Fathom an AI system capable of making utterances like “I think therefore I am”. This inward gaze, arguably a hallmark of conscience, is absent in today’s intelligent machines. Yet, it is essential for the alignment of purpose of machine and human, an imperative that should turn the machine into an ally of human endeavor. Accordingly, this book implements conscience within an AI context, describing how an AI system for neural symbolic reasoning may be endowed with an introspective function....

From the streets of Britain to Canada’s vast unknown, their uncertain journey unfolds.Barnardo’s Homes first opened in East London, in 1867, to provide free shelter, meals, and education for poor and orphaned children. Despite their troubled pasts, these kids found family in each other. But over the decades, as demands grew and funding dwindled, Barnardo’s must look toward a different future for their charges. They must look toward Canada.This gripping novel, inspired by a ...

Cervantine Futures places the writings of Miguel de Cervantes into conversation with some of the most pressing issues in cultural studies, critical theory, and sociopolitical discourse of the last decade. Assembling a diverse range of prominent and emerging scholars in the field, this volume stakes a claim for Hispanism’s place in the growing scholarly movement to vindicate pre- and early modernity for its incisive and often singular perspective on race, gender, ability, the body,...

In the wake of the Great Blackout, faced with the near-extinction of humanity, a pair of lovers speak to each other. They parse, with precision, with familiarity, the endless aspects of their love. Out of their dialogues, piece by piece, a composite image of love takes form, one that moves outwards beyond the realm of relationships and into metaphysics, geology, linguistics, AI.Years previously, a writer and her husband, a Latin professor, stay in Venice while she works on a text. A...

The Earl’s Daughter is a first love, forbidden love, and coming of age novel set in Victorian England* Social divide.* Slow burn, closed door romance in an aristocratic home.* Injustice, secrets and sorrow.Thomas Fraser is a good man unjustly accused of wrongdoing and banished from his Scottish home to a bleak future in a foreign land... England.The earl’s eldest daughter, Lady Alice Aucourte, is angry. Her father has cancel...

It is 1984 in Chile, in the middle of the Pinochet dictatorship. A member of the secret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and finds a reporter, who records his testimony. Our narrator was a child when she first saw this man's face on a magazine cover with the words 'I Tortured People'; his complicity in the worst crimes of the regime has haunted her ever since. Through extraordinary feats of the imagination, Nona Fernández follows 'the man who tortured people' to places ...

In The Things We've Seen, his most ambitious and accomplished novel to date, Agustín Fernández Mallo captures the strangeness and interconnectedness of human existence in the twenty-first century. A writer travels to the small uninhabited island of San Simón, used as a Franquist concentration camp during the Spanish Civil War, and witnesses events which impel him on a wild goose chase across several continents. In Miami, an ageing Kurt Montana, the fourth astronaut who secretly ac...

Preoccupied by uneasy memories and visions, a group of friends look back on their childhood. Their thoughts and dreams circle one old classmate: Estrella González Jepsen, who one day simply disappeared. Estrella's father, it transpires, was a ranking government officer implicated in the Pinochet regime. The question of what became of Estrella haunts her former friends. They catch glimpses of her braids, hear echoes of her voice, read old letters. They recall regimented school assemblies, n...

A witty meditation revealing what our obsession with monsters says about wonder, reality, and narrative itselfWhat does the Loch Ness Monster tell us about belief, tourism, and the stories we need to survive? In this formally innovative essay, award-winning Spanish writer Laura Fernández travels to the Scottish Highlands to investigate the legend of Nessie and develops a perspective on humanity’s perpetual and sometimes destructive need to “discover.” From the 1933 sighting that la...

Elites and the People in Global Power Relations challenges the conventional boundaries of international relations by introducing the differential accumulation of power (DAP) approach. At a time of systemic crisis and eroding democratic legitimacy, this book transcends traditional state-centric and economic paradigms to reveal how the strategic interplay between elite competition and populace mobilisation defines the contemporary global order and its persistent hierarchical structu...

What We Read, and Why is for anyone who has wondered how to make sense of our bewildering, fast-changing world. How do we cope with the welter of information all around us? How do we tell fact from fiction, given the proliferation of misleading or fake news, videos, and content? The answer is simple: we must read and develop our ability to think critically. In this book, we will read from people who do so. In personal essays, business, political, media and community leaders, as well as par...

Planets and Signs in the 12th house / Neptune in each House and Sign / Transits of NeptuneIn this comprehensive study, Maurice Fernandez explores the evolutionary meaning and lessons of Neptune, the 12th house, and Pisces, and lifts the veil on one of the deepest and most misunderstood archetypes of the zodiac. The 2018 edition significantly expands on the original publication (2004), following further extensive research.Maurice Fernandez shares these stell...