Most Popular Books by Ryan Murphy

Formed in the early years after the Great Wars, the Champions are a group dedicated to the safety of Jardenia and its people. Aldron, an unassuming young man will quickly learn they are the force that stands between him and his certain demise at the hands of a once sworn Champion, Elian. Elian and his forces have vowed to never allow humans to once more rule the world. Through might or magic they are determined to end the current bloodline. Aldron, the last of his bloodline must face the perils of Jardenia and Elian''s forces in order to take his place in history among the kings of Jardenia. Aldron, with the Champions at his side, learns the truth of his being and that he must return to Rodan to take his proper place amongst his people, as their king. As preparations are made for their departure to Rodan evil arrives in Aldron''s home, the Black Glade. From the outset Aldron, the only human alive with innate magic, is hunted by Elian and Karan who are intent on his demise. The two are determined to destroy any chance the humans may come to hold magic and regain their foothold upon the world and have searched endlessly for Aldron since his disappearance as an infant. They believe the world has been caused enough grief by the humans and their greed. Aldron flees to the safety of Rodan and as quickly as he becomes king he learns there is much to be done to prevail over the evil brothers and their summoned horde of followers. .

A look back at the first 100 years of Langley Air Force Base, once Langley Field, and its impact on Hampton, Virginia. The articles orginally appeared in the Daily Press of Newport News, Virginia.

Students in economics classrooms are increasingly digital natives, raised in a culture of engagement, expression and learning through online interactions using technological devices. We have turned the concept of a ''selfie'' into an instructional tool for students to demonstrate their understanding of economic concepts, as well as to engage personally with those concepts. A student self-assessment survey supports the expectations of the literature that the EconSelfies assignment leverages the power of visuals and narratives to help students link themselves with introductory economics material for improved learning outcomes.

The application of research-based methods of skill development has enabled people across a variety of fields to reach extraordinary levels of achievement. Among the various fields where superior achievement might be attained, training individuals to recognize the dignity of others and strive for remarkable accomplishment in humanitarian service would be an area that would greatly affect our schools, society and world.

According to popular attitudes in Western democracies, the choice between right-wing and left-wing parties is a choice between socialism and unbridled free markets. In contrast, the cold and staid research of academia has frequently concluded that particular political parties do not really matter, as whichever party is elected will be closely tethered to the will of the median voter. This article considers the effects of the ideology of parties in power over the long run (1928-95) on economic freedom in subsequent periods. Right-wing governments are found to have modest, positive effects on economic freedom, but the effects are not particularly robust. The findings here are consistent with others elsewhere, which conclude that there is minor, uneven evidence of an effect. Nonetheless, historically small effects may not be indicative of the future, should these effects be poorly indicative of today''s tumultuous political landscape.

This paper explores the relationship between country membership in major intergovernmental organizations and economic freedom. While claiming no broad theoretically-bound robust causal mechanism, I use fixed effects models to find baseline results finding a correspondence between economic freedom and membership in the EU, NATO, WTO, UN, OECD, World Bank, and IMF. While the results are not simple, the strongest findings are negative effects of the UN, IMF, and WTO, and positive effects of the World Bank and possibly the EU. I make no claims of causality. However, whatever the relationship could be endogenous to, for example the international openness of governments, is yet of interest.

The Book of Mormon is a controversial text that has a lot of history and makes many claims in regards to authorship. In this study, the Book of Mormon is analyzed using latent semantic analysis to identify if the book as a whole has authorship unity and validity. Authorship unity would suggest only one author wrote the book. Authorship validity would suggest the authors within the text who claim authorship make a valid claim, in the sense that their writings within the Book of Mormon are of uniform authorship. Authorship unity and authorship validity are conflicting terms for this study, meaning both cannot be true about the Book of Mormon since it claims multi-authorship.

Vitamin A deficiency (VAD) is a major public health problem that can cause blindness and increase the risk of disease and mortality in children. VAD is particularly prevalent in children of sub-Saharan Africa, but there is little reliable information available that describes the spatial distribution of VAD below national level estimates. To target interventions that cover affected populations, a clear understanding of the geographic distribution of VAD in children is necessary. However, collection of data on VAD and other micronutrient deficiencies is often costly and difficult, resulting in large gaps in knowledge of severity of micronutrient deficiencies. In cases where available data is sparse, spatial interpolation methods may provide a way to estimate micronutrient status at un-sampled locations. This study compared the accuracy of five different spatial interpolation methods in predicting the spatial distribution of vitamin A status and deficiency in children under the age of five in Cameroon, using infection-adjusted retinol binding protein concentrations collected in a nationally representative survey in 2009. The methods compared included Inverse Distance Weighting, Thin Plate Splines, Random Forests, Ordinary and Universal Kriging, as well as a combined consensus model. Inverse distance weighting performed the best in predicting RBP concentrations, with a Pearson''s cross-validation correlation coefficient of 0.61. This prediction was then used to create an estimate of the number of Cameroonian children who were vitamin A deficient at a higher spatial resolution than was previously available. While prevalence of VAD in children appeared highest in the Northern region of Cameroon, the overall number of VAD children was higher in the Extreme North and Centre regions of the country due to higher population density in these regions. The national proportion of VAD children predicted (33%) aligned well with the estimate based on the original survey data (35%).

One of two winners of the 2002 Aldrich Poetry Competition judged by Robert Hass.