Jeff Scott serves up yet another portion of methanol inspired lunacy to satisfy your speedway craving appetite with his latest book CONCRETE FOR BREAKFAST. Although some view speedway as little more than a fairground sideshow attraction, Scott continues to validate the sport's authenticity as he celebrates the romance of its racing, the bravery of its competitors, and the idiosyncrasies of its partisans on and off the track. An equal opportunity offender, motorcycle speedway thumbs its nose at the nanny-state bureaucrats of Health and Safety as well as the ubiquitous corporate media that enlists the drama and daring of the sport to validate its mission of spin, profit, and mediocrity. But, of course, any sport composed of individuals who willingly embrace the physical and mental challenges of speedway must by definition be considered daring, maverick and subversive. Consider the physical challenges of speedway: riding a high powered motorcycle without brakes or gears, steering only by balance, gravity, and gyroscopic luck four times round a shale covered track at speeds exceeding 60 miles per hour. The bike itself, a huge single piston 500cc machine, without suspension, powered by methanol, roars its sweet hymn to oblivion to those who ride and to those who watch. The mandated helmets and kevlars are the merest genuflection in the direction of self-preservation. In short, the entire enterprise constitutes a complete commitment to barking madness. Let Jeff Scott introduce you to this most anachronistic of sports in 21st Century Britain. If you do you will eventually succumb to the spectacle, the people, and the journey across its peculiar landscape and geographies. You will learn the rhythms of the unvarying repetitiousness of the team meeting format as well as the uniqueness of each individual race. With his gift for location, dialogue, and the human comedy, Jeff will escort you into his world of speedway. There you will accompany him as he watches every speedway team in Britain compete. He lends you his nose as he savors the aroma of methanol, burgers, chips, stressed toilets, and excitement. From his favorite vantage point in the lee of the stadium grandstand or lost in thought on the road to (or from) yet another event behind the wheel and the wipers of his much abused car, Jeff will help you begin your own pilgrimage to speedway. And even though there may well be CONCRETE FOR BREAKFAST for some unlucky riders whose quest for glory ends in a bruised heap of broken bones and bike, Jeff will cleave the chaos for you in a such a way that the event will be invariably portrayed with the charm, irreverence, humanity and compassion that informs the style of this most unique of sports' most unique diarist. This volume is the fifth book in a planned trilogy gone terribly, terribly wrong. It's a "must have" companion to Jeff's masterpiece Showered in Shale as well as his others: Shifting Shale, When Eagles Dared, or the poignantly photographed Shale Britannia.

The present book shares critical perspectives on the conceptualization, implementation, discourses, policies, and alternative practices of environmental education (EE) for diverse and unique groups of learners in a variety of international educational settings. Each contribution offers insights on the authors' own processes of re-imagining an education in/about/for the environment that are realized through their teaching, research and other ways of "doing" EE. Overall, environmental education has been aimed at giving people a wider appreciation of the diversity of cultural and environmental systems around them as well as the urge to overcome existing problems. In this context, universities, schools, and community-based organizations struggle to promote sustainable environmental education practices geared toward the development of ecologically literate citizens in light of surmountable challenges of hyperconsumerism, environmental depletion and socioeconomic inequality. The extent that individuals within educational systems are expected to effectively respond to-as well as benefit from-a "greener" and more just world becomes paramount with the vision and analysis of different successes and challenges embodied by EE efforts worldwide. This book fosters conversations amongst researchers, teacher educators, schoolteachers, and community leaders in order to promote new international collaborations around current and potential forms of environmental education. This book reflects many successful international projects and perspectives on the theory and praxis of environmental education. An eclectic mix of international scholars challenge environmental educators to engage issues of reconciliation of correspondences and difference across regions. In their own ways, authors stimulate critical conversations that seem pivotal for necessary re-imaginings of research and pedagogy across the grain of cultural and ecological realities, systematic barriers and reconceptualizations of environmental education. The book is most encouraging in that it works to expand the creative commons for progress in teaching, researching and doing environmental education in desperate times. - Paul Hart, Professor of Science and Environmental Education at the University of Regina (Canada), Melanson Award for outstanding contributions to environmental and outdoor education (Saskatchewan Outdoor and Environmental Education Association) and North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE)'s Jeske Award for Leadership and Service to the Field of EE and Outstanding Contributions to Research in EE. In an attempt to overcome simplistic and fragmented views of doing Environmental Education in both formal and informal settings, the collected authors from several countries/continents present a wealth of cultural, social, political, artistic, pedagogical, and ethical perspectives that enrich our vision on the theoretical and practical foundations of the field. A remarkable book that I suggest all environmental educators, teacher educators, policy and curricular writers read and present to their students in order to foster dialogue around innovative ways of experiencing an education about/in/for the environment. - Rute Monteiro, Professor of Science Education, Universidade do Algarve/ University of Algarve (Portugal).

