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Leaf Jumpers
By Carole Gerber. 2004
This vibrant poem celebrates the beauty of autumn while inviting us all to go ahead and jump in that big,…
colorful, pile of fall leaves. Leslie Evan&’s bold artwork brings together gold, orange, yellow, red, and brown leaves into a literary pile creating the magic of autumn for young readers. The poetic text gives simple facts about different types of fall leaves making it easy for readers to identify leaves ranging from red maple to sycamore by color, shape, and other characteristics. Informative and fun, Carole Gerber brings us a wonderful introduction to seasons and science for the earliest of leaf jumpers.Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy
By Naomi Cahn, June Carbone, Nancy Levit. 2024
A stirring, comprehensive look at the state of women in the workforce—why women&’s progress has stalled, how our economy fosters…
unproductive competition, and how we can fix the system that holds women back.In an era of supposed great equality, women are still falling behind in the workplace. Even with more women in the workforce than in decades past, wage gaps continue to increase. It is the most educated women who have fallen the furthest behind. Blue-collar women hold the most insecure and badly paid jobs in our economy. And even as we celebrate high-profile representation—women on the board of Fortune 500 companies and our first female vice president—women have limited recourse when they experience harassment and discrimination. Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy explains that the system that governs our economy—a winner-take-all economy—is the root cause of these myriad problems. The WTA economy self-selects for aggressive, cutthroat business tactics, which creates a feedback loop that sidelines women. The authors, three legal scholars, call this feedback loop &“the triple bind&”: if women don&’t compete on the same terms as men, they lose; if women do compete on the same terms as men, they&’re punished more harshly for their sharp elbows or actual misdeeds; and when women see that they can&’t win on the same terms as men, they take themselves out of the game (if they haven&’t been pushed out already). With odds like these stacked against them, it&’s no wonder women feel like, no matter how hard they work, they can&’t get ahead. Fair Shake is not a &“fix the woman&” book; it&’s a &“fix the system&” book. It not only diagnoses the problem of what's wrong with the modern economy, but shows how, with awareness and collective action, we can build a truly just economy for all.Vows: The Modern Genius of an Ancient Rite
By Cheryl Mendelson. 2015
From the bestselling author of Home Comforts comes the story of our wedding vows—what they mean and why they still…
matter.In the West, marrying is so thoroughly identified with ceremonial promises that &“taking vows&” is a synonym for getting married. So, it&’s a surprise to realize that this custom is actually a historical and anthropological oddity. Most of the world, for most of history, married without making promises. And there&’s a reason for that. Marriage by vow presupposes free choice, and free choice makes a love-match possible. It is a very modern arrangement. Vows is both a moving memoir of two marriages and a thoughtful meditation on marriage itself. Cheryl Mendelson tackles the sociology of commitment through our most traditional promises and shows why they endure. In considering the kind of marriage these vows entail, she helps answer some of life&’s most urgent and personal of questions: Could I, would I, or should I make these promises to someone? Using history and literature, the book describes the parameters of the behavior that traditional vows promise and, in doing so, answers a whole series of other questions: Why did wedding-by-vow arise only in the West? Why are they recited in weddings around the world today? Why have these vows lasted for nearly a thousand years? Why does the kind of marriage promised in the vows survive?"A funny, marvelously readable portrait of one of the most brilliant and eccentric men in history." --The Seattle Times Paul…
Erdos was an amazing and prolific mathematician whose life as a world-wandering numerical nomad was legendary. He published almost 1500 scholarly papers before his death in 1996, and he probably thought more about math problems than anyone in history. Like a traveling salesman offering his thoughts as wares, Erdos would show up on the doorstep of one mathematician or another and announce, "My brain is open." After working through a problem, he'd move on to the next place, the next solution. Hoffman's book, like Sylvia Nasar's biography of John Nash, A Beautiful Mind, reveals a genius's life that transcended the merely quirky. But Erdos's brand of madness was joyful, unlike Nash's despairing schizophrenia. Erdos never tried to dilute his obsessive passion for numbers with ordinary emotional interactions, thus avoiding hurting the people around him, as Nash did. Oliver Sacks writes of Erdos: "A mathematical genius of the first order, Paul Erdos was totally obsessed with his subject--he thought and wrote mathematics for nineteen hours a day until the day he died. He traveled constantly, living out of a plastic bag, and had no interest in food, sex, companionship, art--all that is usually indispensable to a human life."The Man Who Loved Only Numbers is easy to love, despite his strangeness. It's hard not to have affection for someone who referred to children as "epsilons," from the Greek letter used to represent small quantities in mathematics; a man whose epitaph for himself read, "Finally I am becoming stupider no more"; and whose only really necessary tool to do his work was a quiet and open mind. Hoffman, who followed and spoke with Erdos over the last 10 years of his life, introduces us to an undeniably odd, yet pure and joyful, man who loved numbers more than he loved God--whom he referred to as SF, for Supreme Fascist. He was often misunderstood, and he certainly annoyed people sometimes, but Paul Erdos is no doubt missed. --Therese LittletonThe Journey: How to Prepare Kids for a Competitive and Changing World
