Explore the vast range of titles available.

Well before Evel Knievel or Hollywood stuntmen, reality television or the X Games, North America had a long tradition of stunt performance, of men (and some women) who sought media attention and popular fame with public feats of daring. Many of these feats—jumping off bridges, climbing steeples and buildings, swimming incredible distances, or doing tricks with wild animals—had their basis in the manual trades or in older entertainments like the circus. In The Thrill Makers, Jacob Smith shows how turn-of-the-century bridge jumpers, human flies, lion tamers, and stunt pilots first drew crowds to their spectacular displays of death-defying action before becoming a crucial, yet often invisible, component of Hollywood film stardom. Smith explains how these working-class stunt performers helped shape definitions of American manhood, and pioneered a form of modern media celebrity that now occupies an increasingly prominent place in our contemporary popular culture.

Since the very first days of cinema, audiences have marveled at the special effects imagery presented on movie screens. While long relegated to the margins of film studies, special effects have recently become the object of a burgeoning field of scholarship. With the emergence of a digital cinema, and the development of computerized visual effects, film theorists and historians have been reconsidering the traditional accounts of cinematic representation, recognising the important role of special effects. Understood as a constituent part of the cinema, special effects are a major technical but also aesthetic component of filmmaking and an important part of the experience for the audience. In this volume, new directions are charted for the exploration of this indispensable aspect of the cinematic experience. Each of the essays in this collection offers new insight into the theoretical and historical study of special effects. The contributors address the many aspects of special effects, from a variety of perspectives, considering them as a conceptual problem, recounting the history of specific special effects techniques, and analysing notable effects films.

In this paper we generalize the Linear Chain Trick (LCT; aka the Gamma Chain Trick) to help provide modelers more flexibility to incorporate appropriate dwell time assumptions into mean field ODEs, and help clarify connections between individual-level stochastic model assumptions and the structure of corresponding mean field ODEs. The LCT is a technique used to construct mean field ODE models from continuous-time stochastic state transition models where the time an individual spends in a given state (i.e., the dwell time) is Erlang distributed (i.e., gamma distributed with integer shape parameter). Despite the LCT’s widespread use, we lack general theory to facilitate the easy application of this technique, especially for complex models. Modelers must therefore choose between constructing ODE models using heuristics with oversimplified dwell time assumptions, using time consuming derivations from first principles, or to instead use non-ODE models (like integro-differential or delay differential equations) which can be cumbersome to derive and analyze. Here, we provide analytical results that enable modelers to more efficiently construct ODE models using the LCT or related extensions. Specifically, we provide (1) novel LCT extensions for various scenarios found in applications, including conditional dwell time distributions; (2) formulations of these LCT extensions that bypass the need to derive ODEs from integral equations; and (3) a novel Generalized Linear Chain Trick (GLCT) framework that extends the LCT to a much broader set of possible dwell time distribution assumptions, including the flexible phase-type distributions which can approximate distributions on \\[{\\mathbb {R}}^+\\] and can be fit to data.

How do photographs compel belief and endow knowledge? To understand the impact of photography in a given era, we must study the adjacent forms of visual persuasion with which photographs compete and collaborate. In photography's early days, magic shows, scientific demonstrations, and philosophical games repeatedly put the visual credulity of the modern public to the test in ways that shaped, and were shaped by, the reality claims of photography. These venues invited viewers to judge the reliability of their own visual experiences. Photography resided at the center of a constellation of places and practices in which the task of visual discernment—of telling the real from the constructed—became an increasingly crucial element of one's location in cultural, political, and social relations. In Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Subject, Jordan Bear tells the story of how photographic trickery in the 1850s and 1860s participated in the fashioning of the modern subject. By locating specific mechanisms of photographic deception employed by the leading mid-century photographers within this capacious culture of discernment, Disillusioned integrates some of the most striking—and puzzling—images of the Victorian period into a new and expansive interpretive framework.

The card game Truco, popular in Argentina and Uruguay, originates in Spain, specifically in Catalonia and Valencia. Some authors, with considerable imagination, have proposed legends of a more remote origin linked to Muslims, perhaps because the four-suited playing cards, which entered Europe from the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt (1250-1517), may have derived from a trick-taking game with a peculiar card hierarchy similar to that of Truco. During the 16th and 17th centuries in Spain, various card games emerged. Some, like Flor, were predominantly games of chance and associated with betting; others, like Truc or Truque, were trick-taking and more social, prioritizing intuition and strategy over luck. From the times of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata up to the 19th century, a card game developed and became popular in these lands, combining the strategy of Truque and the chance of Flor: Truquiflor. The South American gauchos expressed, through this game, their character and temperament, transforming it into a dialectical game, full of sayings and verses. Truco, which today is played with or without the flor, optimally embodies certain traits of the criollo character—most notably, an irreverence in the face of objective and indisputable adversity, capable of “scaring the devil himself.”

