Leading a nonprofit organization is challenging, stressful work-yet it can also be richly rewarding. Alex Counts offer 214 nuggets of wisdom that cover the toughest challenges nonprofit leaders face. Counts's sage advice can help them get through the day while making a greater impact on the world they seek to serve.
Microfinancing is considered one of the most effective strategies in the fight against global poverty. And now, in Small Loans, Big Changes, author Alex Counts reveals how Nobel Prize Winner Muhammad Yunus revolutionized global antipoverty efforts through the development of this approach. This book presents compelling stories of women benefiting from Yunus’s microcredit in rural Bangladesh and urban Chicago, and recounts the experiences of different borrowers in each country, interspersing them with stories of Yunus, his colleagues, and their counterparts in Chicago.
Alexander Park was born in Buffalo NY and later attended the University of Buffalo, studying German history, English, biology, and finished an RN program. He has lived in various places around the country including many years in New England where he attended the most liberal boarding school in existence in Lenox, MA, and also the NYC area. He come a from a family of writers such as Julian & Dr. Roswell Park. Likes sailing and is a pretty bad artist.
Basketball is a game of spirited rallies and fabulous finishes, truly a game where every second counts, where the very rules of the game have been drawn to help teams mount late charges and come from behind to win. With shot clocks and three-point shots, no lead is safe until the final buzzer has sounded. Drawing from every level of the sport -- high school, college, and the NBA, amateur and pro, men's and women's basketball -- this book will put you in the middle of the fast-paced, heart-stopping action When Seconds Count.
Augment your quantum computing journey using Amazon Braket with in-depth details of how to use Braket devices, build quantum circuits, leverage quantum annealing and solve optimization problems Key Features Learn about various quantum devices and their use in solving combinatorial optimization problems Prepare your business to leverage the benefits of the future quantum speedup Implement quantum computing concepts through real-world optimization use cases Book DescriptionAmazon Braket is a cloud-based pay-per-use platform for executing quantum algorithms on cutting-edge quantum computers and simulators. It is ideal for developing robust apps with the latest quantum devices. With this book, you'll take a hands-on approach to learning how to take real-world problems and run them on quantum devices. You'll begin with an introduction to the Amazon Braket platform and learn about the devices currently available on the platform, their benefits, and their purpose. Then, you'll review key quantum concepts and algorithms critical to converting real-world problems into a quantum circuit or binary quadratic model based on the appropriate device and its capability. The book also covers various optimization use cases, along with an explanation of the code. Finally, you'll work with a framework using code examples that will help to solve your use cases with quantum and quantum-inspired technologies. Later chapters cover custom-built functions and include almost 200 figures and diagrams to visualize key concepts. You’ll be able to scan the capabilities provided by Amazon Braket and explore the functions to adapt them for specific use cases. By the end of this book, you’ll have the tools to integrate your current business apps and AWS data with Amazon Braket to solve constrained and multi-objective optimization problems.What you will learn Explore the features and uses of the Amazon Braket console and components Discover the benefits of quantum computing devices available on Amazon Braket, including gate quantum computers, the annealer, and simulators Recognize which type of quantum device is the best fit for specific use cases and scaling Develop your own code from a basic set of use cases dealing with real-world optimization problems Understand the capabilities and limitations of current quantum computing technologies Explore the advanced features and API functions in Amazon Braket Who this book is for This book is for IT practitioners, architects, and developers looking to bring the power of quantum computing to their organizations. If you are a VP of IT, CIO, VP of architecture, chief architect, solution architect, actuarial fellow, or a developer already working on other AWS services such as AWS Lambda and EC2, you'll find this book useful in exploring how to leverage Amazon Braket for real-world use cases and to move your organization towards this emerging technology. Familiarity with the basics of quantum computing and Python is required.
