Best Selling Books by Scott Smith

Philosophical naturalism is taken to be the preferred and reigning epistemology and metaphysics that underwrites many ideas and knowledge claims. But what if we cannot know reality on that basis? What if the institution of science is threatened by its reliance on naturalism? R. Scott Smith argues in a fresh way that we cannot know reality on the basis of naturalism. Moreover, the "fact-value" split has failed to serve our interests of wanting to know reality. The author provocatively argues that since we can know reality, it must be due to a non-naturalistic ontology, best explained by the fact that human knowers are made and designed by God. The book offers fresh implications for the testing of religious truth-claims, science, ethics, education, and public policy. Consequently, naturalism and the fact-value split are shown to be false, and Christian theism is shown to be true.

We all have a story to tell. Three years after losing his first wife to breast cancer in 2001, Scott met Rhonda through an Internet dating service, and, after a whirlwind romance, they married in 2005. The next few years were filled with both bliss and the challenges of blending two families and five children. In 2009, Rhonda was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. This book chronicles their seven-year journey through the raw emotions of e-mails exchanged with their amazing support group of church, friends, coworkers, and family. With a skilled and dedicated team of doctors and caregivers on their side, they were carried through it all by the Grace and Strength of their Lord. This is their story.

Following a brief history of the market for private aircraft, this illustrated guide helps potential buyers assess their needs based on factors like budget, applications, planned travel distances, passenger capacity and speed. A range of models from names like Cessna, Piper, Beechcraft and more, are all arranged by price range.

Constructivism dominates over other theories of knowledge in much of western academia, especially the humanities and social sciences. In Exposing the Roots of Constructivism: Nominalism and the Ontology of Knowledge, R. Scott Smith argues that constructivism is linked to the embrace of nominalism, the theory that everything is particular and located in space and time. Indeed, nominalism is sufficient for a view to be constructivist. However, the natural sciences still enjoy great prestige from the “fact-value split.” They are often perceived as giving us knowledge of the facts of reality, and not merely our constructs. In contrast, ethics and religion, which also have been greatly influenced by nominalism, usually are perceived as giving us just our constructs and opinions. Yet, even the natural sciences have embraced nominalism, and Smith shows that this will undermine knowledge in those disciplines as well. Indeed, the author demonstrates that, at best, nominalism leaves us with only interpretations, but at worst, it undermines all knowledge whatsoever. However, there are many clear examples of knowledge we do have in the many different disciplines, and therefore those must be due to a different ontology of properties. Thus, nominalism should be rejected. In its place, the author defends a kind of Platonic realism about properties.

We live in a time of moral confusion: many believe there are no overarching moral norms, and we have lost an accepted body of moral knowledge. Alasdair MacIntyre addresses this problem in his much-heralded restatement of Aristotelian and Thomistic virtue ethics; Stanley Hauerwas does so through his highly influential work in Christian ethics. Both recast virtue ethics in light of their interpretations of the later Wittgenstein''s views of language. This book systematically assesses the underlying presuppositions of MacIntyre and Hauerwas, finding that their attempts to secure moral knowledge and restate virtue ethics, both philosophical and theological, fail. Scott Smith proposes alternative indications as to how we can secure moral knowledge, and how we should proceed in virtue ethics.

A nuanced portrait of a great historical figure considered everything from a “God-haunted man” to a “stalwart nonbeliever” What did faith mean to Winston Churchill? Churchill was far from transparent about his religious beliefs and never regularly attended church services as an adult, even considering himself “not a pillar of the church but a buttress,” in the sense that he supported it “from the outside.” But Gary Scott Smith assembles pieces of Churchill’s life and words to convey the profound sense of duty and destiny, partly inspired by his religious convictions, that undergirded his outlook. Reflecting on becoming prime minister in 1940, he wrote, “It felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.” In a similarly grand fashion, he described opposing the Nazis—and later the Soviets—as a struggle between light and darkness, driven by the duty to preserve “humane, enlightened, Christian society.” Though Churchill harbored intellectual doubts about Christianity throughout his life, he nevertheless valued it greatly and drew on its resources, especially in the crucible of war. In Duty and Destiny, Smith unpacks Churchill’s paradoxical religious views and carefully analyzes the complexities of his legacy. This thorough examination of Churchill’s religious life provides a new narrative structure to make sense of one of the most important figures of the twentieth century.

It''s hard to know what specific opportunities, technologies or challenges the future will bring. If you want to overcome the uncertainties of tomorrow, it''s essential that you build a future culture. The potential for success is limitless for businesses which develop a culture designed for innovating and adapting to the future. Drawing upon decades of experience as futurists and consultants, Scott Smith and Susan Cox-Smith offer proven strategies that will allow you to fundamentally rewire your culture so that it becomes more fluent, agile and prepared to deal with whatever tomorrow will bring. From futureproofing your brand and manifesto to adapting the experience of your workforce, Future Cultures offers practical tools and techniques that will bring your focus out of the past and into the future. Through first-hand interviews and case studies from multinational companies such as IBM and the UN, this book will show how you can join the world''s most innovative businesses by prioritizing tomorrow today.

