"AN AUTISTIC BOY WHO BEAT THE ODDS." Looking For Normal is the memoir of author, musician and filmmaker, Steve Slavin. His obsession with music, at an early age, led to a long career in the creative arts, albeit one plagued by clinical depression and the symptoms of a condition he was unaware of until 2008. In recounting the 48 years that led to his autism diagnosis, this darkly humorous memoir will inform and inspire anyone with an interest in mental health and autism. But more than this, it is the story of an "emotionally disturbed child, without a future" who, against the backdrop of low expectation, became an ambitious, independent adult, with a wife, daughters, and a career stifled by the long shadow of his childhood dysfunction. "A wonderful insight into an extraordinary life." - Peter Holmes Ph.D. "Insightful, inspiring, informative and entertaining. Looking For Normal is not just about overcoming the adversities that life throws at you on a regular basis. It is also about someone's journey of accepting, embracing and celebrating everything that comes with having autism." - Dr RF (Senior practitioner Educational Psychologist).
Like music, art is a universal language. Although looking at works of art is a pleasurable enough experience, to appreciate them fully requires certain skills and knowledge." --Carol Strickland, from the introduction to The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern * This heavily illustrated crash course in art history is revised and updated. This second edition of Carol Strickland's The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern offers an illustrated tutorial of prehistoric to post-modern art from cave paintings to video art installations to digital and Internet media. * Featuring succinct page-length essays, instructive sidebars, and more than 300 photographs, The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern takes art history out of the realm of dreary textbooks, demystifies jargon and theory, and makes art accessible-even at a cursory reading. * From Stonehenge to the Guggenheim and from Holbein to Warhol, more than 25,000 years of art is distilled into five sections covering a little more than 200 pages.
"In the Fall of 2010 I gave an assignment in my Appalachian Literature class at Berea College, telling my students to write their own version of "Where I'm From" poem based on the writing prompt and poem by George Ella Lyon, one of the preeminent Appalachian poets. I was so impressed by the results of the assignment that I felt the poems needed to be preserved in a bound document. Thus, this little book. These students completely captured the complexities of this region and their poems contain all the joys and sorrows of living in Appalachia. I am proud that they were my students and I am very proud that together we produced this record of contemporary Appalachian Life" -- Silas House
This book is intended as counter-evidence to the perception of Linguistics as the domain of dusty schoolroom grammar, where proponents of one theoretical orientation or the other spend their brief breaks in the playground bashing the others over the head with their favorite abstractions. The discipline may appear to outsiders as fragmented and, worse still, lacking in relevance to the real world outside its gates. The purpose is to show that Linguistics, in all its varied branches, can be entertaining as well as thought-provoking, and that its domain is indeed a coherent one despite all the internecine squabbling. The subject is introduced in an unconventional way as a kind of fable with an historical moral that professional linguists, as well as students, should enjoy as a commentary on the state of the discipline today.
Set in the colorful world of the 1930s and peopled with writers H.P. Lovecraft, L. Ron Hubbard, Lester Dent, and Walter Gibson, this swashbuckling literary thriller propels the characters into a genuine pulp adventure in which they try to thwart a madman intent on creating a new global empire.