A handbook on the tecnique of floor-barre conceived by Alex d’Orsay and written by the creator. A work on the floor expecially conceived for dance teachers and professional dancers which can also be used by amateurs interested in improving any tecnique, be it classical, modern or contemporary dance. The aims of this method are: a perfect alignement, an improvement of the turnout, a postural awareness, the strengthening of all the core and the back muscles. The work on the floor by Alex d’Orsay is structured as a dance class where all exercises constitute an effective instrument to improve the natural relashionship between movement, music and rythm. Manuale sulla tecnica di Sbarra a Terra creata da Alex d’Orsay, scritto da lei stessa. Un lavoro a terra dedicato sì ai danzatori professionisti ed agli Insegnanti di Danza, ma anche a tutti coloro che da amatori ne studiano una tecnica, classica, moderna o contemporanea che sia. I principali obbiettivi che si pone questo metodo sono: una postura correttamente allineata, l’allungamento della muscolatura, il potenziamento dell’ en dehors, lo sviluppo della percezione fisica dei movimenti, della concentrazione e della memoria muscolare del movimento, il rinforzo della muscolatura addominale e di quella di tutto il tronco, il rinforzo dei legamenti e l’alleggerimento dei muscoli sovraccaricati. Inoltre nella Sbarra a Terra di Alex d’Orsay, concepita strutturalmente come una lezione di danza, tutti gli esercizi costituiscono un’efficace strumento di conoscenza della relazione tra musica, ritmo e movimento.
Mining Very Large Databases with Parallel Processing addresses the problem of large-scale data mining. It is an interdisciplinary text, describing advances in the integration of three computer science areas, namely `intelligent' (machine learning-based) data mining techniques, relational databases and parallel processing. The basic idea is to use concepts and techniques of the latter two areas - particularly parallel processing - to speed up and scale up data mining algorithms. The book is divided into three parts. The first part presents a comprehensive review of intelligent data mining techniques such as rule induction, instance-based learning, neural networks and genetic algorithms. Likewise, the second part presents a comprehensive review of parallel processing and parallel databases. Each of these parts includes an overview of commercially-available, state-of-the-art tools. The third part deals with the application of parallel processing to data mining. The emphasis is on finding generic, cost-effective solutions for realistic data volumes. Two parallel computational environments are discussed, the first excluding the use of commercial-strength DBMS, and the second using parallel DBMS servers. It is assumed that the reader has a knowledge roughly equivalent to a first degree (BSc) in accurate sciences, so that (s)he is reasonably familiar with basic concepts of statistics and computer science. The primary audience for Mining Very Large Databases with Parallel Processing is industry data miners and practitioners in general, who would like to apply intelligent data mining techniques to large amounts of data. The book will also be of interest to academic researchers and postgraduate students, particularly database researchers, interested in advanced, intelligent database applications, and artificial intelligence researchers interested in industrial, real-world applications of machine learning.
Home to the Serengeti National Park, Ngorongoro Crater, and Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania offers some of the finest big game watching in the world, from elephants and rhinos to chimpanzees and lions. This field guide covers all the larger mammals of Tanzania, including marine mammals and some newly discovered species. Detailed accounts are provided for more than 135 species, along with color photos, color illustrations of marine mammals, and distribution maps. Accounts for land species give information on identification, subspecies, similar species, ecology, behavior, distribution, conservation status, and where best to see each species. The guide also features plates with side-by-side photographic comparisons of species that are easily confused, as well as first-time-ever species checklists for every national park. The definitive, most up-to-date field guide to the larger mammals of Tanzania, including marine mammals Features detailed species accounts and numerous color photos throughout Provides tips on where to see each species Includes species checklists for every national park
First published in 1979, this guide has become the standard resource for scientists, divers, and spearfishers interested in the fishes of the tropical Pacific Coast. The authors have revised and updated this edition to include the most current taxonomic information, additional species descriptions, and new illustrations.
The Early Anglo-Saxon Period is characterized archaeologically by the regular deposition of artefacts in human graves in England. The scope for dating these objects and graves has long been studied, but it has typically proved easier to identify and enumerate the chronological problems of the material than to solve them. Prior to the work of the project reported on here, therefore, there was no comprehensive chronological framework for Early Anglo-Saxon Archaeology, and the level of detail and precision in dates that could be suggested was low. The evidence has now been studied afresh using a co-ordinated suite of dating techniques, both traditional and new: a review and revision of artefact-typology; seriation of grave-assemblages using correspondence analysis; high-precision radiocarbon dating of selected bone samples; and Bayesian modelling using the results of all of these. These were focussed primarily on the later part of the Early Anglo-Saxon Period, starting in the 6th century. This research has produced a new chronological framework, consisting of sequences of phases that are separate for male and female burials but nevertheless mutually consistent and coordinated. These will allow archaeologists to assign grave-assemblages and a wide range of individual artefact-types to defined phases that are associated with calendrical date-ranges whose limits are expressed to a specific degree of probability. Important unresolved issues include a precise adjustment for dietary effects on radiocarbon dates from human skeletal material. Nonetheless the results of this project suggest the cessation of regular burial with grave goods in Anglo-Saxon England two decades or even more before the end of the seventh century. That creates a limited but important discrepancy with the current numismatic chronology of early English sceattas. The wider implications of the results for key topics in Anglo-Saxon archaeology and social, economic and religious history are discussed to conclude the report.
