Double Or Quits

From the editors of The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction comes this fascinating collection of disturbing mysteries and gruesome tales by authors such as Mary Fortune, James Skipp Borlase, Guy Boothby, Francis Adams, Ernest Favenc, 'Rolf Boldrewood' and Norman Lindsay, among many others. In the bush and the tropics, the goldfields and the city streets, colonial Australia is a troubling, bewildering place and almost impossible to regulate—even for the most vigilant detective. Ex-convicts, bushrangers, ruthless gold prospectors, impostors, thieves and murderers flow through the stories that make up this collection, challenging the nascent forces of colonial law and order. The landscape itself seems to stimulate criminal activity, where identities change at will and people suddenly disappear without a trace. The Anthology of Colonial Australian Crime Fiction is a remarkable anthology that taps into the fears and anxieties of colonial Australian life.

Written over a period of more than half a century, Leo Tolstoy’s stories reflect every aspect of his art and personality. They cover his experiences as a soldier in the Caucasus, his married life, his passionate interest in the peasantry, his cult of truth and simplicity, and his growing preoccupation with religion. The stories in Volume 1 of the Collected Shorter Fiction date from the period in which the young Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina and War and Peace. Ranging from brief, masterfully sketches of military life such as “The Wood-Felling” to novellas like Family Happiness, an uneasy imagining of the idyllic possibilities of marriage by the not-yet-married writer, all feature Tolstoy’s characteristically lavish deployment of detail, shrewd observation, and imaginative power.

Volume II of this two-volume text and reference work concentrates on the applications of probability theory to statistics, e.g., the art of calculating densities of complicated transformations of random vectors, exponential models, consistency of maximum estimators, and asymptotic normality of maximum estimators. It also discusses topics of a pure probabilistic nature, such as stochastic processes, regular conditional probabilities, strong Markov chains, random walks, and optimal stopping strategies in random games. Unusual topics include the transformation theory of densities using Hausdorff measures, the consistency theory using the upper definition function, and the asymptotic normality of maximum estimators using twice stochastic differentiability. With an emphasis on applications to statistics, this is a continuation of the first volume, though it may be used independently of that book. Assuming a knowledge of linear algebra and analysis, as well as a course in modern probability, Volume II looks at statistics from a probabilistic point of view, touching only slightly on the practical computation aspects.

Apart from the coverage given to it in the grammars, number in English nouns has received relatively little attention, especially in the area of theoretical considerations. Guided by the principles of psychomechanics, Hirtle (1982a) put forth a fairly elaborate theory of number in English nouns. The aim of this work is to provide evidence to validate parts of Hirtle's theory, to verify some of his analyses, and to investigate several problems, some of which are mentioned in his work as subjects for further research. Specific areas treated are ailment nouns, liquid names, ending in "-ings," binary objects, abstract "-s," and external singulars.