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Those In Peril
''Those in Peril'' is a book by the author Wilbur Smith. The book focuses on the lives of billionaire Hazel Bannock, who is the owner of the Bannock Oil Corp, and Major Hector Cross, an ex-SAS operative and the owner of a security company, Cross Bow Security. This company has been contracted to protect Hazel Bannock and her business interest and the story unfolds when Hazel's daughter is hijacked by Somali pirates. Background Smith described the novel as "another pretty tale of sex, violence and mayhem with a few belly laughs thrown in for good measure." Smith wanted to write a stand-alone book about a mother being deprived of her adored child, then having to get help from one of his tough guys. "I wanted her to be tough, too," he says, "because I'm a feminist." When he owned an island in the Seychelles, he and his crew once came across Somali pirates. They didn't acknowledge us – rare among sailors – but I've never forgotten this guy, tall and very handsome, as hypnotic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wilbur Smith
Wilbur Addison Smith (9 January 1933 – 13 November 2021) was a Zambian-born British-South African novelist specialising in historical fiction about international involvement in Southern Africa across four centuries, seen from the viewpoints of both black and white families. An accountant by training, he gained a film contract with his first published novel ''When the Lion Feeds''. This encouraged him to become a full-time writer, and he developed three long chronicles of the South African experience which all became best-sellers. He acknowledged his publisher Charles Pick's advice to "write about what you know best", and his work takes in much authentic detail of the local hunting and mining way of life, along with the romance and conflict that goes with it. By the time of his death in 2021 he had published 49 books and had sold more than 140 million copies, 24 million of them in Italy (by 2014). Early life Smith was born in Ndola, Northern Rhodesia, (now Zambia), as was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Somalian Pirates
Somali may refer to: Horn of Africa * Somalis, an inhabitant or ethnicity associated with Greater Somali Region ** Proto-Somali, the ancestors of modern Somalis ** Somali culture ** Somali cuisine ** Somali language, a Cushitic language ** Somali, plural of Somalo, former Somali currency * Somali Plate, a tectonic plate which covers the eastern part of Africa *Somalia, a nation in the Horn of Africa * Somaliland, a self-declared state considered internationally to be a part of Somalia * Somali Region, a Somali-inhabited region of Ethiopia * North Eastern Province (Kenya), a Somali-inhabited region of Kenya Other uses * Somali, a member of the Somalia Battalion, a pro-Russian military group. * , a British destroyer * Somali cat, a cat breed * Somali, a character in the manga series '' Somali and the Forest Spirit'' * Somali Peninsula, a region of East Africa, also known as 'The Horn of Africa' See also * * * Proto-Somali Proto-Somalis were the ancient people and ancestors of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pan Macmillan
Pan Books is a publishing imprint (trade name), imprint that first became active in the 1940s and is now part of the United Kingdom, British-based Macmillan Publishers, owned by the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group of Germany. Pan Books began as an independent publisher, established in 1944 by Alan Bott, previously known for his memoirs of his experiences as a flying ace in the First World War. The Pan Books logo, showing the ancient Greek god Pan (god), Pan playing pan-pipes, was designed by Mervyn Peake. A few years after it was founded, Pan Books was bought out by a consortium of several publishing houses, including Macmillan, William Collins, Sons, Collins, Heinemann (publisher)#Heinemann UK history, Heinemann, and, briefly, Hodder & Stoughton. It became wholly owned by Macmillan in 1987. Pan specialised in publishing paperback fiction and, along with Penguin Books, was one of the first popular publishers of this format in the UK. Many popular authors saw their works ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Publishing
Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software and other content available to the public for sale or for free. Traditionally, the term refers to the creation and distribution of printed works, such as books, newspapers, and magazines. With the advent of digital information systems, the scope has expanded to include electronic publishing such as E-book, ebooks, academic journals, micropublishing, Electronic publishing, websites, blogs, video game publisher, video game publishing, and the like. Publishing may produce private, club, commons or public goods and may be conducted as a commercial, public, social or community activity. The commercial publishing industry ranges from large multinational conglomerates such as Bertelsmann, RELX, Pearson plc, Pearson and Thomson Reuters to thousands of small independents. It has various divisions such as trade/retail publishing of fiction and non-fiction, educational publishing K–12, (k-12) and Academic publi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Assegai (novel)
''Assegai'' is Wilbur Smith's thirty-second novel, it follows ''The Triumph of the Sun'' in which the author brought the Courtney and Ballantyne series together. ''Assegai'' tells the story of Leon Courtney (son the Ryder Courtney) and is set in 1906 in Kenya. The events in the story are linked to and precede the outbreak of World War One. Plot summary Leon Courtney, the eldest son of Ryder Courtney leaves home after a fallout with his father, and joins the army with help from his uncle Penrod Ballantyne. Leon rises to become a second lieutenant in the King's African Rifles regiment based in Nairobi. During the period of the Nandi Resistance, Leon saves the life of Manyoro, one of his Maasai soldiers from a Nandi ambush, for which he is adopted as a son by Manyoro's mother Lusima, a shaman among the Maasai with powers of divination. After recovering from the battle at Manyoro and Lusima's village and returning to his base, Leon narrowly avoids being court-martialled by a vin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Special Air Service
