Jessica and Erick were elated when they found out they were expecting. They planned out names, guessed who the baby would look like, and even talked about how the baby's personality would be. The euphoria came to a halt when Jessica came home to discover all of Erick's things missing from the apartment. As devastating as Erick's disappearing act was, Jessica continued with the pregnancy with hopes that he would resurface sooner than later. As life went on, she lost hope in her traditional family dream but found love again in her new man David. She'd been living on cloud 9 until she soon learns that everybody sent isn't a gift but a surprise in disguise. As her son's birthday approaches, there is not only one but two surprises that will rock Jessica's world.

Surprise: Embrace the Unpredictable and Engineer the Unexpected is a fascinating look at how we can handle and harness surprise in our work, relationships, and everyday lives. Pop Quiz! Do you prefer when: A) Things go according to plan? B) When the unexpected happens? Most of us pick control and predictability. Yet research reveals a counterintuitive truth: surprise is the key that unlocks growth, innovation, and connection. It is also the secret ingredient in our best memories. Through colorful narratives and compelling scientific findings, authors Tania Luna and Dr. LeeAnn Renninger shine a light on the world's least understood and most intriguing emotion. They reveal how shifting our perception of surprise lets us thrive in the face of uncertainty. And they show us how surprise acts as a shortcut that turns a typical product into a meaningful experience, a good idea into a viral one, awkward small talk into engaging conversation, and daily life into an adventure.

A gift was given you at your first breath--have you opened it? It came from the stars and impressed itself into you at your most vulnerable moment. In this introduction to astrosophy, or star wisdom, a science with ancient roots and modern relevance, David Tresemer shows how the patterns written in the heavens influence a person's life. Taking as an example the remarkable life of Rudolf Steiner, Tresemer demonstrates the Oracle of the Solar Cross, whose four points interact throughout each of our lives to shape opportunities and challenges that our souls must face. Steiner spoke often of the "starry script" and hinted that, whereas its patterns impress themselves upon the human psyche, we can also influence this heavenly text, altering it in service of the continued development of humanity. Through stories from the life and examples from the work of Steiner as well as the "Star Brothers and Sisters" who share aspects of his Solar Cross, Tresemer illuminates this truth. Rich in art and anecdote, this groundbreaking book gives insight into the foundations of Anthroposophy and shows how great acts, feelings, and thoughts by human beings on Earth shine out and impress their patterns into the cosmos.

Ephraim Kam observes surprise attack through the eyes of its victim in order to understand the causes of the victim's failure to anticipate the coming of war. Emphasing the psychological aspect of warfare, Kam traces the behavior of the victim at various functional levels and from several points of view in order to examine the difficulties and mistakes that permit a nation to be taken by surprise. He argues that anticipation and prediction of a coming war are more complicated than any other issue of strategic estimation, involving such interdependent factors as analytical contradictions, judgemental biases, organizational obstacles, and political as well as military constraints. Surprise Attack: The Victim's Perspective offers implications based on the intelligence perspective, providing both historical background and scientific analysis that draws from the author's vast experience. The book is of utmost value to all those engaged in intelligence work, and to those whose operational or political responsibility brings them in touch with intelligence assessments and the need to authenticate and then adopt them or discount them. Similarly, the book will interest any reader intrigued by decision-making processes that influence individuals and nations at war, and sometimes even shape national destiny. --Ehud Barak, Former Prime Minister of Israel

Surprise has always been an element of warfare, but the return of great power competition—and the high-level threat that it poses—gives urgency to thinking about surprise now. Because the future is highly uncertain, and great powers have not fought each other for over 70 years, surprise is highly likely in a future great power conflict. This study, therefore, examines potential surprises in a great power conflict, particularly in a conflict’s initial stages when the interaction of adversaries’ technologies, prewar plans, and military doctrines first becomes manifest. It is not an attempt to project the future. Rather, it seeks to do the opposite: explore the range of possible future conflicts to see where surprises might lurk.

Among emotions, surprise has been extensively studied in psychology. In linguistics, surprise, like other emotions, has mainly been studied through the syntactic patterns involving surprise lexemes. However, little has been done so far to correlate the reaction of surprise investigated in psychological approaches and the effects of surprise on language. This cross-disciplinary volume aims to bridge the gap between emotion, cognition and language by bringing together nine contributions on surprise from different backgrounds – psychology, human-agent interaction, linguistics. Using different methods at different levels of analysis, all contributors concur in defining surprise as a cognitive operation and as a component of emotion rather than as a pure emotion. Surprise results from expectations not being met and is therefore related to epistemicity. Linguistically, there does not exist an unequivocal marker of surprise. Surprise may be either described by surprise lexemes, which are often associated with figurative language, or it may be expressed by grammatical and syntactic constructions. Originally published as a special issue of Review of Cognitive Linguistics 13:2 (2015)

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Computer Safety, Reliability and Security, SAFECOMP 2020, held in Lisbon, Portugal, in September 2020.* The 27 full and 2 short papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 116 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: safety cases and argumentation; formal verification and analysis; security modelling and methods; assurance of learning-enabled systems; practical experience and tools; threat analysis and risk mitigation; cyber-physical systems security; and fault injection and fault tolerance. *The conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter ‘Assurance Argument Elements for Off-the-Shelf, Complex Computational Hardware’ is available open access under an Open Government License 3.0 via link.springer.com.

In this book three main things have been accomplished. First, it locates the emergence of religious pluralism as a problem for Christian theology. Secondly, it shows the critical weaknesses in the approaches to pluralism that we find in the works of Gavin D'Costa, George Lindbeck and John Hick, all major players in the field of religious pluralism. Retrieving theological material from seventeenth-century Comenius and eighteenth-century Zinzendorf, the book shows that the Protestant tradition has suitable theological material that can better serve the development of a theology of religious pluralism. Thirdly, the book enters into dialogue with Islam and highlights exciting new approaches to addressing the issues of salvation, the Qur'an and Christology. One critical outcome of the book is that it breaks new ground in showing the limitations of liberation theology and proposes a fascinating, new, pluralism-sensitive hermeneutical approach to contextual theology.