NIPS XI


Book Description

If white boys can't jump, can Asian kids play cricket? Lan's fed up with being called a nip. He wants to be a true-blue Aussie. What better way than by playing the greatest Anglo game of all? Lan gathers a team together and defiantly gives it a name: NIPS XI. Now all they have to do is get some equipment, find a coach, get themselves a sponsor and learn the rules of the game. Then it's time to challenge the best cricket team in the district. A funny, empowering story of cricket and curry, spinners and leggies, that is about overcoming cultural barriers, in sport and in life. Also by Ruth Starke, NIPS GO NATIONAL is the sequel to the bestselling NIPS XI.




NIPS XI


Book Description

If white boys can't jump, can Asian kids play cricket? Lan's fed up with being called a nip. He wants to be a true-blue Aussie. What better way than by playing the greatest Anglo game of all? Lan gathers a team together and defiantly gives it a name: NIPS XI. Now all they have to do is get some equipment, find a coach, get themselves a sponsor and learn the rules of the game. Then it's time to challenge the best cricket team in the district. A funny, empowering story of cricket and curry, spinners and leggies, that is about overcoming cultural barriers, in sport and in life. Also by Ruth Starke, NIPS GO NATIONAL is the sequel to the bestselling NIPS XI.




NIPS Go National


Book Description

In this sequel to the bestselling NIPS XI, the cricket team, together with coach Spinner McGinty, are in Melbourne to compete for the Harmony Cup, and Lan has a lot on his mind: a new star batsman with something to hide, a mystery from Spinner?s past, conflict with his best mate, Izzy, and his fast bowler laid low just before their biggest match ever. Will Lan resolve his problems? Will the Nips get it together in time? Is the Pop Catholic?




Large-scale Kernel Machines


Book Description

Solutions for learning from large scale datasets, including kernel learning algorithms that scale linearly with the volume of the data and experiments carried out on realistically large datasets. Pervasive and networked computers have dramatically reduced the cost of collecting and distributing large datasets. In this context, machine learning algorithms that scale poorly could simply become irrelevant. We need learning algorithms that scale linearly with the volume of the data while maintaining enough statistical efficiency to outperform algorithms that simply process a random subset of the data. This volume offers researchers and engineers practical solutions for learning from large scale datasets, with detailed descriptions of algorithms and experiments carried out on realistically large datasets. At the same time it offers researchers information that can address the relative lack of theoretical grounding for many useful algorithms. After a detailed description of state-of-the-art support vector machine technology, an introduction of the essential concepts discussed in the volume, and a comparison of primal and dual optimization techniques, the book progresses from well-understood techniques to more novel and controversial approaches. Many contributors have made their code and data available online for further experimentation. Topics covered include fast implementations of known algorithms, approximations that are amenable to theoretical guarantees, and algorithms that perform well in practice but are difficult to analyze theoretically. Contributors Léon Bottou, Yoshua Bengio, Stéphane Canu, Eric Cosatto, Olivier Chapelle, Ronan Collobert, Dennis DeCoste, Ramani Duraiswami, Igor Durdanovic, Hans-Peter Graf, Arthur Gretton, Patrick Haffner, Stefanie Jegelka, Stephan Kanthak, S. Sathiya Keerthi, Yann LeCun, Chih-Jen Lin, Gaëlle Loosli, Joaquin Quiñonero-Candela, Carl Edward Rasmussen, Gunnar Rätsch, Vikas Chandrakant Raykar, Konrad Rieck, Vikas Sindhwani, Fabian Sinz, Sören Sonnenburg, Jason Weston, Christopher K. I. Williams, Elad Yom-Tov




The Fiction Gateway


Book Description

In this guide, two experienced school librarians provide a selection of books for librarians, teachers and parents. The Fiction Gateway is an essential resource that supports individual, group and social reading program and provides an instant guide to matching children's interests with suitable reading material.




