Cuneiform script on tablets of clay is, as far as we know, the oldest form of writing in the world. The choice of clay as writing medium in ancient Mesopotamia meant that records of all kinds could survive down to modern times, preserving fascinating documents from ancient civilization, written by a variety of people and societies. From reading these tablets we can understand not only the history and economics of the time but also the beliefs, ideas and superstitions. This new book will bring the world in which the cuneiform was written to life for the non-expert reader, revealing how ancient inscriptions can lead to a new way of thinking about the past. It will explain how this pre-alphabetic writing really worked and how it was possible to use cuneiform signs to record so many different languages so long ago. Richly illustrated with a wealth of fresh examples ranging from elementary school exercises to revealing private letters or beautifully calligraphic literature for the royal library, we will meet people that arent so very different from ourselves. We will read the work of many scribes from mundane record keepers to state fortune tellers, using tricks from puns to cryptography. For the first time cuneiform tablets and their messages are not remote and inaccessible, but wonderfully human documents that resonate today.

These are tales from the post-industrial scablands – stories of austerity, poverty, masochism and migration. The people here are sick, lonely, lost, half-living in the aftermath of upheaval or trauma. A teacher obsessively canes himself. A neurologist forgets where home is. A starving woman sells hugs in an abandoned kiosk. Yet sometimes, even in the twilit scablands, there’s also beauty, music, laughter. Sometimes a town square is filled with bubbles. Sometimes sisters dream they can fly. Sometimes an old man plays Bach to an empty street, two ailing actors see animal shapes in clouds, a cancer survivor searches for a winning lottery ticket in her rundown flat. And sometimes Gustav Mahler lives just round the corner, hoarding rare records in a Stoke terrace.

Laughter, Literature, Violence, 1840-1930 investigates the strange, complex, even paradoxical relationship between laughter, on the one hand, and violence, war, horror, death, on the other. It does so in relation to philosophy, politics, and key nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary texts, by Edgar Allan Poe, Edmund Gosse, Wyndham Lewis and Katherine Mansfield - texts which explore the far reaches of Schadenfreude, and so-called 'superiority theories' of laughter, pushing these theories to breaking point. In these literary texts, the violent superiority often ascribed to laughter is seen as radically unstable, co-existing with its opposite: an anarchic sense of equality. Laughter, humour and comedy are slippery, duplicitous, ambivalent, self-contradictory hybrids, fusing apparently discordant elements. Now and then, though, literary and philosophical texts also dream of a different kind of laughter, one which reaches beyond its alloys - a transcendent, 'perfect' laughter which exists only in and for itself.

Sport: Law and Practice, Fourth Edition is the leading legal title covering sports law and practice in the UK, and at the Court of Arbitration for Sport. It serves both as a comprehensive statement of applicable law and precedent, and as a very practical guide to circumnavigating a complex sector. The new edition retains and updates all of the key chapters from previous editions, including the extended sections on challenges to the actions of sports governing bodies, and on anti-doping regulation and enforcement (with an introduction to the new 2021 World Anti-Doping Code). There are important updates to the chapters on Regulating Financial Fair Play, Misconduct, Safeguarding in Sport, the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and Media Rights and Sport. The Fourth Edition also adds brand new chapters dealing with: -Effective sports regulation (including the first ever comprehensive discussions of the 'general principles of law' applied by CAS panels in determining challenges to sports regulations, as well as of the principles of interpretation of sports regulations). -Best practice in sports governance (describing developments such as the strengthening of the competence and independence of boards and the emergence of independent integrity units). -Data protection law and sport (including discussion of the provisions of the Data Protection Act 2018 that facilitate the sharing of personal data by sports bodies for integrity-related purposes). -Exploiting commercially valuable sports data (explaining how sports rights-holders can fashion commercial agreements to meet the demand for sports data from the betting industry and others). -ESports (the first comprehensive treatment of the legal and practical principles underlying the regulation and commercial exploitation of the increasingly important ESports sector). Readers will also benefit from practice tips, precedent clauses, detailed explanations of key practical issues, and step-by-step analysis. This is an essential title for all sports law practitioners (solicitors and barristers, common law and civil lawyers), sports governing bodies, event organisers, clubs, participants, sports agencies and commercial partners, arbitrators, universities, and students.

An Introduction to Statistical Learning provides an accessible overview of the field of statistical learning, an essential toolset for making sense of the vast and complex data sets that have emerged in fields ranging from biology to finance, marketing, and  astrophysics in the past twenty years. This book presents some of the most important modeling and prediction techniques, along with relevant applications. Topics include linear regression, classification, resampling methods, shrinkage approaches, tree-based methods, support vector machines, clustering, deep learning, survival analysis, multiple testing, and more. Color graphics and real-world examples are used to illustrate the methods presented. This book is targeted at statisticians and non-statisticians alike, who wish to use cutting-edge statistical learning techniques to analyze their data. Four of the authors co-wrote An Introduction to Statistical Learning, With Applications in R (ISLR), which has become a mainstay of undergraduate and graduate classrooms worldwide, as well as an important reference book for data scientists. One of the keys to its success was that each chapter contains a tutorial on implementing the analyses and methods presented in the R scientific computing environment. However, in recent years Python has become a popular language for data science, and there has been increasing demand for a Python-based alternative to ISLR. Hence, this book (ISLP) covers the same materials as ISLR but with labs implemented in Python. These labs will be useful both for Python novices, as well as experienced users.

This book takes as its starting point Pierre-Simon Laplace's much-cited dream in 1812 of a vast intelligence' which can embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom' and for which the future and the past are equally calculable. Laplace sets out the echt-Enlightenment ideal of scientific omniscience and the classic statement of a deterministic universe. The author investigates some of the ways in which Laplacian and, indeed, Newtonian models of observation and the universe are at once assimilated and complicated by Romantic and Victorian writers such as Carlyle, Burke, Abbott, Poe and Wordsworth. In particular, he aims to retrace some of the ways in which LaplacianNewtonian models of scientific intelligence' come to inform nineteenth-century writers' views of themselves and their own modes of observation. The author also explains how some of these literary reimaginings look forward to more modern conceptions of science in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such as Chaos Theory and Einsteinian Cosmology. Oddly enough, contemporary science would seem to realise Carlyle's vision of a Natural-Supernaturalism,' fusing Laplace's mechanical vision with Romanticism. This groundbreaking book covers a huge array of topics, including philosophy, Wagnerian music-drama, Jungian analysis, and it ends with the supposedly "omniscient" narrator in Charles Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop, as an example of what came to be the dominant mode of narration in later Victorian fiction.

The Official Veterinary Marketing Guide is a road map for veterinarians everywhere who want to grow their practice in today's economy. You'll find proven tools and strategies forming a step by step marketing system that will bring more targeted clients to your veterinary practice. This is not some dry, text book theory on marketing. Instead it's simple, effective and affordable marketing tactics that will work every time.

Challenging Sports Governing Bodies covers the decision to challenge the actions of a sports governing body and considers the causes of action that form a basis for them. This title refers to this important area of practice that more company, commercial and regulatory practitioners are venturing in to. The text is encyclopaedic in nature and practice based providing a practical analysis of key issues for practitioners. Footnotes are used to identify the leading cases for propositions in the main text and to help with finding similar and relevant cases. To ensure this work is comprehensive in its subject matter there is a short section on Remedies focusing on internal appeal routes and arbitration.