Python was recently ranked as today's most popular programming language on the TIOBE index, thanks to its broad applicability to design and prototyping to testing, deployment, and maintenance. With this updated fourth edition, you'll learn how to get the most out of Python, whether you're a professional programmer or someone who needs this language to solve problems in a particular field. Carefully curated by recognized experts in Python, this new edition focuses on version 3.10, bringing this seminal work on the Python language fully up to date on five version releases, including preview coverage of upcoming 3.11 features. This handy guide will help you: Learn how Python represents data and program as objects Understand the value and uses of type annotations Examine which language features appeared in which recent versions Discover how to use modern Python idiomatically Learn ways to structure Python projects appropriately Understand how to debug Python code
Portable, powerful, and a breeze to use, Python is the popular open source object-oriented programming language used for both standalone programs and scripting applications. It is now being used by an increasing number of major organizations, including NASA and Google.Updated for Python 2.4, The Python Cookbook, 2nd Edition offers a wealth of useful code for all Python programmers, not just advanced practitioners. Like its predecessor, the new edition provides solutions to problems that Python programmers face everyday.It now includes over 200 recipes that range from simple tasks, such as working with dictionaries and list comprehensions, to complex tasks, such as monitoring a network and building a templating system. This revised version also includes new chapters on topics such as time, money, and metaprogramming.Here's a list of additional topics covered: Manipulating text Searching and sorting Working with files and the filesystem Object-oriented programming Dealing with threads and processes System administration Interacting with databases Creating user interfaces Network and web programming Processing XML Distributed programming Debugging and testing Another advantage of The Python Cookbook, 2nd Edition is its trio of authors--three well-known Python programming experts, who are highly visible on email lists and in newsgroups, and speak often at Python conferences.With scores of practical examples and pertinent background information, The Python Cookbook, 2nd Edition is the one source you need if you're looking to build efficient, flexible, scalable, and well-integrated systems.
A tenth anniversary edition of the iconic book about the wonderful world of maths Sunday Times bestseller | Shortlisted for the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize 'Original and highly entertaining' Sunday Times 'A page turner about humanity's strange, never easy and, above all, never dull relationship with numbers' New Scientist 'Will leave you hooked on numbers' Daily Telegraph In this richly entertaining and accessible book, Alex Bellos explodes the myth that maths is best left to the geeks, and demonstrates the remarkable ways it's linked to our everyday lives. Alex explains the surprising geometry of the 50p piece, and the strategy of how best to gamble it in a casino. He shines a light on the mathematical patterns in nature, and on the peculiar predictability of random behaviour. He eats a potato crisp whose revolutionary shape was unpalatable to the ancient Greeks, and he shows the deep connections between maths, religion and philosophy. From the world's fastest mental calculators in Germany to numerologists in the US desert, from a startlingly numerate chimpanzee in Japan to venerable Hindu sages in India, these dispatches from 'Numberland' are an unlikely but exhilarating cocktail of history, reportage and mathematical proofs. The world of maths is a much friendlier and more colourful place than you might have imagined. This anniversary edition is fully revised and updated.
