[Warning: Explicit Sex.] Now available in ebook for the first time, 18 short stories of crackling erotic futures by the master of erotic voice, M. Christian. Men, women, hackers, derelicts, enforcers, hustlers, and whores in every combination inhabit the streets and beds and back alleys of Christian's imagination. This is erotic science fiction at its best.

This book presents a new and exciting theory of the modern French novel by developing the notion of the narrative as a "textual machine". Many turn-of-the-century French novels thematically identified their means of narration through the various machines that they depicted. The narrative devices that were particularly important in this self-reflection included: the temporal order of the plot, the question of a narrative's beginning and end, the hierarchy of narrative voices, and the techniques of the point of view. The question of mechanization became central on all these fronts. Has the novel become automated or machine-like? At the same time, the machine metaphors in the novels of Alfred Jarry, Emile Zola, Jules Verne, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Raymond Roussel combined the question of the narrative form with new ways to think about man's relationship with technology and the cultural environment. The early modernist texts drew upon contradictory notions of technological promise and threat while they also depicted new forms of identity and behavior, related to or modeled after machines. These texts highlighted cultural assumptions concerning technological innovations and critiqued, mainly through parody and through various figures of man-machine fusion, the positivistic belief in progress. Such writers looked for evidence of advanced forms of consciousness arising out of encounters with new technology such as: telephones, trains, bicycles, telegraphy, phonographs and electricity. This volume will be of interest to anyone working in the field of modern French literary and cultural history. It will especially appeal to anyone intrigued with the origins of the modernist novel, the history of narrative forms, and the question of how the experience of new technology may be portrayed in literary texts.

The Future of an Illusion was first published in 1989. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The Future of an Illusion documents the pivotal role Constance Penley has played in the development of feminist film theory. Penley analyzes the primary movements that have shaped the field: the conjunction of feminism, film theory, and psychoanalysis, and the inherent debates surrounding the politics of women and representation. These debates center on the position of women in the classical Hollywood narrative, the construction of the spectator's desire in pornography and eroticism, and the implicitly male bias in psychoanalytically oriented film theory. Essential to anyone studying the sexual policies of representation, The Future of an Illusion ranges from avant-garde films to video, popular cinema, television, literature, and critical and cultural theory. Constance Penley is associate professor of English and film studies at the University of Rochester. A co-editor of the journal Camera Obscura,she is the editor of Feminism and Film Theory.

How people judge humans and machines differently, in scenarios involving natural disasters, labor displacement, policing, privacy, algorithmic bias, and more. How would you feel about losing your job to a machine? How about a tsunami alert system that fails? Would you react differently to acts of discrimination depending on whether they were carried out by a machine or by a human? What about public surveillance? How Humans Judge Machines compares people's reactions to actions performed by humans and machines. Using data collected in dozens of experiments, this book reveals the biases that permeate human-machine interactions. Are there conditions in which we judge machines unfairly? Is our judgment of machines affected by the moral dimensions of a scenario? Is our judgment of machine correlated with demographic factors such as education or gender? César Hidalgo and colleagues use hard science to take on these pressing technological questions. Using randomized experiments, they create revealing counterfactuals and build statistical models to explain how people judge artificial intelligence and whether they do it fairly. Through original research, How Humans Judge Machines bring us one step closer tounderstanding the ethical consequences of AI.

Third-grader Aven Green has been solving mysteries for a really long time—a whole month! She’s solved many important cases like The Mystery of the Cranky Mom, The Mystery of the Missing Ice Cream, and The Mystery of the Smelly Feet. Her record is nearly 100% (only The Mystery of the Cereal in My Underpants remains unsolved to this day). Aven asks all the right questions, wields her detective kit carefully, and follows up on every clue. Then her teacher’s lunch bag (with her lunch still in it) is taken and Aven’s great-grandma’s beloved dog goes missing! Can this perceptive detective crack two cases at the same time? Luckily, Aven has a super-powered brain full of lots of extra brain cells to take on both cases. See, she was born without arms, so all of the cells that were supposed to make her arms went into making her brain instead. At least that’s her working theory for The Mystery of Why I Have So Many Extra Brain Cells.

A short story from the Classic Shorts collection: The Happy Failure by Herman Melville

Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques, Third Edition, offers a thorough grounding in machine learning concepts as well as practical advice on applying machine learning tools and techniques in real-world data mining situations. This highly anticipated third edition of the most acclaimed work on data mining and machine learning will teach you everything you need to know about preparing inputs, interpreting outputs, evaluating results, and the algorithmic methods at the heart of successful data mining. Thorough updates reflect the technical changes and modernizations that have taken place in the field since the last edition, including new material on Data Transformations, Ensemble Learning, Massive Data Sets, Multi-instance Learning, plus a new version of the popular Weka machine learning software developed by the authors. Witten, Frank, and Hall include both tried-and-true techniques of today as well as methods at the leading edge of contemporary research. The book is targeted at information systems practitioners, programmers, consultants, developers, information technology managers, specification writers, data analysts, data modelers, database R&D professionals, data warehouse engineers, data mining professionals. The book will also be useful for professors and students of upper-level undergraduate and graduate-level data mining and machine learning courses who want to incorporate data mining as part of their data management knowledge base and expertise. - Provides a thorough grounding in machine learning concepts as well as practical advice on applying the tools and techniques to your data mining projects - Offers concrete tips and techniques for performance improvement that work by transforming the input or output in machine learning methods - Includes downloadable Weka software toolkit, a collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining tasks—in an updated, interactive interface. Algorithms in toolkit cover: data pre-processing, classification, regression, clustering, association rules, visualization

"Linda Henderson's work stands out as a truly original contribution. . . . She has enlarged and illuminated our understanding of the most intelligent, elusive, and influential artist of the twentieth century."--Calvin Tomkins, author of "Duchamp: A Biography" "Henderson's book is the most thorough and dedicated analysis ever written about Duchamp's work. It represents the single most complete study of the "Large Glass" and its scientific sources-one that is unlikely to be surpassed."--Francis Naumann, author of "Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" "In tracing the emergence of Duchamp's artworks from their actual cultural/scientific context, Henderson has produced what is quite simply an indispensable book."--Marjorie Perloff, author of "Wittgenstein's Ladder and Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy" "Among the readers of Linda Henderson's brilliant book, historians of science will be especially rewarded by her thorough research into an area hitherto insufficiently explored-how artists and other laypersons during Duchamp's time came to learn of, and draw upon, the stream of exciting results of early twentieth century science."--Gerald Holton, Harvard University