Search results for ""author nicolas""

This book presents tools and algorithms required to compress/uncompress signals such as speech and music. These algorithms are largely used in mobile phones, DVD players, HDTV sets, etc. In a first rather theoretical part, this book presents the standard tools used in compression systems: scalar and vector quantization, predictive quantization, transform quantization, entropy coding. In particular we show the consistency between these different tools. The second part explains how these tools are used in the latest speech and audio coders. The third part gives Matlab programs simulating these coders.

Read more less

Explores Liszt's compositional processes and methods of revision as the product of the composer's interactions with a large variety of social, cultural, personal and political forces.Franz Liszt (1811-86) is mostly known for his virtuosic piano works, but his compositional achievements in the genre of song have so far been neglected. Many of Liszt's Lieder exist in multiple versions, sometimes radically altered, and many with equal claims to 'authenticity'. This has sometimes been viewed as a barrier to performance and a hindrance to scholarly scrutiny. Nicolás Puyané now redresses this imbalance and draws attention to this rich and varied corpus of works.Liszt's songs contain a myriad of intertextual links, not just with the songs of other composers, but also with Liszt's own works in other genres and his own revisions. By focusing on the multi-version songs, the book uncovers how these intertextual relationships have evolved over time. Introducing the concept of "textual fluidity", t

Read more less

Explores how the arrival of cattle transformed life and society in the Americas. Nicolas Delsol compares zooarchaeological and material evidence from sites across Mesoamerica and the Caribbean to show how the introduction of cattle, beginning with imports by Spanish colonizers in the 1500s, shaped colonial American society.

Read more less

In the 1980s and 1990s, Nicolas Jabko suggests, the character of European integration altered radically, from slow growth to what he terms a "quiet revolution." In this book he traces the political strategy that underlay the move from the Single Market of 1986 through the official creation of the European Union in 1992 to the coming of the euro in 1999. The official, shared language of the political forces behind this revolution was that of market reforms—yet, as Jabko notes, this was a very strange "market" revolution, one that saw the building of massive new public institutions designed to regulate economic activity, such as the Economic and Monetary Union, and deeper liberalization in economic areas unaffected by external pressure than in truly internationalized sectors of the European economy. What held together this remarkably diverse reform movement? Precisely because "the market" wasn't a single standard, the agenda of market reforms gained the support of a vast and heterogenous coalition. The "market" was in fact a broad palette of ideas to which different actors could appeal under different circumstances. It variously stood for a constraint on government regulations, a norm by which economic activities were (or should be) governed, a space for the active pursuit of economic growth, an excuse to discipline government policies, and a beacon for new public powers and rule-making. In chapters on financial reform, the provision of collective services, regional development and social policy, and economic and monetary union, Jabko traces how a coalition of strange bedfellows mobilized a variety of market ideas to integrate Europe.

Read more less

This is an account of the rise and fall of the civilization in the Nile Valley, covering the first human settlement (c 120,000 BC) to its conquest by Alexander the Great in 333 BC. This is the first history of ancient Egypt for 25 years Brings together the very latest textual and archaeological evidence The index, bibliography and appendices make this an invaluable reference tool New guide to further reading in English especially commissioned for the paperback edition

Read more less

The nations of Latin America came into being without a strong sense of national purpose and identity. In "The Invention of Argentina", Nicholas Shumway offers a cultural history of one nation's efforts to determine its nature, its destiny, and its place among the nations of the world. His analysis is crucial to understanding not only Argentina's development but also current events in the Argentine Republic.

Read more less

"Audacious, addictive, highly entertaining-unforgettable!" -James PattersonEighteen-year-old aspiring comic Joey Rossi just found out his boyfriend has been cheating on him for the past ten months. But what did he expect? Joey was born with an addiction to toxic jerks-something he inherited from his lovably messy, wisecracking, Italian-American spitfire of a mom (and best friend): 34-year-old Gia Rossi.When Gia's latest non-relationship goes up in flames only a day later, the pair's Bayonne, New Jersey apartment can barely contain their rage. In a misguided attempt at revenge, Joey and Gia inadvertently commit a series of crimes and flee the state, running to the only good man either of them has ever known-Gia's ex, Marco. As they hide out from the law at Marco's secluded lake house, Joey and Gia must confront all the bad habits and mistakes they've made that have led them to this moment-and find a way to take responsibility for what they've done.

