Visual Population Codes: Toward a Common Multivariate Framework for Cell Recording and Functional Imaging By Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, Gabriel Kreiman
2011 | 656 Pages | ISBN: 0262016249 | PDF | 12 MB
Vision is a massively parallel computational process, in which the retinal image is transformed over a sequence of stages so as to emphasize behaviorally relevant information (such as object category and identity) and deemphasize other information (such as viewpoint and lighting). The processes behind vision operate by concurrent computation and message passing among neurons within a visual area and between different areas. The theoretical concept of "population code" encapsulates the idea that visual content is represented at each stage by the pattern of activity across the local population of neurons. Understanding visual population codes ultimately requires multichannel measurement and multivariate analysis of activity patterns. Over the past decade, the multivariate approach has gained significant momentum in vision research. Functional imaging and cell recording measure brain activity in fundamentally different ways, but they now use similar theoretical concepts and mathematical tools in their modeling and analyses. With a focus on the ventral processing stream thought to underlie object recognition, this book presents recent advances in our understanding of visual population codes, novel multivariate pattern-information analysis techniques, and the beginnings of a unified perspective for cell recording and functional imaging. It serves as an introduction, overview, and reference for scientists and students across disciplines who are interested in human and primate vision and, more generally, in understanding how the brain represents and processes information.

Virgin Territory: Representing Sexual Inexperience in Film By Tamar Jeffers MacDonald, Tamar Jeffers MacDonald, Nina Martin, Timothy Shary, Gaylyn Studlar, Alisia Grace Chase, Shelley A. Cobb, Celestino Deleyto, Ilana Nash, Lisa M. Dresner, Pete Falconer, Andrea Sabbadini, Carol Siegel, Rebecca Sullivan, Greg T
2010 | 304 Pages | ISBN: 0814333184 | PDF | 16 MB
In Virgin Territory contributors consider virginity as it is produced and marketed in film. With chapters that span a range of periods, genres, and performances, this collection proves that although it seems like an obvious quality at first glance, virginity in film is anything but simple. The essays in Virgin Territory destabilize assumptions about virginity and connect moments of virginity in film to their larger social significance. Editor Tamar Jeffers McDonald has assembled a range of contributions by noted film scholars to consider virginity from numerous perspectives, including both the male and female quest to lose virginity, the role of virginity in horror film, issues of sexual agency and desire in both historic and contemporary depictions of virginity, and the complications of self-pleasure and masturbation. Films considered include classics of the Production Code era, like Marjorie Morningstar, Pillow Talk, and Bonjour Tristesse, as well as more recent films like Porky's, Losin' It, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, American Pie, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and Scary Movie. Contributors also consider particular stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Doris Day to investigate the positioning of virginity on an actor's physical body. Across different eras and genres, different films have different methods of representing virginity, relying on costume, mise-en-scène, and performance to convey the virgin status, while some film stars are associated with the quality to both the furtherance, and the frustration, of their careers. Virgin Territory explores the contrasts and continuities in films' attempts at representing this internal state to fascinating effect. Scholars of film and television history as well as cultural studies will enjoy this significant volume.

Very Special Episodes: Televising Industrial and Social Change by Jonathan Cohn, Jennifer Porst
English | August 13, 2021 | ISBN: 1978821166, 1978821158 | 256 pages | PDF | 7 MB
Very Special Episodes examines how the quintessential "very special episode" format became a primary way in which the television industry responded to and shaped social change, cultural traumas, and industrial transformations. With essays covering shows ranging from the birth of Desi Arnaz, Jr. on I Love Lucy to contemporary examples such as a delayed episode of Black-ish and the streaming-era phenomenon of the "Very Special Seasons" of UnReal and 13 Reasons Why, this collection seriously and critically uses the "very special episode" to chart the history of American television and its self-identified status as an arbiter of culture.

