Deep Background is an exciting political thriller from David Corn that starts with the assassination of the President of the U.S. and never lets up. After President Bob Hanover is shot dead at the White House press conference by a gunman with no identity, Nick Addis,, a presidential aide, is reluctantly drawn into an unofficial-and private-investigation of the assassination. In this off-the-books effort, he is joined by Clarence Dunne, the disgraced chief of White House security, and Julia Lancette, a CIA analyst at odds with the Agency. As the intrigue mounts-the first lady and the vice president are fiercely competing for their party's presidential nomination-Addis, Dunne, and Lancette are confronted by faceless and ruthless enemies determined to stop them from uncovering long-hidden secrets.

An introduction to a broad range of topics in deep learning, covering mathematical and conceptual background, deep learning techniques used in industry, and research perspectives. “Written by three experts in the field, Deep Learning is the only comprehensive book on the subject.” —Elon Musk, cochair of OpenAI; cofounder and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX Deep learning is a form of machine learning that enables computers to learn from experience and understand the world in terms of a hierarchy of concepts. Because the computer gathers knowledge from experience, there is no need for a human computer operator to formally specify all the knowledge that the computer needs. The hierarchy of concepts allows the computer to learn complicated concepts by building them out of simpler ones; a graph of these hierarchies would be many layers deep. This book introduces a broad range of topics in deep learning. The text offers mathematical and conceptual background, covering relevant concepts in linear algebra, probability theory and information theory, numerical computation, and machine learning. It describes deep learning techniques used by practitioners in industry, including deep feedforward networks, regularization, optimization algorithms, convolutional networks, sequence modeling, and practical methodology; and it surveys such applications as natural language processing, speech recognition, computer vision, online recommendation systems, bioinformatics, and videogames. Finally, the book offers research perspectives, covering such theoretical topics as linear factor models, autoencoders, representation learning, structured probabilistic models, Monte Carlo methods, the partition function, approximate inference, and deep generative models. Deep Learning can be used by undergraduate or graduate students planning careers in either industry or research, and by software engineers who want to begin using deep learning in their products or platforms. A website offers supplementary material for both readers and instructors.

Next to the AP Style Guide, the Media Relations Handbook is arguably the most valuable reference available for any public affairs officer, press secretary or Beltway PR professional. The Media Relations Handbook is required reading for Capitol Hill press secretaries, federal agency public affairs officers, political campaign spin doctors, nonprofit PR professionals, lobbyists or anyone involved in garnering media coverage. In this Handbook, Bradford Fitch explores theory and practice, discussing general principles and illustrating each point with real-life examples. This book is for those who are seeking the most effective means to communicate on behalf of a government agency, a national association or nonprofit, or an elected official. It will help you channel your hot passion with the cool guidance that has been gleaned through others' experience. The author professes no unique insight into media relations in public affairs. Rather, this book is an amalgamation of the collective wisdom of hundreds of public relations professionals in the worlds of government and politics. It is an overview of the ideas that have become the accepted rules of communications in Washington, presented in one volume. "[T]his book will be of value to students and professionals of political communications and public relations. Summing up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduate through professional collections." -- CHOICE "Although targeted for new media relations staff or ones starting a new press office, even the most experienced public information officer can learn from this book." -- Gene Rose, Director of Public Affairs, NCSL, in State Legislatures magazine "Offers a wealth of practical advice on public relations that will be of benefit to governmental and non-governmental organizations alike." -- Municipal World A rich 'how-to' lesson for pros and for novices who must negotiate the competitive landscape of America's new media." -- Ann Compton, White House Correspondent, ABC News Summary Table of Contents Introduction Foreword Ch. 1 First Steps Ch. 2 Tools of the Craft Ch. 3 Developing a Message and Communications Plan Ch. 4 Interacting with Reporters Ch. 5 Overview of the Media: Print, Radio, and TV Ch. 6 Web-Based and Online Communications Ch. 7 Dealing With the Principal Ch. 8 Interview Preparation Ch. 9 Internal Issues: Experts, Policy, Numbers, Leaks, Lawyers and Language Ch. 10 How to Interact with Congressional Campaign Operations Ch. 11 Communications in a Federal Agency Ch. 12 Crisis Communications in Public Affairs Ch. 13 Ethics in Public Affairs Appendices Glossary Epilogue Index Complete Table of Contents online at www.MediaRelationsHandbook.com

