In January 2004, I travelled to Zambia with Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) to take up a two-year placement as a physics teacher at Kasempa Day High School in Northwestern Province. I returned to the UK in December 2005. In an attempt to piece together a coherent chronology of my time in Zambia, this book presents a compilation of emails, journal entries and letters that I wrote.

Originally published in 1969, this book challenges the view among many 20th Century philosophers that no cogent arguments could be found capable of providing support for the normative pronouncements of practical morality. The book asserts that this conclusion is mistaken and the result of basic deficiencies endemic in the logical structure of traditional ethics. The volume develops an argument whose logical structure is quite different from the ways of reasoning that have dominated the history of Western ethics and which allows answers to such primary questions of practical morality such as 'How ought we as moral beings to act?'

Originally published in 1969, this book challenges the view among many 20th Century philosophers that no cogent arguments could be found capable of providing support for the normative pronouncements of practical morality. The book asserts that this conclusion is mistaken and the result of basic deficiencies endemic in the logical structure of traditional ethics. The volume develops an argument whose logical structure is quite different from the ways of reasoning that have dominated the history of Western ethics and which allows answers to such primary questions of practical morality such as 'How ought we as moral beings to act?'

In our hyper-modern world, we are bombarded with more facts, stats and information than ever before. So, what can we grasp hold of to make sense of it all? Oliver Johnson reveals how mathematical thinking can help us understand the myriad data all around us. From the exponential growth of viruses to social media filter-bubbles; from share-price fluctuations to growth of computing power; from the datafication of our sports pages to quantifying climate change. Not to mention the things much closer to home: ever wondered when the best time is to leave a party? What are the chances of rain ruining your barbecue this weekend? How about which queue is the best to join in the supermarket? Journeying through the three sections of Randomness, Structure, and Information, we meet a host of brilliant minds such Alan Turing, Enrico Fermi and Claude Shannon, and we learn the tools, tips and tricks to cut through the noise all around us - from the Law of Large Numbers to Entropy to Brownian Motion. Lucid, surprising, and endlessly entertaining, Numbercrunch equips you with a definitive mathematician's toolkit to make sense of your world.

In our hyper-modern world, we are bombarded with more facts, stats and information than ever before. So, what can we grasp hold of to make sense of it all? Oliver Johnson reveals how mathematical thinking can help us understand the myriad data all around us. From the exponential growth of viruses to social media filter-bubbles; from share price fluctuations to the cost of living; from the datafication of our sports pages to quantifying climate change. Not to mention the things much closer to home: ever wondered when the best time is to leave a party? What are the chances of rain ruining your barbecue this weekend? How about which queue is the best to join in the supermarket? Journeying through three sections - Randomness, Structure, and Information - we meet a host of brilliant minds, such Alan Turing, Enrico Fermi and Claude Shannon, and are equipped with the tools to cut through the noise all around us - from the Law of Large Numbers to Entropy to Brownian Motion. Lucid, surprising, and endlessly entertaining, Numbercrunch equips you with a definitive mathematician's toolkit to make sense of your world.

In 2014, a 28-year old British doctor found himself co-running the Ebola isolation unit in Sierra Leone's main hospital after the doctor in charge had been killed by the virus. Completely overwhelmed and wrapped in stifling protective suits, he and his team took it in turns to provide care to patients while removing dead bodies from the ward. Against all odds he battled to keep the hospital open, as the queue of sick and dying patients grew every day. Only a few miles down the road the Irish Ambassador and Head of Irish Aid worked relentlessly to rapidly scale up the international response. At a time when entire districts had been quarantined, she travelled around the country, and met with UN agencies, the President and senior ministers so as to be better placed in alerting the world to the catastrophe unfolding in front of her. In this blow-by-blow account, Walsh and Johnson expose the often shocking shortcomings of the humanitarian response to the outbreak, both locally and internationally, and call our attention to the immense courage of those who put their lives on the line every day to contain the disease. Theirs is the definitive account of the fight against an epidemic that shook the world.

Group testing emerged as an area for research from the need for the US Government to screen recruits in the second world war for syphilis. Obviously rather than testing each recruit, a more efficient method involving the minimal number of tests was required. The central problem of group testing is thus: Given a number of items and a number of defectives, how many tests are required to accurately discover the defective items, and how can this be achieved? Group testing has since found applications in medical testing, biology, telecommunications, information technology, data science, and more. The focus of this survey is on the non-adaptive setting of group testing. In this setting, the test pools are designed in advance enabling them to be implemented in parallel. The survey gives a comprehensive and thorough treatment of the subject from an information theoretic perspective. It covers several related developments: efficient algorithms with practical storage and computation requirements, achievability bounds for optimal decoding methods, and algorithm-independent converse bounds. It assesses the theoretical guarantees not only in terms of scaling laws, but also in terms of the constant factors, leading to the notion of the rate of group testing, indicating the amount of information learned per test. Considering both noiseless and noisy settings, it identifies several regimes where existing algorithms are provably optimal or near-optimal, as well as regimes where there remains greater potential for improvement. This monograph is an accessible treatment of an important topic for researchers and students in Information Theory.

What the English can teach the Welsh about rugby : a NOVELTY book, which takes concision to the extreme. (The book is completely blank)