The Special Air Service (SAS) is a special forces unit of the British Army. It was founded as a regiment in 1941 by David Stirling and in 1950, it was reconstituted as a corps. The unit specialises in a number of roles including counter-terrorism, hostage rescue, direct action and covert reconnaissance. Much of the information about the SAS is highly classified, and the unit is not commented on by either the British government or the Ministry of Defence due to the secrecy and sensitivity of its operations. The corps currently consists of the 22 Special Air Service Regiment, the regular component, as well as the 21 Special Air Service Regiment (Artists) (Reserve) and the 23 Special Air Service Regiment (Reserve), which are reserve units, all under the operational command of United Kingdom Special Forces (UKSF). Its sister unit is the Royal Navy's Special Boat Service which specialises in maritime counter-terrorism. Both units are under the operational control of the Directo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Somali Pirates
Somali may refer to: Horn of Africa * Somalis, an inhabitant or ethnicity associated with Greater Somali Region ** Proto-Somali, the ancestors of modern Somalis ** Somali culture ** Somali cuisine ** Somali language, a Cushitic language ** Somali, plural of Somalo, former Somali currency * Somali Plate, a tectonic plate which covers the eastern part of Africa *Somalia, a nation in the Horn of Africa * Somaliland, a self-declared state considered internationally to be a part of Somalia * Somali Region, a Somali-inhabited region of Ethiopia * North Eastern Province (Kenya), a Somali-inhabited region of Kenya Other uses * Somali, a member of the Somalia Battalion, a pro-Russian military group. * , a British destroyer * Somali cat, a cat breed * Somali, a character in the manga series '' Somali and the Forest Spirit'' * Somali Peninsula, a region of East Africa, also known as 'The Horn of Africa' See also * * * Proto-Somali Proto-Somalis were the ancient people and ancestors of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Seychelles
Seychelles (, ; ), officially the Republic of Seychelles (french: link=no, République des Seychelles; Creole: ''La Repiblik Sesel''), is an archipelagic state consisting of 115 islands in the Indian Ocean. Its capital and largest city, Victoria, is east of mainland Africa. Nearby island countries and territories include the Comoros, Madagascar, Mauritius, and the French overseas departments of Mayotte and Réunion to the south; and Maldives and the Chagos Archipelago (administered by the United Kingdom as the British Indian Ocean Territory) to the east. It is the least populated sovereign African country, with an estimated 2020 population of 98,462. Seychelles was uninhabited prior to being encountered by Europeans in the 16th century. It faced competing French and British interests until coming under full British control in the late 18th century. Since proclaiming independence from the United Kingdom in 1976, it has developed from a largely agricultural society to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
List Of Datasets For Machine-learning Research
These datasets are applied for machine learning research and have been cited in peer-reviewed academic journals. Datasets are an integral part of the field of machine learning. Major advances in this field can result from advances in learning algorithms (such as deep learning), computer hardware, and, less-intuitively, the availability of high-quality training datasets. High-quality labeled training datasets for supervised and semi-supervised machine learning algorithms are usually difficult and expensive to produce because of the large amount of time needed to label the data. Although they do not need to be labeled, high-quality datasets for unsupervised learning can also be difficult and costly to produce. Image data These datasets consist primarily of images or videos for tasks such as object detection, facial recognition, and multi-label classification. Facial recognition In computer vision, face images have been used extensively to develop facial recognition systems ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Large Language Models
A large language model (LLM) is a language model consisting of a neural network with many parameters (typically billions of weights or more), trained on large quantities of unlabelled text using self-supervised learning. LLMs emerged around 2018 and perform well at a wide variety of tasks. This has shifted the focus of natural language processing research away from the previous paradigm of training specialized supervised models for specific tasks. Properties Though the term ''large language model'' has no formal definition, it often refers to deep learning models having a parameter count on the order of billions or more. LLMs are general purpose models which excel at a wide range of tasks, as opposed to being trained for one specific task (such as sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, or mathematical reasoning). The skill with which they accomplish tasks, and the range of tasks at which they are capable, seems to be a function of the amount of resources (data, parameter-siz ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Novels By Wilbur Smith
A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from the la, novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of ''novellus'', diminutive of ''novus'', meaning "new". Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, John Cowper Powys, preferred the term "romance" to describe their novels. According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, in Chivalric romance, and in the tradition of the Italian renaissance novella.Margaret Anne Doody''The True Story of the Novel'' New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996, rept. 1997, p. 1. Retrieved 25 April 2014. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, especially the historica ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
2011 British Novels
Eleven or 11 may refer to: *11 (number), the natural number following 10 and preceding 12 * one of the years 11 BC, AD 11, 1911, 2011, or any year ending in 11 Literature * ''Eleven'' (novel), a 2006 novel by British author David Llewellyn *''Eleven'', a 1970 collection of short stories by Patricia Highsmith *''Eleven'', a 2004 children's novel in The Winnie Years by Lauren Myracle *''Eleven'', a 2008 children's novel by Patricia Reilly Giff *''Eleven'', a short story by Sandra Cisneros Music *Eleven (band), an American rock band * Eleven: A Music Company, an Australian record label *Up to eleven, an idiom from popular culture, coined in the movie ''This Is Spinal Tap'' Albums * ''11'' (The Smithereens album), 1989 * ''11'' (Ua album), 1996 * ''11'' (Bryan Adams album), 2008 * ''11'' (Sault album), 2022 * ''Eleven'' (Harry Connick, Jr. album), 1992 * ''Eleven'' (22-Pistepirkko album), 1998 * ''Eleven'' (Sugarcult album), 1999 * ''Eleven'' (B'z album), 2000 * ''Eleven'' (Reamonn ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
