Are you afraid you might succumb to bird flu? Worried that a life of poverty awaits you in old age? Concerned that you might not be having as much sex as the French? Anxious that our planet is under threat from climate change or a collision with an asteroid? If any, or all, of these things worry you, you're not alone. Anxiety is a part of modern life. But why? We're living longer, safer, and healthier lives than at any time in human history. So what is there to worry about? In this witty and revealing book, Simon Briscoe and Hugh Aldersey-Williams strip away the hysteria that surrounds over forty of today's most common scare stories, from overpopulation and murder rates to fish shortages and obesity levels, and show the extraordinary extent to which statistics are manipulated or misrepresented by vested interests and the media, eager to exploit our fears. And most importantly they offer a toolkit for skepticism—ways of helping readers sort out what really is worth panicking about from the stuff that really isn't.

Stories of the British airmen shot down over Western Europe who evaded capture by the Germans and made their way to Allied territory during World War II. During the five years from May 1940 to May 1945 several thousand Allied airmen, forced to abandon their aircraft behind enemy lines, evaded capture and reached freedom, by land, sea and air. The territory held by the Germans was immense—from Norway and Denmark in the north, through Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg to the south of France—and initially there was no organization to help the men on the run. The first one to assist the evaders and escapers (“E & E” as the Americans called them) was the PAT line, along the Mediterranean coast to Perpignan and down the Spanish border; named after a naval officer Pat O’Leary, from 1942 it became the PAO line. Next was the Comet line, from Brussels to the Pyrenees. Thousands of brave people were to be involved for whom, if caught, the penalty was death. Theirs is a stirring and awe-inspiring story. Respected historian Oliver Clutton-Brock has researched in depth this secret world of evasion, uncovering some treachery and many hitherto unpublished details, operations and photos. It is a tremendous reference work, written in his own colorful style with numerous anecdotes, which fills a gap of knowledge formerly unavailable to historians, professional or amateur. Packed the information, key figure biographies and listings—2, 094 evaders identified—this is a valuable testimony to the courage of all those involved.

This book explores how discourses of the local, the particular, the everyday, and the situated are being transformed by new discourses of globalization and transnationalism, as used both by government and business and in critical academic discourse. Unlike other studies that have focused on the politics and economics of globalization, Articulating the Global and the Local highlights the importance of culture and provides models for a cultural studies that addresses globalization and the dialectic of local and global forces. Arguing for the inseparability of global and local analysis, the book demonstrates how global forces enter into local situations and how in turn global relations are articulated through local events, identities, and cultures; it includes studies of a wide range of cultural forms including sports, poetry, pedagogy, ecology, dance, cities, and democracy. Articulating the Global and the Local makes the ambitious claim that the category of the local transforms the debate about globalization by redefining what counts as global culture. Central to the essays are the new global and translocal cultures and identities created by the diasporic processes of colonialism and decolonization. The essays explore a variety of local, national, and transnational contexts with particular attention to race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality as categories that force us to rethink globalization itself.

The idea of global citizenship is that human beings are "citizens of the world." Whether or not we are global citizens is a topic of great dispute, however those who take part in the debate agree that a global citizen is a member of the wider community of humanity, the world, or a similar whole which is wider than that of a nation-state or other political community of which we are normally thought to be citizens. Through four main sections, the contributors to Global Citizenship discuss global challenges and attempt to define the ways in which globalization is changing the world in which we live. Offering a breadth of coverage to the core rheme of the individual in a global world, Global Citizenship combines two factors-the idea of global responsibility and the development of institutional structures through which this responsibility can be exercised.

Over the past several years, cooperative control and optimization have increasingly played a larger and more important role in many aspects of military sciences, biology, communications, robotics, and decision making. At the same time, cooperative systems are notoriously difficult to model, analyze, and solve OCo while intuitively understood, they are not axiomatically defined in any commonly accepted manner. The works in this volume provide outstanding insights into this very complex area of research. They are the result of invited papers and selected presentations at the Fourth Annual Conference on Cooperative Control and Optimization held in Destin, Florida, November 2003. This book has been selected for coverage in: . OCo Index to Scientific & Technical Proceedings- (ISTP- / ISI Proceedings). OCo Index to Scientific & Technical Proceedings (ISTP CDROM version / ISI Proceedings). OCo CC Proceedings OCo Engineering & Physical Sciences. Contents: Mesh Stability in Formation of Distributed Systems (C Ashokkumar et al.); On the Performance of Heuristics for Broadcast Scheduling (C Commander et al.); Coupled Detection Rates: An Introduction (D Jeffcoat); Decentralized Receding Horizon Control for Multiple UAVs (Y Kuwata & J How); Multitarget Sensor Management of Dispersed Mobile Sensors (R Mahler); K-Means Clustering Using Entropy Minimization (A Okafor & P Pardalos); Possibility Reasoning and the Cooperative Prisoner''s Dilemma (H Pfister & J Walls); Coordinating Very Large Groups of Wide Area Search Munitions (P Scerri et al.); A Vehicle Following Methodology for UAV Formations (S Spry et al.); Decentralized Optimization via Nash Bargaining (S Waslander et al.); and other papers. Readership: Graduate students and researchers in optimization and control, computer science and engineering."

