From one of the most influential scientists of our time, a dazzling exploration of the hidden laws that govern the life cycle of everything from plants and animals to the cities we live in.
Visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term “complexity” can be misleading, however, because what makes West’s discoveries so beautiful is that he has found an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena of living systems, including our bodies, our cities and our businesses.
Fascinated by aging and mortality, West applied the rigor of a physicist to the biological question of why we live as long as we do and no longer. The result was astonishing, and changed science: West found that despite the riotous diversity in mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other. If you know the size of a mammal, you can use scaling laws to learn everything from how much food it eats per day, what its heart-rate is, how long it will take to mature, its lifespan, and so on. Furthermore, the efficiency of the mammal’s circulatory systems scales up precisely based on weight: if you compare a mouse, a human and an elephant on a logarithmic graph, you find with every doubling of average weight, a species gets 25% more efficient—and lives 25% longer. Fundamentally, he has proven, the issue has to do with the fractal geometry of the networks that supply energy and remove waste from the organism’s body.
West’s work has been game-changing for biologists, but then he made the even bolder move of exploring his work’s applicability. Cities, too, are constellations of networks and laws of scalability relate with eerie precision to them. Recently, West has applied his revolutionary work to the business world. This investigation has led to powerful insights into why some companies thrive while others fail. The implications of these discoveries are far-reaching, and are just beginning to be explored. Scale is a thrilling scientific adventure story about the elemental natural laws that bind us together in simple but profound ways. Through the brilliant mind of Geoffrey West, we can envision how cities, companies and biological life alike are dancing to the same simple, powerful tune.

★ 北欧版《霍乱时期的爱情》
★ 作者乔纳斯‧嘉德尔因为此书获选为年度风云人物，由瑞典王储亲自颁奖
★ 同名影集击败《冰与火之歌》荣膺欧洲电视大奖，豆瓣评分9.0分
★ 同名影集首播创下120万人收视，瑞典每8个人中就有1个人观看并为之落泪
头脑可以接受劝告，心却不能，太容易告别的年代，他们爱的像置身事外
人生，我唯一的人生，我唯一拥有的人生
我唯一能得到的人生，也是我唯一想过的人生
一个男人失去挚爱并永远无望被理解的故事
我这一生，只是想要爱一个愿意爱我的人。
只是想在一瞬间，自由地活着。
拉斯穆斯高中一毕业便离开封闭的家乡，前往斯德哥尔摩追求属于他的人生，年轻俊美的他很快就融入五光十色的夜生活。
班杰明在虔诚的宗教家庭长大，因传教认识了保罗，保罗却对他说：“你认识真正的自己吗？”」这句话有如针尖刺入班杰明的心，而他的回应彷彿告解一般：「我这辈子，只是想爱一个愿意爱我的人。」
那一晚，在保罗家的圣诞派对上，班杰明遇见了拉斯穆斯，整座城市开始下起雪来……
八○年代的斯德哥尔摩，一个刻意被遗忘的时代，一份永志不渝的爱情，一场自由与选择的反覆辩证……

<p>At the heart of this panoramic， multidimensional narrative is the compelling struggle of a young woman to lift her body and soul out of the gutter. Faber leads us back to 1870s London， where Sugar， a nineteen-year-old whore in the brothel of the terrifying Mrs. Castaway， yearns for escape to a better life. Her ascent through the strata of Victorian society offers us intimacy with a host of lovable， maddening， unforgettable characters. They begin with William Rackham， an egotistical perfume magnate whose ambition is fueled by his lust for Sugar， and whose patronage brings her into proximity to his extended family and milieu: his unhinged， childlike wife， Agnes， who manages to overcome her chronic hysteria to make her appearances d</p>

Goodbye to Berlin is a short novel by Christopher Isherwood. It is often published together with The Last of Mr. Norris in a collection called The Berlin Stories.
The novel, a semiautobiographical account of Isherwood's time in 1930s Berlin, describes pre-Nazi Germany and the people he met.
Moving to Germany to work on his novel, Isherwood soon becomes involved with many different German citizens: The caring landlady, Frau. Shroeder; the "divinely decadent" Sally Bowles, a young English woman who sings in the local Cabaret; Natalia Laundauer, the rich, Jewish heiress of a prosperous family business; Peter and Otto, a couple struggling to accept their relationship in light of the rise of the Nazis.
The book, first published in 1939, ironically highlights the groups of people who would be most at risk from Nazi intimidation.

A self-contained and coherent account of probabilistic techniques, covering: distance measures, kernel rules, nearest neighbour rules, Vapnik-Chervonenkis theory, parametric classification, and feature extraction. Each chapter concludes with problems and exercises to further the readers understanding. Both research workers and graduate students will benefit from this wide-ranging and up-to-date account of a fast- moving field.

In a panoramic and pioneering reappraisal, Pieter Judson shows why the Habsburg Empire mattered so much, for so long, to millions of Central Europeans. Across divides of language, religion, region, and history, ordinary women and men felt a common attachment to their empire, while bureaucrats, soldiers, politicians, and academics devised inventive solutions to the challenges of governing Europe s second largest state. In the decades before and after its dissolution, some observers belittled the Habsburg Empire as a dysfunctional patchwork of hostile ethnic groups and an anachronistic imperial relic. Judson examines their motives and explains just how wrong these rearguard critics were.
Rejecting fragmented histories of nations in the making, this bold revision surveys the shared institutions that bridged difference and distance to bring stability and meaning to the far-flung empire. By supporting new schools, law courts, and railroads, along with scientific and artistic advances, the Habsburg monarchs sought to anchor their authority in the cultures and economies of Central Europe. A rising standard of living throughout the empire deepened the legitimacy of Habsburg rule, as citizens learned to use the empire s administrative machinery to their local advantage. Nationalists developed distinctive ideas about cultural difference in the context of imperial institutions, yet all of them claimed the Habsburg state as their empire.
The empire s creative solutions to governing its many lands and peoples as well as the intractable problems it could not solve left an enduring imprint on its successor states in Central Europe. Its lessons remain no less important today."

There is a need for integrated thinking about causality, probability and mechanisms in scientific methodology. Causality and probability are long-established central concepts in the sciences, with a corresponding philosophical literature examining their problems. On the other hand, the philosophical literature examining mechanisms is not long-established, and there is no clear idea of how mechanisms relate to causality and probability. But we need some idea if we are to understand causal inference in the sciences: a panoply of disciplines, ranging from epidemiology to biology, from econometrics to physics, routinely make use of probability, statistics, theory and mechanisms to infer causal relationships. These disciplines have developed very different methods, where causality and probability often seem to have different understandings, and where the mechanisms involved often look very different. This variegated situation raises the question of whether the different sciences are really using different concepts, or whether progress in understanding the tools of causal inference in some sciences can lead to progress in other sciences. The book tackles these questions as well as others concerning the use of causality in the sciences.