Empire of the Seas

Empire of the Seas

The year 1588 marked a turning point in our national story. Victory over the Spanish Armada transformed us into a seafaring nation and it sparked a myth that one day would become a reality that the nation’s new destiny, the source of her future wealth and power lay out on the oceans. This book tells the story of how the navy expanded from a tiny force to become the most complex industrial enterprise on earth; how the need to organise it laid the foundations of our civil service and our economy; and how it transformed our culture, our sense of national identity and our democracy.

Empire of the Seas

Cross Disciplinary Biometric Systems

Cross Disciplinary Biometric Systems

Cross disciplinary biometric systems help boost the performance of the conventional systems. Not only is the recognition accuracy significantly improved, but also the robustness of the systems is greatly enhanced in the challenging environments, such as varying illumination conditions. By leveraging the cross disciplinary technologies, face recognition systems, fingerprint recognition systems, iris recognition systems, as well as image search systems all benefit in terms of recognition performance. Take face recognition for an example, which is not only the most natural way human beings recognize the identity of each other, but also the least privacy-intrusive means because people show their face publicly every day. Face recognition systems display superb performance when they capitalize on the innovative ideas across color science, mathematics, and computer science (e.g., pattern recognition, machine learning, and image processing). The novel ideas lead to the development of new color models and effective color features in color science; innovative features from wavelets and statistics, and new kernel methods and novel kernel models in mathematics; new discriminant analysis frameworks, novel similarity measures, and new image analysis methods, such as fusing multiple image features from frequency domain, spatial domain, and color domain in computer science; as well as system design, new strategies for system integration, and different fusion strategies, such as the feature level fusion, decision level fusion, and new fusion strategies with novel similarity measures.

Cross Disciplinary Biometric Systems

The Catalyzing Mind

The Catalyzing Mind

How do we understand and explain phenomena in psychology? What does the concept of causality mean when we discuss higher psychological functions and behavior? Is it possible to generate laws in a psychological and behavioral sciencelaws that go beyond statistical regularities, frequencies, and probabilities? An international group of authors compare and contrast the use of a causal model in psychology with a newer modelthe catalytic model. The Catalyzing Mind: Beyond Models of Causality proposes an approach to the qualitative nature of psychological phenomena that focuses on the psychological significance and meaning of conditions, contexts, and situations as well as their sign-mediating processes. Contributors develop, apply, and criticize the notion of a catalyzing mind in hopes of achieving conceptual clarity and rigor. Disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, semiotics and biosemiotics are used for an interdisciplinary approach to the book. Research topics such as history and national identity, immigration, and transitions to adulthood are all brought into a dialogue with the concept of the catalyzing mind. With a variety of disciplines, theoretical concepts, and research topics this book is a collective effort at an approach to move beyond models of causality for explaining and understanding psychological phenomena.

The Catalyzing Mind

Identity Theft

Identity Theft

Identity theft is a horrifying and traumatic experience. It’s easy to imagine the frustration at being wrongly denied a credit card or loan. Worse are the sleepless nights after threatening phone calls from creditors anxious to retrieve cash loaned in your name. It can also be much more serious.

Identity Theft

Refusing to be a Man

Refusing to be a Man

Since its original publication in 1989, Refusing to be a Man has been acclaimed as a classic and widely cited in gender studies literature. In 13 eloquent essays, Stoltenberg articulates the first fully argued liberation theory for men that will also liberate women. He argues that male sexual identity is entirely a political and ethical construction whose advantages grow out of injustice. His thesis is, however, ultimately one of hope – that precisely because masculinity is so constructed, it is possible to refuse it, to act against it and to change. A new introduction by the author discusses the roots of his work in the American civil rights and radical feminist movements and distinguishes it from the anti-feminist philosophies underlying the recent tide of reactionary mens movements.

Refusing to be a Man

Enterprise Identity Management

Enterprise Identity Management

The introduction of Enterprise Identity Management Systems (EIdMS) in organizations even beyond the purely technological level is a costly and challenging endeavor. However, for decision makers it seems difficult to fully understand the impacts and opportunities arising from the introduction of EIdMS. This book explores the relevant aspects for an ex-ante evaluation of EIdMS. Therefore it examines this domain by employing a qualitative expert interview study to better understand the nature of EIdMS, as they are situated between security and productive IT systems. To this regard, the focus is put on the general nature of EIdMS projects and the constructs being relevant for analyzing such projects in the decision support phase. Based on the derived constructs and thematic topics from the interviews, an explanatory model for EIdMS introductions is derived and iteratively improved and evaluated. Finally, a possible application use-case for the creation of adequate decision support tools is presented.

Enterprise Identity Management

A Question of Identity

A Question of Identity

How do you catch a killer who doesn’t seem to exist?

