Simon James

From the perennially popular author-illustrator Simon James, comes a heart-warming, funny story about being a dinosaur step-dad.For kids who love dinosaurs – Rex is the story of becoming a dino step-dad by the ever-popular author-illustrator Simon James. Once upon 100 million years ago a terrifying tyrannosaurus roamed the earth. He spent his days raging through the jungle scaring every dinosaur he saw with his fierce roar. One night, while he is sleeping, an abandoned egg cracks open and what should pop out but a teeny-weeny baby dino who immediately thinks that the T-Rex is his dad! And so begins the touching, funny story of a little newborn dino and his adopted daddy... A perfect book for dads and their little ones to share together.

A heartwarming tale with an important ecological message about respecting an animal's natural habitat.Grandad and Jess are walking together in the woods when they see a squirrel pass by. Jess wants to take it home with her as a pet, but Grandad says that you can't tame a squirrel. As Jess follows the creature deeper into the woods, she discovers more natural wonders and comes to understand that her grandad is right – the squirrel's proper home is the wild woods.

Choquet capacities, which provide the weighting mechanism for the Choquet and other fuzzy integrals, model synergistic and antagonistic interactions between variables by assigning value to all subsets rather than individual inputs. While the flexibility of capacities (also referred to as fuzzy measures and cooperative games) comes at the expense of an exponentially increasing number of parameters, the ability to explain their behavior using various value and interaction indices makes them appealing for applications requiring transparency and interpretability. As well as a number of useful indices that in some way capture the extent to which positive and negative interactions occur, significant progress has been made in addressing the scalability issues that arise in applications. This book provides a detailed overview of the background concepts relating to capacities and their role in fuzzy integration and aggregation, then presents specialised chapters on most recent results in learning, random sampling and optimization that involve Choquet capacities. Topics and features: · Fundamentals of Choquet capacities (fuzzy measures) and their use in modeling importance and interaction between variables · Definitions, properties and mappings between alternative representations that allow capacities and fuzzy integrals to be interpreted and applied in different settings · Various simplification assumptions, from k-additive, p-symmetric and l-measures to more recent concepts such as k-interactive and hierarchical frameworks · Capacity learning formulations that allow the diverse types to be elicited from datasets or according to user-specified requirements · Recent findings related to random sampling and optimisation with Choquet integral objectives This book includes illustrative examples and guidance for implementation, including an appendix detailing functions found in the pyfmtools software library. It aims to be useful for practitioners and researchers in decision and data-driven fields, or those who wish to apply these emerging tools to new problems. The authors are all affiliated with the School of Information Technology at Deakin University, Australia. Gleb Beliakov is a professor, Simon James is an Associate Professor, and Jian-Zhang Wu is a Research Fellow.

First published in 1994, Putting the Family First is a study of better-off couples that clarifies the relationship between individualism and family values. Partners’ cultural practices focus on "making something of themselves", being "supportive" of each other, and spending "quality time" with children. But their economic strategies are directed towards competition for positional goods, especially higher education and good jobs for their offspring. The authors argue that, although these strategies are rational for individual families, they are collectively wasteful and mutually frustrating, and construct a narrow and exclusive version of citizenship. Such private morality depletes civic culture, and is socially costly. This revealing study provides a valuable text for students, with considerable appeal for courses in sociology, social policy, gender and cultural studies. It will be of broader interest to others connected to avoid the unravelling of our social fabric.

The Roman eastern frontier stretched from the north-east shore of the Black Sea to the Red Sea. It faced Rome’s formidable foe, the kingdom of Parthia, and its successor, Sasanian Persia. Rome’s bulwark in antiquity was the area known as Syria or the Levant, roughly modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and Palestine. To the south lay the Nabataean kingdom, annexed by Rome in 106 and formed into the province of Arabia. To the north, the Cappadocian frontier was laid out in one of the most inaccessible and remote parts of Eurasia facing extremes of climate and topography, amid a patchwork of client kingdoms. This hidden and fascinating frontier in Turkey, whose bases mostly lie under reservoirs, is the major omission from this volume and it is hoped that a more in-depth account might appear in due course. The Caucasian forts along the edge of the Black Sea are, however, part of this volume; this is perhaps Rome’s least known frontier archaeologically but the subject of a unique account by Arrian when governor of Cappadocia.

First published in 1994, Putting the Family First is a study of better-off couples that clarifies the relationship between individualism and family values. Partners’ cultural practices focus on "making something of themselves", being "supportive" of each other, and spending "quality time" with children. But their economic strategies are directed towards competition for positional goods, especially higher education and good jobs for their offspring. The authors argue that, although these strategies are rational for individual families, they are collectively wasteful and mutually frustrating, and construct a narrow and exclusive version of citizenship. Such private morality depletes civic culture, and is socially costly. This revealing study provides a valuable text for students, with considerable appeal for courses in sociology, social policy, gender and cultural studies. It will be of broader interest to others connected to avoid the unravelling of our social fabric.

