Shadow Speaker

Deluxe, expanded edition of an out-of-print early novel from Africanfuturist luminary Nnedi Okorafor, with a brand-new introduction from the author. Niger, West Africa, 2074 It is an era of tainted technology and mysterious mysticism. A great change has happened all over the planet, and the laws of physics aren’t what they used to be. Within all this, I introduce you to Ejii Ugabe, a child of the worst type of politician. Back when she was nine years old, she was there as her father met his end. Don’t waste your tears on him: this girl’s father would throw anyone under a bus to gain power. He was a cruel, cruel man, but even so, Ejii did not rejoice at his departure from the world. Children are still learning that some people don’t deserve their love. Now 15 years old and manifesting the abilities given to her by the strange Earth, Ejii decides to go after the killer of her father. Is it for revenge or something else? You will have to find out by reading this book. I am the Desert Magician, and this is a novel I have conjured for you, so I’m certainly not going to just tell you here.

Deluxe, expanded edition of an out-of-print early novel from Africanfuturist luminary Nnedi Okorafor, with a brand-new introduction from the author. Niger, West Africa, 2074 It is an era of tainted technology and mysterious mysticism. A great change has happened all over the planet, and the laws of physics aren’t what they used to be. Within all this, I introduce you to Ejii Ugabe, a child of the worst type of politician. Back when she was nine years old, she was there as her father met his end. Don’t waste your tears on him: this girl’s father would throw anyone under a bus to gain power. He was a cruel, cruel man, but even so, Ejii did not rejoice at his departure from the world. Children are still learning that some people don’t deserve their love. Now 15 years old and manifesting the abilities given to her by the strange Earth, Ejii decides to go after the killer of her father. Is it for revenge or something else? You will have to find out by reading this book. I am the Desert Magician, and this is a novel I have conjured for you, so I’m certainly not going to just tell you here.

This book is the first monographic study on subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing from a multidisciplinary perspective, from engineering to philology. The book departs from studies, analyses, tests, validations, resulting data, and their application from the nation-wide research on accessibility and usability of subtitles carried out in Spain. Tests and further analysis were carried out paying attention to users' hearing profiles, the many formal features of subtitles - size, font, colour, position, etc. -, and the syntax of the subtitle. The book also contains articles which discuss present and future research on subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing carried out in Canada and across Europe: Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Poland, Spain, and UK. It provides an outlook for the implementation of the European Guidelines on Media Accessibility.

Winner of the Children’s Literature Association’s 2023 Edited Book Award Contributions by Malin Alkestrand, Joshua Yu Burnett, Sean P. Connors, Jill Coste, Meghan Gilbert-Hickey, Miranda A. Green-Barteet, Sierra Hale, Kathryn Strong Hansen, Elizabeth Ho, Esther L. Jones, Sarah Olutola, Alex Polish, Zara Rix, Susan Tan, and Roberta Seelinger Trites Race in Young Adult Speculative Fiction offers a sustained analysis of race and representation in young adult speculative fiction (YASF). The collection considers how characters of color are represented in YASF, how they contribute to and participate in speculative worlds, how race affects or influences the structures of speculative worlds, and how race and racial ideologies are implicated in YASF. This collection also examines how race and racism are discussed in YASF or if, indeed, race and racism are discussed at all. Essays explore such notable and popular works as the Divergent series, The Red Queen, The Lunar Chronicles, and the Infernal Devices trilogy. They consider the effects of colorblind ideology and postracialism on YASF, a genre that is often seen as progressive in its representation of adolescent protagonists. Simply put, colorblindness silences those who believe—and whose experiences demonstrate—that race and racism do continue to matter. In examining how some YASF texts normalize many of our social structures and hierarchies, this collection examines how race and racism are represented in the genre and considers how hierarchies of race are reinscribed in some texts and transgressed in others. Contributors point toward the potential of YASF to address and interrogate racial inequities in the contemporary West and beyond. They critique texts that fall short of this possibility, and they articulate ways in which readers and critics alike might nonetheless locate diversity within narratives. This is a collection troubled by the lingering emphasis on colorblindness in YASF, but it is also the work of scholars who love the genre and celebrate its progress toward inclusivity, and who further see in it an enduring future for intersectional identity.

Annotation This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue, TSD 2010, held in Brno, Czech Republic, September 2010. The 71 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 144 submissions. The topics of the conference include, but are not limited to text corpora and tagging, transcription problems in spoken corpora, sense disambiguation, links between text and speech oriented systems, parsing issues, multi-lingual issues, information retrieval and information extraction, text/topic summarization, machine translation, semantic web, speech modeling, speech recognition, search in speech for IR and IE, text-to-speech synthesis, emotions and personality modeling, user modeling, knowledge representation in relation to dialogue systems, assistive technologies based on speech and dialogue, applied systems and software, facial animation, as well as visual speech synthesis.

Sound Systems: Design and Optimization provides an accessible and unique perspective on the behavior of sound systems in the practical world. The third edition reflects current trends in the audio field thereby providing readers with the newest methodologies and techniques. In this greatly expanded new edition, you’ll find clearer explanations, a more streamlined organization, increased coverage of current technologies and comprehensive case studies of the author’s award-winning work in the field. As the only book devoted exclusively to modern tools and techniques in this emerging field, Sound Systems: Design and Optimization provides the specialized guidance needed to perfect your design skills. This book helps you: Improve your design and optimization decisions by understanding how audiences perceive reinforced sound Use modern analyzers and prediction programs to select speaker placement, equalization, delay and level settings based on how loudspeakers interact in the space Define speaker array configurations and design strategies that maximize the potential for spatial uniformity Gain a comprehensive understanding of the tools and techniques required to generate a design that will create a successful transmission/reception model

This work is the first book-length scholarly treatment of Nnedi Okorafor's critically acclaimed fiction. Written for an audience that includes serious fans as well as scholars, it is an introduction to Okorafor's work and major influences. The scope of the text is ambitious, featuring detailed analyses of her novels, short story collection, memoir, comics and graphic novel. Particular emphasis is given to Okorafor's most enduring themes, which include healthy young adult development and decision making, the interweaving of fantasy and science fiction, flight as a unifying force and the use of innovative biotechnology in ecological utopian communities. Influences examined include feminism, Afrofuturist and Africanfuturist movements and African mythology. Chapters also detail Okorafor's examinations of colonialism and corporate neocolonialism in Africa and Africa's potential to become a major world power.

What's wrong with the world today and how might it become better (or worse)? These are the questions pursued in this book, which explores the hopes and fears, dreams and nightmares of the 21st century. Through architecture, fiction, theory, film and experiments with everyday life, Sargisson explores contemporary hopes and fears about the future.