Triple bill of romantic dramas based on the novels by Nicholas Sparks. In 'Dear John' (2010), while Special Forces Army Sergeant John Tyree (Channing Tatum) is home on leave, he meets beautiful college student Savannah Curtis (Amanda Seyfried) and the two fall in love. When the time comes for Savannah to return to college, she promises to write to John during his 12-month enlistment overseas. However, their budding love affair is put to the test when John decides to re-enlist in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. 'Safe Haven' (2013), follows the fortunes of a guarded young woman who unexpectedly finds love in a North Carolina town. Katie Feldman (Julianne Hough) stands out on arrival in Southport. Beautiful but highly reserved, she makes it clear that she expects to have little involvement in the social life of the town and its inhabitants. However, an unforeseen chain of events brings Katie close to Alex (Josh Duhamel), a widower who runs a store while also attempting to bring up his young children. As she inexorably falls in love with Alex and the children Katie begins to let down her guard, but doing so threatens to raise the dark secret she has been protecting. Will she find a way to reconcile the trauma of her past with the possibility of a brighter future? 'The Best of Me' (2014), charts the relationship between Dawson Cole (Luke Bracey/James Marsden) and Amanda Collier (Liana Liberato/Michelle Monaghan), two people from opposite sides of town, who fall deeply in love as teenagers. However, Amanda's parents don't approve of Dawson and their relationship is short-lived due to a number of unfortunate events outside of their control. 20 years later, the pair are reunited at a mutual friend's funeral and it doesn't take long for their romance to rekindle. But although it seems the universe is conspiring to bring them back together after all this time, it seems there are still other forces at work which are determined to keep them apart...

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil. One morning, ordinary salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant cockroach. Metamorphosis, Kafka's masterpiece of unease and black humour, is one of the twentieth century's most influential works of fiction, and is accompanied here by two more classic stories. 'He is the greatest German writer of our time. Such poets as Rilke or such novelists as Thomas Mann are dwarfs or plaster saints in comparison to him' - Vladimir Nabokov

Based on the encoding process, arithmetic codes can be viewed as tree codes and current proposals for decoding arithmetic codes with forbidden symbols belong to sequential decoding algorithms and their variants. In this monograph, we propose a new way of looking at arithmetic codes with forbidden symbols. If a limit is imposed on the maximum value of a key parameter in the encoder, this modified arithmetic encoder can also be modeled as a finite state machine and the code generated can be treated as a variable-length trellis code. The number of states used can be reduced and techniques used for decoding convolutional codes, such as the list Viterbi decoding algorithm, can be applied directly on the trellis. The finite state machine interpretation can be easily migrated to Markov source case. We can encode Markov sources without considering the conditional probabilities, while using the list Viterbi decoding algorithm which utilizes the conditional probabilities. We can also use context-based arithmetic coding to exploit the conditional probabilities of the Markov source and apply a finite state machine interpretation to this problem. The finite state machine interpretation also allows us to more systematically understand arithmetic codes with forbidden symbols. It allows us to find the partial distance spectrum of arithmetic codes with forbidden symbols. We also propose arithmetic codes with memories which use high memory but low implementation precision arithmetic codes. The low implementation precision results in a state machine with less complexity. The introduced input memories allow us to switch the probability functions used for arithmetic coding. Combining these two methods give us a huge parameter space of the arithmetic codes with forbidden symbols. Hence we can choose codes with better distance properties while maintaining the encoding efficiency and decoding complexity. A construction and search method is proposed and simulation results show that we can achieve a similar performance as turbo codes when we apply this approach to rate 2/3 arithmetic codes. Table of Contents: Introduction / Arithmetic Codes / Arithmetic Codes with Forbidden Symbols / Distance Property and Code Construction / Conclusion

Your natural gift is the natural expression that spontaneously unfolds when you open your heart. This book is for people who have always suspected they have uplifting qualities that can make a difference in the world and with the people they interact with. Rather than declaring success principles and spiritual truths as many other spiritual and personal growth books, this book functions as a tool that allows you to experience your unique spiritual essence for yourself. The early chapters walk readers through the elemental natural gifts of human beings and how to see your unique blend of these qualities. The book then shows how to unlock your natural gift from your limiting self beliefs and to awaken it. Next it guides you to walk with your natural gift in your daily life and to offer it to others. Finally, it teaches you how to keep yourself intact and find support when walking with your heart open - the natural state for offering your gift. Michael Hoffman is a trained spiritual guide who offers workshops and coaching for people to directly experience their spiritual connection and natural gift. He trained with a Spiritual Teacher, Zen Master, and Shaman for 22 years to guide and support people in their spiritual development. Michael also holds a Masters Degree in Social Work from Boise State University and has worked as a psychotherapist and spiritual guide since 1986.