By Greg Kaplan. 2024
Rooted in humorous stories distilled with bits of sagely honest advice, The Journey goes beyond the well-chronicled college admissions madness…
and cuts to the core of parental angst with concrete suggestions for preparing children for a competitive and rapidly changing world.Young people face an increasing medley of challenges as they pursue higher education—rising tuition costs, daunting prospective student debt, and a talented and competitive applicant pool. After a decade of preparing students for the ever more difficult admissions process, college counselor Greg Kaplan wishes parents would stop thinking, &“What should I do to get my kid into a good college?&” and instead ask: &“How can I best prepare my child for what comes next?&” Having practiced law and worked in investment banking early in his career before pivoting to working with students, parents, and educators, Kaplan knows what the world—and its population of college admissions officers—is looking for in today&’s youth and tomorrow's leaders: Grit. Leadership. Passion.Emphasizing these fundamental tenets of successful adulthood, The Journey paints a realistic picture of the lack of preparedness among today&’s youth. Using stories of parents and students who have struggled and succeeded, Kaplan pushes students to consider: What do you want to get out of your college and work career? How can you jumpstart your journey into the real world? He asks parents: Are you preparing your children to attain a life of health, happiness, and financial independence?Rooted in humorous stories sprinkled with bits of brutally honest advice, The Journey goes beyond the well-chronicled college admissions madness and cuts to the core of parental angst. This is the definitive guide in preparing children for a competitive and rapidly changing world.Breathe: Journeys to Healthy Binding
By Maia Kobabe, Sarah Peitzmeier. 2024
A graphic guide to chest binding with real-life stories and research-backed advice from bestselling Gender Queer author MAIA KOBABE and…
University of Michigan professor SARAH PEITZMEIER. Breathe arose from the need for a resource for folks considering chest binding as gender-affirming care. Dr. Peitzmeier interviewed twenty-five people of different ages and backgrounds about their journeys with binding, and then she and Kobabe combined excerpts from those interviews with evidence-based resources on binding into this extremely accessible guide. Breathe is both a practical resource for trans and nonbinary folks and an engaging and perspective-broadening read for anyone interested in what it means to be on a journey of expressing one&’s gender in ways that are joyful, healthy, and affirming.Muhammad Ali: A Little Golden Book Biography (Little Golden Book)
By Frank Berrios. 2024
Help your little one dream big with a Little Golden Book biography about legendary boxer and activist Muhammad Ali. Little…
Golden Book biographies are the perfect introduction to nonfiction for young readers—as well as fans of all ages!This Little Golden Book about Muhammad Ali--the boxing heavyweight champion, civil rights activist, and the original GOAT (Greatest of All Time)--is an inspiring read-aloud for young readers.Look for more Little Golden Book biographies:Jackie RobinsonMartin Luther King Jr.Simone BilesMisty CopelandBayesian Precision Medicine (Chapman & Hall/CRC Biostatistics Series)
By Peter F. Thall. 2024
Bayesian Precision Medicine presents modern Bayesian statistical models and methods for identifying treatments tailored to individual patients using their prognostic…
variables and predictive biomarkers. The process of evaluating and comparing treatments is explained and illustrated by practical examples, followed by a discussion of causal analysis and its relationship to statistical inference. A wide array of modern Bayesian clinical trial designs are presented, including applications to many oncology trials. The later chapters describe Bayesian nonparametric regression analyses of datasets arising from multistage chemotherapy for acute leukemia, allogeneic stem cell transplantation, and targeted agents for treating advanced breast cancer.Features: Describes the connection between causal analysis and statistical inference Reviews modern personalized Bayesian clinical trial designs for dose-finding, treatment screening, basket trials, enrichment, incorporating historical data, and confirmatory treatment comparison, illustrated by real-world applications Presents adaptive methods for clustering similar patient subgroups to improve efficiency Describes Bayesian nonparametric regression analyses of real-world datasets from oncology Provides pointers to software for implementation Bayesian Precision Medicine is primarily aimed at biostatisticians and medical researchers who desire to apply modern Bayesian methods to their own clinical trials and data analyses. It also might be used to teach a special topics course on precision medicine using a Bayesian approach to postgraduate biostatistics students. The main goal of the book is to show how Bayesian thinking can provide a practical scientific basis for tailoring treatments to individual patients.A Sociology of Journalism in Japan: The Last Empire of the Press (ISSN)
By César Castellvi. 2024
This book represents an in-depth analysis of journalism in Japan during the golden era of the daily press and the…