Get up to speed on Scala, the JVM language that offers all the benefits of a modern object model, functional programming, and an advanced type system. Packed with code examples, this comprehensive book shows you how to be productive with the language and ecosystem right away, and explains why Scala is ideal for today's highly scalable, data-centric applications that support concurrency and distribution. This second edition covers recent language features, with new chapters on pattern matching, comprehensions, and advanced functional programming. You’ll also learn about Scala’s command-line tools, third-party tools, libraries, and language-aware plugins for editors and IDEs. This book is ideal for beginning and advanced Scala developers alike. Program faster with Scala’s succinct and flexible syntax Dive into basic and advanced functional programming (FP) techniques Build killer big-data apps, using Scala’s functional combinators Use traits for mixin composition and pattern matching for data extraction Learn the sophisticated type system that combines FP and object-oriented programming concepts Explore Scala-specific concurrency tools, including Akka Understand how to develop rich domain-specific languages Learn good design techniques for building scalable and robust Scala applications
Traditional data architecture patterns are severely limited. To use these patterns, you have to ETL data into each tool—a cost-prohibitive process for making warehouse features available to all of your data. The lack of flexibility with these patterns requires you to lock into a set of priority tools and formats, which creates data silos and data drift. This practical book shows you a better way. Apache Iceberg provides the capabilities, performance, scalability, and savings that fulfill the promise of an open data lakehouse. By following the lessons in this book, you'll be able to achieve interactive, batch, machine learning, and streaming analytics with this high-performance open source format. Authors Tomer Shiran, Jason Hughes, and Alex Merced from Dremio show you how to get started with Iceberg. With this book, you'll learn: The architecture of Apache Iceberg tables What happens under the hood when you perform operations on Iceberg tables How to further optimize Iceberg tables for maximum performance How to use Iceberg with popular data engines such as Apache Spark, Apache Flink, and Dremio Discover why Apache Iceberg is a foundational technology for implementing an open data lakehouse.
The data lake is a daring new approach for harnessing the power of big data technology and providing convenient self-service capabilities. But is it right for your company? This book is based on discussions with practitioners and executives from more than a hundred organizations, ranging from data-driven companies such as Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook, to governments and traditional corporate enterprises. You’ll learn what a data lake is, why enterprises need one, and how to build one successfully with the best practices in this book. Alex Gorelik, CTO and founder of Waterline Data, explains why old systems and processes can no longer support data needs in the enterprise. Then, in a collection of essays about data lake implementation, you’ll examine data lake initiatives, analytic projects, experiences, and best practices from data experts working in various industries. Get a succinct introduction to data warehousing, big data, and data science Learn various paths enterprises take to build a data lake Explore how to build a self-service model and best practices for providing analysts access to the data Use different methods for architecting your data lake Discover ways to implement a data lake from experts in different industries
Criminal Law in Focus (CLIF) provides an updated approach to the first-year criminal law casebook, with coverage and pedagogy that reflects modern criminal law practice. Alongside the traditional justificatory theories of punishment, the book considers punishment as a tool for social control, the rise of mass incarceration, and racial disparities in criminal enforcement. Using compelling cases that clearly articulate legal doctrine, this book covers core traditional offenses (like homicide and rape), as well as those that figure prominently in modern practice, but which have historically been absent from or deemphasized in the criminal law curriculum (like drug possession and property crimes). The Real Life Applications feature following each case poses a series of questions to spotlight important topics that might otherwise be overlooked, such as prosecutorial discretion and plea bargaining. Straightforward exposition helps students navigate their way around the differences and tensions between jurisdictional approaches to defining crimes and defenses. Features: CLIF goes beyond the traditional coverage of most casebooks, (which focus primarily on homicide offenses, rape, and (to a lesser extent) theft crimes). With expanded coverage of property offenses, an entire chapter on drug offenses, and coverage of contemporary issues (such as child pornography offenses and the public authority defense), CLIF reflects a wider, more inclusive perspective on criminal law today. Most criminal law casebooks place extended coverage of the elements of crime (mens rea, actus reus, and causation) at the front of the book, before covering individual criminal offenses—which requires students to grapple with these concepts in the abstract. By contrast, CLIF provides a brief, early introduction to the elements of crime (which can be covered in one class); it then pivots to an integrated discussion of specific criminal offenses and covers principles related to mens rea, actus reus, and causation in the context of those offenses. Chapter 10 also covers the interpretation of criminal statutes. At 550 pages, CLIF is much shorter than most criminal law casebooks, even though it includes topics (e.g., drug crimes) that aren’t covered in most criminal law casebooks. Professors and students will benefit from: Coverage of offenses that are either absent from, or deemphasized in, most other casebooks, CLIF helps professors to design a course that improves both