Mix yourself a Hurricane and see New Orleans through a glass of rum.Like a drunken Mardi Gras parade, the history of New Orleans lurches from electrifying highs to heart-rending lows. Through it all, good drink was a constant - especially rum. The victory at the Battle of New Orleans was sealed with a barrel of rum, and a half-hearted implementation of Prohibition a century later certainly didn't dampen the city's spirits. From priests making tafia to modern deligh...

In a world built on a lie, can one woman make the lie true enough to stop a war?One day, Sasha hopes to become one of the most powerful mages of her generation. The world is not as it ought to be—the Heroes of old are long gone, nobody dares approach the elven forests, and most of the remaining mages are pushed into military service.Sasha has no time for any of that, however. The curse on her bloodline brings ever increasing danger to her doorstep. Her only hope of a cure l...

Drawing upon a range of perspectives from textual and cultural studies, this book synthesizes textual, contextual and audience analysis into an overall picture of meaning making. Using examples ranging from Balzac to blonde jokes, modernist poetry to pop lyrics, the book discusses the factors that contribute to the fomation of meaning: language, media, texts, contexts and readers.In the cultural study of texts - texts, contexts and practices - are equally important, the author argu...

An Introduction to Aquatic Toxicology is an introductory reference for all aspects of toxicology pertaining to aquatic environments. As water sources diminish, the need to understand the effects that contaminants may have on aquatic organisms and ecosystems increases in importance. This book will provide you with a solid understanding of aquatic toxicology, its past, its cutting-edge present and its likely future. An Introduction to Aquatic Toxicology will introduce you to the global issue...

This book addresses the interplay between stochastic processes and partial differential equations. More specifically, it focuses on the connection between the nonlinear p-Laplace equation and the stochastic game called tug-of-war with noise. The connection in this context was discovered approximately 15 years ago and has since provided new insights and approaches. These lecture notes provide a brief but detailed and accessible introduction to the subject and to the more research-oriented l...

The remnants of humanity reside on Mars after a nebulous Enemy destroyed Earth.Revealed to be an advanced nanotechnological AI geared to produce paperclips, their Enemy does so with abandon out of everything it touches.Taru, a recently-promoted cadet in the Martian special forces, is tasked to implement a mutually-assured destruction deterrent: to survive, the Martians threaten to destroy the Universe through false vacuum collapse if the AI attacks Mars.As events ar...

An enlightening examination of the economic fundamentals of efficient organizing, focusing on governance and avoiding organizational waste in all forms. If there are two alternative ways to perform a task, why not choose the one that generates less waste? In Efficient Organization, Mikko Ketokivi and Joseph T. Mahoney take a practical and decision-oriented approach to organization design and governance. They first examine contracting and relationships within and a...

This open access book offers a concise yet pedagogic introduction to the theory of cosmological inflation and the early epochs that follow it. Inflation explains how the seeds for density perturbations could have formed during a period of exponential expansion. Apart from density perturbations, also so-called tensor perturbations are generated, which may be observed as gravitational waves. Starting from the Einstein equations of general relativity, the formalism is developed through explic...

Battlefield Forensics for Persian Gulf States provides an illustrative reference of various weapons, toolmarks, headstamps, and other traits in order to identify the origins of a variety of guns, casings, and ammunition that can be found in the Middle East. Various conflicts in the region have led to innumerable weapons being used throughout the years. The lead author, Don Mikko, has investigated and examined firearms related items of evidence in countless crime scenes throughout the world...

This book studies maximal solvable subgroups of classical groups over finite fields. It provides the first modern account of Camille Jordan's classical results, and extends them, giving a classification of maximal irreducible solvable subgroups of general linear groups, symplectic groups, and orthogonal groups over arbitrary finite fields.A subgroup of a group G is said to be maximal solvable if it is maximal among the solvable subgroups of G. The history of this notion goes back t...

Examines the importance of Leo Bersani's work for queer theory, psychoanalysis, literary criticism and theory, cultural studies, and film studies.For more than fifty years, Leo Bersani's writing has inspired and challenged scholars in the fields of literary criticism and theory, cultural studies, queer theory, psychoanalysis, and film and visual studies. This is the first book-length collection on this important author. The book's extensive introduction outlines in...

This collection focuses on conceptions of the unfamiliar from the viewpoint of mainstream American history: aliens, immigrants, ethnic groups, and previously unencountered ideas and ideologies in Trumpian America. The book suggests bringing historical thinking back to the center of American Studies, given that it has been recently challenged by the influential memory studies boom. As much as identity-building appears to be the central concern for much of the current practice in American hi...