Read more less

Drawing on research conducted on Chios during the sovereign debt crisis that struck Greece in 2010, Nicolas Argenti follows the lives of individuals who symbolize the transformations affecting this Aegean island. As witnesses to the crisis speak of their lives, however, their current anxieties and frustrations are expressed in terms of past crises that have shaped the dramatic history of Chios, including the German occupation in World War II and the ensuing famine, the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey of 1922–23, and the Massacres of 1822 that decimated the island at the outset of the Greek War of Independence. The complex temporality that emerges in these accounts is ensconced in a cultural context of commemorative ritual, ecstatic visions, an annual rocket war, and other embodied practices that contribute to forms of memory production that question the assumptions of the trauma discourse, revealing the islanders of Chios to be active in forging their place in time in a manner that blurs the boundaries between historiography, memory, religion, and myth. A member of the Chiot diaspora, Argenti makes use of unpublished correspondence from survivors of the Massacres of 1822 and their descendants and reflects on oral family histories and silences in which the island represents an enigmatic but palpable absence. As he explores the ways in which a body of memory and a cultural experience of temporality came to be dislocated and shared between two populations, his return to Chios marks an encounter in which the traditional roles of ethnographer and participant come to be dispersed and intertwined.

Read more less

The 1954 Conference on Theory, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, featured a who's who of scholars and practitioners debating the foundations of international relations theory. Assembling his own team of experts, all of whom have struggled with this legacy, Nicolas Guilhot revisits a seminal event and its odd rejection of scientific rationalism. Far from being a spontaneous development, these essays argue, the emergence of a "realist" approach to international politics, later codified at the conference, was deliberately triggered by the Rockefeller Foundation. The organization was an early advocate of scholars who opposed the idea of a "science" of politics, pursuing, for the sake of disciplinary autonomy, a vision of politics as a prerational and existential dimension that could not be "solved" by scientific means. As a result, this nascent theory was more a rejection of behavioral social science than the birth of one of its specialized branches. The archived conversations reproduced here, along with unpublished papers by Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul Nitze, speak to this defensive stance. International relations theory is critically linked to the context of postwar liberalism, and the contributors explore how these origins have played out in political thought and American foreign policy.

Read more less

The 1954 Conference on Theory, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, featured a who's who of scholars and practitioners debating the foundations of international relations theory. Assembling his own team of experts, all of whom have struggled with this legacy, Nicolas Guilhot revisits a seminal event and its odd rejection of scientific rationalism. Far from being a spontaneous development, these essays argue, the emergence of a "realist" approach to international politics, later codified at the conference, was deliberately triggered by the Rockefeller Foundation. The organization was an early advocate of scholars who opposed the idea of a "science" of politics, pursuing, for the sake of disciplinary autonomy, a vision of politics as a prerational and existential dimension that could not be "solved" by scientific means. As a result, this nascent theory was more a rejection of behavioral social science than the birth of one of its specialized branches. The archived conversations reproduced here, along with unpublished papers by Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul Nitze, speak to this defensive stance. International relations theory is critically linked to the context of postwar liberalism, and the contributors explore how these origins have played out in political thought and American foreign policy.

Read more less

The young people of the Cameroon Grassfields have been subject to a long history of violence and political marginalization. For centuries, the main victims of the slave trade, they became prime targets for forced labor campaigns under a series of colonial rulers. Today's youth remain at the bottom of the fiercely hierarchical and polarized societies of the Grassfields, and it is their response to centuries of exploitation that Nicolas Pandely Argenti takes up in this absorbing and original book. Beginning his study with a political analysis of youth in the Grassfields from the eighteenth century to the present, Argenti pays special attention to the repeated violent revolts staged by young victims of political oppression. He then combines this history with extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the Oku chiefdom, discovering that the specter of past violence lives on in the masked dance performances that have earned intense devotion from today's youth. Argenti contends that by evoking the imagery of past cataclysmic events, these masquerades allow young Oku men and women to address the inequities they face in their relations with elders and state authorities today.

