This Student Workbook incorporates interactive reading strategies with core content from the “EXPLORING OUR WORLD (People, Places, and Culture)” textbook written at a lower level than the textbook to help struggling readers and ELL (English Language Learner) students. Some texts will also be useful for ESL/EFL reading comprehension exercises on social studies topics.

Before Palm Pilots and iPods, PCs and laptops, the term "computer" referred to the people who did scientific calculations by hand. These workers were neither calculating geniuses nor idiot savants but knowledgeable people who, in other circumstances, might have become scientists in their own right. When Computers Were Human represents the first in-depth account of this little-known, 200-year epoch in the history of science and technology.
Beginning with the story of his own grandmother, who was trained as a human computer, David Alan Grier provides a poignant introduction to the wider world of women and men who did the hard computational labor of science. His grandmother's casual remark, "I wish I'd used my calculus," hinted at a career deferred and an education forgotten, a secret life unappreciated; like many highly educated women of her generation, she studied to become a human computer because nothing else would offer her a place in the scientific world.
The book begins with the return of Halley's comet in 1758 and the effort of three French astronomers to compute its orbit. It ends four cycles later, with a UNIVAC electronic computer projecting the 1986 orbit. In between, Grier tells us about the surveyors of the French Revolution, describes the calculating machines of Charles Babbage, and guides the reader through the Great Depression to marvel at the giant computing room of the Works Progress Administration.
When Computers Were Human is the sad but lyrical story of workers who gladly did the hard labor of research calculation in the hope that they might be part of the scientific community. In the end, they were rewarded by a new electronic machine that took the place and the name of those who were, once, the computers.

Anathem is set on a planet called Arbre, where the protagonist, Erasmas, is among a cohort of secluded scientists, philosophers and mathematicians who are called upon to save the world from impending catastrophe. Erasmas - Raz to his friends - has spent most of his life inside a 3,400-year-old sanctuary. The rest of society — the Sжcular world — is described as an "endless landscape of casinos and megastores that is plagued by recurring cycles of booms and busts, dark ages and renaissances, world wars and climate change." Their planet, Arbre, has a history and culture that is roughly analogous to Earth. Resident scholars, including Raz, are unexpectedly summoned by a frightened Sжcular power to leave their monastic stronghold in the hope that they may prevent an approaching catastrophe.

from album "Long Road out of Eden"

 

It's Your World Now

Center of the Universe

 

 

(It's an experiment)

The U·X·L® Encyclopedia of World Biography features 750 biographies of notable historic and current figures from around the world in 10 volumes. Selected from nearly 7,000 entries included in the Gale's critically acclaimed Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd Edition, the entries focus on the people studied most often in middle and high school. Features include 750 black-and-white photos and illustrations; alphabetical arrangement; "Words to Know" section; sidebars highlighting interesting facts; and nationality, ethnicity, occupation and general indexes.