Gather round the fireside and let our motley crew of characters regale you with stories of humour and horror, love and lust, mischief and mayhem! The Winter Of Our Mixed Content features authors of every shade. The reader will discover everything from pulp fiction to saucy humour within these pages, all bound with the bow of a festive theme. Christmas is the best of times, we are told. But for many children it is the worst. The author members of My Writers Circle, who have kindly offered their work for free, hope to bring a little light into the lives of these unfortunate children. You can help too, by purchasing The Winter of our Mixed Content. All proceeds will be donated to children's charities.We hope you enjoy these tales and we thank you for helping those less fortunate than ourselves at this special time of year.

The final novel of one of America’s most beloved writers—a tale of degeneration, corruption, and spiritual crisis A Penguin Classic In awarding John Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel committee stated that with The Winter of Our Discontent, he had “resumed his position as an independent expounder of the truth, with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American.” Ethan Allen Hawley, the protagonist of Steinbeck’s last novel, works as a clerk in a grocery store that his family once owned. With Ethan no longer a member of Long Island’s aristocratic class, his wife is restless, and his teenage children are hungry for the tantalizing material comforts he cannot provide. Then one day, in a moment of moral crisis, Ethan decides to take a holiday from his own scrupulous standards. Set in Steinbeck’s contemporary 1960 America, the novel explores the tenuous line between private and public honesty, and today ranks alongside his most acclaimed works of penetrating insight into the American condition. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction and notes by leading Steinbeck scholar Susan Shillinglaw. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

An account of a winter spent on an island in Ontario.

The wise and hilarious story of a family who discovered that having fewer tools to communicate with led them to actually communicate more. When Susan Maushart first announced her intention to pull the plug on her family's entire armory of electronic weaponry for six months-from the itsy-bitsiest iPod Shuffle to her son's seriously souped-up gaming PC-her three kids didn't blink an eye. Says Maushart: "Looking back, I can understand why. They didn't hear me." For any parent who's ever IM-ed their child to the dinner table, this account of one family's self-imposed exile from the Information Age will leave you LOLing with recognition. But it will also make you think. The Winter of Our Disconnect challenges readers to examine the toll that technology is taking on their own family connections, and to create a media ecology that instead encourages kids-and parents-to thrive. Indeed, as a self-confessed single mom who "slept with her iPhone," Maushart knew her family's exile from Cyburbia wasn't going to be any easier for her than for her three teenagers, ages fourteen, fifteen, and eighteen. Yet they all soon discovered that the rewards of becoming "unplugged" were more rich and varied than any cyber reality could ever be.

Fusing the academic with the applied, this book provides a comprehensive introduction to social media for future communications professionals. While most social media texts approach the subject through either a theoretical, scholarly lens or a professional, practical lens, this text offers a much-needed linkage of theory to the practical tactics employed by social media communicators. Concise and conversational chapters break down the basics of both social media theory and practice and are complemented by sidebars written by scholars and industry professionals, chapter summaries and end-of-chapter exercises. This book is ideal for introductory social media courses in communication, public relations and mass communication departments, as well as courses in digital media and public relations. Online resources include social media writing templates, sample posts and content calendar templates. Please visit www.routledge.com/9781032185873.

The research domains of information retrieval and databases have traditionally adopted different approaches to information management. However, in recent years, there has been an increasing cross-fertilization among the two fields and now many research challenges are transversal to them. With this in mind, a winter school was organized in Bressanone, Italy, in February 2013, within the context of the EU-funded research project PROMISE (Participative Research Laboratory for Multimedia and Multilingual Information Systems Evaluation). PROMISE aimed at advancing the experimental evaluation of complex multimedia and multilingual information systems in order to support individuals, commercial entities and communities, who design, develop, employ and improve such complex systems. The overall goal of PROMISE was to deliver a unified environment collecting data, knowledge, tools and methodologies and to help the user community involved in experimental evaluation. This book constitutes the outcome of the PROMISE Winter School 2013 and contains 9 invited lectures from the research domains of information retrieval and databases plus short papers of the best student poster awards. A large variety of topics are covered, including databases, information retrieval, experimental evaluation, metrics and statistics, semantic search, keyword search in databases, semi-structured search, evaluation both in information retrieval and databases, crowdsourcing and social media.