Dear Mom, Joy's vaporator lipstick extracted me onto an enhanced microchip-virtual black ops is what I do nights now, nobody regulates this bio gun biz so they've cut our pay chits like porridge to orphans.. Please cyber credit my kill zones quick... - David S. Pointer

A winner of the Hayden Carruth Award and selected for publication from over one thousand manuscripts.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Beckett and nothing invites its readership to understand the complex ways in which the Beckett canon both suggests and resists turning nothing into something by looking at specific, sometimes almost invisible ways in which ‘little nothings’ pervade the Beckett canon. The volume has two main functions: on the one hand, it looks at ‘nothing’ not only as a content but also a set of rhetorical strategies to reconsider afresh classic Beckett problems such as Irishness, silence, value, marginality, politics and the relationships between modernism and postmodernism and absence and presence. On the other, it focuses on ‘nothing’ in order to assess how the Beckett oeuvre can help us rethink contemporary preoccupations with materialism, neurology, sculpture, music and television. The volume is a scholarly intervention in the fields of Beckett studies which offers its chapters as case studies to use in the classroom. It will prove of interest to advanced students and scholars in English, French, Comparative Literature, Drama, Visual Studies, Philosophy, Music, Cinema and TV studies.

Chemical synapses are specialised junctions through which cells of the nervous system signal to one another and to non-neuronal cells such as muscles or glands. A chemical synapse between a motor neuron and a muscle cell is called a neuromuscular junction. Chemical synapses allow the neurons of the central nervous system to form interconnected neural circuits. They are thus crucial to the biological computations that underlie perception and thought. They also provide the means through which the nervous system connects to and controls the other systems of the body. The human brain contains a huge number of chemical synapses, with young children having about 1016 synapses (10,000 trillion[1].). This number declines with age, stabilising by adulthood. Estimates for an adult vary from 1015 to 5 × 1015 synapses (1,000 to 5,000 trillion).

The three volume set LNCS 7062, LNCS 7063, and LNCS 7064 constitutes the proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Neural Information Processing, ICONIP 2011, held in Shanghai, China, in November 2011. The 262 regular session papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers of part I are organized in topical sections on perception, emotion and development, bioinformatics, biologically inspired vision and recognition, bio-medical data analysis, brain signal processing, brain-computer interfaces, brain-like systems, brain-realistic models for learning, memory and embodied cognition, Clifford algebraic neural networks, combining multiple learners, computational advances in bioinformatics, and computational-intelligent human computer interaction. The second volume is structured in topical sections on cybersecurity and data mining workshop, data mining and knowledge doscovery, evolutionary design and optimisation, graphical models, human-originated data analysis and implementation, information retrieval, integrating multiple nature-inspired approaches, kernel methods and support vector machines, and learning and memory. The third volume contains all the contributions connected with multi-agent systems, natural language processing and intelligent Web information processing, neural encoding and decoding, neural network models, neuromorphic hardware and implementations, object recognition, visual perception modelling, and advances in computational intelligence methods based pattern recognition.

"Synaptic Reverie" is a captivating exploration of perception, reality, and the intricate workings of the human mind. Set in a not so far future where technological advancements blur the lines between consciousness and artificial intelligence, the story takes us on a thrilling journey through a world where technology and human emotions intertwine. It follows the story of Akio, a brilliant researcher, as he uncovers a hidden agenda within Synapse, a cutting-edge technology company. With his enigmatic colleague Mika, Akio embarks on a perilous journey, confronting his own internal conflicts and delving into the nature of truth. As alliances shift and secrets unravel, Akio's relentless pursuit of justice becomes a quest to shape the future of humanity. Filled with intrigue, suspense, and profound explorations of identity and the power of emotions, "Synaptic Reverie" challenges readers to reflect on the ethical implications of technological progress and the essence of what it means to be human.

All mountains, forced up from the earth's crust by forces greater than we can imagine in a time so far in the past that we can imagine, carry an aura of 'climb me at your own risk, puny earthling.' But there are mountains which are truly dark, ones which hold secrets that are only uncovered at our peril. Take the rocky pathway to the summit, see what awaits you...