In our second story, Chip, the little robot sees his friends playing on the beach and later surfing and he wants to join them so badly. But robots are made of metal and cannot get wet, or play in the sand. So his friend Tommy and pals come up with a plan that might allow him to surf. A children's picture book, about friendship, problem-solving, teamwork, and surfing, from a little robot's perspective

He called himself Zoot Marlowe, said he’d just blown in from Cay City, but even the wacked out surfer dudes could tell that the four-foot detective with the giant schnoz was from somewhere out of their world. Still, he could throw a mean frisbee and he said he was a private eye, and when someone decided to smash and trash all the surfing robots in Malibu just days before the biggest surfing contest of the year, Zoot was the only being around willing to track the bot beaters down. But Zoot didn’t know just how widespread a conspiracy he was about to run up against. For this first case of his Earthly career would see him taking on everything from the Malibu cops to Samurai robots; motorcycle madmen to talking gorillas; and a misplaced mistress of genetic manipulation! "Gilden proves that you can write first-rate humorous science fiction." —Science Fiction Chronicle

Surf’s up, Bro! Not yet, Dude. Books are boring. Not this one! Newbery Award Winner Kwame Alexander's bouncy ode to the joy of reading is available in board book format Bro and Dude have very different ideas about how to spend a day at the beach. But as Bro continues to gasp and cheer while he reads his book (Moby Dick), Dude can’t help getting pulled in—literally. Before you can shout “Surf’s up!” both frogs are sharing the same adventure— that is, until they get to the beach. Newbery Medalist Kwame Alexander and illustrator Daniel Miyares join forces to give readers a wild ride in this playful board book celebrating the joys of summer and reading.

Two research issues motivate this work and distinguish it from approaches usually taken by information retrieval or machine learning researchers. First, a recommender system will have many users, with overlapping interests. How can this be exploited? Second, each edition of a personalized newspaper consists of a small set of articles. Techniques for deciding on the relevance of individual articles are well known, but how is the composition of the set determined?

**Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography** Included in President Obama’s 2016 Summer Reading List “Without a doubt, the finest surf book I’ve ever read . . . ” —The New York Times Magazine Barbarian Days is William Finnegan’s memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life. Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa. A bookish boy, and then an excessively adventurous young man, he went on to become a distinguished writer and war reporter. Barbarian Days takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our noses—off the coasts of New York and San Francisco. It immerses the reader in the edgy camaraderie of close male friendships forged in challenging waves. Finnegan shares stories of life in a whites-only gang in a tough school in Honolulu. He shows us a world turned upside down for kids and adults alike by the social upheavals of the 1960s. He details the intricacies of famous waves and his own apprenticeships to them. Youthful folly—he drops LSD while riding huge Honolua Bay, on Maui—is served up with rueful humor. As Finnegan’s travels take him ever farther afield, he discovers the picturesque simplicity of a Samoan fishing village, dissects the sexual politics of Tongan interactions with Americans and Japanese, and navigates the Indonesian black market while nearly succumbing to malaria. Throughout, he surfs, carrying readers with him on rides of harrowing, unprecedented lucidity. Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, a social history, a literary road movie, and an extraordinary exploration of the gradual mastering of an exacting, little-understood art.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference, ICT Innovations 2010, held in Ohrid, Macedonia, in September 2010. The 33 revised papers presented together with 5 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected. The papers address the following topics: internet applications and services, artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, internet, mobile and wireless technologies, multimedia information systems, computer networks, computer security, e-business, cryptography, high-performance-computing, social networks, e-government, as well as GPU computing.

Discover how the freedom of sucking at something can help you build resilience, embrace imperfection, and find joy in the pursuit rather than the goal. What if the secret to resilience and joy is the one thing we’ve been taught to avoid? When was the last time you tried something new? Something that won’t make you more productive, make you more money, or check anything off your to-do list? Something you’re really, really bad at, but that brought you joy? Odds are, not recently. As a sh*tty surfer and all-around-imperfect human Karen Rinaldi explains in this eye-opening book, we live in a time of aspirational psychoses. We humblebrag about how hard we work and we prioritize productivity over play. Even kids don’t play for the sake of playing anymore: they’re building blocks to build the ideal college application. But we’re all being had. We’re told to be the best or nothing at all. We’re trapped in an epic and farcical quest for perfection. We judge others on stuff we can’t even begin to master, and it’s all making us more anxious and depressed than ever. Worse, we’re not improving on what really matters. This book provides the antidote. (It’s Great to) Suck at Something reveals that the key to a richer, more fulfilling life is finding something to suck at. Drawing on her personal experience sucking at surfing (a sport she’s dedicated nearly two decades of her life to doing without ever coming close to getting good at it) along with philosophy, literature, and the latest science, Rinaldi explores sucking as a lost art we must reclaim for our health and our sanity and helps us find the way to our own riotous suck-ability. She draws from sources as diverse as Anthony Bourdain and surfing luminary Jaimal Yogis, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Jean-Paul Sartre, among many others, and explains the marvelous things that happen to our mammalian brains when we try something new, all to discover what she’s learned firsthand: it is great to suck at something. Sucking at something rewires our brain in positive ways, helps us cultivate grit, and inspires us to find joy in the process, without obsessing about the destination. Ultimately, it gives you freedom: the freedom to suck without caring is revelatory. Coupling honest, hilarious storytelling with unexpected insights, (It’s Great to) Suck at Something is an invitation to embrace our shortcomings as the very best of who we are and to open ourselves up to adventure, where we may not find what we thought we were looking for, but something way more important.