Double bill featuring two spoof comedies. 'Epic Movie' (2007) tells the tale of four fully grown orphans: one the victim of snakes that attacked her plane, another raised by a kindly Louvre curator, the third a Mexican 'libre' wrestling refuge, and the last an average mutant from an 'X'-community. When the curious quartet visits a sprawling chocolate factory, they stumble across a magical wardrobe which transports them to the enchanted land of Gnarnia. It seems that the wondrous fantasy land has recently fallen under the spell of the evil White Bitch (Jennifer Coolidge), and in order to bring peace back to Gnarnia these four bumbling mortals will have to join forces with a charismatic pirate, a painfully sincere group of aspiring wizards, and one particularly libidinous lion. 'Date Movie' (2006) stars Alyson Hannigan as a hopeless romantic who has finally met the man of her dreams Grant Funkyerdoder. But before they can have their 'Big Fat Greek Wedding', they'll have to 'Meet the Parents', hook up with 'The Wedding Planner' and contend with Grant's girlfriend, Andy, a spectacularly beautiful woman who wants to put a stop to her 'Best Friend's Wedding'.

Complex analysis is found in many areas of applied mathematics, from fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, signal processing, control theory, mechanical and electrical engineering to quantum mechanics, among others. And of course, it is a fundamental branch of pure mathematics. The coverage in this text includes advanced topics that are not always considered in more elementary texts. These topics include, a detailed treatment of univalent functions, harmonic functions, subharmonic and superharmonic functions, Nevanlinna theory, normal families, hyperbolic geometry, iteration of rational functions, and analytic number theory. As well, the text includes in depth discussions of the Dirichlet Problem, Green's function, Riemann Hypothesis, and the Laplace transform. Some beautiful color illustrations supplement the text of this most elegant subject.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer brings to life the most intriguing woman in the history of the world: Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt.
Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnets, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator.
Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first when both were teenagers. She poisoned the second. Ultimately she dispensed with an ambitious sister as well; incest and assassination were family specialties. Cleopatra appears to have had sex with only two men. They happen, however, to have been Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, among the most prominent Romans of the day. Both were married to other women. Cleopatra had a child with Caesar and--after his murder--three more with his protege. Already she was the wealthiest ruler in the Mediterranean; the relationship with Antony confirmed her status as the most influential woman of the age. The two would together attempt to forge a new empire, in an alliance that spelled their ends. Cleopatra has lodged herself in our imaginations ever since.
Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Shakespeare and Shaw put words in her mouth. Michelangelo, Tiepolo, and Elizabeth Taylor put a face to her name. Along the way, Cleopatra's supple personality and the drama of her circumstances have been lost. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff here boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order. Rich in detail, epic in scope, Schiff 's is a luminous, deeply original reconstruction of a dazzling life."

All 12 episodes from the first season of the TV series created by Matthew Carnahan. Centred around a group of management consultants who work for Galweather and Stearn, the second ranked management consultancy in the US, the management team led by Marty Kahn (Don Cheadle) will stop at nothing to secure business deals, especially if it will undermine rival firm Kinsley-Johnson. The episodes comprise: 'The Gods of Dangerous Financial Instruments', 'Amsterdam', 'Microphallus', 'Mini-Mogul', 'Utah', 'Our Descent Into Los Angeles', 'Bareback Town', 'Veritas', 'Ouroboros', 'Prologue and Aftermath', 'Business' and 'The Mayan Apocalypse'.

Comparing the educational experiences of adolescents from a variety of 'visible' ethnic minority groups across Europe, and focusing on underprivileged urban contexts, this book reveals the structural inequalities, as well as the often conflicting inter-ethnic relations which develop in classrooms, playgrounds and larger communities.

Improving Student Achievement: Reforms that Work expands on the first volume in the Milken Family Foundation series on education policy, ""Talented Teachers: The Essential Force for Improving Student Achievement."" The series explains to policymakers, parents, business leaders, and teachers the importance of teacher quality in increasing student achievement. This volume is based primarily on the proceedings from the 2004 Milken National Education Conference (NEC), which was held in Washington, D.C., in May 2004. Reform of any kind is an arduous process. It requires forward thinking, hard work, collaboration, and commitment on the part of teachers, administrators, policy leaders, and other supporters of the endeavor. Education reform in particular can be especially difficult due to the many ingrained features of our current K-12 system; however, it is vital to learn from our past mistakes and break the cycle of failed efforts in order to fix the system that is the lifeblood of our country's future success. These proceedings provide insights into some of those past efforts as well as some of the current initiatives that provide optimism and hope in schools across the country. From these examples, we recognize that it is imperative that we improve student achievement by embracing reforms that work.

