Artificial Intelligence is transforming every industry, but if you want to win with AI, you have to put it first on your priority list. AI-First companies are the only trillion-dollar companies, and soon they will dominate even more industries, more definitively than ever before. These companies succeed by design--they collect valuable data from day one and use it to train predictive models that automate core functions. As a result, they learn faster and outpace the competition in the process. Thankfully, you don't need a Ph.D. to learn how to win with AI. In The AI-First Company, internationally-renowned startup investor Ash Fontana offers an executable guide for applying AI to business problems. It's a playbook made for real companies, with real budgets, that need strategies and tactics to effectively implement AI. Whether you're a new online retailer or a Fortune 500 company, Fontana will teach you how to: • Identify the most valuable data; • Build the teams that build AI; • Integrate AI with existing processes and keep it in check; • Measure and communicate its effectiveness; • Reinvest the profits from automation to compound competitive advantage. If the last fifty years were about getting AI to work in the lab, the next fifty years will be about getting AI to work for people, businesses, and society. It's not about building the right software -- it's about building the right AI. The AI-First Company is your guide to winning with artificial intelligence.

In 1961, a solo exhibition by Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana met with a scathing critical response from New York art critics. Fontana (1899--1968), well known in Europe for his series of slashed monochrome paintings, offered New York ten canvases slashed and punctured, thickly painted in luridly brilliant hues and embellished with chunks of colored glass. One critic described the work as "halfway between constructivism and costume jewelry," unwittingly putting his finger on the contradiction at the heart of these paintings and much of Fontana's work: the cut canvases suggest avant-garde iconoclasm, but the glittery ornamentation evokes outmoded forms of kitsch. In Lucio Fontana, Anthony White examines a selection of the artist's work from the 1930s to the 1960s, arguing that Fontana attacked the idealism of twentieth-century art by marrying modernist aesthetics to industrialized mass culture, and attacked modernism's purity in a way that anticipated both pop art and postmodernism. Fontana painted expressionist and abstract sculptures in the pinks and golds of mass-produced knick-knacks, saturated architectural installations with fluorescent paint and ultraviolet light, and encrusted candy-colored monochrome canvases with glitter. In doing so, White argues, he challenged Clement Greenberg's dictum that avant-garde and kitsch are diametrically opposed. Relating Fontana's art to the political and social context in which he worked, White shows how Fontana used the materials and techniques of mass culture to comment on the fate of the avant-garde under Italian fascism and the postwar "economic miracle." At a time when Fontana's work is commanding record prices, this new interpretation of the work assures that it has unprecedented critical relevance.

In Learn to Meditate Professor David Fontana shows you how to meditate, and puts his 35 years of experience into a series of exercises, visualisations and affirmations that will bring meditation into any lifestyle. Written with a refreshing clarity and simplicity this accessible guide draws upon all of world's meditation traditions to present an eclectic and thoroughly practical programme for inner peace. Fully illustrated and brimming with innovative exercises, visualisations and affirmations, this is a book that helps attune us both physically and mentally whatever our mood or need.

Catalogue for the major retrospective of this breakthrough Italian artist.

This volume investigates emblematic and art-historical issues in Lavinia Fontana’s mythological paintings. Fontana is the first female painter of the sixteenth century in Italy to depict female nudes, as well as mythological and emblematic paintings associated with concepts of beauty and wisdom. Her paintings reveal an appropriation of the antique, a fusion between patronage and culture, and a humanistic pursuit of Mannerist conceits. Fontana’s secular imagery provides a challenging paragone with the male tradition of history painting during the sixteenth century and paves the way for new subjects to be depicted and interpreted by female painters of the seventeenth century.

This book is an up-to-date checklist of the current valid taxonomyfor all vascular plants, bryophytes, and lichens in British Columbia,including synonyms, species codes, and other information. A convenient,geographically restricted, comprehensive checklist like this one willaid greatly in avoiding the present confusion concerning the names ofmany species in the ecological and systematic literature, as well as inapplied fields. The book is organized into three sections. Part 1 organizes speciesalphabetically according to taxonomic order by families of vascularplants, bryophytes, and lichens. Within each family, the genera arelisted alphabetically, along with any synonomies (former names) andcommon names. In Part 2 species are organized alphabetically accordingto their scientific names. Part 3 lists common names followed by theirscientific names. Excluded names (names inappropriately applied toplants in B.C.) are given in an appendix. Those familiar with planttaxonomy will find Part 1 particularly helpful when checkingnomenclature; semi-professionals familiar with scientific names willuse Part 2 and then Part 1; those who know only common names will checkPart 3 and then Part 2 and Part 1 to determine families. There is presently considerable confusion about many species namesin B.C. Plant names change for many reasons and new plants invade.Information about plants in B.C. is scattered in several checklists,most of them incomplete or out of date; for some species, such asliverworts, no provincial checklist even exists. This checklisttherefore will be useful to all professionals working with vegetationand for students in agriculture, botany, ecology, forestry and othersciences. Although the focus is on B.C., the book will also be usefuloutside the province, particularly in the northwest American states andin Alberta and the Yukon.