Richard James – författare

This is the perfect introduction to chess for children from the age of seven upwards. The book contains 30 short lessons, starting with learning about the board and the pieces, then the moves of each piece in turn, then the vital concepts of check, checkmate and stalemate, and finally basic strategy and thinking skills. Quizzes and puzzles reinforce what the children learn.The book uses the characters of the 7-year-old twins Sam and Alice who are always arguing and fighting. They decide to join the army where they are told about an impending invasion of aliens from the planet Caïssa. The outcome of the invasion will be decided by a game of living chess. During their lessons they learn about the battlefield and the different types of soldier and get to play the part of each in turn.

This accessible how-to guide for parents and teachers on the best way to teach chess to children, from international chess expert Richard James, is linked to both his bestselling book, Chess for Kids, and his website chessKIDS academy.James, who taught grandmasters Luke McShane and Jonathan Rowson, shows how learning chessis interesting and fun. It can also help children develop life skills, such as decision-making and social skills, and be a springboard to other subjects in the school curriculum, such as maths, science, history and even languages.In an easy-to-follow, fun way, James explains how to structure short lessons with worksheets and other activities to introduce the chess pieces, chess notation and chess-board dynamics - sothat children can understand the thinking behind the moves and start playing and enjoying thisfascinating game.

Social network analysis is used widely in the social sciences to study interactions among people, groups, and organizations, yet until now there has been no book that shows behavioral biologists how to apply it to their work on animal populations. Exploring Animal Social Networks provides a practical guide for researchers, undergraduates, and graduate students in ecology, evolutionary biology, animal behavior, and zoology. Existing methods for studying animal social structure focus either on one animal and its interactions or on the average properties of a whole population. This book enables researchers to probe animal social structure at all levels, from the individual to the population. No prior knowledge of network theory is assumed. The authors give a step-by-step introduction to the different procedures and offer ideas for designing studies, collecting data, and interpreting results. They examine some of today''s most sophisticated statistical tools for social network analysis and show how they can be used to study social interactions in animals, including cetaceans, ungulates, primates, insects, and fish. Drawing from an array of techniques, the authors explore how network structures influence individual behavior and how this in turn influences, and is influenced by, behavior at the population level. Throughout, the authors use two software packages--UCINET and NETDRAW--to illustrate how these powerful analytical tools can be applied to different animal social organizations.