Hand argues that extraordinarily rare events are anything but. In fact, they’re commonplace. Not only that, we should all expect to experience a miracle roughly once every month.     But Hand is no believer in superstitions, prophecies, or the paranormal. His definition of “miracle” is thoroughly rational. No mystical or supernatural explanation is necessary to understand why someone is lucky enough to win the lottery twice, or is destined to be hit by lightning three times and still survive. All we need, Hand argues, is a firm grounding in a powerful set of laws: the laws of inevitability, of truly large numbers, of selection, of the probability lever, and of near enough.     Together, these constitute Hand’s groundbreaking Improbability Principle. And together, they explain why we should not be so surprised to bump into a friend in a foreign country, or to come across the same unfamiliar word four times in one day. Hand wrestles with seemingly less explicable questions as well: what the Bible and Shakespeare have in common, why financial crashes are par for the course, and why lightning does strike the same place (and the same person) twice. Along the way, he teaches us how to use the Improbability Principle in our own lives—including how to cash in at a casino and how to recognize when a medicine is truly effective.     An irresistible adventure into the laws behind “chance” moments and a trusty guide for understanding the world and universe we live in, The Improbability Principle will transform how you think about serendipity and luck, whether it’s in the world of business and finance or you’re merely sitting in your backyard, tossing a ball into the air and wondering where it will land.

    That’s a mistake, Tim Harford says in The Data Detective. We shouldn’t be suspicious of statistics—we need to understand what they mean and how they can improve our lives: they are, at heart, human behavior seen through the prism of numbers and are often “the only way of grasping much of what is going on around us.” If we can toss aside our fears and learn to approach them clearly—understanding how our own preconceptions lead us astray—statistics can point to ways we can live better and work smarter.As “perhaps the best popular economics writer in the world” (New Statesman), Tim Harford is an expert at taking complicated ideas and untangling them for millions of readers. In The Data Detective, he uses new research in science and psychology to set out ten strategies for using statistics to erase our biases and replace them with new ideas that use virtues like patience, curiosity, and good sense to better understand ourselves and the world. As a result, The Data Detective is a big-idea book about statistics and human behavior that is fresh, unexpected, and insightful.

    This text provides a comprehensive view of programming and interfacing of the Intel family of Microprocessors from the 8088 through the latest Pentium 4 microprocessor. Organized in an orderly and manageable format, it offers over 200 programming examples using the Microsoft Macro Assembler program, and provides a thorough description of each Intel family members, memory systems, and various I/O systems.

    This text provides a simple and straightforward introduction to econometrics for the beginner. The book is designed to help students understand econometric techniques through extensive examples, careful explanations, and a wide variety of problem material. In each of the editions, I have tried to incorporate major developments in the field in an intuitive and informative way without resort to matrix algebra, calculus, or statistics beyond the introductory level. The fourth edition continues that tradition.

    Now, physicist Leonard Susskind has teamed up with data engineer Art Friedman to present the theory and associated mathematics of the strange world of quantum mechanics.In this follow-up to The Theoretical Minimum, Susskind and Friedman provide a lively introduction to this famously difficult field, which attempts to understand the behavior of sub-atomic objects through mathematical abstractions. Unlike other popularizations that shy away from quantum mechanics’ weirdness, Quantum Mechanics embraces the utter strangeness of quantum logic. The authors offer crystal-clear explanations of the principles of quantum states, uncertainty and time dependence, entanglement, and particle and wave states, among other topics, and each chapter includes exercises to ensure mastery of each area. Like The Theoretical Minimum, this volume runs parallel to Susskind’s eponymous Stanford University-hosted continuing education course.An approachable yet rigorous introduction to a famously difficult topic, Quantum Mechanics provides a tool kit for amateur scientists to learn physics at their own pace.

    Collected from the series of blog posts starting at: https://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/10/2...Hardcover available at: http://www.blurb.com/b/9008339-catego...

    The author has made this edition more accessible to better meet the needs of today's undergraduate mathematics and philosophy students. It is intended for the reader who has not studied logic previously, but who has some experience in mathematical reasoning. Material is presented on computer science issues such as computational complexity and database queries, with additional coverage of introductory material such as sets.

    The calculus is not a hard subject and I prove this through an easy to read and obvious approach spanning only 100 pages. I have written this book with the following type of student in mind; the non-traditional student returning to college after a long break, a notoriously weak student in math who just needs to get past calculus to obtain a degree, and the garage tinkerer who wishes to understand a little more about the technical subjects. This book is meant to address the many fundamental thought-blocks that keep the average 'mathaphobe' (or just an interested person who doesn't have the time to enroll in a course) from excelling in mathematics in a clear and concise manner. It is my sincerest hope that this book helps you with your needs.Show more Show less

    Its flexible organization (with all chapters complete and self-contained) allows instructors the freedom to cover the topics they want in the order they choose.

