Uncertain Manifesto

The writer and artist Frédéric Pajak was ten when he began to dream of “a book mixing words and pictures: snippets of adventure, random memories, maxims, ghosts, forgotten heroes, trees, the raging sea,” but it was not until he was in his forties that this dream took form as Uncertain Manifesto. The utterly original book that he produced is a memoir born of reading and a meditation on the lives and ideas, the motivations, feelings, and fates of some of Pajak’s heroes: Samuel Beckett and the artist Bram van Velde, and, especially, Walter Benjamin, whose travels to Moscow, Naples, and Ibiza, whose experiences with hashish, whose faltering marriage and love affairs and critique of modern experience Pajak re-creates and reflects on in word and image. Pajak’s moody black-and white drawings accompany the text throughout, though their bearing on it is often indirect and all the more absorbing for that. Between word and image, the reader is drawn into a mysterious space that is all Pajak’s as he seeks to evoke vanished histories and to resist a modern world more and more given over to a present without a past. With the support of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia

Security professionals are trained skeptics. They poke and prod at other people’s digital creations, expecting them to fail in unexpected ways. Shouldn’t that same skeptical power be turned inward? Shouldn’t practitioners ask: “How do I know that my enterprise security capabilities work? Are they scaling, accelerating, or slowing as the business exposes more value to more people and through more channels at higher velocities?” This is the start of the modern measurement mindset—the mindset that seeks to confront security with data. The Metrics Manifesto: Confronting Security with Data delivers an examination of security metrics with R, the popular open-source programming language and software development environment for statistical computing. This insightful and up-to-date guide offers readers a practical focus on applied measurement that can prove or disprove the efficacy of information security measures taken by a firm. The book’s detailed chapters combine topics like security, predictive analytics, and R programming to present an authoritative and innovative approach to security metrics. The author and security professional examines historical and modern methods of measurement with a particular emphasis on Bayesian Data Analysis to shed light on measuring security operations. Readers will learn how processing data with R can help measure security improvements and changes as well as help technology security teams identify and fix gaps in security. The book also includes downloadable code for people who are new to the R programming language. Perfect for security engineers, risk engineers, IT security managers, CISOs, and data scientists comfortable with a bit of code, The Metrics Manifesto offers readers an invaluable collection of information to help professionals prove the efficacy of security measures within their company.

This highly original collection is a far cry from the demand on the literary humanities to offer the soothing hum of theory to a world of breaks, crises and pain. Instead, it exemplifies a way ahead for the critical humanities.... -Arjun Appadurai, New York University 'Doing the Humanities' comes to life in this passionate, provocative set of experiments in descriptive poetics. Failure, fantasy, freefall are reconceived as forms of aesthetic achievement across the creative arts.... -Ros Ballaster, University of Oxford ....This timely volume inspires a collective undertaking to learn 'to do' the humanities through the untimeliness of a work of art. A humanities that remains attentive to this form of techné will prove indispensable to remaking the world in the aftermath of a pandemic. -Premesh Lalu, University of the Western Cape ....exhilarating in the democratic breadth of its interests, the emotional fervour of its commitments and its yoking of systemic criticism to the work of poetic language. -Helen Small, University of Oxford How can the humanities make an intervention in such a time as this, when life as we have known it hangs in pandemic balance since the spring of 2020-and when contagion calls for distancing and isolation, while loneliness cries out for the solace of touch? Perhaps only by being, at once, fearless, critical, sorrowing, exultant, enraged, intimate. Humanities, Provocateur brings you fourteen essays and two creative pieces by established as well as younger scholars and writers from America, Europe, the Middle East, South Africa and South Asia, in a bracing invitation to a freefall of reading. They travel from classical literatures and philosophy to twentieth-century writing, cinema and critical-imaginative thinking, grouped whimsically around a set of provocations-Gleaning, Perforation, Caprice, Paraphernalia, Descent, Flux, Flesh, Ephemera-and welcome you to argue, to cherish or to distrust. Taking sharp, sparkling twists and turns in thought and style, this eclectic collection of writings incites you to be intellectually adventurous and destitute at the same time. And, invoking Dante, to never be afraid, for our fate is our gift.

An accomplished Fortune 50 executive translates for a western audience the lessons he learned from the land of his birth, India. Bob Miglani was stressed out, burnt out, and stuck until he rediscovered the enduring lessons of his childhood: celebrate impermanence, serve others, and move forward no matter what. Bob's message: chaos isn't going away--embrace it!

Reimagining the scholarly book as living and collaborative--not as commodified and essentialized, but in all its dynamic materiality. In this book, Janneke Adema proposes that we reimagine the scholarly book as a living and collaborative project--not as linear, bound, and fixed, but as fluid, remixed, and liquid, a space for experimentation. She presents a series of cutting-edge experiments in arts and humanities book publishing, showcasing the radical new forms that book-based scholarly work might take in the digital age. Adema's proposed alternative futures for the scholarly book go beyond such print-based assumptions as fixity, stability, the single author, originality, and copyright, reaching instead for a dynamic and emergent materiality. Adema suggests ways to unbind the book, describing experiments in scholarly book publishing with new forms of anonymous collaborative authorship, radical open access publishing, and processual, living, and remixed publications, among other practices. She doesn't cast digital as the solution and print as the problem; the problem in scholarly publishing, she argues, is not print itself, but the way print has been commodified and essentialized. Adema explores alternative, more ethical models of authorship; constructs an alternative genealogy of openness; and examines opportunities for intervention in current cultures of knowledge production. Finally, asking why it is that we cut and bind our research together at all, she examines two book publishing projects that experiment with remix and reuse and try to rethink and reperform the book-apparatus by taking responsibility for the cuts they make.

