Best Selling Books by Ryan W

A modern, fully-illustrated bestiary, and a mixed-genre anthology all-in-one! Join the time-traveling Mythologist as he explores world-wide legendary birds throughout history. Birds of Lore is the closest you can get to mythological bird watching (without losing a finger).

Disclaimer Please note that this book is an unauthorised game guide and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the original production of Destiny 2 "Embark on a journey to become the ultimate Guardian with AN EXPERT GAME GUIDE TO DESTINY 2's FINAL SHAPE. This comprehensive guide is packed with expert strategies, tips, and secrets to help you dominate the latest expansion. Inside, you'll discover: - Detailed walkthroughs of new story missions and quests, including hidden secrets and rewards - Expert tactics for taking down the toughest enemies and bosses, including the Witness and its minions - Strategies for maximizing your Power level, unlocking exclusive gear, and optimizing your build - In-depth guides to the latest raids and dungeons, including hidden areas, secret chests, and exclusive loot - Tips for mastering the new Prismatic subclass, its abilities, and how to combine them with other subclasses for maximum damage - A comprehensive list of weapons and armor, including stats, perks, and how to acquire them - Secrets and Easter eggs revealed, including hidden areas, exclusive loot, and developer insights - Expert advice on how to navigate the new Pale Heart destination and make the most of its activities - Strategies for playing with a fireteam, including communication tips, role assignments, and teamplay tactics - A comprehensive FAQ section that answers the most pressing questions about the expansion Whether you're a seasoned Guardian or a new player, this guide has something for everyone. Take your gameplay to the next level, unlock the secrets of the Final Shape, and become the ultimate Guardian with AN EXPERT GAME GUIDE TO DESTINY 2's FINAL SHAPE."

Disclaimer Please note that this book is an unauthorized game guide and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the original production of Stellar Blade. worries: Are you new to the world of Stellar Blade and feeling overwhelmed? Are you worried that you're not leveling up fast enough, or that you're constantly being outmatched by more experienced players? Challenges: Stellar Blade is a complex game with a steep learning curve. It's easy to get lost in its vast universe, intricate gameplay mechanics, and competitive multiplayer battles. Mastering the game requires strategic thinking, quick reflexes, and a deep understanding of the game's systems and mechanics. Things to Expect in the Book: "The Ultimate Companion Guide to Stellar Blade" is your comprehensive guide to conquering these challenges. This book is packed with beginner-friendly tips and tricks, detailed walkthroughs, and expert strategies to help you master the game. You'll learn how to optimize your character build, master combat techniques, navigate the game world, and much more. Giving Solution: This guide is designed to turn beginners into pros. It breaks down complex concepts into easy-to-understand language, with clear instructions and step-by-step tutorials. Whether you're struggling with your first battles or aiming to top the leaderboards, this book will equip you with the knowledge and skills you need to succeed. Call to Action: Don't let the challenges of Stellar Blade intimidate you. With "The Ultimate Companion Guide to Stellar Blade," you'll be slaying enemies, conquering dungeons, and ruling the leaderboards in no time. Grab your copy today and embark on your journey to become a Stellar Blade master!

Welcome to the world of Dominic Eden, a laidback, ruthless PSIA agent also known as Agent Pinstrike. In the first ever Eden adventure, Agent Pinstrike goes up against a powerful, corrupt, real-estate magnate called Zack Justinsin. When Ben Nelson, a friend and colleague of Eden who's investigating Justinsin's company, is framed for the attempted murder of Eden's boss, General Snell, Dominic goes after Justinsin. He uncovers a plot that could destroy a large portion of New Hampshire and make Justinsin the richest and most powerful businessman in the region.

The challenge of modeling the organization and function of biological membranes on a solid support has received considerable attention in recent years, primarily driven by potential applications in biosensor design. Affinity-based biosensors show great promise for extremely sensitive detection of BW agents and toxins. Receptor molecules have been successfully incorporated into phospholipid bilayers supported on sensing platforms. However, a collective body of data detailing a mechanistic understanding of membrane processes involved in receptor-substrate interactions and the competition between localized perturbations and delocalized responses resulting in reorganization of transmembrane protein structure, has yet to be produced. This report describes a systematic procedure to develop detailed correlation between (recognition-induced) protein restructuring and function of a ligand gated ion channel by combining single molecule fluorescence spectroscopy and single channel current recordings. This document is divided into three sections: (1) reported are the thermodynamics and diffusion properties of gramicidin using single molecule fluorescence imaging and (2) preliminary work on the 5HT{sub 3} serotonin receptor. Thirdly, we describe the design and fabrication of a miniaturized platform using the concepts of these two technologies (spectroscopic and single channel electrochemical techniques) for single molecule analysis, with a longer term goal of using the physical and electronic changes caused by a specific molecular recognition event as a transduction pathway in affinity based biosensors for biotoxin detection.

