An examination of metaphor in poetry as a microcosm of the human imagination—a way to understand the mechanisms of creativity.
In The Spider's Thread, Keith Holyoak looks at metaphor as a microcosm of the creative imagination. Holyoak, a psychologist and poet, draws on the perspectives of thinkers from the humanities—poets, philosophers, and critics—and from the sciences—psychologists, neuroscientists, linguists, and computer scientists. He begins each chapter with a poem—by poets including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sylvia Plath, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Theodore Roethke, Du Fu, William Butler Yeats, and Pablo Neruda—and then widens the discussion to broader notions of metaphor and mind.
Holyoak uses Whitman's poem “A Noiseless Patient Spider” to illustrate the process of interpreting a poem, and explains the relevance of two psychological mechanisms, analogy and conceptual combination, to metaphor. He outlines ideas first sketched by Coleridge—who called poetry “the best words in their best order”—and links them to modern research on the interplay between cognition and emotion, controlled and associative thinking, memory and creativity. Building on Emily Dickinson's declaration “the brain is wider than the sky,” Holyoak suggests that the control and default networks in the brain may combine to support creativity. He also considers, among other things, the interplay of sound and meaning in poetry; symbolism in the work of Yeats, Jung, and others; indirect communication in poems; the mixture of active and passive processes in creativity; and whether artificial intelligence could ever achieve poetic authenticity. Guided by Holyoak, we can begin to trace the outlines of creativity through the mechanisms of metaphor.

What makes us happy? What makes us sad? How do we come to feel a sense of enthusiasm? What fills us with lust, anger, fear, or tenderness? Traditional behavioral and cognitive neuroscience have yet to provide satisfactory answers. The Archaeology of Mind presents an affective neuroscience approach--which takes into consideration basic mental processes, brain functions, and emotional behaviors that all mammals share--to locate the neural mechanisms of emotional expression. It reveals--for the first time--the deep neural sources of our values and basic emotional feelings. This book elaborates on the seven emotional systems that explain how we live and behave. These systems originate in deep areas of the brain that are remarkably similar across all mammalian species. When they are disrupted, we find the origins of emotional disorders: - SEEKING: how the brain generates a euphoric and expectant response - FEAR: how the brain responds to the threat of physical danger and death - RAGE: sources of irritation and fury in the brain - LUST: how sexual desire and attachments are elaborated in the brain - CARE: sources of maternal nurturance - GRIEF: sources of non-sexual attachments - PLAY: how the brain generates joyous, rough-and-tumble interactions - SELF: a hypothesis explaining how affects might be elaborated in the brain The book offers an evidence-based evolutionary taxonomy of emotions and affects and, as such, a brand-new clinical paradigm for treating psychiatric disorders in clinical practice.

When it was first published in 1947, "The Age of Anxiety" - W. H. Auden's last, longest, and most ambitious book-length poem - immediately struck a powerful chord, capturing the imagination of the cultural moment that it diagnosed and named. Beginning as a conversation among four strangers in a barroom on New York's Third Avenue, Auden's analysis of Western culture during the Second World War won the Pulitzer Prize and inspired a symphony by Leonard Bernstein as well as a ballet by Jerome Robbins. Yet reviews of the poem were sharply divided, and today, despite its continuing fame, it is unjustly neglected by readers. This volume - the first annotated, critical edition of the poem - introduces this important work to a new generation of readers by putting it in historical and biographical context and elucidating its difficulties. Alan Jacobs's introduction and thorough annotations help today's readers understand and appreciate the full richness of a poem that contains some of Auden's most powerful and beautiful verse, and that still deserves a central place in the canon of twentieth-century poetry.

"Linear and Nonlinear Programming" is considered a classic textbook in Optimization. While it is a classic, it also reflects modern theoretical insights. These insights provide structure to what might otherwise be simply a collection of techniques and results, and this is valuable both as a means for learning existing material and for developing new results. One major insight of this type is the connection between the purely analytical character of an optimization problem, expressed perhaps by properties of the necessary conditions, and the behavior of algorithms used to solve a problem. This was a major theme of the first edition of this book and the second edition expands and further illustrates this relationship.</P>
"Linear and Nonlinear Programming" covers the central concepts of practical optimization techniques. It is designed for either self-study by professionals or classroom work at the undergraduate or graduate level for technical students. Like the field of optimization itself, which involves many classical disciplines, the book should be useful to system analysts, operations researchers, numerical analysts, management scientists, and other specialists from the host of disciplines from which practical optimization applications are drawn. </P>

