A guide for making sense of life--from action (good except when it's not) to thinking (depressing) to youth (a treasure). This book offers a guide to human nature and human experience--a reference book for making sense of life. In thirty-eight short, interconnected essays, Shimon Edelman considers the parameters of the human condition, addressing them in alphabetical order, from action (good except when it's not) to love (only makes sense to the lovers) to thinking (should not be so depressing) to youth (a treasure). In a style that is by turns personal and philosophical, at once informative and entertaining, Edelman offers a series of illuminating takes on the most important aspects of living in the world.

A New York Times bestseller! The follow up to the #1 New York Times bestselling An Inconvenient Truth and companion to Vice President Al Gore’s new documentary, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, this new book is a daring call to action. It exposes the reality of how humankind has aided in the destruction of our planet and delivers hope through groundbreaking information on what you can do now. Vice President Gore, one of our environmental heroes and a leading expert in climate change, brings together cutting-edge research from top scientists around the world; approximately 200 photographs and illustrations to visually articulate the subject matter; and personal anecdotes and observations to document the fast pace and wide scope of global warming. He presents, with alarming clarity and conclusiveness (and with humor, too) that the fact of global climate change is not in question and that its consequences for the world we live in will be assuredly disastrous if left unchecked. Follow Vice President Gore around the globe as he tells a story of change in the making. He connects the dots of Zika, flooding, and other natural disasters we've lived through in the last 10+ years—and much more. The book also offers a comprehensive how-to guide on exactly how we can change the course of fate. With concrete, actionable advice on topics ranging from how to run for office to how to talk to your children about climate change, An Inconvenient Sequel will empower you to make a difference—and lets you know how exactly to do it. Where Gore’s first documentary and book took us through the technical aspects of climate change, the second documentary is a gripping, narrative journey that leaves you filled with hope and the urge to take action immediately. This book captures that same essence and is a must-have for everyone who cares deeply about our planet.

How we see and how we visualize: why the scientific account differs from our experience.

A new collection of essays from Dodie Bellamy on disenfranchisement, vulgarity, American working-class life, aesthetic values, and profound embarrassment. So. Much. Information. When does one expand? Cut back? Stop researching? When is enough enough? Like Colette's aging courtesan Lea in the Chéri books, I straddle two centuries that are drifting further and further apart. --Dodie Bellamy, "Hoarding as Ecriture" This new collection of essays, selected by Dodie Bellamy after the death of Kevin Killian, her companion and husband of thirty-three years, circles around loss and abandonment large and small. Bellamy's highly focused selection comprises pieces written over three decades, in which the themes consistent within her work emerge with new force and clarity: disenfranchisement, vulgarity, American working-class life, aesthetic values, profound embarrassment. Bellamy writes with shocking, and often hilarious, candor about the experience of turning her literary archive over to the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale and about being targeted by an enraged online anti-capitalist stalker. Just as she did in her previous essay collection, When The Sick Rule The World, Bellamy examines aspects of contemporary life with deep intelligence, intimacy, ambivalence, and calm.

In a culmination of humanity's millennia-long quest for self knowledge, the sciences of the mind are now in a position to offer concrete, empirically validated answers to the most fundamental questions about human nature. What does it mean to be a mind? How is the mind related to the brain? How are minds shaped by their embodiment and environment? What are the principles behind cognitive functions such as perception, memory, language, thought, and consciousness? By analyzing the tasks facing any sentient being that is subject to stimulation and a pressure to act, Shimon Edelman identifies computation as the common denominator in the emerging answers to all these questions. Any system composed of elements that exchange signals with each other and occasionally with the rest of the world can be said to be engaged in computation. A brain composed of neurons is one example of a system that computes, and the computations that the neurons collectively carry out constitute the brain's mind. Edelman presents a computational account of the entire spectrum of cognitive phenomena that constitutes the mind. He begins with sentience, and uses examples from visual perception to demonstrate that it must, at its very core, be a type of computation. Throughout his account, Edelman acknowledges the human mind's biological origins. Along the way, he also demystifies traits such as creativity, language, and individual and collective consciousness, and hints at how naturally evolved minds can transcend some of their limitations by moving to computational substrates other than brains. The account that Edelman gives in this book is accessible, yet unified and rigorous, and the big picture he presents is supported by evidence ranging from neurobiology to computer science. The book should be read by anyone seeking a comprehensive and current introduction to cognitive psychology.

Drawing on some of the most powerful theories and trends in physics, biology, philosophy, and psychology, D'Souza concludes that belief in life after deathoffers depth and significance to this life.

Sharp, acerbic, and humorous writings that approach psychoanalysis and celebrity on a first-name basis, with subjects that range from Oprah Winfrey to William Eggleston. As any good magician or psychoanalyst knows, it's the deliberate chalking of a particular square that allows for the discovery of personal order and private mythology. —from The Irresponsible Magician Sharp, acerbic, and often humorous, Rebekah Rutkoff's writings about contemporary culture reflect the present in ways reminiscent of Renata Adler's and Joan Didion's writings about urban life in the late twentieth century. Moving freely between fact and fiction, utilizing imaginary interviews, accidental stories, and critical essays, The Irresponsible Magician approaches psychoanalysis and celebrity on a first-name basis. Writing about cultural figures as diverse as Oprah Winfrey, Michel Auder, the Kennedy women, William Eggleston, Gregory Markopoulos, and Hilda Doolittle, Rutkoff interprets protagonists as if they were figures in a dream. Navigating a world of painting, cable television, video art, avant-garde film, memories, or Rutkoff's own photographs, these texts read images like tea leaves, opening up a space in which shadows speak more eloquently than symbols or signs.

ñVivid and fresh and finely crafted, this is a book that will strike a chord with anyone who has loved, lived, or wondered how we manage, in the face of our fragility, to carry on.î „ Nino Ricci This is the story of Zee, an aimless ex-lawyer who has turned his inability to make a decision into a fine art, and his wife, Alex, a practical and hard-working social worker who feels her biological clock ticking loudly. Reverberating with the emotional crises of the urban adult, Alex & Zee is an offbeat portrait of contemporary relationships, full of wickedly astute observations of city life and its multifarious life forms. Grimly hilarious at every turn, this is a terrific debut novel. Nominated for the 1995 W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the recipient of widespread critical acclaim, Alex & Zee is the long-awaited reissue of Cordelia StrubeÍs biting take on contemporary romance.

Using the tools of complexity theory, Stephen Judd develops a formal description of associative learning in connectionist networks. He rigorously exposes the computational difficulties in training neural networks and explores how certain design principles will or will not make the problems easier.Judd looks beyond the scope of any one particular learning rule, at a level above the details of neurons. There he finds new issues that arise when great numbers of neurons are employed and he offers fresh insights into design principles that could guide the construction of artificial and biological neural networks.The first part of the book describes the motivations and goals of the study and relates them to current scientific theory. It provides an overview of the major ideas, formulates the general learning problem with an eye to the computational complexity of the task, reviews current theory on learning, relates the book's model of learning to other models outside the connectionist paradigm, and sets out to examine scale-up issues in connectionist learning.Later chapters prove the intractability of the general case of memorizing in networks, elaborate on implications of this intractability and point out several corollaries applying to various special subcases. Judd refines the distinctive characteristics of the difficulties with families of shallow networks, addresses concerns about the ability of neural networks to generalize, and summarizes the results, implications, and possible extensions of the work. Neural Network Design and the Complexity of Learning is included in the Network Modeling and Connectionism series edited by Jeffrey Elman.