Goppy and Libby are best friends. But when Libby needs money for a new backpack, Goppy decides to teach her a valuable lesson about responsibility and frugality. He shows her how to earn her own money, and together they learn the joy of honest work and financial independence. It is never too early to begin teaching children about self-responsibility and the fundamentals of conservatism, and in this charming and humorous tale, Scott and Andrea Smith prove these lessons can be learned in an enjoyable and entertaining way. Children will identify with Goppy''s prudence and Libby''s tenacity, and together, children and their parents will learn how to Teach a Donkey to Fish. Andrea and Scott Smith are the not-so-normal parents of two young kids living in beautiful upstate South Carolina. Although not farmers by trade, Andrea and Scott wanted to plant the seeds of conservatism in their children at an early age.

A blockbuster anthology of original, blood-curdling vampire fiction from New York Times bestselling and award-winning authors, including Charlaine Harris, whose novels were adapted into HBO’s hit show True Blood, and Scott Smith, publishing his first work since The Ruins. Before being transformed into romantic heroes and soft, emotional antiheroes, vampires were figures of overwhelming terror. Now, from some of the biggest names in horror and dark fiction, comes this stellar collection of short stories that make vampires frightening once again. Edited by New York Times bestselling author Christopher Golden and featuring all-new stories from such contributors as Charlaine Harris, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Scott Smith, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Michael Kortya, Kelley Armstrong, Brian Keene, David Wellington, Seanan McGuire, and Tim Lebbon, Seize the Night is old-school vampire fiction at its finest.

This book presents sociology in an orderly, consistent, and integrated manner.

Field Guide to Bedside Diagnosis, Second Edition enables students and physicians to navigate from the patient''s symptoms and presenting signs to the diagnosis. The book covers 139 chief complaints and signs and is organized to parallel the diagnostic reasoning process: a differential overview of probable causes, a diagnostic approach for each differential, and the specific clinical findings that point to diagnosis. A collection of 192 full-color illustrations show diagnostically important observable signs. This edition includes thoroughly updated diagnostic approaches and quick-access Evidence-Based Medicine Physical Diagnosis tables indicating sensitivity, specificity, and likelihood ratios for findings.

Designing Asynchronous Circuits using NULL Convention Logic (NCL) begins with an introduction to asynchronous (clockless) logic in general, and then focuses on delay-insensitive asynchronous logic design using the NCL paradigm. The book details design of input-complete and observable dual-rail and quad-rail combinational circuits, and then discusses implementation of sequential circuits, which require datapath feedback. Next, throughput optimization techniques are presented, including pipelining, embedding registration, early completion, and NULL cycle reduction. Subsequently, low-power design techniques, such as wavefront steering and Multi-Threshold CMOS (MTCMOS) for NCL, are discussed. The book culminates with a comprehensive design example of an optimized Greatest Common Divisor circuit. Readers should have prior knowledge of basic logic design concepts, such as Boolean algebra and Karnaugh maps. After studying this book, readers should have a good understanding of the differences between asynchronous and synchronous circuits, and should be able to design arbitrary NCL circuits, optimized for area, throughput, and power. Table of Contents: Introduction to Asynchronous Logic / Overview of NULL Convention Logic (NCL) / Combinational NCL Circuit Design / Sequential NCL Circuit Design / NCL Throughput Optimization / Low-Power NCL Design / Comprehensive NCL Design Example

This book reports the results of an ethnographic study, focusing primarily on the experiences of four teachers of the Chinese language in Australian secondary schools. The author creates an audience for their voices as they reflect on their own understandings of culture, language teaching, and culture in language teaching through semi-structured interviews, and compares these reflections with written stimulus dialogues designed to elicit ''culture-in-language'' reflections, as well as curriculum and policy documents produced by the Australian government. The book''s findings indicate that teachers of the Chinese language are diverse in their views on culture, language teaching, and the ways in which culture can or should inform language teaching, and the author argues that language teacher intercultural competence cannot be assessed through a synthesis of the current English-only research literature. This book will be of interest to teachers and teacher trainers of Chinese as a foreign language, as well as students and scholars of applied linguistics and language education more broadly.

Mechanical Vibrations: Modeling and Measurement describes essential concepts in vibration analysis of mechanical systems. It incorporates the required mathematics, experimental techniques, fundamentals of model analysis, and beam theory into a unified framework that is written to be accessible to undergraduate students, researchers, and practicing engineers. To unify the various concepts, a single experimental platform is used throughout the text. Engineering drawings for the platform are included in an appendix. Additionally, MATLAB programming solutions are integrated into the content throughout the text.