From cell phones to Web portals, advances in information and communications technology have thrust society into an information age that is far-reaching, fast-moving, increasingly complex, and yet essential to modern life. Now, renowned scholar and author David Luenberger has produced Information Science, a text that distills and explains the most important concepts and insights at the core of this ongoing revolution. The book represents the material used in a widely acclaimed course offered at Stanford University. Drawing concepts from each of the constituent subfields that collectively comprise information science, Luenberger builds his book around the five "E's" of information: Entropy, Economics, Encryption, Extraction, and Emission. Each area directly impacts modern information products, services, and technology--everything from word processors to digital cash, database systems to decision making, marketing strategy to spread spectrum communication. To study these principles is to learn how English text, music, and pictures can be compressed, how it is possible to construct a digital signature that cannot simply be copied, how beautiful photographs can be sent from distant planets with a tiny battery, how communication networks expand, and how producers of information products can make a profit under difficult market conditions. The book contains vivid examples, illustrations, exercises, and points of historic interest, all of which bring to life the analytic methods presented. It presents a unified approach to the field of information science. It emphasizes basic principles, and includes a wide range of examples and applications. It helps students develop important new skills, and suggests exercises with solutions in an instructor's manual.

Acclaimed for its clear, friendly style, excellent illustrations, leading author team, and compelling theme of exploration, Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain, 4e takes a fresh, contemporary approach to the study of neuroscience, emphasizing the biological basis of behavior. The authors' passion for the dynamic field of neuroscience is evident on every page, engaging students and helping them master the material. In just a few years, the field of neuroscience has been transformed by exciting new technologies and an explosion of knowledge about the brain. The human genome has been sequenced, sophisticated new methods have been developed for genetic engineering, and new methods have been introduced to enable visualization and stimulation of specific types of nerve cells and connections in the brain. The new Fourth Edition has been fully updated to reflect these and other rapid advances in the field, while honoring its commitment to be student-friendly with striking new illustrations, additional animations, and an unparalleled array of online resources.

For more than seven centuries most of the Near East was part of the Roman empire. Yet no work exists which explores the means by which an ancient power originating in the western Mediterranean could control such a vast and distant region. What was the impact of the army presence on the population of the provinces? How did Rome respond to the challenge posed by the desert and its nomadic population? Isaac here offers answers to these questions in the first comprehensive treatment of the Roman military presence in the Near East. Using both well-known and neglected sources, he reassesses the means by which Rome achieved and maintained its control over the region. His study, now revised and updated to reflect recent research findings, casts new light on an important issue which has far-reaching implications for the understanding of ancient and modern imperialism.

Product Description
The Art of Agile Development contains practical guidance for anyone considering or applying agile development for building valuable software. Plenty of books describe what agile development is or why it helps software projects succeed, but very few combine information for developers, managers, testers, and customers into a single package that they can apply directly.
This book provides no-nonsense advice on agile planning, development, delivery, and management taken from the authors' many years of experience with Extreme Programming (XP). You get a gestalt view of the agile development process, including comprehensive guidance for non-technical readers and hands-on technical practices for developers and testers.
The Art of Agile Development gives you clear answers to questions such as:
How can we adopt agile development?
Do we really need to pair program?
What metrics should we report?
What if I can't get my customer to participate?
How much documentation should we write?
When do we design and architect?
As a non-developer, how should I work with my agile team?
Where is my product roadmap?
How does QA fit in?
The book teaches you how to adopt XP practices, describes each practice in detail, then discusses principles that will allow you to modify XP and create your own agile method. In particular, this book tackles the difficult aspects of agile development: the need for cooperation and trust among team members.
Whether you're currently part of an agile team, working with an agile team, or interested in agile development, this book provides the practical tips you need to start practicing agile development. As your experience grows, the book will grow with you, providing exercises and information that will teach you first to understand the rules of agile development, break them, and ultimately abandon rules altogether as you master the art of agile development.
"Jim Shore and Shane Warden expertly explain the practices and benefits of Extreme Programming. They offer advice from their real-world experiences in leading teams. They answer questions about the practices and show contraindications - ways that a practice may be mis-applied. They offer alternatives you can try if there are impediments to applying a practice, such as the lack of an on-site customer.
--Ken Pugh, Author of Jolt Award Winner, Prefactoring
"I will leave a copy of this book with every team I visit."
--Brian Marick, Exampler Consulting

This title is a full-colour, accessible synthesis of the interdisciplinary field of the neurobiology of learning and memory.It is an accessible textbook for a 'hot' interdisciplinary field. It is extensively illustrated in full-colour.To understand how the brain learns and remembers requires an integration of psychological concepts and behavioral methods with mechanisms of synaptic plasticity systems and systems neuroscience. This new full-colour textbook provides a synthesis of this interdisciplinary field, each chapter making the key concepts transparent and accessible.

