This book is a collection of essays on neglected aspects of the Great War. It begins by asking what exactly was so "Great" about it, before turning to individual studies of various aspects of the war. These fall broadly into two categories. Firstly personal, micro-narratives that deal directly with the experience of war, often derived from contemporary interest in diaries and oral histories. Presenting both a close-up view of the viscerality, and the tedium and powerlessness of personal situations, these same narratives also address the effects of the war on hitherto under-regarded groups such as children and animals. Secondly, the authors look at the impact of the course of the war on theatres, often left out in reflections on the main European combatants and therefore not part of the regular iconography of the trenches in places such as Denmark, Canada, India, the Levant, Greece and East Africa.

Comparing Grief in French, British and Canadian Great War Fiction (1977-2014) offers a comparative analysis of twenty-three First World War novels. Engaging with such themes as war trauma, facial disfigurement, women’s war identities, communal bonds, as well as the concepts of mourning and post-memory, Anna Branach-Kallas and Piotr Sadkowski identify the dominant trends in recent French, British and Canadian fiction about the Great War. Referring to historical, sociological, philosophical and literary sources, they show how, by both consolidating and contesting national myths, fiction continues to construct the 1914-1918 conflict as a cultural trauma, illuminating at the same time some of our most recent ethical concerns.

M.P.T. Acharya (1887–1954) was a contemporary of Mohandas Gandhi during the Indian Independence Movement. Despite political differences with Gandhi, Acharya saw a tremendous anarchistic potential in the practice of non-violent direct action. We Are Anarchists: Essays on Anarchism, Pacifism, and the Indian Independence Movement is the first collection of essays by M. P. T. Acharya. A transnational and revolutionary figure, Acharya engaged in anticolonial activism across India, Europe, the United States, and Russia. He was also a prolific writer, whose essays are testimony to a tireless agitator and intellectual. Comprising fifty essays, the collection opens a window onto the global reach of anarchism in the interwar period and beyond, and enables a more nuanced understanding of Indian anticolonial struggles against oppressive state power, be it imperialist, Bolshevik, or capitalist. Ole Birk Laursen’s biographical introduction and notes in this collection set the essays in their historical and political context, and guide readers into Acharya’s life and thoughts.

This book presents a multi-layered analysis of the situation in Central Europe after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The new geopolitics emerging from the Versailles order, and at the same time ongoing fights for borders, considerable war damage, social and economic problems and replacement of administrative staff as well as leaders, all contributed to the fact that unlike Western Europe, Central Europe faced challenges and dilemmas on an unprecedented scale. The editors of this book have invited authors from over a dozen academic institutions to answer the question of to what extent the solutions applied in the Habsburg Monarchy were still practiced in the newly created nation states, and to what extent these new political organisms went their own ways. It offers a closer look at Central Europe with its multiple problems typical of that region after 1918 (organizing the post-imperial space, a new political discourse and attempts to create new national memories, the role of national minorities, solving social problems, and verbal and physical violence expressed in public space). Particular chapters concern post-1918 Central Europe on the local, state and international levels, providing a comprehensive view of this sub-region between 1918 and 1923.

How did the First World War, the so-called 'Great War' - widely seen on all sides as 'the war to end all wars' - impact the development of German philosophy? Combining history and biography with astute philosophical and textual analysis, Nicolas de Warren addresses here the intellectual trajectories of ten significant wartime philosophers: Ernst Bloch, Martin Buber, Ernst Cassirer, Hermann Cohen, György Lukács, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Franz Rosenzweig, Max Scheler and Georg Simmel. In exploring their individual works written during and after the War, the author reveals how philosophical concepts and new forms of thinking were forged in response to this unprecedented catastrophe. In reassessing standardized narratives of German thought, the book deepens and enhances our understanding of the intimate and complex relationship between philosophy and violence by demonstrating how the 1914-18 conflict was a crucible for ways of thinking that still define us today.

