From one of the 20th century’s most profound philosophers and writers, comes a thought provoking essay that seeks to reconcile Marxism with existentialism. Exploring the complicated relationship the two philosophical schools of thought have with one another, Sartre supposes that the two are in fact compatible and complimentary towards one another, with poignant analysis and reasoning. An important work of modern philosophy, Search for a Method has a major influence on the current perceptions of existentialism and Marxism. “This is the most important philosophical work by Sartre to be translated since Being and Nothingness.”—James Collings, America

An infinite number of mathematical models can be created to describe naturally occurring physical systems. In addition there is a smaller, but large, number of criteria which can be used to measure the goodness of fit of a model to a physical process. Together, a selected criterion and a mathematical model define an objective function to be optimized.

The book is intended for graduate students and researchers in mathematics, computer science, and operational research. The book presents a new derivative-free optimization method/algorithm based on randomly generated trial points in specified domains and where the best ones are selected at each iteration by using a number of rules. This method is different from many other well established methods presented in the literature and proves to be competitive for solving many unconstrained optimization problems with different structures and complexities, with a relative large number of variables. Intensive numerical experiments with 140 unconstrained optimization problems, with up to 500 variables, have shown that this approach is efficient and robust. Structured into 4 chapters, Chapter 1 is introductory. Chapter 2 is dedicated to presenting a two level derivative-free random search method for unconstrained optimization. It is assumed that the minimizing function is continuous, lower bounded and its minimum value is known. Chapter 3 proves the convergence of the algorithm. In Chapter 4, the numerical performances of the algorithm are shown for solving 140 unconstrained optimization problems, out of which 16 are real applications. This shows that the optimization process has two phases: the reduction phase and the stalling one. Finally, the performances of the algorithm for solving a number of 30 large-scale unconstrained optimization problems up to 500 variables are presented. These numerical results show that this approach based on the two level random search method for unconstrained optimization is able to solve a large diversity of problems with different structures and complexities. There are a number of open problems which refer to the following aspects: the selection of the number of trial or the number of the local trial points, the selection of the bounds of the domains where the trial points and the local trial points are randomly generated and a criterion for initiating the line search.

In this instant New York Times Bestseller, Geoff Smart and Randy Street provide a simple, practical, and effective solution to what The Economist calls “the single biggest problem in business today”: unsuccessful hiring. The average hiring mistake costs a company $1.5 million or more a year and countless wasted hours. This statistic becomes even more startling when you consider that the typical hiring success rate of managers is only 50 percent. The silver lining is that “who” problems are easily preventable. Based on more than 1,300 hours of interviews with more than 20 billionaires and 300 CEOs, Who presents Smart and Street’s A Method for Hiring. Refined through the largest research study of its kind ever undertaken, the A Method stresses fundamental elements that anyone can implement–and it has a 90 percent success rate. Whether you’re a member of a board of directors looking for a new CEO, the owner of a small business searching for the right people to make your company grow, or a parent in need of a new babysitter, it’s all about Who. Inside you’ll learn how to • avoid common “voodoo hiring” methods • define the outcomes you seek • generate a flow of A Players to your team–by implementing the #1 tactic used by successful businesspeople • ask the right interview questions to dramatically improve your ability to quickly distinguish an A Player from a B or C candidate • attract the person you want to hire, by emphasizing the points the candidate cares about most In business, you are who you hire. In Who, Geoff Smart and Randy Street offer simple, easy-to-follow steps that will put the right people in place for optimal success.

Conjectures and Refutations is one of Karl Popper's most wide-ranging and popular works, notable not only for its acute insight into the way scientific knowledge grows, but also for applying those insights to politics and to history. It provides one of the clearest and most accessible statements of the fundamental idea that guided his work: not only our knowledge, but our aims and our standards, grow through an unending process of trial and error.

This textbook is an anthology of significant theoretical discussions of biography as a genre and as a literary-historical practice. Covering the 18th to the 21st centuries, the reader includes programmatic texts by authors such as Herder, Carlyle, Dilthey, Proust, Freud, Kracauer, Woolf and Bourdieu. Each text is accompanied by a commentary placing its contribution in critical context. Ideal for use in undergraduate seminars, this reader may also be of interest for academic researchers in the areas of literary studies and history aiming to get an overview of historical questions in biographical theory. This revised and updated English language edition also includes new translations of texts by J. G. Herder and Stefan Zweig, as well as an introductory discussion on the possibility of a ‘theory of biography’. Note: Due to copyright reasons, the chapter "Sade, Fourier, Loyola [Extract] (1971)" (pp. 175–177) by Roland Barthes could not be included in the ebook.

In this book we formulate and prove the variational extremum principle for viscous incompressible and compressible fluid, from which principle follows that the Naviet-Stokes equations represent the extremum conditions of a certain functional. We describe the method of seeking solution for these equations, which consists in moving along the gradient to this functional extremum. We formulate the conditions of reaching this extremum, which are at the same time necessary and sufficient conditions of this functional global extremum existence.