The humorous story of a little boy and a dog who are destined to be together!Polly belongs with Molly, Eric belongs with Derek, Perry belongs with Terry – everyone knows that owners and their dogs belong together in their own unique way. But for Poor Mr Scruff, alone in the dogs' home, there's no one – that is until a very special little boy arrives looking for a friend...A wonderful, witty and warm story about the true nature of friendship from award-winning author-illustrator Simon James.

Fully revised and updated, this new edition of Simon James’s comprehensible and accessible text provides an excellent insight into the work of the Prime Minister and Cabinet government. It draws on the wealth of new material that has become available in recent years to shed light on the mechanisms and processes of the Cabinet system in Britain, focusing on the post-1979 period. Its coverage includes: ministers and their departments; collective decision-making; the role of the Prime Minister; the strengths and weaknesses of the Cabinet system; and the future of the Cabinet system.Prime Minister and Cabinet Government will give both A-level students and undergraduates a clear understanding of the realities of this central aspect of British politics.

Fully revised and updated, this new edition of Simon James’s comprehensible and accessible text provides an excellent insight into the work of the Prime Minister and Cabinet government. It draws on the wealth of new material that has become available in recent years to shed light on the mechanisms and processes of the Cabinet system in Britain, focusing on the post-1979 period. Its coverage includes: ministers and their departments; collective decision-making; the role of the Prime Minister; the strengths and weaknesses of the Cabinet system; and the future of the Cabinet system.Prime Minister and Cabinet Government will give both A-level students and undergraduates a clear understanding of the realities of this central aspect of British politics.

A sweetly silly story of a little boy and a dog who make an unlikely (but perhaps perfect) pair. Everyone knows that owners and their dogs belong together in a unique way. Polly belongs to Molly, Eric belongs to Derek, Berry belongs to Terry. But poor Mr. Scruff, alone in the rescue shelter, doesn't belong to anyone. Then a boy named Jim walks in, and they seem to get along. Jim and Mr. Scruff don't look anything alike, and their names certainly don't rhyme, but they may end up belonging to each other just the same. From author-illustrator Simon James comes a warm, winning story about friendship and finding a home.

The humorous story of a little boy and a dog who are destined to be together!Polly belongs with Molly, Eric belongs with Derek, Perry belongs with Terry - everyone knows that owners and their dogs belong together in their own unique way. But for Poor Mr Scruff, alone in the dogs' home, there's no one - that is until a very special little boy arrives looking for a friend...A wonderful, witty and warm story about the true nature of friendship from award-winning author-illustrator Simon James.

This book addresses computer scientists, IT specialists, mathematicians, knowledge engineers and programmers, who are engaged in research and practice of multicriteria decision making. Fuzzy measures, also known as capacities, allow one to combine degrees of preferences, support or fuzzy memberships into one representative value, taking into account interactions between the inputs. The notions of mutual reinforcement or redundancy are modeled explicitly through coefficients of fuzzy measures, and fuzzy integrals, such as the Choquet and Sugeno integrals combine the inputs. Building on previous monographs published by the authors and dealing with different aspects of aggregation, this book especially focuses on the Choquet and Sugeno integrals. It presents a number of new findings concerning computation of fuzzy measures, learning them from data and modeling interactions. The book does not require substantial mathematical background, as all the relevant notions are explained. It is intended as concise, timely and self-contained guide to the use of fuzzy measures in the field of multicriteria decision making.

Dura-Europos, a Parthian-ruled Greco-Syrian city, was captured by Rome c.AD165. It then accommodated a Roman garrison until its destruction by Sasanian siege c.AD256. Excavations of the site between the World Wars made sensational discoveries, and with renewed exploration from 1986 to 2011, Dura remains the best-explored city of the Roman East. A critical revelation was a sprawling Roman military base occupying a quarter of the city's interior. This included swathes of civilian housing converted to soldiers' accommodation and several existing sanctuaries, as well as baths, an amphitheatre, headquarters, and more temples added by the garrison. Base and garrison were clearly fundamental factors in the history of Roman Dura, but what impact did they have on the civil population? Original excavators gloomily portrayed Durenes evicted from their homes and holy places, and subjected to extortion and impoverishment by brutal soldiers, while recent commentators have envisaged military-civilian concordia, with shared prosperity and integration. Detailed examination of the evidence presents a new picture. Through the use of GPS, satellite, geophysical and archival evidence, this volume shows that the Roman military base and resident community were even bigger than previously understood, with both military and civil communities appearing much more internally complex than has been allowed until now. The result is a fascinating social dynamic which we can partly reconstruct, giving us a nuanced picture of life in a city near the eastern frontier of the Roman world.

The heart-warming story of a little boy who misses his mum from award-winning author–illustrator Simon James.The day that Stanley’s mum had to go away, he decided to go to Mars. In his place, a not-very-well-behaved Martian arrived. He looked just like Stanley, but he wouldn’t eat his vegetables, he wouldn’t clean his teeth and he certainly didn’t play nicely in the playground. Dad's not sure what Mum will think when she gets back. Will the martian still be there, or will the real Stanley get back in time?