Highlighting the central importance of theological configurations of immortality and eternal life from 1914-1945, Mårten Björk explores the key writings of Franz Rosenzweig, Karl Barth and Oskar Goldberg to situate their ideas in relation to the political turmoil of the period, including the rise of social Darwinism, nationalism and fascism. The conversations happening among Christian and Jewish theologians and philosophers on the nature of immortality and eternal life during the period constitute what Björk calls a 'politics of immortality'. The speculative question of eternal life became a way to address the meaning of 'a good life' in a period when millions of lives were lost to war, camps and prisons. This book shows how theology was related to central political concepts and ideas of the era, revealing how the question of immortality pursued by Rosenzweig, Barth and Goldberg became a way to resist the reduction of life to race, blood and soil. By situating the exact political consequences of theological and metaphysical theories of immortality and eternal life, Björk's discussion of Rosenzweig, Barth and Goldberg confronts the perennial question on the relation between life and death and exposes the important connections between political theology and philosophical posthumanism.

The Great War of 1914–1918 marks a turning point in modern history and culture. This Companion offers critical overviews of the major literary genres and social contexts that define the study of the literatures produced by the First World War. The volume comprises original essays by distinguished scholars of international reputation, who examine the impact of the war on various national literatures, principally Great Britain, Germany, France and the United States, before addressing the way the war affected Modernism, the European avant-garde, film, women's writing, memoirs, and of course the war poets. It concludes by addressing the legacy of the war for twentieth-century literature. The Companion offers readers a chronology of key events and publication dates covering the years leading up to and including the war, and ends with a current bibliography of further reading organised by chapter topics.

Provides historical coverage of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Includes information abstracted from over 2,000 journals published worldwide.

The goal of this book is to gather in a single work the most relevant concepts related in optimization methods, showing how such theories and methods can be addressed using the open source, multi-platform R tool. Modern optimization methods, also known as metaheuristics, are particularly useful for solving complex problems for which no specialized optimization algorithm has been developed. These methods often yield high quality solutions with a more reasonable use of computational resources (e.g. memory and processing effort). Examples of popular modern methods discussed in this book are: simulated annealing; tabu search; genetic algorithms; differential evolution; and particle swarm optimization. This book is suitable for undergraduate and graduate students in computer science, information technology, and related areas, as well as data analysts interested in exploring modern optimization methods using R. This new edition integrates the latest R packages through text and code examples. It also discusses new topics, such as: the impact of artificial intelligence and business analytics in modern optimization tasks; the creation of interactive Web applications; usage of parallel computing; and more modern optimization algorithms (e.g., iterated racing, ant colony optimization, grammatical evolution).

Developments and Applications for ECG Signal Processing: Modeling, Segmentation, and Pattern Recognition covers reliable techniques for ECG signal processing and their potential to significantly increase the applicability of ECG use in diagnosis. This book details a wide range of challenges in the processes of acquisition, preprocessing, segmentation, mathematical modelling and pattern recognition in ECG signals, presenting practical and robust solutions based on digital signal processing techniques. Users will find this to be a comprehensive resource that contributes to research on the automatic analysis of ECG signals and extends resources relating to rapid and accurate diagnoses, particularly for long-term signals. Chapters cover classical and modern features surrounding f ECG signals, ECG signal acquisition systems, techniques for noise suppression for ECG signal processing, a delineation of the QRS complex, mathematical modelling of T- and P-waves, and the automatic classification of heartbeats. - Gives comprehensive coverage of ECG signal processing - Presents development and parametrization techniques for ECG signal acquisition systems - Analyzes and compares distortions caused by different digital filtering techniques for noise suppression applied over the ECG signal - Describes how to identify if a digitized ECG signal presents irreversible distortion through analysis of its frequency components prior to, and after, filtering - Considers how to enhance QRS complexes and differentiate these from artefacts, noise, and other characteristic waves under different scenarios