In Independent Ed, Edward Burns shares the story of his two remarkable decades in the film industry. At the age of 25 Burns produced his first film, The Brothers McMullen (1995), on a tiny budget. It went on to win the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1995. Since then, aspiring film makers have sought his advice. This entertaining and inspirational memoir tells readers how he managed to secure financing and how he found stars on the way up, as well as sharing his work methods. A must-read for movie fans, film students and everyone who loves a gripping tale.

Award-winning filmmaker Edward Burns is hardly an overnight success story. For four years, Burns wrote his own screenplays while he made a meager living working as a production assistant for a television show in New York City. Then on an extremely low budget - and shot mostly in his parents' Long Island home - Burns wrote, produced, directed, and starred in his brilliant first film, The Brothers McMullen, about three Irish-American brothers coping with life and love in the 1990s. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival, and Burn's career took off, bolstered the next year by the instant success of his second romantic comedy, She's the One. Now, to coincide with the release of his biggest film yet, No Looking Back, Burns presents a complete collection of his three screenplays, along with numerous photo stills and an original autobiographical Introduction.

The crime-infested intersection of West Fayette and Monroe Streets is well-known--and cautiously avoided--by most of Baltimore. But this notorious corner's 24-hour open-air drug market provides the economic fuel for a dying neighborhood. David Simon, an award-winning author and crime reporter, and Edward Burns, a 20-year veteran of the urban drug war, tell the chilling story of this desolate crossroad. Through the eyes of one broken family--two drug-addicted adults and their smart, vulnerable 15-year-old son, DeAndre McCollough, Simon and Burns examine the sinister realities of inner cities across the country and unflinchingly assess why law enforcement policies, moral crusades, and the welfare system have accomplished so little. This extraordinary book is a crucial look at the price of the drug culture and the poignant scenes of hope, caring, and love that astonishingly rise in the midst of a place America has abandoned.

An Irish-American family comes to life through the eyes of a 12-year-old boy in this debut novel by actor-filmmaker Ed Burns. Immigrants and storytellers, lilting voices and Long Island moxie are all part of this colorful Irish-Catholic community in 1970s New York. Our twelve-year-old narrator, an aspiring writer, is at a wake. He takes in the death of his beloved grandfather, Pop, a larger-than-life figure. The overflowing crowd—a sign of a life well lived—comprises sandhogs in their muddy work boots, Irish grandmothers in black dresses, cops in uniform, members of the family deep in mourning. He watches it all, not yet realizing how this Irish American world defines who he is and who he will become. His older brother Tommy has no patience for rules and domesticities, his father is emotionally elsewhere. This boy knows he’s the best thing his mother's got, though her sadness envelops them both. In A Kid from Marlboro Road, past and present intermingle as family stories are told and retold. The narrative careens between the prior generation’s colorful sojourns in the Bronx and Hell’s Kitchen and the softer world of Gibson, the town on Long Island where they live now. There are scenes in the Rockaways, at Belmont racetrack, and in Montauk. Edward Burns’s buoyant first novel is a bildungsroman. Out of one boy’s story a collective warmth emerges, a certain kind of American tale, raucous and joyous. With eight pages of photographs of some of the people and historical locations that inspired characters and scenes in the novel.

"Richard III has the status of a monster in British culture, and the continuous popularity of Shakespeare's play has done much to foster this. Deformity and distortion operate through this myth on many levels. This study is an essay in five 'distortions', tracking the way the play manipulates and explores fundamental human concerns: the body, history, theatre, childhood and family and the mirrors and shadows of individual identity and self-knowledge."--BOOK JACKET.

In their lively and engaging edition of this sometimes neglected early play, Cox and Rasmussen make a strong claim for it as a remarkable work, revealing a confidence and sureness that very few earlier plays can rival. They show how the young Shakespeare, working closely from his chronicle sources, nevertheless freely shaped his complex material to make it both theatrically effective and poetically innovative. The resulting work creates, in Queen Margaret, one of Shakespeare's strongest female roles and is the source of the popular view of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick as `kingmaker'. Focusing on the history of the play both in terms of both performance and criticism, the editors open it to a wide and challenging variety of interpretative and editorial paradigms.

In this dissertation, we consider the problem of estimating functions of parameters found in reliability and queueing models. The problem is to allocate a fixed sampling budget among the populations with the goal of minimizing the mean squared error (MSF) of the estimator. We consider the reliability model with three components such that the probability the system works is f(u1,u2,u3) = u1(u2+u3), and the mean waiting time of the M/G/I queue. For each of these models, we consider a set of sample sizes referred to as a first-allocation procedure which minimizes the first-order approximation to the MSE. Since the first-order allocation procedure depends on the unknown parameters in the model, we propose a two-stage procedure in which we first use a fraction of the sampling budget to estimate the unknown parameters and then allocate the remaining budget based on the initial sample. We show that the difference between the MSE for the two-stage procedure and the minimum MSE obtained using the optimal set of sample sizes from the first-allocation procedure goes to zero as the budget goes to infinity. Simulations are used to demonstrate the asymptotic optimality results for the two stage procedures. The empirical studies show that the two stage estimation procedures work well for reasonable sample sizes.

The notorious corner of West Fayette and Monroe Streets in Baltimore is a 24-hour open-air drug market that provides the economic fuel for a dying neighbourhood. Through the eyes of one broken family - two drug-addicted adults and their smart, vulnerable fifteen-year-old son, DeAndre McCollough - Simon and Burns examine the sinister realities of inner cities across the USA and unflinchingly assess why law enforcement policies, moral crusades and the welfare system have accomplished so little.