Showing results by narrator "Mike Cooper" in All Categories

 In today's society, work takes up a vast proportion of the time and energy of ordinary people. Although use of the phrase "work-life balance" is now commonplace in the media and ordinary conversation, people work longer hours than ever before. However, rather than purely a means to an end in terms of supporting oneself financially, the workplace is a place to develop skills and talents and build lasting friendships. 

Social science is the study of human behavior. It offers the tools to understand and explain people's choices and actions, and how they live in communities. With insights from social science, organizations and individuals may be persuaded to change their behavior, making a difference in addressing societal challenges. Social science can offer us the answers to key questions, such as why do some people gamble, eat unhealthy foods, or hold racist beliefs?

The financial services industry is being transformed by heightened regulation, technological disruption, and changing demographics. These structural forces have lowered barriers to entry, increasing competition from within and outside the industry, in the form of entrepreneurial fintech...

Bloomsbury presents So Very Small by Thomas Levenson, read by Mike Cooper. In 1665, an infectious disease swept through the British capital and claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people. It would take another two hundred years for the cause of the Great Plague of London to be confirmed: a...

This Very Short Introduction takes listeners into the inferno of a racing pyroclastic current, and the heart of a moving lava flow, as understood through the latest scientific research. Exploring how volcanologists forensically decipher how volcanoes work, Michael Branney and Jan Zalasiewicz explain what we do (and don't) understand about the fundamental mechanisms of volcanism, and consider how volcanoes interact with other physical processes on the Earth, with life, and with human society. 

What is socialism? Does it have a future, or has it become an outdated ideology in the 21st century? This audiobook considers the major theories in socialism and explores its historical evolution from the French Revolution to the present day. Michael Newman argues that socialism has always been a diverse doctrine, while nevertheless containing a central core of interconnected values and goals: a critique of capitalism; an optimistic view of human beings; and the belief that it is possible to establish societies based on egalitarianism, social solidarity, and cooperation. 

The 20th century saw a remarkable upsurge of research on drugs, with major advances in the treatment of bacterial and viral infections, heart disease, stomach ulcers, cancer, and metal illnesses. These, along with the introduction of the oral contraceptive, have altered all of our lives. There has also been an increase in the recreational use and abuse of drugs in the Western world. This Very Short Introduction, in its second edition, gives a nontechnical account of how drugs work in the body.

The Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron offers the latest in critical thinking about the poet that defined the Romantic era across Europe and beyond. The volume presents forty-four groundbreaking essays that enable listeners to assess Lord Byron's central position in Romantic traditions and his profound and far-reaching influence on British, European, and world culture.

Forged during the tumultuous aftermath of Partition in 1947, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) has grown to become the preeminent intelligence service in Pakistan. Its capabilities are comprehensive, its remit covers both foreign and domestic intelligence, and it is one of the most feared and respected agencies of the Global South. Pakistan's ISI provides an up-to-date and detailed introduction to the ISI and its historical evolution.

Generative AI is the hottest topic in tech. This practical book teaches machine learning engineers and data scientists how to use TensorFlow and Keras to create impressive generative deep learning models from scratch, including variational autoencoders (VAEs), generative adversarial networks (GANs), Transformers, normalizing flows, energy-based models, and denoising diffusion models.

Author Andrew Harmel-Law shows you how architects and development teams can collaborate to create and evolve more efficient architectures for their systems. Techniques in this book will help you learn how to create a mindset that allows everyone to practice architecture and build the best systems they've ever experienced.

Emotions are complex mental states that resist reduction. They are visceral reactions but also beliefs about the world. They are spontaneous outbursts but also culturally learned performances. And just as our emotions in any given moment display this complex structure, so their history is plural rather than singular. The history of emotions is where the history of ideas meets the history of the body, and where the history of subjectivity meets social and cultural history.

Jeremy Peckham shows us how we have become seduced by progress, embracing AI applications for their convenience, yet unwittingly diminishing our ability to be God’s image-bearers and losing moral responsibility. Rooted in the biblical truth that humanity is created in God’s image, Masters or Slaves? explores six ways in which AI has an impact today. We are challenged where, and how, to set boundaries, both privately and as a society, in order not to fall into addiction, slavery and idolatry.

The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History provides a critical historical analysis of the Enlightenment in England, Scotland, France, Germany, and the United States from c. 1650 to the present. It argues that the degree of commonality between social and intellectual movements in each—and, more broadly, between the five societies—has been overstated for polemical purposes. Clark shows that the concept of 'the Enlightenment' was not widely adopted in those societies until the mid-twentieth century; indeed, that it was unknown in the eighteenth.

A contemporary look at Albert Einstein's classic call for socialism First published more than seventy-five years ago in the inaugural issue of Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine, Albert Einstein's "Why Socialism?" is an unheralded classic. Written during the McCarthyite witch-hunt...

Some people are cleverer than others. This everyday observation is the subject of an academic field that is often portrayed as confused and controversial, when in fact, the field of intelligence holds some of psychology's best-replicated findings. This Very Short Introduction audiobook describes what psychologists have discovered about how and why people differ in their thinking powers. Drawing on largescale data, Ian Deary considers how many types of intelligence there are and how intelligence changes with age. 

In Origin Story, medical historian Howard Markel recounts the two-year period (1858 to 1860) of Darwin's writing of On the Origin of Species through its spectacular success and controversy. Simultaneously, Markel delves into the mysterious health symptoms Darwin developed, combing the literature to emerge with a cogent diagnosis of a case that has long fascinated medical historians.

Lenin's work and influence have often been written off as no longer relevant, and many today consider this to be so. Lenin has, they claim, had his day, even though he is still revered in China, the world's most populous country. However, Lenin, like his mentor Marx, has had a tendency to rise from apparent decline and oblivion to renewed force and influence.

This book explores why there is a major war again in Europe. Putin's actions need to be understood if not forgiven. With the Ukraine conflict seen as a proxy war of NATO versus Russia, how likely is the fighting to spread?

In Regency England the eldest son usually inherited almost everything—while his younger brothers, left with little inheritance, had to make a crucial decision: What should they do to make an independent living? Historian Rory Muir weaves together the stories of many obscure and well-known young men of good family but small fortune, shedding light on an overlooked aspect of Regency society. This is the first scholarly yet accessible exploration of the lifestyle and prospects of these younger sons.