A Calculating People

A Calculating People
Author: Patricia Cline Cohen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2016-07-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1134958889

Now back in print, A Calculating People reveals how numeracy profoundly shaped the character of society in the early republic and provides a wholly original perspective on the development of modern America.

Calculating Success

Calculating Success
Author: Carl Hoffmann
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2012
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1422166392

This title helps us in using analytics to make more effective talent management decisions. Most managers understand that employees can make or break a company's strategy. You can have the best ideas and the most promising plan, but if you don't have the right people to carry it out, that plan will fail. Still, despite having this critical knowledge, most companies don't have a data-driven approach to the decisions they make about talent. In fact, a recent IBM study that interviewed over 400 senior HR executives showed that only 6 per cent of companies believe they can effectively use human capital data to make strategic workforce decisions. Enter "Calculating Success", the forthcoming book by human capital experts Carl Hoffmann, Eric Lesser, and Tim Ringo. Based on decades of experience creating human capital systems at IBM, the authors show how using analytics can dramatically improve a company's ability to make better and faster talent decisions. By organizing the book around four crucial questions managers must ask, the book provides a framework to help executives rethink how they use information on talent. The result? A path to using analytics to make more effective talent management decisions. In addition, the authors' ideas help to link HR with all levels of the organization in a strategic way, by showing readers how to connect their version of analytics to the strategic mission of the larger organization, so that the analytics flows throughout the enterprise. With detailed examples and studies from IBM's Institute for Business Value and Human Capital Management practice, this book will make you rethink the relationship of talent to business success. The results allow for a more stable and cost-effective workforce, an improved ability to motivate employees, and a more systematic approach to developing critical talent.

The Mental Calculator's Handbook

The Mental Calculator's Handbook
Author: Robert Fountain
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 500
Release: 2013
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 1300846658

Written by two of the world's foremost authorities on mental calculation, The Mental Calculator's Handbook is essential reading for aspiring calculating prodigies. From multiplying fractions to extracting square roots, all the techniques are presented and explained in a clear and rigorous way.

Calculated Risks

Calculated Risks
Author: Gerd Gigerenzer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2015-11-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1439127093

At the beginning of the twentieth century, H. G. Wells predicted that statistical thinking would be as necessary for citizenship in a technological world as the ability to read and write. But in the twenty-first century, we are often overwhelmed by a baffling array of percentages and probabilities as we try to navigate in a world dominated by statistics. Cognitive scientist Gerd Gigerenzer says that because we haven't learned statistical thinking, we don't understand risk and uncertainty. In order to assess risk -- everything from the risk of an automobile accident to the certainty or uncertainty of some common medical screening tests -- we need a basic understanding of statistics. Astonishingly, doctors and lawyers don't understand risk any better than anyone else. Gigerenzer reports a study in which doctors were told the results of breast cancer screenings and then were asked to explain the risks of contracting breast cancer to a woman who received a positive result from a screening. The actual risk was small because the test gives many false positives. But nearly every physician in the study overstated the risk. Yet many people will have to make important health decisions based on such information and the interpretation of that information by their doctors. Gigerenzer explains that a major obstacle to our understanding of numbers is that we live with an illusion of certainty. Many of us believe that HIV tests, DNA fingerprinting, and the growing number of genetic tests are absolutely certain. But even DNA evidence can produce spurious matches. We cling to our illusion of certainty because the medical industry, insurance companies, investment advisers, and election campaigns have become purveyors of certainty, marketing it like a commodity. To avoid confusion, says Gigerenzer, we should rely on more understandable representations of risk, such as absolute risks. For example, it is said that a mammography screening reduces the risk of breast cancer by 25 percent. But in absolute risks, that means that out of every 1,000 women who do not participate in screening, 4 will die; while out of 1,000 women who do, 3 will die. A 25 percent risk reduction sounds much more significant than a benefit that 1 out of 1,000 women will reap. This eye-opening book explains how we can overcome our ignorance of numbers and better understand the risks we may be taking with our money, our health, and our lives.