Artificial Intelligence: Technologies, Applications, and Challenges is an invaluable resource for readers to explore the utilization of Artificial Intelligence, applications, challenges, and its underlying technologies in different applications areas. Using a series of present and future applications, such as indoor-outdoor securities, graphic signal processing, robotic surgery, image processing, character recognition, augmented reality, object detection and tracking, intelligent traffic monitoring, emergency department medical imaging, and many more, this publication will support readers to get deeper knowledge and implementing the tools of Artificial Intelligence. The book offers comprehensive coverage of the most essential topics, including: Rise of the machines and communications to IoT (3G, 5G). Tools and Technologies of Artificial Intelligence Real-time applications of artificial intelligence using machine learning and deep learning. Challenging Issues and Novel Solutions for realistic applications Mining and tracking of motion based object data image processing and analysis into the unified framework to understand both IoT and Artificial Intelligence-based applications. This book will be an ideal resource for IT professionals, researchers, under or post-graduate students, practitioners, and technology developers who are interested in gaining insight to the Artificial Intelligence with deep learning, IoT and machine learning, critical applications domains, technologies, and solutions to handle relevant challenges.

Anna Deveare Smith's award-winning one-woman shows were borne of her uniquely brilliant ability to listen. In Talk to Me she applies her rare talent to the language of political power in America. Believing that character and language are inextricably bound, Smith sets out to discern the essence of America by listening to its people and trying to capture its politics. To that end she travels to some of America's most conspicuous places, like the presidential conventions of 1996, and some of its darkest corners, like a women's prison in Maryland. And along the way she interviews everyone from janitors to murderers to Bill Clinton himself. Memoir, social commentary, meditation on language, this book is as vastly ambitious as it is compellingly unique.

This comprehensive textbook presents a broad review of both traditional (i.e., conventional) and deep learning aspects of object detection in various adversarial real-world conditions in a clear, insightful, and highly comprehensive style. Beginning with the relation of computer vision and object detection, the text covers the various representation of objects, applications of object detection, and real-world challenges faced by the research community for object detection task. The book addresses various real-world degradations and artifacts for the object detection task and also highlights the impacts of artifacts in the object detection problems. The book covers various imaging modalities and benchmark datasets mostly adopted by the research community for solving various aspects of object detection tasks. The book also collects together solutions and perspectives proposed by the preeminent researchers in the field, addressing not only the background of visibility enhancement but also techniques proposed in the literature for visibility enhancement of scenes and detection of objects in various representative real-world challenges. Computer Vision: Object Detection in Adversarial Vision is unique for its diverse content, clear presentation, and overall completeness. It provides a clear, practical, and detailed introduction and advancement of object detection in various representative challenging real-world conditions. Topics and Features: • Offers the first truly comprehensive presentation of aspects of the object detection in degraded and nondegraded environment. • Includes in-depth discussion of various degradation and artifacts, and impact of those artifacts in the real world on solving the object detection problems. • Gives detailed visual examples of applications of object detection in the real world. • Presents a detailed description of popular imaging modalities for object detection adopted by researchers. • Presents the key characteristics of various benchmark datasets in indoor and outdoor environment for solving object detection tasks. • Surveys the complete field of visibility enhancement of degraded scenes, including conventional methods designed for enhancing the degraded scenes as well as the deep architectures. • Discusses techniques for detection of objects in real-world applications. • Contains various hands-on practical examples and a tutorial for solving object detection problems using Python. • Motivates readers to build vision-based systems for solving object detection problems in degraded and nondegraded real-world challenges. The book will be of great interest to a broad audience ranging from researchers and practitioners to graduate and postgraduate students involved in computer vision tasks with respect to object detection in degraded and nondegraded real-world vision problems.