From the (mock) introduction by the (fictitious) translator: "'The Naked Ear' is an unpolished, apparently unfinished piece of writing by an author about whom nothing is known, not even his name. The manuscript that chanced to come into my possession in so bizarre a fashion is signed--self-mockingly, one presumes--'John of Silence.'" Who was this 'John of Silence'? Was he alive? Could he be found? Surely a man doesn't pour out his soul like this into four thick notebooks... only to toss them into an unlocked train station locker?..."

Robert Frost and Edward Thomas met in a bookshop in London in 1913. During the next four years, the two writers--Frost, an unknown poet who had sold his farm in New Hampshire in order to take his family to England for one last gamble on poetry and Thomas, a sad literary journalist--formed the most important friendship between poets since that of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Their friendship only ended with Thomas' death in Arras, France, a casualty of the First World War.
The story of Edward Thomas' turn to poetry, in fact, has been dominated by the account of Robert Frost's injunction: to break his existing prose into lines, bringing his musical cadence and his direct speaking voice into conversation with formal prosody. Thomas himself had already championed Frost's own early work: "These poems are revolutionary because they lack the exaggeration of rhetoric.... Their language is free from the poetical words and forms that are the chief material of the secondary poets. The metre avoids not only old fashioned pomp and sweetness, but the later fashion also of discord and fuss. In fact the medium is common speech.... Mr. Frost has, in fact, gone back, as Whitman and as Wordsworth went back, through the paraphernalia of poetry into poetry once again."
This book presents for the first time the full record, arranged chronologically, of what the poets wrote to, for, and about one another--their letters, poems, and Thomas' review of Frost's first two books. They reveal a warmth and charm that give us the key to the relationship between Frost and Thomas.

The six stories that make up "Little Pieces" are all set in Japan, land of Zen austerity, manga excess, and much in between. In "First Snow," a joyous chance reunion of a babysitter and her one-time charge unexpectedly spirals into confession and response. Sonoko, in the story that bears her name, slips with practiced ease out of the world of her life into that of 11th-century Japan. In "The Miracle," the miracle is that nothing happens-until the end. The narrator of "The Concussion," age 87, sums up the spirit of these stories when, responding to the disbelief he inspires, he says, "I have the sort of face that turns everything I say into a joke. Still..." "First Snow" and "Sonoko" first appeared in The Japan Times.

Green will illustrate and shed new light on the gamut of issues associated with renewable energy, a topic whose importance increases exponentially with every temperature record-setting year. Jane and Michael Hoffman use their years of experience to explain the technological and economic future of this ecologically significant issue. They incisively explain its politics: what countries are doing right now and, most importantly, what we should be doing. Green will cut through the hype and polemics surrounding ecologically friendly technologies and present the unvarnished truth. It will guide the reader through the misinformation and confusion over global warming, and demonstrate the degree to which renewable energy can be part of the solution.

The four stories of Part I vary in setting from Shinobazu Pond to 19th-century Germany, where Dostoevsky toils in despairing, poverty-stricken exile on Crime and Punishment. The "Nectar Fragments" of Part II are linked short stories set in the fictional Montreal suburb of Nectar, where an aging recluse living like a prisoner in the house in which he grew up struggles to recast the story of Abraham and Isaac into modern form. Was Abraham a saint, or a murderer? No one suspected the recluse himself had a son - who one day appears, seemingly out of nowhere...

Michael Hoffman's characters are, willy-nilly, participants in plots that don't add up. Some emerge stronger; others, shadows of their former selves. The six stories and one novel that make up this collection are set, wholly or primarily, in Japan, land of the artful mask. Meet the man who loses his key and sets in motion a chain of events whose incomprehensibility he will never understand; a small girl who accosts a fugitive murderer (is he really a murderer?) for sex, only to be admonished to go back to school; a murdered boy who is resurrected (is he really?) and wreaks his mad revenge; and, finally, Sidney Levin, whose reunion twenty years later with a lost Japanese girlfriend ends in a hopeless entanglement with her growing daughter.

Why did the woman in the restaurant scream? Why is the man falsely charged guilty? The empty cafe fills; reason unravels. In the novella "Solitude, " the last of eight tales in this volume, Solomon Rose returns home after 22 years to confront a dilemma soluble only by murder.