St. Louis Cardinals manager Mike Matheny's New York Times bestselling manifesto about what parents, coaches, and athletes get wrong about sports; what we can do better; and how sports can teach eight keys to success in sports and life. Mike Matheny was just forty-one, without professional managerial experience and looking for a next step after a successful career as a Major League catcher, when he succeeded the legendary Tony La Russa as manager of the St. Louis Cardinals in 2012. While Matheny has enjoyed immediate success, leading the Cards to the postseason four times in his first four years−a Major League record−people have noticed something else about his life, something not measured in day-to-day results. Instead, it’s based on a frankly worded letter he wrote to the parents of a Little League team he coached, a cry for change that became an Internet sensation and eventually a “manifesto.” The tough-love philosophy Matheny expressed in the letter contained his throwback beliefs that authority should be respected, discipline and hard work rewarded, spiritual faith cultivated, family made a priority, and humility considered a virtue. In The Matheny Manifesto, he builds on his original letter by first diagnosing the problem at the heart of youth sports−it starts with parents and coaches−and then by offering a hopeful path forward. Along the way, he uses stories from his small-town childhood as well as his career as a player, coach, and manager to explore eight keys to success: leadership, confidence, teamwork, faith, class, character, toughness, and humility. From “The Coach Is Always Right, Even When He’s Wrong” to “Let Your Catcher Call the Game,” Matheny’s old-school advice might not always be popular or politically correct, but it works. His entertaining and deeply inspirational book will not only resonate with parents, coaches, and athletes, it will also be a powerful reminder, from one of the most successful new managers in the game, of what sports can teach us all about winning on the field and in life.

Veteran blackjack player and expert card counter John Bukofsky offers players a complete guide to all aspects of blackjack, including card counting at professional level. Easy-to-understand lessons outline the basics of game play and strategy and give advice on how to gain an advantage over the house. Bukofsky's step-by-step instructions and detailed illustrations also provide helpful information for novices and pros alike on betting and bankroll techniques; casino countermeasures against card counting; and camouflage techniques for counting cards.

A timely book containing foundations and current research directions on emotion recognition by facial expression, voice, gesture and biopotential signals This book provides a comprehensive examination of the research methodology of different modalities of emotion recognition. Key topics of discussion include facial expression, voice and biopotential signal-based emotion recognition. Special emphasis is given to feature selection, feature reduction, classifier design and multi-modal fusion to improve performance of emotion-classifiers. Written by several experts, the book includes several tools and techniques, including dynamic Bayesian networks, neural nets, hidden Markov model, rough sets, type-2 fuzzy sets, support vector machines and their applications in emotion recognition by different modalities. The book ends with a discussion on emotion recognition in automotive fields to determine stress and anger of the drivers, responsible for degradation of their performance and driving-ability. There is an increasing demand of emotion recognition in diverse fields, including psycho-therapy, bio-medicine and security in government, public and private agencies. The importance of emotion recognition has been given priority by industries including Hewlett Packard in the design and development of the next generation human-computer interface (HCI) systems. Emotion Recognition: A Pattern Analysis Approach would be of great interest to researchers, graduate students and practitioners, as the book Offers both foundations and advances on emotion recognition in a single volume Provides a thorough and insightful introduction to the subject by utilizing computational tools of diverse domains Inspires young researchers to prepare themselves for their own research Demonstrates direction of future research through new technologies, such as Microsoft Kinect, EEG systems etc.