Bøger af John Janovy Jr

OUTWITTING COLLEGE PROFESSORS is the ultimate college success book. This valuable little volume tells everything you need to know, from how profs make out exams, how you should act if you encounter your prof in a bar, tips for maximizing grades on papers, to advice on how to handle your relationships with the most difficult profs (in a chapter named "Advanced Outwitting"!) For over four decades, college students have used these tricks on the author, and now he's passing along the ones that work, along with explanations of why they work. The 4th Edition contains a contributed chapter by Nicole Searcey, champion outwitter and Fulbright Scholar. If there is any single textbook any college student must have, it's OUTWITTING. This one makes the ideal gift for a graduating, college-bound, high school senior!

"In this unique piece of pop-science, one of the world's preeminent experts on parasites reveals their astonishing, disgusting, weird, and fascinating behaviors and how they provide insight into humanity's most difficult problems. Squeamishness aside, what can humans learn from the most reviled yet misunderstood animals on Earth: lice, tapeworms, and maggots that can eat a lizard from the inside? And how can these lessons help us negotiate a world characterized by pandemic disease, ethnic hatred, climate change, war, and internet-driven political chaos? Whether we're learning to adapt to adverse conditions, accept our own limitations, or process new information in a frightening landscape-we can be sure a parasite did it first. Because sometimes, the answers to life's biggest questions can be found by looking at the little things"--

TUSKERS takes place on the day of a football game between the University of Nebraska and the University of Oklahoma in the year 2090. Nebraska has not lost a game in ten years, but must win this last one to complete the perfect Winning Decade. Global warming has turned the American central plains into a desert. A brilliant chemical engineer has devised a way to make petroleum products from slime corn, a desert-loving perennial invented by molecular biologists. As a result of his patents, this engineer owns a company named Anti-Environmental Products, Inc. (AEPI), whose raw material-corn slime-is the crude oil of the late 21st Century. Nebraska is now the petroleum source for much of the world, and thus the engineer's wealth. But this guy hates Nebraska and will use everything in his power to make the Tuskers lose! The molecular biologists also have succeeded in resurrecting woolly mammoths from DNA in carcasses appearing in the rapidly-melting polar ice cap. The first, and largest, of these mammoths is Archie, the University of Nebraska mascot, and the team is now known as the "Tuskers" instead of the "Cornhuskers" as earlier in the century. TUSKERS not only is science fiction, it also is satire, exploring the American obsession with football as a national sport as the world experiences global climate change, political turmoil, and accelerating technological advance. In the end, the book is not so much about sport as it is about our preoccupation with sport as a displacement behavior in a world that is changing so rapidly we cannot control it.

Dr. Charlie Weatherford, dashing young geology prof at Cavanaugh College in Iowa, is arrested for the murder of a colleague, Rebecca Stitcher, reputed to have solved the problem of making major earthquakes occur on purpose, using hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") techniques developed by the petroleum industry. Connecticut "Connie" Bergen, a civil attorney for Stevens Oil, Inc., the company supporting Weatherford for proprietary access to research results, gets on a company jet bound for Des Moines, sent by owner Delmar Stevens himself to defend Weatherford. This is Bergen's first assignment in a criminal case, and he's met at the airport by Amber Buchanan, a mysterious woman with various roles in Stevens Oil, Inc., whose job evidently is to guide him through the legal labyrinth surrounding this murder. It's not obvious that anyone, even Weatherford, cares whether he's convicted or acquitted. The Weatherford Trial leads us through the Iowa Department of Criminal Investigation witness protection efforts, Bergen's handling of forensic geology, competing expert witnesses, and Bergen's education at the hands of Amber, until the jury adjourns to arrive at a verdict. The Weatherford Trial is the fourth Gideon Marshall Mystery. As with the first three books, this one brings out the deadly potential of seemingly arcane ideas, the phenomenon of scientific illiteracy in high places, and the power of belief regardless of truth.

The Ginkgo is a story about a girl from a western ranch who comes to a large university and writes four papers about a single tree. In the process, she discovers and explores the clash between tradition and creativity, eventually producing a sobering vision of American a thousand years into the future.