A Question of Identity

We Have No King But Christ

We Have No King But Christ

Drawing on little-used sources in Syriac, once the lingua franca of the Middle East, Philip Wood examines how, at the close of the Roman Empire, Christianity carried with it new foundation myths for the peoples of the Near East that transformed their self-identity and their relationships with their rulers. This cultural independence was followed by a more radical political philosophy that dared to criticize the emperor and laid the seeds for the blending of religious and ethnic identity that we see in the Middle East today.

We Have No King But Christ

Language Across Boundaries

Language Across Boundaries

A selection of papers from the millennium conference of the British Association of Applied Linguistics. The boundaries of the title have been widely interpreted, ranging from work on the linguistic repercussions of individual and group identity boundaries, to work dealing with ways of crossing national and cultural boundaries through language learning.

Language Across Boundaries

Language Culture and Identity

Language Culture and Identity

How language shapes and is shaped by identity is a key topic within sociolinguistics. An individual’s identity is constituted through a variety of different factors, including the social, linguistic, cultural and ethnic contexts.

Language Culture and Identity

Bilingual Youth

Bilingual Youth

The present volume represents a variety of portraits of what happens when families attempt to raise children in Spanish while living in English-speaking societies. Aided by the foregrounding chapter by Suzanne Romaine about language and identity and the afterword by Carol Klee that ties together many issues brought up throughout the collection, the reader gains a more complete understanding of the variables that contribute to Spanish bilingualism in English-speaking societies, and by extension a more complete understanding of the dynamic nature of bilingualism in general. This volume, the first of its kind, brings together an impressive array of sociolinguistic environments while keeping the two languages constant. We hope that it marks the beginning of comparative analyses of bilingualism, acquisition outcomes, and identity construction across environments that share the same languages, but where important disparities exist in the sociolinguistic landscapes.

Bilingual Youth

Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity, 1745-1820

Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity, 1745-1820

What did it mean to be British, and more specifically to feel British, in the century following the parliamentary union of Scotland and England? Juliet Shields departs from recent accounts of the Romantic emergence of nationalism by recovering the terms in which eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers understood nationhood. She argues that in the wake of the turmoil surrounding the Union, Scottish writers appealed to sentiment, or refined feeling, to imagine the nation as a community. They sought to transform a Great Britain united by political and economic interests into one united by shared sympathies, even while they used the gendered and racial connotations of sentiment to differentiate sharply between Scottish, English, and British identities. By moving Scotland from the margins to the center of literary history, the book explores how sentiment shaped both the development of British identity and the literature within which writers responded creatively to the idea of nationhood.

Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity, 1745-1820

New Homelands

New Homelands

When the colonial slave trade, and then slavery itself, were abolished early in the 19th century, the British empire brazenly set up a new system of trade using Indian rather than African laborers. The new system of ‘indentured’ labor was supposed to be different from slavery because the indenture, or contract, was written for an initial period of five years and involved fixed wages and some specified conditions of work. From the workers’ point of view, the one redeeming feature of the system was that most of their workmates spoke their language and came from the same area of India. Because this allowed them to develop some sense of community, by the end of the initial five years most of the Indian laborers chose to stay in the land to which they had been taken. In time that land became the place in which they joined with others to build a new homeland. In this fieldwork-based study, Paul Younger looks at the present day descendents of these workers and their post-indenture societies in Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad, South Africa, Fiji, and East Africa. He finds that they still cling to the fact that it was an arbitrary British decision that took them there and made the society pluralistic. This plurality seems to require them to search their memory for a distinctive religious tradition that they can pass on to their children. They know that there was a loss of culture involved in their move to these locations and consider it important to recover from that loss. But they are also intensely proud of their new identity, and insist that they have established a new religious tradition in their new homeland. For generations, says Younger, these people had struggled in their situation and now they had come up with a sense of community and purpose and were prepared to make the historical claim that they had developed an appropriate religious tradition for their specific community.

New Homelands

Altar of Bones

Altar of Bones

A deathbed confession ignites a globe-spanning race for answers in this page-turning thriller described as The Da Vinci Code meets The Bourne Identity.

