Böcker av Jonathan Carroll

The first historical look at what happened during the Somalia intervention; what went wrong and what lessons we should learn from it.The story of Black Hawk Down is a familiar one. On 3 October 1993 two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down, and in the ensuing Battle of Mogadishu eighteen Americans and hundreds of Somalis were killed. But very few appreciate that this was just one day in a two-and-a-half-year operation; the most ambitious attempt in history to rebuild a nation. The United States sought to show the world that the UN could rebuild a country, but in a dire foreshadowing of the failed efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan a decade later, the intervention in Somalia was plagued with political infighting, policy mismatch, confusion, and fatal assumptions. In 1992 Somalia saw the largest ever deployment of American troops to the continent of Africa, and 1993 brought the first UN-led peace enforcement mission and the most ambitious experiment in nation-building. In Beyond Black Hawk Down, Jonathan Carroll provides the first scholarly military history of the entire intervention, from its early and largely successful humanitarian phase in 1992 through to the ultimate withdrawal of UN forces in 1995. Carroll dispels the myths and misunderstandings surrounding one of the most infamous episodes of the 1990s to present a new interpretation of events, most notably by including the Somali perspective, to argue what went so wrong in Somalia, and more importantly, why. Understanding the intervention in Somalia, its successes and the roots of its failures, is invaluable to contemporary debates on concepts of nation-building and counterinsurgency. Moreover, the increasing regularity of inter-state and intra-state conflicts across the world means the international community will continue to be called upon to intervene in other failed or failing states in the future. Beyond Black Hawk Down is an important new history that will inform the shape and nature of future military interventions.

From one of the great modern masters of the fantastic, “A beautiful, brilliant, meditation on art, love, inspiration and what makes life worthwhile."-- Neil Gaiman"[Carroll's] prose is spare, polished and quick-moving, sometimes lightly comic, always immensely engaging... Mr. Breakfast is pure pleasure to read. It will surprise you, make you laugh and scare you — and then, just when you think it’s over, add several extra twists." - Michael Dirda, The Washington PostGraham Patterson’s life has hit a dead end. His career as a comedian is failing. The love of his life recently broke up with him and he literally has no idea what to do next. With nothing to lose, he buys a new car and hits the road, planning to drive across country and hopefully figure out his next moves before reaching California.  But along the way Patterson does something his old self would never have even considered: he gets tattooed by a brilliant tattoo artist in North Carolina. The decision sets off a series of extraordinary events that changes his life forever in ways he never could have imagined. Among other things, Patterson is gifted with the ability to see in real time three different lives that are available to him. The choice is his: The life he is leading right now, or two very different ones. In all of them there is love or fame and of course danger because once he has chosen, there is no telling what will happen next. Mr. Breakfast is a dazzling, absorbing and deeply moving novel about the choices that we have to confront and face, confirming Jonathan Carroll’s status as one of our greatest and most imaginative storytellers.

SummaryBeyond Spreadsheets with R shows you how to take raw data and transform it for use in computations, tables, graphs, and more. You''ll build on simple programming techniques like loops and conditionals to create your own custom functions. You''ll come away with a toolkit of strategies for analyzing and visualizing data of all sorts using R and RStudio.Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.About the TechnologySpreadsheets are powerful tools for many tasks, but if you need to interpret, interrogate, and present data, they can feel like the wrong tools for the task. That''s when R programming is the way to go. The R programming language provides a comfortable environment to properly handle all types of data. And within the open source RStudio development suite, you have at your fingertips easy-to-use ways to simplify complex manipulations and create reproducible processes for analysis and reporting.About the BookWith Beyond Spreadsheets with R you''ll learn how to go from raw data to meaningful insights using R and RStudio. Each carefully crafted chapter covers a unique way to wrangle data, from understanding individual values to interacting with complex collections of data, including data you scrape from the web. You''ll build on simple programming techniques like loops and conditionals to create your own custom functions. You''ll come away with a toolkit of strategies for analyzing and visualizing data of all sorts.What''s insideHow to start programming with R and RStudioUnderstanding and implementing important R structures and operatorsInstalling and working with R packagesTidying, refining, and plotting your dataAbout the ReaderIf you''re comfortable writing formulas in Excel, you''re ready for this book.About the AuthorDr Jonathan Carroll is a data science consultant providing R programming services. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics.Table of ContentsIntroducing data and the R languageGetting to know R data typesMaking new data valuesUnderstanding the tools you''ll use: FunctionsCombining data valuesSelecting data valuesDoing things with lots of dataDoing things conditionally: Control structuresVisualizing data: PlottingDoing more with your data with extensions

The special Jonathan Carroll issue (all arwork by Featured Artist Thomas Kidd) inclues 4 stories by Carroll, plus contributions from William F. Nolan, Ian Watson, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, and many more.