Keith Robinson

Young shapeshifters Travis and Melinda are tasked with visiting the infamous Haunted Fortress to uncover its dark secrets. The residents of Hemlock, a small seaside village, have been seeing a phantom figure on and off for the past two hundred years. The phantom has many names - Screeching Witch, Fiery Goddess, Ghoulish Ghost, and Mechanical Lady for starters - but she's mostly known as the Snake Lady, a naga who appears out of thin air and then vanishes again. The fortress is something to behold, floating above the sea just off the coast. And what's with the block of ice in the main chamber? Not only does it refuse to melt despite repeated attempts at thawing, the naga folk in the nearby woods suggest it contains a perfectly preserved corpse and should be left well alone. Miss Simone disagrees. With Travis as a super-heated cherufe and Melinda as a naga girl, their two-pronged mission is to melt the ice and debunk the phantom... HAUNTED FORTRESS is the fourth installment in the Island of Fog Legacies series.

Eleven-year-old Melinda Strickland is setting out on her first mission as a shapeshifter-to save a town from unruly gargoyles. The ugly stone creatures have been perched on the rooftops of Garlen's Well for decades, warding off evil spirits, but lately they've grown mischievous and downright destructive. Somebody needs to talk to them, find out what's going on, and persuade them to be more respectful of private property. That somebody is Melinda, daughter of famous shapeshifters Robbie the ogre and Lauren the harpy. But what kind of creature will she get to be? Travis Franklin accompanies her on the trip west, though Melinda is keen to point out she's in charge, not him. He's only a dragon, after all. Nothing ever goes as planned. What promises to be a fairly routine mission turns into something quite deadly . . . GARGOYLE SCOURGE is the third installment in the Island of Fog Legacies series.

2016 is the 150th Anniversary of the first Chinese Government approved visit to England, by the learned Manchu BinChun. The book draws on the diaries of those involved, the Government papers and also newspaper reports from the time to follow his route and bring into sharper focus some of the famous people that he met. The British Government's aims were broadly to try and support the Qing Government as it tried to modernise and thus help it preserve its independence and also to create a future market for British trade. Politically it was a failure, but perhaps BinChun's importance is that he was a pioneer of public diplomacy, and it is these lessons that are most relevant to us today as we once again seek to engage with China.

Shapeshifter Travis Franklin has a new mission: to deliver a mysterious package to the Grim Reaper. Traveling with his best friend Rez, the boys set off on an overnight journey to a blank spot on the map where Death is thought to reside. This time Travis is going as a three-headed fireball-shooting chimera, and he's fairly sure nothing will stand in his way. Not even the annoying trolls who demand payment at every turn. Yet something else lurks in the woods. Something far more sinister even than the Grim Reaper... This the second installment in the Island of Fog Legacies series. It can be read as a standalone book but is best enjoyed in sequence.

"...one of the best novels I've read regardless of genre; it haunted me for several days after I read it. Read this novel regardless of your age; I doubt you'll be disappointed, and your mind may be stretched a bit. The final ten percent blew me away." -Piers Anthony, New York Times bestselling author of the Magic of Xanth (full review at HiPiers.com, July 2015 newsletter)Everything changes for twelve-year-old Liam when a girl moves in next door. Madison is fifteen, pretty, and much weirder than she seems. Sometimes when she's sound asleep, she scrawls a message on a notepad by her pillow. She finds these cryptic words when she wakes the next morning - a time and a place. But for what? Liam and best friend Ant join her when she goes hunting around a cemetery late one night, and life is never the same again... So begins one freaky adventure after another involving all manner of aliens, monsters, and ghouls. SLEEP WRITER is the first in a wild sci-fi series by the author of ISLAND OF FOG.

This book offers a completely new sequence for learning Chinese writing. If foreign students start learning to write Chinese by first inputting Radicals on the computer, they will make faster progress in being able to remember the vocabulary, and their transition to writing Chinese by hand will be more successful. At every stage in this carefully thought out sequence, the student should be encouraged to also practice what they have learnt on computer by writing the characters out by hand. The biggest problem that students have with learning Mandarin Chinese is being able to write Chinese. It is a daunting task because of the sheer number of different characters involved and also because until now each character has been treated as a unique and separate entity. The time needed to commit all this vocabulary to memory and gain fluency and facility in writing Chinese is immense, but using this method it will make learning faster.