    However, despite all of the recent advances in computer vision research, the dream of having a computer interpret an image at the same level as a two-year old remains elusive. Why is computer vision such a challenging problem and what is the current state of the art?Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications explores the variety of techniques commonly used to analyze and interpret images. It also describes challenging real-world applications where vision is being successfully used, both for specialized applications such as medical imaging, and for fun, consumer-level tasks such as image editing and stitching, which students can apply to their own personal photos and videos.More than just a source of "recipes," this exceptionally authoritative and comprehensive textbook/reference also takes a scientific approach to basic vision problems, formulating physical models of the imaging process before inverting them to produce descriptions of a scene. These problems are also analyzed using statistical models and solved using rigorous engineering techniquesTopics and features: Structured to support active curricula and project-oriented courses, with tips in the Introduction for using the book in a variety of customized courses Presents exercises at the end of each chapter with a heavy emphasis on testing algorithms and containing numerous suggestions for small mid-term projects Provides additional material and more detailed mathematical topics in the Appendices, which cover linear algebra, numerical techniques, and Bayesian estimation theory Suggests additional reading at the end of each chapter, including the latest research in each sub-field, in addition to a full Bibliography at the end of the book Supplies supplementary course material for students at the associated website, http: //szeliski.org/Book/ Suitable for an upper-level undergraduate or graduate-level course in computer science or engineering, this textbook focuses on basic techniques that work under real-world conditions and encourages students to push their creative boundaries. Its design and exposition also make it eminently suitable as a unique reference to the fundamental techniques and current research literature in computer vision.

    Linear Equations; Vector Spaces; Linear Transformations; Polynomials; Determinants; Elementary canonical Forms; Rational and Jordan Forms; Inner Product Spaces; Operators on Inner Product Spaces; Bilinear Forms For all readers interested in linear algebra.

    This book investigates what cannot be known. Rather than exploring the amazing facts that science, mathematics, and reason have revealed to us, this work studies what science, mathematics, and reason tell us cannot be revealed. In The Outer Limits of Reason, Noson Yanofsky considers what cannot be predicted, described, or known, and what will never be understood. He discusses the limitations of computers, physics, logic, and our own thought processes.Yanofsky describes simple tasks that would take computers trillions of centuries to complete and other problems that computers can never solve; perfectly formed English sentences that make no sense; different levels of infinity; the bizarre world of the quantum; the relevance of relativity theory; the causes of chaos theory; math problems that cannot be solved by normal means; and statements that are true but cannot be proven. He explains the limitations of our intuitions about the world -- our ideas about space, time, and motion, and the complex relationship between the knower and the known.Moving from the concrete to the abstract, from problems of everyday language to straightforward philosophical questions to the formalities of physics and mathematics, Yanofsky demonstrates a myriad of unsolvable problems and paradoxes. Exploring the various limitations of our knowledge, he shows that many of these limitations have a similar pattern and that by investigating these patterns, we can better understand the structure and limitations of reason itself. Yanofsky even attempts to look beyond the borders of reason to see what, if anything, is out there.

    In this lively and groundbreaking new book, economist Ian Ayres shows how today's best and brightest organizations are analyzing massive databases at lightening speed to provide greater insights into human behavior. They are the Super Crunchers. From internet sites like Google and Amazon that know your tastes better than you do, to a physician's diagnosis and your child's education, to boardrooms and government agencies, this new breed of decision makers are calling the shots. And they are delivering staggeringly accurate results. How can a football coach evaluate a player without ever seeing him play? Want to know whether the price of an airline ticket will go up or down before you buy? How can a formula outpredict wine experts in determining the best vintages? Super crunchers have the answers. In this brave new world of equation versus expertise, Ayres shows us the benefits and risks, who loses and who wins, and how super crunching can be used to help, not manipulate us.Gone are the days of solely relying on intuition to make decisions. No businessperson, consumer, or student who wants to stay ahead of the curve should make another keystroke without reading Super Crunchers.

    It givessyntax and output for accomplishing many analyses through the mostrecent releases of SAS, SPSS, and SYSTAT, some not available insoftware manuals. The book maintains its practical approach, stillfocusing on the benefits and limitations of applications of a techniqueto a data set -- when, why, and how to do it. Overall, it providesadvanced students with a timely and comprehensive introduction totoday's most commonly encountered statistical and multivariatetechniques, while assuming only a limited knowledge of higher-levelmathematics.

    Even after more than three centuries and the revolutions of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, Newtonian physics continues to account for many of the phenomena of the observed world, and Newtonian celestial dynamics is used to determine the orbits of our space vehicles.This completely new translation, the first in 270 years, is based on the third (1726) edition, the final revised version approved by Newton; it includes extracts from the earlier editions, corrects errors found in earlier versions, and replaces archaic English with contemporary prose and up-to-date mathematical forms. Newton's principles describe acceleration, deceleration, and inertial movement; fluid dynamics; and the motions of the earth, moon, planets, and comets. A great work in itself, the Principia also revolutionized the methods of scientific investigation. It set forth the fundamental three laws of motion and the law of universal gravity, the physical principles that account for the Copernican system of the world as emended by Kepler, thus effectively ending controversy concerning the Copernican planetary system.The illuminating Guide to the Principia by I. Bernard Cohen, along with his and Anne Whitman's translation, will make this preeminent work truly accessible for today's scientists, scholars, and students.