The Dramatic Conclusion to The Link Series On the verge of cataclysm, humanity needs heroes. Reggie and Lisa are in no condition for the job. When fate pulls them from the brink of despair, only to push them into confrontation with a cosmic madman, they both must reach past personal loss, and work together to discover the truth about the link. The answers they seek lie deep in The Beyond, and time is running out. Reluctant heroes, a maniacal cosmonaut, all of humanity in peril. The search to find out what it means to be human ends here.

The Dramatic Conclusion to The Link Series On the verge of unimaginable cataclysm, the universe needs heroes. Reggie and Lisa are in no condition for the job. But when fate pulls them from the brink of despair, only to push them into confrontation with a cosmic madman, they must reach past personal loss and work together. And the answers they seek lie deep in The Beyond. Time is running out. The air beneath the surface of Venus stings and smells of chlorine when Vladimir Kontopovic arrives. He sneers and breathes it in deeply, stoking a rage that burns like the Venus atmosphere. The docile Folk who live in the subterranean halls of this sizzling planet wronged him. His taskmasters on Earth wronged him. They will pay, starting with the Venusfolk who once cared for him, then the Earthfolk who sent him on a suicide mission, then, literally, all of humanity. He has the power to do it. He controls the link. Reluctant heroes, a maniacal cosmonaut, greater humanity; none of them know the true source of the link.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Celebrated futurist Ray Kurzweil, hailed by Bill Gates as “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence,” presents an “elaborate, smart, and persuasive” (The Boston Globe) view of the future course of human development. “Artfully envisions a breathtakingly better world.”—Los Angeles Times “Startling in scope and bravado.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times “An important book.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer At the onset of the twenty-first century, humanity stands on the verge of the most transforming and thrilling period in its history. It will be an era in which the very nature of what it means to be human will be both enriched and challenged as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity. While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, The Singularity Is Near presents a radical and optimistic view of the coming age that is both a dramatic culmination of centuries of technological ingenuity and a genuinely inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny.

The book undertakes a thorough human rights assessment of the EU Returns Directive. The overarching human rights framework, which circumscribes states prerogatives in the context of expulsion, builds upon obligations derived from the principle of non-refoulement; the right to life, respect for family and private life, effective remedy, basic social rights; the prohibition of torture and ill-treatment; and protection against arbitrary detention and collective expulsion. Based on this assessment, Majcher explores several protection gaps in the EU return policy which may result in violations of migrants’ rights and highlights how the provisions of the Directive should be implemented in line with member states’ human rights obligations. Informed by this assessment, the book discusses amendments to the Directive, proposed by the European Commission in September 2018. “By examining the European Union (EU) Returns Directive in the light of international and European human rights law, Izabella Majcher thoroughly explores and analyses the requirements the EU member states’ authorities must guarantee migrants in an irregular situation when they adopt and implement return decisions, entry bans, pre-removal detention, and removal.” Marie-Laure Basilien-Gainche, Professor of public international law, University Jean Moulin Lyon 3, Honorary member of the Institut universitaire de France

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action. Includes Black-and-White Illustrations

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This qualitative case study of an American manufacturing organization describes the barriers which limited its ability to receive maximum return on its investment for training and development resources invested in their human assets. Changing global economics have forced organizations to the realization that their competitive advantage lies in developing and tapping into their human assets or human capital. Professionals, managers, human resource development specialists, and academicians alike have developed theories supporting the systematic development of human assets to improve performance and achieve organizational business goals. This book examines how one organization, typically described as a High Performance Organization, attempted to put theory into application. Specifically, the book examines the concepts of needs assessment, systems theory, organization development, human capital theory, and performance improvement. The results find a systemic failure in human asset development initiatives rooted in the failure to view the organization as a whole, systematically assess performance, and involve the entire organization in designing and implementing a holistic approach to improving performance and developing the organizations human assets. Specifically, inefficient organizational structure and lack of clearly defined business goals were significant barriers to the systematic development of their human assets.

First published in 1973. This book proposes and tests a theory about human memory, about how a person encodes, retains, and retrieves information from memory. The book is especially concerned with memory for sentential materials. We propose a theoretical framework which is adequate for describing comprehension of linguistic materials, for exhibiting the internal representation of propositional materials, for characterizing the interpretative processes which encode this information into memory and make use of it for remembering, for answering questions, recognizing instances of known categories, drawing inferences, and making deductions.