Identify maple, ash, oak, and more with easy-to-learn visual techniques. In this friendly and approachable field guide, writer and avid hiker Mark Mikolas shares a unique approach for year-round tree identification. His method, which centers on the northeastern United States where 20 species make up the majority of trees, will prepare readers to recognize trees at a glance, even in winter when leaves and flowers are not present. Mikolas’s secret is to focus on the key characteristics of each tree—black cherry bark looks like burnt potato chips; beech and oak trees keep their leaves in winter; spruce needles are pointed while balsam fir needles are soft and rounded at the ends. Some trees can even be identified by scent. Location maps for each of the 40 species covered and more than 400 photographs illustrating key characteristics make the trees easy to identify. Mikolas also explains how to differentiate between similar and commonly confused trees, such as red maple and sugar maple. A Beginner’s Guide to Recognizing Trees of the Northeast is a book to keep close at hand wherever trees grow.

Three former CIA officers--the world's foremost authorities on recognizing deceptive behavior--share their techniques for spotting a lie with thrilling anecdotes from the authors' careers in counterintelligence.

Human knowing is examined as it emerges from classical empirical psychology, with its ramifications into language, computing, science, and scholarship. While the discussion takes empirical support from a wide range, claims for the significance of logic and rules are challenged throughout. Highlights of the discussion: knowing is a matter of habits or dispositions that guide the person's stream of consciousness; rules of language have no significance in language production and understanding, being descriptions of linguistic styles; statements that may be true or false enter into ordinary linguistic activity, not as elements of messages, but merely as summaries of situations, with a view to action; in computer programming the significance of logic, proof, and formalized description, is incidental and subject to the programmer's personality; analysis of computer modelling of the mental activity shows that in describing human knowing the computer is irrelevant; in accounting for the scholarly/scientific activity, logic and rules are impotent; a novel theory: scholarship and science have coherent descriptions as their core. The discussion addresses questions that are basic to advanced applications of computers and to students of language and science.