bar-exam readiness and practice readiness. The inclusion of issues related to mass incarceration in the first chapter modernizes the traditional “purposes of punishment” material. CLIF retains coverage of justificatory theories of punishment, including the famous case of Dudley and Stephens; these theories aim to provide a morally defensible account of punishment and they are important. But they do not fully explain the reality of punishment in the United States today. By covering issues related to the rise of mass incarceration alongside the traditional theories of punishment, CLIF allows for a fuller discussion of the theory and reality of punishment. The book’s innovative approach to covering the elements of crimes has a number of benefits. It is much more efficient, from a teaching perspective; it will afford professors time to cover other topics that they can’t usually fit into the course (e.g., drug crimes and a more in-depth treatment of property offenses). Professors might spend 4 or 5 (or more) class sessions on the elements of crime before they can begin to cover individual offenses. This is not necessary: Most of these concepts are more effectively covered in the context of specific crimes (e.g., intent and mistakes of fact can both be introduced in the context of larceny; willful blindness can be addressed in the context of drug crimes). Then, after students have learned about these concepts in the context of individual offenses, the concepts can be tied together in 1 or 2 class sessions using the materials in Chapter 10. Covering difficult mens rea and actus reus concepts in depth before covering individual crimes (as most books do) often leaves students confused. They don’t have enough context to appreciate how the difficult mens rea problems fit into criminal law doctrine, for example. The structure in CLIF teaches students the basics first. Once they have that foundation, they are better able to grapple with the more complex mens rea questions in Chapter 10. The traditional approach can be frustrating for faculty, as well. It is a bit like trying to teach someone about the broad structure of mathematics before they have learned basic arithmetic. The approach in CLIF more accurately reflects criminal law practice. In a real-world case, the prosecutor and defense do not argue about mens rea or actus reus in the abstract. Instead, the parties are focused on the elements of the specific crime(s) at issue. When difficult mens rea or actus reus questions arise in practice, it is in the context of the elements of a particular crime.
Whether You're A Newly Diagnosed Leukemia Patient, A Survivor, or A Friend or Relative of Either, This Book Offers Help. the Only Text to Provide the Doctor and Patient's View, 100 Questions and amp; Answers About Leukemia, Second Edition Gives You an Updated and Authoritative Practical Answers to Your Questions About Treatment Options, Post-Treatment Quality of Life, Sources of Support, and Much More. Written by A Leukemia Survivor and A Prominent Physician Specializing In Treatment of Leukemia, This Book Is an Invaluable Resource for Anyone Coping with the Physical and Emotional Turmoil of This Fri
Conceived as a reference manual for practicing engineers, instrument designers, service technicians and engineering students. The related fields of physics, mechanics and mathematics are frequently incorporated to enhance the understanding of the subject matter. Historical anecdotes as far back as Hellenistic times to modern scientists help illustrate in an entertaining manner ideas ranging from impractical inventions in history to those that have changed our lives.
The efficient generation of single photon and entangled photon states is of considerable interest both for fundamental studies of quantum mechanics and practical applications, such as quantum communications and computation. It is now well known that correlated pairs of photons suitable for such applications can be generated directly in a guided mode of an optical fiber through the nonlinear process of spontaneous four-wave mixing. Detection of one photon of the pair can be used to herald the presence of the other, in order to realise a probabilistic heralded single photon source. Alternatively, both photons can be used directly as an entangled photon pair if the source is designed such that the two photons are correlated in one or more of their degrees of freedom. This chapter provides an overview of the progress that has been made into the development of photon sources based on four-wave mixing in optical fibers. A theoretical model of four-wave mixing is described in Section 12.2, which demonstrates how the dispersion characteristics of an optical fiber influence the properties of the photon pair state that is generated. Section 12.3 focusses on heralded single photon sources operating in both the anomalous and normal dispersion regimes of optical fiber, and highlights several experimental demonstrations of this type of source. Section 12.4 discusses the concept of non-classical interference and the parameters of the generated photons that can influence the interference visibility. Section 12.5 expands upon this discussion to consider two different approaches for preparing photons in pure states that have been used to demonstrate high visibility two-photon interference. Section 12.6 describes several different experimental implementations of entangled photon pair sources. Finally, two practical applications using fiber-based photon sources are presented, with an all-fiber, quantum controlled-NOT gate discussed in Section 12.7, and the potential to use photonic fusion to build up large photonic cluster states outlined in Section 12.8.
Basketball is a game of spirited rallies and fabulous finishes, truly a game where every second counts, where the very rules of the game have been drawn to help teams mount late charges and come from behind to win. With shot clocks and three-point shots, no lead is safe until the final buzzer has sounded. Drawing from every level of the sport -- high school, college, and the NBA, amateur and pro, men's and women's basketball -- this book will put you in the middle of the fast-paced, heart-stopping action When Seconds Count.