Do you have a scurry of squirrels playing baseball in your backyard? Jack does - along with many other groups of adventurous animals you''ll learn about in this fun story of amazing discoveries! From a tower of sparkly, pink giraffes to an array of cartwheeling hedgehogs, Jack uses the power of his imagination to create a tale that delights his teacher and classmates alike!

Comet Press is extremely proud to present its third annual anthology featuring this year''s hardcore corps of authors with the best extreme horror fiction of 2017 that breaks boundaries and trashes taboos. It was a killer year for horror fiction of the harder kind. Authors, editors and publishers presented readers with some startling works of horrific imagination, stories graphic in the extreme yet with subtleties suggesting larger meanings, tales that explore humanity by plumbing depths of soulless inhumanity and, in some cases, outright depravity. The stories here represent the best of them, disturbing tales that dig deep and take you into the dark heart of horror itself, unrelenting and unapologetic. “So Sings The Siren” by Annie Neugebauer takes us onto a Dark Fantasy stage for a one-night-only performance of mythological torture. Then Ryan Harding’s “Junk” gets right to the hardcore stuff with the ultimate dick-pic horror tale. Robert Levy’s “The Cenacle” is a literary cemetery feast you may have a hard time stomaching (Tums won’t save you). Nathan Ballingrud’s “The Maw” treads surefootedly on Sci-Fi ground, right up to the edge of the Maw itself in a tale of stunning originality. Luciano Marano made his first pro sell when he sold “Burnt” to DOA III, certainly one of the year’s best anthologies, and the tale has it own fiery fetishistic twist. “The Better Part of Drowning” by Octavia Cade treads waters of both science fiction and fantasy but it’s pure horror at its biting depths. Tim Waggoner’s “Til Death” is Lovecraftian Post-Apocalypse horror at its absolute best. “Letter From Hell” comes with that special delivery you only get from Matt Shaw. Dani Brown gets down and very dirty in her “Theatrum Mortuum,” which may be the most extreme thing you read all year. Glenn Gray’s “Break” is a hard-to-take anatomy lesson given to a man weary of doing hard time. In “Bernadette” Ramiro Perez de Pereda gets medieval in his tale of a djinn summoned by a desperate priest. Brian Hodge takes you on a trip to Mexico you will never forget in “West of Matamoros, North of Hell.” This story is a masterpiece of suspense, a grueling experience that may well leave you exhausted by the end. You might even feel like a vacation afterward, but we’re betting it won’t be to Matamoros. Bracken MacLeod’s “Reprising Her Role” takes us behind the scenes of a porno snuff film for a gut-wrenching reprisal and unexpected bonus footage. A real-life death threat inspired Doug Ford’s “The Watcher” and we think it shows. “Scratching From The Outer Darkness” showcases Tim Curran’s descriptive prowess and gives you a tale of hardcore Cthulhu Mythos. Brace yourself when Adam Howe’s “Foreign Bodies” takes you deep into the bowels of a nasty abyss—which might make a good echo chamber for the laughter Adam’s patented black humor is likely to elicit. Sean Patrick Hazlett introduces us to “Adramelech,” an ancient demon with a taste for broiled children. Daniel Marc Chant’s “ULTRA” jacks into a popular VR game called Slut Slayer. But what if it’s more than a game? Nathan Robinson takes us into the trees with a group of militant environmentalists who will discover a tree hugger of the deadly sort, entirely alien to their experience. Scott Smith (A Simple Plan and The Ruins) wraps up this year’s fat package of the hard stuff in a big bloody bow with “The Dogs.” The canines in this tale are not Man’s Best Friend variety, nor are they Woman’s Besties, as you will see. Thanks for coming along into this year’s heart of hardcore darkness. We hope to see you on the other side.

Easy-to-follow advice from two top-notch attorneys. Any creator of visual symbols, images, slogans, or other insignia connected to a product needs to know how to protect his or her creation. The Pocket Idiot’s Guide to Trademarks offers the necessary information to do just that. Using easy-to-understand, concise language, this pocket guide simplifies the fast- paced, high profile, and complicated legal world of trademarks. Written by experts in the field, it explains everything from the origin and theory of trademarks to the different categories, laws, and ways to create trademarks. • Written in clear, layman’s language • Features a complete Internet and government resource guide • Presents helpful examples of government filing documents • Expert attorney authors

A complete primer on the art and technique of digital filmmaking with the FireWire-equipped digital video camera, this guide begins with a basic introduction to digital camcorders, then moves on to showing readers how to shoot their own digital movies. The CD-ROM includes QuickTime files, storyboards, audio clips, and eight short film selections from FireWire moviemakers.