The Laplace transform is a wonderful tool for solving ordinary and partial differential equations and has enjoyed much success in this realm. With its success, however, a certain casualness has been bred concerning its application, without much regard for hypotheses and when they are valid. Even proofs of theorems often lack rigor, and dubious mathematical practices are not uncommon in the literature for students. In the present text, I have tried to bring to the subject a certain amount of mathematical correctness and make it accessible to un dergraduates. Th this end, this text addresses a number of issues that are rarely considered. For instance, when we apply the Laplace trans form method to a linear ordinary differential equation with constant coefficients, any(n) + an-lY(n-l) + . . . + aoy = f(t), why is it justified to take the Laplace transform of both sides of the equation (Theorem A. 6)? Or, in many proofs it is required to take the limit inside an integral. This is always fraught with danger, especially with an improper integral, and not always justified. I have given complete details (sometimes in the Appendix) whenever this procedure is required. IX X Preface Furthermore, it is sometimes desirable to take the Laplace trans form of an infinite series term by term. Again it is shown that this cannot always be done, and specific sufficient conditions are established to justify this operation."

Foreword by Jeremy Irons, preface by Adrian Lyne. Based on the novel by Vladimir Nabokov, Schiff tells the astounding story behind the most controversial movie of our time. 75 movie stills. "Like Nabokov's novel, it is an eloquent tragedy laced with wit and a serious, disturbing work of art..." - The New York Times

This book reviews systematic training programs that are designed to enhance the language, reading, literacy and cognitive skills of individuals with Learning Disabilities in various disciplines. Most titles on Learning Disabilities intervention often focus on the linguistic area of the disability, while there are many more areas of difficulty. Students with learning disabilities struggle with such as math, cognitive abilities, and organizational skills. Adopting a multi-disciplinary approach, this book encompasses a wide variety of remedial treatments and therapies developed by expert researchers and scholars in the Learning Disabilities area.

Author Jerald Schiff presents a framework within which charitable behavior can be understood from an economist's viewpoint. He stresses the impact of various government fiscal policies on charitable giving, an issue of increasing importance in light of social welfare spending cuts and the Tax Reform Act of 1986. The book begins with an introduction of the issues involved and an explanation of how an economic analysis differs from that of other disciplines. Chapter 2 introduces the basic model of giving employed throughout the book. Using this model, he describes conditions under which government spending will crowd out, or reduce, charitable giving. This analysis is then extended in several different directions in the balance of the book. First, Schiff considers the implications of the fact that much government spending is funneled through charitable organizations, arguing that government support for charities may actually encourage donations. Contending that donors often have poor information about the activities of charities, he analyzes soliciting by charities. Next, the author models the behavior of volunteers, arguing that money and time are often given for very different reasons and so may respond to policy changes in different ways. He offers several alternative explanations for volunteering. These several hypotheses are then tested against data from the National Survey of Philanthropy. The use of time series data from 1930-86 examines the historical relationship between government spending and money donations. In conclusion, the author considers likely future trends in the charitable sector. This book will interest economists and other social scientists working in the areas of charitable giving and the nonprofit sector and public finance. Practitioners--lawyers and fundraisers--in the nonprofit sector will also find this book required reading.

This book, based on a large-scale research project funded by the National Institute of Justice and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, provides an overview of the restorative justice conferencing programs currently in operation in the United States, paying particular attention to the qualitative dimensions of this, based on interviews, focus groups and ethnographic observation. It provides an unrivalled view of restorative justice conferencing in practice, and what the people involved felt and thought about it. The book looks at four structural variations in the face-to-face form of restorative decision making: family group conferences, victim-offender mediation/dialogue, neighborhood accountability boards, peacemaking circles. The authors address two issues that have received limited research emphasis in restorative justice: the lack of clear and consistent standards, and the absence of testable theories of intervention that reflect what has become a rather diverse practice. In response the authors conclude with a proposed structure for principle-based evaluation designed to test emerging theories of restorative decision making.