As Americans' trust in government nears historic lows, frustration with government performance approaches record highs. We propose that Americans’ views of government can be reshaped by increasing government’s operational transparency--that is, the extent to which citizens can see the often-hidden work that government performs. Across three studies using laboratory and field data, increasing operational transparency improves citizens’ views of and increases engagement with government. In Study 1 (N=554), viewing a five-minute computer simulation highlighting the work performed by the government of an archetypal American town--from building roads to ensuring food safety--increased trust in government and support for government services. In Study 2 (N=125), Boston residents who interacted with a website that visualizes both citizens’ service requests--such as potholes and broken streetlamps--and efforts by city government to address them became more trusting and supportive of government. Study 3 (N=21,986) was a natural experiment using data from a mobile phone application through which Boston residents submit service requests to their city government. Users who viewed photos of the city workers responding to their service requests were more likely to continue using the app over the ensuing 13 months, demonstrating that operational transparency led to sustained engagement with government.

This paper investigates the impact of customer compatibility – the degree of fit between the needs of customers and the capabilities of the operations serving them – on customer experiences and firm performance. We decompose the variance of 58,294 face-to-face retail banking transactions, quantifying the relative importance of customer, employee, process, location, and market-level effects on customer satisfaction. In our models, which explain roughly a quarter of the aggregate variance in customer satisfaction, differences among customers account for 96-97% of this variance. Further analysis reveals that customers report relatively consistent satisfaction across transactions, but that some customers are habitually more satisfied than others. An empirical investigation of the satisfaction of 149,389 customers interacting with 166 banks over a five-year period provides evidence that these customer-level differences are explained in part by customer compatibility. Customers whose needs diverge more starkly from those of their bank’s average customers report significantly lower levels of satisfaction on a broad range of operating dimensions. Consistently, banks that serve customer bases with more dispersed needs receive lower satisfaction scores than banks serving customer bases with less dispersed needs. Finally, a longitudinal analysis of the deposit growth of all federally insured banks in the United States from 2006-2017 reveals that customer compatibility affects financial performance. Branches with more divergent customers grow deposits more slowly than branches with less divergent customers. Institutions serving customer bases with more dispersed needs have branches that exhibit slower deposit growth than those of institutions serving customer bases with less dispersed needs.

Each year approximately 8 million people die from cancer on a global scale. Treatment varies depending on the stage and type of cancer but frequently includes surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. For surgical removal of cancer, it is critical that health care professionals only remove the cancerous portion of tissue and avoid damaging healthy tissue. Imaging modalities are frequently used during surgery but are currently limited in their ability to differentiate between healthy and cancerous tissue. Image processing has the potential to allow surgeons the ability to visualize these differences. This study is aimed to develop an image processing algorithm capable of differentiating between healthy and cancerous tissues from a brain tumor. Fluorescence imaging was utilized to capture grayscale images of a mouse brain tumor samples, marked with green fluorescent protein-labeled biomarker, approximately 10 micro-meters thick. The discrete wavelet transform was then applied in conjunction with a nonlinear mapping function to process the images. Multiple levels of the discrete wavelet transform were applied to further differentiate between the healthy and cancerous tissue. A threshold was then applied and contour maps are shown for clarity. The results indicate both a clear in contrast and a successful segmentation of the tumorous region in each of the input images. This is shown through the statistical texture analysis, a comparison to previous studies, and by visual inspection.

