Roll the Bones tells the story of gambling: where it came from, how it has changed, and where it is now. This is the new Casino Edition. which updates and expands the global history of gambling to include a greater focus on casinos, from their development in European spas to their growth in Reno and Las Vegas. New material chronicles in greater depth the development of casino resorts on the Las Vegas Strip and their spread throughout the United States. A new chapter better places Atlantic City's casinos into their correct context, and new material accounts for the rise of casinos in Asia and online gaming. From the first modern casino in Venice (1638), casinos have grown incredibly. During the 18th and 19th century, a series of European spa towns, culminating in Monte Carlo, hosted casinos. In the United States, during those same years, gambling developed both in illegal urban gambling halls and in the wide-open saloons of the western frontier. Those two strands of American gambling came together in Nevada's legal casinos, whose current regime dates from 1931. Developing with a healthy assist from elements affiliated with organized crime, these casinos eventually outgrew their rough-hewn routes, becoming sun-drenched pleasure palaces along the Las Vegas Strip. With Nevada casinos proving successful, other states, beginning with New Jersey in 1976, rolled the dice. From there, casinos have come to America's tribal lands, rivers, and urban centers. In the last decade, gambling has moved online, while Asia--with multi-billion dollar projects in Macau and Singapore--has become a new casino frontier. Reading Roll the Bones, you'll get a better appreciation for how long casinos and gambling have been with us--and what they mean to us today.

Providing a social, economic and political study of field sports and those other activities and customs labelled as rural sports, from the earliest of times to the present day in all of the United Kingdom and Ireland. This book brings together several distinct types of traditional rural sports with particular emphasis on the social history and 'traditional' aspects. It contains several hundred entries focusing on individual sports and others providing analysis of key concepts, themes and terminologies. The Encyclopedia of Traditional British Rural Sports is an invaluable reference that provides students, scholars and sports enthusiasts with a focussed and authoritative source of information on the history and culture of rural sport in Britain.

Jan Huizinga and Roger Caillois have already taught us to realize how important games and play have been for pre-modern civilization. Recent research has begun to acknowledge the fundamental importance of these aspects in cultural, religious, philosophical, and literary terms. This volume expands on the traditional approach still very much focused on the materiality of game (toys, cards, dice, falcons, dolls, etc.) and acknowledges that game constituted also a form of coming to terms with human existence in an unstable and volatile world determined by universal randomness and fortune. Whether considering blessings or horse fighting, falconry or card games, playing with dice or dolls, we can gain a much deeper understanding of medieval and early modern society when we consider how people pursued pleasure and how they structured their leisure time. The contributions examine a wide gamut of approaches to pleasure, considering health issues, eroticism, tournaments, playing music, reading and listening, drinking alcohol, gambling and throwing dice. This large issue was also relevant, of course, in non-Christian societies, and constitutes a critical concern both for the past and the present because we are all homines ludentes.

Women have battled for a place in the male-dominated world of sports throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, overturning obstacles and highlighting the changing position of women in societies around the world. This has become one of the defining stories of our age and the central story of women’s sports. They Run with Surprising Swiftness tells a different and much older, forgotten story with many of the same themes. Sports have never been the sole preserve of men; women athletes have always been there. As this book shows, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Britain, women of all ages ran, fought, rode, played football, cricket, tennis, and other sports. They competed in tough, head-to-head events that required extraordinary endurance and skill. Though not labeled "athletic" at the time, these women performed feats that in our age would certainly earn that descriptor. They Run with Surprising Swiftness recognizes these remarkable athletes and their achievements and aims to restore them to their rightful place in the long history of women in sport.

