New Releases by J. Brooks

The A+ Certification is a testing program that certifies the competency of service technicians in the computer industry. Earning A+ Certification means that you possess the knowledge, skills, and customer relations skills essential to be a successful computer service technician. Candidates for this certification can use this guide to study from hundreds of test questions and take simulated tests on the CD-ROM.

A full account of the part played by Kent''s airfields during the Second World War. The history of each airfield is described with the aircraft based at them and the main operations flown. The effects of the war on the daily lives of civilians, and the constant dangers from raids and night bombing are also detailed. Fully illustrated.

Assesses the conservation status of Clemmys insculpta, the wood turtle, which ranges discontinuously in north-eastern North America and is confined to specific habitats associated with streams. Information is included on the turtle''s geographic distribution in Canada and the United States, population size and trends, protection status, habitat, general biology, factors limiting the turtle population size and distribution, and the special significance of the species. Concludes with brief discussion of the current consensus regarding the status of the species and a recommendation for designation of the species as vulnerable.

Brutal Choreographies investigates the novels of Margaret Atwood, focusing on their psychological and political concerns. Drawing on recent feminist and psychoanalytic theory, J. Brooks Bouson examines Atwood''s recurring self, family, and romantic dramas, her novelistic subversion of romantic love ideology, and her critique of gender and power politics. Bouson also considers the oppositional strategies used in Atwood''s novels: their punitive plotting and enactments of female revenge fantasies, their dialogic resistance to romantic discourse, and their self-conscious manipulation and sabotage of romance and other traditional plot lines and conventions. From the protofeminism of The Edible Woman, the cultural feminism of Surfacing, and the examination of the perils of Gothic thinking in Lady Oracle to the domestic and sexual warfare of Life Before Man, the anti-feminist backlash terrors of Bodily Harm and The Handmaid''s Tale, and the power politics of female relationships in Cat''s Eye, Atwood''s women-centered fiction has strong oppositional appeal. Because Atwood does not shun what she calls the "story of the disaster which is the world," her tales are often brutal, portraying female victimization at the hands of the husband or male lover, the mother, or the female friend. But if the Atwood novel has the power to disturb, compel, and at times brutalize its reader, it is also carefully choreographed, using form and design to contain and control the female fears, anxieties, and anger that drive the narrative.

This text highlights the aspects of accounting which apply to the upstream oil industry.

Understanding how the shape of a three dimensional object may be recovered fromshading in a two-dimensional image of the object is one of the most important - and still unresolved- problems in machine vision. Although this important subfield is now in its second decade, thisbook is the first to provide a comprehensive review of shape from shading. It brings together all ofthe seminal papers on the subject, shows how recent work relates to more traditional approaches, andprovides a comprehensive annotated bibliography.The book''s 17 chapters cover: Surface Descriptionsfrom Stereo and Shading. Shape and Source from Shading. The Eikonal Equation: some ResultsApplicable to Computer Vision. A Method for Enforcing Integrability in Shape from ShadingAlgorithms. Obtaining Shape from Shading Information. The Variational Approach to Shape fromShading. Calculating the Reflectance Map. Numerical Shape from Shading and Occluding Boundaries.Photometric Invariants Related to Solid Shape. Improved Methods of Estimating Shape from ShadingUsing the Light Source Coordinate System. A Provably Convergent Algorithm for Shape from Shading.Recovering Three Dimensional Shape from a Single Image of Curved Objects. Perception of Solid Shapefrom Shading. Local Shading Analysis Pentland. Radarclinometry for the Venus Radar Mapper.Photometric Method for Determining Surface Orientation from Multiple Images.Berthold K. P. Horn isProfessor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. He has presided over the field ofmachine vision for more than a decade and is the author of Robot Vision. Michael Brooks is Reader inComputer Science at The Flinders University of South Australia. Shape from Shading is included inthe Artificial Intelligence series, edited by Michael Brady, Daniel Bobrow, and RandallDavis.

In a series of important studies, American psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut focused attention on a fundamental aspect of human behavior: the desire each person feels for a sense of relationship with and empathic responsiveness from others. This book offers the first sustained application of Kohut''s work to the study of literature and sheds new light on the complex nature of interactions between texts and readers. J. Brooks Bouson investigates nine representative "narcissistic" characters from works by Atwood, Bellow, Conrad, Dotosevsky, Kafka, Lessing, Mann, and Woolf. Combining a careful examination of individual characters and texts with an analysis of the critical commentaries they have generated, Bouson makes us aware of the narcissistic dramas encoded in texts, dramas that are often unconsciously replicated by critics in their interpretive narratives. "In an essential way," Bouson writes, "the meaning of literary work grows out of the empathic event that occurs between the reader and the text." The book establishes a place for Kohut''s self psychology in the study of literature and provides a refreshing perspective on the empathic dynamics of the reading and critical processes.

A creative approach relating flower arrangement to the arts and crafts of ceramists, weavers, woodcarvers, makers of china and glass, and others. Photographs in color and black-and-white.