Pankreatische neuroendokrine Neoplasien (PanNEN) sind eher selten. Die Morphologie hilft in der Zusammenschau mit der Immunhistochemie bei der Typisierung und weiteren Einteilung des jeweiligen Tumortyps. Je nach Tumorstadium und Differentialdiagnose variiert das diagnostische Panel. Die vorliegende Arbeit fasst die obligaten diagnostischen, prognostischen und prädiktiven Marker bei PanNEN zusammen. Marker der Wahl zum Nachweis eines neuroendokrinen Phänotyps sind Synaptophysin, Chromogranin A sowie INSM1. Die Proliferationsfraktion Ki67 ist zur Graduierung unabdingbar, während p53 und Rb1 in der Abgrenzung zum neuroendokrinen Karzinom (NEC) helfen können. Transkriptionsfaktoren, wie beispielsweise CDX2, TTF‑1, Islet‑1 geben Hinweise auf die Lokalisation eines Primarius in der Cancer-of-unknown-primary(CUP)-Situation. Die DAXX/ATRX-Immunhistochemie hat vor allem prognostischen Wert. Molekularpathologische Untersuchungen haben bisher einen geringen Stellenwert in der Diagnostik der PanNEN. Wichtiger Fallstrick in der Routinediagnostik ist das breite Spektrum an Differentialdiagnosen, welche neuroendokrine Neoplasien imitieren. Ein erweitertes immunhistochemisches Panel ist im Zweifelsfall empfohlen.

The well known linear chain trick (LCT) allows modellers to derive mean field ODEs that assume gamma (Erlang) distributed passage times, by transitioning individuals sequentially through a chain of sub-states. The time spent in these sub-states is the sum of k exponentially distributed random variables, and is thus gamma distributed. The generalized linear chain trick (GLCT) extends this technique to the broader phase-type family of distributions, which includes exponential, Erlang, hypoexponential, and Coxian distributions. Phase-type distributions are the family of matrix exponential distributions on that represent the absorption time distributions for finite-state, continuous time Markov chains (CTMCs). Here we review CTMCs and phase-type distributions, then illustrate how to use the GLCT to efficiently build ODE models from underlying stochastic model assumptions. We introduce two novel model families by using the GLCT to generalize the Rosenzweig-MacArthur predator-prey model, and the SEIR model. We illustrate the kinds of complexity that can be captured by such models through multiple examples. We also show the benefits of using a GLCT-based model formulation to speed up the computation of numerical solutions to such models. These results highlight the intuitive nature, and utility, of using the GLCT to derive ODE models from first principles.

The usual one third trick allows to reduce problems involving general cubes to a countable family. Moreover, this covering lemma uses only dyadic cubes, which allows to use nice martingale properties in harmonic analysis problems. We consider alternatives to this technique in spaces equipped with nonhomogeneous measures. This entails additional difficulties which force us to consider martingale filtrations that are not regular. The dyadic covering that we find can be used to clarify the relationship between martingale BMO spaces and the most natural BMO space in this setting, which is the space RBMO introduced by Tolsa.

Past research demonstrates that unconscious primes can affect people’s decisions. However, these free choice priming paradigms present participants with very few alternatives. Magicians’ forcing techniques provide a powerful tool to investigate how natural implicit primes can unconsciously influence decisions with multiple alternatives. We used video and live performances of the mental priming force. This technique uses subtle nonverbal and verbal conversational primes to influence spectators to choose the three of diamonds. Our results show that a large number of participants chose the target card while reporting feeling free and in control of their choice. Even when they were influenced by the primes, participants typically failed to give the reason for their choice. These results show that naturally embedding primes within a person’s speech and gestures effectively influenced people’s decision making. This raises the possibility that this form of mind control could be used to effectively manipulate other mental processes.

Magical Mathematicsreveals the secrets of amazing, fun-to-perform card tricks--and the profound mathematical ideas behind them--that will astound even the most accomplished magician. Persi Diaconis and Ron Graham provide easy, step-by-step instructions for each trick, explaining how to set up the effect and offering tips on what to say and do while performing it. Each card trick introduces a new mathematical idea, and varying the tricks in turn takes readers to the very threshold of today's mathematical knowledge. For example, the Gilbreath Principle--a fantastic effect where the cards remain in control despite being shuffled--is found to share an intimate connection with the Mandelbrot set. Other card tricks link to the mathematical secrets of combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, topology, the Riemann hypothesis, and even Fermat's last theorem. Diaconis and Graham are mathematicians as well as skilled performers with decades of professional experience between them. In this book they share a wealth of conjuring lore, including some closely guarded secrets of legendary magicians.Magical Mathematicscovers the mathematics of juggling and shows how theI Chingconnects to the history of probability and magic tricks both old and new. It tells the stories--and reveals the best tricks--of the eccentric and brilliant inventors of mathematical magic.Magical Mathematicsexposes old gambling secrets through the mathematics of shuffling cards, explains the classic street-gambling scam of three-card monte, traces the history of mathematical magic back to the thirteenth century and the oldest mathematical trick--and much more.