A beautiful L.A. woman goes undercover as a "fidelity inspector" to find out who's faithful and who's not in this dazzling commercial debut. Working under the code name Ashlyn, Jennifer Hunter is hired by suspicious wives and girlfriends to conduct her infamous "fidelity inspection" on the men in their lives. Between bachelor parties and business trips, "Ashlyn" has successfully exposed hundreds of unfaithful men. Of course, she never actually sleeps with any of them; she tests for an intention to cheat only. But Jen's double life starts to take its toll and her friends suspect that the reason she hasn't had a date in two years is more complicated than the demands of her supposed "investment banking" career. And when a suspicious email surfaces with her picture on it warning men of her real motives, Jen fears that her secret identity is in danger of being uncovered. Plus, her best friend Sophie now plans to hire "Ashlyn" for an inspection of her own! Just when it seems like nothing is going her way, Jen meets sexy, sophisticated Jamie Richards. She knows there's no room for romance in her life, but she finds herself more and more drawn to him. It doesn't take long to realize it's time to retire Ashlyn for the sake of true love but not before taking on one last assignment--a job which will change everything.

The Premise of Fidelity puts forward a new history of Japanese visuality through an examination of the discourses and practices surrounding the nineteenth century transposition of "the real" in the decades before photography was introduced. This intellectual history is informed by a careful examination of a network of local scholars—from physicians to farmers to bureaucrats—known as Shōhyaku-sha. In their archival materials, these scholars used the term shashin (which would, years later, come to signify "photography" in Japanese) in a wide variety of medical, botanical, and pictorial practices. These scholars pursued questions of the relationship between what they observed and what they believed they knew, in the process investigating scientific ideas and practices by obsessively naming and classifying, and then rendering through highly accurate illustration, the objects of their study. This book is an exploration of the process by which the Shōhyaku-sha shaped the concept of shashin. As such, it disrupts the dominant narratives of photography, art, and science in Japan, providing a prehistory of Japanese photography that requires the accepted history of the discipline to be rewritten.

Reissued as part of Counterpoint's celebration of beloved American author Wendell Berry, the five stories in Fidelity return readers to Berry's fictional town of Port William, Kentucky, and the familiar characters who form a tight–knit community within. "Berry richly evokes Port William's farmlands and hamlets, and his characters are fiercely individual, yet mutually protective in everything they do. . . . His sentences are exquisitely constructed, suggesting the cyclic rhythms of his agrarian world." —The New York Times Book Review "Each of these elegant stories spans the twentieth century and reveals the profound interconnectedness of the farmers and their families to one another, to their past and to the landscape they inhabit." —The San Francisco Chronicle "Visionary . . . rooted in a deep concern for nature and the land, . . . [these stories are] tough, relentless and clear. In a roundabout way they are confrontational because they ask basic questions about men and women, violence, work and loyalty." —Hans Ostrom, The Morning News Tribune

Fifty percent of Hollywood productions each year are adaptations--films that use an already published book, dramatic work, or comic as their source material. If the original is well known, then for most spectators the question of whether these adaptations are "true to the spirit" of the original is central. The recent wave of adaptation studies dismisses the question of fidelity as irrelevant, mistaken, or an affront to the unstable nature of meaning itself. The essays gathered here, mixing the field's top authorities (Andrew, Gunning, Jameson, Mulvey, and Naremore) with fresh new voices, take the question of correspondence between source and adaptation as seriously as do producers and audiences. Spanning examples from Shakespeare to Ghost World, and addressing such notable directors as Welles, Kubrick, Hawks, Tarkovsky, and Ophuls, the contributors write against the grain of recent adaption studies by investigating the question of what fidelity might mean in its broadest and truest sense, what it might reveal of the adaptive process, and why it is still one of the richest veins of investigation in the study of cinema.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Self-Organizing Maps, WSOM 2011, held in Espoo, Finland, in June 2011. The 36 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on plenaries; financial and societal applications; theory and methodology; applications of data mining and analysis; language processing and document analysis; and visualization and image processing.