The Table Sets Itself

Izzy is thrilled to finally help set the table, learning all the proper places for her friends Fork, Spoon, Dish, Napkin, Cup, and Knife. But once they get into a nightly groove, Izzy and her friends grow tired of their same old spots. Shaking things up doesn't go over so well with Mom and Dad, so Spoon and Dish run off for an adventure of their own. Lonely without her favorite tablemates, Izzy will need to find a way to convince Spoon and Dish to come back to the table. Perfect for any kid who has ever resisted a daily task, this clever, pun-filled story is gentle reminder that every dish has its place, and that injecting some creativity into daily tasks can make even the dullest ones lots of fun.

Poetry has long been thought of as a genre devoted to grand subjects, timeless themes, and sublime beauty. Why, then, have contemporary poets turned with such intensity to documenting and capturing the everyday and mundane? Drawing on insights about the nature of everyday life from philosophy, history, and critical theory, Andrew Epstein traces the modern history of this preoccupation and considers why it is so much with us today. Attention Equals Life argues that a potent hunger for everyday life explodes in the post-1945 period as a reaction to the rapid, unsettling transformations of this epoch, which have resulted in a culture of perilous distraction. Epstein demonstrates that poetry is an important, and perhaps unlikely, cultural form that has mounted a response, and even a mode of resistance, to a culture suffering from an acute crisis of attention. In this timely and engaging study, Epstein examines why a compulsion to represent the everyday becomes predominant in the decades after modernism and why it has so often sparked genre-bending formal experimentation. With chapters devoted to illuminating readings of a diverse group of writers--including poets associated with influential movements like the New York School, language poetry, and conceptual writing--the book considers the variety of forms contemporary poetry of everyday life has taken, and analyzes how gender, race, and political forces all profoundly inflect the experience and the representation of the quotidian. By exploring the rise of experimental realism as a poetic mode and the turn to rule-governed "everyday-life projects," Attention Equals Life offers a new way of understanding a vital strain at the heart of twentieth- and twenty-first century literature. It not only charts the evolution of a significant concept in cultural theory and poetry, but also reminds readers that the quest to pay attention to the everyday within today's frenetic world of smartphones and social media is an urgent and unending task.

Each page from this book turns into a project that can help you save the planet, from plastic-free diaries, bug hotel 'rooms' and apple seed planters to upcycling papers, organic recipe cards, and litter pickup invitations.

In recent years rough set theory has attracted the attention of many researchers and practitioners all over the world, who have contributed essentially to its development and applications. Weareobservingagrowingresearchinterestinthefoundationsofroughsets, including the various logical, mathematical and philosophical aspects of rough sets. Some relationships have already been established between rough sets and other approaches, and also with a wide range of hybrid systems. As a result, rough sets are linked with decision system modeling and analysis of complex systems, fuzzy sets, neural networks, evolutionary computing, data mining and knowledge discovery, pattern recognition, machine learning, and approximate reasoning. In particular, rough sets are used in probabilistic reasoning, granular computing (including information granule calculi based on rough mereology), intelligent control, intelligent agent modeling, identi?cation of autonomous s- tems, and process speci?cation. Methods based on rough set theory alone or in combination with other - proacheshavebeendiscoveredwith awide rangeofapplicationsinsuchareasas: acoustics, bioinformatics, business and ?nance, chemistry, computer engineering (e.g., data compression, digital image processing, digital signal processing, p- allel and distributed computer systems, sensor fusion, fractal engineering), de- sion analysis and systems, economics, electrical engineering (e.g., control, signal analysis, power systems), environmental studies, informatics, medicine, mole- lar biology, musicology, neurology, robotics, social science, software engineering, spatial visualization, Web engineering, and Web mining.

Volume IV of the Transactions on Rough Sets (TRS) introduces a number of new advances in the theory and application of rough sets. Rough sets and - proximationspaceswereintroducedmorethan30yearsagobyZdzis lawPawlak. These advances have profound implications in a number of research areas such as the foundations of rough sets, approximate reasoning, arti?cial intelligence, bioinformatics,computationalintelligence, cognitivescience, intelligentsystems, datamining,machineintelligence,andsecurity. Inaddition,itisevidentfromthe papers included in this volume that the foundations and applications of rough sets is a very active research area worldwide. A total of 16 researchers from 7 countries are represented in this volume, namely, Canada, India, Norway, S- den, Poland, Russia and the United States of America. Evidence of the vigor, breadth and depth of research in the theory and applications of rough sets can be found in the 10 articles in this volume. Prof. Pawlak has contributed a treatise on the philosophical underpinnings of rough sets. In this treatise, observations are made about the Cantor notion of a set, antinomies arising from Cantor sets, the problem of vagueness (es- cially, vague (imprecise) concepts), fuzzy sets, rough sets, fuzzy vs. rough sets as well as logic and rough sets. Among the many vistas and research directions suggested by Prof. Pawlak, one of the most fruitful concerns the model for a rough membership function, which was incarnated in many di?erent forms since its introduction by Pawlakand Skowronin 1994. Recall, here, that Prof.