With the School Invention Fair coming up, Sam is determined to invent the best invention. First, he builds a robot that’ll clean the toilet (but it refuses). He tries a fart fan (but that just creates a mess at lunch). Will Sam come to the fair empty-handed, or will he create something great and win a prize?

Sam's school is hosting a talent show to raise money for the Environmental Center. But Sam doesn't have a talent to perform! Or so he thinks. He tries juggling, but just can't get the hang of it. Plus, his arch-nemesis, Wax, decides to juggle in the talent show as well--and Wax is good. But in a moment of inspiration, Sam learns that sometimes you don't have to look very far to find out what you're really good at!

With the School Invention Fair coming up, Sam is determined to invent the best invention.

Acclaimed writer Naomi Kritzer's marvelous tales of science fiction and fantasy are now collected in Cat Pictures and Other Stories. Here are seventeen short stories, including her Hugo Award-winning story "Cat Pictures Please," which is about what would happen if artificial intelligence was born out of our search engine history. Two stories are previously unpublished. Kritzer has a gift for telling stories both humorous and tender. Her stories are filled with wit and intelligence, and require thoughtful reading.

In Robotics in Service he observes that the time is ripe for robotics to launch itself into an entirely new marketplace.

Something happened, something big. Over thousands of years we became the humans we are today. Homo sapiens: to our current knowledge, the most intelligent species on this planet. But are we the most intelligent species, period? We are standing at the brink of a massive paradigm shift. A shift so fundamental, so far-reaching and transformative that we cannot even begin to understand what is going to happen to us and our intelligence. We are facing the most transformative change in about 10,000 years. Industrialization and globalization, the connectedness of minds and machines in the worldwide web, and the use of data as a new currency are mere precursors of what is going to happen next. We will no longer be the only species using reason, experience and intelligence to make sense of our world. Maybe we should rethink calling it our world anyway.

"Robots Don't Respect Sundays" locates the humor in facts. It's a book of tough, terse and often terrific accounts of science and technology gone awry. Hard-hitting and ethical. Ironic and spiritual. Direct and downright funny.

On the advice of a five-dollar psychic, Tina Martin, a zany, overworked mother of two, quits her high-powered job and moves her family to Shanghai. Tina yearns for this new setting to bring her the zen-like inner peace she’s always heard about on infomercials. Instead, she becomes a totally exasperated fish out of water, doing wacky things like stealing the shoes of a shifty delivery man, spraying local women with a bidet hose, and contemplating the murder of her new pet cricket. It takes the friendship of an elderly tai chi instructor, a hot Mandarin tutor, and several mah-jongg-tile-slinging expats to bring Tina closer to a culture she doesn’t understand, the dream job she never knew existed, and the self she has always sought. Fish Heads and Duck Skin will resonate with anyone who has ever wondered who they are, why they were put here, and how they ever lived before eating pan-fried pork buns.

123 ROBOT EXPERIMENTS! 123 STEPS NEEDED TO BRING OUT THE GENIUS IN EVERY BASEMENT HOBBYIST! If you enjoy tinkering in your workshop and have a fascination for robotics, you'll have hours of fun working through the 123 experiments found in this innovative project book. More than just an enjoyable way to spend time, these exciting experiments also provide a solid grounding in robotics, electronics, and programming. Each experiment builds on the skills acquired in those before it so you develop a hands-on, nuts-and-bolts understanding of robotics -- from the ground up. 123 Robotics Projects for the Evil Genius -- * Introduces you to robotics, electronics, and programming for robotics step-by-step -- you don't need to be a science whiz to get started, but you will be when you have finished * Vividly explains the science behind robots and the technologies needed to build them, including: Electronics; Mechanical assembly; Motors and batteries; Programming and microcontrollers * Shows how you can create simple robots and models using materials found around the house and workroom * Requires only inexpensive, easily obtained parts and tools * Provides a PCB (printed circuit board) that will make it easy to create the circuits used in this book as well as your own experiments * Gives you directions for building a maze-solving robot, two different designs for a light-seeking robot, an artificial intelligence program that will respond to you, and much more * Explains underlying principles and suggests other applications * Supplies parts lists and program listings IMAGINATIVE EXPERIMENTS THAT TEACH THE BASICS -- WHILE PROVIDING HOURS OF FUN!

Information about intelligent robots and their makers, including photographis, interviews, behind-the-scenes information and technical date about machines that is easy to understand.