In this chilling short-story by a master of the craft, Kurt Vonnegut creates a fictional world of the future where life and death are no longer matters of individual choice or destiny. The title refers to the famous quote from Hamlet, "To be or not to be...." with "0" being pronounced as "naught." It also refers to the eternal dilemma of life and death that face every human being at some point in their lives.Written in 1962 it is set in some unspecified time in the future, when earth has become a Utopia. The population is under control, there is no poverty, suffering or even natural death. Man has conquered all. It's common for humans to live for two centuries or more. Death happens only when someone requests it. 2BR02B in the story is the telephone number that volunteers must call when they are ready for assisted suicide. It belongs to the Federal Bureau of Termination which decides that for every child born, one person must volunteer to die. However, all is not perfect in this paradise - human beings still retain a spark of humanity and yearn for freedom.When the story opens, Edward Wehling, a youngish father-to-be is waiting for his wife to give birth. What follows is both spine-chilling and eerie. It makes you introspect about the future of humankind, whether the earth can sustain itself at the pace at which population is growing and about the ethics of concepts like assisted suicide. The reader pauses to wonder whether greater common good can replace love and the individual.2BR02B has memorable characters like the nameless two-hundred-year-old painter, the genial Dr Hitz who created the first population control gas-chamber and Leora Duncan a gas-chamber hostess.Apart from these, the story explores Vonnegut's favorite anti-establishment ideas, where the government is seen as the enemy of personal freedom. Art in the future, according to Vonnegut, will become dull, commercialized and prescribed by the state. Creativity and individual expression will die out along with other freedoms. Technology and scientific advancements will render simple human concepts of compassion and love redundant.Though the story is a trifle dated (it refers to the year 2000 as the year in which population control systems were first imposed, and the earth had run out of food and water) it is an interesting one that appeals to readers of all ages. In this chilling short-story by a master of the craft, Kurt Vonnegut creates a fictional world of the future where life and death are no longer matters of individual choice or destiny. The title refers to the famous quote from Hamlet, "To be or not to be...." with "0" being pronounced as "naught." It also refers to the eternal dilemma of life and death that face every human being at some point in their lives.Written in 1962 it is set in some unspecified time in the future, when earth has become a Utopia. The population is under control, there is no poverty, suffering or even natural death. Man has conquered all. It's common for humans to live for two centuries or more. Death happens only when someone requests it. 2BR02B in the story is the telephone number that volunteers must call when they are ready for assisted suicide. It belongs to the Federal Bureau of Termination which decides that for every child born, one person must volunteer to die. However, all is not perfect in this paradise - human beings still retain a spark of humanity and yearn for freedom.When the story opens, Edward Wehling, a youngish father-to-be is waiting for his wife to give birth. What follows is both spine-chilling and eerie. It makes you introspect about the future of humankind, whether the earth can sustain itself at the pace at which population is growing and about the ethics of concepts like assisted suicide. The reader pauses to wonder whether greater common good can replace love and the individual.

The essential introduction to the principles and applications of feedback systems—now fully revised and expanded This textbook covers the mathematics needed to model, analyze, and design feedback systems. Now more user-friendly than ever, this revised and expanded edition of Feedback Systems is a one-volume resource for students and researchers in mathematics and engineering. It has applications across a range of disciplines that utilize feedback in physical, biological, information, and economic systems. Karl Åström and Richard Murray use techniques from physics, computer science, and operations research to introduce control-oriented modeling. They begin with state space tools for analysis and design, including stability of solutions, Lyapunov functions, reachability, state feedback observability, and estimators. The matrix exponential plays a central role in the analysis of linear control systems, allowing a concise development of many of the key concepts for this class of models. Åström and Murray then develop and explain tools in the frequency domain, including transfer functions, Nyquist analysis, PID control, frequency domain design, and robustness. Features a new chapter on design principles and tools, illustrating the types of problems that can be solved using feedback Includes a new chapter on fundamental limits and new material on the Routh-Hurwitz criterion and root locus plots Provides exercises at the end of every chapter Comes with an electronic solutions manual An ideal textbook for undergraduate and graduate students Indispensable for researchers seeking a self-contained resource on control theory

An authorised reissue of the long out of print classic textbook, Advanced Calculus by the late Dr Lynn Loomis and Dr Shlomo Sternberg both of Harvard University has been a revered but hard to find textbook for the advanced calculus course for decades.This book is based on an honors course in advanced calculus that the authors gave in the 1960's. The foundational material, presented in the unstarred sections of Chapters 1 through 11, was normally covered, but different applications of this basic material were stressed from year to year, and the book therefore contains more material than was covered in any one year. It can accordingly be used (with omissions) as a text for a year's course in advanced calculus, or as a text for a three-semester introduction to analysis.The prerequisites are a good grounding in the calculus of one variable from a mathematically rigorous point of view, together with some acquaintance with linear algebra. The reader should be familiar with limit and continuity type arguments and have a certain amount of mathematical sophistication. As possible introductory texts, we mention Differential and Integral Calculus by R Courant, Calculus by T Apostol, Calculus by M Spivak, and Pure Mathematics by G Hardy. The reader should also have some experience with partial derivatives.In overall plan the book divides roughly into a first half which develops the calculus (principally the differential calculus) in the setting of normed vector spaces, and a second half which deals with the calculus of differentiable manifolds.

