He won over fans nationwide with his wildly endearing antics such as talking to the ball---and throwing back the ones that "had hits in them"; getting down on his knees to "manicure" the mound of any cleat marks; and shaking hands with just about everyone from teammates to groundskeepers to cops during and after games. Female fans tried to obtain locks of his hair from his barber and even named babies after him.But The Bird was no mere sideshow. The non-roster invitee to spring training that year quickly emerged as one of the best pitchers in the game. Meanwhile, his boyish enthusiasm, his famously modest lifestyle, and his refusal to sign with an agent during the days of labor disputes and free agency made him such a breath of fresh air for fans that not only did attendance in Detroit increase---by tens of thousands---for games he pitched, opposing teams would specifically ask the Tigers to shuffle their rotation so Fidrych would pitch in their cities, too. A rare player who transcended pop culture, Fidrych was named starting pitcher in the All-Star Game as a rookie (the first of his two All-Star nods) and became the first athlete to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.Baseball researcher Doug Wilson delivers the first biography of this once-in-a-lifetime player. Through extensive interviews and meticulous research, the author recounts Fidrych's meteoric rise from Northborough, Massachusetts, to the big leagues, his heartbreaking fall after a torn knee ligament and then rotator cuff, his comeback attempts with the Tigers and in the Red Sox system, and one unforgettable night when The Bird pitched a swan song for the Pawtucket Red Sox against future star Dave Righetti in a game that remains part of local folklore. Finally, Wilson captures Fidrych's post-baseball life and his roles in the community, tragically culminating with his death in a freak accident in 2009.The Bird gives readers a long-overdue look into the life of a player whom baseball had never seen before---and has never seen since.

    “Big data” refers to our burgeoning ability to crunch vast collections of information, analyze it instantly, and draw sometimes profoundly surprising conclusions from it. This emerging science can translate myriad phenomena—from the price of airline tickets to the text of millions of books—into searchable form, and uses our increasing computing power to unearth epiphanies that we never could have seen before. A revolution on par with the Internet or perhaps even the printing press, big data will change the way we think about business, health, politics, education, and innovation in the years to come. It also poses fresh threats, from the inevitable end of privacy as we know it to the prospect of being penalized for things we haven’t even done yet, based on big data’s ability to predict our future behavior.In this brilliantly clear, often surprising work, two leading experts explain what big data is, how it will change our lives, and what we can do to protect ourselves from its hazards. Big Data is the first big book about the next big thing.www.big-data-book.com

    Drawing on their hugely popular BBC Radio 4 show More or Less,, journalist Michael Blastland and internationally known economist Andrew Dilnot delight, amuse, and convert American mathphobes by showing how our everyday experiences make sense of numbers. The radical premise of The Numbers Game is to show how much we already know, and give practical ways to use our knowledge to become cannier consumers of the media. In each concise chapter, the authors take on a different theme—such as size, chance, averages, targets, risk, measurement, and data—and present it as a memorable and entertaining story. If you’ve ever wondered what “average” really means, whether the scare stories about cancer risk should convince you to change your behavior, or whether a story you read in the paper is biased (and how), you need this book. Blastland and Dilnot show how to survive and thrive on the torrent of numbers that pours through everyday life. It’s the essential guide to every cause you love or hate, and every issue you follow, in the language everyone uses.

    Sparky Anderson, the Tigers' colorful manager and 1984 American League Manager of the Year, tells all in this, his day-by-day diary of the making of a championship ball club.

    Then they came to Earth and amnesia set in: they forgot they were from different planets.Based on years of successful counseling of couples and individuals, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus has helped millions of couples transform their relationships. Now viewed as a modern classic, this phenomenal book has helped men and women realize how different they really are and how to communicate their needs in such a way that conflict doesn't arise and intimacy is given every chance to grow!!!!

    The algorithms you'll use most often as a programmer have already been discovered, tested, and proven. If you want to take a hard pass on Knuth's brilliant but impenetrable theories and the dense multi-page proofs you'll find in most textbooks, this is the book for you. This fully-illustrated and engaging guide makes it easy for you to learn how to use algorithms effectively in your own programs.Grokking Algorithms is a disarming take on a core computer science topic. In it, you'll learn how to apply common algorithms to the practical problems you face in day-to-day life as a programmer. You'll start with problems like sorting and searching. As you build up your skills in thinking algorithmically, you'll tackle more complex concerns such as data compression or artificial intelligence. Whether you're writing business software, video games, mobile apps, or system utilities, you'll learn algorithmic techniques for solving problems that you thought were out of your grasp. For example, you'll be able to:Write a spell checker using graph algorithmsUnderstand how data compression works using Huffman codingIdentify problems that take too long to solve with naive algorithms, and attack them with algorithms that give you an approximate answer insteadEach carefully-presented example includes helpful diagrams and fully-annotated code samples in Python. By the end of this book, you will know some of the most widely applicable algorithms as well as how and when to use them.

    Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the wherewithal: Call it what you like, it matters. To Christians, love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it’s the sinews of war. To revolutionaries, it’s the chains of labor. But in The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson shows that finance is in fact the foundation of human progress. What’s more, he reveals financial history as the essential backstory behind all history. With the clarity and verve for which he is known, Ferguson elucidates key financial institutions and concepts by showing where they came from. What is money? What do banks do? What’s the difference between a stock and a bond? Why buy insurance or real estate? And what exactly does a hedge fund do? This is history for the present. Ferguson travels to post-Katrina New Orleans to ask why the free market can’t provide adequate protection against catastrophe. He delves into the origins of the subprime mortgage crisis.

    Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts’ predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight, and Tetlock has spent the past decade trying to figure out why. What makes some people so good? And can this talent be taught?   In Superforecasting, Tetlock and coauthor Dan Gardner offer a masterwork on prediction, drawing on decades of research and the results of a massive, government-funded forecasting tournament. The Good Judgment Project involves tens of thousands of ordinary people—including a Brooklyn filmmaker, a retired pipe installer, and a former ballroom dancer—who set out to forecast global events. Some of the volunteers have turned out to be astonishingly good. They’ve beaten other benchmarks, competitors, and prediction markets. They’ve even beaten the collective judgment of intelligence analysts with access to classified information. They are "superforecasters."   In this groundbreaking and accessible book, Tetlock and Gardner show us how we can learn from this elite group. Weaving together stories of forecasting successes (the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound) and failures (the Bay of Pigs) and interviews with a range of high-level decision makers, from David Petraeus to Robert Rubin, they show that good forecasting doesn’t require powerful computers or arcane methods. It involves gathering evidence from a variety of sources, thinking probabilistically, working in teams, keeping score, and being willing to admit error and change course. Superforecasting offers the first demonstrably effective way to improve our ability to predict the future—whether in business, finance, politics, international affairs, or daily life—and is destined to become a modern classic.

    Spanning fifty books and hundreds of ideas, 50 Psychology Classics examines some of the most intriguing questions regarding cognitive development and behavioral motivations, summarizing the myriad theories that psychologists have put forth to make sense of the human experience. Butler-Bowdon covers everything from humanism to psychoanalysis to the fundamental principles where theorists disagree, like nature versus nurture and the existence of free will. In this single book, you will find Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Kinsey, and the most significant contributors to modern psychological thought. From the author of the bestselling 50 Self-Help Classics, 50 Success Classics, and 50 Spiritual Classics, 50 Psychology Classics will enrich your understanding of the human condition.Includes:1. Alfred Adler "Understanding Human Nature" (1927)2. Gavin Becker "The Gift of Fear" (1997)3. Eric Berne "Games People Play" (1964)4. Edward de Bono "Lateral Thinking" (1970)5. Robert Bolton "People Skills" (1979)6. Nathaniel Branden "The Psychology of Self-Esteem" (1969)7. Isabel Briggs Myers "Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type" (1980)8. Louann Brizendine "The Female Brain" (2006)9. David D Burns "Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy" (1980)10. Robert Cialdini "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" (1984)11. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi "Creativity" (1997)12. Albert Ellis & Robert Harper (1961) "A Guide To Rational Living" (1961)13. Milton Erickson "My Voice Will Go With You" (1982) by Sidney Rosen14. Eric Erikson "Young Man Luther" (1958)15. Hans Eysenck "Dimensions of Personality" (1947)16. Susan Forward "Emotional Blackmail" (1997)17. Viktor Frankl "The Will to Meaning" (1969)18. Anna Freud "The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense" (1936)19. Sigmund Freud "The Interpretation of Dreams" (1901)20. Howard Gardner "Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences" (1983)21. Daniel Gilbert "Stumbling on Happiness" (2006)22. Malcolm Gladwell "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" (2005)23. Daniel Goleman "Emotional Intelligence at Work" (1998)24. John M Gottman "The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work" (1999)25. Harry Harlow "The Nature of Love" (1958)26. Thomas A Harris "I'm OK - You're OK" (1967)27. Eric Hoffer "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements" (1951)28. Karen Horney "Our Inner Conflicts" (1945)29. William James "Principles of Psychology" (1890)30. Carl Jung "The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious" (1953)31. Alfred Kinsey "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female" (1953)32. Melanie Klein "Envy and Gratitude" (1975)33. RD Laing "The Divided Self" (1959)34. Abraham Maslow "The Farther Reaches of Human Nature" (1970)35. Stanley Milgram "Obedience To Authority" (1974)36. Anne Moir & David Jessel "Brainsex: The Real Difference Between Men and Women" (1989)37. IP Pavlov "Conditioned Reflexes" (1927)38. Fritz Perls "Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality" (1951)39. Jean Piaget "The Language and Thought of the Child" (1966)40. Steven Pinker "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature" (2002)41. VS Ramachandran "Phantoms in the Brain" (1998)42. Carl Rogers "On Becoming a Person" (1961)43. Oliver Sacks "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" (1970)44. Barry Schwartz "The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less" (2004)45. Martin Seligman "Authentic Happiness" (2002)46. Gail Sheehy "Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life" (1974)47. BF Skinner "Beyond Freedom & Dignity" (1953)48. Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton & Sheila Heen "Difficult Conversations" (2000)49. William Styron "Darkness Visible" (1990)50. Robert E Thayer "The Origin of Everyday Moods" (1996)

