2004 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title According to Stephen Ray Flora, reinforcement is a very powerful tool for improving the human condition despite often being dismissed as regarding people as less than human and as "overly simplistic." This book addresses and defends the use of reinforcement principles against a wide variety of attacks. Countering the myths, criticisms, and misrepresentations of reinforcement, including false claims that reinforcement is "rat psychology," the author shows that building reinforcement theory on basic laboratory research is a strength, not a weakness, and allows unlimited applications to human situations as it promotes well-being and productivity. Also examined are reinforcement contingencies, planned or accidental, as they shape behavioral patterns and repertoires in a positive way.
This is the first fitness book that explains and organizes behavior analytic training (or "BAT") principles in a systematic user friendly manner that the reader can apply to gain and maintain fitness, health, and lose weight. Part one lays out the rationale for improved fitness, and details how being fit enables living a more value filled, meaningful and happy life. In addition to many physical benefits, increased fitness results in reduced anxiety, depression and has many other psychological benefits. In part two, the nuts and bolts of BAT are presented; how to measure, assess, and gradually, effectively and beneficially change fitness, weight and health related behaviors; how to make and use meaningful, realistic and effective short-term, intermediate and long-term goals. You are also taught how to accept and handle, in a productive manner, any discomfort exercise may produce. Part Three covers further considerations and advanced issues including the nature of the "self" as it relates to fitness; breaking bad habits; how to graph behavior and use graphs to assist health related behavior change; how to learn to relax and use relaxation; and the scientifically proven, most effective procedures for effective, lasting and healthy dieting, weight loss and weight loss maintenance.
This is the first fitness book that explains and organizes behavior analytic training (or "BAT") principles in a systematic user friendly manner that the reader can apply to gain and maintain fitness, health, and lose weight. Part one lays out the rationale for improved fitness, and details how being fit enables living a more value filled, meaningful and happy life. In addition to many physical benefits, increased fitness results in reduced anxiety, depression and has many other psychological benefits. In part two, the nuts and bolts of BAT are presented; how to measure, assess, and gradually, effectively and beneficially change fitness, weight and health related behaviors; how to make and use meaningful, realistic and effective short-term, intermediate and long-term goals. You are also taught how to accept and handle, in a productive manner, any discomfort exercise may produce. Part Three covers further considerations and advanced issues including the nature of the "self" as it relates to fitness; breaking bad habits; how to graph behavior and use graphs to assist health related behavior change; how to learn to relax and use relaxation; and the scientifically proven, most effective procedures for effective, lasting and healthy dieting, weight loss and weight loss maintenance."--Amazon.com.
2004 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title According to Stephen Ray Flora, reinforcement is a very powerful tool for improving the human condition despite often being dismissed as regarding people as less than human and as "overly simplistic." This book addresses and defends the use of reinforcement principles against a wide variety of attacks. Countering the myths, criticisms, and misrepresentations of reinforcement, including false claims that reinforcement is "rat psychology," the author shows that building reinforcement theory on basic laboratory research is a strength, not a weakness, and allows unlimited applications to human situations as it promotes well-being and productivity. Also examined are reinforcement contingencies, planned or accidental, as they shape behavioral patterns and repertoires in a positive way.
In this highly provocative book, Stephen Ray Flora maintains that we have been deceived into believing that whatever one's psychological problem—from anxiety, anorexia, bulimia, depression, phobias, sleeping and sexual difficulties to schizophrenia—there is a drug to cure us. In contrast, he argues that these problems are behavioral, not chemical, and he advocates behavioral therapy as an antidote. He makes the controversial claim that for virtually every psychological difficulty, behavioral therapy is more effective than drug treatment. Not only that, but the side effects of behavioral therapy, rather than being harmful like many drugs, are actually beneficial, often facilitating self-empowerment through learning functional life skills.
While the story of Endeavour is widely written about, Captain Cook sailed in or with eight ships which began their lives as merchant ships. This detailed illustrated history tells the story of these ships and the people who sailed in them. In placing these ships and people in the personal, political, social, financial, scientific and religious contexts of their times, this book provides a readable and comprehensible account of the long Eighteenth Century. Often using contemporary sources, this gripping account fills a gap in Cook history and attempts to catch something of that exciting, violent, gossipy but largely untaught and unknown period through which these vessels and their people sailed literally and figuratively between the old world and the new.
The desert islands of the Gulf of California are among the world's best-preserved archipelagos. The diverse and unique flora, from the cardón forests of Cholludo to the agave-dominated slopes of San Esteban remain much as they were centuries ago, when the Comcaac (Seri people) were the only human presence in the region. Almost 400 plant species exist here, with each island manifesting a unique composition of vegetation and flora. For thousands of years, climatic and biological forces have sculpted a set of unparalleled desert worlds. Plant Life of a Desert Archipelago is the first in-depth coverage of the plants on islands in the Gulf of California found in between the coasts of Baja California and Sonora. The work is the culmination of decades of study by botanist Richard Felger and recent investigations by Benjamin Wilder, in collaboration with Sr. Humberto Romero-Morales, one of the most knowledgeable Seris concerning the region's flora. Their collective effort weaves together careful and accurate botanical science with the rich cultural and stunning physical setting of this island realm. The researchers surveyed, collected, and studied thousands of plants—seen here in meticulous illustrations and stunning color photographs—providing the most precise species accounts of the islands ever made. To access remote parts of the islands the authors worked directly with the Comcaac, an indigenous community who have lived off marine and terrestrial life in this coastal desert region for centuries. Invaluable information regarding indigenous names and distributions are an intrinsic part of this work. The flora descriptions are extraordinarily detailed and painstakingly crafted for field biologists. Conservationists, students, and others who are interested in learning about the natural wealth of the Gulf of California, desert regions, or islands in general are sure to be captivated by this rich and fascinating volume.
