Move, Connect, Play is a book detailing the core principles of Acroyoga, a practice that melds the spectacle of circus arts with the healing power of massage and the breathwork of yoga. Get ready to learn how to fly. AcroYoga is a movement practice that combines the balance and connection of yoga with the fitness and intensity of acrobatics, as well as the holistic healing power of physical therapy. People come to it for all kinds of reasons—they may have chronic pain and are looking for a long-term solution to manage it, they may want to lose weight, gain muscle or increase their mobility, or maybe they just want to experience it with their friends or partners to deepen their relationships. Some even just want to have some fun together. In Move, Connect, Play, pounder of AcroYoga International Jason Nemer shares the core principles of AcroYoga for athletic performance and for life, as well as 10 key areas of training (strength, flexibility, technique, balance, breath, gravity, relationships, mental, emotional, and sustainability). He also offers specific exercises and routines for how to train safely and effectively in each area. This is a book that millions of AcroYogis around the world have long been waiting for, and one that is an essential read for high-performance athletes, weekend health warriors, and spiritual seekers alike.

An engaging examination of how video game design can create strong, positive emotional experiences for players—with examples from popular, indie, and art games. This is a renaissance moment for video games—in the variety of genres they represent, and the range of emotional territory they cover. But how do games create emotion? In How Games Move Us, Katherine Isbister takes the reader on a timely and novel exploration of the design techniques that evoke strong emotions for players. She counters arguments that games are creating a generation of isolated, emotionally numb, antisocial loners. Games, Isbister shows us, can actually play a powerful role in creating empathy and other strong, positive emotional experiences; they reveal these qualities over time, through the act of playing. She offers a nuanced, systematic examination of exactly how games can influence emotion and social connection, with examples—drawn from popular, indie, and art games—that unpack the gamer’s experience. Isbister describes choice and flow, two qualities that distinguish games from other media, and explains how game developers build upon these qualities using avatars, non-player characters, and character customization, in both solo and social play. She shows how designers use physical movement to enhance players’ emotional experience, and examines long-distance networked play. She illustrates the use of these design methods with examples that range from Sony’s Little Big Planet to the much-praised indie game Journey to art games like Brenda Romero’s Train. Isbister’s analysis shows us a new way to think about games, helping us appreciate them as an innovative and powerful medium for doing what film, literature, and other creative media do: helping us to understand ourselves and what it means to be human.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th Australian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AI 2004, held in Cairns, Australia, in December 2004. The 78 revised full papers and 62 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 340 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on agents; biomedical applications; computer vision, image processing, and pattern recognition; ontologies, knowledge discovery and data mining; natural language and speech processing; problem solving and reasoning; robotics; and soft computing.

From the USA TODAY bestselling author of Sweet Thing and Nowhere But Here comes a love story about a Craigslist “missed connection” post that gives two people a second chance at love fifteen years after they were separated in New York City. To the Green-eyed Lovebird: We met fifteen years ago, almost to the day, when I moved my stuff into the NYU dorm room next to yours at Senior House. You called us fast friends. I like to think it was more. We lived on nothing but the excitement of finding ourselves through music (you were obsessed with Jeff Buckley), photography (I couldn’t stop taking pictures of you), hanging out in Washington Square Park, and all the weird things we did to make money. I learned more about myself that year than any other. Yet, somehow, it all fell apart. We lost touch the summer after graduation when I went to South America to work for National Geographic. When I came back, you were gone. A part of me still wonders if I pushed you too hard after the wedding… I didn’t see you again until a month ago. It was a Wednesday. You were rocking back on your heels, balancing on that thick yellow line that runs along the subway platform, waiting for the F train. I didn’t know it was you until it was too late, and then you were gone. Again. You said my name; I saw it on your lips. I tried to will the train to stop, just so I could say hello. After seeing you, all of the youthful feelings and memories came flooding back to me, and now I’ve spent the better part of a month wondering what your life is like. I might be totally out of my mind, but would you like to get a drink with me and catch up on the last decade and a half? M

Everyone gets 168 hours a week, but it never feels like enough, does it? Work gobbles up the lion's share--many professionals are working as much as 70 hours a week--leaving less and less for rest, exercise, family, and friends. You know, all those things that make life great. Most people think productivity is about finding or saving time. But it's not. It's about making our time work for us. Just imagine having free time again. It's not a pipe dream. In Free to Focus, New York Times bestselling author Michael Hyatt reveals to readers nine proven ways to win at work so they are finally free to succeed at the rest of life--their health, relationships, hobbies, and more. He helps readers redefine their goals, evaluate what's working, cut out the nonessentials, focus on the most important tasks, manage their time and energy, and build momentum for a lifetime of success.

Each volume of the 2-volume teacher edition set contains 54 complete lesson plans for 18 units of Guitar Expressions. Each lesson includes a Lesson Snapshot, Instructional Overview, a complete step-by-step lesson plan with embedded assessments. The book also includes reproducible student worksheets, assessments forms and student progress record, CDs containing complete instruction, demonstration, play-along, and additional listening tracks. Included are Bloom's Taxonomy Correlation, Assessment Overviews, and Core Thinking Overviews. Plus interactive Guitar Guru technology embedded on the included CD-ROM (included in Teacher ed. v. 2) allows students to use their computers to view animated fretboard displays of selected songs.

May 11, 1997, was a watershed moment in the history of artificial intelligence (AI): the IBM supercomputer chess engine, Deep Blue, beat the world Chess champion, Garry Kasparov. It was the first time a machine had triumphed over a human player in a Chess tournament. Fast forward 19 years to May 9, 2016, DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat the world Go champion Lee Sedol. AI again stole the spotlight and generated a media frenzy. This time, a new type of AI algorithm, namely machine learning (ML) was the driving force behind the game strategies. What exactly is ML? How is it related to AI? Why is deep learning (DL) so popular these days? This book explains how traditional rule-based AI and ML work and how they can be implemented in everyday games such as Last Coin Standing, Tic Tac Toe, or Connect Four. Game rules in these three games are easy to implement. As a result, readers will learn rule-based AI, deep reinforcement learning, and more importantly, how to combine the two to create powerful game strategies (the whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts) without getting bogged down in complicated game rules. Implementing rule-based AI and ML in these straightforward games is quick and not computationally intensive. Consequently, game strategies can be trained in mere minutes or hours without requiring GPU training or supercomputing facilities, showcasing AI's ability to achieve superhuman performance in these games. More importantly, readers will gain a thorough understanding of the principles behind rule-based AI, such as the MiniMax algorithm, alpha-beta pruning, and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), and how to integrate them with cutting-edge ML techniques like convolutional neural networks and deep reinforcement learning to apply them in their own business fields and tackle real-world challenges. Written with clarity from the ground up, this book appeals to both general readers and industry professionals who seek to learn about rule-based AI and deep reinforcement learning, as well as students and educators in computer science and programming courses.