This chapter argues that the pressures of war led many to reassess the 'value' of their work in a wartime society, with the slippery concept of work of 'national importance'. The concept of 'national work' provides a new benchmark against which men sought to measure themselves. The chapter considers the impact on working lives of wartime regulations, as well as of the vicissitudes. It deals with the ideal of work that contributed to the war effort and closes with its polar opposite: work that it was thought allowed certain individuals to 'profiteer' from the calamity of war. The chapter examines the problems and opportunities that were particularly associated with the world of business. There is little doubt that middle-class working lives were deeply affected by wartime shortages of labour. Shortages occurred not only among working-class 'hands', but also white-collar and middle-class occupations.

The active construction of the grotesque as a paradoxical 'order of disorder' has been a hallmark of Angela Carter's writing career. This chapter aims to show, The Bloody Chamber, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children collectively form a vivid contemporary grotesque that stays unfinished in its treatment of the excessive body. Both Nights at the Circus and Wise Children rely on the discourse and mechanisms of carnival for much of their literary vigour. However, Carter takes care to situate their often-comic narratives within wider contexts of historical change and its attendant troubles. The chapter focuses on the important congruence between the carnivalesque and dialogic forms in Mikhail Bakhtin's work. It explains how Bakhtin himself describes the English comic novel as a menippean tradition of a heteroglossic kind.

Richard Attenborough has long been recognised as a significant figure in British cinema history and film culture. After his screen debut in the war-time film In Which We Serve, Attenborough's cinema career developed through acting and later through producing and directing to become one of the industry's most renowned figures. Attenborough's entry into production stemmed from a desire to make films that had purpose and social relevance. Despite his artistic background, Attenborough's films with the exception of Oh! What a Lovely War, cannot be described as innovative in style. While Oh! What a Lovely War and Shadowlands have also been popular successes, others have been either nominated or have received national or international awards. Attenborough's influence has also been nationally recognised through his being officially honoured three times, initially as a Commander of the British Empire (CBE), then knighted and finally ennobled for his contributions.

Cronos is a film that has been given an afterlife with the subsequent global success of Guillermo del Toro. Cronos is an interesting film to explore, as it shows del Toro without big budgets. At the time, it was the most expensive Mexican film ever made, with a budget of $2 million, according to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB); however, that is clearly miniscule in comparison with Hollywood and European art cinema productions. Most of the literature on Cronos has focused on the film's relationships to national cinema and to the vampire genre. This chapter explores the ways in which the writer-director applies his thesis on the importance of death to the horror genre and examines how this subverts an understanding of death as the dark element to be feared. It explores the film's application of alchemy, with a focus on the Cronos device and its inventor.

This chapter describes the railway development in France, the inauguration of Paris-St-Germain (PSG), the hesitant administrative arrangements accompaning the concessions of the State's role, and the insufficiency of investment capital to finance railway development. The Pereires' developing partnership was placed under great pressure from the start. Their satisfaction with the inauguration of the PSG rail line had been marred by the sudden death a month earlier of Isaac's wife Laurence at the age of twenty-five, leaving Isaac with two small sons, Eugene and Georges. Saint-Simonian Paulin Talabot had been pursuing Chevalier's 'Mediterranean system' as actively as the Pereires, though from a different direction. Railways were among the most immediate of the public infrastructure attacked by the workers. While the Pereires' railway interests survived the riots and fires which followed, they lost heavily. Railway stations were looted and vandalised.

This chapter traces notions of the self in the plays of early modern Spain. Drawing on a vast corpus of unpublished plays with the technique of “distant reading”, it examines the relation between self and free will in a period of increasing authoritarian control by both church and state. These plays demonstrate a deep preoccupation with maintaining a sense of personal freedom and choice despite the pressure of external constraints: Kallendorf proposes that the self is conceived as a “fortress” within which some sense of personal autonomy can be retained. This is very different from the more free-form relational concepts of the self that we have seen developed in the volume up to this point: the self remains grounded in the body and operative in society, but society places the body under heavy restraint.

This chapter focuses on the pivotal role Mary Sidney played in the specific development of the English devotional lyric. It re-examines the terms in which John Donne praises 'thy Sydnean Psalmes' in 'Vpon the translation of the Psalmes by Sir Philip Sydney, and the Countesse of Pembroke his Sister'. In combining God's word, Mary Sidney's own words through translation and her brother's favourite sonnet form into an expression of communal praise, Mary Sidney's sonnet perhaps epitomises the truly collaborative nature of 'thy Sydnean Psalmes'. Calling upon his contemporaries specifically to celebrate 'thy Sydnean Psalmes', Donne's choice of syntactical rearrangement places the emphasis on the object and its possessors. Although Donne's poem has been curiously marginalised until relatively, its eloquent encapsulation of the essential problematic of early modern devotional poetics is remarkable.

16.1 Introduction to Artificial Neural Network

Neural networks and deep learning are the buzzwords in modern-day computer science. And, if you think that these are the latest entrants in this field, you probably have a misconception. Neural networks have been around for quite some time, and they have only started picking up now, putting up a huge positive impact on computer science.

Artificial neural network (ANN) was invented in the 1960s and 1970s. It became a part of common tech talks, and people started thinking that this machine learning (ML) technique would solve all the complex problems that were challenging the researchers during that time. But sooner, the hopes and expectations died off over the next decade.

The decline could not be attributed to some loopholes in neural networks, but the major reason for the decline was the “technology” itself. The technology back then was not up to the right standard to facilitate neural networks as they needed a lot of data for training and huge computation resources for building the model. During that time, both data and computing power were scarce. Hence, the resulting neural network remained only on paper rather than taking centerstage of the machine to solve some real-world problems.

Later on, at the beginning of the 21st century, we saw a lot of improvements in storage techniques resulting in reduced cost per gigabyte of storage. Humanity witnessed a huge rise in big data due to the Internet boom and smartphones.