From the Pinacate lava fields and expansive dunes to the shores of the Gulf of California, the Gran Desierto is one of the hottest and driest places in the Western Hemisphere. Yet this region in the state of Sonora in northwestern Mexico embraces a remarkable number of habitats with a fascinating and surprisingly rich flora. This is the heart of the Sonoran Desert, still in a largely primordial state, in juxtaposition with the ravished wetlands of the once great Río Colorado. Flora of the Gran Desierto is the culmination of more than twenty-five years of research in this magnificent desert and delta by botanist Richard Felger. This comprehensive floristic study of more than 565 species of vascular plants features original diagnostic descriptions and innovative identification keys to the families, genera, and species. Particular attention has been devoted to taxa that are poorly known. Even weeds and their histories are treated in detail. Hundreds of illustrations by such eminent botanical artists as Lucretia Brezeale Hamilton, Matt Johnson, and Bobbi Angell will aid in the identification of plants. Common names of plants are given in English, Spanish, and O'odham. While emphasizing scientific accuracy, the book is written in an accessible style. Felger's observations and knowledge of plant ecology, geographic distribution, evolution, ethnobotany, plant variation and special adaptations, and the history of the region provides botanists, naturalists, ecologists, conservationists, and anyone else celebrating the desert with readable, interesting, and important information. With two of Mexico's newest biosphere reserves—the Pinacate and the Upper Gulf of California—this region is a keystone for desert conservation efforts. Its location linking vast preserves to the north makes this book especially useful for anyone interested in borderland studies and the Sonoran Desert. Flora of the Gran Desierto represents a most creative, definitive, and enthusiastic treatment of Sonoran Desert plant life and is highly relevant to ecological restoration in deserts and wetlands in arid places worldwide.
Woody plants such as trees have a significant economic and climatic influence on global economies and ecologies. This completely revised classic book is an up-to-date synthesis of the intensive research devoted to woody plants published in the second edition, with additional important aspects from the authors' previous book, Growth Control in Woody Plants. Intended primarily as a reference for researchers, the interdisciplinary nature of the book makes it useful to a broad range of scientists and researchers from agroforesters, agronomists, and arborists to plant pathologists and soil scientists. This third edition provides crutial updates to many chapters, including: responses of plants to elevated CO2; the process and regulation of cambial growth; photoinhibition and photoprotection of photosynthesis; nitrogen metabolism and internal recycling, and more. Revised chapters focus on emerging discoveries of the patterns and processes of woody plant physiology.* The only book to provide recommendations for the use of specific management practices and experimental procedures and equipment*Updated coverage of nearly all topics of interest to woody plant physiologists* Extensive revisions of chapters relating to key processes in growth, photosynthesis, and water relations* More than 500 new references * Examples of molecular-level evidence incorporated in discussion of the role of expansion proteins in plant growth; mechanism of ATP production by coupling factor in photosynthesis; the role of cellulose synthase in cell wall construction; structure-function relationships for aquaporin proteins
Sightseers and Scholars provides portraits of the explorers and naturalists who sought to explore the New World in the pre-Darwinian Age. The late 18th and early 19th centuries in Europe and America saw the dawn of a golden age of science in which society energetically sought to quantify, categorize, and rationally explain the world. The accurate cataloguing of nature was one of the goals of the age, and most plants and animals known today were collected, classified, and named in a great frenzy of scientifically-motivated exploration. Until the publication in 1859 of Darwin's The Origin of Species, it was believed that there was a finite number of species on the planet and through diligent effort all of nature might be collected and then studied. Sightseers and Scholars profiles nine important naturalists-both dedicated professionals and amateurs-who set off for what is now North and South America to discover and document the natural wonders they found there. Their stories of adventure are punctuated with hardship, both in finding the financing to get their ventures off the ground, and the vagaries of the elements once they reached the New World, be it North or South America. Despite the odds, these explorers, either travelling with artists or as artists themselves, chronicled their adventures in both words and pictures, providing a unique portrait of the natural world in North, South and Central America before it became widely settled. Many of the species observed or discovered still bear the names of the explorers who discovered them (the Stellar Sea Lion, Douglas Fir, Townsend's Finch). Written with insight, the sometimes wry, always fascinating, text entertains the modern reader with the adventures of: William Bartram, Alexander Von Humboldt, Charles Waterton, Prince Maximillian of Wied, David Douglas, John Townsend, John Richardson, Henry Bates and John Powell
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