Beginning with 'Aardvark' and ending with 'Zuma' (with all sorts of animals, brands, characters, places and plants in-between) this book captures and alphabetises the essence of South Africa. A remarkable achievement for such a small book, don't you think?

Dirk de Vos’s journey, which has taken him across continents, within dynamic cultures, and into direct experience within divergent ideologies, originated in the land of apartheid, South Africa, and ended in the far north of another continent. Cobblestones follows the path of this personal journey while embarking on a journey of political discovery as well. With understanding, rooted in his childhood in apartheid South Africa, and spanning work experience in law, multinational business, government, and academics, de Vos is uniquely positioned to comprehend the origins and nature of transformative and manipulative political processes, especially as they bear on the growing importance and problématique of the interplay between human rights and multiculturalism. A central argument that emerges in this intricate mix of personal experience and sociopolitical analysis echoes Gene Veith’s view of political postmodernism as rejecting of individual identity. This results in a collectivist mentality in which individual claims are lost in the demands of the group. de Vos expands on such an idea, demonstrating its origins, addressing the results of social experiments driven by such beliefs, and analyzing the influence of groupism on recent politics in Europe, Africa, and North America. Cobblestones is certain to evoke important, expansive thought and discussion among readers and students alike.

Are you involved in making decisions in court, a tribunal, or another formal decision-making environment? This book gives guidance in the skills required to reach and deliver well-structured judicial decisions. The authors (all of whom have extensive judicial and quasi-judicial experience) instruct the readers on the skills required at each stage of a hearing, including: - ensuring there is a fair hearing process; - standards and conduct of decision-makers; - successful communication; - taking into account the needs of vulnerable participants and litigants in person; - case management; - assessing evidence; and - the process of reaching and then delivering a well-structured decision. The book includes practical guidance, examples, and short exercises to help the reader engage with the issues discussed and understand the skills required. Buy this book and you will have the confidence you need to make great decisions.

Feature engineering is a crucial step in the machine-learning pipeline, yet this topic is rarely examined on its own. With this practical book, you’ll learn techniques for extracting and transforming features—the numeric representations of raw data—into formats for machine-learning models. Each chapter guides you through a single data problem, such as how to represent text or image data. Together, these examples illustrate the main principles of feature engineering. Rather than simply teach these principles, authors Alice Zheng and Amanda Casari focus on practical application with exercises throughout the book. The closing chapter brings everything together by tackling a real-world, structured dataset with several feature-engineering techniques. Python packages including numpy, Pandas, Scikit-learn, and Matplotlib are used in code examples. You’ll examine: Feature engineering for numeric data: filtering, binning, scaling, log transforms, and power transforms Natural text techniques: bag-of-words, n-grams, and phrase detection Frequency-based filtering and feature scaling for eliminating uninformative features Encoding techniques of categorical variables, including feature hashing and bin-counting Model-based feature engineering with principal component analysis The concept of model stacking, using k-means as a featurization technique Image feature extraction with manual and deep-learning techniques

IF YOU KNEW A BOOK WAS CURSED, WOULD YOU READ IT? When Ariel Manto uncovers a copy of The End of Mr Y in a second-hand bookshop, she can't believe her eyes. She's read about its author before, the outlandish Victorian scientist Thomas Lumas, and this is his most notorious, and rarest, book. It is also believed to hold a curse. Anyone who's ever read it, including Lumas, has disappeared without trace. With Mr Y under her arm, Ariel is thrust into an adventure of faith, physics, love, death, and everything in between. Part gothic mystery, part time-travelling love story, The End of Mr Y lies somewhere between Shadow of the Wind and Dr Who. Scarlett Thomas sends us on a wild and irresistible quest into our deepest selves and our biggest questions.