Popular Mechanics inspires, instructs and influences readers to help them master the modern world. Whether it’s practical DIY home-improvement tips, gadgets and digital technology, information on the newest cars or the latest breakthroughs in science -- PM is the ultimate guide to our high-tech lifestyle.

The global economy is characterized by increasing locational competition to attract the resources necessary to develop leading-edge technologies as drivers of regional and national growth. One means of facilitating such growth and improving national competitiveness is to improve the operation of the national innovation system. This involves national technology development and innovation programs designed to support research on new technologies, enhance the commercial return on national research, and facilitate the production of globally competitive products. Understanding the policies that other nations are pursuing to become more innovative and to what effect is essential to understanding how the nature and terms of economic competition are shifting. Building the 21st Century U.S.-China Cooperation on Science, Technology, and Innovation studies selected foreign innovation programs and comparing them with major U.S. programs. This analysis of Comparative Innovation Policy includes a review of the goals, concept, structure, operation, funding levels, and evaluation of foreign programs designed to advance the innovation capacity of national economies and enhance their international competitiveness. This analysis focuses on key areas of future growth, such as renewable energy, among others, to generate case-specific recommendations where appropriate.

This updated and augmented second edition covers the history of mechanics in such a way as to explain how this all-important discipline shaped our world. Like the first edition, Dr. Allen presents the material in an engaging, accessible manner, with many historic insights and thorough explanations of attending concepts. The text retains its coverage of classical mechanics, essentially Newtonian mechanics, and adds chapters on three additional topics that go well beyond classical mechanics: relativity, quantum/nanomechanics, and biomechanics.

Writing Well in the 21st Century: The Five Essentials provides students, career-builders, and professional writers with the basic elements needed for writing in the 21st century. The book fully explains—and links—the five essentials of good writing: punctuation, grammar, fact-checking, style, and voice. Throughout history technology has changed both language and writing. Today in the digital age, language and writing are changing at a phenomenal pace. Students, career-builders, and professional writers need this guide that reviews those changes and connects the essentials for creating good writing in the digital age. Writing Well in the 21st Century: The Five Essentials gives writers the tools needed today. Among other essentials, the book: Resolves comma issues by explaining the Open and Close Punctuation systems. Writers select which system to use in their writing. Clarifies active and passive voice verbs and advocates using strong, specific verbs in writing. Provides guidelines for choosing credible online websites when searching for resources. Examines attributes of essentials that contribute to a writing style and urges a critical review of verbs. Connects elements that combine to create a voice in a written piece. Relevant and succinctly written, Writing Well in the 21st Century: The Five Essentials gives readers the basics they need to know to create well-written documents for school, work and in their professional writing.

Numericon tells the stories of the numbers, mathematical discoveries, oddities and personalities that have shaped the way we understand the world around us. Funny, bizarre, tragic and dramatic, these stories reveal the power, passion and beauty of mathematics. Each chapter is an intriguing story about a number, including why 3 is strong, e is natural and Graham's number is too big to write. Packed with quirky, informative facts and bound in a beautiful foil-blocked cover, this book will do for maths what The Etymologicon did for the English language.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning, EC-TEL 2012, held in Saarbrücken, Germany, in September 2012. The 26 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 130 submissions. The book also includes 12 short papers, 16 demonstration papers, 11 poster papers, and 1 invited paper. Specifically, the programme and organizing structure was formed through the themes: mobile learning and context; serious and educational games; collaborative learning; organisational and workplace learning; learning analytics and retrieval; personalised and adaptive learning; learning environments; academic learning and context; and, learning facilitation by semantic means.