In Under the Streetlights, a former atheist shares his journey of asking tough questions, pondering the purpose of life, and ultimately stumbling toward faith in God. Having been raised in an atheist home, science functioned as more than a discipline for Matt Deisen; it was his religion. He had faith in the scientific method, but faith in God was a foreign thing, a strange thing, even a dangerous thing. He was raised, like so many in his generation, to view religion with tolerant skepticism and respectful disbelief. But Matt had questions. How could you possibly know if God truly exists? How can you follow someone you cant see? And why do you need to go sit in a building or join a religious club in order to find Him? In his early years, Matt wanted Christians to fail in their faith, to wake up from their delusions, and come back to reality. And then something happened. Under the Streetlights follows Matt on his journey of questioning what we have taken for granted, thirsting for something deeper, and ultimately finding what each of us in our own way is longing to find... an unshakable belief in something greater than ourselves.

An expert explains how the conventional wisdom about decision making can get us into trouble—and why experience can’t be replaced by rules, procedures, or analytical methods In making decisions, when should we go with our gut and when should we try to analyze every option? When should we use our intuition and when should we rely on logic and statistics? Most of us would probably agree that for important decisions, we should follow certain guidelines—gather as much information as possible, compare the options, pin down the goals before getting started. But in practice we make some of our best decisions by adapting to circumstances rather than blindly following procedures. In Streetlights and Shadows, Gary Klein debunks the conventional wisdom about how to make decisions. He takes ten commonly accepted claims about decision making and shows that they are better suited for the laboratory than for life. The standard advice works well when everything is clear, but the tough decisions involve shadowy conditions of complexity and ambiguity. Gathering masses of information, for example, works if the information is accurate and complete—but that doesn't often happen in the real world. (Think about the careful risk calculations that led to the downfall of the Wall Street investment houses.) Klein offers more realistic ideas about how to make decisions in real-life settings. He provides many examples—ranging from airline pilots and weather forecasters to sports announcers and Captain Jack Aubrey in Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander novels—to make his point. All these decision makers saw things that others didn’t. They used their expertise to pick up cues and to discern patterns and trends. We can make better decisions, Klein tells us, if we are prepared for complexity and ambiguity and if we will stop expecting the data to tell us everything. “I know of no one who combines theory and observation—intellectual rigor and painstaking observation of the real world—so brilliantly and gracefully as Gary Klein.” —Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers and Blink

How Do They Do That? A young man of Dublin walks past a row of streetlights at night--and they go out, one by one, as he passes. An engineer in Woodville, Washington, is stopped by police and his car searched to nd out what he's doing to their streetlights. An Australian in the entertainment industry parks his car in a parking lot, and the light above him goes out-until the following evening when he parks in precisely the same space and the light comes on again. And that's not all. When a guest in a restaurant in Athens, Greece, asks that the music be turned down, they refuse--whereupon she "kills" the restaurant's electricity and they eat the rest of their meal by candlelight. Other people affect traf c lights, computers, railway crossings... This is Street Light Interference (SLI). Once considered to be folklore--something that happened to a friend of a friend--today it is recognized as a scienti c enigma with implications for our knowledge of the universe, including ourselves. In this, the rst full-length book on SLI, we hear from some of the hundreds of SLIders who have reported their uncanny experiences, and consider the wider implications of this fascinating phenomenon.

Most studies on urbanisation focus on the move of rural people to cities and the impact this has, both on the cities to which the people have moved, and on the rural communities they have left. This book, on the other hand, considers the impact on rural communities of the physical expansion of cities. Based on extensive original research over a long period in one settlement, a rural commune which over the course of the last two decades has become engulfed by Hanoi’s urban spread, the book explores what happens when village people become urbanites or city dwellers – when agriculture is abandoned, population density rises, the value of land increases, people have to make a living in the city, and the dynamics of family life, including gender relations, are profoundly altered. This book charts these developments over time, and sets urbanisation in Vietnam in the wider context of urbanisation in Southeast Asia and Asia more generally.

Participation, Community, and Public Policy in a Virginia Suburb: Of Our Own Making challenges the conventional wisdom about participation in modern American communities through the story of Pimmit Hills, Virginia—one of the first federally-financed subdivisions built for World War II veterans. Its story will be familiar to the millions of baby boomers who grew up in middle-class suburbs. This book argues that every community is the sum of all of the different types of participation—positive, negative, formal, informal, direct, and indirect—and not just the few participation activities that social surveys have tracked over the past few decades, such as voting or attending religious services. At the same time, Pimmit Hills’s story is unique. Its proximity to Washington, D.C., meant its residents had front-row seats to—and sometimes supporting roles in—the creation of policies that continue to shape the America we live in today, such as childhood vaccinations, discrimination, and information technology.

The NLT Streetlights New Testament is a visually compelling, easy-to-understand resource for churches, ministries, and individuals. Linking to remarkably creative audio and video resources, the NLT Streetlights New Testament explains Christian truth to young people and serves as a basic discipleship tool for ministries. Its unique tone and approach to the gospel have strong appeal for those in an urban culture. The feature content focuses on helping the reader engage the Word of God. The Corner Talk features answer these key questions: Who is God? Who am I? What do I do? This New Testament also includes QR codes that link to the entire Streetlights New Testament Audio Bible, as well as to visually compelling teaching videos.