Wainwright: The Man Who Loved the Lakes is a celebration of the British landscape, and it tells the remarkable story of Alfred Wainwright who in 1952 decided to hand draw a series of guides to the fells of Lakeland. For the next 13 years he spent every weekend walking, and every weekday evening drawing and writing - completing one page per night. The result was Wainwright's Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells. Although initially self published they have now sold over a...

Abysmal weather, slag heaps, funny accents; the bleak uplands of a landscape carved out of millstone grit; townscapes of abandoned mills and shipyards; the detritus of an industrial revolution well past its sell-by date. These, all too often, are the gloomy perceptions of 'the north', the foundations for the belief that northerners spend their lives battling hardship and misery, and that nothing beyond Watford is worth a bag of chips.With an insider's sensitivity and a journalist's enquiring ...

The village remains a quintessential and much-loved treasure of the English countryside. This rural idyll has inspired generations of great poets, novelists and artists including the likes of Constable, Hardy, Wordsworth, as well as providing the picturesque setting for modern TV series such as Lark Rise to Candleford and Cranford. The English Village celebrates all that is unique and loved about a typical village - the pub, the green, the school, the church, the...

The split screen, the indicators poking up like perspex orange fingers, the notoriously rust-prone floors, the pootling exhaust note… just some of the much-loved characteristics of the Morris Minor or Morris 1000. Designed by Sir Alec Issigonis back in 1948, in a sense it was Britain’s answer to the Beetle – a bulbous little creation that was also Britain’s first mass-appeal car. Between then and 1972 when production belatedly ceased some 1.6 million were built. There were variants like th...

The twentieth century saw two world wars and countless other conflicts whose effects on society have been well documented. Here you will find the less familiar story of how these international struggles managed to reach into the quietest corners of the British countryside. From Battle of Britain vapour trails looping over summer cornfields and affecting local hawks and waterfowl to the lone ringed bird who limped in from invaded Czechoslovakia, diarists note down and...

Virtual History examines many of the most popular historical video games released over the last decade and explores their portrayal of history.The book looks at the motives and perspectives of game designers and marketers, as well as the societal expectations addressed, through contingency and determinism, economics, the environment, culture, ethnicity, gender, and violence. Approaching videogames as a compelling art form that can simultaneously inform and mislead, the boo...

Discover New Methods for Dealing with High-Dimensional DataA sparse statistical model has only a small number of nonzero parameters or weights; therefore, it is much easier to estimate and interpret than a dense model. Statistical Learning with Sparsity: The Lasso and Generalizations presents methods that exploit sparsity to help recover the underl

Recent years have witnessed an explosion in the volume and variety of data collected in all scientific disciplines and industrial settings. Such massive data sets present a number of challenges to researchers in statistics and machine learning. This book provides a self-contained introduction to the area of high-dimensional statistics, aimed at the first-year graduate level. It includes chapters that are focused on core methodology and theory - including tail bounds, concentration inequali...

Introducing the reader to the mathematics beyond complex networked systems, these lecture notes investigate graph theory, graphical models, and methods from statistical physics. Complex networked systems play a fundamental role in our society, both in everyday life and in scientific research, with applications ranging from physics and biology to economics and finance.The book is self-contained, and requires only an undergraduate mathematical background.

A graphical model is a statistical model that is represented by a graph. The factorization properties underlying graphical models facilitate tractable computation with multivariate distributions, making the models a valuable tool with a plethora of applications. Furthermore, directed graphical models allow intuitive causal interpretations and have become a cornerstone for causal inference.While there exist a number of excellent books on graphical models, the field has grown so much...

Available open access digitally under CC BY-NC-ND licence.‘Desistance’ - understanding how people move away from offending – has become a significant policy focus in recent years, with desistance thinking transplanted from the adult to the youth justice system in England and Wales. This book is the first to critique this approach to justice-involved children, many of whom are yet to fully develop an identity (criminal or otherwise) from which to ‘desist’.Featuring voices fr...