Hack the Edge Off Classics comprises a collection of all my surviving fiction writing from 2009 to 2024, the year I wrote and published my first novel called Warrens Witches Psionics. I consider all this earlier writing as practice for that novel. Both the included Warrens series and the Moral Hazard series belong to the same leaky universe as Warrens Witches Psionics, and form prequels to it. The Warrens series and my story game Dandelion developed closely together. I used Dandelion subse...

• Reveals the powerful influence of near-death experiences (NDEs) on the formation of religious beliefs, mystical literature, and ritual practices• Focuses on the afterlife beliefs of five ancient world regions: Old and Middle Kingdom Egypt, Sumer and Old Babylonian Mesopotamia, Vedic India, pre-Buddhist China, and Maya and Aztec Mesoamerica• Shows how the similarities among afterlife beliefs and their correspondences with NDEs reveal that they both stem from universal trut...

When a bird of prey snatches a baby rabbit, the rabbits suspect something much worse. This thrilling adventure mixes naturalistic talking rabbits in the style of Watership Down together with psionic powers, teleporters, helpful robots and dangerous monsters. Follow the rabbits of Oraculum Warren, their neighbours Deep Index Warren, the hi-tech Greenmint Warren and the secretive Mothership Down Warren in this beautifully-told fable. The rabbits will need all their faith and courage to survi...

"Never Had the Like Occurred" examines Ancient Egypt's own multifaceted encounters with its past. As Egyptian culture constantly changed and evolved, this book follows a chronological arrangement, from early Egypt to the attitudes of the Coptic population in the Byzantine Period. Within this framework, it asks what access the Egyptians had to information about the past, whether deliberately or accidentally acquired; what use was made of the past; what were the Egyptians attitudes to the pa...

A juicy piece of trivia is like a beautiful fresh cut of protein. It needs to be handled just right. Some fillets of trivia work well as a question, others are best posed as a ‘Did you know’. Some have so much flesh on them that they are better served up as a whole story or essay. That is what you will find between these pages, a smorgasbord of trivia treats to feast upon. Like a buffet on a cruise ship, you can start at the beginning and work your way along, you can push in at any point f...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 39th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2017, held in Aberdeen, UK, in April 2017.The 36 full papers and 47 poster papers presented together with 5 Abstracts, were carefully reviewed and selected from 248 submissions. Being the premier European forum for the presentation of new research results in the field of Information Retrieval, ECIR features a wide range of topics such as: IR Theory and Practice; Deep Learning and IR;...

Harry Vanda and George Young put Friday on our minds, triggered Easyfever with the Easybeats, and harnessed the raw energy and power of Aussie pub rock to make superstars of AC/DC, Rose Tattoo, and the Angels. The day Vanda and Young met at Sydney's Villawood Migrant Hostel has been called the most significant moment in Australian music history. What followed, as members of the Easybeats, producers and mentors for George's brothers' band AC/DC, and songwriters of a diverse range of hits fr...

• Reveals the powerful influence of near-death experiences (NDEs) on the formation of religious beliefs, mystical literature, and ritual practices• Focuses on the afterlife beliefs of five ancient world regions: Old and Middle Kingdom Egypt, Sumer and Old Babylonian Mesopotamia, Vedic India, pre-Buddhist China, and Maya and Aztec Mesoamerica• Shows how the similarities among afterlife beliefs and their correspondences with NDEs reveal that they both stem from universal trut...

An engrossing biography of the longest-reigning female pharaoh in Ancient Egypt and the story of her audacious rise to power.Hatshepsut—the daughter of a general who usurped Egypt's throne—was expected to bear the sons who would legitimize the reign of her father’s family. Her failure to produce a male heir, however, paved the way for her improbable rule as a cross-dressing king. At just over twenty, Hatshepsut out-maneuvered the mother of Thutmose III, the infant ...

Class-tested and coherent, this textbook teaches classical and web information retrieval, including web search and the related areas of text classification and text clustering from basic concepts. It gives an up-to-date treatment of all aspects of the design and implementation of systems for gathering, indexing, and searching documents; methods for evaluating systems; and an introduction to the use of machine learning methods on text collections. All the important ideas are explained using...

In this age of information overload, people use a variety of strategies to make choices about what to buy, how to spend their leisure time, and even whom to date. Recommender systems automate some of these strategies with the goal of providing affordable, personal, and high-quality recommendations. This book offers an overview of approaches to developing state-of-the-art recommender systems. The authors present current algorithmic approaches for generating personalized buying proposals, su...

Do you remember Beatlemania? Radio Caroline? Mods and Rockers? The very first miniskirts? Then the chances are you were born in the or around 1960.To the young people of today, the 1960s seems like another age. But for those who grew up in this decade, school life, 'mod' fashions and sixties pop music are still fresh in their minds. From James Bond to Sindy dolls and playing hopscotch in the street, life was very different to how it is now. After the tough and frug...