It seems like common sense that children do better when parents are actively involved in their schooling. But how well does the evidence stack up? The Broken Compass puts this question to the test in the most thorough scientific investigation to date of how parents across socioeconomic and ethnic groups contribute to the academic performance of K-12 children. The study's surprising discovery is that no clear connection exists between parental involvement and improved student performance. Keith Robinson and Angel Harris assessed over sixty measures of parental participation, at home and in school. Some of the associations they found between socioeconomic status and educational involvement were consistent with past studies. Yet other results ran contrary to previous research and popular perceptions. It is not the case that Hispanic and African American parents are less concerned with education than other ethnic groups--or that "tiger parenting" among Asian Americans gets the desired results. In fact, many low-income parents across a wide spectrum want to be involved in their children's school lives, but they often receive little support from the school system. And for immigrant families, language barriers only worsen the problem. While Robinson and Harris do not wish to discourage parents' interest, they believe that the time has come to seriously reconsider whether greater parental involvement can make much of a dent in the basic problems facing their children's education today. This provocative study challenges some of our most cherished beliefs about the role of family in educational success.

Learn how to create, produce, and perform your music at the next level by unlocking the power of Ableton Live 9. This book and web combination shows, if you get it right, exactly what Live can deliver. Engineered to follow Live's non-linear music environment, the book looks and feels like the program. Its unique format utilizes the terms and creative features of Live – tabs, keys, pointers, and labels—to help you learn the littlest things that make the biggest difference. Packed with professional insight, concepts, definitions, and hundreds of tips, tricks, and hidden features, author Keith Robinson covers the software’s nuts and bolts, while never neglecting creative techniques for creating, producing, performing, – all the tools for making music on the fly. The accompanying website contains bonus chapters, Live Sets and clips to sync and download. Ableton Live 9…* Features step-by-step tutorials, useful web-based media (Sets, Clips, Loops, and Samples) designed to perfect your techniques* Identifies key concepts and definitions, and uncovers hidden features of Live 9* Its unique graphic format, mirrors Live's structure, terms, and creative features, so you can get into a "Live frame of mind" as you read

In English it is possible to suggest subtle changes in meaning by altering the tone of your voice. However in Chinese this is not an option, because altering the tone of your voice could completely change the meaning of the word. To achieve the same affect, the Chinese use Modal Particles. Modal Particles frequently appear in written Chinese and especially in "on line" Blogs or e mails and can be confusing to the foreign students, because they are rarely mentioned in text books. This study will fully explain their use, and including judicially chosen Modal Particles will enable the students' work to sound more idiomatic.

Learn how to create, produce and perform a whole new way; prepare to unlock the power of Live! In this brand new title for Ableton Live 8 and Suite 8 users, author Keith Robinson details exactly what Abelton Live can deliver. The book is engineered to follow Live's non-linear music environment - the book look and feels like the program! Its unique format utilizes the terms and creative features of Live - tabs, keys, pointers, and labels. Packed with professional testimonials, concepts, definitions, hundreds of tips, tricks and hidden features, Ableton Live 8 and Suite 8 covers the software's nuts and bolts and creative technique to create, produce, perform and make music on the fly. The accompanying website contains "Live sets" and web pointer information to sync and download as well as interviews, additional hints, tips and video

This is a book about the physics of stars and starlight. The story of starlight is truly fascinating. Astronomers analyze and interpret the light from stars using photometry and spectroscopy, then inspirational detective work combines with the laws of physics to reveal the temperatures, masses, luminosities and outer structure of these far away points of light. The laws of physics themselves enable us to journey to the very center of a star and to understand its inner structure and source of energy! Starlight provides an in-depth study of stellar astrophysics that requires only basic high school mathematics and physics, making it accessible to all amateur astronomers. Starlight teaches amateur astronomers about the physics of stars and starlight in a friendly, easy-to-read way. The reader will take away a profoundly deeper understanding of this truly fascinating subject – and find his practical observations more rewarding and fulfilling as a result.

While most amateur astronomers know about the red shift, have a general idea of the way that the emission and absorption lines in stellar spectra provide an insight into the atomic processes of the star, it is unusual to find someone who has any kind of detailed knowledge. The reason isn’t lack on interest – far from it – but is because all the books currently available are pitched at professional astronomers and degree students, and are to say the least, difficult to read. This is the first non-technical book on this subject, written specifically for practical amateur astronomers. It includes all the science necessary for a qualitative understanding of stellar spectra, but avoids a mathematical treatment which would alienate many of its intended readers. Any amateur astronomer who carries out (or who is interested in) observational spectroscopy and who wants a non-technical account of the physical processes which determine the intensity and profile morphology of lines in stellar spectra will find this is the only book written specially for him. And of course, "armchair astronomers" who simply want to understand the physical processes which shape lines in stellar spectra will find this book equally fascinating.