New Releases by John Elder

In Be Different, New York Times bestselling author of Look Me in the Eye shares a new batch of endearing stories about his childhood, adolescence, and young adult years, giving the reader a rare window into the Autistic mind. In his bestselling memoir, Look Me in the Eye, John Elder Robison described growing up with Autism Spectrum Disorder at a time when the diagnosis didn’t exist. He was intelligent but socially isolated; his talents won him jobs with toy makers and rock bands but did little to endear him to authority figures and classmates, who were put off by his inclination to blurt out non sequiturs and avoid eye contact. By the time he was diagnosed at age forty, John had already developed a myriad of coping strategies that helped him achieve a seemingly normal, even highly successful, life. In each story, he offers practical advice for anyone who feels “different” on how to improve the weak communication and social skills that keep so many people from taking full advantage of their often remarkable gifts. With his trademark honesty and unapologetic eccentricity, Robison addresses questions like: • How to read others and follow their behaviors when in uncertain social situations • Why manners matter • How to harness your powers of concentration to master difficult skills • How to deal with bullies • When to make an effort to fit in, and when to embrace eccentricity • How to identify special gifts and use them to your advantage Every person has something unique to offer the world, and every person has the capacity to create strong, loving bonds with their friends and family. Be Different will help readers and those they love find their path to success.

The theories of investment under uncertainty and real options predict that uncertainty about, for example, oil prices will tend to depress current investment. We reinvestigate the relationship between the price of oil and investment, focusing on the role of uncertainty about oil prices. We find that volatility in oil prices has had a negative and statistically significant effect on several measures of investment, durables consumption and aggregate output. We also find that accounting for the effects of oil price volatility tends to exacerbate the negative dynamic response of economic activity to a negative oil price shock, while dampening the response to a positive oil price shock.

The Handbook of Statistical Analysis and Data Mining Applications is a comprehensive professional reference book that guides business analysts, scientists, engineers and researchers (both academic and industrial) through all stages of data analysis, model building and implementation. The Handbook helps one discern the technical and business problem, understand the strengths and weaknesses of modern data mining algorithms, and employ the right statistical methods for practical application. Use this book to address massive and complex datasets with novel statistical approaches and be able to objectively evaluate analyses and solutions. It has clear, intuitive explanations of the principles and tools for solving problems using modern analytic techniques, and discusses their application to real problems, in ways accessible and beneficial to practitioners across industries - from science and engineering, to medicine, academia and commerce. This handbook brings together, in a single resource, all the information a beginner will need to understand the tools and issues in data mining to build successful data mining solutions. - Written "By Practitioners for Practitioners" - Non-technical explanations build understanding without jargon and equations - Tutorials in numerous fields of study provide step-by-step instruction on how to use supplied tools to build models - Practical advice from successful real-world implementations - Includes extensive case studies, examples, MS PowerPoint slides and datasets - CD-DVD with valuable fully-working 90-day software included: "Complete Data Miner - QC-Miner - Text Miner" bound with book

This paper provides some empirical evidence on a relatively new and increasingly prevalent form of equity restructuring called tracking stock. Also known as quot;targetedquot; or quot;letteredquot; stock in the financial press, this equity structure has been adopted with increasing frequency, with seven tracking stocks being proposed in the first half of 1999 and several more rumored to be imminent. We find, for a sample of 27 firms, a mean abnormal return of over 3% in the two-day period surrounding the announced proposal to issue a tracking stock. Individually, 24 of the 27 firms in the sample earned positive abnormal returns, while none earned significantly negative abnormal returns. These estimates are comparable to previous estimates of abnormal returns associated with announcements of carve-outs and spin- offs. The empirical finding that announcements of all three forms of equity restructurings earn positive abnormal returns is consistent with the hypothesis that investors expect gains from more focused and transparent business units.

A firm''s announcement that it intends to restructure based on tracking stock is usually associated with a positive and significant stock price reaction, at least in the short-run. Typically, this reaction has been attributed to expected reductions in a diversification discount, via reduced agency costs and/or reduced informational asymmetries. The existing literature has investigated this latter hypothesis - the impact of tracking stocks on informational asymmetries - by focusing on the behavior of equity analysts: the number following the specified firms and the accuracy of their forecasts. The results thus far have been inconclusive. In contrast, we focus on the behavior of market makers. In particular, we analyze the liquidity provided by market makers, as measured by the bid-ask spread, before and after a firm issues a tracking stock. Our results provide additional support to the growing evidence that restructurings based on tracking stocks are not effective at reducing informational asymmetries. Rather, firms that issue tracking stocks tend to exhibit less liquidity and greater adverse selection than a matched sample of control firms.

Analytical results are presented that drastically simplify joint estimation of the APT by Non-linear SUR and maximum likelihood when the factors are measured. Four alternative analytical expressions for calculating standard errors are also presented.Please see published version in Economics Letters for full text and equations.

