Make your own luck by understanding probability Over the years, some very smart people have thought they understood the rules of chance?only to fail dismally. Whether you call it probability, risk, or uncertainty, the workings of chance often defy common sense. Fortunately, advances in math and science have revealed the laws of chance, and understanding those laws can help in your everyday life. In Chancing It, award-winning scientist and writer Robert Matthews shows how to understand the laws of probability and use them to your advantage. He gives you access to some of the most potent intellectual tools ever developed and explains how to use them to guide your judgments and decisions. By the end of the book, you will know: How to understand and even predict coincidences When an insurance policy is worth having Why “expert” predictions are often misleading How to tell when a scientific claim is a breakthrough or baloney When it makes sense to place a bet on anything from sports to stock markets A groundbreaking introduction to the power of probability, Chancing It will sharpen your decision-making and maximize your luck.
Tens of millions of people in the U.S. with criminal records are highly talented, reliable, and eager to work. Implement these second chance hiring practices to give your company a significant competitive advantage over those that do not. Researched, tested, and written by the chief investment strategist of one of the country’s leading business banks, Jeffrey Korzenik includes dozens of examples of businesses that have successfully implemented the second chance hiring practices outlined in this book. Korzenik shows those companies that have learned to go beyond the label and to evaluate the qualities of the individual applicant have tapped into an often-overlooked source of loyal and productive talent. In Untapped Talent, you will: Understand what goes into a successful second chance hire, from the support that will be needed internally to the resources that are available from outside agencies. Learn how businesses from a variety of industries have instituted successful second chance hiring programs and how this has positively impacted their culture and bottom line. Gain practical onboarding and coaching strategies that will help ensure a smooth transition and a productive, happy new employee. Acquire relevant knowledge of the criminal justice system to provide context in identifying the potential of second chance hiring. Your path to a loyal, engaged, and productive workforce starts with the clear competitive advantage you’ll gain by implementing the second-chance hiring practices within Untapped Talent.
This classroom-tested textbook is an introduction to probability theory, with the right balance between mathematical precision, probabilistic intuition, and concrete applications. Introduction to Probability covers the material precisely, while avoiding excessive technical details. After introducing the basic vocabulary of randomness, including events, probabilities, and random variables, the text offers the reader a first glimpse of the major theorems of the subject: the law of large numbers and the central limit theorem. The important probability distributions are introduced organically as they arise from applications. The discrete and continuous sides of probability are treated together to emphasize their similarities. Intended for students with a calculus background, the text teaches not only the nuts and bolts of probability theory and how to solve specific problems, but also why the methods of solution work.
As her sizzling new series continues, Jennifer Chance sparks some serious combustion between a sexy biker and a corporate go-getter who’s ready to let her hair down. New grad Anna Richardson works hard—so hard that she’s given up having a romantic life. Anna has even convinced her friends that she’s dating an amazing guy—who they’ve simply never met. But now Anna has a wedding to attend and needs to produce the hottie she’s been lying about for the past six months. Enter Jake Flynn, her infuriating, motorcycle-riding, jaw-droppingly gorgeous neighbor, who’s more than willing to fake it for a weekend. In fact, Jake won’t be satisfied until things get real. Though Jake is only playing the role of adoring boyfriend, he’s starting to feel the heat, and judging by Anna’s sweet blush, so is she. Letting chemistry this intense go to waste would be a real shame. Soon, though, the thin line between fantasy and reality fades. Jake may not be what every buttoned-up fast-tracker wants, but he’s sure as hell what Anna needs. And if she takes a ride with him, their adventure never has to end. Praise for Fake It “Fun, flirty, and fantastic! Fake It is one sweet and exciting ride.”—New York Times bestselling author Tracy Wolff “I love this author’s voice, I love these books . . . and I absolutely love her bad boy heroes. . . . Sometimes outrageous, often funny, and always sexy, you honestly don’t want to miss what this author is putting out. . . . If you want a fast and furious romance that will keep you entertained from beginning to end, then look no further than Fake It by Jennifer Chance. It is sexy and fun!”—Guilty Pleasures Book Review “If you love an unlikely hero, smoking hot chemistry, and crying big happy tears at kick-ass endings, Fake It is for you! Thank you, Jennifer, for another fantastic read!”—Read-Love-Blog “A very fun, sexy, and entertaining story! . . . Each book in this series just keeps getting better, and I’m excited to see what Ms. Chance comes up with next!”—A Bookish Escape “Their chemistry is undeniable and these two have some sweet and sexy hot scenes together. I loved it. . . . This will be the first one in a long time to go on my perfect romance shelf.”—Not Everyone’s Mama “Bringing a new twist to hot and sexy, Jennifer continues her revelations into the lives of her Rule Breaker characters. . . . This was an amazing story that I thoroughly enjoyed! Well played, Jennifer! I can’t wait to read the next book!”—Twin Sisters Rockin’ Book Reviews “Explosive . . . I loved this hot little number.”—Red’s Hot Reads “Sexy, sweet and just plain old fun . . . Fake It rocked!”—A Tasty Read Book Reviews Includes a special message from the editor, as well as excerpts from other Loveswept titles.