The 10th-anniversary edition of the New York Times business bestseller-now updated with "Answers to Ten Questions People Ask" We attempt or avoid difficult conversations every day-whether dealing with an underperforming employee, disagreeing with a spouse, or negotiating with a client. From the Harvard Negotiation Project, the organization that brought you Getting to Yes, Difficult Conversations provides a step-by-step approach to having those tough conversations with less stress and more success. you'll learn how to: · Decipher the underlying structure of every difficult conversation · Start a conversation without defensiveness · Listen for the meaning of what is not said · Stay balanced in the face of attacks and accusations · Move from emotion to productive problem solving

The high-level language of R is recognized as one of the mostpowerful and flexible statistical software environments, and israpidly becoming the standard setting for quantitative analysis,statistics and graphics. R provides free access to unrivalledcoverage and cutting-edge applications, enabling the user to applynumerous statistical methods ranging from simple regression to timeseries or multivariate analysis. Building on the success of the author’s bestsellingStatistics: An Introduction using R, The R Book ispacked with worked examples, providing an all inclusive guide to R,ideal for novice and more accomplished users alike. The bookassumes no background in statistics or computing and introduces theadvantages of the R environment, detailing its applications in awide range of disciplines. Provides the first comprehensive reference manual for the Rlanguage, including practical guidance and full coverage of thegraphics facilities. Introduces all the statistical models covered by R, beginningwith simple classical tests such as chi-square and t-test. Proceeds to examine more advance methods, from regression andanalysis of variance, through to generalized linear models,generalized mixed models, time series, spatial statistics,multivariate statistics and much more. The R Book is aimed at undergraduates, postgraduates andprofessionals in science, engineering and medicine. It is alsoideal for students and professionals in statistics, economics,geography and the social sciences.

hundreds of additions, deletions, accusations, conditions, warnings, advice and homely philosophy. The document was, Lou reflected, a fifty-year diary, all jammed onto two sheets — a garbled, illegible log of day after day of strife. This day, Lou would be disinherited for the eleventh time, and it would take him perhaps six months of impeccable behavior to regain the promise of a share in the estate. To say nothing of the daybed in the living room for Em and himself...FROM THE BOOK.

“Relentlessly fun to read.”—Dave Eggers • A collection of fourteen previously unpublished short stories from one of the most original writers in all of American fiction In this series of perfectly rendered vignettes, written just as he was starting to find his comic voice, Kurt Vonnegut paints a warm, wise, and funny portrait of life in post–World War II America—a world where squabbling couples, high school geniuses, misfit office workers, and small-town lotharios struggle to adapt to changing technology, moral ambiguity, and unprecedented affluence. Here are tales both cautionary and hopeful, each brimming with Vonnegut’s trademark humor and profound humanism. A family learns the downside of confiding their deepest secrets into a magical invention. A man finds himself in a Kafkaesque world of trouble after he runs afoul of the shady underworld boss who calls the shots in an upstate New York town. A quack psychiatrist turned “murder counselor” concocts a novel new outlet for his paranoid patients. While these stories reflect the anxieties of the postwar era that Vonnegut was so adept at capturing—and provide insight into the development of his early style—collectively, they have a timeless quality that makes them just as relevant today as when they were written. It’s impossible to imagine any of these pieces flowing from the pen of another writer; each in its own way is unmistakably, quintessentially Vonnegut. Featuring a foreword by author and longtime Vonnegut confidant Sidney Offit and illustrated with Vonnegut’s characteristically insouciant line drawings, Look at the Birdie is an unexpected gift for readers who thought his unique voice had been stilled forever—and serves as a terrific introduction to his short fiction for anyone who has yet to experience his genius. Includes these never-before-published stories: “Confido” “FUBAR” “Shout About It from the Housetops” “Ed Luby’s Key Club” “A Song for Selma” “Hall of Mirrors” “The Nice Little People” “Hello, Red” “Little Drops of Water” “The Petrified Ants” “The Honor of a Newsboy” “Look at the Birdie” “King and Queen of the Universe” “The Good Explainer” “[Look at the Birdie] brings us the late writer’s young voice as he skewers—sometimes gently, always lethally—post World War II America.”—The Boston Globe

Using 33 different words that all begin with the letter B, the Berenstains create a funny tale that snowballs to an exciting climax.

2 B R 0 2 B' is a short story by renowned science fiction writer Kurt Vonnegut. The title is pronounced as "2 B R naught 2 B", referencing to the famous phrase "to be, or not to be" from William Shakespeare's 'Hamlet'. In this story, the title refers to the telephone number one dials to schedule an assisted suicide with the Federal Bureau of Termination. The setting is a society in which aging has been cured, individuals have indefinite lifespans, and population control is used to limit the population of the United States to forty million. This is maintained through a combination of infanticide and government-assisted suicide. In short, in order for someone to be born, someone must first volunteer to die. As a result, births are few and far between, and deaths occur primarily by accident.

From the acclaimed author of Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, and Breakfast of Champions comes a compilation of twenty-three never-before-collected short stories. These vignettes of American life draw on Kurt Vonnegut's World War 2 experiences and the resolute optimism of the country after the war. Together, they present a poignant and humorous portrayal of an America peopled with overzealous high school band directors and their students, rebellious housewives, and boasting salesmen, soldiers misplaced during the war and people lost in their own gadget-filled homes. In an era before television, Kurt Vonnegut found a ready and willing audience in the readers of such magazines as Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Argosy, and Redbook. These rare, rediscovered tales gives us a glimpse into a more innocent America—and into the developing genius of one of the greatest writers of our time.