![]() |
![]() Free Download Fodor's Barcelona: with Highlights of Catalonia (Full-color Travel Guide) by Fodor's Travel Guides English | December 17, 2024 | ISBN: 1640977082 | 320 pages | MOBI | 34 Mb Whether you want to tour Parc Güell, explore the Barri Gòtic, or marvel at the Sagrada Familia, the local Fodor's travel experts in Barcelona are here to help! Fodor's Barcelona guidebook is packed with maps, carefully curated recommendations, and everything else you need to simplify your trip-planning process and make the most of your time. This new edition has been fully redesigned with an easy-to-read layout, fresh information, and beautiful color photos. ![]() Free Download Flexible Leadership: Navigate Uncertainty and Lead with Confidence by Kevin Eikenberry English | March 25, 2025 | ISBN: 1637746318, 9781637746325 | True EPUB | 224 pages | 5.1 MB Become a more flexible leader with a revolutionary approach to applying leadership skills-while remaining steadfast in proven principles and your values. ![]() Free Download First Women of Hollywood: Female Pioneers in the Early Motion Picture Business by Mary Mallory English | March 25, 2025 | ISBN: 1493089307, 9781493089314 | True EPUB | 304 pages | 4.4 MB Largely created by immigrants, the film industry evolved over its first few decades thanks to the work of people outside the traditional ruling class-immigrants, people of color, women-partly as a result of elites denigrating the fledgling field. As the moving picture industry transitioned from neophyte to powerhouse, young and ambitious rebels energized its output. ![]() Free Download Justin Jennings, "Finding Fairness: From Pleistocene Foragers to Contemporary Capitalists" English | ISBN: 0813066743 | 2021 | 332 pages | PDF | 22 MB In this ambitious work, Justin Jennings explores the origins, endurance, and elasticity of ideas about fairness and how these ideas have shaped the development of societies at critical moments over the last 20,000 years. He argues that humans have an innate expectation for fairness, a disposition that evolved during the Pleistocene era as a means of adapting to an unpredictable and often cruel climate. This deep-seated desire to do what felt right then impacted how our species transitioned into smaller territories, settled into villages, formed cities, expanded empires, and navigated capitalism. Paradoxically, the predilection to find fair solutions often led to entrenched inequities over time as cooperative groups grew in size, duration, and complexity. ![]() Free Download Edgar Peltenburg, "Figurine Makers of Prehistoric Cyprus: Settlement and Cemeteries at Souskiou" English | ISBN: 1789250196 | 2019 | 368 pages | EPUB | 75 MB The Chalcolithic period in Cyprus has been known since Porphyrios Dikaios' excavations at Erimi in the 1930s and through the appearance in the antiquities market of illicitly acquired anthropomorphic cruciform figures, often manufactured from picrolite, a soft blue-green stone. The excavations of the settlement and cemetery at Souskiou Laona reported on in this volume paint a very different picture of life on the island during the late 4th and early 3rd millennia BC. Burial practices at other known sites are generally single inhumations in intramural pit graves, only rarely equipped with artefacts. At Souskiou, multiple inhumations were interred in deep rock-cut tombs clustered in extra-mural cemeteries. Although the sites were also subjected to extensive looting, excavations have revealed complex multi-stage burial practices with arrangements of disarticulated and articulated burials accompanied by a rich variety of grave goods. Chief among these are a multitude of cruciform figurines and pendants. This unusual treatment of the dead, which has not been recorded elsewhere in Cyprus, shifts the focus from the individual to the communal, and provides evidence for significant changes involving kinship group links to common ancestors. Excavations at the Laona settlement have furnished evidence suggesting that it functioned as a specialised centre for the procurement and manufacture of picrolite during its early phase. The subsequent decline of picrolite production and the earliest known occurrence of new types of ornaments, such as faience beads and copper spiral pendants, attest to important changes involving the transformation of personal and social identities during the first centuries of the 3rd millennium BC, a topic that forms a central theme of this final report on the site. ![]() Free Download Fierce Vulnerability: Healing from Trauma, Emerging through Collapse by Kazu Haga English | March 25, 2025 | ISBN: 1946764981, 9781946764997 | True EPUB | 224 pages | 4.7 MB Mobilizing the Power to Stop Harm, Cultivating the Love to Heal ![]() Free Download Ellen Widmer, "Fiction's Family: Zhan Xi, Zhan Kai, and the Business of Women in Late-Qing China " English | ISBN: 0674088379 | 2016 | 352 pages | PDF | 20 MB At the end of the Qing dynasty, works of fiction by male authors placed women in new roles. Fiction's