Criminological Theory: The Essentials, Fourth Edition by Stephen G. Tibbetts and Alex R. Piquero is a brief yet comprehensive overview of the major concepts and perspectives of the key theories in the evolution of criminology. Putting criminological theory in context, the acclaimed authors examine policy implications brought about by theoretical perspectives to show students the practical application of theories to contemporary social problems. The new edition has been thoroughly updated with the latest theoretical extensions and empirical research, with links made to specific theories and recent events.
Although service-level objectives (SLOs) continue to grow in importance, there’s a distinct lack of information about how to implement them. Practical advice that does exist usually assumes that your team already has the infrastructure, tooling, and culture in place. In this book, recognized SLO expert Alex Hidalgo explains how to build an SLO culture from the ground up. Ideal as a primer and daily reference for anyone creating both the culture and tooling necessary for SLO-based approaches to reliability, this guide provides detailed analysis of advanced SLO and service-level indicator (SLI) techniques. Armed with mathematical models and statistical knowledge to help you get the most out of an SLO-based approach, you’ll learn how to build systems capable of measuring meaningful SLIs with buy-in across all departments of your organization. Define SLIs that meaningfully measure the reliability of a service from a user’s perspective Choose appropriate SLO targets, including how to perform statistical and probabilistic analysis Use error budgets to help your team have better discussions and make better data-driven decisions Build supportive tooling and resources required for an SLO-based approach Use SLO data to present meaningful reports to leadership and your users
Drill down into Windows architecture and internals, discover how core Windows components work behind the scenes, and master information you can continually apply to improve architecture, development, system administration, and support. Led by three renowned Windows internals experts, this classic guide is now fully updated for Windows 10 and 8.x. As always, it combines unparalleled insider perspectives on how Windows behaves “under the hood” with hands-on experiments that let you experience these hidden behaviors firsthand. Part 2 examines these and other key Windows 10 OS components and capabilities: Startup and shutdown The Windows Registry Windows management mechanisms WMI System mechanisms ALPC ETW Cache Manager Windows file systems The hypervisor and virtualization UWP Activation Revised throughout, this edition also contains three entirely new chapters: Virtualization technologies Management diagnostics and tracing Caching and file system support
Leverage the power of Scala and master the art of building, improving, and validating scalable machine learning and AI applications using Scala's most advanced and finest features About This Book Build functional, type-safe routines to interact with relational and NoSQL databases with the help of the tutorials and examples provided Leverage your expertise in Scala programming to create and customize your own scalable machine learning algorithms Experiment with different techniques; evaluate their benefits and limitations using real-world financial applications Get to know the best practices to incorporate new Big Data machine learning in your data-driven enterprise and gain future scalability and maintainability Who This Book Is For This Learning Path is for engineers and scientists who are familiar with Scala and want to learn how to create, validate, and apply machine learning algorithms. It will also benefit software developers with a background in Scala programming who want to apply machine learning. What You Will Learn Create Scala web applications that couple with JavaScript libraries such as D3 to create compelling interactive visualizations Deploy scalable parallel applications using Apache Spark, loading data from HDFS or Hive Solve big data problems with Scala parallel collections, Akka actors, and Apache Spark clusters Apply key learning strategies to perform technical analysis of financial markets Understand the principles of supervised and unsupervised learning in machine learning Work with unstructured data and serialize it using Kryo, Protobuf, Avro, and AvroParquet Construct reliable and robust data pipelines and manage data in a data-driven enterprise Implement scalable model monitoring and alerts with Scala In Detail This Learning Path aims to put the entire world of machine learning with Scala in front of you. Scala for Data Science, the first module in this course, is a tutorial guide that provides tutorials on some of the most common Scala libraries for data science, allowing you to quickly get up to speed building data science and data engineering solutions. The second course, Scala for Machine Learning guides you through the process of building AI applications with diagrams, formal mathematical notation, source code snippets, and useful tips. A review of the Akka framework and Apache Spark clusters concludes the tutorial. The next module, Mastering Scala Machine Learning, is the final step in this course. It will take your knowledge to next level and help you use the knowledge to build advanced applications such as social media mining, intelligent news portals, and more. After a quick refresher on functional programming concepts using REPL, you will see some practical examples of setting up the development environment and tinkering with data. We will then explore working with Spark and MLlib using k-means and decision trees. By the end of this course, you will be a master at Scala machine learning and have enough expertise to be able to build complex machine learning projects using Scala. This Learning Path combines some of the best that Packt has to offer in one complete, curated package. It includes content from the following Packt products: Scala for Data Science, Pascal Bugnion Scala for Machine Learning, Patrick Nicolas Mastering Scala Machine Learning, Alex Kozlov Style and approach A tutorial with complete examples, this course will give you the tools to start building useful data engineering and data science solutions straightaway. This course provides practical examples from the field on how to correctly tackle data analysis problems, particularly for modern Big Data datasets.