Computer Vision Textbook for Beginners with 3 Hands-On ProjectsAre you ready to crush your Computer Vision career goals?The recent advances in the field of computer vision have simply been astounding. In less than a decade, the rate of accuracy for object identification and classification has risen from 50 percent to 99 percent. Today's systems are, in fact, more accurate than humans at swiftly detecting and responding to visual inputs.The emergence of deep learning and the advent of very large datasets in recent years have led to an increase in the number of computer vision applications. Against this backdrop, it's worthwhile to add computer vision knowledge to your data science arsenal. Now is the perfect time to enter this dynamic field.Computer Vision with Python for Beginners presents you with a hands-on, straightforward approach to learn computer vision fast. The step-by-step format of this book makes learning computer vision simple, fast, and easy. The exercises at the end of each chapter test your knowledge of the concepts you have covered. They also help you apply what you have learned. This book presents you with: A solid foundation in computer vision. Knowledge of elementary and intermediate topics. Basics of coding in Python. Links to additional content related to the topics you study. Access to external files to train and test all the knowledge you have acquired about a computer vision tool. Three mini-projects in the concluding section of the book that help you to bring together all the theoretical concepts you've learned.You begin with Python installation in the first chapter. Then you have a crash course in Python in the second chapter. Jumping straight to Python quickens your learning and makes it simpler to follow along. Throughout this book, the code is written using Jupyter Notebook. Access to the datasets used in this book is easy. In the final section, you work on three hands-on mini-projects: 1. Detecting Hand Symbols for Rock, Paper, Scissors Game2. Covid-19 Detection from X-Rays3. Detecting Weather from ImagesThe scripts, images, and graphs are clear. They are designed to help you understand the visuals to the text description easily. This book is the perfect option for self-study, even if your proficiency is at the level of an intermediate learner. You can tackle new computer vision problems confidently and develop complete solutions at your workplace. Finally, you can count on this learning by doing book to accomplish your computer vision career goals faster.The topics covered include: Introduction to Computer Vision Environment Setup & Writing Your First Program in Python Python Crash Course Basics of Image Processing Basics of Video Processing Face Detection with OpenCV in Python Introduction to Machine Learning for Computer Vision Introduction to Deep Learning for Computer Vision Transfer Learning for Computer Vision Object Detection with YOLO Introduction to GANSHit BUY NOW and begin your Computer Vision learning journey.

The first of three explosive pulp thrillers arriving back-to-back from cult crime fiction sensation and Marvel Comics scribe Duane Swierczynski. Charlie Hardie, an ex-cop still reeling from the revenge killing of his former partner's entire family, fears one thing above all else: that he'll suffer the same fate. Languishing in self-imposed exile, Hardie has become a glorified house sitter. His latest gig comes replete with an illegally squatting B-movie actress who rants about hit men who specialize in making deaths look like accidents. Unfortunately, it's the real deal. Hardie finds himself squared off against a small army of the most lethal men in the world: The Accident People. It's nothing personal-the girl just happens to be the next name on their list. For Hardie, though, it's intensely personal. He's not about to let more innocent people die. Not on his watch.

A follow-up publication to the Handbook of Medieval Studies, this new reference work turns to a different focus: medieval culture. Medieval research has grown tremendously in depth and breadth over the last decades. Particularly our understanding of medieval culture, of the basic living conditions, and the specific value system prevalent at that time has considerably expanded, to a point where we are in danger of no longer seeing the proverbial forest for the trees. The present, innovative handbook offers compact articles on essential topics, ideals, specific knowledge, and concepts defining the medieval world as comprehensively as possible. The topics covered in this new handbook pertain to issues such as love and marriage, belief in God, hell, and the devil, education, lordship and servitude, Christianity versus Judaism and Islam, health, medicine, the rural world, the rise of the urban class, travel, roads and bridges, entertainment, games, and sport activities, numbers, measuring, the education system, the papacy, saints, the senses, death, and money.

Inspired by research undertaken for the new Medieval & Renaissance Galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Re-thinking Renaissance Objects explores and often challenges some of the key issues and current debates relating to Renaissance art and culture. Puts forward original research, including evidence provided by an in-depth study arising from the Medieval & Renaissance Gallery project Contributions are unusual in their combination of a variety of approaches, but with each paper starting with an examination of the objects themselves New theories emerge from several papers, some of which challenge current thinking