Family delves into the writings of one literary family from western Zhejiang whose works were emblematic of shifting attitudes toward women. The mother, Wang Qingdi, and the father, Zhan Sizeng, published their poems during the second half of the nineteenth century. Two of their four sons, Zhan Xi and Zhan Kai, wrote novels that promoted reforms in women's lives. This book explores the intergenerational link, as well as relations between the sons, to find out how the conflicts faced by the parents may have been refigured in the novels of their sons. Its central question is about the brothers' reformist attitudes. Were they based on the pronouncements of political leaders? Were they the result of trends in Shanghai publishing? Or did they derive from Wang Qingdi's disappointment in her "companionate marriage," as manifested in her poems? By placing one family at the center of this study, Ellen Widmer illuminates the diachronic bridge between the late Qing and the period just before it, the synchronic interplay of genres during the brothers' lifetimes, and the interaction of Shanghai publishing with regions outside Shanghai. ![]() Free Download Fault-Tolerant Distributed Consensus in Synchronous Networks English | 2025 | ISBN: 3031804597 | 319 Pages | PDF | 6.4 MB Fault-tolerant distributed consensus is a fundamental concept, both in cryptography as well as distributed computing. Ever since the inception of the problem by Lamport et al in 1982, the problem has been widely studied, both in cryptography as well as distributed computing community and several fundamental results have been obtained regarding the possibility, feasibility and optimality of the consensus protocols in various network models and adversarial settings. The problem has generated revived interest from several other communities over the last few years, after the advent of Blockchain protocols. Traditionally, the consensus protocols are studied either in the synchronous or in the asynchronous communication setting and very often the protocols in the former category serve as the basis for the protocols in the latter category. The focus of this book will be on the synchronous communication setting. The book presents all the seminal possibility and feasibility results in this model ever since the inception of the consensus problem, with formal security proofs. Even though the synchronous corruption model may seem weaker than the more practical asynchronous communication model, designing protocols in the synchronous model turns out to be non-trivial and demands sophisticated and highly advanced techniques. Moreover, understanding protocols in the synchronous setting often constitutes the first stepping stone to understanding the more complex asynchronous consensus protocols. The topic of synchronous consensus protocols in itself is a very vast and important topic to be covered in a single book. ![]() Free Download Families We Need: Disability, Abandonment, and Foster Care's Resistance in Contemporary China By Erin Raffety 2022 | 220 Pages | ISBN: 1978829329 | PDF | 1 MB Set in the remote, mountainous Guangxi Autonomous Region and based on ethnographic fieldwork, Families We Need traces the movement of three Chinese foster children, Dengrong, Pei Pei, and Meili, from the state orphanage into the humble, foster homes of Auntie Li, Auntie Ma, and Auntie Huang. Traversing the geography of Guangxi, from the modern capital Nanning where Pei Pei and Meili reside, to the small farming village several hours away where Dengrong is placed, this ethnography details the hardships of social abandonment for disabled children and disenfranchised, older women in China, while also analyzing the state's efforts to cope with such marginal populations and incorporate them into China's modern future. The book argues that Chinese foster families perform necessary, invisible service to the Chinese state and intercountry adoption, yet the bonds they form also resist such forces, exposing the inequalities, privilege, and ableism at the heart of global family making. ![]() Free Download Failed State: A Portrait of California in the Twilight of Empire by Christopher Moritz English | March 25, 2025 | ISBN: 1510784470, 9781510784482 | True EPUB | 512 pages | 8.5 MB California was once the crown jewel of the American dream: prosperous, innovative, egalitarian, and aspirational. Today, it stands as a dystopian warning of what happens when nihilistic, radical ideology consumes the foundations of governance. InFailed State, Christopher Moritz dissects the unraveling of the Golden State with the precision of a lawyer, the depth of a historian, and the heartbreak of a California native son who has witnessed its collapse firsthand. Through disturbing, relentless detail drawn from whistleblowers, law enforcement insiders, and classified reports, he exposes the corrosive and deadly impact of progressive policies that have prioritized criminals over victims, cartels over citizens, and ideological dogma over law and order. |