Treasure Island


Book Description




Spike-timing dependent plasticity


Book Description

Hebb's postulate provided a crucial framework to understand synaptic alterations underlying learning and memory. Hebb's theory proposed that neurons that fire together, also wire together, which provided the logical framework for the strengthening of synapses. Weakening of synapses was however addressed by "not being strengthened", and it was only later that the active decrease of synaptic strength was introduced through the discovery of long-term depression caused by low frequency stimulation of the presynaptic neuron. In 1994, it was found that the precise relative timing of pre and postynaptic spikes determined not only the magnitude, but also the direction of synaptic alterations when two neurons are active together. Neurons that fire together may therefore not necessarily wire together if the precise timing of the spikes involved are not tighly correlated. In the subsequent 15 years, Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP) has been found in multiple brain brain regions and in many different species. The size and shape of the time windows in which positive and negative changes can be made vary for different brain regions, but the core principle of spike timing dependent changes remain. A large number of theoretical studies have also been conducted during this period that explore the computational function of this driving principle and STDP algorithms have become the main learning algorithm when modeling neural networks. This Research Topic will bring together all the key experimental and theoretical research on STDP.




Data-Intensive Text Processing with MapReduce


Book Description

Our world is being revolutionized by data-driven methods: access to large amounts of data has generated new insights and opened exciting new opportunities in commerce, science, and computing applications. Processing the enormous quantities of data necessary for these advances requires large clusters, making distributed computing paradigms more crucial than ever. MapReduce is a programming model for expressing distributed computations on massive datasets and an execution framework for large-scale data processing on clusters of commodity servers. The programming model provides an easy-to-understand abstraction for designing scalable algorithms, while the execution framework transparently handles many system-level details, ranging from scheduling to synchronization to fault tolerance. This book focuses on MapReduce algorithm design, with an emphasis on text processing algorithms common in natural language processing, information retrieval, and machine learning. We introduce the notion of MapReduce design patterns, which represent general reusable solutions to commonly occurring problems across a variety of problem domains. This book not only intends to help the reader "think in MapReduce", but also discusses limitations of the programming model as well. Table of Contents: Introduction / MapReduce Basics / MapReduce Algorithm Design / Inverted Indexing for Text Retrieval / Graph Algorithms / EM Algorithms for Text Processing / Closing Remarks




Chains


Book Description

If an entire nation could seek its freedom, why not a girl? As the Revolutionary War begins, thirteen-year-old Isabel wages her own fight...for freedom. Promised freedom upon the death of their owner, she and her sister, Ruth, in a cruel twist of fate become the property of a malicious New York City couple, the Locktons, who have no sympathy for the American Revolution and even less for Ruth and Isabel. When Isabel meets Curzon, a slave with ties to the Patriots, he encourages her to spy on her owners, who know details of British plans for invasion. She is reluctant at first, but when the unthinkable happens to Ruth, Isabel realizes her loyalty is available to the bidder who can provide her with freedom. From acclaimed author Laurie Halse Anderson comes this compelling, impeccably researched novel that shows the lengths we can go to cast off our chains, both physical and spiritual.




The Ideal and the Real


Book Description

Many students coming to grips with Kant's philosophy are understandably daunted not only by the complexity and sheer difficulty of the man's writings, but almost equally by the amount of secondary literature available. A great deal of this seems to be - and not only on first reading - just about as difficult as the work it is meant to make more accessible. Any writer deliberately setting out to provide an authentically introductory text thus faces a double problem: how to provide an exegesis which would capture some of the spirit of the original, without gross and misleading over-simplification; and secondly, how to anchor the argument in the best and most imaginative secondary literature, yet avoid the whole project appearing so fragmented as to make the average book of chess openings seem positively austere. Until fairly recently, matters were made even more difficul t, in that commentaries on Kant were very often of a whole work, say, The Critique of Pure Reason, with the result that students would have to struggle through a very great deal of material indeed in order to feel any confidence at all that they had begun to understand the original writings. Recently, things have changed somewhat. There are now excellent commentaries on "Kant's Analytic", "Kant's Analogies" etc. . We have also seen, (at least as reflected in book titles), a resurgence of interest in what is perhaps the most controversial and far-reaching Kantian claim, viz.