When you author a book and you get to the process of writing any acknowledgments it is a very good day. It means you are finally at the end of a very long journey that has many ups and downs. From late nights working through coding issues, to scouring the web for any new information on the topics you are trying to write about, getting here requires a lot of help. First and foremost, I want to thank Maureen Spears for once again leading me through this journey and keeping me sane when deadlines were missed or things just didn’t work the way I wanted them to. I also need to thank Mary James for keeping all of us on track and taking care of the various project management details of which there were many, given the number of authors involved. Finally, I want to thank Paul Reese who initiated this entire process quite some time ago and got the entire ball rolling!

If you already speak English, but now would like to start speaking even better, then the bestselling book & audio CD set Speak English Like an American is for you. This set is designed to help native speakers of any language speak better English. Over 300 of the most-used American English idioms and phrases are presented in engaging dialogue, with plenty of usage examples, illustrations, and lots of exercises -- with convenient answer key -- to help you learn the material. The audio CD includes all of the dialogues. Ideal for self-study as well as for ESL classroom use. A fun and effective way to improve your conversational English! Great for TOEFL study too -- learn many of the expressions you'll find on the exam in a fun and engaging way.

This book represents (to me at least) a significant culmination in my work as an art historian over a thirty-year period and some of the people who have in various ways supported me – knowingly or not – might be surprised to see their names mentioned here. An ever-increasing number of them, depressingly, are also deceased and their mention is partly offered here as a sign that the books and essays they produced were important to me and might be consulted by anyone who values my contribution and wants to investigate its relationship to work by the writers and scholars who have influenced me. I should like to thank, then: Rasheed Araeen, Paula Barreiro-López, Vivienne Barsky, Kathy Battista, Al and Myra Boime, Tim Clark, August Davis, Angela Dimitrakaki, Ed D ’ Souza, Lindsey Fryer, Barry Gibbs, Christoph Grunenberg, Charles Harrison, Helen Hills, Peter and Linda Huby, Richard Koerck, Anne MacPhee, Annie Makhoul, David Oldham, Julie Sheldon, Brandon Taylor, Colin Trodd, Alan Wallach, Judith Walsh, Ren Wendong and Nigel Whiteley. Jayne Fargnoli, commissioning editor at Wiley-Blackwell, has been warmly supportive in both critical and practical terms on this and related projects – I look forward to extending this exciting and enjoyable relationship in the years to come! Bashir Makhoul – artist, historian of Palestinian art and Head of Winchester School of Art – has been a great friend and supporter, in practical and intellectual terms. If pedagogy, research and progressive politics can ever fit together comfortably in an institutional context, then WSA International offers a compelling model for it! Fred Orton read the manuscript and offered astute commentary on both its merits and lapses. He also corrected its English in many places and for that service I am extremely grateful. Fred ’ s work and deep friendship (and that of Miranda ’ s!) has really kept me going since my days as a doctoral student. Thank you! Gudrun, William, Oliver, Claire, Jim and Jules provide an indispensable part of the nest of family relationships within which this and all my other projects have been nurtured for many years now. Tom and Kate remain enthusiastic if sometimes justifiably mystified by the world of academe! Pie was a keen supporter too: thank you all. Jane Linden ’ s intellectual pugilism has always been matched by her affection and love for me. Many of the ideas and arguments that both unite and sometimes divide us have developed in and outside this book. May this conversation long continue! Thank you, sweetheart, for listening and responding. David Craven, for many years my friend and partner in lots of ventures, died suddenly as this book was nearing completion. His wide-ranging scholarship, moral and political commitment, idealism and good humour were an inspiration to me. This book is dedicated to his memory.

“The last scan in the pile was strikingly odd. In fact it looked exactly like the most abnormal of the scans I had just been writing about, suggesting that the poor individual it belonged to was a psychopath—or at least shared an uncomfortable amount of traits with one....When I found out who the scan belonged to, I had to believe there was a mistake....But there had been no mistake. The scan was mine.” For the first fifty-eight years of his life James Fallon was by all appearances a normal guy. A successful neuroscientist and medical school professor, he’d been raised in a loving, supportive family, married his high school sweetheart, and had three kids and lots of friends. Then he learned a shocking truth that would not only disrupt his personal and professional life, but would lead him to question the very nature of his own identity. The Psychopath Inside tells the fascinating story of Fallon’s reaction to the discovery that he has the brain of a psychopath. While researching serial murderers, he uncovered a distinct neurological pattern in their brain scans that helped explain their cold and violent behavior. A few months later he learned that he was descended from a family with a long line of murderers which confirmed that Fallon’s own brain pattern wasn’t a fluke. As a scientist convinced that humans are shaped by their genetics, Fallon set out to reconcile the truth about his brain with everything he knew about the mind, behavior, and the influence of nature vs. nurture on our personalities. How could he, a successful scientist and a happy family man with no history of violence, be a psychopath? How much did his biology influence his behavior? Was he capable of some of the gruesome atrocities perpetrated by the serial killers he had studied? Combining his personal experience with scientific analysis, Fallon shares his journey and the discoveries that ultimately led him to understand that, despite everything science can teach us, humans are even more complex than we can imagine.

