girls are determined to win the century-long war against Winfield Academy before the clock ticks down on their senior year. But when their headmistress announces that The Weston School will merge with its rival the following year, their longtime feud spirals into chaos. To protect the school that has been her safe haven since her parents’ divorce, Doe puts together a plan to prove once and for all that Winfield boys and Weston girls just don’t mix, starting with a direct hit at Three, Winfield’s boy king and her nemesis. In a desperate move to win, Doe strikes a bargain with Three’s cousin, Wells: If he fake dates her to get under Three’s skin, she’ll help him get back his rightful family heirloom from Three. As the pranks escalate, so do her feelings for her fake boyfriend, and Doe spins lie after lie to keep up her end of the deal. But when a teacher long suspected of inappropriate behavior messes with a younger Weston girl, Doe has to decide what’s more important: winning a rivalry, or joining forces to protect something far more critical than a prank war legacy. This May End Badly is a story about friendship, falling in love, and crossing pretty much every line presented to you—and how to atone when you do.

Rev. ed. of: Media and culture. 2nd ed. c2000. Includes bibliographical references (p. 575-582) and index.

A concise and affordable resource for the mass communication course, Media Essentials provides a flexible, informative, and relevant breakdown of what the media is, how it works, and how it impacts today’s most talked-about subjects. From #metoo to content streaming to social media and politics, students learn how a wide variety of recent developments have impacted the mass-media landscape—and how past innovation and change have informed our current media world. Media Essentials is available with LaunchPad, a robust online platform designed to help students fully engage with course content—and with the world of mass media. From our acclaimed LearningCurve adaptive quizzing, which helps students learn and retain concepts, to compelling features like an interactive e-book and a variety of entertaining and thought-provoking video clips, LaunchPad gets students connected with—and interested in—the information they need to succeed in class.

"There has never been a craze like Beanie Babies. The $5 beanbag animals with names like Seaweed the Otter and Gigi the Poodle drove a large swath of America into a greed-fueled frenzy as they chased the rarest Beanie Babies, whose values escalated weekly in the late 1990s. Just as strange as the mass hysteria was the man behind it. Sometimes called the "Steve Jobs of plush" by his employees, he obsessed over every detail of every animal his company ever released. He had no marketing budget and no connections, but he had something more valuable - an intuitive grasp of human psychology that would make him the richest man in the history of toys. The Great Beanie Baby Bubble is a classic American story of people winning and losing vast fortunes chasing what one dealer remembers as "the most spectacular dream ever sold.""--Back cover.

"AN AUTISTIC BOY WHO BEAT THE ODDS." Looking For Normal is the memoir of author, musician and filmmaker, Steve Slavin. His obsession with music, at an early age, led to a long career in the creative arts, albeit one plagued by clinical depression and the symptoms of a condition he was unaware of until 2008. In recounting the 48 years that led to his autism diagnosis, this darkly humorous memoir will inform and inspire anyone with an interest in mental health and autism. But more than this, it is the story of an "emotionally disturbed child, without a future" who, against the backdrop of low expectation, became an ambitious, independent adult, with a wife, daughters, and a career stifled by the long shadow of his childhood dysfunction. "A wonderful insight into an extraordinary life." - Peter Holmes Ph.D. "Insightful, inspiring, informative and entertaining. Looking For Normal is not just about overcoming the adversities that life throws at you on a regular basis. It is also about someone's journey of accepting, embracing and celebrating everything that comes with having autism." - Dr RF (Senior practitioner Educational Psychologist).

This book, which can be seen as both a research monograph and a text book, challenges the approaches to human interaction based on supposedly universal "maxims of conversation" and "principles of politeness", which fly in the face of reality as experienced by millions of people - refugees, immigrants, crosscultural families, and so on. By contrast to such approaches, which can be of no use in crosscultural communication and education, this book is both theoretical and practical: it shows that in different societies, norms of human interaction are different and reflect different cultural attitudes and values; and it offers a framework within which different cultural norms and different ways of speaking can be effectively explored, explained, and taught. The book discusses data from a wide range of languages, including English, Italian, Russian, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, and Walmatjari (an Australian Aboriginal language), and it shows that the meanings expressed in human interaction and the different "cultural scripts" prevailing in different speech communities can be described and compared in a way that is clear, simple, rigorous, and free of ethnocentric bias by using a "natural semantic metalanguage", based on empirically established universal human concepts. As the book shows, this metalanguage can be used as a basis for teaching successful cross-cultural communication and education, including the teaching of languages in a cultural context.