About this product: Daniel M. Fox gives an incisive assessment of the critical collaboration between researchers and public officials that has recently emerged to evaluate the effectiveness and comparative effectiveness of health services. Drawing on research as well as his first-hand experience in policymaking, Fox's broad-ranging analysis describes how politics, public finance and management, and advances in research methods made this convergence of science and governance possible. The book then widens into a sweeping history of central issues in research on health services and health governance during the past century. Returning to the past decade, Fox looks closely at how policy informed by research has been made and implemented in public programs that cover pharmaceutical drugs in most American states. This case study illuminates how politics has informed the questions, methods, and reception of research on health services, and also sheds new light on how research has informed politics and public management. Looking toward the future, Fox describes the promise, as well as the fragility, of the convergence of science and governance, making his book essential reading for those struggling to revise health care in the United States over the next several years.
Virtual worlds are persistent online computer-generated environments where people can interact, whether for work or play, in a manner comparable to the real world. The most popular current example is World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online game with eleven million subscribers. However, other virtual worlds, notably Second Life, are not games at all but internet-based collaboration contexts in which people can create virtual objects, simulated architecture, and working groups.
This book brings together an international team of highly accomplished authors to examine the phenomena of virtual worlds, using a range of theories and methodologies to discover the principles that are making virtual worlds increasingly popular, and which are establishing them as a major sector of human-centred computing.
About this product: A new look at weak-convergence methods in metric spaces-from a master of probability theory In this new edition, Patrick Billingsley updates his classic work Convergence of Probability Measures to reflect developments of the past thirty years. Widely known for his straightforward approach and reader-friendly style, Dr. Billingsley presents a clear, precise, up-to-date account of probability limit theory in metric spaces. He incorporates many examples and applications that illustrate the power and utility of this theory in a range of disciplines-from analysis and number theory to statistics, engineering, economics, and population biology. With an emphasis on the simplicity of the mathematics and smooth transitions between topics, the Second Edition boasts major revisions of the sections on dependent random variables as well as new sections on relative measure, on lacunary trigonometric series, and on the Poisson-Dirichlet distribution as a description of the long cycles in permutations and the large divisors of integers. Assuming only standard measure-theoretic probability and metric-space topology, Convergence of Probability Measures provides statisticians and mathematicians with basic tools of probability theory as well as a springboard to the "industrial-strength" literature available today.
About this product: There's trouble on the horizon for ILS when a rival challenges them head on, and their best weapons, Dar and Kerry, are distracted by life instead of focusing on the business. Add to that an old flame, and an aggressive entreprenaur throwing down the gauntlet and Dar at least is ready to throw in the towel. Is Kerry ready to follow suit, or will she decide to step out from behind Dar's shadow and step up to the challenges they both face?
About this product: As a result of the global convergence of financial reporting standards, U.S. GAAP is changing profoundly. U.S. GAAP is also being abandoned by many public and private companies, and will eventually be replaced by a higher-quality set of global standards. The Convergence Guidebook for Corporate Financial Reporting provides the timely, practical guidance that CFOs, controllers, and other financial managers need in order to prepare for the impact of Convergence on their companies, departments, and careers. Guidebook readers will also learn why they must begin preparing for "the next big challenge in corporate financial reporting" now.
About this product: Reinventing Cinema examines film culture at the turn of this century, at the precise moment when digital media are altering our historical relationship with the movies. Spanning multiple disciplines, Chuck Tryon addresses the interaction between production, distribution, and reception of films, television, and other new and emerging media. Through close readings of trade publications, DVD extras, public lectures by new media leaders, movie blogs, and YouTube videos, Tryon navigates the shift to digital cinema and examines how it is altering film and popular culture.
About this product: Imagine direct communication links between the human brain and machines, or tailored materials capable of adapting by themselves to changing environmental conditions, or computer chips and environmental sensors embedded into everyday clothing, or medical technologies that eliminate currently untreatable conditions such as blindness and paralysis. Now imagine all of these developments occurring at the same time. The stuff of science fiction?
Not So. These are actually the reasonable predictions of scientists attempting to forecast a few decades into the future based on the rapid pace of innovation.
Author Stanley Schmidt-a physicist, a writer, and the editor of Analog: Science Fiction and Fact-explores these and many more amazing yet probable scenarios in this fascinating guide to the near future. He shows how past convergences have led to today's world, then considers tomorrow's main currents in biotechnology, cognitive science, information technology, and nanotechnology. Looking even further downstream he foresees both exciting and potentially dangerous developments:
·Lonnger, healthier lives ·Cheap, generally available food, energy, and technology ·Reduced pollution and environmental stress ·Economic disruption during transitional periods ·Excessive power in too few hands ·Increased vulnerability from overdependence on technology.
Schmidt notes that even a routine technology such as the CAT scan is the result of three wholly separate innovations started many decades ago which recently converged: the X-ray, the computer, and advances in medicine. On a more ominous note, he also observes that the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center was made possible by the malicious convergence of two separate trends in modern engineering and technology: the concentration of people in high rises within cities and the success of the passenger airline industry.
The message is clear: the choices we make now will converge to create a near and distant future that will be almost unbelievably wonderful or unimaginably catastrophic, or both. This knowledgeable, fascinating glimpse into the future is a must read for everyone interested in technology, upcoming innovations in business, science fiction, and the future.
About this product: This book provides an account of weak convergence theory and empirical processes and their applications to a wide variety of applications in statistics. The first part of the book presents a thorough account of stocastic convergence in its various forms. Part 2 brings together the theory of empirical processes in a form accessible to statisticians and probabilists. In Part 3, the authors cover a range of topics which demonstrate the applicability of the theory to important questions such as: limit theorems in asymptotic statistics; measures of goodness of fit; the bootstrap; and semiparametric estimation. Most of the sections conclude with "problems and complements". Some of these are exercises to help the reader's understanding of the material whereas others are intended to supplement the text.
About this product: From a cuneiform tablet to a Chicago prison, from the depths of the cosmos to the text on our T-shirts, art historian and journalist Lawrence Weschler finds strange connections wherever he looks. The farther one travels (through geography, through art, through science, through time), the more everything seems to converge — at least, it does through Weschler's giddy, brilliant eyes. Weschler combines his keen insights into art (both contemporary and Renaissance), his years of experience as a chronicler of the fall of Communism, and his triumphs and failures as the father of a teenage girl into a series of essays that are sure to illuminate, educate, and astound.
About this product: God has made protons which are positive charges in the center of all atoms, and atoms in the center of all things, humans, feathers, planets, bunnies, etc., so that your very design is to think, speak and act positively. It was through the Parent Teacher Association I learned the importance of affirming my family. Let us teach it in the church. Everything we say is recorded. If we had the instrument to retrieve it, it would show us when we cursed or blessed. The deeper we go in chemistry the more power we have, TNT vs. Atomic bomb. Also the deeper we go with God the more power we have. Prophecy is speaking the words and mind of God which lies beyond our five senses and having to do with seeing the unseen and hearing the unheard. Quantum physics enhances all this.
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