Your voice as biometric data, and how marketers are using it to manipulate you Only three decades ago, it was inconceivable that virtually entire populations would be carrying around wireless phones wherever they went, or that peoples’ exact locations could be tracked by those devices. We now take both for granted. Even just a decade ago the idea that individuals’ voices could be used to identify and draw inferences about them as they shopped or interacted with retailers seemed like something out of a science fiction novel. Yet a new business sector is emerging to do exactly that. The first in-depth examination of the voice intelligence industry, The Voice Catchers exposes how artificial intelligence is enabling personalized marketing and discrimination through voice analysis. Amazon and Google have numerous patents pertaining to voice profiling, and even now their smart speakers are extracting and using voice prints for identification and more. Customer service centers are already approaching every caller based on what they conclude a caller’s voice reveals about that person’s emotions, sentiments, and personality, often in real time. In fact, many scientists believe that a person’s weight, height, age, and race, not to mention any illnesses they may have, can also be identified from the sound of that individual’s voice. Ultimately not only marketers, but also politicians and governments, may use voice profiling to infer personal characteristics for selfish interests and not for the benefit of a citizen or of society as a whole. Leading communications scholar Joseph Turow places the voice intelligence industry in historical perspective, explores its contemporary developments, and offers a clarion call for regulating this rising surveillance regime.

What a shock for Lidia Afanasyevna! While cleaning the toilets in the German parliament, she finds a dead politician. Who was the man? And why does the news claim that he died in his office? Is there perhaps a cover-up going on? Curious, Lidia Afanasyevna begins to investigate the circumstances of the death. Not a completely harmless plan! Fortunately, she is not alone: Lutz, a former intelligence officer, the mysterious Leona, a beauty from the red-light district, and last but not least her family give her active support. And not to forget: Alyosha, the man of her dreams ...

One night, Kerstan Wolphsan has a peculiar dream in which a wizard and his companions are calling upon him for help. When his people doubt his premonitions, Kerstan decides to visit the Source - a mysterious energy force that was created by the small rodent-like creatures known as the Catchers, and man - to help keep the city's inhabitants safe.

The story is of a young Chahta-Choctaw boy¿s odyssey into manhood prior to the European discovery of the Americas. The young man Issi, Deer, lives at Nanih Wayia, the Chahta ¿Mother Site,¿ Winston County, Mississippi. Throughout the story, Issi shows a great deal of character as he nears adulthood, mixing the real world with the spirit world. In a cross-cultural way, the story is a kind of imaginary time travel, where people lived quite differently from us, yet were as human and as loving, having the same feelings and hopes but expressing and achieving them with different thoughts and actions. They are referred as the Oklafihna and the Chito, meaning the Great People. The Oklafihna are a village and community, and a part of the greater collegium of peoples later known as the Chahta. Within the story are brief glimpses of the people, the geographic place, and the environment. The story is a fictional adventure, placed primarily in Mississippi and the adjacent states. Comments on the ethnographic customs and descriptions of daily living and activities are based upon the written literature, enhanced by the writer¿s personal interpretations of the Southeastern United States Indians and their archaeology, and imagination. Many places referenced are actual, though little known. Brief historical comment is made of places when important to the understanding of the story and place. The story hopefully builds a believably real and acceptable construct of Issi¿s time, place, and adventure, mixed with the spirit world. Moderate use of Chahta words throughout the story lend authenticity. About the Author Richard Arling Marshall has spent more than fifty years as a teacher and archeologist. Born in 1928 in Belen, New Mexico, he grew up in Missouri, graduating with a bachelor¿s in art and science and obtained a master¿s degree in anthropology from the University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri. After 1966 the author was associated with the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Cobb Institute of Archaeology, Mississippi State University, as professor of anthropology, and conducted research and salvage archaeology and Cultural Resource Surveys throughout that state. He retired in 1994 as associate professor of anthropology emeritus. The author¿s wife is Helen Justine Noe, formerly of Lilbourn, Missouri. Together they have two daughters and five grandchildren. (2013, Paperback, 568 pages)

This non-academic author presents a study of Salinger’s major writings, a study designed to enhance the reader’s enjoyment even in a reread. The study is an analysis of their artistic structure, especially Salinger’s sophisticated use of the narrator’s voice or voices. Catcher comes off as the Hindu Connection, Franny and Zooey as Take Out Zen and Raise High as Kabbalah Reception. The Hindu connection structures what happens to Holden in Catcher, and fast as take out Zen structures what happens to Franny in Franny and Zooey. Principal tenants of Kabbalah influence and structure important aspects of the story Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters, particularly the lack of civil reception of “others” at the wedding reception. These choices were no doubt influenced by Salinger’s experiments with different forms of spirituality. Salinger apparently came to the conclusion that your spiritual soul lies in your individual identity, a conclusion Joyce and others had reached earlier from connection with Eastern Spirituality. Direct versions of Jesus and Buddha dwell within you just waiting to be discovered. You don’t need an escort. For many young readers in the 20th century, these stories made up the New Testament, the new gospel as to what was important in life values. Read here how and why they were so powerful.

This provocative book posits a new theory of women's writing characterized by what Claire Raymond calls 'the posthumous voice.'This suggestive term evokes the way that women's writing both forefronts and hides the author's implied body within and behind the written work. Tracing the use of the disembodied posthumous voice in fiction and poetry by Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath, Raymond's study sounds out the ways that the trope of the posthumous voice succeeds in negotiating the difficult cultural space between the concept of woman's body and the production of canonical literature. Arguing that the nineteenth-century cult of mourning opens to women's writing the possibility of a post-Romantic 'self-elegy,' Raymond explores how the woman writer's appropriation and alteration of elegiac conventions signifies and revises her disrupted relationship to audience. Theorizing the posthumous voice as a gesture by which the woman writer claims, and in some cases gains, canonicity, Raymond contends that the elegy posed as if written by a dead woman for herself both describes and subverts the woman writer's secondary status in the English canon. For the woman writer, the self-elegy permits access to a topos central to canonical literature, with the implementation of the trope of the posthumous voice marking a crucial site of woman's interaction with the English canon.

Annie has had dreams for most of her life, dreams that seem to be of a past she has lived. They are trying to lead her to a life she should have, but which seems destined to be kept from her.