The Ground Truth

Professionals who work with grieving families, including psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, family therapists, physicians and nurses who work with dying patients and their families, hospice and patient home-care workers, clergy. The book also serves as a text in courses on bereavement, family development, family and child therapy, and child developmental psychopathology.

From the senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, a mesmerizing real-time portrayal of that day, why we weren?t told the truth, and why our nation is still at risk. As one of the primary authors of the 9/11 Commission Report, John Farmer is proud of his and his colleagues? work. Yet he came away from the experience convinced that there was a further story to be told, one he was uniquely qualified to write. Now that story can be told. Tape recordings, transcripts, and contemporaneous records that had been classified have since been declassified, and the inspector general?s investigations of government conduct have been completed. Drawing on his knowledge of those sources, as well as his years as an attorney in public and private practice, Farmer reconstructs the truth of what happened on that fateful day and the disastrous circumstances that allowed it: the institutionalized disconnect between what those on the ground knew and what those in power did. He details ?terrifyingly and illuminatingly?the key moments in the years, months, weeks, and days that preceded the attacks, then descends almost in real time through the attacks themselves, portraying them as they have never before been seen. Ultimately, Farmer builds the inescapably convincing case that the official version not only is almost entirely untrue but serves to create a false impression of order and security. The ground truth that Farmer captures suggests a very different scenario?one that is doomed to be repeated unless the systemic failures he reveals are confronted and remedied.

FINALIST for the 2021 Oregon Book Award. Rooted in the Pacific Northwest, the essays in Ruby McConnell's Ground Truth: A Geological Survey of a Life cover the vast terrain of this region &– from volcanoes to city parks, the eroding shorelines along the Oregon coast, badlands, lush forests, and city parks. Combining her background as a registered geologist, McConnell's essays also weave in personal landscapes composed of grief, loss, and optimism for the future of our environment. "The Pacific Northwest that you see today is the result of forty years of radical changes in the culture and economics of what was once a resource-extraction and agriculture-driven region. They are changes so fundamental in nature and scope...that, for those of us from this place, will always be marked by the cataclysmic eruptions of Mt. St. Helens on May 18, 1980." --Ruby McConnell In this collection of 17 essays, geologist Ruby McConnell opens her part natural history, part memoir-in-essays about the Pacific Northwest with the cataclysmic eruption of Mt. St. Helens in May of 1980. She was two years old. "Everything that I have stood direct witness to since, everything I know about this place, happe

“Expertly crafted and enjoyable . . . transforms the complicated topics of phenology and climate change. . . . accessible, tangible, and actionable.” —Mark D. Schwartz, editor of Phenology: An Integrative Environmental Science Before you read this book, grab a notebook, go outside, and find a nearby patch of nature. What do you see, hear, feel, and smell? Are there bugs, birds, squirrels, deer, lizards, frogs, or fish, and what are they doing? What plants are in the vicinity, and in what ways are they growing? What shape are the rocks, what texture is the dirt, and what color are the bodies of water? Everything you notice, write it all down. We know that the Earth’s climate is changing, and that the magnitude of this change is colossal. At the same time, the world outside is still a natural world, and one we can experience on a granular level every day. Featuring detailed guidance for keeping records of the plants, invertebrates, amphibians, birds, and mammals in your neighborhood, this book also ponders the value of everyday observations, probes the connections between seasons and climate change, and traces the history of phenology—the study and timing of natural events—and the uses to which it can be put. An expansive yet accessible book, Ground Truth is a guide to paying attention instead of turning away, and to gathering facts from which a fuller understanding of the natural world can emerge. “A unique DIY manual for becoming attuned to the rhythms of the natural world.” —James T. Costa, author of Darwin’s Backyard: How Small Experiments Led to a Big Theory “A necessary book.” —Susan J. Tweit, author of Walking Nature Home: A Life’s Journey

Computer Vision Metrics provides an extensive survey and analysis of over 100 current and historical feature description and machine vision methods, with a detailed taxonomy for local, regional and global features. This book provides necessary background to develop intuition about why interest point detectors and feature descriptors actually work, how they are designed, with observations about tuning the methods for achieving robustness and invariance targets for specific applications. The survey is broader than it is deep, with over 540 references provided to dig deeper. The taxonomy includes search methods, spectra components, descriptor representation, shape, distance functions, accuracy, efficiency, robustness and invariance attributes, and more. Rather than providing ‘how-to’ source code examples and shortcuts, this book provides a counterpoint discussion to the many fine opencv community source code resources available for hands-on practitioners.

A laboratory study that investigates how algorithms come into existence. Algorithms--often associated with the terms big data, machine learning, or artificial intelligence--underlie the technologies we use every day, and disputes over the consequences, actual or potential, of new algorithms arise regularly. In this book, Florian Jaton offers a new way to study computerized methods, providing an account of where algorithms come from and how they are constituted, investigating the practical activities by which algorithms are progressively assembled rather than what they may suggest or require once they are assembled.

Why are so many American children learning so much misinformation about climate change? Investigative reporter Katie Worth reviewed scores of textbooks, built a 50-state database, and traveled to a dozen communities to talk to children and teachers about what is being taught, and found a red-blue divide in climate education. More than one-third of young adults believe that climate change is not man-made, and science teachers who teach global warming are being contradicted by history teachers who tell children not to worry about it. Who has tried to influence what children learn, and how successful have they been? Worth connects the dots to find out how oil corporations, state legislatures, school boards, and textbook publishers sow uncertainty, confusion, and distrust about climate science. A thoroughly researched, eye-opening look at how some states do not want children to learn the facts about climate change.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Energy Minimization Methods in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition held in Ezhou, China, in August 2007. Twenty-two full papers are presented along with fifteen poster papers. The papers are organized into topical sections on algorithms, applications, image parsing, image processing, motion, shape, and three-dimensional processing.