This straight-talking, empowering video program offers essential information on how problem gambling develops, its damaging impact on individuals and families, and how it can successfully be treated. Through candid first-hand accounts from four recovering gamblers, along with illuminating commentary from mental health experts, the program shows gamblers, their families, and therapists: *How an alluring diversion becomes a shameful secret as problem gambling takes hold *Common myths and misperceptions about gambling--and why winning big is so unlikely *The benefits of individual and group therapy and self-help approaches *Ways to overcome setbacks in recovery and make meaningful, lasting changes Winner--CINE Golden Eagle Award

Michael Walker's Laurel Canyon presents the inside story of the once hottest rock and roll neighborhood in LA. In the late sixties and early seventies, an impromptu collection of musicians colonized a eucalyptus-scented canyon deep in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles and melded folk, rock, and savvy American pop into a sound that conquered the world as thoroughly as the songs of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had before them. Thirty years later, the music made in Laurel Canyon continues to pour from radios, iPods, and concert stages around the world. During the canyon's golden era, the musicians who lived and worked there scored dozens of landmark hits, from California Dreamin' to Suite: Judy Blue Eyes to It's Too Late, selling tens of millions of records and resetting the thermostat of pop culture. In Laurel Canyon, veteran journalist Michael Walker tells the inside story of this unprecedented gathering of some of the baby boomer's leading musical lights--including Joni Mitchell; Jim Morrison; Crosby, Stills, and Nash; John Mayall; the Mamas and the Papas; Carole King; the Eagles; and Frank Zappa, to name just a few--who turned Los Angeles into the music capital of the world and forever changed the way popular music is recorded, marketed, and consumed.

This book offers a new way of thinking about film endings. Whereas existing works on the subject concentrate on narrative resolution, this book explores the way film endings blend together a complex of motifs, tropes and other elements to create the sense of an ending -that is, it looks at 'endings as endings'. Drawing on a wide range of examples taken from films of different periods and national cinemas, the author identifies three key features which structure the work: thresholds and boundaries, water, and, above all, the beach. The beach combines water and a boundary and is the most resonant of the key sites to which film endings gravitate. Although beach endings go back to at least 1910, they have increased markedly in post-classical cinema, and can be found across all genres and in films from many different countries. As the leading example of the book's argument, they illustrate both the aesthetic richness and the structural complexity of film endings.

The IMA conferences onCryptographyandCoding arenotonly a blend of these two aspects of information theory, but a blend of mathematics and engineering and of theoretical results and applications. The papers in this book show that the1999conferencewasnoexception. Indeed, weagainsawthemathematics- derlyingcryptographyanderrorcorrectingcodingbeing appliedto otheraspects ofcommunications, andwe alsosawclassicalmathematicalconcepts nding new applications in communications theory. As usual the conference was held at the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, shortly before Christmas - this time 20-22 December 1999. The papers appear in this book in the order in which they were presented, grouped into sessions, eachsessionbeginning with an invited paper. Theseinvited papers were intended to re?ect the invitees' views on the future of their subject - or more accurately where they intended to take it. Indeed the focus of the conf- encewas thefutureofcryptographyandcoding as seenthroughtheeyes ofyoung researchers. The r st group of papers is concerned with mathematical bounds, concepts, and constructions that form a common thread running through error corre- ing coding theory, cryptography, and codes for multiple access schemes. This is followed by a group of papers from a conference session concerned with app- cations. The papers range over various topics from arithmetic coding for data compression and encryption, through image coding, biometrics for authenti- tion, and access to broadcast channels, to photographic signatures for secure identi cation. The third set of papers deals with theoretical aspects of error c- recting coding, including graph and trellis decoding, turbo codes, convolution codes and low complexity soft decision decoding of Reed Solomon codes.