DescriptionThis difficult volume is about the far side of Christmas. We prefer to see only the tree and the tinsel, the mere exterior, and we forget, neglect, ignore the inner soul of religion. And religion can be the most dangerous thing of all... How is this a schizophrenic spin on the Yuletide trivialities? Here is a querulous book that does not witness Christmas and all Christianity through the gaze of respectability, but through the poisoned eyes of the doomed homeless outsider. Some of the verse- which aspires to be as dubious and questionable as possible- was actually done on a psychiatric ward. Christmas and the Faith become emblems of that conventionality which may be so choking for a schizophrenic. The two faces of Christmas- the cynical and the celebratory- are bleakly investigated. Christmas on a psychiatric ward! This is able to be the most pathetically poignant period of all for a patient. Amidst the loud crackers and the greasy mince pies, and those cards and presents from the nurses and other patients, after the all too flatulent Christmas dinner, the merciless medication is still to be dealt out. The schizophrenics are still locked up. Baby Jesus does not intend to liberate the lunatics... So we offer Christmas, Easter and the Church through a schizophrenic's shattered prism, with everything intentionally deformed, everything chaotically distorted! About the AuthorZekria Ibrahimi (born in 1959) is defined by his schizophrenia. It first hit him long ago, in his late teens. He is fifty years old now, grey and frail, almost a pensioner, with all the aches and injuries of age, and he does not always want to remember how, as an adolescent in the late 1970's, he suddenly became afraid of everything surrounding him, and, worst of all, of himself. He would run around the countryside and knock at the doors of strangers because he feared the apocalypse was pursuing him ... He would pick up rubbish outside in alleys and streets and hoard it in his not very palatial lodgings ... He was always wandering away from home, searching for ... what would never be found again ... the straight route, the level way ... He was a tramp, freezing during the nights in public toilets where he had various unsavoury insects as company on the cold concrete ... There were years of pain when his schizophrenia became almost his only companion- albeit a sadistic one, punishing him even as he hugged it. Perhaps, to echo both R. D. Laing and Emily Dickinson, it is the entire globe, it is general society, that is truly insane. Schizophrenics simply burrow all too deeply under the surface. They reach the very core of the savage reality in us all. Most varnish over the anarchic truth within through the superficial sham paraded as 'civilization'. Schizophrenics prefer to be uncomfortably honest barbarians. Eventually, after much psychotic shouting on Hammersmith Broadway, the hapless Zekria was confined at the Charing Cross unit in the West London Mental Health Trust. Following the unsafe unstable freedom of his schizophrenia, came the restrictions of Section 3. He would not have survived without the multi- racial compassion of the individual doctors and nurses in Charing Cross. Yet the overall SYSTEM remains an ogre of rules and restraints, and the INSTITUTION of psychiatry can be as cold and vicious as in the days of lobotomy and insulin shock. Now he is elderly, but still he muses about being locked up, drugged up, about how, with schizophrenia, the treatment can be worse than the disease...

This all-new edition of the best-selling guide The TV Showrunner’s Roadmap provides readers with the tools for creating, writing, and managing your own hit streaming series. Combining his 30+ years as a working screenwriter and professor, industry veteran Neil Landau expertly unpacks essential insights to the creation of a successful show and takes readers behind the scenes with exclusive and enlightening interviews with showrunners from some of TV’s most lauded series, including Fargo, Better Call Saul, Watchmen, Insecure, Barry, Money Heist, Succession, Ozark, Schitt’s Creek, Euphoria, PEN15, and many more. From conception to final rewrite, The TV Showrunner’s Roadmap is an invaluable resource for anyone seeking to create a series that won’t run out of steam after the first few episodes. This groundbreaking guide features an eResource with additional interviews and bonus materials. So grab your laptop, dig out that stalled spec script, and buckle up. Welcome to the fast lane.

This Handbook explores the cognitive, motivational, interpersonal, clinical, and applied aspects of personal uncertainty. It showcases both the diversity and the unity that defines contemporary perspectives on uncertainty in self within social and personality psychology. The contributions to the volume are all written by distinguished scholars in personality, social psychology, and clinical psychology united by their common focus on the causes and consequences of self-uncertainty. Chapters explore the similarities and differences between personal uncertainty and other psychological experiences in terms of their nature and relationship with human thought, emotion, motivation, and behavior. Specific challenges posed by personal uncertainty and the coping strategies people develop in their daily life are identified. There is an assessment of the potential negative and positive repercussions of coping with the specific experience of self-uncertainty, including academic, health, and relationship outcomes. Throughout, strategies specifically designed to assist others in confronting the unique challenges posed by self-uncertainty in ways that emphasize healthy psychological functioning and growth are promoted. In addition, the contributions to the Handbook touch on the psychological, social, and cultural context of the new millennium, including concepts such as Friedman’s "flat world," confidence, the absence of doubt in world leaders, the threat of terrorism since 9/11, the arts, doubt and religious belief, and views of doubt as the universal condition of humankind. The Handbook is an invaluable resource for researchers, practitioners, and senior undergraduate and graduate students in social and personality psychology, clinical and counseling psychology, educational psychology, and developmental psychology.