The identification of specific markers of psychopathology in social media data has the potential to provide new tools for the research and practice of clinical psychology, thus augmenting and addressing many of the limitations of existing self-report measures. This project sought to detect relationships between Facebook activity, interaction, word-use and self-reported depressive symptoms. Additionally, it extended the existing literature to examine multiple disorders by examining self-reported worry and social anxiety. These analyses were completed in both college student- and internet-based samples. Self-reported depressive symptoms were found to be associated with social media activity, interactions, and language in both samples. Self-reported depressive symptoms were associated with increased activity on Facebook, including posting more frequently to Facebook and documenting more life events. However, these symptoms were also associated with fewer and more negative interactions with other Facebook users, such as liking and commenting on less content produced by others, receiving fewer likes and tags, and receiving more negative reactions. There were also associations between self-reported depressive symptoms, emotional word use, and pronoun use in participants' posts to Facebook. The pattern of increased Facebook activity and decreased Facebook interaction was also shared with measures of worry and social anxiety, including posting more content, having fewer reactions to other's content, and receiving fewer tags. Additionally, social anxiety was associated with having a greater number of life events and receiving more negative reactions. There were fewer associations between social anxiety, worry, and Facebook language use, with worry being associated with decreased positive word use, and no associations were found with social anxiety. The tripartite model (Clark & Watson, 1991) was used to generate a hypothesized pattern in emotion word use across depression, worry, and social anxiety, which was not supported by the results. Additionally, groups of LIWC categories (Pennebaker, Boyd, Jordan, & Blackburn, 2015) thought to be relevant to worry and social anxiety were not found to be associated with these measures. The patterns and magnitude of the associations observed in this project did not support the use of these markers in the reliable prediction of depression, worry, or social anxiety using Facebook data, or the discrimination between them using Facebook data. Thus, while this project found associations between Facebook activity, interaction, and language and self-reported depressive symptoms, worry, and social anxiety, caution is warranted before these methods are applied to the detection of mental health symptoms.

This study examined the ways in which a pair of Spanish/English dual language bilingual education preschool teachers--one teacher who was designated as the model of Spanish and the other teacher the model of English--enacted their bilingualism as they worked cohesively and simultaneously to work toward common instructional goals. Dual language bilingual education is an instructional model wherein bilingualism is promoted among all students regardless of their level of bilingual proficiency, and in which students are instructed a significant amount of the day in a language other than English (García, 2013). Methodologically, I drew on classroom video data, field notes, and other relevant artifacts collected weekly during shared reading activity in the focal classroom over the course of one academic year to document the interactions in which teachers engaged with each other and students. An initial pass of the data allowed me to explore and map out the ways that the teachers coordinated their practices by identifying the instructional targets and instructional strategies that characterized those practices. A subsequent pass of the data aided in characterizing the ways that the teachers drew on their bilingualism within instances of coordinated practice to support their instructional goals. Guided by a translanguaging framework (García, 2009a, 2009b), findings indicate that teachers not only made expected choices about their language practices (i.e., they maintained their designated language), but that other times they also made choices that departed from the expectations of the school's language policy (e.g., at least one of the teachers used bilingual speech). As such, teachers drew on their own and each other's bilingualism, manifested through both monolingual and bilingual individual speech and collaborative talk, and a mutual understanding of each language. Teachers' use of dynamic bilingualism (e.g., drawing on their own and students' full linguistic repertoires) supported the coordination of their instructional targets and instructional practices. These instances of coordinated practice show teachers taking on multiple discursive roles--ones that support meaning making between the two of them and ones that support meaning making for students. Engaging in, and therefore modeling, dynamic bilingualism provided students with an authentic bilingual experience and may support their meaning making in ways that languaging monolingually could not afford.

It is a well-established result in social psychology that when people feel anxious, they seek advice from others. However, increasingly companies that operate in high-anxiety settings (like financial services, health care, and education) are deploying self-service technologies (SSTs), through which anxious customers transact without human contact. The impact of customer anxiety on service relationships is neither well understood, nor consistently factored into service design. In this paper, two laboratory experiments and one field experiment, conducted in financial service contexts, document the negative effects of anxiety on customer choice satisfaction, firm trust, and long-term engagement and explore the impact of giving self-service consumers the option to interact with a person. Participants engaged in an online investing simulation who are made to feel anxious due to market downturns are less satisfied with their choices and report lower levels of trust in the firm. Providing participants with the opportunity to interact with an expert, or even another participant, dampens anxiety’s negative effects on choice satisfaction and, by extension, firm trust. Interestingly, we find that very few participants who are offered the option to interact with a person take advantage of the opportunity, which is consistent with the idea that it is the mere availability of human contact that mitigates anxiety’s deleterious effects. Finally, in a field experiment conducted with a credit union’s self-service term loan approval process, the incorporation of access to human contact increased customer loan acceptance by 16%, suggesting that access to human contact can improve long-term service engagement.

