This book explores recreational uses of consumer drones from the lenses of media ecology, mobile communication, mobilities research, and science and technology studies. In this provocative ethnography, Julia M. Hildebrand discusses camera drones as mobile media for meaningful play. She thus widens perspectives onto the flying camera as foremost unmanned aircraft, spying tool, or dangerous toy towards a more comprehensive understanding of its potentials. How should we situate drone practices in recreational spaces? What ways of seeing, moving, and being do hobby drones open up? Across chapters about drone geography, communication, mobility, visuality, and human-machine relations, Aerial Play introduces novel frameworks for drone affordances, such as communication on the fly, disembodied mobilities, auratic vertical play, and drone-mindedness. In the mobile companionship with her own drone, Hildebrand contributes an innovative “auto-technographic” method for the self-reflective study of media and mobility. Ultimately, her grounded and aerial fieldwork illuminates new technological, mobile, visual, and social relations in everyday spaces.

The Aerial is a collection of high school (grades 9-12) students' fiction, prose, drama, poetry and art. This literary-art magazine is entirely students' work, including the layout and design.

A SUNDAY TIMES NATURE BOOK OF THE YEAR It's flight and egg and feathers and song. It's the demure plumage of a mountain thornbill and the extravagant tail feathers of an Indian paradise flycatcher, the solo song of a superb lyrebird and the perfectly timed duets of canebrake wrens, an osprey's hurtling dive toward the sea, and a long-legged heron's still, patient eyeing of the dark water. There is no single bird way of being. Drawing on personal observations, the latest science, and her bird-related travel around the world, Jennifer Ackerman playfully explores our dramatically shifting understanding of these magnificent animals. 'Jennifer Ackerman knows what she's talking about...Her knack for catching the personalities of different species in gorgeous, playful prose further collapses comfortable barriers between the human and the birdlike' Daily Telegraph 'The real joy of [this] book is its close attention to some of the specialists of the region... Ackerman is alive to the humour at play in field research ' Mark Cocker, Spectator

The United States Marine Corps is the largest such force on the planet, and yet it is the smallest, most elite section of the U.S. military, one with a long and storied history and some of the most rigorous training procedures. Here, in the most current version of the manual used by the Corps itself, is the guidebook used by the service to physically prepare its troops for their dangerous work. Areas covered include: . the fundamentals of physical fitness for Marines . development of fitness training programs . conditioning drills . guerilla exercises . the basics of orienteering . individual exercise programs . the basics of combat water survival . team contests and athletics . physical readiness tests . and much, much more. Military buffs, athletes, and anyone seeking to understand how American armed services train for the ever-changing arena of modern warfare will find this a fascinating and informative document.

From the evaluation of the individual players to the choosing and development of a system of play, this book guides the reader through the process of organising, developing and building a successful soccer team.

In her comprehensive and carefully crafted book, Gisela Kaplan demonstrates how intelligent and emotional Australian birds can be. She describes complex behaviours such as grieving, deception, problem solving and the use of tools. Many Australian birds cooperate and defend each other, and exceptional ones go fishing by throwing breadcrumbs in the water, extract poisonous parts from prey and use tools to crack open eggshells and mussels. The author brings together evidence of many such cognitive abilities, suggesting plausible reasons for their appearance in Australian birds. Bird Minds is the first attempt to shine a critical and scientific light on the cognitive behaviour of Australian land birds. In this fascinating volume, the author also presents recent changes in our understanding of the avian brain and links these to life histories and longevity. Following on from Gisela’s well-received books on the Australian Magpie and the Tawny Frogmouth, as well as two earlier titles on birds, Bird Minds contends that the unique and often difficult conditions of Australia's environment have been crucial for the evolution of unusual complexities in avian cognition and behaviour.

Orson Welles’s greatest breakthrough into the popular consciousness occurred in 1938, three years before Citizen Kane, when his War of the Worlds radio broadcast succeeded so spectacularly that terrified listeners believed they were hearing a genuine report of an alien invasion—a landmark in the history of radio’s powerful relationship with its audience. In Radio’s America, Bruce Lenthall documents the enormous impact radio had on the lives of Depression-era Americans and charts the formative years of our modern mass culture. Many Americans became alienated from their government and economy in the twentieth century, and Lenthall explains that radio’s appeal came from its capability to personalize an increasingly impersonal public arena. His depictions of such figures as proto-Fascist Charles Coughlin and medical quack John Brinkley offer penetrating insight into radio’s use as a persuasive tool, and Lenthall’s book is unique in its exploration of how ordinary Americans made radio a part of their lives. Television inherited radio’s cultural role, and as the voting tallies for American Idol attest, broadcasting continues to occupy a powerfully intimate place in American life. Radio’s America reveals how the connections between power and mass media began.