Read more less

What if the deadliest assassin in all of Mexico, a man with dozens of kills to his name, was actually a vacuum repairman in Arizona?Falcon City, Arizona. Jacques Ramirez works at Robotop, the leading home appliance company in the southwest United States. Jacques is efficient, thorough, and discreet. That last one is easy: he's also mute. But everything changes when two members of one of Paso del Rio's largest drug cartels stumble upon Jacques and believe him to be the deadly hitman who betrayed them in the past: the ruthless Ramirez. Could it be that the cartel's legendary clean-up man is really a legendary vacuum cleaner expert? Now that they've found him, the men of the cartel will do everything they can to kill this traitor!Nicolas Petrimaux presents a tribute to the action thrillers of the 1980s and 90s, a brutal narrative with never a dull moment. Gunning for Ramirez is as much a descendant of Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A. as it is Taratino's Pulp Fiction or Rodriguez's Mexico Trilogy.

Read more less

This textbook is written as an accessible introduction to interest rate modeling and related derivatives, which have become increasingly important subjects of interest in financial mathematics. The models considered range from standard short rate to forward rate models and include more advanced topics such as the BGM model and an approach to its calibration. An elementary treatment of the pricing of caps and swaptions under forward measures is also provided, with a focus on explicit calculations and a step-by-step introduction of concepts. Each chapter is accompanied with exercises and their complete solutions, making this book suitable for advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate-level students.

Read more less

A series of twenty non-fiction science readers which engages children in the world around them. What is light? What is white light? What is a polar night? You can find the answers to these and other questions about light and shade in Why Do Shadows Change?

Read more less

A satirical autobiography about a young Frenchman and his hilarious, yet poignant, adventures in the heart of Afghanistan.It’s 2005. Nicolas Wild is a French cartoonist. He’s broke and about to be homeless. He’s a man without a plan. That is until destiny shows up in his inbox: a paid job… In Afghanistan! In his graphic Travelogue series, Nicolas Wild brilliantly explores the differences between the Afghan cultures around him and his own, as he and his fellow expat friends crash Asura celebrations, avoid the afterlife, and muse on the differences between Christian Easter egg hunts and Islamic penance.

Read more less

Al igual que en el macrocosmos existen dos corrientes o polaridades, una positiva y otra negativa, así también en el microcosmos existen alimentos eléctricos y alimentos magnéticos: las verduras, por ejemplo, son eléctricas mientras que las frutas son magnéticas. Pero para que nuestra alimentación, sea verdaderamente nutricional y regenerativa, debe tener siempre presentes las ?Leyes de la incompatibilidad de los alimentos? (expuestas en este libro precisamente por uno de sus creadores). Sólo así será consciente y no caerá en el error de mezclar en una misma comida alimentos de diferente polaridad. Con El secreto del electromagnetismo., el autor nos introduce con lenguaje sencillo y directo en los entresijos del vegetarianismo y expone de forma aguda y crítica los conceptos básicos de algunas corrientes como el vegetarianismo integral de Suecia o Waerlandismo, el régimen frugívo-ro-frutariano de los yoguis, la dieta sátwica o la monodieta tamásico-rúpica. Las reflexiones de este gran n

Read more less

Este libro pretende ser una herramienta para el alumno universitario de Diplomática a la hora de resolver las pruebas que se le van a plantear.La primera parte es teórica y constituye un prontuario de la estructura del diploma, sometiendo cada concepto a las distintas opiniones de las publicaciones más autorizadas.El apartado práctico consiste en quince ejercicios arquetípicos, resueltos metódicamente con arreglo a las propuestas planteadas, buscando soluciones eficaces y sencillas.