Now updated with new material that brings the killer's picture into clearer focus. In the fall of 1888, all of London was held in the grip of unspeakable terror. An elusive madman calling himself Jack the Ripper was brutally butchering women in the slums of London’s East End. Police seemed powerless to stop the killer, who delighted in taunting them and whose crimes were clearly escalating in violence from victim to victim. And then the Ripper’s violent spree seemingly ended as abruptly as it had begun. He had struck out of nowhere and then vanished from the scene. Decades passed, then fifty years, then a hundred, and the Ripper’s bloody sexual crimes became anemic and impotent fodder for puzzles, mystery weekends, crime conventions, and so-called “Ripper Walks” that end with pints of ale in the pubs of Whitechapel. But to number-one New York Times bestselling novelist Patricia Cornwell, the Ripper murders are not cute little mysteries to be transformed into parlor games or movies but rather a series of terrible crimes that no one should get away with, even after death. Now Cornwell applies her trademark skills for meticulous research and scientific expertise to dig deeper into the Ripper case than any detective before her—and reveal the true identity of this fabled Victorian killer. In Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed, Cornwell combines the rigorous discipline of twenty-first century police investigation with forensic techniques undreamed of during the late Victorian era to solve one of the most infamous and difficult serial murder cases in history. Drawing on unparalleled access to original Ripper evidence, documents, and records, as well as archival, academic, and law-enforcement resources, FBI profilers, and top forensic scientists, Cornwell reveals that Jack the Ripper was none other than a respected painter of his day, an artist now collected by some of the world’s finest museums: Walter Richard Sickert. It has been said of Cornwell that no one depicts the human capability for evil better than she. Adding layer after layer of circumstantial evidence to the physical evidence discovered by modern forensic science and expert minds, Cornwell shows that Sickert, who died peacefully in his bed in 1942, at the age of 81, was not only one of Great Britain’s greatest painters but also a serial killer, a damaged diabolical man driven by megalomania and hate. She exposes Sickert as the author of the infamous Ripper letters that were written to the Metropolitan Police and the press. Her detailed analysis of his paintings shows that his art continually depicted his horrific mutilation of his victims, and her examination of this man’s birth defects, the consequent genital surgical interventions, and their effects on his upbringing present a casebook example of how a psychopathic killer is created. New information and startling revelations detailed in Portrait of a Killer include: - How a year-long battery of more than 100 DNA tests—on samples drawn by Cornwell’s forensics team in September 2001 from original Ripper letters and Sickert documents—yielded the first shadows of the 75- to 114 year-old genetic evid...
Introducing a witty and unique voice poised to take the literary world by storm. For fans of The Borrowers, Munmun and The Truckers. Everybody became a bit mean. A bit individual. Units. That's all humanity could say for itself – well, it couldn't actually, because it was made up of too many, um, units. And then there were the elderly, who could never bear to be so isolated, yet isolated they were. It was cruel, really it was. And kids – not that many people had them any more – they seemed to be born sitting in one of those egg-shaped chairs, only seeing what was right in front of them. So, the government asked a doctor, that famous one, to get a team together and figure it all out. He did. Everyone got a playmate. Well, everyone who wanted one, could buy a playmate. About a foot tall, they stood, naked (except in winter), very affectionate, not too intelligent. Mute, but cute - exactly what every home needs. Something to love, little units of love. The Biggerers is set in a dystopian future where our two heroes, Bonbon and Jinx, spend their days gathering stones and feathers for their basket, and waiting to be fed by their owners. But it’s not long before getting sick, falling in love and wondering why they can’t eat with a spoon pushes them to realise they are exactly the same as their owners…only smaller.
‘Painful, raw and with an honesty that rings clear as a bell’ Catherine Simpson, author of When I Had a Little Sister A searing account of a mother’s late-diagnosis of autism – and its reaching effects on a whole family.
After a long time of neglect, Artificial Intelligence is once again at the center of most of our political, economic, and socio-cultural debates. Recent advances in the field of Artifical Neural Networks have led to a renaissance of dystopian and utopian speculations on an AI-rendered future. Algorithmic technologies are deployed for identifying potential terrorists through vast surveillance networks, for producing sentencing guidelines and recidivism risk profiles in criminal justice systems, for demographic and psychographic targeting of bodies for advertising or propaganda, and more generally for automating the analysis of language, text, and images. Against this background, the aim of this book is to discuss the heterogenous conditions, implications, and effects of modern AI and Internet technologies in terms of their political dimension: What does it mean to critically investigate efforts of net politics in the age of machine learning algorithms?
Some companies think that adopting devops means bringing in specialists or a host of new tools. With this practical guide, you’ll learn why devops is a professional and cultural movement that calls for change from inside your organization. Authors Ryn Daniels and Jennifer Davis provide several approaches for improving collaboration within teams, creating affinity among teams, promoting efficient tool usage in your company, and scaling up what works throughout your organization’s inflection points. Devops stresses iterative efforts to break down information silos, monitor relationships, and repair misunderstandings that arise between and within teams in your organization. By applying the actionable strategies in this book, you can make sustainable changes in your environment regardless of your level within your organization. Explore the foundations of devops and learn the four pillars of effective devops Encourage collaboration to help individuals work together and build durable and long-lasting relationships Create affinity among teams while balancing differing goals or metrics Accelerate cultural direction by selecting tools and workflows that complement your organization Troubleshoot common problems and misunderstandings that can arise throughout the organizational lifecycle Learn from case studies from organizations and individuals to help inform your own devops journey