gradual introduction of digital technology starting from the mid-1980s to the late 2010s.By presenting firsthand testimony from journalists and field notes collected from fieldwork in the newsroom of one of the country's largest newspapers, this book provides a unique insight into Japan’s highly active yet relatively under-institutionalized journalistic profession. It also explores the changes experienced by the organizational development of Japanese journalism in response to broader changes in Japanese society, such as the emergence of social networks, the evolution of reading practices, the demographic situation, and the new aspirations of the Japanese youth.Based on an extensive ethnographic fieldwork carried out by the author over several years, this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Japanese society, journalism, and media studies.Turkey: The Second Republic (The Contemporary Middle East)
By Birol Başkan, Burak Bilgehan Özpek. 2024
Focused on the rise of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) over the last two decades, this book discusses and…
contextualizes key events and developments in Turkish politics, economics and foreign policy.The authors begin by exploring the longer-term historical trends that shaped the country, focusing on Ottoman and Republican legacies, culminating in the formation of the modern state in Turkey. This context, it is argued, is key in understanding the AKP’s emergence since 2002 as the preeminent political power. The book further argues that the AKP achieved this position due to political maneuvers aimed at undermining military influence within politics, its management of the economy and its approach to foreign policy. These three domains are dealt with in successive chapters to help explicate how the AKP built broad societal coalitions and consolidated its power. The book concludes by analyzing contemporary developments: in the face of mounting economic and political challenges, the fate of the AKP, and of Turkey, remain uncertain.Written in an accessible style and grounded in data-driven analysis, the book will appeal to journalists, policymakers, researchers and general audiences interested in the contemporary Middle East, Turkish political economy and international relations.A Tour of the Human Body: Amazing Numbers--Fantastic Facts (Number Tours for Curious Kids)
By Jennifer Berne. 2024
Jennifer Berne takes children on a tour of the human body to reveal the wonders of how it works -- with some astonishing numbers and fascinating facts along…
the way.From our eyes to our toes, kids will find out what makes the human body tick. They&’ll discover that our hearts beat 100,000 times a day, which equals 36 MILLION times a year. And that our tongue&’s 8,000 taste buds can detect only 5 flavors. And that we have 60,000 miles of blood vessels, enough to circle the world more than twice!With such remarkable facts and numbers, and vivid informative illustrations by Dawn DeVries Sokol, this book takes your child on an entertainingly educational journey through the wonders of the human body.An expansive case for bibliography as infrastructure in information science.Cats, Carpenters, and Accountants argues that bibliography serves a foundational role…
within information science as infrastructure, and like all infrastructures, it needs and deserves attention. Wayne de Fremery&’s thoughtful provocation positions bibliography as a means to serve the many ends pursued by information scientists. He explains that bibliographic practices, such as enumeration and description, lie at the heart of knowledge practices and cultural endeavors, but these kinds of infrastructures are difficult to see. In this book, he reveals them and the ways that they formulate information and meaning, artificial intelligence, and human knowledge.Drawing on scholarship from areas as diverse as data science, machine learning, Korean poetry, and the history of bibliography, de Fremery makes the case for understanding bibliography as a generative mode of accounting for what has been received as data, what he calls &“carpentry-accounting.&” Referencing a well-known debate in the Anglo-American bibliographical tradition that features a willful cat, he suggests that bibliography and bibliographers are intentionally marginal figures who, paradoxically, perform foundational work in the service of the diverse disciplinary ends that formulate, however loosely, information science as a field. When we attend to the marginal but essential work of accounting for what humankind has fashioned as recorded knowledge, it becomes easier to consider the ways that human accounts can serve and, sometimes, injure us. Relevant to scholars and students from the sciences to the humanities, Cats, Carpenters, and Accountants is a highly original argument for bibliography as a marginal but foundationally powerful force shaping information science as a field and the ways that we know.Everything Is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World
By Tom Chivers. 2024
A captivating and user-friendly tour of Bayes&’s theorem and its global impact on modern life from the acclaimed science writer…
and author of The Rationalist&’s Guide to the Galaxy.At its simplest, Bayes&’s theorem describes the probability of an event, based on prior knowledge of conditions that might be related to the event. But in Everything Is Predictable, Tom Chivers lays out how it affects every aspect of our lives. He explains why highly accurate screening tests can lead to false positives and how a failure to account for it in court has put innocent people in jail. A cornerstone of rational thought, many argue that Bayes&’s theorem is a description of almost everything. But who was the man who lent his name to this theorem? How did an 18th-century Presbyterian minister and amateur mathematician uncover a theorem that would affect fields as diverse as medicine, law, and artificial intelligence? Fusing biography, razor-sharp science writing, and intellectual history, Everything Is Predictable is an entertaining tour of Bayes&’s theorem and its impact on modern life, showing how a single compelling idea can have far reaching consequences.What Do We Know About the Mystery of D. B. Cooper? (What Do We Know About?)
