Peter Ward

Joe Kirschvink

Draws on cutting-edge research in a variety of scientific disciplines to outline provocative new theories about the evolution of life on Earth that challenge mainstream Darwinian beliefs and make predictions about future evolutions.

The Radical New Discoveries about the Origins and Evolution of Life on Earth

A New History of Life

Darwinian life -- What is evolutionary "success"? -- Two hypotheses about the nature of life on earth -- Medean feedbacks and global processes -- Medean events in the history of life -- Humans as medeans -- Biomass through time as a test -- Predicted future trends of biomass -- Summation -- Environmental implications -- What must be done

Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive?

The Medea Hypothesis

Wie Katastrophen den Lauf der Evolution bestimmt haben

Eine neue Geschichte des Lebens

The NASA Search for (and Synthesis of) Alien Life

Life as We Do Not Know It

For fans of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Even more excitement! Even more romance! Even more danger! Even more sequelly! In Time Rep, Peter Ward took up the mantle of Douglas Adams, penning a dizzying, inventive, giddly fun adventure story of time travel and its discontents. Now, Geoffrey Stamp wakes up with virtually no memory. It first starts to come back when he remembers that he is a time rep, a sort of tour guide for people who want to travel through history (but keep their hands and feet inside the car at all times, lest they change the fabric of space and time). The second thing he remembers is that he saved the universe at one point or another. He can't remember a third thing. A new company has sprung up, offering people the opportunity to go back and futz around with anything they like. Ask out your pretty coworker? Rob a bank? Kill the archduke? Everything is within your grasp, and this new company can repair the time/space continuum to allow for it. But something fishy is going on, and Geoffrey finds himself telling himself that he needs to get to the bottom of this. Literally--Geoffrey returns to the past to tell himself that he has a mission. Time travel can be perilous on a good day, and today is certainly not a good day for Geoffrey Stamp. With a little help, he'll be tasked with saving the world (yet again, sigh...) and might even get himself the girl this time.

Continuum: Time Rep

Susan Ward

Barbara Campbell - Justin O'Brien - Neil Moore - John Sultana - Lisa Roet.

Australian Artists Working in Italy

In a Different Light

Set in ancient China, two brothers fight the classic battle between good and evil as the Shadow-without-name attempts to break free from an eternal imprisonment by utilising the strength and power of the famed dragon horses.

Dragon Horse

For 65 million years dinosaurs ruled the Earth--until a deadly asteroid forced their extinction. But what accounts for the incredible longevity of dinosaurs? A renowned scientist now provides a startling explanation that is rewriting the history of the Age of Dinosaurs. Dinosaurs were pretty amazing creatures--real-life monsters that have the power to fascinate us. And their fiery Hollywood ending only serves to make the story that much more dramatic. But fossil evidence demonstrates that dinosaurs survived several mass extinctions, and were seemingly unaffected by catastrophes that decimated most other life on Earth. What could explain their uncanny ability to endure through the ages? Biologist and earth scientist Peter Ward now accounts for the remarkable indestructibility of dinosaurs by connecting their unusual respiration system with their ability to adapt to Earth's changing environment--a system that was ultimately bequeathed to their descendants, birds. By tracing the evolutionary path back through time and carefully connecting the dots from birds to dinosaurs, Ward describes the unique form of breathing shared by these two distant relatives and demonstrates how this simple but remarkable characteristic provides the elusive explanation to a question that has thus far stumped scientists. Nothing short of revolutionary in its bold presentation of an astonishing theory, Out of Thin Air is a story of science at the edge of discovery. Ward is an outstanding guide to the process of scientific detection. Audacious and innovative in his thinking, meticulous and thoroughly detailed in his research, only a scientist of his caliber is capable of telling this surprising story.

Dinosaurs, Birds, and Earth's Ancient Atmosphere

Out of Thin Air

How often did our ancestors bathe? How often did they wash their clothes and change them? What did they understand cleanliness to be? Why have our hygienic habits changed so dramatically over time? In short, how have we come to be so clean? The Clean Body explores one of the most fundamental and pervasive cultural changes in Western history since the seventeenth century: the personal hygiene revolution. In the age of Louis XIV bathing was rare and hygiene was mainly a matter of wearing clean underclothes. By the late twentieth century frequent – often daily – bathing had become the norm and wearing freshly laundered clothing the general practice. Cleanliness, once simply a requirement for good health, became an essential element of beauty. Beneath this transformation lay a sea change in understandings, motives, ideologies, technologies, and practices, all of which shaped popular habits over time. Peter Ward explains that what began as an urban bourgeois phenomenon in the later eighteenth century became a universal condition by the end of the twentieth, touching young and old, rich and poor, city dwellers and country residents alike. Based on a wealth of sources in English, French, German, and Italian, The Clean Body surveys the great hygienic transformation that took place across Europe and North America over the course of four centuries.

A Modern History

The Clean Body

In the tradition of Jon Ronson and Tim Wu, an absorbing and revelatory journey into the American Way of Defying Death . . . As longevity medicine revolutionizes the lives of many older people, the quest to take the next step—to live as long as we choose—has spurred a scientific arms race in search of the elixir of life, funded by Big Tech and Silicon Valley. Once the stuff of Mesopotamian mythology and episodes of Star Trek, the effort to make humans immortal is becoming increasingly credible as the pace of technological progress quickens. It has also empowered a wild-eyed fringe of pseudo-scientists, tech visionaries, scam-artists, and religious fanatics who have given their lives over to the pursuit of immortality. Starting off at the Church of Perpetual Life in Florida and exploring the feuding subcultures around the cryonics industry, Peter Ward immerses himself into an eccentric world of startups, scam artists, scientific institutions, and tech billionaires to deliver this deeply reported, nuanced, and sometimes very funny exploration of the race for immortality — and the potentially devastating consequences should humanity realize its ultimate dream.

