Books about Irregularities from Amazon.com

This exuberantly illustrated book celebrates the sophistication, vivacity, and significance of improvisational African-Aemrican quilts, both as artistic achievements and as expressions of African-American traditions. The knowledge, attitudes, and values carried across the Atlantic by enslaved Africans appear to have informed a quiltmaking tradition so powerful that, to this day, it preserves its identity in a special province of African-American quilts. Such "Afro-traditional" quilts are made by people who have no formal art training and who usually do not consider themselves artists; they learned their craft and absorbed its aesthetics by watching and helping their mothers, aunts, and grandmothers who, in turn, learned form previous generations. The resulting--often highly idiosyncratic--quilts call out to be seen as the works of art that they are. The brilliance of this work must be partially credited to a tradition which encourages individual expression and provides a context in which the talents of individual artists can flourish. Improvisation, pervasive in black African art and familiar as a basic element of many African-American musical forms, is a vital force in this tradition. The artists maintain a generous attitude toward the accidental, embracing innovations that originate beyond the conscious domain. they use approximate measurement and "flexible patterning," in which the design, conceived of as a an invitation to variation, will not repeat, but will materialize in a sequence of visual elaborations. Afro-traditional attitudes and methods are antithetical to the standard American quiltmaking tradition--practiced by both whites and blacks--in which great value is placed on precise measurement and exact pattern replication. Instead they bear a keen likeness to the improvisatory practices of the textile-makers of Kongo and West Africa, regions from which American slaves were taken. These antipathies and affinities suggest an enduring African influence on the Afro-traditional quilt..
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In recent years, the upsurge in highly publicized allegations of accounting irregularities and fraudulent financial reporting have shaken up today’s corporate community and have been the impetus for the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, as well as closer scrutiny by the SEC. Accounting Irregularities and Financial Fraud: A Corporate Governance Guide provides a step-by-step guide to the crises enveloping a company in the wake of fraudulent financial reporting--and how to prevent it from happening in the first place. It discusses the corporate environment that causes fraudulent financial reporting, how it spreads, the kinds of crises it can create for a company, and the best way to deal with them..
Price: $123.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The discrepancy method has produced the most fruitful line of attack on a pivotal computer science question: What is the computational power of random bits? It has also played a major role in recent developments in complexity theory. This book tells the story of the discrepancy method in a few succinct independent vignettes. The chapters explore such topics as communication complexity, pseudo-randomness, rapidly mixing Markov chains, points on a sphere, derandomization, convex hulls and Voronoi diagrams, linear programming, geometric sampling and VC-dimension theory, minimum spanning trees, circuit complexity, and multidimensional searching. The mathematical treatment is thorough and self-contained, with minimal prerequisites. More information can be found on the book's home page at http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/book.html..
Price: $79.94 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The main purpose of this book is to give an overview of the developments during the last 20 years in the theory of uniformly distributed sequences The authors focus on various aspects such as special sequences, metric theory, geometric concepts of discrepancy, irregularities of distribution, continuous uniform distribution and uniform distribution in discrete spaces. Specific applications are presented in detail: numerical integration, spherical designs, random number generation and mathematical finance. Furthermore over 1000 references are collected and discussed. While written in the style of a research monograph, the book is readable with basic knowledge in analysis, number theory and measure theory..
Price: $99.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In a relatively short period of time, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) has grown into a powerful quantitative, analytical tool for measuring and evaluating performance. It has been successfully applied to a whole variety of problems in many different contexts worldwide. The analysis of an array of these problems has been resistant to other methodological approaches because of the multiple levels of complexity that must be considered. Several examples of multifaceted problems in which DEA analysis has been successfully used are: (1) maintenance activities of US Air Force bases in geographically dispersed locations, (2) policy force efficiencies in the United Kingdom, (3) branch bank performances in Canada, Cyprus, and other countries and (4) the efficiency of universities in performing their education and research functions in the U.S., England, and France. In addition to localized problems, DEA applications have been extended to performance evaluations of 'larger entities' such as cities, regions, and countries. These extensions have a wider scope than traditional analyses because they include "social" and "quality-of-life" dimensions which require the modeling of qualitative and quantitative data in order to analyze the layers of complexity for an evaluation of performance and to provide solution strategies.

DEA is computational at its core and this book will be one of several books that we will look to publish on the computational aspects of DEA. This book by Zhu and Cook will deal with the micro aspects of handling and modeling data issues in modeling DEA problems. DEA's use has grown with its capability of dealing with complex "service industry" and the "public service domain" types of problems that require modeling both qualitative and quantitative data. This will be a handbook treatment dealing with specific data problems including the following: (1) imprecise data, (2) inaccurate data, (3) missing data, (4) qualitative data, (5) outliers, (6) undesirable outputs, (7) quality data, (8) statistical analysis, (9) software and other data aspects of modeling complex DEA problems. In addition, the book will demonstrate how to visualize DEA results when the data is more than 3-dimensional, and how to identify efficiency units quickly and accurately.

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Over a billion people are trapped in corporate cubicles worldwide. More than 99% of them are dead.

From the first puzzling sentence, Banker's Holiday - a euphemism for a federal bank closure - conjures the bleak and humorous world of C. Stillman Fuller, a workaholic financier who suffers a serious setback in the middle of a Monday morning staff meeting: Fuller comes to the sudden, disturbing realization that his "brooding, luxurious zombies, otherwise known as senior management" have become just that, and that he must either escape, or become one of them. He flees the horror of his discorporate dystopia, and his own growing hunger, disguises himself as a janitor and heads cross-country in an old pick-up. Fuller soon finds himself in an odd and idyllic Shangri-la in Upstate NY. But will he escape the bizarre events that continue to dog him? And can he dispel a thousand-foot Nixon?

Part satirical fantasia, part corporate fantasy & horror, Gary Clemenceau's singular debut novel illustrates Capitalism's mid-life crisis, and offers a unique solution to the problem of being human in an increasingly inhuman world..
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