In the fourth Railroad Semantics collection, Aaron takes you along on an epic train journey through desolate stretches of Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah. His personal accounts of train hopping are paired with newspaper clippings, photos, rail yard graffiti, and ephemera to fill in the story. In this volume, Aaron survives encounters with police, railroad workers, and hipsters posing as hobos. He drinks under overpasses, is injured alone in the desert, and even takes a legitimate, ticketed Amtrak ride.

Devoted to train hopping and train culture, this firsthand account of a risk-taking traveler describes with stunning detail the sights, sounds, successes, and defeats of riding United States railroads without a ticket. From exhausting waits in sparse canyons to breezy sunny rides through the Pacific Northwest, the author glorifies train hopping and expounds his grand adventures. Full of unique photographs documenting the author's railroad journeys, this real-life narrative of a self-styled hobo exudes the feel of adventure and allows readers to explore the world of freight train travel vicariously though him.

Railroad Semantics is no less a high spirited an adventure to read than the train hopping it describes. You are swept along as you precariously climb aboard and jumble down the tracks with Aaron Dactyl and his fellow travelers. As the story unfolds and you become familiar with the terrain in the fascinating pictures contained herein, you can't help but imagine you're one of the animated characters riding along as you attempt to avoid detection. Before long it's one of your tags Aaron spots and photographs under a bridge or on the walls of the box cars he uses to traverse from the snowy white capped peaks to the tree lined valley floor on his way north and south between cities. The morning dew dripping from the rail yard's grassy meadows signifies it's time to navigate the maze of tracks to catch the next train. Sometimes you must take flying leaps of faith from the cars onto the rocky ground below in order to outrun the authorities. But by the end you're waving goodbye to your new friend to return to your mundane life, anticipating his return.

Devoted to train-hopping, graffiti, and railroad culture, Aaron Dactyl's Railroad Semantics series describes the sights, sounds, successes, and defeats of exploring the western U.S. by freight train. The first four Railroad Semantics books are collected here for the first time. In their pages, you'll see epic, hidden works of art, read up on rail lore and riding tips, meet rail workers and fellow adventurers, and experience the perils and glories of life in rail yards, train cars, small towns, and encampments. The adventures in these books take you through California, Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Oregon. Cities visited: Sacramento, California Arcata, California Redding, California Ukiah, California Willits, California Dunsmuir, California Roseville, California Fort Bragg, California Portland, Oregon Eugene, Oregon Bend, Oregon La Grande, Oregon Missoula, Montana Laurel, Montana Cheyenne, Wyoming Laramie, Wyoming Pocatello, Idaho Nampa, Idaho Salt Lake City, Utah Elko, Nevada Denver, Colorado

“This book was written late in the North American night, with the rumbling thuds and booming train horns of the nearby rail yard echoing through my windows, reminding me of the train hoppers and gutter punks out there rolling through the darkness.” In Drift, Jeff Ferrell shows how dislocation and disorientation can become phenomena in their own right. Examining the history of drifting, Ferrell situates the contemporary global phenomenon of drift within today’s economic, social, and cultural dynamics. He also highlights a distinctly North American form of drift—that of the train-hopping hobo—by tracing the hobo’s political history and by sharing his own immersion in the world of contemporary train-hoppers. Along the way, Ferrell sheds light on the ephemeral intensity of drifting communities and explores the contested politics of drift—the legal and political strategies designed to control drifters in the interest of economic development, the irony by which these strategies spawn further social and spatial exclusion, and the ways in which drifters and those who embrace drift create their own slippery strategies of resistance. With an eye toward the truth, Ferrell keenly argues that the lessons of drift can provide us with new models for knowing and engaging with the world around us.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Reliability, Safety, and Security of Railway Systems, RSSRail 2019, held in Lille, France in June 2019. The 18 full papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 38 submissions. They cover a range of topics including railways system and infrastructure advance modelling; scheduling and track planning; safety process and validation; modelling; formal verification; and security.

This book presents 11 tutorial lectures by leading researchers given at the 12th edition of the International School on Formal Methods for the Design of Computer, Communication and Software Systems, SFM 2012, held in Bertinoro, Italy, in June 2012. SFM 2012 was devoted to model-driven engineering and covered several topics including modeling languages; model transformations, functional and performance modeling and analysis; and model evolution management.

This open access book introduces Vector semantics, which links the formal theory of word vectors to the cognitive theory of linguistics. The computational linguists and deep learning researchers who developed word vectors have relied primarily on the ever-increasing availability of large corpora and of computers with highly parallel GPU and TPU compute engines, and their focus is with endowing computers with natural language capabilities for practical applications such as machine translation or question answering. Cognitive linguists investigate natural language from the perspective of human cognition, the relation between language and thought, and questions about conceptual universals, relying primarily on in-depth investigation of language in use. In spite of the fact that these two schools both have ‘linguistics’ in their name, so far there has been very limited communication between them, as their historical origins, data collection methods, and conceptual apparatuses are quite different. Vector semantics bridges the gap by presenting a formal theory, cast in terms of linear polytopes, that generalizes both word vectors and conceptual structures, by treating each dictionary definition as an equation, and the entire lexicon as a set of equations mutually constraining all meanings.

The practical task of building a talking robot requires a theory of how natural language communication works. Conversely, the best way to computationally verify a theory of natural language communication is to demonstrate its functioning concretely in the form of a talking robot, the epitome of human–machine communication. To build an actual robot requires hardware that provides appropriate recognition and action interfaces, and because such hardware is hard to develop the approach in this book is theoretical: the author presents an artificial cognitive agent with language as a software system called database semantics (DBS). Because a theoretical approach does not have to deal with the technical difficulties of hardware engineering there is no reason to simplify the system – instead the software components of DBS aim at completeness of function and of data coverage in word form recognition, syntactic–semantic interpretation and inferencing, leaving the procedural implementation of elementary concepts for later. In this book the author first examines the universals of natural language and explains the Database Semantics approach. Then in Part I he examines the following natural language communication issues: using external surfaces; the cycle of natural language communication; memory structure; autonomous control; and learning. In Part II he analyzes the coding of content according to the aspects: semantic relations of structure; simultaneous amalgamation of content; graph-theoretical considerations; computing perspective in dialogue; and computing perspective in text. The book ends with a concluding chapter, a bibliography and an index. The book will be of value to researchers, graduate students and engineers in the areas of artificial intelligence and robotics, in particular those who deal with natural language processing.

This book reflects the latest research trends, methods, and experimental results in the field of electrical and information technologies for rail transportation, which covers abundant state-of-the-art research theories and ideas. As a vital field of research that is highly relevant to current developments in a number of technological domains, the subjects it covered include intelligent computing, information processing, communication technology, automatic control, etc. The objective of the proceedings is to provide a major interdisciplinary forum for researchers, engineers, academicians, and industrial professionals to present the most innovative research and development in the field of rail transportation electrical and information technologies. Engineers and researchers in academia, industry, and government will also explore an insightful view of the solutions that combine ideas from multiple disciplines in this field. The volumes serve as an excellent reference work for researchers and graduate students working on rail transportation and electrical and information technologies.