This book is dedicated to all those who have contributed to China’s dramaticrise, which haschanged the lot of one-fifth of mankind forever, and to the visionary architect of this rise, China’s late leader Deng Xiaoping, whom I had the privilege to serve as an English interpreter in the mid- 1980s and whose many ideas have inspired me to write this book. I owe an intellectual debt to many individuals and it is impossible to mention all of them, but I should thank those individuals, some of whom are also personal friends, who shared their perspectives with me on various issues discussed in the book. These individuals include Li Junru of the Central Party School; Eric Li, Jin Zhongwei and Sha Ye of the Chunqiu Institute; Shi Zhengfu, Chen Ping, Jiang Yihua and Xiao Sijian of Fudan University; Pan Wei of Beijing University; Zhang Wenmu of Beihang University; Wang Shaoguang of the University of Hong Kong; Wang Wen of the Global Times; Ji Guibao of the Wenhui Daily; Francis Fukuyama of Standard University; and Robert Kuhn, the author of How China’s Leaders Think. I would like to express my special gratitude to K. K. Phua, Ho Yi Kai, Dong Lixi and their colleagues at World Scientific and World Century for their invaluable professional support in editing and publishingthis book in English. My heartfelt thanks also go to Chen Xin, Hu Dawei, Shi Hongjun a nd Cai Xin of Shanghai Century Publishing for their dedicated professional assistance in editing and publishing the Chinese edition of the book. I should also thank Pan Xiaoli and H. B. Teng for their linguistic counsel, especially for Xiaoli’s original proposal on the book’s English title. I am most grateful to my wife Hui-Hui and my son Marco Yi-Zhou for their kind understanding and unfailing support. I am alone, however, responsible for any errors that may appear in this book.

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If you're like many music lovers, you still have a lot of your music collection on old records and tape cassettes. You probably want to be able to listen to a lot of that music on your iPod, but re-purchasing all of it in digital form would cost you hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. Have no fear, this book provides an easy-to-read, non-technical guide to digitizing all of those records on the cheap. You'll get an overview of the tools available to help you with the task and how to find them. From there, you'll get a gentle introduction to the world of digital audio that focuses on the task at hand with no unnecessary tech-speak. You'll also learn how to use the software that can digitize that music into your computer, including how to clean up tape hiss, hum, pops, and clicks from the material. You'll even get tips on how to organize your MP3s and which MP3 players are the best buy. By the end of the book, you'll have learned to transfer all of your old records and tapes to MP3s you can listen to on the go, remastered some of your scratched records and worn-out tapes, and learned a little bit of pro audio to boot. So what are you waiting for? Your new digital music library awaits you!

Plants are people too? Not exactly, but in this work of philosophical botany Matthew Hall challenges readers to reconsider the moral standing of plants, arguing that they are other-than-human persons. Plants constitute the bulk of our visible biomass, underpin all natural ecosystems, and make life on Earth possible. Yet plants are considered passive and insensitive beings rightly placed outside moral consideration. As the human assault on nature continues, more ethical behavior toward plants is needed. Hall surveys Western, Eastern, Pagan, and Indigenous thought, as well as modern science and botanical history, for attitudes toward plants, noting the particular resources for plant personhood and those modes of thought which most exclude plants. The most hierarchical systems typically put plants at the bottom, but Hall finds much to support a more positive view of plants. Indeed, some Indigenous animisms actually recognize plants as relational, intelligent beings who are the appropriate recipients of care and respect. New scientific findings encourage this perspective, revealing that plants possess many of the capacities of sentience and mentality traditionally denied them. “All those who depend on plants should critically read Plants as Persons … I highly recommend Plants as Persons as a challenging read for any carnivores, PETA advocates, or emerging academics; the book is thought-provoking for omnivores, medical practitioners, life science enthusiasts, and philosophers … If you are fascinated by plants, you will want this for your personal collection.” — Katie Kamelamela, Economic Botany “Overall, this book is a ‘must read’ for anyone interested in the state of the environment today, whether professionally or as a concerned citizen. It does not simplify the issues but has managed to attain that elusive balance between remaining accessible and readable without sacrificing intellectual range, subtlety and complexity of thought.” — Australian Humanities Review “Dr. Hall does a wonderful job of presenting many layers of research and insight in a very organized way. His introduction outlines the content of his book clearly and each chapter ends with a helpful summary and a smooth transition into the next topic of discussion. There is a lot of information to think about in Plants as Persons. All of it enlightening. Now here is a book that is hard to put down.” — ArtPlantae Today “If you are someone who thought philosophy began and ended with Aristotle and Socrates, then this book will be an eye opener … [it] explains that plants are active, self-directed, and even intelligent. Hall puts forward the view that nature is a communion of subjective, collaborative beings, organizing and experiencing their environment.” — Chicago Botanic Garden “The extension of ethics to the nonhuman, nonanimal is important, and ahead of its time. What a pleasure to experience this well-written, well-researched, interesting approach to applied comparative philosophy. Matthew Hall makes an outstanding contribution to a new and important field of study.” — Christopher Key Chapple, author of Yoga and the Luminous: Patañjali’s Spiritual Path to Freedom