    It provides a simple, thorough survey of elementary topics, starting with set theory and advancing to metric and topological spaces, connectedness, and compactness. 1975 edition.

    Rare are the football innovations that have occurred without an owner, general manager, coach, or player up against the wall and reaching for a way to succeed anyway. In this meticulously researched, lively book, Bleacher Report lead NFL scout Doug Farrar traces the schematic history of the pro game through these “if this/then that” moments—paradigm shifts in the game from 1920 through the present. More than just a book about schemes and strategies, The Genius of Desperation: The Schematic Innovations that Made the Modern NFL also tells the stories of the game’s most prominent innovators, the adversities they endured, and the ways in which they learned to exceed their own expectations on the path to true greatness. Everyone from George Halas to Greasy Neale, Paul Brown to Sid Gillman, Bill Walsh to Chip Kelly is featured, as well as many more.

    Includes "There's a certain slant of light," "Because I could not stop for death," "It was not death for I stood up."

    I finished it as Casey Stengel."--The Cincinnati EnquirerTim McCarver, baseball's preeminent analyst, has set down all that he knows about how the game should be played and watched. With his trademark wit and style, McCarver explains the fundamentals and proper mechanics at the level necessary for success in the major leagues.         Baseball for Brain Surgeons and Other Fans is a gold mine for all fans, brain surgeons or otherwise, and anyone learning how to play or coach the game. (Even major leaguers will pick up some pointers.) After the wonderful 1998 season, America's pastime has never been more popular, and with the deeper knowledge and understanding of baseball that Brain Surgeons provides, any fan will be able to watch it like a pro.

    Coach Bob Hurley had been working miracles at St. Anthony High School for over thirty years, winning state and national championships and offering his players rescue from their surroundings through college scholarships, when he met his most dysfunctional team yet. In The Miracle of St. Anthony Adrian Wojnarowski follows Hurley through a gripping and heartrending season as he struggles to lead a troubled team to glory through his unparalleled understanding of the game and his ceaseless determination to see no more children lost to these streets. In The Miracle of St. Anthony, acclaimed sports journalist Adrian Wojnarowski follows Hurley through a gripping and heartrending season, as he struggles to lead a troubled team to glory through his unparalleled understanding of the game and his ceaseless determination to see no more children lost to the city streets.

    This book synthesizes these recent advances and makes them accessible to first-year graduate students. James Hamilton provides the first adequate text-book treatments of important innovations such as vector autoregressions, generalized method of moments, the economic and statistical consequences of unit roots, time-varying variances, and nonlinear time series models. In addition, he presents basic tools for analyzing dynamic systems (including linear representations, autocovariance generating functions, spectral analysis, and the Kalman filter) in a way that integrates economic theory with the practical difficulties of analyzing and interpreting real-world data. Time Series Analysis fills an important need for a textbook that integrates economic theory, econometrics, and new results.The book is intended to provide students and researchers with a self-contained survey of time series analysis. It starts from first principles and should be readily accessible to any beginning graduate student, while it is also intended to serve as a reference book for researchers.-- "Journal of Economics"