"White sturgeon (Acipenser transmontanus) in the upper Columbia River have been in decline for over 60 years and are listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Annual spawning produces dispersing larvae; however, recruitment into the juvenile age class has not occurred since the early 1970s. One hypothesis to explain this failure in recruitment is that larvae may not find adequate prey. Little is known about diet and prey availability for white sturgeon larvae, especially in Lake Roosevelt, a reservoir of the Columbia River. The Spokane Tribe of Indians collected littoral and mid-channel benthic drift samples annually at 9 locations in Lake Roosevelt from 2007 to 2010. Zooplankton dominated drift samples in both littoral and thalweg zones, while excluding zooplankton, Hydra dominated the drift. Overall, the mean density and biomass of invertebrates within the flow was highest in littoral sites and highest in years with the greatest flow. Littoral and thalweg sites had no impact on drifting benthic macroinvertebrate diversity, richness, or evenness. To determine the feeding ecology, 590 larvae were collected in July 2015. A total of 14 prey items were found in 9 stomachs, mainly Dipteran larvae and Temoridae. Our results suggest that prey scarcity could be limiting white sturgeon recruitment in Lake Roosevelt"--Leaf 4.

Tilled inter-row areas led to a larger mean increase (from May to September, 2005) in shoot lengths, diameters, and plant spreads than for the inter-row sod treatments. Biological yield of rose hips was also significantly lower in inter-row sod treatments when compared to tilled treatments in experiment #2. Inter-row sod increased plant uptake of P in both experiments, but was not as effective at promoting plant growth and rose hip yields as the tilled inter-row treatment used in this study.

We explore the conditions under which service competition leads to customer defection from an incumbent and which customers are most vulnerable to its effects. We find that customers defect at a higher rate from the incumbent following increased service competition only when the incumbent offers high quality service relative to existing competitors in a local market. We provide evidence that this result is due to a sorting effect whereby the incumbent attracts service (price) sensitive customers in markets where it has supplied relatively high (low) levels of service quality in the past. Furthermore, we show that it is the high quality incumbent's most valuable customers, those with the longest tenure, most products, and highest balances, who are the most vulnerable to superior service alternatives. Along the way, we also show that firms trade-off price and service quality and that when the incumbent offers relatively low service quality in a local market, it is susceptible to the entry or expansion of inferior service (price) competitors. Our results appear to have long run implications whereby sustaining a high level of service relative to local competitors leads the incumbent to attract and retain higher value customers over time.

Since the 1890s, American federalism has been perceived as being unique in the world by having two different levels of government operating within the same jurisdiction without influencing one another. Modern scholars call into question the validity of this basic assumption, but few have published quantitative evidence to reject its application. Furthermore, even some of these theorists continue to suggest that national government programs established under the interstate commerce clause may resist influence from state counterparts. This study tests this suggestion by examining how selected outcomes of the national wetland regulatory program may be influenced by similar statute-based state programs. In the process, three other voids in the wetland management literature are filled. First, wetland regulatory units are described for the first time as consequential components of the regulatory landscape. Second, relationships between the outcomes of the national wetland regulatory program and local socioeconomic and landscape conditions such as population size and growth rates, income, wetland abundance, and program funding levels are quantified. Finally, a model describing the amount of wetland fill permitted and the number of permits issued by the national government is constructed from these relationships. The accomplishment of these tasks produces new evaluative tools that may be used by state and national government wetland managers to more efficiently and effectively implement their programs. The results reveal that some, but not all measures of the national wetland regulatory program's outcomes are influenced by state programs. There is no evidence that the amount of wetland fill permitted by the national government differs measurably in accordance with the presence of any type of active state wetland regulatory program. There is, however, strong evidence that the number of permits issued is directly related to the presence of statute-based state programs. Furthermore, these programs exhibit the same relationship to the national program as do state programs that are empowered solely through federal authorizations. Therefore, when it comes to wetland regulation, the traditional assumption of American federalism is inadequate. The United States does have two different levels of government operating within the same jurisdictions, however, their programs exhibit measurable influence upon one another.

Abstract: In my work, I am dealing with narrative, where we place emphasis or importance; dealing with historical and political figures that may conjure an immediate sense of importance, or at least the idea that there is something that should be figured out. I am presenting stories of no particular consequence that involve important or at least well known people. Maybe this comes out of a dissatisfaction with the way our histories are told in such a way that they are supposed to add up to some sort of sensical conclusion, but my aim here, the reason that I am doing this is not specifically to critique that aspect of our histories, but to celebrate the absurdity that coincides along with any sense that we try and make out of our history.