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How animals conceive of death and dying—and what it can teach us about our own relationships with mortalityWhen the opossum feels threatened, she becomes paralyzed. Her body temperature plummets, her breathing and heart rates drop to a minimum, and her glands simulate the smell of a putrefying corpse. Playing Possum explores what the opossum and other creatures can teach us about how we and other species understand mortality, and demonstrates that the concept of death, far from being a uniquely human attribute, is widespread in the animal kingdom.With humor and empathy, Susana Monsó tells the stories of ants who attend their own funerals, chimpanzees who clean the teeth of their dead, dogs who snack on their caregivers, crows who avoid the places where they saw a carcass, elephants obsessed with collecting ivory, and whales who carry their dead for weeks. Monsó, one of today's leading experts on animal cognition and ethics, shows how there are more ways to conceive of mortality than the human way, and challenges the notion that the only emotional reactions to death worthy of our attention are ones that resemble our own.Blending philosophical insight with new evidence from behavioral science and comparative psychology, Playing Possum dispels the anthropocentric biases that cloud our understanding of the natural world, and reveals that, when it comes to death and dying, we are just another animal.

We all sometimes ‘lurk'in online spaces without posting or engaging, just reading the posts and comments. But neither reading nor lurking are ever passive acts. In fact, readers of social media are making decisions and taking grassroots actions on multiple dimensions. Unpacking this understudied phenomenon, this book challenges the conventional perspective of what counts as participatory online culture. Presenting lurking as a communication and literacy practice that resists dominant power structures, it offers an innovative approach to digital qualitative methods. Unique and original in its subject, this is a call for internet researchers to broaden their methods to include lurkers'participation and presence.

Giraffes have stretched and munched their ways into kids'hearts. With this book, readers can become giraffe experts and learn how to save the animals they love. Featuring an introduction from Chelsea Clinton!Did you know that one well-placed giraffe kick is strong enough to kill a lion? How about that an adult giraffe can eat a hundred pounds of leaves in a day? Or that some giraffes hum to each other at night?Perfect for all animal lovers—and giraffe fans in particular—this book is filled with all the facts you need to know to become a giraffe expert! Where are giraffes found? What's it like to be a giraffe? Why are giraffes endangered, and who has been working hard to save them? Read this book and find out how you can help save the giraffes!Complete with black-and-white photographs, a list of fun giraffe facts, and things that kids can do right this very moment to help save giraffes from extinction, this book, with an introduction by animal advocate Chelsea Clinton, is a must for every family, school, and community library.

Quietly, without most people noticing, the population of giraffes in the wild has decreased by nearly 40 percent since 1985. Giraffes have disappeared entirely from seven countries where they used to live. Researchers believe fewer than 98,000 exist in the wild—fewer even than endangered African elephants. In 2016, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature added giraffes to the organization's Red List of Threatened Species. What is causing their disappearance? Overpopulation of humans in giraffe habitats and illegal poaching. Learn about giraffes'physical characteristics, habitats, and life cycles; examine the dangers they face from humans and climate change; and meet the scientists working to save these gentle giants using technology and conservation efforts.

A USA Today Bestseller'Immersive, satisfying, tense--and timely: This is probably happening for real right now.'--Lee Child'First-rate...Slick, heart-hammering entertainment.'--The New York Times Book ReviewOn an early morning in November, a couple boards a private plane bound for Geneva, flying into a storm. Soon after, it simply drops off the radar, and its wreckage is later uncovered in the Alps. Among the disappeared is Matthew Werner, a banking insider at Swiss United, a powerful offshore bank. His young widow, Annabel, is left grappling with the secrets he left behind, including an encrypted laptop and a shady client list. As she begins a desperate search for answers, she determines that Matthew's death was no accident, and that she is now in the crosshairs of his powerful enemies. Meanwhile, ambitious society journalist Marina Tourneau has finally landed at the top. Now that she's engaged to Grant Ellis, she will stop writing about powerful families and finally be a part of one. Her entry into the upper echelons of New York's social scene is more appealing than any article could ever be, but, after the death of her mentor, she agrees to dig into one more story. While looking into Swiss United, Marina uncovers information that implicates some of the most powerful men in the financial world, including a few who are too close to home. The story could also be the answer to Annabel's heartbreaking search--if Marina chooses to publish it. The Banker's Wife is both a high-stakes thriller and an inside look at the personal lives in the intriguing world of finance, introducing Cristina Alger as a powerful new voice in the genre.

Gain the basics of Ruby's map, reduce, and select functions and discover how to use them to solve data-processing problems. This compact hands-on book explains how you can encode certain complex programs in 10 lines of Ruby code, an astonishingly small number. You will walk through problems and solutions which are effective because they use map, reduce, and select. As you read Ruby Data Processing, type in the code, run the code, and ponder the results. Tweak the code to test the code and see how the results change. After reading this book, you will have a deeper understanding of how to break data-processing problems into processing stages, each of which is understandable, debuggable, and composable, and how to combine the stages to solve your data-processing problem. As a result, your Ruby coding will become more efficient and your programs will be more elegant and robust. What You Will LearnDiscover Ruby data processing and how to do it using the map, reduce, and select functionsDevelop complex solutions including debugging, randomizing, sorting, grouping, and moreReverse engineer complex data-processing solutionsWho This Book Is For Those who have at least some prior experience programming in Ruby and who have a background and interest in data analysis and processing using Ruby.

The most comprehensive book on giraffes to appear in the last fifty years, this volume presents a magnificent portrait of a group of animals who, in spite of their legendary elegance and astonishing gentleness, may not entirely survive this century.Dale Peterson's text provides a natural and cultural history of the world's tallest and second-biggest land animals, describing in detail their biology and behavior. He offers a new perspective on the giraffes'place in our world, and argues for the stronger protection of these imposing yet endangered creatures and their elusive forest relatives, the okapis.Some 120 stunning photographs by award-winning wildlife photographer Karl Ammann capture the grace and elegance of Giraffa camelopardalis. Both beautiful and informative, the images document giraffes'complex interactions with each other and their environment.