Systems Science

Corporate flameout Ned Altimer dreams of leaving his world behind. So, when Earthblood Online splashes onto the VRMMO scene, he dives in and never looks back. His advantages are twofold: exclusive access to the game’s three-day Head Start period, and a ridiculously handsome talking axe named Frank who has knowledge of the game’s deepest secrets...if the magnificent Frank ever feels like sharing them.

Three years ago, Lift asked a goddess to stop her from growing older - a wish she believed was granted. Now, in Edgedancer, the barely teenage nascent Knight Radiant finds that time stands still for no one. Although the young Azish emperor granted her safe haven from an executioner she knows only as Darkness, court life is suffocating the free-spirited Lift, who can't help heading to Yeddaw when she hears the relentless Darkness is there hunting people like her with budding powers. The downtrodden in Yeddaw have no champion, and Lift knows she must seize this awesome responsibility.

Discover the brilliant life of Hedy Lamarr. This talented film actress became an influential scientist with her invention of a secret radio system in the early 1940s, a building block of today’s wireless communications.

"Copaganda" is a special kind of propaganda employed by police, prosecutors, and news media. It stokes fear of police-recorded crime and distorts society’s responses to it. As the United States incarcerates five times more people per capita than it did in 1970—despite record low crime rates—a sprawling and profitable punishment bureaucracy spends a lot of time and money to manipulate what we think that bureaucracy does and why.

For decades, James MacGregor Burns has been one of the great masters of the study of power and leadership in America. Now he turns his eye to an institution of government that he believes has become more powerful---and more partisan---than the Founding Fathers ever intended: the Supreme Court. Much as we would like to believe that the Court remains aloof from ideological politics, Packing the Court reveals how often justices behave like politicians in robes.

The Connected System has changed Earth forever. It has brought the apocalypse but also brought other stronger enemies from the wider universe. Lochlan Brady and his daughters have found shelter in a new and growing community. Loch has found himself put in charge of the fledgling Clan Brady. It is not a position he wanted, but with his greater power it is one he has the responsibility for. Together with a Council of knowledgeable and skilled people in the Clan, the Bradys work to set themselves up to survive through the coming winter and the dangers from the changes brought by the Connection.

More potatoes for the Potato Lord! More workers for the potato plantations! I have mastered the Mage, resisted Temptation, and even learned to brew my own System Cider. But soon the curtain between System zones will fall. What waits behind it? People? People on boars?!

At a time when Steve Jobs was only a teenager and Mark Zuckerberg wasn't even born, a group of visionary engineers and designers - some of them only high school students - in the late 1960s and 1970s created a computer system called PLATO, which was not only years but light-years ahead in experimenting with how people would learn, engage, communicate, and play through connected computers.

More than any other institution in the country, Georgia State has overturned the assumption that poorer students are doomed to fail. Won't Lose This Dream describes how the architects of Georgia State's success harnessed the power of evolving data technologies, a "moneyball" strategy that helped them recognize and remove the obstacles that have held poor students back. Veteran journalist Andrew Gumbel uncovers the human stories behind these innovations, tracing real students as they realize lifelong dreams of graduating from college.

Every year, millions of Americans are overcharged and underserved while the health-care industry makes record profits. We know something is wrong, but the layers of bureaucracy designed to discourage complaints make pushing back seem impossible. Never Pay the First Bill is the guerilla guide to health care the American people and employers need. Drawing on 15 years of investigating the health-care industry, reporter Marshall Allen shows how companies and individuals have managed to force medical providers to play fair and shows how you can, too.

Recent elections in the advanced Western democracies have undermined the basic foundations of political systems that had previously beaten back all challenges - from both the left and the right. The election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, only months after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, signaled a dramatic shift in the politics of the rich democracies. In Anti-System Politics, Jonathan Hopkin traces the evolution of this shift and argues that it is a long-term result of abandoning the post-war model of egalitarian capitalism in the 1970s.

Gary doesn’t have all that much going for him. He’s a teenage boy who lives in a Tier-3 town that’s barely hanging on, and his family’s just a rung above dirt poor. Which is why he’s taken the very dangerous step of becoming an errand boy for the savage Underdogs gang. He doesn’t like what they do, but if he tries to get out, he’s pretty sure he’ll get very dead.

In My Stroke of Insight, Taylor shares her unique perspective on the brain and its capacity for recovery, and the sense of omniscient understanding she gained from this unusual and inspiring voyage out of the abyss of a wounded brain. It would take eight years for Taylor to heal completely. Because of her knowledge of how the brain works, her respect for the cells composing her human form, and most of all an amazing mother, Taylor completely repaired her mind and recalibrated her understanding of the world.

A leading expert in epigenetics - how genes switch on and off - provides a revolutionary, holistic, and personalized approach to better health by improving how your genes behave to prevent and reverse common ailments, chronic illnesses, and life-threatening diseases, including cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disorders, anxiety, depression, digestive issues, obesity, cancer, diabetes, and more.

The Ascension arc begins—and not everyone will make it out alive. After surviving the siege of Bastion, Alec West—Arcane Warden and Architect Nodebearer—receives a new directive: locate the First Pillar of Ascension. His team’s next destination? The ruins of Atlantis City. But they’re not alone. Another Nodebearer walks the earth—chosen by the Harbingers. And as rival factions clash beneath the broken skyline, Alec’s mission turns into a brutal three-way conflict: deadly Tier 2 monstrosities, PvP-enabled Harbinger elites, and the Obelisk’s own Warforged constructs. Inside ...

Ominous Obelisks land on Earth with a single message: Join the Games to give humanity a fighting chance to survive... or roll over and die. Too bad for them, Warren isn't the rolling-over type. The Empire is up to something. Warren and his cohort of unlikely heroes have just discovered that the game has been stacked against them. Someone really wants to harvest Earth's resources... And Warren just might know what that resource is... Turns out that Earth has an abundance of a particular mineral that just might make it the richest planet... well, anywhere. If they survive the games, that is.

Planet Earth burns in nuclear flame. But The System was kind and wise enough to transfer all its little humans into a new world. Everyone has been granted a new name, a starting bonus, and a rousing kick up the backside. Some got a sword, some a crown, and me . . . A potato?! How am I supposed to take over the world with this thing? System, are you sure you're so kind and wise after all?

Living with an advanced Werewolf System hasn't always been easy for Gary Dem. But it sure comes in handy. Without it, he would never have been able to take on—and literally devour—a lethal Altered and live to tell about it. With his new rank and abilities, Gary and his gang, the Howlers, are primed to finally wipe out the last remaining competition in Slough. As long as he can control himself and his growing werewolf pack, things might just turn out all right . . . But it's not bloody likely.

Quinn can barely handle her own life. When the Library of Everywhere discovers her compatible magical signature, suddenly, she is the sole existing potential librarian. Now, it's not only the weight of her world on her shoulders—Quinn must connect with the library system before the universe itself disintegrates. Once she's settled, it should be quiet, peaceful work—just as soon as she battles a few engorged bookworms, repairs hundreds of years of damage, and figures out why there's been no librarian for the last several centuries.

From best-selling author Jon Krakauer, a stark, powerful, meticulously reported narrative about a series of sexual assaults at the University of Montana - stories that illuminate the human drama behind the national plague of campus rape.