“Most of the serious thinking I have done over the past twenty years has been done while running,” says philosophy professor Rowlands, who has run for most of his life. And for him, running and philosophizing are inextricably connected. In Running with the Pack, he reveals the most significant runs of his life—from the entire day he spent running as a boy in Wales, to the runs along French beaches and up Irish mountains with his beloved wolf, Brenin, and through Florida swamps with his dog, Nina. Intertwined with this honest, passionate, and witty memoir are the fascinating meditations that those runs triggered, including mortality, midlife, and the meaning of life. A highly original and moving book that will make the philosophically inclined want to run, and make those who love running become intoxicated by the beauty of philosophy.
The first comprehensive guide to distributional reinforcement learning, providing a new mathematical formalism for thinking about decisions from a probabilistic perspective. Distributional reinforcement learning is a new mathematical formalism for thinking about decisions. Going beyond the common approach to reinforcement learning and expected values, it focuses on the total reward or return obtained as a consequence of an agent's choices—specifically, how this return behaves from a probabilistic perspective. In this first comprehensive guide to distributional reinforcement learning, Marc G. Bellemare, Will Dabney, and Mark Rowland, who spearheaded development of the field, present its key concepts and review some of its many applications. They demonstrate its power to account for many complex, interesting phenomena that arise from interactions with one's environment. The authors present core ideas from classical reinforcement learning to contextualize distributional topics and include mathematical proofs pertaining to major results discussed in the text. They guide the reader through a series of algorithmic and mathematical developments that, in turn, characterize, compute, estimate, and make decisions on the basis of the random return. Practitioners in disciplines as diverse as finance (risk management), computational neuroscience, computational psychiatry, psychology, macroeconomics, and robotics are already using distributional reinforcement learning, paving the way for its expanding applications in mathematical finance, engineering, and the life sciences. More than a mathematical approach, distributional reinforcement learning represents a new perspective on how intelligent agents make predictions and decisions.
Acclaimed writers, family, friends, and more pay homage to the celebrated Southern author of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini. New York Times–bestselling writer Pat Conroy (1945–2016) inspired a worldwide legion of devoted fans, but none are more loyal to him and more committed to sustaining his literary legacy than the many writers he nurtured over the course of his fifty-year career. In sharing their stories of Conroy, his fellow writers honor his memory and advance our shared understanding of his lasting impact on literary life in and well beyond the American South. Conroy’s fellowship drew from all walks of life. His relationships were complicated, and people and places he thought he’d left behind often circled back to him at crucial moments. The pantheon of contributors includes Rick Bragg, Kathleen Parker, Barbra Streisand, Janis Ian, Anthony Grooms, Mary Hood, Nikky Finney, Nathalie Dupree and Cynthia Graubart, Ron Rash, Sandra Brown, and Mary Alice Monroe; Conroy biographers Katherine Clark and Catherine Seltzer; his longtime friends; Pat’s students Sallie Ann Robinson and Valerie Sayers; members of the Conroy family; and many more. Each author in this collection shares a slightly different view of Conroy. Through their voices, a multifaceted portrait of him comes to life and sheds new light on who he was. Loosely following Conroy’s own chronology, the essays herewith wind through his river of a story, stopping at important ports of call. Cities he called home and longed to visit, along with each book he birthed, become characters that are as equally important as the people he touched along the way.
Animal Rights is a big deal. From animal testing to vegetarianism, and hunting to preservation of fish stocks, it's a topic that's always in the news. Mark Rowlands, author of The Philosopher and the Wolf, is the world's best known philosopher of animal rights. In this, the first introduction he has written to the topic, he starts by asking whether there is anything about humans that makes us psychologically or physiologically distinctive - so that there might be a moral justification for treating animals in a different way to how we treat humans. From this foundation, he goes on to explore specific issues of eating animals, experimentation, pets, hunting, zoos, predation and engineering animals. He ends with a challenging argument of how an improved understanding of animal ethics can and should affect readers' choices.
This important book provides a sampling of liberation theology's use of biblical texts, relating it to the "standard" methods of interpretation in Europe and America. Divided into four sections, the book sets out contemporary readings of the parable of Jesus influenced by a liberationist perspective; identifies the biblical and theoretical foundations of liberation theology, comparing them with the dominant exegetical paradigm in the first world; explores the way in which liberation exegesis affects reading the canonical accounts of Jesus; and argues that liberation theology cannot be seen solely as a third-world phenomenon.
A colleague recently recounted a conversation she had had with a group of graduate students. For reasons that she cannot recall, the discussion had turned to the topic of "old-fashioned" ideas in psychology-perspectives and beliefs that had once enjoyed widespread support but that are now regarded as quaint curiosities. The students racked their brains to outdo one ofthe historical trivia of psychology: Le Bon's another with their knowledge fascination with the "group mind," Mesmer's theory of animal magnetism, the short-lived popularity of "moral therapy," Descartes' belief that erec tions are maintained by air from the lungs, and so on. When it came his tum to contribute to the discussion, one student brought up an enigmatic journal he had seen in the library stacks: the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. He thought that the inclusion of abnormal and social psychology within the covers of a single journal seemed an odd combination, and he wondered aloud what sort of historical quirk had led psychologists of an earlier generation to regard these two fields as somehow related. Our colleague then asked her students if they had any ideas about how such an odd combination had found its way into a single journal.
Reader's Beware! Vacation time is upon us, but not everything will go as planned. We obsess over hotel reviews and cross paths with unsavory characters and this tome is no exception! From the mild to the gory, prepare for unexpected twist and turns on these vacations. Some are from hell, and we mean the characters, the events, and the places these stories will take you! Laugh, cringe, and shudder as you experience a trip like no other...
In The Nature of Consciousness, Mark Rowlands develops an innovative account of the nature of phenomenal consciousness, one that has significant consequences for attempts to find a place for it in the natural order. The most significant feature of consciousness is its dual nature: consciousness can be both the directing of awareness and that upon which awareness is directed. Rowlands offers a clear and philosophically insightful discussion of the main positions in this fast-moving debate, and argues that the phenomenal aspects of conscious experience are aspects that exist only in the directing of experience towards non-phenomenal objects, a theory that undermines reductive attempts to explain consciousness in terms of what is not conscious. His book will be of interest to a wide range of readers in the philosophy of mind and language, psychology and cognitive science.
Suitable for use by Advanced Level and GNVQ students, this new and complete text follows the structure of this Key Skills Qualification. The book builds from Level 2 material, with the extension material for Level 3, and also includes sections on basic numeracy.
Mary was just seven-weeks-old when she was adopted by James and Carol Rowland following her birth in 1949 in the grim and austere surroundings of a home for young unmarried mothers which was governed by Nuns. Mary grew up living happily within the Rowland family home, accepting that she had been adopted and never seeking to know more about the full circumstances surrounding her being given away by her birth mother, Ruth. Now twenty-eight years on and as a single mother raising a daughter of her own, Mary begins to question those long forgotten and still unresolved questions about her own birth, her mother, and as to why she was abandoned at such a young age. The appalling detail of violence and abuse experienced by Ruth throughout her early life as a young Jewish girl transported to the death camp at Birkenau, and again she struggled to make a life for herself after the war – coupled with the shocking detail of her pregnancy will dramatically challenge and change the two women’s lives forever." --Publisher description.
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