A book-length selection from Kevin Killian's legendary corpus of more than two thousand product reviews posted on Amazon.com. An enchanting roll of duct tape. Love Actually on Blu-ray Disc. The Toaster Oven Cookbook, The Biography of Stevie Nicks, and an anthology of poets who died of AIDS. In this only book-length selection from his legendary corpus of more than two thousand product reviews posted on Amazon.com, sagacious shopper Kevin Killian holds forth on these household essentials and many, many, many others. The beloved author of more than a dozen volumes of innovative poetry, fiction, drama, and scholarship, Killian was for decades a charismatic participant in San Francisco’s New Narrative writing circle. From 2003–2019, he was also one of Amazon’s most prolific reviewers, rising to rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site. Alternately hilarious and heartfelt, Killian’s commentaries consider an incredible variety of items, each review a literary escapade hidden in plain sight amongst the retailer’s endless pages of user-generated content. Selected Amazon Reviews at last gathers an appropriately wide swath of this material between two covers, revealing the project to be a unified whole and always more than a lark. Some for “verified purchases,” others for products enjoyed in theory, Killian’s reviews draw on the influential strategies of New Narrative, his unrivaled fandom for both elevated and popular culture, and the fine art of fabulation. Many of them are ingeniously funny—flash-fictional riffs on the commodity as talismanic object, written by a cast of personas worthy of Pessoa. And many others are serious, even scholarly—earnest tributes to contemporaries, and to small-press books that may not have received attention elsewhere, offered with exemplary attention. All of Killian’s reviews subvert the Amazon platform, queering it to his own play with language, identity, genre, critique. Killian’s prose is a consistent pleasure throughout Selected Amazon Reviews, brimming with wit, lyricism, and true affection. As the Hall of Famer himself reflected on this form-of-his-own-invention shortly before his untimely passing in 2019: “They’re reviews of a sort, but they also seem like novels. They’re poems. They’re essays about life. I get a lot of my kinks out there, on Amazon.”

The papers in this volume are the refereed papers presented at AI-2016, the Thirty-sixth SGAI International Conference on Innovative Techniques and Applications of Artificial Intelligence, held in Cambridge in December 2016 in both the technical and the application streams. They present new and innovative developments and applications, divided into technical stream sections on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Sentiment Analysis and Recommendation, Machine Learning, AI Techniques, and Natural Language Processing, followed by application stream sections on AI for Medicine and Disability, Legal Liability and Finance, Telecoms and eLearning, and Genetic Algorithms in Action. The volume also includes the text of short papers presented as posters at the conference. This is the thirty-third volume in the Research and Development in Intelligent Systems series, which also incorporates the twenty-fourth volume in the Applications and Innovations in Intelligent Systems series. These series are essential reading for those who wish to keep up to date with developments in this important field.

The entertainment industry has long been dominated by legendary screenwriter William Goldman’s “Nobody-Knows-Anything” mantra, which argues that success is the result of managerial intuition and instinct. This book builds the case that combining such intuition with data analytics and rigorous scholarly knowledge provides a source of sustainable competitive advantage – the same recipe for success that is behind the rise of firms such as Netflix and Spotify, but has also fueled Disney’s recent success. Unlocking a large repertoire of scientific studies by business scholars and entertainment economists, the authors identify essential factors, mechanisms, and methods that help a new entertainment product succeed. The book thus offers a timely alternative to “Nobody-Knows” decision-making in the digital era: while coupling a good idea with smart data analytics and entertainment theory cannot guarantee a hit, it systematically and substantially increases the probability of success in the entertainment industry. Entertainment Science is poised to inspire fresh new thinking among managers, students of entertainment, and scholars alike. Thorsten Hennig-Thurau and Mark B. Houston – two of our finest scholars in the area of entertainment marketing – have produced a definitive research-based compendium that cuts across various branches of the arts to explain the phenomena that provide consumption experiences to capture the hearts and minds of audiences. Morris B. Holbrook, W. T. Dillard Professor Emeritus of Marketing, Columbia University Entertainment Science is a must-read for everyone working in the entertainment industry today, where the impact of digital and the use of big data can’t be ignored anymore. Hennig-Thurau and Houston are the scientific frontrunners of knowledge that the industry urgently needs. Michael Kölmel, media entrepreneur and Honorary Professor of Media Economics at University of Leipzig Entertainment Science’s winning combination of creativity, theory, and data analytics offers managers in the creative industries and beyond a novel, compelling, and comprehensive approach to support their decision-making. This ground-breaking book marks the dawn of a new Golden Age of fruitful conversation between entertainment scholars, managers, and artists. Allègre Hadida, Associate Professor in Strategy, University of Cambridge

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Workshop on E-Business (WEB 2011), held in Shanghai, China, on December 4, 2011. The 40 papers, which were selected from 88 submissions to the workshop, touch on topics that are diverse yet highly relevant to the challenges faced by today's e-business researchers and practitioners. They are organized in topical sections on social networks, business intelligence, and social computing; economics and organizational implications of electronic markets; and e-business systems and applications.

This book gathers the proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Computational Science and Technology 2020 (ICCST 2020), held in Pattaya, Thailand, on 29–30 August 2020. The respective contributions offer practitioners and researchers a range of new computational techniques and solutions, identify emerging issues, and outline future research directions, while also showing them how to apply the latest large-scale, high-performance computational methods.

Passwords Primeval sets aside the artificial boundaries of poetry "schools" and "movements" to cut to the art of the matter. Tony Leuzzi's astounding knowledge of poetry draws new insights from such luminaries as Billy Collins, Gerald Stern, Jane Hirshfield, Patricia Smith, and Martín Espada. These new interviews provide insights into the poets and their poems without losing any of their mystery. Whether you're looking for deeper understanding of your favorite poets or simply interested in the lives of contemporary artists, Passwords Primeval reveals the interconnectedness of these masters whose voices echo each other from opposite ends of the same canyon.