This third edition of Reconstructing Quaternary Environments has been completely revised and updated to provide a new account of the history and scale of environmental changes during the Quaternary. The evidence is extremely diverse ranging from landforms and sediments to fossil assemblages and geochemical data, and includes new data from terrestrial, marine and ice-core records. Dating methods are described and evaluated, while the principles and practices of Quaternary stratigraphy are also discussed. The volume concludes with a new chapter which considers some of the key questions about the nature, causes and consequences of global climatic and environmental change over a range of temporal scales. This synthesis builds on the methods and approaches described earlier in the book to show how a number of exciting ideas that have emerged over the last two decades are providing new insights into the operation of the global earth-ocean-atmosphere system, and are now central to many areas of contemporary Quaternary research. This comprehensive and dynamic textbook is richly illustrated throughout with full-colour figures and photographs. The book will be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and professionals in Earth Science, Environmental Science, Physical Geography, Geology, Botany, Zoology, Ecology, Archaeology and Anthropology

This book offers a new way of thinking about film endings. Whereas existing works on the subject concentrate on narrative resolution, this book explores the way film endings blend together a complex of motifs, tropes and other elements to create the sense of an ending -that is, it looks at 'endings as endings'. Drawing on a wide range of examples taken from films of different periods and national cinemas, the author identifies three key features which structure the work: thresholds and boundaries, water, and, above all, the beach. The beach combines water and a boundary and is the most resonant of the key sites to which film endings gravitate. Although beach endings go back to at least 1910, they have increased markedly in post-classical cinema, and can be found across all genres and in films from many different countries. As the leading example of the book's argument, they illustrate both the aesthetic richness and the structural complexity of film endings.

The two-time Grammy Award-winning singer and songwriter bares her heart and soul in this intimate memoir, a story of music, stardom, love, family, heritage, and resilience. She inspired songs-Leon Russell wrote "A Song for You" and "Delta Lady" for her, Stephen Stills wrote "Cherokee." She co-wrote songs-"Superstar" and the piano coda to "Layla," uncredited. She sang backup for Eric Clapton, Joe Cocker, and Stills, before finding fame as a solo artist with such hits as "We're All Alone" and "(Your Love Has Lifted Me) Higher and Higher." Following her story from Lafayette, Tennessee to becoming one of the most sought after rock vocalists in LA in the 1970s, Delta Lady chronicles Rita Coolidge's fascinating journey throughout the '60s-'70s pop/rock universe. A muse to some of the twentieth century's most influential rock musicians, she broke hearts, and broke up bands. Her relationship with drummer Jim Gordon took a violent turn during the legendary 1970 Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour; David Crosby maintained that her triangle with Stills and Graham Nash was the last straw for the group. Her volatile six-year marriage to Kris Kristofferson yielded two Grammys, a daughter, and one of the Baby Boom generation's epic love stories. Throughout it all, her strength, resilience, and inner and outer beauty-along with her strong sense of heritage and devotion to her family-helped her to not only survive, but thrive. Co-written with best-selling author Michael Walker, Delta Lady is a rich, deeply personal memoir that offers a front row seat to an iconic era, and illuminates the life of an artist whose career has helped shape modern American culture.

Explore supercharged machine learning techniques to take care of your data laundry loads Key Features Learn how to prepare data for machine learning processes Understand which algorithms are based on prediction objectives and the properties of the data Explore how to interpret and evaluate the results from machine learning Book DescriptionMany individuals who know how to run machine learning algorithms do not have a good sense of the statistical assumptions they make and how to match the properties of the data to the algorithm for the best results. As you start with this book, models are carefully chosen to help you grasp the underlying data, including in-feature importance and correlation, and the distribution of features and targets. The first two parts of the book introduce you to techniques for preparing data for ML algorithms, without being bashful about using some ML techniques for data cleaning, including anomaly detection and feature selection. The book then helps you apply that knowledge to a wide variety of ML tasks. You'll gain an understanding of popular supervised and unsupervised algorithms, how to prepare data for them, and how to evaluate them. Next, you'll build models and understand the relationships in your data, as well as perform cleaning and exploration tasks with that data. You'll make quick progress in studying the distribution of variables, identifying anomalies, and examining bivariate relationships, as you focus more on the accuracy of predictions in this book. By the end of this book, you'll be able to deal with complex data problems using unsupervised ML algorithms like principal component analysis and k-means clustering. What you will learn Explore essential data cleaning and exploration techniques to be used before running the most popular machine learning algorithms Understand how to perform preprocessing and feature selection, and how to set up the data for testing and validation Model continuous targets with supervised learning algorithms Model binary and multiclass targets with supervised learning algorithms Execute clustering and dimension reduction with unsupervised learning algorithms Understand how to use regression trees to model a continuous target Who this book is forThis book is for professional data scientists, particularly those in the first few years of their career, or more experienced analysts who are relatively new to machine learning. Readers should have prior knowledge of concepts in statistics typically taught in an undergraduate introductory course as well as beginner-level experience in manipulating data programmatically.