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In the late 1990s, a group of young drifters find themselves washed up in a small town on the west coast of Wales. Here they explore and attempt to overcome the yearnings and addictions which have brought them to this place: promiscuity, drugs, alcohol, petty crime, the intense and angry search for the meaning which they feel life lacks.
**WINNER OF THE 2020 WALES BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD** 'A magnificently gifted writer' Irvine Welsh A Welsh community witnesses a strange vision: the huge spectre of a woman floating over a ridge. Is it a collective hallucination, a meteorological phenomenon, or something supernatural? The individuals living in these mountains are already battling their own demons - of drink, drugs, domestic violence, depression - how could an apparition unite these crushed people or their fragmented country? This is a novel that gives voices to the marginalised, the dispossessed, the forgotten. An examination of modern humanity's desperate need to live meaningfully and vividly in a mediated world - where indiv...
Sixteen-year-old Grace has dreams, and she knows how to make them come true: a little silicone and surgery here and there –nose, breasts, lips, hair, teeth, nails. Then with the right clothes and a new tan she’ll be ready: ready to be seen, consumed and adored by millions. Grace will become a celebrity. Someone, though, remembers her as an ordinary, pretty schoolgirl living in a rural paradise: a place of simple, natural beauty. When he sees how utterly Grace has changed, he realises how far the world has fallen since those days. The collision of their two lives, their two very different trajectories, can only end in catastrophe.
Robbed of his ancestral home - a near-derelict hovel in the mountains of west Wales - Ianto pledges revenge not only on the English yuppies who have turned his grandmother's cottage into a weekenders' barbecue party but on all those who have violated him and the land that is his. This latest act of colonial oppression and desecration triggers his lurid and strange imagination into unspeakable savagery - embodying our most primal fears of physical threat, a world beyond our control.
Percentage of L1-based errors in ESL: An update on Ellis (1985) (François Pichette & Justyna Leśniewska, pp. 1-16); Exploring novice and experienced Iranian EFL teachers' beliefs representations: A more vivid picture (Saeed Mehrpour & Meisam Moghaddam, pp. 17-50); Movie-generated EFL writing: Discovering the act of writing through visual literacy practices (Nargess Hekmati, Sue-san Ghahremani Ghajar & Hossein Navidinia, pp. 51-64); Parental perceptions toward and practices of heritage language maintenance: Focusing on the United States and Canada (Feng Liang, pp. 65-86); You could so easily od like: Clause final and other pragmatic functions of like in Liverpool English speech (Manel Herat, pp. 87-112); A comprehensive survey on the etymology of three Avestan words: 'Pairikā', 'Xnąϑaiti-' and 'Gaṇdarəβa-' (Farrokh Hajiani & Mohsen Mahmoodi, pp. 113-130); A semiotics representation of outdoor HIV/AIDS pictorial campaign messages in Benin Metropolis, Nigeria (Patience Obiageri Solomon-Etefia, pp. 131-158)
This volume presents the most up-to-date collection of neural network models of music and creativity gathered together in one place. Chapters by leaders in the field cover new connectionist models of pitch perception, tonality, musical streaming, sequential and hierarchical melodic structure, composition, harmonization, rhythmic analysis, sound generation, and creative evolution. The collection combines journal papers on connectionist modeling, cognitive science, and music perception with new papers solicited for this volume. It also contains an extensive bibliography of related work. Contributors Shumeet Baluja, M.I. Bellgard, Michael A. Casey, Garrison W. Cottrell, Peter Desain, Robert O. Gjerdingen, Mike Greenhough, Niall Griffith, Stephen Grossberg, Henkjan Honing, Todd Jochem, Bruce F. Katz, John F. Kolen, Edward W. Large, Michael C. Mozer, Michael P.A. Page, Caroline Palmer, Jordan B. Pollack, Dean Pomerleau, Stephen W. Smoliar, Ian Taylor, Peter M. Todd, C.P. Tsang, Gregory M. Werner
The controversial revisionist history of World War I that made Niall Ferguson's name The First World War killed around eight million men and bled Europe dry. More than any other event, it made the twentieth century. In this boldly conceived book and provocative, aimed to appeal not only to students but also to the general reader, Niall Ferguson explodes many of the myths surrounding the war. Niall Ferguson is Herzog Professor of Financial History at the Stern School of Business, New York University, Visiting Professor of History, Oxford University and Senior Research Fellow, Jesus College, Oxford. His other books for Penguin include Empire, The Cash Nexus, Colossus, The War of the World, Virtual History, High Financier and Civilization.
Art is the Queen of all sciences communicating knowledge to all the generations of the world. Leonardo da Vinci Artistic behavior is one of the most valued qualities of the human mind. Although artistic manifestations vary from culture to culture, dedication to artistic tasks is common to all. In other words, artistic behavior is a universal trait of the human species. The current, Western de?nition of art is relatively new. However, a d- ication to artistic endeavors — such as the embellishment of tools, body - namentation, or gathering of unusual, arguably aesthetic, objects — can be traced back to the origins of humanity. That is, art is ever-present in human history and prehistory. A...
Although there has been much progress in developing theories, models and systems in the areas of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Vision Processing (VP) there has heretofore been little progress on integrating these subareas of Artificial Intelligence (AI). This book contains a set of edited papers addressing computational models and systems for the integration of NLP and VP. The papers focus on site descriptions such as that of the large Japanese $500 million Real World Computing (RWC) project, on historical philosophical issues, on systems which have been built and which integrate the processing of visual scenes together with language about them, and on spatial relations which appear to be the key to integration. The U.S.A., Japan and the EU are well reflected, showing up the fact that integration is a truly international issue. There is no doubt that all of this will be necessary for the InformationSuperHighways of the future.
Rhythm is the fundamental pulse that animates poetry, music, and dance across all cultures. And yet the recent explosion of scholarly interest across disciplines in the aural dimensions of aesthetic experience--particularly in sociology, cultural and media theory, and literary studies--has yet to explore this fundamental category. This book furthers the discussion of rhythm beyond the discrete conceptual domains and technical vocabularies of musicology and prosody. With original essays by philosophers, psychologists, musicians, literary theorists, and ethno-musicologists, The Philosophy of Rhythm opens up wider-and plural-perspectives, examining formal affinities between the historically int...