He has been regarded with suspicion by some, as an anti-postmodernist who dared to write about unfashionable concepts such as truth and meaning. But in recent years, the philosopher Alain Badiou has risen in prominence, pioneering new ways to produce, conceptualise and discover art. Badiou Reframed is an original book about an original thinker which applies - for the first time - Badiou's philosophy to the visual arts. The six central concepts of this philosophy - 'being and appearing', 'event and subject' and 'truth and ethics' - are elucidated through detailed analysis of a range of visual artworks, including Marcel Duchamp's readymades, the abstract paintings of Kazimir Malevich and Mark Rothko, Banksy's contemporary street art, the sculpture of Alberto Giacometti, Stephane Mallarme's visual poetry and Victor Fleming's classic film The Wizard of Oz. In focusing on Badiou's critical relationship with the visual arts, Alex Ling reinterprets and represents not only the man, but art itself.
The industry’s most complete, useful, and up-to-date guide to SQL Server 2014. You’ll find start-to-finish coverage of SQL Server’s core database server and management capabilities: all the real-world information, tips, guidelines, and examples you’ll need to install, monitor, maintain, and optimize the most complex database environments. The provided examples and sample code provide plenty of hands-on opportunities to learn more about SQL Server and create your own viable solutions. Four leading SQL Server experts present deep practical insights for administering SQL Server, analyzing and optimizing queries, implementing data warehouses, ensuring high availability, tuning performance, and much more. You will benefit from their behind-the-scenes look into SQL Server, showing what goes on behind the various wizards and GUI-based tools. You’ll learn how to use the underlying SQL commands to fully unlock the power and capabilities of SQL Server. Writing for all intermediate-to-advanced-level SQL Server professionals, the authors draw on immense production experience with SQL Server. Throughout, they focus on successfully applying SQL Server 2014’s most powerful capabilities and its newest tools and features. Detailed information on how to... Understand SQL Server 2014’s new features and each edition’s capabilities and licensing Install, upgrade to, and configure SQL Server 2014 for better performance and easier management Streamline and automate key administration tasks with Smart Admin Leverage powerful new backup/restore options: flexible backup to URL, Managed Backup to Windows Azure, and encrypted backups Strengthen security with new features for enforcing “least privilege” Improve performance with updateable columnstore indexes, Delayed Durability, and other enhancements Execute queries and business logic more efficiently with memoryoptimized tables, buffer pool extension, and natively-compiled stored procedures Control workloads and Disk I/O with the Resource Governor Deploy AlwaysOn Availability Groups and Failover Cluster Instances to achieve enterprise-class availability and disaster recovery Apply new Business Intelligence improvements in Master Data Services, data quality, and Parallel Data Warehouse
If you want to build an enterprise-quality application that uses natural language text but aren’t sure where to begin or what tools to use, this practical guide will help get you started. Alex Thomas, principal data scientist at Wisecube, shows software engineers and data scientists how to build scalable natural language processing (NLP) applications using deep learning and the Apache Spark NLP library. Through concrete examples, practical and theoretical explanations, and hands-on exercises for using NLP on the Spark processing framework, this book teaches you everything from basic linguistics and writing systems to sentiment analysis and search engines. You’ll also explore special concerns for developing text-based applications, such as performance. In four sections, you’ll learn NLP basics and building blocks before diving into application and system building: Basics: Understand the fundamentals of natural language processing, NLP on Apache Stark, and deep learning Building blocks: Learn techniques for building NLP applications—including tokenization, sentence segmentation, and named-entity recognition—and discover how and why they work Applications: Explore the design, development, and experimentation process for building your own NLP applications Building NLP systems: Consider options for productionizing and deploying NLP models, including which human languages to support