By Kirsten Anderson, Who Hq. 2024
Find out what really happened when a strange man hijacked an airplane in 1971 and then parachuted out of it,…
never to be seen again. What is the truth behind the mystery of the man who came to be known as D. B. Cooper?On November 24, 1971, an unidentified man hijacked an airplane that was flying from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle, Washington. He demanded $200,000 and told a flight attendant that he had weapons. After stopping in Seattle, the hijacker was given the money and he released the attendants. But he demanded that the pilots stay on-board, refuel, and fly him to Mexico City. Just thirty minutes after the plane took off, the man jumped out of the aircraft and parachuted away...never to be seen or heard from again. Did he escape with the money? Did he even survive the jump? Over fifty years later, the FBI still does not know what happened to the man they call "D. B. Cooper." Find out what we do know about one of America's most famous, unsolved mysteries in this book for young readers.An innovative investigation of the five strange worlds that worship women’s chests. After years of biopsies, best-selling author Sarah Thornton…
made the difficult decision to have a double mastectomy. But, after her reconstructive surgery, she was perplexed: What had she lost? And gained? An experienced sleuth, she resolved to venture behind the scenes to uncover the social and cultural significance of breasts. Riotous and galvanizing, Tits Up excavates the diverse truths of mammary glands from the strip club to the operating room, from the nation’s oldest human milk bank to the fit rooms of bra designers. Thornton draws insights from plastic surgeons, lactation consultants, body-positive witches, lingerie models, and “free the nipple” activists to explore the status of breasts as emblems of femininity. She examines how women’s chests have become a billion-dollar business, as well as a stage for debates about race, class, gender, and desire. Everywhere she turns, Thornton encounters chauvinist myths about this elemental body part that quietly justify deficits in women’s bodily autonomy and endorse shortfalls in their political status. Blending sociology, reportage, and personal narrative with refreshing optimism and wit, Thornton has one overriding ambition—to liberate breasts from centuries of patriarchal prejudice.Space and Play in Japanese Videogame Arcades (Routledge Contemporary Japan Series)
By Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon. 2024
This book presents a scholarly investigation of the development and culture of Japanese videogame arcades, both from a historical and…
contemporary point of view.Providing an overview of the historical evolution of public amusement spaces from the early rooftop amusement spaces from the early nineteenth century to the modern multi‑floor and interconnected arcade complexes that characterize the urban fabric of contemporary Japan, the book argues that arcade videogames and their associated practices must be examined in the context in which they are played, situated in the interrelation between the game software, the cabinets as material conditions of play, and the space of the venue that frames the experience. Including three case studies of distinct and significant game centres located in Tokyo and Kyoto, the book addresses of play in public, including the notion of performance and observation as play practices, spatial appropriation, as well as the compartmentalization of the play experience.In treating videogames as sets of circumstances, the book identifies the opportunities for ludic practices that videogame arcades provide in Japan. As such, it will appeal to students and scholars of Game Studies and Digital Media Studies, as well as those of Japanese Culture and Society.This book revisits social theory with a view to highlighting certain essential features of ‘good’ social theory: its ability to…
raise certain questions, its explanatory power, its critical and reflexive interrogation of concepts, its search for objectivity, its concern to make sense of empirical data and its aim of projecting some degree of generality and abstraction. With particular attention to issues of nationalism, democracy, civil society, state, feminism, neoliberalism, minority rights, environment and North-East Indian society, it considers whether new and more relevant theoretical questions need to be asked.It will therefore appeal to scholars of social theory and political sociology with interests in new approaches to social theory and the development of local or ‘indigenous’ social thought.First Love: Essays on Friendship
By Lilly Dancyger. 2024
A bold, poignant essay collection that treats women&’s friendships as the love stories they truly are, from the critically acclaimed…
