Books about Refinement from Amazon.com

This lively and authoritative volume makes clear that the quest for taste and manners in America has been essential to the serious pursuit of a democratic culture. Spanning the material world from mansions and silverware to etiquette books, city planning, and sentimental novels, Richard L. Bushman shows how a set of values originating in aristocratic court culture gradually permeated almost every stratum of American society and served to prevent the hardening of class consciousness. A work of immense and richly nuanced learning, The Refinement of America newly illuminates every facet of both our artifacts and our values..
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This is a revision of a market leader in social cognition written by two well-known and respected authors. The text is designed to provide a critical overview of the theories and methods in the newly emerging field of social cognition. The major theme of the book is that normal cognitive processes account for much of how people understand themselves and others. In basic research, social cognition theories of attribution, psychological control, social schemata, attention, person memory, and social inference have become central to the field. In a recent poll, social psychologists predicted that topics within a cognitive approach would be the most popular research area in the coming decade..
Price: $44.59 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In the frantic pace of everyday demands, finding even a few moments of quality "alone-time" for yourself is nearly impossible.

Solitary Refinement shows you not only how to find precious time alone but to use it to catapult you to greater levels of health, happiness, and success.
Not only do we crave and need time for ourselves but we must know how to make the most of it - to benefit ourselves as well as others.

Whether you are always on the go or lonely in the middle of it all, Solitary Refinement shows you how to find and embrace alone-time using it productively to change your thoughts and your life for the best.

In this book you will discover:

The ten voices you must ignore
How to think like God thinks
How being alone with His words will change the way you think, feel, and act

The four ways to set your priorities right

How to eliminate emotional isolation.
Price: $9.87 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Much current research in computer science is concerned with two questions: is a program correct? and how can we improve a correct program preserving correctness? This latter question is known as the refinement of programs and the purpose of this book is to consider these questions in a formal setting. In fact, correctness turns out to be a special case of refinement and so the focus is on refinement.

Although a reasonable background knowledge is assumed from mathematics and CS, the book is a self-contained introduction suitable for graduate students and researchers coming to this subject for the first time. There are numerous exercises provided of varying degrees of challenge..
Price: $115.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The systems engineering method proposed in this book, which is based on Abstract State Machines (ASMs), guides the development of software and embedded hardware-software systems seamlessly from requirements capture to actual implementation and documentation. The method bridges the gap between the human understanding and formulation of real-world problems and the deployment of their algorithmic solutions by code-executing machines. Within a single conceptual framework it covers design, verification by reasoning techniques, and validation by simulation and testing. ASMs improve current industrial practice by using accurate high-level modeling and by linking the descriptions at the successive stages of system development in an organic and efficiently maintainable chain of rigorous and coherent system models at stepwise-refined abstraction levels. In several industrial projects the ASM method has proven its superiority compared to the popular UML methodology when designing complex parallel or dynamic systems.

This book combines the features of a textbook and a handbook: the reader will find detailed explanations, proofs, and exercises as well as numerous examples and real-world case studies. Researchers will find here the most comprehensive description of ASMs available today and professionals will use it as a 'modeling handbook for the working software engineer.' As a textbook it supports self-study or it can form the basis of a lecture course. The book is complemented by a CD containing the whole book text, additional course material, solutions to exercises, and additional examples..
Price: $52.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

1900. As set forth and inscribed upon, some of the oldest existing monuments, papyri, and other records of that people; from the earliest historic times to A.D. 64; together with facsimiles and translations of some of the Oldest Books in the World. Twenty-seven illustrations..
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The Mental Models Theory of Reasoning presents theoretical and empirical research on an area of growing interest, the status of mental models in deductive reasoning. As research in the framework of the mental models theory flourishes, this book answers a need to assess the contribution of the notion of training and content. It covers the central issues of propositional, relational, causal and probabilistic reasoning, and argumentation and development. In addition, this work presents data regarding strategies, argumentation, and the development of reasoning.

Special features of this text include:
*sharp theoretical analyses as well as important new empirical data offered by theorists who work in the framework of the mental models theory;
*a critical and empirically driven account of content effects in conditional and linear reasoning; and
*an original account on the influence of pragmatics on reasoning.

The Mental Models Theory of Reasoning will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of cognitive psychology, and will be valuable to individuals working in Artificial Intelligence, as it highlights theoretical and empirical data on how humans use mental models when tackling deductive puzzles..
Price: $62.73 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The first major study of this subject, exploring Charleston's special fascination with European culture. This illustrated catalogue accompanies an exhibition of more than 140 objects, focusing on the portraits, paintings, decorative arts and other artifacts that document the allure that England and Europe held..
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This book is a companion volume to the author’s classic The Capital Budgeting Decision and explores the complexities of capital budgeting as well as the opportunities to improve the decision process where risk and time are important elements.

There is a long list of contenders for the next breakthrough for making capital budgeting decisions and this book gives in-depth coverage to:

• Real options. The value of a project must take into consideration the flexibility that it provides management, acknowledging the option of making decisions in the future when more information is available. This book emphasizes the need to assign a value to this flexibility, and how option-pricing theory (also known as contingent claims analysis) sometimes provides a method for valuing flexibility.
• Decomposing cash flows. A project consists of many series of cash flows and each series deserves its own specific risk-adjusted discount rate. Decomposing the cash flows of an investment highlights the fact that while managers are generally aware that divisions and projects have different risks, too often they neglect the fact that the cash flow components may also have different risks, with severe consequences on the quality of the decision-making.

Designed to assist business decisions at all levels, the emphasis is on the applications of capital budgeting techniques to a variety of issues. These include the hugely significant buy versus lease decision which costs corporations billions each year. Current business decisions also need to be made considering the cross-border implications, and global business aspects, identifying the specific aspects of international investment decisions, appear throughout the book.

Harold Bierman, Jr., is the Nicholas H. Noyes Professor of Business Administration at the Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University.

Seymour Smidt is Professor Emeritus at the Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University.

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