Brexit is a tale of two unions, not one: the British and the European unions. Their origins are different, but both struggle to maintain unity in diversity and both have to face the challenge of ...populism and claims of democratic deficit. Mark Corner suggests that the »four nations« that make up the UK can only survive as part of a single nation-state, if the country looks more sympathetically at the very European structures from which it has chosen to detach itself. This study addresses both academic and lay audiences interested in the current situation of the UK, particularly the strains raised by devolution and Brexit.
Ear Jan Prochazka, Prochazka; Mark Corner, Corner
2022, 2022-11-19
eBook
A paranoid thriller of life under surveillance in Soviet Czechoslovakia. A deputy minister in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Ludvìk enjoys all the luxuries that success in the party affords ...him, but he must be careful: he's under no illusions about the secret police bugging his apartment. Luckily, he and his wife, Anna, know where the bug is and where they can safely converse. However, any comfort they feel disappears the evening they attend an official party, where they learn that Ludvìk's boss has just been arrested after presenting a report written by Ludvìk himself. Is Ludvìk next? Back home after the party, the couple must get past unresolved marital tensions to get rid of absolutely anything that could incriminate them-all while contending with the strange men outside their apartment and the bug inside. ? Penned under the oppressive watch of Soviet authorities in 1960s Czechoslovakia-but touching on still-current themes of surveillance and paranoia-this cinematic thriller is as tense and timely as ever. A promising Party member who became persona non grata after the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, author Jan Procházka knew firsthand the gnawing terror of life in a surveillance state: after his death in 1971, the new tenants of his apartment discovered twelve hidden listening devices. As Ear makes terrifyingly clear, the most frightening horror stories are the ones closest to everyday reality.
Signs of God reveals why discussion of the nature of miracles is of central rather than marginal importance where belief in God is concerned. Miracles cannot be shunted to one side as an embarrassing ...hangover from a 'pre-scientific age'. Miracles have played an important role in the history of all the major world religions, and many religious believers claim that they continue to do so. Yet they have also been criticized from a philosophical viewpoint as incompatible with a belief in laws of nature, and those who seek to have their religious beliefs properly attuned to the modern world often prefer to do without them. This accessible book examines the nature of miracles both in philosophical and historical terms, and concludes that, whether or not miracles happen, it is difficult to see how religious belief could survive without them.
Disruption-tolerant networks (DTNs) rely on intermittent contacts between mobile nodes to deliver packets using a store-carry-and-forward paradigm. We earlier proposed the use of throwbox nodes, ...which are stationary, battery-powered nodes with storage and processing, to enhance the capacity of DTNs. However, the use of throwboxes without efficient power management is minimally effective. If the nodes are too liberal with their energy consumption, they will fail prematurely. However, if they are too conservative, they may miss important transfer opportunities, hence increasing lifetime without improving performance. In this paper, we present a hardware and software architecture for energy-efficient throwboxes in DTNs. We propose a hardware platform that uses a multitiered, multiradio, scalable, solar-powered platform. The throwbox employs an approximate heuristic for solving the NP-hard problem of meeting an average power constraint while maximizing the number of bytes forwarded by the throwbox. We built and deployed prototype throwboxes in UMass DieselNet, a bus-based DTN testbed. Through extensive trace-driven simulations and prototype deployment, we show that a single throwbox with a 270-cm 2 solar panel can run perpetually while improving packet delivery by 37% and reducing message delivery latency by at least 10% in the network.
On its initial publication in Czech in 1942, iSaturnin/i was a best-seller. This is entirely appropriate, for while iSaturnin/i draws on a tradition of Czech comedy and authors such as J. Hašek, K. ...Čapek and K. Poláček, it was also clearly influenced by the English masters Jerome K. Jerome and P. G. Wodehouse.iSaturnin/i is the story of a young man in love and his faithful servant Saturnin, who upsets the peaceful rhythm of his master’s domestic arrangements and turns his life inside out. He lures him into an exotic world where he is forced to live dangerously, and shows him how to cope with any situation. Saturnin lays bare the weaknesses of others and compels them to disclose their ‘true’ nature – he is a subversive servant.Written at a time when Czechoslovakia was deep in the grip of the Nazi occupation, iSaturnin/i showed that one form of resistance was to put the world created by invasion out of your mind and create another. However, so recognisably Czech was that ‘other’ that its popularity did not diminish with the end of the war or, indeed, with the end of the forty years of communism that followed shortly after the war’s end. The book has been adapted for radio and television, produced as a film and has a regular place in the repertoire of the Czech stage.“A delicious dry humour and an imaginative flair that makes it much more than just the ‘Czech Jeeves.’ Owing more to Jerome K. Jerome than to P. G. Wodehouse, the writing is rich in homespun wisdom and casual asides that take on a life of their own, leading the reader up charming byways of irrelevance… A surprising number of belly-laughs for a novel that is more than half a century old."bAdam Preston/b, Times Literary Supplement
An important challenge in mobile sensor networks is to enable energy-efficient communication over a diversity of distanceYC while being robust to wireless effects caused by node mobility. In this ...paper, we argue that the pairing of two complementary radios with heterogeneous range characteristics enables greater range and interference diversity at lower energy cost than a single radio. We make three contributions towards the design of such multi-radio mobile sensor systems. First, we present the design of a novel reinforcement learning-based link layer algorithm that continually learns channel characteristics and dynamically decides when to switch between radios. Second, we describe a simple protocol that translates the benefits of the adaptive link layer into practice in an energy-efficient manner. Third, we present the design of Arthropod, a mote-class sensor platform that combines two such heterogneous radios (XE1205 and CC2420) and our implementation of the Q-learning based switching protocol in TinyOS 2.0. Using experiments conducted in a variety of urban and forested environments, we show that our system achieves up to 52% energy gains over a single radio system while handling node mobility. Our results also show that our system can handle short, medium and long-term wireless interference in such environments.
