Books about Frailties from Amazon.com

In her latest spellbinding escapade, Jane Austen arrives in London to watch over the printing of her first novel, and finds herself embroiled in a crime that could end more than her career. For it is up to Jane to tease a murderer out of the ton, lest she—and her country—suffer a dastardly demise.…

On the heels of completing Sense and Sensibility, Jane heads to Sloane Street for a monthlong visit with her brother Henry and his wife, Eliza. Hobnobbing with the Fashionable Great at the height of the Season, Jane is well aware of their secrets and peccadilloes. But even she is surprised when the intimate correspondence between a Russian princess and a prominent Tory minister is published in the papers for all to see. More shocking, the disgraced beauty is soon found with her throat slit on Lord Castlereagh’s very doorstep.

Everyone who’s anyone in high society is certain the spurned princess committed the violence upon herself. But Jane is unconvinced. Nor does she believe the minister guilty of so grisly and public a crime. Jane, however, is willing to let someone else investigate—until a quirk of fate thrusts her and Eliza into the heart of the case…as prime suspects!

Striking a bargain with the authorities, Jane secures seven days to save herself and Eliza from hanging. But as her quest to unmask a killer takes her from the halls of government to the drawing rooms of London’s most celebrated courtesan, only one thing is sure: her failure will not only cut short her life. It could lead to England’s downfall. A compulsively readable, uncommonly elegant novel of historical suspense, Jane and the Barque of Frailty once again proves Jane Austen a sleuth to be reckoned with.


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This sharply intelligent, consistently provocative book takes the reader on an astonishing, thought-provoking voyage into the realm of delightful uncertainty--a world of paradox in which logical argument leads to contradiction and common sense is seemingly rendered irrelevant..
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Time-to-event data are ubiquitous in fields such as medicine, biology, demography, sociology, economics and reliability theory. Recently, a need to analyze more complex event histories has emerged. Examples are individuals that move among several states, frailty that makes some units fail before others, internal time-dependent covariates, and the estimation of causal effects from observational data.

The aim of this book is to bridge the gap between standard textbook models and a range of models where the dynamic structure of the data manifests itself fully. The common denominator of such models is stochastic processes. The authors show how counting processes, martingales, and stochastic integrals fit very nicely with censored data. Beginning with standard analyses such as Kaplan-Meier plots and Cox regression, the presentation progresses to the additive hazard model and recurrent event data. Stochastic processes are also used as natural models for individual frailty; they allow sensible interpretations of a number of surprising artifacts seen in population data.

The stochastic process framework is naturally connected to causality. The authors show how dynamic path analyses can incorporate many modern causality ideas in a framework that takes the time aspect seriously.

To make the material accessible to the reader, a large number of practical examples, mainly from medicine, are developed in detail. Stochastic processes are introduced in an intuitive and non-technical manner. The book is aimed at investigators who use event history methods and want a better understanding of the statistical concepts. It is suitable as a textbook for graduate courses in statistics and biostatistics.

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Can women be equal to men as long as men are physically stronger? And are men, in fact, stronger?
These are key questions that Colette Dowling, author of the bestselling The Cinderella Complex, raises in her provocative new book. The myth of female frailty, with its roots in nineteenth-century medicine and misogyny, has had a damaging effect on women's health, social status, and physical safety. It is Dowling's controversial thesis that women succumb to societal pressures to appear weak in order to seem more "feminine."
The Frailty Myth presents new evidence that girls are weaned from the use of their bodies even before they begin school. By adolescence, their strength and aerobic powers have started to decline unless the girls are exercising vigorously--and most aren't. By sixteen, they have already lost bone density and turned themselves into prime candidates for osteoporosis. They have also been deprived of motor stimulation that is essential for brain growth.
Yet as breakthroughs among elite women athletes grow more and more astounding, it begins to appear that strength and physical skill--for all women--is only a matter of learning and training. Men don't have a monopoly on physical prowess; when women and men are matched in size and level of training, the strength gap closes. In some areas, women are actually equipped to outperform men, due partly to differences in body structure, and partly to the newly discovered strengthening benefits of estrogen.

Drawing on extensive research in motor development, performance assessment, sports physi-ology, and endocrinology, Dowling presents an astonishing picture of the new physical woman. And she creates a powerful argument that true equality isn't possible until women learn how to stand up for themselves--physically..
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Clustered survival data are encountered in many scientific disciplines including human and veterinary medicine, biology, epidemiology, public health and demography  Frailty models provide a powerful tool to analyse clustered survival data. In contrast to the large number of research publications on frailty models, relatively few statistical software packages contain frailty models.

It is demanding for statistical practitioners and graduate students to grasp a good knowledge on frailty models from the existing literature. This book provides an in-depth discussion and explanation of the basics of frailty model methodology for such readers. The discussion includes parametric and semiparametric frailty models and accelerated failure time models. Common techniques to fit frailty models include the EM-algorithm, penalised likelihood techniques, Laplacian integration and Bayesian techniques. More advanced frailty models for hierarchical data are also included.

Real-life examples are used to demonstrate how particular frailty models can be fitted and how the results should be interpreted. The programs to fit all the worked-out examples in the book are available from the Springer website with most of the programs developed in the freeware packages R and Winbugs. The book starts with a brief overview of some basic concepts in classical survival analysis, collecting what is needed for the reading on the more complex frailty models.

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Are people ever rational? Consider this: You auction off a one-dollar bill to the highest bidder, but you set the rules so that the second highest bidder also has to pay the amount of his last bid, even though he gets nothing Would people ever enter such an auction? Not only do they, but according to Martin Shubik, the game's inventor, the average winning bid (for a dollar, remember) is $3.40. Many winners report that they bid so high only because their opponent "went completely crazy." This game lies at the intersection of three subjects of eternal fascination: human psychology, morality, and John von Neumann's game theory. Hungarian game-theorist Laszlo Mero introduces us to the basics of game theory, including such concepts as zero-sum games, Prisoner's Dilemma and the origins of altruism; shows how game theory is applicable to fields ranging from physics to politics; and explores the role of rational thinking in the context of many different kinds of thinking. This fascinating, urbane book will interest everyone who wonders what mathematics can tell us about the human condition..
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