This volume analyses contemporary capitalism and its crises based on a theory of capitalist evolution known as the social structure of accumulation (SSA) theory. It applies this theory to explain the severe financial and economic crisis that broke out in 2008 and the kind of changes required to resolve it. The editors and contributors make available new work within this school of thought on such issues as the rise and persistence of the "neoliberal," or "free-market," form of capitalism since 1980 and the growing globalization and financialization of the world economy. The collection includes analyses of the U.S. economy as well as that of several parts of the developing world.

Because of the clearly important role cooperative systems play in areas such as military sciences, biology, communications, robotics, and economics, just to name a few, the study of cooperative systems has intensified. This book provides an insight in the basic understanding of cooperative systems as well as in theory, modeling, and applications of cooperative control, optimization and related problems.

Artificial Intelligence continues to be one of the most exciting and fast-developing fields of computer science. This book presents the 177 long papers and 123 short papers accepted for ECAI 2016, the latest edition of the biennial European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Europe’s premier venue for presenting scientific results in AI. The conference was held in The Hague, the Netherlands, from August 29 to September 2, 2016. ECAI 2016 also incorporated the conference on Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems (PAIS) 2016, and the Starting AI Researcher Symposium (STAIRS). The papers from PAIS are included in this volume; the papers from STAIRS are published in a separate volume in the Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications (FAIA) series. Organized by the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI) and the Benelux Association for Artificial Intelligence (BNVKI), the ECAI conference provides an opportunity for researchers to present and hear about the very best research in contemporary AI. This proceedings will be of interest to all those seeking an overview of the very latest innovations and developments in this field.

In the late 1970s, the alternative comedy scene exploded into life in Britain and completely changed the style, subject matter and politics of British stand-up. Contemporary critics talked about it as 'anti-matter comedy' that 'makes you laugh while actually rearranging large chunks of your brain'. This book draws on a wealth of archive material – including unpublished recordings of early performances – and new interviews with key figures such as Alexei Sayle, Andy de la Tour and Jim Barclay, to provide a detailed history of the early scene and an examination of the distinctive modes of performance style which developed. Beginning with its origins, the volume traces the influence of American stand-up, and in particular the significance of Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce as the originators of a style of stand-up that influenced the British pioneers of alternative comedy. It shows how the opening of the Comedy Store in 1979 provided a catalyst for a new movement, which grew outward from there with the foundation of the group Alternative Cabaret and the opening of the Comic Strip. But it also looks at smaller venues and less celebrated acts that have not been as well remembered, including ranting poets and street performers. Finally, it looks at alternative comedy's legacy, showing how it was the starting point for the UK's thriving and varied live scene, which encompasses anything from small pub gigs to huge arena tours.

The cooperation and contamination among mathematicians, statisticians and econometricians working in actuarial sciences and finance are improving the research on these topics and producing numerous meaningful scientific results. This volume presents new ideas in the form of four- to six-page papers presented at the International Conference MAF2022 – Mathematical and Statistical Methods for Actuarial Sciences and Finance. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the conference, to which this book is related, was organized in a hybrid form by the Department of Economics and Statistics of the University of Salerno, with the partnership of the Department of Economics of Cà Foscari University of Venice, and was held from 20 to 22 April 2022 in Salerno (Italy) MAF2022 is the tenth edition of an international biennial series of scientific meetings, started in 2004 on the initiative of the Department of Economics and Statistics of the University of Salerno. It has established itself internationally with gradual and continuous growth and scientific enrichment. The effectiveness of this idea has been proven by the wide participation in all the editions, which have been held in Salerno (2004, 2006, 2010, 2014, 2022), Venice (2008, 2012 and 2020 online), Paris (2016) and Madrid (2018). This book covers a wide variety of subjects: artificial intelligence and machine learning in finance and insurance, behavioural finance, credit risk methods and models, dynamic optimization in finance, financial data analytics, forecasting dynamics of actuarial and financial phenomena, foreign exchange markets, insurance models, interest rate models, longevity risk, models and methods for financial time series analysis, multivariate techniques for financial markets analysis, pension systems, portfolio selection and management, real-world finance, risk analysis and management, trading systems, and others. This volume is a valuable resource for academics, PhD students, practitioners, professionals and researchers. Moreover, it is also of interest to other readers with quantitative background knowledge.