Showing results by narrator "David Vickery" in All Categories

Declassified explores some of the most remarkable revelations to have emerged from top secret documents brought to light in recent years. It ranges from revelations of spies and sleeper agents, such as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, to the frankly bizarre Acoustic Kitty project, in which the US government trained cats to spy on the Kremlin, to the murky tale of the 'disappeared' citizens during Argentina's military dictatorship.

In the past few years, online crowdworking platforms - like Amazon's Mechanical Turk and Clickworker - have become an increasingly important source of work, particularly for those in the Global South. Here, small tasks are assigned to people online, and are often used to train algorithms to spot patterns, patterns through machine learning those same algorithms will then be able to spot more effectively than humans. Used for everything from the mechanics of self-driving cars to Google image search, this is an increasingly powerful part of the digital economy.

George Orwell is considered one of the greatest writers and thinkers of the 20th century, best known for his incisive political critiques in his celebrated novels Animal Farm and 1984. This comprehensive guide explores Orwell's position on the issues that truly mattered to him, including poverty, social class, nationalism, imperialism, political ideologies, and totalitarianism.

When our hero, Victor, needs a pseudonym to avoid embarrassing his wife after deciding to pen a book about up-sticking to Greece, he dusts off his original name of V.D. Bucket, the name he was stuck with after being abandoned in a bucket as a baby. As Victor adapts to his adopted homeland, he battles an obsession with the exacting hygiene standards he demanded during his illustrious career as a public health inspector against the rather less exacting standards of rural Greece. His attempts to master the complexities of the language lead to a number of embarrassing misunderstandings.

With the SAS: Across the Rhine is the story of the latter part of Captain Ian Wellsted's military career with the Special Air Service. This is a very personal account, revealing the many emotional as well as physical strains placed upon men in the fighting line. The author takes us back to his time employed with the 79th armored Division (the famous "Hobart's Funnies") preparing for D-Day and his desire for more exciting action, which led first to the Parachute Regiment and then the SAS.