Calculating God

Calculating God
Author: Robert J. Sawyer
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2009-03-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429914599

Calculating God is the new near-future SF thriller from the popular and award-winning Robert J. Sawyer. An alien shuttle craft lands outside the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. A six-legged, two-armed alien emerges, who says, in perfect English, "Take me to a paleontologist." It seems that Earth, and the alien's home planet, and the home planet of another alien species traveling on the alien mother ship, all experienced the same five cataclysmic events at about the same time (one example of these "cataclysmic events" would be the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs). Both alien races believe this proves the existence of God: i.e. he's obviously been playing with the evolution of life on each of these planets. From this provocative launch point, Sawyer tells a fast-paced, and morally and intellectually challenging, SF story that just grows larger and larger in scope. The evidence of God's universal existence is not universally well received on Earth, nor even immediately believed. And it reveals nothing of God's nature. In fact. it poses more questions than it answers. When a supernova explodes out in the galaxy but close enough to wipe out life on all three home-worlds, the big question is, Will God intervene or is this the sixth cataclysm:? Calculating God is SF on the grand scale. Calculating God is a 2001 Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Calculating Brilliance

Calculating Brilliance
Author: Gerardo Aldana
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2022-03-15
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0816542201

This book contextualizes the discovery of a Venus astronomical pattern by a female Mayan astronomer at Chich'en Itza and the discovery's later adaptation and application at Mayapan. Calculating Brilliance brings different intellectual threads together across time and space, from the Classic to the Postclassic, the colonial period to the twenty-first century to offer a new vision for understanding Mayan astronomy.

Calculated Values

Calculated Values
Author: William Deringer
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 439
Release: 2018-02-19
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0674971876

Modern political culture features a deep-seated faith in the power of numbers. But quantitative evidence has not always been revered, as William Deringer shows. After the 1688 Revolution, as Britons learned to fight by the numbers, their enthusiasm for figures arose not from efforts to find objective truths but from the turmoil of politics itself.

Peoples of a Spacious Land

Peoples of a Spacious Land
Author: Gloria L. Main
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2009-07-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780674040465

In this book about families--those of the various native peoples of southern New England and those of the English settlers and their descendants--Gloria Main compares the ways in which the two cultures went about solving common human problems. Using original sources--diaries, inventories, wills, court records--as well as the findings of demographers, ethnologists, and cultural anthropologists, she compares the family life of the English colonists with the lives of comparable groups remaining in England and of native Americans. She looks at social organization, patterns of work, gender relations, sexual practices, childbearing and childrearing, demographic changes, and ways of dealing with sickness and death. Main finds that the transplanted English family system produced descendants who were unusually healthy for the times and spectacularly fecund. Large families and steady population growth led to the creation of new towns and the enlargement of old ones with inevitably adverse consequences for the native Americans in the area. Main follows the two cultures into the eighteenth century and makes clear how the promise of perpetual accessions of new land eventually extended Puritan family culture across much of the North American continent.

What Is Your Race?

What Is Your Race?
Author: Kenneth Prewitt
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2016-08-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0691173567

A historical overview of the census race question—and a bold proposal for eliminating it America is preoccupied with race statistics—perhaps more than any other nation. Do these statistics illuminate social reality and produce coherent social policy, or cloud that reality and confuse social policy? Does America still have a color line? Who is on which side? Does it have a different "race" line—the nativity line—separating the native born from the foreign born? You might expect to answer these and similar questions with the government's "statistical races." Not likely, observes Kenneth Prewitt, who shows why the way we count by race is flawed. Prewitt calls for radical change. The nation needs to move beyond a race classification whose origins are in discredited eighteenth-century race-is-biology science, a classification that once defined Japanese and Chinese as separate races, but now combines them as a statistical "Asian race." One that once tried to divide the "white race" into "good whites" and "bad whites," and that today cannot distinguish descendants of Africans brought in chains four hundred years ago from children of Ethiopian parents who eagerly immigrated twenty years ago. Contrary to common sense, the classification says there are only two ethnicities in America—Hispanics and non-Hispanics. But if the old classification is cast aside, is there something better? What Is Your Race? clearly lays out the steps that can take the nation from where it is to where it needs to be. It's not an overnight task—particularly the explosive step of dropping today's race question from the census—but Prewitt argues persuasively that radical change is technically and politically achievable, and morally necessary.