Selfdiscovery

Heatwaves are a disruptive force in literature, setting the scene for transformative acts of transgression as inhibitions are cast off. The effect is felt particularly keenly in the ordinarily temperate English countryside – just think of LP Hartley’s The Go-Between, Ian McEwan’s Atonement or, indeed, Penelope Lively’s Heat Wave. To that list can now be added K Patrick’s debut novel, a striking queer romance in which lust yields subtle revelations about sexual power and selfhood.The dislocation of soaring temperatures is…

There has been a spate of excellent novels about Nigeria, its past and present predicaments. Set in the predominantly Muslim town of Kontagora, Stephen Buoro’s debut is overstuffed with themes, from corruption and religious intolerance to identity and teenage desire, but there’s much to admire in this imaginative coming-of-age tale.Fifteen-year-old Andrew Aziza, nicknamed Andy Africa, is an altar boy in the neighbourhood church. He lives with his single-parent photographer mother, who refuses to reveal the identity of his…

The year is 1967 and 40-year-old Phyllis Fischer is sitting at her dressing table applying lipstick ahead of an informal dinner she is hosting for the son of a family friend. Phyllis is married to Roger, a senior civil servant, with whom she has two children, Colette and Hugh, and is regarded as “an easy person. Easily made happy, glad to make others happy. She was pleased with her life.” And yet her comfortable commuter-belt existence is upended with the arrival of their dinner guest, Nicholas, a young socialist and…

Get better results on scarce medical image datasets with a novel transfer learning technique to pretrain deep learning modelPhoto by Jonathan Borba on UnsplashOne of the primary problems with applying machine learning and deep learning models to medical imaging tasks is the scarcity of sufficient data to train the model. Manual generation and labelling of medical images are costly and time taking as highly trained experts are needed to understand and label the medical images correctly. To counter the problem of scarce…