The Price of Immortality

Aeons ago, winged dragons spread terror across the chinese empire. Their descendents, magnificent horses bred and ridden by the Wild Horsemen, are known as dragon horses.

How often did our ancestors bathe? How often did they wash their clothes and change them? What did they understand cleanliness to be? Why have our hygienic habits changed so dramatically over time? In short, how have we come to be so clean? The Clean Body explores one of the most fundamental and pervasive cultural changes in Western history since the seventeenth century: the personal hygiene revolution. In the age of Louis XIV bathing was rare and hygiene was mainly a matter of wearing clean underclothes. By the late twentieth century frequent - often daily - bathing had become the norm and wearing freshly laundered clothing the general practice. Cleanliness, once simply a requirement for good health, became an essential element of beauty. Beneath this transformation lay a sea change in understandings, motives, ideologies, technologies, and practices, all of which shaped popular habits over time. Peter Ward explains that what began as an urban bourgeois phenomenon in the later eighteenth century became a universal condition by the end of the twentieth, touching young and old, rich and poor, city dwellers and country residents alike. Based on a wealth of sources in English, French, German, and Italian, The Clean Body surveys the great hygienic transformation that took place across Europe and North America over the course of four centuries.

"A lucid, bright and essential work of reporting, analysis and genuine care. Peter Ward has given us a new way to think about private endeavors in space. Superb."⁠—Rivka Galchen, author of Little Labors This in-depth work of reportage dares to ask what’s at stake in privatizing outer space Earth is in trouble—so dramatically that we’re now scrambling to explore space for valuable resources and a home for permanent colonization. With the era of NASA’s dominance now behind us, the private sector is winning this new space race. But if humans and their private wealth have made such a mess of Earth, who can say we won’t do the same in space? In The Consequential Frontier, business and technology journalist Peter Ward is raising this vital question before it’s too late. Interviewing tech CEOs, inventors, scientists, lobbyists, politicians, and future civilian astronauts, Ward sheds light on a whole industry beyond headline-grabbing rocket billionaires like Bezos and Musk, and introduces the new generation of activists trying to keep it from rushing recklessly into the cosmos. With optimism for what humans might accomplish in space if we could leave our tendency toward deregulation, inequality, and environmental destruction behind, Ward shows just how much cooperation it will take to protect our universal resource and how beneficial it could be for all of us.

Challenging the Privatization of Space

The Consequential Frontier

The Race to Live Forever

Set in ancient China, two brothers fight the classic battle between good and evil as the Shadow-without-name attempts to break free from an eternal imprisonment by utilizing the strength and power of the famed dragon horses. Rokshan and An-Lushan are drawn into this centuries-old struggle, along with a young girl destined to become the Spellweaver of her nomadic tribe. And as An-Lushan is pulled towards the dark, Rokshan must embark upon a dangerous journey into the lands of the Wild Horsemen - where he is to meet the great stallion Stargazer and, ultimately, must learn the innermost secrets of the dragons . . .

A visionary book for the emergent church. The church must be like water--flexible, fluid, changeable. This book is a vision for how the church can embrace the liquid nature of culture rather than just scrambling to keep afloat while sailing over it. Ward urges us to move away from the traditional notion of church as a gathering of people meeting in one place at one time to the dynamic notion of the emergent church as a series of relationships and communications. In the Liquid Church, membership is determined by participation and involvement. Liquid Church is continually on the move, flowing in response to the Spirit and the gospel of Jesus, the imagination and creativity of its leaders, and the choices and experiences of it worshippers. In this provocative, insightful, and challenging book, Pete Ward presents his vision of a Liquid Church that addresses the needs of the isolated consumer-Christian by providing connection and community, located in common cause and similar desire for God.

Liquid Church

Based on the Diary kept by 21 years old Peter Ward (Leading Seaman Radar), between June, 1943 and June, 1944. He was a crew member of a 'B' Class Destroyer, HMS Beagle, during World War II. The diary ends with a graphic account of 'Beagle's' involvement in the 'D' Day Landings.

A Year on the Destroyer HMS Beagle During World War II

From Africa to the Arctic

360-degree appraisal can provide accurate and useful insight into individual employee strengths, weaknesses and scope for development. Ward explains its advantages and offers detailed guidance on implementation.

360-degree Feedback

Behind each shot there lies an idea or purpose. When setting up a shot, the camera operator can employ a range of visual techniques that will clearly communicate the idea to an audience. Composition is the bedrock of the operator's craft, yet is seldom taught in training courses in the belief that it is an intuitive, personal skill. Peter Ward shows how composition can be learned, to enhance the quality of your work. Based on the author's own practical experience, the book deals with the methods available for resolving practical production questions such as: Does the shot composition accurately reflect the idea that initiated the shot? Will the content and method of presenting the subject accurately convey the idea? Major innovations in television and film production since the previous edition have affected the styles of composition, such as wide-screen and the use of mini DV cameras. These new technologies and their implications for picture composition are addressed in this new edition. A new colour plate section is also being included to update the section on colour. If you are a practising camera operator, trainee camera operator, student or lecturer on a television or film production course, or simply a video enthusiast wishing to progress to a more professional standard you will find this book essential in enhancing the quality of your work.

Picture Composition

Khai Liew is one of Australia's finest, best-known and most original furniture designers. His very recent commissions include bedroom furniture for the Governor-General at Admiralty House, the official Sydney residence; public seating for the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, and refurbishment of the JamFactory, the Museum of Economic Botany, and the millionaire's Southern Ocean Lodge (on Kangaroo Island) in South Australia.

Peter Ward

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