Mark Olmstead is a young pest control exterminator whose company, Eco PC, becomes politically incorrect in the ultra green yet polluted city of Portland, where he is besieged by animal rights protesters, including the Militant Insect Alliance, who spank him with fly swatters. He moves back to rural eastern Oregon and commutes, only to find that his hometown Morehead Gap is now mostly owned by his new landlord, Wes Titus, a politically correct developer from Portland. The town church has decayed, is infested by vermin and occupied by Waldo Ralph, an old hippie who has reconsecrated the structure as the ecocentric Church of Highs, a refuge for wildlife where he grows medical marijuana in the basement. While trying to make enough money to buy a house, Mark courts a former classmate, Sally Chan, who is half Chinese, and takes a side job as an illegal marijuana distributor, involving him with violent hippies, a black drug gang, Islamic terrorists, political assassins, the FBI and a cabal of computer hackers playing God in real life through an Internet video game called Oz and the Flying Monkeys. Mark is targeted for deletion by the Monkeys when he turns informer and he suspects that one of the Monkeys is Yakov Tete, a radical professor visiting his neighbor Diana Hartfield, a book editor vacationing from New York.

Smart Wheelchairs and Brain-Computer Interfaces: Mobile Assistive Technologies combines the fields of neuroscience, rehabilitation and robotics via contributions from experts in their field to help readers develop new mobile assistive technologies. It provides information on robotics, control algorithm design for mobile robotics systems, ultrasonic and laser sensors for measurement and trajectory planning, and is ideal for researchers in BCI. A full view of this new field is presented, giving readers the current research in the field of smart wheelchairs, potential control mechanisms and human interfaces that covers mobility, particularly powered mobility, smart wheelchairs, particularly sensors, control mechanisms, and human interfaces. Presents the first book that combines BCI and mobile robotics Focuses on fundamentals and developments in assistive robotic devices which are commanded by alternative ways, such as the brain Provides an overview of the technologies that are already available to support research and the development of new products

In order to more fully understand what we mean by "race", social scientists need to engage genetics, medicine, and health. While the contributors of this volume reject pseudoscience and hierarchical ways of looking at race, they make the claim that it is time to reassess the Western-based, "social construction" paradigm. Arguing that race is not merely socially constructed, the contributors offer a provocative collection of views on the way that social scientistsmust reconsider the idea of race in the age of genomics.

The essays in this collection start with the premise that although race, like class and gender, is socially constructed, all three categories have been shaped profoundly by their context in a capitalist society. Race, in other words, is a historical category that develops not only in dialectical relation to class and gender but also in relation to the material conditions in which all three are forged. In addition to discussing and analyzing various dimensions of the African American experience, contributors also consider the ways in which race plays itself out in the experience of Asian Americans and in the very different geopolitical environments of the British Empire and postcolonial Africa. Contributors are Pedro Caban, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, David Crockett, Theodore Koditschek, Scott Kurashige, Clarence Lang, Minkah Makalani, Helen A. Neville, Ibitola O. Pearce, David Roediger, Monica M. White, and Jeffrey Williams.

This special issue provides a view of the past, present, and future of the field of personality and social psychology as an interdisciplinary endeavor. Collectively, the articles illustrate the vital contributions that can be made pursuing the reciprocal connections between personality/social psychology and psychobiology; developmental psychology; comparative psychology and evolutionary biology; clinical and health psychology; communication studies; organizational studies and systems theory; and cultural anthropology. The papers reflect the collective past and present of the field and set an agenda for a collective future.

Deals with technologise such as cyberspace, animation, multimedia, and speech recognition. Also includes the philosophical and psychological background to creating effective interfaces.