author of Negative Space&“Fiercely felt and finely etched.&”—Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy ExamsLilly Dancyger always thought of her closest friendships as great loves, complex and profound as any romance. When her beloved cousin was murdered just as both girls were entering adulthood, Dancyger&’s devotion to the women in her life took on a new urgency—a desire to hold her friends close while she still could. In First Love, this urgency runs through a striking exploration of the bonds between women, from the intensity of adolescent best friendship and fluid sexuality to mothering and chosen family.Each essay in this incisive collection is grounded in a close female friendship in Dancyger&’s life, reaching outward to dissect cultural assumptions about identity and desire, and the many ways women create space for each other in a world that wants us small. Seamlessly weaving personal experience with literature and pop culture—ranging from fairy tales to true crime, from Anaïs Nin and Sylvia Plath to Heavenly Creatures and the &“sad girls&” of Tumblr—Dancyger&’s essays form a kaleidoscopic story of a life told through friendships, and an expansive interrogation of what it means to love each other.Though friendship will never be enough to keep us safe from the dangers of the world, Dancyger reminds us that love is always worth the risk, and that when tragedy strikes, it&’s our friends who will help us survive. In First Love, these essential bonds get their due.Accountable and Explainable Methods for Complex Reasoning over Text
By Pepa Atanasova. 2024
This thesis presents research that expands the collective knowledge in the areas of accountability and transparency of machine learning (ML)…
models developed for complex reasoning tasks over text. In particular, the presented results facilitate the analysis of the reasons behind the outputs of ML models and assist in detecting and correcting for potential harms. It presents two new methods for accountable ML models; advances the state of the art with methods generating textual explanations that are further improved to be fluent, easy to read, and to contain logically connected multi-chain arguments; and makes substantial contributions in the area of diagnostics for explainability approaches. All results are empirically tested on complex reasoning tasks over text, including fact checking, question answering, and natural language inference. This book is a revised version of the PhD dissertation written by the author to receive her PhD from the Faculty of Science, University ofCopenhagen, Denmark. In 2023, it won the Informatics Europe Best Dissertation Award, granted to the most outstanding European PhD thesis in the field of computer science.Mathematics in Politics and Governance
By Francisco J. Aragón-Artacho, Miguel A. Goberna. 2024
This book presents the mathematical tools that politicians use to make rational decisions about health, education, culture, economy, finance, transportation,…
and national defense for their citizens. The selection of topics addressed is based on the experiences of four veteran politicians who have doctorates or master’s degrees in mathematics. The exposition also considers the mathematical tools used by politicians to capture votes or optimize their impact on the design of electoral districts, i.e., gerrymandering, without forgetting the mathematics applied to parliamentary activity and political science.Aimed at a general educated readership, a basic knowledge of mathematics is the only requisite to understanding most of the book. Certain sections, denoted in the book with a star, contain more advanced material and require some knowledge of undergraduate math. A later chapter is dedicated to applications and techniques of machine learning and the final chapter discusses a variety of cases where political decisions have affected mathematical development. Readers gravitating towards this book are those who are curious about the history of mathematics, including optimizers and mathematicians who would like to learn more about the historical roots of their discipline. There will also be strong appeal to mathematically-oriented economists, political scientists, and people generally interested in mathematics.Mathematics is – or it should be! – an important part of our culture. The impact of mathematics is sometimes silent, but a powerful one. The authors of this book did an incredible work in digging out areas of mathematical reasoning that pervades social and political life. Reading this book, we will all enrich our vision of mathematics’ value for society.(Nuno Crato, Professor of Applied Mathematics, University of Lisbon, former minister of Education and Science of Portugal 2011–2015)This monograph shows in an impressive way that mathematics can be very helpful in making and evaluating political decisions and that it is indispensable in the progressive penetration of all areas of society with scientific methods. This also includes politics. Not everything in politics can be justified or related to mathematics, but politics should not be made in contradiction to mathematical truths. For me, this is a central message of this publication.(Johanna Wanka, Professor of Applied Mathematics, Merseburg University of Applied Sciences, former Minister of Education and Research, Germany 2013–2018)