Vertical Gardening: A Beginner's Guide to Growing Fruit, Vegetables, Herbs and Flowers on a Living Wall and How to Create an Urban Garden in Small Spaces (Gardening in Small Places) by Dion Rosser
English | 2021 | ISBN: N/A | ASIN: B09B5HH7F3 | 155 pages | EPUB | 5.69 Mb
Have you always dreamt of having your own garden?

Éva Illés, "Understanding Context in Language Use and Teaching"
English | ISBN: 0367223791 | 2020 | 162 pages | PDF | 11 MB
This book is a guide to understanding and applying the essential, heretofore elusive, notion of context in language study and pedagogy. Éva Illés offers a new, critical, systematic theoretical framework, then applies that framework to practical interactions and issues in communicative language teaching rooted in English as a Lingua Franca. By linking theory and practice for research and teaching around the world, this book brings a new awareness of how context can be conceptualised and related to language pedagogy to advanced students, teachers, teacher educators and researchers of language teaching, applied linguistics and pragmatics.

Stephanie E. Pitts, "Understanding Audience Engagement in the Contemporary Arts "
English | ISBN: 0367358883 | 2020 | 234 pages | PDF | 3 MB
Drawing on unique multi-arts, multi-city scholarly research, Understanding Audiences for the Contemporary Arts makes a timely and urgent contribution to debates about the place of arts and culture in contemporary society.

Ukraine's Revolt, Russia's Revenge by Christopher M. Smith
English | March 15th, 2022 | ISBN: 0815739249 | 444 pages | True PDF | 13.03 MB
An eyewitness account by a U.S. diplomat of Russia's brazen attempt to undo the democratic revolution in Ukraine

Tuscan Spaces: Literary Constructions of Place By Silvia M. Ross
2010 | 224 Pages | ISBN: 1442639989 | PDF | 2 MB
An important locus for English-speaking writers, the region of Tuscany is also well represented in the Italian literary canon. In Tuscan Spaces, Silvia Ross focuses on constructions of Tuscany in twentieth-century Italian literature and juxtaposes them with English prose works by such authors as E.M. Forster and Frances Mayes to expose the complexity of literary representation centred on a single milieu.Ross uses the works of writers such as Federigo Tozzi, Aldo Palazzeschi, Vasco Pratolini, and Elena Gianini Belotti, to seek out alternative visions of Tuscan space and emphasizes that each author fashions the region in a manner which reflects their personal poetics, background, and experiences. Theories of cultural geography, space, travel, and narrative contribute to Ross's consideration of the dualisms commonly employed in writings about Tuscany, such as country/city, nature/culture, female/male, and self/other, all of which are in turn affected by her interrogation of the local/foreign opposition that underlies the study as a whole.

Eric Boynton, Peter Capretto, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, "Trauma and Transcendence: Suffering and the Limits of Theory"
English | 2018 | ISBN: 0823280276, 0823280268 | PDF | pages: 343 | 1.1 mb
Trauma theory has become a burgeoning site of research in recent decades, often demanding interdisciplinary reflections on trauma as a phenomenon that defies disciplinary ownership. While this research has always been challenged by the temporal, affective, and corporeal dimensions of trauma itself, trauma theory now faces theoretical and methodological obstacles given its growing interdisciplinarity. Trauma and Transcendence gathers scholars in philosophy, theology, psychoanalysis, and social theory to engage the limits and prospects of trauma's transcendence. This volume draws attention to the increasing challenge of deciding whether trauma's unassimilable quality can be wielded as a defense of traumatic experience against reductionism, or whether it succumbs to a form of obscurantism.

Transnational Civil Society in Asia: The Potential of Grassroots Regionalization by Simon Avenell and Akihiro Ogawa
English | Jul 23, 2021 | ISBN: 0367627116 | 242 pages | PDF | 5 MB
This edited volume addresses how transnational interactions among civil society actors in Asia and its sub-regions are helping to strengthen common democratic values and transform dominant processes of policymaking and corporate capitalism in the region.