A brutal murder at Gideon Marshall's upscale liberal arts college in Iowa remains unsolved. A Department of Criminal Investigation detective and the Polk County medical examiner show up in Marshall's office on a bleak Friday afternoon with the victim's autopsy report, a box of plastic bags, and a request to determine the origin of dirt samples. Paleontologist Marshall is about to become a crucial prosecution witness because of his ability to identify materials in those bags. The DCI request sends Marshall and his wife Mykala on an adventure that begins with concealed carry training and weapons purchase, continues on a trek through Oklahoma oil fields posing as inspectors, and ends with an arrest that is certain to bring Marshall into direct confrontation with Big Oil, Big Money, and the Department of Defense. THE EARTHQUAKE LADY is the third Gideon Marshall Mystery. The stories center around the potential danger of scientific discoveries and the sometimes eccentric lives of people who make them. Marshall is dragged into efforts by various people to control the discoveries of a genius-level scientist, a former faculty member in his department, this unhappy woman-Rebecca Stitcher-who was the murder victim. Stitcher's theoretical research in geology could empower a nation to produce ideal weapons of mass destruction, namely large volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tsunamis occurring at times and places chosen on purpose. Needless to say, there many people interested in this possibility, and all of them eventually descend on Gideon Marshall's small liberal arts college in Iowa. As Marshall's perceptive wife Mykala says to him: "Gideon, it's just beginning."

Ten Minute Ecologist contains twenty answered questions about life on Earth and the factors that control numbers and distributions of biological resources. The book should be required reading for anyone dealing with natural resources, and it is ideal for classroom use and both the high school and college level.

Dr. Clyde Renner, professor of geology, chair of the department, world renowned expert on volcanoes and earthquakes, and intellectual giant, is dead, apparently of a heart attack, alone in his insect-infested house. Leonard Branch, campus cop at Renner's small liberal arts college in Iowa, is convinced there's more to Renner's demise than appears on the death certificate. Gideon Marshall, paleontologist, now acting chair, plays host to a parade of characters, including Ranner's bullied secretary and accountant, a belligerent female prof, an untenured young scientist and his hot-headed coed paramour, her wealthy helicopter parent, Renner's estranged gay son and his computer geek husband, and the college president; all are involved in various ways with Clyde Renner's distinguished career and all have a stake in the autopsy results. In the end, Marshall accepts the fact that he's probably discovered not only the perfect murder, but also ideal weapons of mass destruction.

With another death at his small, Forbes-listed, liberal arts college in Iowa, Gideon Marshall, unwilling and temporary chair of the Geology Department, gets dumped into even a bigger and more complex mess than he experienced as a result of the first one a year earlier. Instead of the simple heart attack and stroke that felled his predecessor, which was the perfect murder of a despised faculty bully, Marshall now deals with the brutal execution-style shooting of a geology prof, this one a female whose personality has earned her the nickname "Becky Bitcher." THE STITCHER FILE is a sequel to BE CAREFUL, Dr. RENNER. In THE STITCHER FILE Marshall is put under house arrest because of a note found in the deceased's hands. The victim is found on an ice-covered railroad crossing by the Geology Department accountant. Law enforcement descends on the site, and Marshall ends up with an ankle monitor. Many of the same players that plagued Gideon Marshall in BE CAREFUL, DR. RENNER re-appear in new roles, along with new characters from various law enforcement agencies. RENNER, it turns out, was a victim of a perfect murder scheme. STITCHER is a different matter.

Delmar Stevens, obscenely rich oil baron with rigs and drilling platforms throughout the world, is obsessed with theoretical research by an obscure, and now dead, woman scientist at a small college in Iowa, research he believes will give him the power to generate massive earthquakes, or set off equally massive volcanoes, at selected places on Earth. Caught up in this obsession with a potential weapon of mass destruction are a suite of characters, including scientists, detectives from the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, and an oil field inspector working for the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, and a young geologist who holds the key to success, or failure, of Stevens' obsession. Belief in the validity of scientific discoveries drives Stevens' actions, namely an effort to build a weapon of mass destruction disguised as a natural disaster. He dreams of the power at his command if he can use his company's massive inventory of equipment and those Einstein-level equations to prove that his ideas work. The first big experiments are underway in Oklahoma.

Intelligent Designer is a set of twenty answered questions about evolution. The book is intended to help alleviate the rampant scientific illiteracy so typical of today's political climate, an illiteracy that is outright dangerous to any society so dependent on science and technology as is the United States.