No End To The Search

A monastery is not just for monks. Laypeople enjoy visiting monasteries and learning from the women and men who live there. The silence of the monastery is a retreat from the clatter and bluster of city and suburb. In No End to the Search Mark Plaiss, married with a wife, children, and grandchildren, writes of his visits to various monasteries while striving to delve into the experience and meaning of monasticism. What is behind that wall? What is the appeal of monastic life? To what degree can such a life be lived by persons who are married, and why would they wish to do so? This book explores the relationship between the vowed life of monks and the life of laypersons who are unable to live such vows but desire to share just a sliver of it.

No End in Sight offers a critical analysis of Polish cinema and literature during the transformative late Socialist period of the 1970s and 1980s. Anna Krakus details how conceptions of time, permanence, and endings shaped major Polish artistic works. She further demonstrates how film and literature played a major role in shaping political consciousness during this highly-charged era. Despite being controlled by an authoritarian state and the doctrine of socialism, artists were able to portray the unsettled nature of the political and psychological climate of the period, and an undetermined future. In analyzing films by Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Kieslowsi, Krzysztof Zanussi, Wojciech Has, and Tadeusz Konwicki alongside Konwicki’s literary production, Anna Krakus identifies their shared penchant to defer or completely eschew narrative closure, whether in plot, theme, or style. Krakus calls this artistic tendency "aesthetic unfinalizability." As she reveals, aesthetic unfinalizability was far more than an occasional artistic preference or a passing trend; it was a radical counterpolitical act. The obsession with historical teleology saturated Polish public life during socialism to such a degree that instances of nonclosure or ambivalent endings emerged as polemical responses to official ideology.

This story is written as it happens, on the road. Digital technology and dot-com know-how are in harmony with minimalist living. The result is salt-of-the-earth drama related on the fly through an internet journal, culminating in a series of captivating true stories. A winning combination of integrity and know-how, with a relaxing informal prose, become informative nonfiction that reads like a novel. This first book progresses from the shedding of a traditional lifestyle to discoveries made on their bicycle journey from Arizona, USA to Panama City, Panama. On bicycle, the Travises are exposed to the ground level of society, an experience few outsiders will ever know. Along the way, the Travises witness a religious pilgrimage in Chalma, Mexico, visited ancient Aztec and Mayan ruins, were attacked by an airplane spraying pesticides in Guatemala and saw alligators, scarlet Macaws and three-toed sloths in the jungles and cloud forests of Costa Rica. You can check on their location, catch up on the latest news, and view stunning photographs from their global bicycle tour at their extensive web site: http://www.downtheroad.org.

Santa Barbara General Hospital Days of our lives.

Search algorithms aim to find solutions or objects with specified properties and constraints in a large solution search space or among a collection of objects. A solution can be a set of value assignments to variables that will satisfy the constraints or a sub-structure of a given discrete structure. In addition, there are search algorithms, mostly probabilistic, that are designed for the prospective quantum computer. This book demonstrates the wide applicability of search algorithms for the purpose of developing useful and practical solutions to problems that arise in a variety of problem domains. Although it is targeted to a wide group of readers: researchers, graduate students, and practitioners, it does not offer an exhaustive coverage of search algorithms and applications. The chapters are organized into three parts: Population-based and quantum search algorithms, Search algorithms for image and video processing, and Search algorithms for engineering applications.

In 1974 Linda Quiring moved to Salt Spring Island, British Columbia to ‘find’ herself. Salt Spring Island was one of the centers for the counter-culture movement in Canada; home to hippies and back-to-the-landers. Soon, Linda encountered an enlightened man, Sydney Banks, and became his first student. Together they wrote Island of Knowledge under Linda’s authorship, detailing Syd’s teachings and the profound changes those listening experienced in their lives, health and relationships. Sydney Banks would ultimately become renowned for his revelation of The Three Principles inherent in those teachings. Linda and Syd remained friends until his passing in 2009. Before his death, Syd approached Linda about the possibility of getting Island of Knowledge republished. However, embarrassed by the ‘hippy’ jargon of the 1970’s, Syd asked that references to the times be changed. In deciding what should be left in, what changed, and what taken out, Linda and her publisher realized the book was in fact an important historical account of an amazing time and place and that to tamper with the integrity of the book would be a great disservice, thus it is republished exactly as is.

A career-spanning assessment of Glissant’s work as a philosophical project. With a career spanning more than fifty years as a writer, scholar, and public intellectual, Édouard Glissant produced an astonishingly wide range of work, including poems, novels, essays, pamphlets, and theater. In Think Like an Archipelago, Michael Wiedorn offers a fresh interpretation of Glissant’s work as a cohesive and explicitly philosophical project, paying particular attention to the last two decades of his career, which have received much less attention in the English-speaking world despite their remarkable productivity. Focusing his study on the idea of paradox, Wiedorn argues that it is fundamental to Caribbean culture and thought, and at the heart of Glissant’s philosophy. The question of difference has long played a central role in the literary and philosophical traditions of the West, however to think differently, Glissant suggests focusing elsewhere: on the post-plantation societies of the Caribbean, and the Americas more broadly. For Glissant, paradoxical lessons drawn from the natural and cultural realities of the Caribbean can point to new ways of thinking and being in the world: in other words, to the creation of what Glissant calls a “new category of literature,” and in turn to the attainment of his utopian political vision. Thinking through such paradoxes, Wiedorn demonstrates, can offer new perspectives on the old questions of totality, alterity, teleology, and the potential of philosophy itself. “The book’s use of the central concept of paradox is both original and convincing, and allows Wiedorn to reframe many of the issues surrounding Glissant’s thought in a new and illuminating way.” — Celia Britton, author of Édouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance

Legal precedents created during Prohibition have lingered, leaving search-and-seizure law much better defined than limits on police use of force, interrogation practices, or eyewitness identification protocols. An unlawful trunk search is thus guarded against more thoroughly than an unnecessary shooting or a wrongful conviction. Intrusive searches for alcohol during Prohibition destroyed middle-class Americans' faith in police and ushered in a new basis for controlling police conduct. State courts in the 1920s began to exclude perfectly reliable evidence obtained in an illegal search. Then, as Prohibition drew to a close, a presidential commission awakened the public to torture in interrogation rooms, prompting courts to exclude coerced confessions irrespective of whether the technique had produced a reliable statement. Prohibition's scheme lingered long past the Roaring '20s. Racial tensions and police brutality were bigger concerns in the 1960s than illegal searches, yet when the Supreme Court imposed limits on officers' conduct in 1961, searches alone were regulated. Interrogation law during the 1960s, fundamentally reshaped by the Miranda ruling, ensured that suspects who invoked their rights would not be subject to coercive tactics, but did nothing to ensure reliable confessions by those who were questioned. Explicitly recognizing that its decisions excluding evidence had not been well-received, the Court in the 1970s refused to exclude identifications merely because they were made in suggestive lineups. Perhaps a larger project awaits—refocusing our rules of criminal procedure on those concerns from which Prohibition distracted us: conviction accuracy and the use of force by police.