Figs Of The Imagination

The work explores the notion that we are all perceptually branded by the experiences and milieu of early childhood. The author illustrates this with tales set in his native Edinburgh, Scotland during the 1940s and 1950s. Through a series of adventures and misadventures, the young protagonist makes discoveries about life and people, ranging from the inconsistencies and contradictions of adult behavior to learning about mortality. In one episode, the young lad is tricked into having his tonsils removed. As he grows older, he learns about betrayal by adults and authority figures. Poems that reinforce each of these learning themes introduce each chapter and the use of local dialect sharpens the sense of location and social milieu. Exploring the universal themes of the innocence of childhood, “Figs of the Imagination” illustrates how much we are a product of the formative years and how these key life experiences prepare children to become adults.

This third book in the three-part series on the History of the GPU covers the second to sixth eras of the GPU, which can be found in anything that has a display or screen. The GPU is now part of supercomputers, PCs, Smartphones and tablets, wearables, game consoles and handhelds, TVs, and every type of vehicle including boats and planes. In the early 2000s the number of GPU suppliers consolidated to three whereas now, the number has expanded to almost 20. In 2022 the GPU market was worth over $250 billion with over 2.2 billion GPUs being sold just in PCs, and more than 10 billion in smartphones. Understanding the power and history of these devices is not only a fascinating tale, but one that will aid your understanding of some of the developments in consumer electronics, computers, new automobiles, and your fitness watch.

Despite the many important developments and innovations traceable to the Seljuq period (5th-7th/11th-13th centuries), the Seljuqs remain one of the understudied Muslim dynasties. This unique collaborative exploration of the Seljuqs' achievement contributes to the growing interest in this pivotal dynasty. The various chapters in this volume cover a representative geographical spectrum, from Central Asia and Persia to Iraq, Syria and Anatolia, and address novel questions such as the ideological foundations and ritual expressions of Seljuq power, the mutual attitudes of the learned classes and the Seljuq state, the organization of space, and the relationship between nomads and the settled peoples.The book is divided into three parts: the origins of the Seljuqs, their gradual transformation into a powerful dynasty, and their concepts of political legitimization (part one); the social history of the Seljuq period, particularly with regard to the 'ulama' and the urban populations (part two); developments in religious thought, jurisprudence, belles-lettres and architecture under the Seljuqs (part three).Key Features*Brings together the work of leading international experts in Seljuq studies including C. E. Bosworth, Massimo Campanini, Carole Hillenbrand, Robert Hillenbrand, Jurgen Paul, Andrew C. S. Peacock and Scott Redford*Critically engages with previous scholarly work on the Seljuqs*Addresses novel questions and challenges in the historiography of the Seljuq period*Pays particular attention to the Seljuqs' formative influence on later socio-political orders

In her feminist inquiry into aesthetics and the sublime, Claire Raymond reinterprets the work of the American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981). Placing Woodman in a lineage of women artists beginning with nineteenth-century photographers Julia Margaret Cameron and Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden, Raymond compels a reconsideration of Woodman's achievement in light of the gender dynamics of the sublime. Raymond argues that Woodman's photographs of decrepit architecture allegorically depict the dissolution of the frame, a dissolution Derrida links to theories of the sublime in Kant's Critique of Judgement. Woodman's self-portraits, Raymond contends, test the parameters of the gaze, a reading that departs from the many analyses of Woodman's work that emphasize her dramatic biography. Woodman is here revealed as a conceptually sophisticated artist whose deployment of allegory and allusion engages a broader debate about Enlightenment aesthetics, and the sublime.

Considering career development in the current and future work landscape, this book explores a leading-edge framework for careers, drawing on design thinking to apply career planning to a wide range of individual contexts.

Deep reinforcement learning has attracted considerable attention recently. Impressive results have been achieved in such diverse fields as autonomous driving, game playing, molecular recombination, and robotics. In all these fields, computer programs have taught themselves to understand problems that were previously considered to be very difficult. In the game of Go, the program AlphaGo has even learned to outmatch three of the world’s leading players.Deep reinforcement learning takes its inspiration from the fields of biology and psychology. Biology has inspired the creation of artificial neural networks and deep learning, while psychology studies how animals and humans learn, and how subjects’ desired behavior can be reinforced with positive and negative stimuli. When we see how reinforcement learning teaches a simulated robot to walk, we are reminded of how children learn, through playful exploration. Techniques that are inspired by biology and psychology work amazingly well in computers: animal behavior and the structure of the brain as new blueprints for science and engineering. In fact, computers truly seem to possess aspects of human behavior; as such, this field goes to the heart of the dream of artificial intelligence. These research advances have not gone unnoticed by educators. Many universities have begun offering courses on the subject of deep reinforcement learning. The aim of this book is to provide an overview of the field, at the proper level of detail for a graduate course in artificial intelligence. It covers the complete field, from the basic algorithms of Deep Q-learning, to advanced topics such as multi-agent reinforcement learning and meta learning.