This book took more than seven years to research and write and has passed through several stages of transformation. During this long process, I have benefited from the encouragement and ideas of countless colleagues, mentors, friends, and family members. First, I would like to thank Charles D. Smith and Julia Clancy-Smith. Carl’s and Julia’s mentoring, insight, and engagement with my work were instrumental in seeing this project through. I will forever be in their debt. I would also like to thank Linda T. Darling. Linda is the consummate mentor; her office door was always open to me for endless academic questions and discussions. I would like to thank Kate Wahl, the Stanford University Press executive editor, for taking a chance on my book and for her thoroughness and professionalism. The critical and encouraging comments of the SUP anonymous readers were extremely helpful in framing my revisions. My book is much better because of the readers’ advice. I am especially grateful to Walter Armbrust, who meticulously examined and critiqued the entire manuscript. His insights led me to explore new paths I had not yet considered. I am indebted to many colleagues, friends, and acquaintances: Donald Malcolm Reid, Tracy Gould, Julia Hutchins-Richards, and Christina Lindeman, for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of Chapter 2; Frédéric Lagrange, for sending me some relevant pages from the catalogs of Odeon, Columbia, and Baidaphon record companies; Munther Yunis, for allowing me to use his extensive library on linguistics; and Lauren Monroe, for reading and commenting on my introduction. I would also like to thank Deborah Starr and Vikash Yadav for sharing their book proposals with me and for their helpful advice on the publication process. Through the years, a great number of people have directly or indirectly contributed to my scholarship and intellectual growth. I benefited from the mentoring and advice of Richard Eaton, Leila Hudson, Michael Bonine, Adel Gamal, Kamran Talattof, Amy Newhall, Richard Cosgrove, Kevin Gosner, Eric Davis, and Stephen Reinhardt. Throughout the writing process, my colleagues and the academic staff in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University were generous and unbelievably supportive. I am truly blessed to work in such a collegial and supportive atmosphere. Financial assistance for the research and writing of this project came from a variety of sources. The bulk of the research for this book took place in Egypt and England, with the help of generous research grants from Fulbright-Hays and the American Research Center in Egypt. Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities summer research grants in 2008 and 2010 helped me acquire additional resources, which were instrumental in the completion of this project. I am also indebted to the Cornell University Library and especially Ali Houissa, the Middle East and Islamic Studies librarian, for acquiring dozens of rare Arabic periodicals, which were extremely useful for my research. A part of Chapter 5 and a section from the introduction are reprinted with permission from my previous work, “Media Capitalism: Colloquial Mass Culture and Nationalism in Egypt, 1908–1918,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 42(1) (February 2010): 83–103. I am eternally grateful to my parents, Ferial Sammakia and Adel Fahmy, who sacrificed a lot for my education and helped instill in me a sense of historical and intellectual curiosity. Most of all, I would like to thank my wife, Kaila Bussert, who proofread countless incarnations of this manuscript and endured my endless obsessions with this book project. Her love and unfailing intellectual and emotional support made this book possible.

Почти 300 миллионов пользователей Интернета сегодня защищают свои компьютеры с помощью антивирусных продуктов и технологий "Лаборатории Касперского". 80 крупнейших мировых IТ-корпораций находятся под защитой бренда Kaspersky. Среди них -- Microsoft, Intel, Safenet, Check Point, IBM/Lotus, Clearswift, D-Link, Juniper, LANDesk, Netasq, ZyXEL, Cisco, Aladdin, Novell, Linux и др. Таков итог более чем двадцатилетних усилий и целеустремленного труда команды единомышленников во главе с Евгением Касперским. В офисах его транснациональной корпорации со штаб-квартирой в Москве говорят на 18 языках мира. Представительства компании расположены в 29 странах. Самый известный в мире гражданин IT-России, профессиональный криптограф и шифровальщик, выпускник элитной разведшколы, путешественник, либерал, умелый лидер, ведущий мировой эксперт в области информационной безопасности и просто удачливый человек Евгений Касперский всегда хотел быть лучшим в своем деле. Ему, команде и компании, носящей его имя, это удалось. Как? Об этом наша книга.

The Austrian needs lots of persuading to have his traditions tampered with in the name of modernization and efficiency. He is attached to his sausage, his insipid beer, and the young white wine that tastes so remarkably like iron filings. He prefers the familiar, tried, and tested to the novelty, the latter almost certainly being an attempt by persons unknown to make money at his expense.