Servants of the Law
Servants of the Law

Author: Donald R. Burrill

Publisher: University Press of America

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0761848916

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"Among the judicial immigrants ... were the southerner David S. Terry of Texas and the northerner Stephen J. Field of New York. These men served on California's highest court during its formative, strenuous years from 1855 to 1863. ... The intellectual similarities and differences that these two shared ... played themselves out over a period of 35 years and brought about a series of events that neither man could have envisioned. Their exchanges began as wary judicial amity within the courtroom, but in short order spilled out into the community as public grudges. Neither judge could tolerate the other's regional provincialism; hence, lifelong resentments inevitably turned into a bitterness that led to tragedy"--Foreword, p. vii.

Gold Seeking
Gold Seeking

Author: David Goodman

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 9780804724807

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"The brave independence of the 'roaring days', the camaraderie of the gold fields, jolly diggers on a spree - these are the images that have come down to us of the gold era of the 1850s in Australia and California. But these images were largely shaped decades later, by writers such as Henry Lawson and Bret Harte - they speak of later nostalgia rather than the experience of the time." "In this study of the contemporary response to the discoveries of gold in Victoria and California, David Goodman argues that people at the time were apprehensive about gold rushing, and the kind of society it seemed to prefigure. In the chaos of the gold rushes, individual self-interest seemed to be all that could motivate people to any exertion. And it was only the economic rationalists of the day - those who believed in political economy and its promise, that out of the confusion of individual self-interest would come some sort of social order - who could wholeheartedly endorse the gold rushes as events." "This is a history of the ways people talked about gold. As the first full-length cultural history of the gold rushes on two continents, it examines the meanings of gold at the time, and the narratives which were told about social disruption. It locates the deeper underlying themes in the response to gold. It also looks at the ways in which the dominant later memories of gold were shaped. And it is about national differences, about the construction of distinctive national cultures out of materials common to the British world. This book should be read not only by Australian and American historians but by anyone with an interest in the cultural history of modernity."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Collected Works (volume 1): Published Papers
Collected Works (volume 1): Published Papers

Author: STEPHEN LUTTRELL

Publisher: Stephen Luttrell

Published: 2023-10-24

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13:

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The motivation for the research that is described in these volumes is the wish to explain things in terms of their underlying causes, rather than merely being satisfied with phenomenological descriptions. When this reductionist approach is applied to information processing it allows the internal structure of information to be analysed, so information processing algorithms can then be derived from first principles. One of the simplest examples of this approach is the diagonalisation of a data covariance matrix – there are many variants of this basic approach, such as singular value decomposition – in which the assumed independent components of high-dimensional data are identified and extracted. The main limitation of this type of information analysis approach is that it is based on linear algebra applied globally to the data space, so it is unable to preserve information about any local data structure in the data space. For instance, if the data lives on a low-dimensional curved manifold embedded in the data space, then only the global properties of this manifold would be preserved by global linear algebra methods. In practice, data whose high-dimensional structure is non-trivial typically lives on a noisy version of a curved manifold, so techniques for analysing such data must automatically handle this type of structure. For instance, a blurred image of a point source is described by its underlying degrees of freedom – i.e. the position of the source – and as the source moves about it generates a curved manifold that lives in the high-dimensional space of pixel values of the sampled image. The basic problem is then to deduce the internal properties of this manifold by analysing examples of such images. A more challenging problem would be to extend this analysis to images that contain several overlapping blurred images of point sources, and so on. There is no limit to the complexity of the types of high-dimensional data that one might want to analyse. These methods then need to be automated so that they do not rely on human intervention, which would then allow them to be inserted as “components” into information processing networks. The purpose of the research that is described in these volumes is to develop principled information processing methods that can be used for such analysis. Self-organising information processing networks arise naturally in this context, in which ways of cutting up the original manifold into simpler pieces emerge automatically.