The thrilling, cinematic story of a community shattered by disaster—and the extraordinary woman who helped pull it back together “A powerful, heart-wrenching book, as much art as it is journalism.”—The Wall Street Journal “A beautifully wrought and profoundly joyful story of compassion and perseverance.”—BuzzFeed (Best Books of the Year) In the spring of 1964, Anchorage, Alaska, was a modern-day frontier town yearning to be a metropolis—the largest, proudest city in a state that was still brand-new. But just before sundown on Good Friday, the community was jolted by the most powerful earthquake in American history, a catastrophic 9.2 on the Richter Scale. For four and a half minutes, the ground lurched and rolled. Streets cracked open and swallowed buildings whole. And once the shaking stopped, night fell and Anchorage went dark. The city was in disarray and sealed off from the outside world. Slowly, people switched on their transistor radios and heard a familiar woman’s voice explaining what had just happened and what to do next. Genie Chance was a part-time radio reporter and working mother who would play an unlikely role in the wake of the disaster, helping to put her fractured community back together. Her tireless broadcasts over the next three days would transform her into a legendary figure in Alaska and bring her fame worldwide—but only briefly. That Easter weekend in Anchorage, Genie and a cast of endearingly eccentric characters—from a mountaineering psychologist to the local community theater group staging Our Town—were thrown into a jumbled world they could not recognize. Together, they would make a home in it again. Drawing on thousands of pages of unpublished documents, interviews with survivors, and original broadcast recordings, This Is Chance! is the hopeful, gorgeously told story of a single catastrophic weekend and proof of our collective strength in a turbulent world. There are moments when reality instantly changes—when the life we assume is stable gets upended by pure chance. This Is Chance! is an electrifying and lavishly empathetic portrayal of one community rising above the randomness, a real-life fable of human connection withstanding chaos.
In this innovative study, Crystal Sanders explores how working-class black women, in collaboration with the federal government, created the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) in 1965, a Head Start program that not only gave poor black children access to early childhood education but also provided black women with greater opportunities for political activism during a crucial time in the unfolding of the civil rights movement. Women who had previously worked as domestics and sharecroppers secured jobs through CDGM as teachers and support staff and earned higher wages. The availability of jobs independent of the local white power structure afforded these women the freedom to vote in elections and petition officials without fear of reprisal. But CDGM's success antagonized segregationists at both the local and state levels who eventually defunded it. Tracing the stories of the more than 2,500 women who staffed Mississippi's CDGM preschool centers, Sanders's book remembers women who went beyond teaching children their shapes and colors to challenge the state's closed political system and white supremacist ideology and offers a profound example for future community organizing in the South.
The landmark New York Times best seller that reveals how the explosion of sugar in our diets has created an obesity epidemic, and what we can do to save ourselves. Robert Lustig is at the forefront of war against sugar — showing us that it's toxic, it's addictive, and it's everywhere because the food companies want it to be. His 90-minute YouTube video "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" has been viewed more than 7 million times. Now, in this landmark book, he documents the science and the politics that have led to personal misery and public crisis — the pandemic of obesity and chronic disease--over the last thirty years. In the late 1970s, when the U.S. government declared that we needed to get the fat out of our diets, the food industry responded by pumping in more sugar to make food more palatable (and more salable), and by removing the fiber to make food last longer on the shelf. The result has been a perfect storm for our health, disastrously altering our biochemistry to make us think we're starving, drive our eating habits out of our control, and turn us into couch potatoes. If we cannot control how we eat, it's because of the catastrophic excess of sugar in our diet--the resulting hormonal imbalances have rewired our brains! To help us lose weight and recover our health, Lustig presents strategies we can each use to readjust the key hormones that regulate hunger, reward, and stress, as well as societal strategies to improve the health of the next generation. With scientific rigor and even a little humor, Fat Chance categorically proves that "a calorie is not a calorie," and takes that knowledge to its logical conclusion--an overhaul of the global food system.
This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation (very briefly) is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures--and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense--that whatever can happen can just as naturally happen backwards. Albert provides an unprecedentedly clear, lively, and systematic new account--in the context of a Newtonian-Mechanical picture of the world--of the ultimate origins of the statistical regularities we see around us, of the temporal irreversibility of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, of the asymmetries in our epistemic access to the past and the future, and of our conviction that by acting now we can affect the future but not the past. Then, in the final section of the book, he generalizes the Newtonian picture to the quantum-mechanical case and (most interestingly) suggests a very deep potential connection between the problem of the direction of time and the quantum-mechanical measurement problem. The book aims to be both an original contribution to the present scientific and philosophical understanding of these matters at the most advanced level, and something in the nature of an elementary textbook on the subject accessible to interested high-school students.