A panoramic narrative that places ancient Africa on the stage of world history This book brings together archaeological and linguistic evidence to provide a sweeping global history of ancient Africa, tracing how the continent played an important role in the technological, agricultural, and economic transitions of world civilization. Christopher Ehret takes readers from the close of the last Ice Age some ten thousand years ago, when a changing climate allowed for the transition from hunting and gathering to the cultivation of crops and raising of livestock, to the rise of kingdoms and empires in the first centuries of the common era. Ehret takes up the problem of how we discuss Africa in the context of global history, combining results of multiple disciplines. He sheds light on the rich history of technological innovation by African societies—from advances in ceramics to cotton weaving and iron smelting—highlighting the important contributions of women as inventors and innovators. He shows how Africa helped to usher in an age of agricultural exchange, exporting essential crops as well as new agricultural methods into other regions, and how African traders and merchants led a commercial revolution spanning diverse regions and cultures. Ehret lays out the deeply African foundations of ancient Egyptian culture, beliefs, and institutions and discusses early Christianity in Africa. A monumental achievement by one of today’s eminent scholars, Ancient Africa offers vital new perspectives on our shared past, explaining why we need to reshape our historical frameworks for understanding the ancient world as a whole.

Nick Santangelo, a freelance reporter investigating the explosion of a NASA satellite on Christmas Eve—later, his brother’s assassination—discovers that his ex-wife is “Eve,” an incredible revelation he fights even as he helps her and her libidinous sister defend Earth against their father’s wrath. To complicate things, his mother’s oncologist does not expect her to last the night, a package for him explodes and turns the street outside his parents’ home into an inferno, and his investigation confirms that his ex-wife is the biblical “Eve.” He treats this revelation with proper skepticism—though he has documented it, independently—and curses it as he embraces it, and damns too, until the very end, the role of prophet that Ms. Hannah Schwartz, a.k.a. Eve Black, has placed on him. This is the book that Nick has promised her he would write— to tell her story: “A Contemporary Mythic Tale,” a neo-mythic Bible story for our times. It begins quietly enough as a domestic drama about the Santangelo family—on the periphery of Bella Vista, S. Philadelphia, “The S. 9th St. Italian Market Neighborhood.” Then it quickly evolves into an SF fantasy and an epiphany that is both miraculous and tragic. The first line propels the story: “The ‘shooting star’ that Nick and his father saw Christmas Eve was not the star of Bethlehem.” An exploding NASA satellite showers the East Coast of the USA with a treacherous, electronic pulse that heals, temporarily, virtually any illness, including his mother’s “terminal” cancer. Torn between fear and doubt, suspicious that Eve, his ex-, whatever her biblical-alien status, had conspired with his brother and may have been responsible for his death, Nick leaps into the abyss and helps her and her libidinous big sister, Inga, to defend “their” planet, Heaven—and Earth—against their father Methuselah’s Almighty wrath at their ancient disobedience.

This book constitutes refereed proceedings of the 26th International Workshop Frontiers of Computer Vision, IW-FCV 2020, held in Ibusuki, Kagoshima, Japan, in February 2020. The 27 full papers presented were thoroughly reviewed and selected from 68 submissions. The papers in the volume are organized according to the following topics: real-world applications; face, pose, and action recognition; object detection and tracking; inspection and diagnosis; camera, 3D and imaging.

This book compares John Searle and Michel Foucault's radically opposed views on truth in order to demonstrate the need for invigorating cross-fertilization between the analytic and Continental philosophical traditions. By pressing beyond familiar clichés about analytic philosophy and postmodernism, a surprising convergence of Searle and Foucault's thought on truth emerge. Prado rebuts the analytic impression of Michel Foucault as a radical relativist and shows that Foucault not only is a realist, but also is much closer than many imagine to John Searle and Donald Davidson, both model analytic thinkers