Mark Fleming

Neil Renton and Mark Fleming met through The Changing Room, a 12-week support program run by Scottish Action for Mental Health. The Changing Room was pioneered at Hibernian FC in Edinburgh before similar sessions were rolled out across many other senior Scottish football clubs.Attending these drop-ins, Neil and Mark discovered a shared interest in creative writing, both admitting they found this activity inspirational and therapeutic. This led to them bouncing ideas off each other, initiating fiction writing via simple prompts. They took turns sending each other song titles randomly selected from their phone playlists. These prompts became the spark to construct a short story. This exercise proved to be cathartic, giving both ideas for plots, characters, and settings. If 'writers block' ever set in, the next selection of songs would be requested Taking this a step further, they began not only crafting new pieces inspired by these random songs, but also digging into their respective back catalogues of fiction, revamping older stories. As well as stories, many containing semi-autobiographical elements, they wrote essays about how their musical tastes have benefited their wellbeing. Finally, they interviewed each other about their respective mental health journeys, transforming sometimes harrowing flashbacks into poignant memoirs.HEIDS UP is the result: a collection of flash fiction, longer short stories, essays on musical appreciation, and descriptions of lived mental health experiences. This book will resonate with anyone who has faced issues of their own, directly or indirectly.Crucially, HEIDS UP does not represent the conclusion of Neil and Mark's collaboration. It is the start.

This book introduces Mechanistic Data Science (MDS) as a structured methodology for combining data science tools with mathematical scientific principles (i.e., “mechanistic” principles) to solve intractable problems. Traditional data science methodologies require copious quantities of data to show a reliable pattern, but the amount of required data can be greatly reduced by considering the mathematical science principles. MDS is presented here in six easy-to-follow modules: 1) Multimodal data generation and collection, 2) extraction of mechanistic features, 3) knowledge-driven dimension reduction, 4) reduced order surrogate models, 5) deep learning for regression and classification, and 6) system and design. These data science and mechanistic analysis steps are presented in an intuitive manner that emphasizes practical concepts for solving engineering problems as well as real-life problems. This book is written in a spectral style and is ideal as an entry leveltextbook for engineering and data science undergraduate and graduate students, practicing scientists and engineers, as well as STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) high school students and teachers.

1976 - Growing Up Bipolar is a disturbing, but darkly humorous and life-affirming mental health memoir by Mark Fleming, a Scottish writer and musician. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder in his 20s, this book is heavily reliant on his actual medical case notes as an inpatient and outpatient, but is also set against the wider picture of the chaotic but inspirational post-punk scene of the late-1970s and 1980s in his native Edinburgh. Through an unflinching, unsentimental eye, Fleming takes the reader into bipolar's depths of depression and unnatural highs of mania, and is candid about his experiences of locked psych wards, the debilitating side-effects of potent anti-psychotic drugs, and the wonderful and weird but terrifying places his deluded mind took him to.The subject of mental health has been described as permanently contemporary, with awareness of vital importance in challenging ongoing misconceptions at a time when one-in-four will have issues at some point, while depression can be a trigger for suicide, still the single biggest killer of males under-45 in Britain. Fleming rolls back the years to a time when mental health was far more heavily stigmatised, his unravelling health a journey into the unknown for himself and his family. His story focuses on key events before, during, and after his peak bipolar spell (1987-1990). Delving deep into the psyche of a chemically-imbalanced mind, he relives a tragic event during the heatwave of 1976 that left the indelible stain in his adolescence the possibly led to illness in later years. (Mental injuries are cited as a common prompt for bipolar disorder, while the majority of patients are diagnosed in their teens and 20s). He also ponders why lithium treatment was considered the sole antidote to his situation, and why he was left to languish on this potent medication for almost three decades.Much of the book's timescale overlaps with Grant McPhee's award-winning documentary, Big Gold Dream: The Sound of Young Scotland 1977-1985. So, 1976 - Growing Up Bipolar is so much more than a lurid story about the fallout of mental breakdowns. It is a celebration of the rejuvenating potency of music, at times a vivid celebration of Scotland's electrifying indie and post-punk music and cultural scenes, awash with enthusiastic anecdotes about gigging, songwriting, recording sessions at BBC's Maida Vale studios, and teenage obsessions with sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. The cathartic impact of John Peel's BBC Radio 1 show and a long-time devotion to Manchester post-punk legends The Fall figure prominently.Bestselling Edinburgh author Irvine Welsh read an early draft of 1976 - Growing Up Bipolar entitled BrainBomb (named after a song title by cult Newcastle post-punk band Punishment of Luxury). His comment, "It moved like a rocket, and it's mashed my head " was so apt.

This book introduces Mechanistic Data Science (MDS) as a structured methodology for combining data science tools with mathematical scientific principles (i.e., “mechanistic” principles) to solve intractable problems. Traditional data science methodologies require copious quantities of data to show a reliable pattern, but the amount of required data can be greatly reduced by considering the mathematical science principles. MDS is presented here in six easy-to-follow modules: 1) Multimodal data generation and collection, 2) extraction of mechanistic features, 3) knowledge-driven dimension reduction, 4) reduced order surrogate models, 5) deep learning for regression and classification, and 6) system and design. These data science and mechanistic analysis steps are presented in an intuitive manner that emphasizes practical concepts for solving engineering problems as well as real-life problems. This book is written in a spectral style and is ideal as an entry leveltextbook for engineering and data science undergraduate and graduate students, practicing scientists and engineers, as well as STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) high school students and teachers.

libro si ispira al famoso flusso di coscienza di Joyce, ma con una netta distinzione per quanto concerne l'ambientazione (non piu una citta, ma l'interno di una casa) e la rivelazione finale (non piu una semplice epifania, tanto cara a Joyce, ma una epifania che acquisisce in questo racconto il carattere di agnizione). Una confessione del protagonista, uno shock per la coprotagonista del racconto. Un finale inaspettato...

Being Killed by the Siren is a wonderful way to die Introducing a new character to the world of contemporary fantasy The ancients called her by many names: the Nereid, a Morgan, or an Undine. The Greeks called her a Nymph. They are all very beautiful names for a beautiful killer of humans. If you are in her company near water, and should she wish for you to go farther, then you have already gone too far... Her name is Eleanor Orlen, and she is the last of her kind. She is the Siren Once an object of romantic myth and legend, it took until the 20th Century for humans to find a use for her... the perfect killer. Eleanor leaves no fingerprints, and can beguile her way into any place, mind or secret. When seen at her most beautiful, few have lived to describe her. She has the ability to vanish without trace, bear horrific injuries and is difficult to kill unless you know how. She is also lonely, lost, scared and frustrated, and finds herself trapped in a modern and at times cruel world. Those who entrap her, the mysterious Brabant Committee, do so with a simple ultimatum - work for us, or perish. Eleanor must conduct her hated tasks against an ever more dangerous background, with even the Vatican tracking her. Forever young and forever lonely, all she wants is her freedom, but time is now running out... A hunter is closing in. A man whose greatest wish is to make a species become extinct. The Call of the Siren is the first book in the Siren Trilogy. "...This mixture of an espionage thriller and a contemporary fantasy, felt like something John le Carre might have produced if he'd been tasked with writing something similar to Twilight."