Grails is a full stack framework which aims to greatly simplify the task of building serious web applications for the JVM. The concepts within Grails, like interceptors, tag libs, and Groovy Server Pages (GSP), make those in the Java community feel right at home. Grails' foundation is on solid open source technologies such as Spring, Hibernate, and SiteMesh, which gives it even more potential in the Java space: Spring provides powerful inversion of control and MVC, Hibernate brings a stable, mature object relational mapping technology with the ability to integrate with legacy systems, and SiteMesh handles flexible layout control and page decoration. Grails complements these with additional features that take advantage of the coding-by-convention paradigm such as dynamic tag libraries, Grails object relational mapping, Groovy Server Pages, and scaffolding. Graeme Rocher, Grails lead and founder, and Jeff Brown bring you completely up-to-date with their authoritative and fully comprehensive guide to the Grails 2 framework. You'll get to know all the core features, services, and Grails extensions via plug-ins, and understand the roles that Groovy and Grails are playing in the changing Web.

The rise of Ruby on Rails has signified a huge shift in how we build web applications today; it is a fantastic framework with a growing community. There is, however, space for another such framework that integrates seamlessly with Java. Thousands of companies have invested in Java, and these same companies are losing out on the benefits of a Railslike framework. Enter Grails.

Grails is not just a Rails clone. It aims to provide a Railslike environment that is more familiar to Java developers and employs idioms that Java developers are comfortable using, making the adjustment in mentality to a dynamic framework less of a jump. The concepts within Grails, like interceptors, tag libs, and Groovy Server Pages (GSP), make those in the Java community feel right at home.

Grails' foundation is on solid open source technologies such as Spring, Hibernate, and SiteMesh, which gives it even more potential in the Java space: Spring provides powerful inversion of control and MVC, Hibernate brings a stable, mature object relational mapping technology with the ability to integrate with legacy systems, and SiteMesh handles flexible layout control and page decoration.

Grails complements these with additional features that take advantage of the codingbyconvention paradigm such as dynamic tag libraries, Grails object relational mapping, Groovy Server Pages, and scaffolding.

Graeme Rocher, Grails lead and founder, and Jeff Brown bring you completely uptodate with their authoritative and fully comprehensive guide to the Grails framework. You'll get to know all the core features, services, and Grails extensions via plugins, and understand the roles that Groovy and Grails are playing in the changing Web. What you'll learn Discover how the Web is changing and the role the Groovy language and its Rails framework play Get to know the Grails Project and its domains, services, filters, controllers, views, testing, and plugins Experience the availability of plugins for Rich Client and Ajax, web services, performance/utilities, scheduling, security, functionality, and even Persistence See how Grails works with other frameworks like Spring, Wicket, Hibernate, and more Create custom plugins in Grails Who this book is for

This book is for everyone who is looking for a more agile approach to web development with a dynamic scripting language such as Groovy. This includes a large number of Java developers who have been enticed by the productivity gains seen with frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, JRuby on Rails, etc. The Web and its environment is a perfect fit for easily adaptable and concise languages such as Groovy and Ruby, and there is huge interest from the developer community in general to embrace these languages.

