Slightly Staked

Welcome to Climax, where the people are friendly, the location is rustic, and things can get a little quirky. Lina Harker has discovered her grandmother’s secret. She used to be a vampire. Now, Lina’s greatest fear is that a remnant of that vampire DNA is lurking in her cells, waiting to reactivate. Yes, Dracula’s lineage had been destroyed, but the ‘what if’s were too much to imagine. Doggedly following the trail of two families that escaped the Van Helsing purge, she discovers that ‘X’ leads to Climax, Canada. She has her stakes, garlic and holy water ready, but when she arrives, nothing is as she expects. Are vampires really living in Climax or has she completely lost her mind? She’d better figure it out before she sprouts a pair of fangs and a taste for O Positive. And before she stakes another innocent shop keeper.

The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped life across the world, placing people at risk as our responses to it alter not only health and wellbeing but also governance, economies, social relations, and our interaction with the natural environment. This volume draws globally recognized human rights scholars and practitioners into dialogue over the costs and consequences of the pandemic. With insights and data from fields as diverse as medicine, anthropology, political science, social work, business, and law, these contributors help us make sense of the pandemic’s ongoing effects and its potential impact on future systems and processes. Drawn from two special issues of The Journal of Human Rights—one published within eight months of the first lockdowns, the other published almost two years into the pandemic—this book offers one of the most comprehensive collections of such research available. It will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of Politics, Sociology, Social Work, Economics, Anthropology, Social and Political Geography, and Public Policy.

#15 in the multiple best-selling Ring of Fire Series. It's springtime in the Eternal City, 1635. But it's no Roman holiday for uptimer Frank Stone and his pregnant downtime wife, Giovanna. They're in the clutches of would be Pope Cardinal Borgia, with the real Pope¾Urban VII¾on the run with the renegade embassy of uptime Ambassador Sharon Nichols and her swashbuckling downtime husband, Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz. Up to their necks in papal assassins, power politics, murder, and mayhem, the uptimers and their spouses need help and they need it quickly. Special rescue teams¾including Harry Lefferts and his infamous Wrecking Crew¾converge on Rome to extract Frank and Gia. And an uptime airplane is on its way to spirit the Pope to safety before Borgia's assassins can find him. It seems that everything is going to work out just fine in sunny Italy. Until, that is, everything goes wrong. Now, whether they are prisoners in Rome or renegades protecting a pope on the run, it's up to the rough and ready can do attitude of Grantville natives to once again escape the clutches of aristocratic skullduggery and ring in freedom for a war torn land. At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).

As a nation, we spend more than $1 billion a year on federally mandated educational tests that 30 million students must take each year. The country spends an additional $1.2 billion on test preparation materials designed to help students pass these tests. While test mandates were put in place with good intentions, increasingly educational leaders and policy makers are questioning these test based reform efforts. Some question whether these programs are doing more harm than good. Others call for the development of more and better tests. Given the vast amount of resources our nation pours into testing, is it time we pay closer attention to these testing programs? Is it time we hold the testing industry and policy makers accountable for the tests they make and use? Is it time we invest resources to develop new ways of testing our students? The Paradoxes of High-Stakes Testing explores these and other questions, as it helps parents, teachers, educational leaders, and policy makers better understand the complexities of educational policies that use tests as a lever for improving the quality of education. The book explores: >> how testing is used to enable teachers and schools to be more effective and improve student learning, >> why testing is so ingrained in the American psyche and why policy makers rely on testing policies to reform our educational system, >> what we can learn from a long history of test-based reform efforts that have occurred over centuries and across continents, >> what effects testing has on teaching and learning in our schools when it is used to solve political, social, or economic problems. Most importantly, the book describes several ways in which testing can be improved to provide more accurate and more useful measures of student learning. Many of these improvements capitalize on technology to provide teachers with more detailed, diagnostic information about student learning and measure skills that some leaders argue are essential for the 21st century work force. Exploring what is within reach is critical because current testing policies are hindering these improvements. Finally, given that testing is and will continue to be an integral part of our educational system, the book concludes that, like other sectors of our society, educational testing must be more closely monitored to ensure that high quality tests are used to measure student achievement and to minimize the negative effects that testing has on students, schools, and our society. Given the opportunity our nation has to rethink and redesign its testing policies, The Paradoxes of High-Stakes Testing presents a clear strategy to maximize the positive effects of educational testing.