This translation originally published in 2014.

A collection of outrageous stories by the standup comic, TV host, and inspiration for the movie National Lampoon's Van Wilder Bert Kreischer doesn't know how to say "no." If he did, he wouldn't have gotten himself mixed up with a group of Russian mobsters on a class trip to Moscow, earning him his nickname: "The Machine." He wouldn't have wrestled with a bear or swum with sharks on national television. He wouldn't have (possibly) smoked PCP with a star of Saturday Night Live. And he wouldn't have been named the Number One Partier in the Nation by Rolling Stone, inspired the movie National Lampoon's Van Wilder, or performed standup to sellout crowds across the country. The stories Kreischer shares in Life of the Party are a guidebook on how not to grow up. From his fraternity days at Florida State University, to his rise as a standup, to his marriage and first brushes with fatherhood, Kreischer shows you a path that may not lead you to maturity or personal growth. But it will lead you to a shitload of fun.

Two favorite Sesame Street characters introduce basic concepts to preschoolers. Features bright, full-color pictures and durable, wipe-clean pages with safe, rounded corners.

Kickstart your NLP journey by exploring BERT and its variants such as ALBERT, RoBERTa, DistilBERT, VideoBERT, and more with Hugging Face's transformers library Key FeaturesExplore the encoder and decoder of the transformer modelBecome well-versed with BERT along with ALBERT, RoBERTa, and DistilBERTDiscover how to pre-train and fine-tune BERT models for several NLP tasksBook Description BERT (bidirectional encoder representations from transformer) has revolutionized the world of natural language processing (NLP) with promising results. This book is an introductory guide that will help you get to grips with Google's BERT architecture. With a detailed explanation of the transformer architecture, this book will help you understand how the transformer’s encoder and decoder work. You’ll explore the BERT architecture by learning how the BERT model is pre-trained and how to use pre-trained BERT for downstream tasks by fine-tuning it for NLP tasks such as sentiment analysis and text summarization with the Hugging Face transformers library. As you advance, you’ll learn about different variants of BERT such as ALBERT, RoBERTa, and ELECTRA, and look at SpanBERT, which is used for NLP tasks like question answering. You'll also cover simpler and faster BERT variants based on knowledge distillation such as DistilBERT and TinyBERT. The book takes you through MBERT, XLM, and XLM-R in detail and then introduces you to sentence-BERT, which is used for obtaining sentence representation. Finally, you'll discover domain-specific BERT models such as BioBERT and ClinicalBERT, and discover an interesting variant called VideoBERT. By the end of this BERT book, you’ll be well-versed with using BERT and its variants for performing practical NLP tasks. What you will learnUnderstand the transformer model from the ground upFind out how BERT works and pre-train it using masked language model (MLM) and next sentence prediction (NSP) tasksGet hands-on with BERT by learning to generate contextual word and sentence embeddingsFine-tune BERT for downstream tasksGet to grips with ALBERT, RoBERTa, ELECTRA, and SpanBERT modelsGet the hang of the BERT models based on knowledge distillationUnderstand cross-lingual models such as XLM and XLM-RExplore Sentence-BERT, VideoBERT, and BARTWho this book is for This book is for NLP professionals and data scientists looking to simplify NLP tasks to enable efficient language understanding using BERT. A basic understanding of NLP concepts and deep learning is required to get the best out of this book.

Anyone who can hold a pencil can learn to draw. In this book, Bert Dodson shares his complete drawing system—fifty-five "keys" that you can use to render any subject with confidence, even if you're a beginner. These keys, along with dozens of practice exercises, will help you draw like an artist in no time. You'll learn how to: • Restore, focus, map, and intensify • Free your hand action, then learn to control it • Convey the illusions of light, depth, and texture • Stimulate your imagination through "creative play"

The eternal question: Are you a Bert or an Ernie? You’ll find out thanks to The Importance of Being Ernie (and Bert). And this book will show you how to be best friends with those who wear their stripes a little differently. Bert and Ernie have been friends and roommates on Sesame Street for decades, despite very different approaches to life’s challenges and joys. One collects jokes, the other collects paperclips. One loves pigeons, the other his Rubber Duckie. One sees the bathtub half-full, the other needs to empty it so he can give it a good scrub. But they both agree that having a best buddy is worth all the daily ups and downs. There are no better experts on living together and learning together. Their guide to friendship will make the perfect gift for any Bert or Ernie in your life. An Imprint Book "This might be one of the happiest books you’ll ever pick up." —Nerdist For more fun from folks who live on Sesame Street, check out Cookie Monster's The Joy of Cookies and Oscar the Grouch's The Pursuit of Grouchiness.

Winner of the Gold Medal for Best Christian Family and Parenting Book of 2020 by the Illumination Book Awards The creator of the viral parenting concept the “X-Plan” illuminates the importance of awakening your child’s unique strength—while also taking an introspective look at your own life story to become a better parent. Last year, father and former teacher Bert Fulks’s simple parenting idea went viral: if your teenagers find themselves in a situation where they feel uncomfortable or trapped, they can text a family member an “X.” That family member will then call, giving the teen a way out, while still maintaining their freedom—and no questions will be asked. Now in X-Plan Parenting, Fulks expands on the how and the why behind his plan, emphasizing the importance of developing trusting relationships with our kids. Drawing on biblical principles, Fulks’s approach illuminates how even though we want the very best for our children, we sometimes parent from a place of brokenness and a desire for control rather than support and encouragement. We focus on our mistakes and painful growing up moments and the things we wish we’d had when we were kids instead of what’s best for our own children right now. This dynamic can pit kids against their parents and create rifts in the relationship. Fulks advocates for an alliance between children and parents instead of an “us vs. them” mentality. Rather than spending so much time coaxing or battling our kids, Fulks inspires us to work with our kids instead of against them. And rather than trying to right our own past wrongs vicariously through our children, he urges us to recognize where we need healing so we can provide authentic strength to support our kids’ unique journeys. There is a tender art to disciplining our kids, and X-Plan Parenting serves up laughter and tears, hard questions, and plenty of grace to moms and dads who want their kids to love God and lead passionate, joyful lives in an unpredictable world.