Soon after her husband's tragic death, Robin Besher makes a startling discovery: He had recklessly blown through their entire savings on decrepit rentals in Four Points, the Appalachian town Robin grew up in. Forced to return after decades, Robin and her daughter, Haley, set out to renovate the properties as quickly as possible—before anyone exposes Robin's secret past as a teenage prostitute. Disaster strikes when Haley befriends a troubled teen mother, hurling Robin back into a past she'd worked so hard to escape. Robin must reshape her idea of home or risk repeating her greatest mistakes. Margo Orlando Littell, author of Each Vagabond by Name, tells an enthralling and nuanced story about family, womanhood, and coming to terms with a left-behind past.

The need for improved mathematics education at the high school and college levels has never been more apparent than in the 1990s. As early as the 1960s, I. M. Gel'fand and his colleagues in the USSR thought hard about this same question and developed a style for presenting basic mathematics in a clear and simple form that engaged the curiosity and intellectual interest of thousands of high school and college students. These same ideas, this same content, unchanged by over thirty years of experience and mathematical development, are available in the present books to any student who is willing to read, to be stimulated and to learn. "The Method of Coordinates" is a way of transferring geometric images into formulas, a method for describing pictures by numbers and letters denoting constants and variables. It is fundamental to the study of calculus and other mathematical topics. Teachers of mathematics will find here a fresh understanding of the subject and a valuable path to the training of students in mathematical concepts and skills.

With the aim of automatically reasoning with spatial aspects in a cognitive way, several qualitative models have been developed recently in the Qualitative Spatial Reasoning field. However, there is no model to reason with several spatial aspects in a uniform way. Moreover, most of these models simplify spatial objects to points. In this book we present a novel approach for integrating the qualitative concepts of orientation, distance, and cardinal directions, using points as well as extended objects as primitive of reasoning, based on Constraint Logic Programming. The resulting model has been applied to build a qualitative Navigation Simulator on the structured environment of the city of Castellon.

Geometric algebra is a powerful mathematical language with applications across a range of subjects in physics and engineering.

The Global Urban Competitiveness Report 2010 is an empirical study of the competitiveness of 500 cities around the world. This one-of-a-kind annual resource draws on a wealth of data sources, all of which are described and assessed. Using a sophisticated methodology and a team of 100 researchers from the Chinese Academy of Social Science, the book not only ranks these cities but also presents a wealth of information with regard to the strengths and weaknesses of each city in relation to each other. The book includes a full discussion of the factors that create urban competitiveness, what sorts or categories of cities are most competitive, and comments on the policies and initiatives that are adopted by the most competitive cities. Scholars and researchers in the areas of urban economics, planning, geography and regional economics will find the information invaluable as will local authorities, decision-makers, and economic planners in cities throughout the world.

The subject of information geometry blends several areas of statistics, computer science, physics, and mathematics. The subject evolved from the groundbreaking article published by legendary statistician C.R. Rao in 1945. His works led to the creation of Cramer-Rao bounds, Rao distance, and Rao-Blackawellization. Fisher-Rao metrics and Rao distances play a very important role in geodesics, econometric analysis to modern-day business analytics. The chapters of the book are written by experts in the field who have been promoting the field of information geometry and its applications. - Written by experts for users of information geometry - Basics to advanced readers are equally taken care - Origins and Clarity on Foundations

The Geometry of Musical Rhythm: What Makes a "Good" Rhythm Good? is the first book to provide a systematic and accessible computational geometric analysis of the musical rhythms of the world. It explains how the study of the mathematical properties of musical rhythm generates common mathematical problems that arise in a variety of seemingly disparate fields. For the music community, the book also introduces the distance approach to phylogenetic analysis and illustrates its application to the study of musical rhythm. Accessible to both academics and musicians, the text requires a minimal set of prerequisites. Emphasizing a visual geometric treatment of musical rhythm and its underlying structures, the author—an eminent computer scientist and music theory researcher—presents new symbolic geometric approaches and often compares them to existing methods. He shows how distance geometry and phylogenetic analysis can be used in comparative musicology, ethnomusicology, and evolutionary musicology research. The book also strengthens the bridge between these disciplines and mathematical music theory. Many concepts are illustrated with examples using a group of six distinguished rhythms that feature prominently in world music, including the clave son. Exploring the mathematical properties of good rhythms, this book offers an original computational geometric approach for analyzing musical rhythm and its underlying structures. With numerous figures to complement the explanations, it is suitable for a wide audience, from musicians, composers, and electronic music programmers to music theorists and psychologists to computer scientists and mathematicians. It can also be used in an undergraduate course on music technology, music and computers, or music and mathematics.