Read more less

El art. II-98 de la nueva Constitución Europea establece que "en las políticas de la Unión se garantizará un elevado nivel de protección de los consumidores", misión que compartirán las instituciones comunitarias y las correspondientes de cada país miembro. Dicha tutela se orienta en una doble dirección: la protección de la salud humana y el logro de una adecuada transparencia en el mercado interior. Se trata, por tanto, de un problema de primer rango para nuestra comunidad y, por ello, es objeto de protección en los distintos Códigos Penales europeos. El presente volumen recoge los trabajos elaborados por un grupo de penalistas del viejo continente que se han especializado en el análisis de los problemas dogmáticos y politicocriminales que plantean los delitos relativos a los consumidores, desde cuestiones relativas a la seguridad alimentaria hasta la moderna concepción del accionista como consumidor de productos financieros, pasando por la publicidad engañosa o la responsabilidad por

Read more less

The triple disaster that struck Japan in March 2011 forced people living there to confront new risks in their lives. Despite the Japanese government's reassurance that radiation exposure would be small and unlikely to affect the health of the general population, many questioned the government's commitment to protecting their health. The disaster prompted them to become vigilant about limiting their risk exposure, and food emerged as a key area where citizens could determine their own levels of acceptable risk. Food Safety after Fukushima examines the process by which notions about what is safe to eat were formulated after the nuclear meltdown. Its central argument is that as citizens informed themselves about potential risks, they also became savvier in their assessment of the government's handling of the crisis. The author terms this "Scientific Citizenship," and he shows that the acquisition of scientific knowledge on the part of citizens resulted in a transformed relationship between individuals and the state. Groups of citizens turned to existing and newly formed organizations where food was sourced from areas far away from the nuclear accident or screened to stricter standards than those required by the state. These organizations enabled citizens to exchange information about the disaster, meet food producers, and work to establish networks of trust where food they considered safe could circulate.Based on extensive fieldwork and interviews with citizens groups, mothers' associations, farmers, government officials, and retailers, Food Safety after Fukushima reflects on how social relations were affected by the accident. The author vividly depicts an environment where trust between food producers and consumers had been shaken, where people felt uneasy about their food choices and the consequences they might have for their children, and where farmers were forced to deal with the consequences of pollution that was not of their making. Most poignantly, the book conveys the heavy burden now attached to the name "Fukushima" in the popular imagination and explores efforts to resurrect it.

Read more less

Escrito en la llamada "era de oro" de la caricatura inglesa -las últimas décadas del siglo XVIII-, este pequeño libro de Francis Grose, 'Principios de la caricatura', es sin lugar a dudas una obra clave para una historia de la imagen satírica, género que cada vez más ocupa la atención de historiadores y de historiadores del arte en relación con la historia política, social y cultural. En su primera parte, el autor presenta un tratado de fórmulas apropiadas para realizar retratos caricaturizados, sobre la base de una geometría sencilla, cuya práctica ejemplifica a través de una serie de encantadoras ilustraciones. A continuación, en el "Ensayo sobre la pintura cómica", examina cuáles son los recursos compositivos y estilísticos que hacen que una pintura o un dibujo muevan a la risa. Las figuras del músico sordo, la seductora añosa, el danzarín de piernas torcidas son, así, el objeto de una sátira visual amable que, según piensa Grose, nos permitiría conocer y tolerar mejor a nuestro pró

Read more less

Este libro quiere despertar el deseo ardiente de buscar, de contemplar, de escuchar y de poner en práctica la Palabra de Aquel que revela la ternura de Dios y la presenta, como un regalo, a todos los habitantes de la tierra. Y quiere difundir la alegría de conocer a Jesús y de vivir su presencia a través de una existencia ofrecida por amor a su imagen y semejanza.

Read more less

A picture book about dealing with change and separation

Read more less

Pobre Joan! Ha de retenir el pet que té... Ja que és ben sabut que un pet d'elefant pot ser la fi de l'univers. Davant la idea de ser lacausa de la fi del món, és clar, en Joan s'asseu i espera. No pot ni imaginar què acabarà passant!

Read more less