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.

<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.

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.

This book looks at a broad collection of contributions from experts in their fields. Providing a thorough treatment on statistical causality. Methods and their applications are provided with theoretical background and emphasis is given to practice rather than theory, with technical content kept to a minimum. Step-by-step instructions for using the methods are presented with a broad range of examples, including medicine, biology, economics, sociology and political science.

"He was a man who often was incapable of conducting himself properly in the most elementary social interactions. His only continuing contacts with women were limited to his mother, nieces, and housekeepers. He was a man who knew the power of money and desired it, but refused to work for it, preferring to live off the sweat of his family and long-suffering friends, whom he often insulted even as they paid his bills."-from the book This, then, was Oliver Heaviside, a pioneer of modern electrical theory. Born into a low social class of Victorian England, Heaviside made advances in mathematics by introducing the operational calculus; in physics, where he formulated the modern-day expressions of Maxwell's Laws of electromagnetism; and in electrical engineering, through his duplex equations. Now available in paperback with a new preface by the author, this acclaimed biography will appeal to historians of technology and science, as well as to scientists and engineers who wish to learn more about this remarkable man.

This biography of Oliver Heaviside profiles the life of an underappreciated genius and describes his many contributions to electrical science, which proved to be essential to the future of mass communications.
Oliver Heaviside (1850 -1925) may not be a household name but he was one of the great pioneers of electrical science: his work led to huge advances in communications and became the bedrock of the subject of electrical engineering as it is taught and practiced today. His ideas and original accomplishments are now so much a part of everyday electrical science that they are simply taken for granted; almost nobody wonders how they came about and Heaviside's name has been lost from view.
This book tells the complete story of this extraordinary though often unappreciated scientist. The author interweaves details of Heaviside's life and personality with clear explanations of his many important contributions to the field of electrical engineering. He describes a man with an irreverent sense of fun who cared nothing for social or mathematical conventions and lived a fiercely independent life.
His achievements include creating the mathematical tools that were to prove essential to the proper understanding and use of electricity, finding a way to rid telephone lines of the distortion that had stifled progress, and showing that electrical power doesn't flow in a wire but in the space alongside it.
At first his ideas were thought to be weird, even outrageous, and he had to battle long and hard to get them accepted. Yet by the end of his life he was awarded the first Faraday Medal.
This engrossing story will restore long-overdue recognition to a scientist whose achievements in many ways were as crucial to our modern age as those of Edison's and Tesla's.