"[Yourgrau] presents the nature of an intimate friendship between two magnificent thinkers and the nature of Godel's work, which inspired Einstein but is now lost in obscurity." (Deseret Morning News)
In 1942, the logician Kurt Godel and Albert Einstein became close friends; they walked to and from their offices every day, exchanging ideas about science, philosophy, politics, and the lost world of German science. By 1949, Godel had produced a remarkable proof: In any universe described by the Theory of Relativity, time cannot exist. Einstein endorsed this result reluctantly but he could find no way to refute it, since then, neither has anyone else. Yet cosmologists and philosophers alike have proceeded as if this discovery was never made. In A World Without Time, Palle Yourgrau sets out to restore Godel to his rightful place in history, telling the story of two magnificent minds put on the shelf by the scientific fashions of their day, and attempts to rescue the brilliant work they did together.
"[A World Without Time is] very interesting if you like [scientific] speculation. Even if you don't, the descriptions of the friendship between Godel and Einstein-Einstein said he went to his office at Princeton University mainly so that he would have the pleasure of G&#154;del's company on his walk back home-make this book interesting." (Wisconsin State Journal)
如果时间只是幻想，而非真实存在，那世界将会怎样？作为一名哲学教授，此书作者在书中阐释说，爱因斯坦的相对论将允许这种可能性，而第一个意识到这一点的则是哥德尔。很多人都知道，哥德尔和爱因斯坦是非常亲密的朋友。他们每天都要一同从普林斯顿高等研究所步行回家，他们分享物理学、哲学以及政治上的想法。但是并不广为人知的是，哥德尔于1949年做出了一项不寻常的发现：他认为爱因斯坦的相对论提供了一种可能性，即可能存在一个没有时间的世界。作者以一种哲学的背景加以思考而认为，哥德尔的发现势必会带来这样一个后果：假如哥德尔是对的，那么爱因斯坦并没有解释何为时间，而只是将这个问题搪塞过去了。爱因斯坦意识到他的朋友已经对相对论做出了重要的贡献，因为正是他对其理论提出了一个令人困扰的新问题：他的理论中是否还应保留时间。爱因斯坦之后的物理学家并未在哥德尔的理论中找出什么有误的成分，而哲学家们则保持沉默。此书所聚焦的正是哥德尔和爱因斯坦之间这戏剧性的一幕，并且将它置于20世纪人类智慧发展的大背景之下来讲述。在哥德尔和爱因斯坦生活的年代，无论是物理学、数学、哲学还是艺术都获得了非常大的进步。在这一背景之下，两位思想者的友谊故事无疑是动人心弦的。

Today man's mind is under attack by all the leading schools of philosophy. We are told that we cannot trust our senses, that logic is arbitrary, that concepts have no basis in reality. Ayn Rand opposes that torrent of nihilism, and she provides the alternative in this eloquent presentation of the essential nature--and power--of man's conceptual faculty. She offers a startlingly original solution to the problem that brought about the collapse of modern philosophy: the problem of universals. This brilliantly argued, superbly written work, together with an essay by philosophy professor Leonard Peikoff, is vital reading for all those who seek to discover that human beings can and should live by the guidance of reason.

The Best-Selling Programmer Resource–Now Updated for C++11
The C++ standard library provides a set of common classes and interfaces that greatly extend the core C++ language. The library, however, is not self-explanatory. To make full use of its components - and to benefit from their power - you need a resource that does far more than list the classes and their functions.
The C++ Standard Library - A Tutorial and Reference, 2nd Edition describes this library as now incorporated into the new ANSI/ISO C++ language standard (C++11). The book provides comprehensive documentation of each library component, including an introduction to its purpose and design; clearly written explanations of complex concepts; the practical programming details needed for effective use; traps and pitfalls; the exact signature and definition of the most important classes and functions; and numerous examples of working code.
The book focuses on the Standard Template Library (STL), examining containers, iterators, function objects, and STL algorithms. You will also find detailed coverage of strings, concurrency, random numbers and distributions, special containers, numerical classes, internationalization, and the IOStreams library. An insightful introduction to fundamental concepts and an overview of the library will help bring newcomers quickly up to speed. A comprehensive index will support the C++ programmer in his/her day-to-day life.
The book covers all the new C++11 library components, including
Concurrency
Fractional arithmetic
Clocks and Timers
Random numbers and distributions
New smart pointers
Regular expressions
New STL containers, such as arrays, forward lists, and unordered containers
New STL algorithms
Tuples
Type traits and type utilities
The book also examines the new C++ programming style and its effect on the standard library, including lambdas, range-based for loops, and variadic templates.
An accompanying Web site, including source code, can be found at http://www.josuttis.com/.