In factories! In the sky! In your cars and phones! In your own home! Robots are everywhere! And they have been for a lot longer than you might realize.

From tea-serving robots in feudal Japan to modern rovers exploring Mars, robots have been humanity's partners, helpers, and protectors for centuries! Join one of the world's earliest robots, a mechanical bird named Pouli, as he explores where robots came from, how they work, and where they're going in this informative and hilarious new book! Ever dreamt of building your own best friend? It might be easier than you think!

Every volume of Science Comics offers a complete introduction to a particular topic--dinosaurs, coral reefs, the solar system, volcanoes, bats, flying machines, and more. These gorgeously illustrated graphic novels offer wildly entertaining views of their subjects. Whether you're a fourth grader doing a natural science unit at school or a thirty year old with a secret passion for airplanes, these books are for you!

Every volume of Science Comics is a complete introduction to a particular topic - dinosaurs, coral reefs, the solar system, volcanoes, bats, flying machines, and more. These gorgeously illustrated graphic novels offer wildly entertaining views of their subjects. Whether you're a fourth grader doing a natural science unit at school or a thirty-year-old with a secret passion for airplanes, these books are for you! This volume: In Robots & Drones, a mechanical dove named Pouli introduces a wide array of robots of various capacities. He covers one of the oldest robots, the coin-powered water fountain; everyday essentials like the coffee maker and the car; and even modern-day weapons of war. Pouli is out to remind us that there are robots everywhere around us.

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

Stump Connolly, chief political correspondent of The Week Behind, is at it again following along the 2008 presidential campaign trail with an irreverent eye toward what makes the politicians tick. Here are first hand accounts along the primary trail, plus the story behind the story of Hillary's tears, Obama's rallies, "live bloggers," the air war vs. the ground game, and the silently-brokered deal that ultimately gave Obama the nomination. Watch Stump make his way through the Democratic and Republican conventions and join him for Obama's triumphant Election Night rally in Chicago "The candidates run and we run alongside, trying to make sense of what they do and say," he writes. "We talk to whoever comes across our radar. We read each other voraciously to see what the others have that we do not. We guess. We conjecture on what will happen. And we pontificate on why it didn't."

Reconstructing Argumentative Discourse analyzes argumentation in ordinary disputes. The analysis begins with an ideal model: a theoretical structure of discourse that might be used to resolve a dispute about the merits of two opposing cases. The ideal model does not describe actual argumentative practice. Argumentative discourse does not always seek genuine resolution and, when it does, the participants may not perform as ideal arguers. A central challenge for argumentation theory is to give an account of argumentation occurring under less-than-ideal conditions and conducted by less-than-ideal participants. The authors offer detailed analysis of argument in such contexts as ordinary conversation, third party dispute mediation, and religious confrontation. An adequate analytic approach to such forms of discourse, the authors argue, must offer critical insight into actual practice; must begin with a defensible normative standard against which practice can be compared; and must also offer an applicable analytic machinery for making the comparison, so its methods can be tailored to empirical circumstances. The authors position their study of argumentation within a general 'normative pragmatics' characterized by a dual commitment to usefulness and adequacy in description. A distinctive set of practical applications and a distinctive view of practicality follow from this approach, characterized not by the search for generalizable means-end relationships but by the development and testing of plans for making real argumentation look as much as possible like ideal argumentation. This book integrates for the first time the normative interest of dialectical theories of argumentation with the descriptive interests of the empirical study of everyday language use. This ambitious project is achieved by adopting a distinctively social and pragmatic view of argumentation - by seeing argumentation as a language activity structured for the function of resolving disagreements. The authors examine argumentation in a wide variety of contexts - including everyday conversation, campus evangelism, political speeches, newspaper letters to the editor, and the formal mediation of disputes. In doing so, they illustrate how to analyze the details of actual argumentation and tackle a variety of theoretical and methodological puzzles encountered in the effort to apply normative models to real life argumentation.