“I hated looking for work. I hated circling the classifieds, I hated the web searches, I hated the web job sites, I hated the phony resumes, I hated the phony interviews. What do you think your greatest strength is? I got to the highest level of Wolfenstein II The New Colossus. How do you think that would help you in this job? Hand-eye coordination. High moral character - I killed a lot of bad guys. Oh, and I killed a few bad women too. Um, I killed some good guys, but I was still a beginner when that happened. What’s your greatest weakness? How much time you got? That would be an honest interview. But I need a job, so you have to make shit up and look like you care." Jack Lack has just lost another job to the invisible forces of automation, algorithms, and artificial intelligence. This time, though, he decides to get off the high-tech merry-go-round of serial job loss. This time, he is determined to fight back - but against who? And how? A Bit Too Much is a darkly humorous satire that will intrigue readers of contemporary fiction with its intriguing portrayal of a young man who grew up in the haze of Texas Gulf Coast refineries and is facing an uncertain future. “4/5 Stars – Loved It! The fear of losing one’s job to a robot is not misplaced, as 2019 news reports say that one-quarter of American jobs are at a high risk of automation. Clack has picked up on this sentiment perfectly and woven an all-too-real story around it. Descriptions of Amazon’s automated stores and Uber’s driverless cars give the story a sense of immediacy. The writing is smooth and descriptions are informative…tongue-in-cheek humor and biting sarcasm…” - Satabdi Mukherjee, Reedsy

With today's flood of data circulating on storage media and the Internet, compression of digital data remains an immensely important aspect of data transmission and storage. This essential explains, without theoretical superstructure and with elementary mathematical methods, the most important compression methods, such as the entropy encodings of Shannon-Fano and of Huffman, as well as the dictionary encodings of the Lempel-Ziv family. Irrelevance reduction and quantization for optical and acoustic signals, which exploit the inadequacies of the human eye and ear for data compression, are also discussed in detail. The whole is illustrated by means of common practical applications from the everyday environment. The presentation allows for use in, for example, working groups at schools, introductory courses at universities, and is also suitable for interested laypersons. This Springer essential is a translation of the original German 1st edition essentials, Gut gepackt Kein Bit zu viel by Olaf Manz, published by Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature in 2020. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors. The Content Data transmission and storage Digitization Overview of data compression methods Entropy encodings Dictionary encodings Quantization The Author Dr. Olaf Manz worked as a research assistant and Heisenberg professor at the mathematical institutes of the universities of Mainz and Heidelberg. He then worked for many years at Siemens in IT product management and also knows data processing from the practical side. He is the author of the books "Fehlerkorrigierende Codes" and "Verschlusseln, Signieren, Angreifen" published by Springer

The New York Times Bestseller In 2006 Jamie Tworkowski wrote a story called “To Write Love on Her Arms,” about helping a friend through her struggle with drug addiction, depression, and self-injury. The piece was so hauntingly beautiful that it quickly went viral, giving birth to a non-profit organization of the same name. Now, To Write Love on Her Arms (TWLOHA) is an internationally recognized leader in suicide prevention and a source of hope, encouragement, and support for people worldwide. If You Feel Too Much is a celebration of hope, wonder, and what it means to be human. From personal stories of struggling on days most people celebrate to words of strength and encouragement in moments of loss, the essays in this book invite readers to believe that it’s okay to admit to pain and okay to ask for help. If You Feel Too Much is an important book from one of this generation’s most important voices.

Four trips to different worlds. A bicycle ride in Japan, a long weekend in Cairns Queensland, two weeks in India and another ride in New Zealand.