Like a medieval astrologer peering at the heavens, author Jeff Scott continues to interpret the cycles, epicycles, and motorcycles of the spinning planets of Speedway in this his latest book: Quantum of Shale. As he engages with the myriad social and cultural gears that power this unique engine of British working class sport, Scott seeks to determine whether the forces that turn these wheels within wheels are centrifugal or centripetal. Will Speedway adjust to the increasing challenges of 21st Century Britain and so plot an enduring course towards significance and survival? Or will it succumb to the general nihilistic inertia of our time and spin itself out into social irrelevance and extinction? As in his other critically acclaimed works documenting the current status of Speedway, Quantum of Shale follows Scott's travels around Britain as he visits Speedway tracks on race day. There he observes and participates in the sport's rituals, culture and traditions that have engendered the fierce loyalties of its primarily blue collar fan base. Yet, while he does this with respect and affection, Scott also acknowledges those trends that appear to conspire to knock Speedway from its orbit. Whether from aging fans to increasingly obsolete and inconvenient venue sites, complex rules, the idiosyncrasies and travails of management all set in the context of a pitiless economic calculus that scars the curve of a beautiful but undervalued sport. Quantum of Shale joins Jeff Scott's other critically acclaimed works on British Speedway: Showered in Shale, When Eagles Dared, Shifting Shale, Shale Britannia, along with Concrete for Breakfast, nominated for the 2009 British Sports Book of the year (Biography section). Together they constitute a body of work unique in its dedication to a sport as well as the social and cultural scope of its subject, and the compassion of its author.

Best current thinking on accelerating organizational transitions.

For beer servers and fans alike, The 60-Minute Primer is a crash course to quickly gain immediately usable knowledge of specialty and craft beer. Like learning a new language from the ground up, The 60-Minute Primer is designed to immerse you in the "alphabet and grammar" of beer language, the bare-bones knowledge including ingredients, jargon, styles, service, and more to get you the tools you need to begin enjoying beer and communicating more effectively about it.

Out of public view lurk anxiety and hopelessness as racetrack Greyhounds fear the worst once they lose their value to the dog track industry. DAISY'S GREYT ESCAPE plunges the reader into the tumultuous life of one Greyhound that is not willing to go without a struggle. When Daisy learns that slow dogs like her are taken away, she makes a courageous choice that catapults her on a thrilling and adventurous search for a home to find the genuine love that has eluded her all of her life.

Life can be heavy. Once in a while, think light. "My Name is Mudd: Facebook Posts and other (A)musings" does both. Combining sarcastic jabs at life in general with a prickly-yet-poignant look at marriage and family, this collection of short stories and deadpan posts is a casserole of wit, honesty and sarcasm. Think of "My Name is Mudd..." as a Hallmark card of sorts, only it's located at Spencer's Gifts, next to the whoopee cushions and the poster of Erik Estrada.

Down the Drain should be a national best seller as Vincent Mancino rants about what this great country of ours has become. Parents have created a nation of whiners and entitled youth that doesn't understand how we were created through capitalism and by allowing kids to be complacent and teaching them that no one wins or loses, well, America falters in its steps. Dealing with subjects of the day: Immigration, politicians, stay-at-home parents, and technology, Vincent pokes fun and offers changes that could be made in order to regain America's stature as a leader. This coffee table read isn't meant to offend, but with society's sensitive nature through the years, and a time when politicians can't fix any problems even by allocating new taxes, Vincent asks, "What the hell is really happening?" Buy this book and know that you're not alone in the desire for real change in America.

This book, More Than A Housewife, is not only excerpts of Vicki Gunvalson's life while growing up... the hurdles she had to get over, such as a disease that could have taken her life, but it is also a collection of experiences she's had while trying to transform herself from a once stay-at-home mom to a full-fledged entrepreneur. There have been many obstacles along the way while working toward increasing her business and she shares with the readers just how she got past and began breaking away from the fears of true success. Within the book, she explains how she found her purpose which led her to understand better, the directions she should take. This information, about purpose and direction, can help those with similar questions of their own. Do you want to know what your purpose in life is? Will you know what to do once you find it? Though there may be different paths to explore, there is still a common thread between you and Vicki. Regardless if you're a single mom or dad, a person looking for a new career or just want to learn some of the things Vicki went through to attain an affluent level of existence, buy her book, More Than A Housewife, and explore the possibilities that may have eluded you.