There are endless possibilities for the next generation of mobile social applications that automatically determine your social context. A key element of such applications is ubiquitous and precise ...sensing of the people you interact with. Existing techniques that rely on deployed infrastructure to determine proximity are limited in availability and accuracy. Virtual Compass is a peer-based relative positioning system that relies solely on the hardware and operating system support available on commodity mobile handhelds. It uses multiple radios to detect nearby mobile devices and places them in a two-dimensional plane. It uses adaptive scanning and out-of-band coordination to explore trade-offs between energy consumption and the latency in detecting movement. We have implemented Virtual Compass on mobile phones and laptops, and we evaluate it using a sample application that senses social interactions between Facebook friends.
Mark Corner is dealing with a topic which is of perennial interest and he does so by reference to the classic discussions in the modern period. The subject matter guarantees that there will be a wide ...interest in the topic: the issue of miracles is central to Christian theology. I have no doubt that this is just the kind of book that many theology tutors would want to put into the hands of their students to enable them to grapple with the issues. Combining a look at the philosophical issues raised — what is a miracle, laws of nature, miracle and providence — with biblical and church traditions, this is a book which will offer a much more ready entry into discussions for many students than many of the standard text books.
Christopher Rowland, Dean Ireland Professor of Exegesis of Holy Scripture, Queen's College, Oxford, UK
This book offers a well informed and accessible guide to the subject of miracles for students and a wider public. Mark Corner's study of the nature of miracles is a careful, sane and comprehensive study of an important area of religious belief, which is often inhabited by deeply implausible speculation, in theory and in practice. He offers a rational and coherent account of the basic elements of the subject — the nature of miracles, the seminal work of Aquinas and Hume, resurrection and theodicy, the Bible, miracles in the Church and in the modern world.
George Newlands, Professor of Divinity, University of Glasgow, UK
Signs of God reveals why discussion of the nature of miracles is of central rather than marginal importance where belief in God is concerned. Miracles cannot be shunted to one side as an embarrassing hangover from a 'pre-scientific age'. Miracles have played an important role in the history of all the major world religions, and many religious believers claim that they continue to do so. Yet they have also been criticized from a philosophical viewpoint as incompatible with a belief in laws of nature, and those who seek to have their religious beliefs properly attuned to the modern world often prefer to do without them. This accessible book examines the nature of miracles both in philosophical and historical terms, and concludes that, whether or not miracles happen, it is difficult to see how religious belief could survive without them.
In this accessible and engaging book, Mark Corner provides an essential introduction to the history and modern workings of the EU. Focusing on key themes in the union's development and the debates ...surrounding future enlargement, he answers the key questions related to the EU and provides a 'one-stop shop' for anyone curious about the future of Europe.
Summer of Caprice Vladislav Vancura, Vancura; Mark Corner, Corner
02/2018, Volume:
57734
eBook
In iSummer of Caprice/i (the classic novel of the Twenties that was adapted into the beloved film of the Czech New Wave in the Sixties) the arrival of a magician and his girlfriend to a sleepy spa ...town sets off a series of events that will turn the lives of everyone in Little Karlsbad upside down. Set over the course of just three days in June, this poetic and comic novel beautifully captures the atmosphere of a small town, as Vančura juxtaposes the mundanity of life with the majesty of language.The playful narrative, linguistic dexterity, and metatextuality that has only become richer over the decades are hallmarks of this brilliant work of interwar modernism.“The witty conversation and ingenious dialogues surpassthe plot itself."bEpoch Times/b“Certainly, Vladislav Vančura’s language is a test for any translator’s mettle."bAlice Horáčková/b, MF Dnes"(What makes Vladislav Vančura unique) is that all of his avant-garde searching finally led him to the epic’s classical approach, which enabled him, like no other prose writer in the world, to appropriate all the fundamental epiphanies of modern lyric poetry."bM. Kundera/b, The Art of the Novel: Vladislav Vančura’s Journey in Search of the Great Epic
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