The Cycles of Speculation is a comprehensive exploration of the recurring patterns and psychological forces that drive financial markets, written by Thomas Gibson. First published in 1911, the book delves into the nature of speculation, examining how human emotions, crowd psychology, and economic conditions combine to create cycles of boom and bust. Gibson draws on historical examples from stock markets, commodities, and real estate to illustrate the universal tendencies of investors to sw...

In The Value of Comparison Peter van der Veer makes a compelling case for using comparative approaches in the study of society and for the need to resist the simplified civilization narratives popular in public discourse and some social theory. He takes the quantitative social sciences and the broad social theories they rely on to task for their inability to question Western cultural presuppositions, demonstrating that anthropology's comparative approach provides a better means to...

This title was first published in 2001. A general introduction to the study of motorised road haulage in Britain from its beginng up to the outbreak of the Second World War (1904-1940). Filling a gap in market, this is the first work to offer a broad survey into the subject, and is intended to stimulate further interest and debate.

Charles Booth’s seventeen-volume series, The Life and Labour of the People in London (1886-1903), is a staple of late Victorian social history and a monumental work of scholarship. Despite these facts, historians have paid little attention to its section on religious influences. Thomas Gibson-Brydon’s The Moral Mapping of Victorian and Edwardian London seeks to remedy this neglect.Combing through the interviews Booth and his researchers conducted with 1,800 churchmen and w...

This festschrift was written in honor of Andrew William (Bill) Roscoe on the occasion of his 60th birthday, and features tributes by Sir Tony Hoare, Stephen Brookes, and Michael Wooldridge. Bill Roscoe is an international authority in process algebra, and has been the driving force behind the development of the FDR refinement checker for CSP. He is also world renowned for his pioneering work in analyzing security protocols, modeling information flow, human-interactive security, and much mo...

Selected Short's most popular volume! Over three hours of stories to tickle your funny bone.Nicholson Baker's "Subsoil"performed by Thomas GibsonA darkly comic thriller about a tractor historian besieged by man-eating potatoes.David Schickler's "Jamaica"performed by Isaiah ShefferA man with his head stuck between the banisters has no choice but to listen in on his wife's "Gorgon Book Club."Neil Gaiman's "Chivalry"performe...

Ronald Hutton is known for his colourful and provocative writings on original subjects. This work is no exception: for the first full-scale scholarly study of the only religion England has ever given the world; that of modern pagan witchcraft, which has now spread from English shores across four continents. Hutton examines the nature of that religion and its development, and offers a microhistory of attitudes to paganism, witchcraft, and magic in British society since 1800. Itspages reveal...

The concept of an encyclopedic museum was born of the Enlightenment, a manifestation of society’s growing belief that the spread of knowledge and the promotion of intellectual inquiry were crucial to human development and the future of a rational society. But in recent years, museums have been under attack, with critics arguing that they are little more than relics and promoters of imperialism. Could it be that the encyclopedic museum has outlived its usefulness?With Museums Ma...

Text mining is a new and exciting area of computer science research that tries to solve the crisis of information overload by combining techniques from data mining, machine learning, natural language processing, information retrieval, and knowledge management. Similarly, link detection – a rapidly evolving approach to the analysis of text that shares and builds upon many of the key elements of text mining – also provides new tools for people to better leverage their burgeoning textual data...

Nowadays we believe that consenting adults have the freedom to do what they like with their own bodies. We publicise and celebrate sex; we discuss it endlessly; we are obsessed with the sex lives of celebrities. We think it wrong that in other cultures people suffer for their sexual orientation, that women are treated as second-class citizens, or that adulterers are put to death. Yet until quite recently our own society was like this too. For most of western history, all sex outside marria...

This book is a thorough introduction to the formal foundations and practical applications of Bayesian networks. It provides an extensive discussion of techniques for building Bayesian networks that model real-world situations, including techniques for synthesizing models from design, learning models from data, and debugging models using sensitivity analysis. It also treats exact and approximate inference algorithms at both theoretical and practical levels. The treatment of exact algorithms...

Jhumpa Lahiri is among the few contemporary writers being read widely by both mainstream and minority audiences, the general public and academic scholars, in the U.S. and globally. While her works focus on specific ethnic experiences of highly educated, upper middle-class professional Bengalis and their children living in New England since the 1970s, they simultaneously address universal themes that consistently keep them on the New York Times bestseller lists, and that have made the film ...