Unlock the complexities of machine learning algorithms in Spark to generate useful data insights through this data analysis tutorial About This Book Process and analyze big data in a distributed and scalable way Write sophisticated Spark pipelines that incorporate elaborate extraction Build and use regression models to predict flight delays Who This Book Is For Are you a developer with a background in machine learning and statistics who is feeling limited by the current slow and “small data” machine learning tools? Then this is the book for you! In this book, you will create scalable machine learning applications to power a modern data-driven business using Spark. We assume that you already know the machine learning concepts and algorithms and have Spark up and running (whether on a cluster or locally) and have a basic knowledge of the various libraries contained in Spark. What You Will Learn Use Spark streams to cluster tweets online Run the PageRank algorithm to compute user influence Perform complex manipulation of DataFrames using Spark Define Spark pipelines to compose individual data transformations Utilize generated models for off-line/on-line prediction Transfer the learning from an ensemble to a simpler Neural Network Understand basic graph properties and important graph operations Use GraphFrames, an extension of DataFrames to graphs, to study graphs using an elegant query language Use K-means algorithm to cluster movie reviews dataset In Detail The purpose of machine learning is to build systems that learn from data. Being able to understand trends and patterns in complex data is critical to success; it is one of the key strategies to unlock growth in the challenging contemporary marketplace today. With the meteoric rise of machine learning, developers are now keen on finding out how can they make their Spark applications smarter. This book gives you access to transform data into actionable knowledge. The book commences by defining machine learning primitives by the MLlib and H2O libraries. You will learn how to use Binary classification to detect the Higgs Boson particle in the huge amount of data produced by CERN particle collider and classify daily health activities using ensemble Methods for Multi-Class Classification. Next, you will solve a typical regression problem involving flight delay predictions and write sophisticated Spark pipelines. You will analyze Twitter data with help of the doc2vec algorithm and K-means clustering. Finally, you will build different pattern mining models using MLlib, perform complex manipulation of DataFrames using Spark and Spark SQL, and deploy your app in a Spark streaming environment. Style and approach This book takes a practical approach to help you get to grips with using Spark for analytics and to implement machine learning algorithms. We'll teach you about advanced applications of machine learning through illustrative examples. These examples will equip you to harness the potential of machine learning, through Spark, in a variety of enterprise-grade systems.
This volume holds a datelist of 647 radiocarbon determinations carried out between 2004 and 2007 in support of research funded by English Heritage throught the Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund. It contains supporting information about the samples and the sites which produced them, a comprehensive bibliography, and two indexes for reference and analysis. An introduction provides information about the scientific dating undertaken, and methods used for the analyses reported. Details of technical reports available for programmes of dendrochronology, luminescence dating, and amino-acid racemization funded under this scheme are also provided. The datelist has been collated from information provided by the submitters of samples and the dating laboratories, in order to provide easy access to raw scientific and contextual data which may be used in further research. Many of the sites and projects from which dates have been obtained are in the process of publication. Full references are given to these reports for those requiring further detail.
This 102-page report details how the dictatorship under President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo has used an oil boom to entrench and enrich itself further at the expense of the country's people. Since oil was discovered there in the early 1990s, Equatorial Guinea's gross domestic product (GDP) has increased more than 5,000 percent, and the country has become the fourth-largest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, living standards for the country's 500,000 people have not substantially improved.--Publisher description.
If you strip away the rosy language of “school-business partnership,” “win-win situation,” “giving back to the community,” and the like, what you see when you look at corporate marketing activities in the schools is example after example of the exploitation of children for financial gain. Over the long run the financial benefit marketing in schools delivers to corporations rests on the ability of advertising to “brand” students and thereby help insure that they will be customers for life. This process of “branding” involves inculcating the value of consumption as the primary mechanism for achieving happiness, demonstrating success, and finding fulfillment. Along the way, “branding” children – just like branding cattle – inflicts pain. Yet school districts, desperate for funding sources, often eagerly welcome marketers and seem not to recognize the threats that marketing brings to children’s well-being and to the integrity of the education they receive. Given that all ads in school pose some threat to children, it is past time for considering whether marketing activities belong in school. Schools should be ad-free zones.
Most cultural and legal codes agree that the intentional killing of civilians, whether in peacetime or war, is prohibited. Yet despite this fact, the deliberate killing of large numbers of civilians remains a persistent feature of global political life.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.