Altar of Bones

The De-Mathematisation of Logic

The De-Mathematisation of Logic

This book collects together several articles by the author, to which a certain recent RATIO paper of his relates, with that paper as an introduction to the whole. It displays a major failure in the disposition of the logicians who have followed on from Frege, principally through their attachment to mathematics, and their subsequent neglect of natural language, and its basic grammar. Thus these logicians as a whole have confused, in substantial ways, categories like use with mention, identity with equivalence, predicates with functions, predicates with their nominalisations, sentences with nominals, sentences with propositions, propositions with functions, propositions with sets, properties with states of affairs, direct speech with indirect speech, reference with description, objects with facts, pronouns with nouns, mereological sums with (mathematical) sets, numbers with sets, count terms with mass terms, amounts with numbers, and also units of measure with objects, amongst other things. The book consists in fourteen chapters, with eleven of them being as they have been, or will be, when published in central journals, and other collections. Two further chapters extend the work in another two published papers, while one chapter is quite new. The chapter titles are: ‘Logic and Grammar’, ‘Completing Russell’s Logic’, ‘Logic and Arithmetic’, ‘Natural Language Sets’, ‘Namely Riders: an Update’, ‘Concept and Object in Frege’, ‘Frege’s Hidden Assumption’, ‘A Poor Concept Script’, ‘Motivation by De Se Beliefs’, ‘Out of the Liar Tangle’, ‘Ramseying Liars’, ‘Proving that 2+3=5′, ‘Harmonising Natural Deduction’, and ‘Dialetheias are Mental Confusions’.

The De-Mathematisation of Logic

Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture

Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture

This book introduces readers to the practice of Vodou and helps deconstruct and destroy stereotypes which have survived for hundreds of years. The authors in the collection–from Karen McCarthy Brown to Gerdes Fleurant to Leslie Desmangles–are leading scholars in the rapidly growing field of Vodou Studies. Tackling a wide range of Vodou practices and images, the essays within work to introduce readers to the history and practice of this religion, and to correct the fiction of Vodou which has been circulating as fact. The book focuses specifically on the role Vodou plays in Haiti, the country in which it has its strongest following, examining the influence it has on spiritual beliefs, cultural practices, national identity, popular culture, writing and art. By looking in detail at the beliefs and practices in one country, the reader will begin to understand this unique religion and the multiple domains in which it operates.

Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture

Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender

Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender

Addresses issues of sex and gender at the personal and the social level; examines issues of identity, status, class, ethnicity, race, and nation; of sexuality and the body; of social institutions and the structures of representation. Topics include changing conceptions of ‘the feminine,’ the family and masculinity, religion, morality, cultural images, medical practice, public health, economy and society and many more.

Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender

Mendelssohn, Goethe and the Walpurgis Night

Mendelssohn, Goethe and the Walpurgis Night

Mendelssohn, Goethe, and the Walpurgis Night addresses tolerance and acceptance in the face of cultural, political, and religious strife. Its point of departure is the Walpurgis Night. The Night, also known as Beltane or May Eve, was supposedly an annual witches’ Sabbath that centered around the Brocken, the highest peak of the Harz Mountains. After exploring how a notoriously pagan celebration came to be named after the Christian missionary St. Walpurgis (ca. 710-79), John Michael Cooper discusses the Night’s treatments in several closely interwoven works by Goethe and Mendelssohn. His book situates those works in their immediate personal and professional contexts, as well as among treatments by a wide array of other artists, philosophers, and political thinkers, including Voltaire, Lessing, Shelley, Heine, Delacroix, and Berlioz. In an age of decisive political and religious conflict, Walpurgis Night became a heathen muse: a source of spiritual inspiration that was neither specifically Christian, nor Jewish, nor Muslim. And Mendelssohn’s and Goethe’s engagements with it offer new insights into its role in European cultural history, as well as into issues of political, religious, and social identity — and the relations between cultural groups — in today’s world. John Michael Cooper is Professor of Music at Southwestern University and author of Mendelssohn’s ‘Italian’ Symphony (Oxford University Press).

Mendelssohn, Goethe and the Walpurgis Night

New Perspectives on Type Identity

New Perspectives on Type Identity

The type identity theory, according to which types of mental state are identical to types of physical state, fell out of favour for some years but is now being considered with renewed interest. Many philosophers are critically re-examining the arguments which were marshalled against it, finding in the type identity theory both resources to strengthen a comprehensive, physicalistic metaphysics and a useful tool in understanding the relationship between developments in psychology and new results in neuroscience. This volume brings together leading philosophers of mind, whose essays challenge in new ways the standard objections to type identity theory, such as the multiple realizability objection and the modal argument. Other essays show how cognitive science and neuroscience are lending new support to type identity theory and still others provide, extend and improve traditional arguments concerning the theory’s explanatory power.

New Perspectives on Type Identity

Mastering Magento Theme Design

Mastering Magento Theme Design

This book explores Magento theme design, from , theme structures to an advanced options panel, and provides you with the advanced knowledge that you need on the frontend of this great CMS.,

The book starts with an overview of best practices for Magento theming and explores the field of theme development, starting from the home page all the way through to , optimization, analyzing advanced Magento applications such as widgets and modules. You will learn how to change the look and feel of the Magento backend to adapt it to your company’s brand identity. The book will also take a look at adding functionalities such as lightbox effects on the product details page and awesome , animations on the products grid.

Mastering Magento Theme Design