This paper investigates the extent to which observable macroeconomic factors can explain the time-varying risk premia in the short-end of the term structure. The empirical model we employ is motivated by a dynamic asset pricing model with time-invariant reward-to-risk measures and time-varying risk premia. Our results indicate that two factors, based innovations in the federal funds rate and shifts in the yield curve, explain up to 65% of the temporal variation in Treasury bill returns. We also find that shifts in the yield curve factor may explain some time-variation in risk premia at the very short end of the term structure, and that the federal funds rate factor may be weakly linked to the time-varying risk premia over the post-1966 sample, when the federal funds market first began to function as a major source of bank liquidity. This latter result, however, is somewhat sensitive to the sample period.

We reexamine commodity futures returns for evidence of fractional integration utilizing two estimators based on wavelets. We summarize basic wavelet methods for signal processing and decompose commodity futures returns by wavelet scale. We find the evidence for long memory is not conclusive based on visual inspection of the wavelet decomposition, but formal statistical tests suggest evidence of long memory, in the form of anti-persistence, in about half of agricultural commodity futures. We find little evidence of long memory in metal futures. Our results are useful in interpreting previous disparate findings based on frequency domain estimators.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “As sweet and funny and sad and true and heartfelt a memoir as one could find.” —from the foreword by Augusten Burroughs Ever since he was young, John Robison longed to connect with other people, but by the time he was a teenager, his odd habits—an inclination to blurt out non sequiturs, avoid eye contact, dismantle radios, and dig five-foot holes (and stick his younger brother, Augusten Burroughs, in them)—had earned him the label “social deviant.” It was not until he was forty that he was diagnosed with a form of autism called Asperger’s syndrome. That understanding transformed the way he saw himself—and the world. A born storyteller, Robison has written a moving, darkly funny memoir about a life that has taken him from developing exploding guitars for KISS to building a family of his own. It’s a strange, sly, indelible account—sometimes alien yet always deeply human.

Annotation "Teacher and writer John Elder, a man who loves both literature and the outdoors, describes in The Frog Run how he found a way to balance these passions in building a sugarhouse with his sons in the Vermont woods. He celebrates the moment between winter and spring - known to sugarmakers as "the frog run"--When the tree frogs begin to be heard and the last run of sap good for making syrup flows from the maples. For Elder, who also writes in this book about the resurgence of New England forests and about his life as a reader, the frog run is a time to savor and celebrate the fleeting beauties of his family''s place on earth."--BOOK JACKET. Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Small farms once occupied the heights that John Elder calls home, but now only a few cellar holes and tumbled stone walls remain among the dense stands of maple, beech, and hemlocks on these Vermont hills. Reading the Mountains of Homeis a journey into these verdant reaches where in the last century humans tried their hand and where bear and moose now find shelter. As John Elder is our guide, so Robert Frost is Elder''s companion, his great poem "Directive" seeing us through a landscape in which nature and literature, loss and recovery, are inextricably joined. Over the course of a year, Elder takes us on his hikes through the forested uplands between South Mountain and North Mountain, reflecting on the forces of nature, from the descent of the glaciers to the rush of the New Haven River, that shaped a plateau for his village of Bristol; and on the human will that denuded and farmed and abandoned the mountains so many years ago. His forays wind through the flinty relics of nineteenth-century homesteads and Abenaki settlements, leading to meditations on both human failure and the possibility for deeper communion with the land and others. An exploration of the body and soul of a place, an interpretive map of its natural and literary life, Reading the Mountains of Home strikes a moving balance between the pressures of civilization and the attraction of wilderness. It is a beautiful work of nature writing in which human nature finds its place, where the reader is invited to follow the last line of Frost''s "Directive," to "Drink and be whole again beyond confusion."

An uncomplicated, comparative ''inside'' into health service complaints procedures, compensation schemes and patients'' rights in the developed world, with a critical yet objective focus on the UK systems.

This landmark work explores how our attitudes toward nature are mirrored in and influenced by poetry. Showing us a resurgent vision of harmony between nature and humanity in the work of some of our most widely read poets, Imagining the Earth reveals the power of poetry to identify, interpret, and celebrate a wide range of issues related to nature and our place in it.

The Scribner Writers Series has set the standard for literary reference for more than 25 years. In addition to addressing the lives and careers of important writers, the articles discuss the themes and styles of major works and place them in pertinent historical, social and political contexts for today''s readers. Novelists, playwrights, essayists, poets, short story writers, and more recently, genre writers in science fiction and mystery, are all expertly discussed in the more than 16 sets comprising this series.The essays in the set combine biography, criticism, and in some cases, original interviews to tell the story of each author. This set includes 70 biographical/critical essays on such writers as Rachel Carson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Gary Snyder and 12 general subject essays.

A novel set in the 21st century, dealing with the problem of overpopulation. This is the first novel by John Elder, a geophysicist, whose previous works include ''The Structure of the Planets''. He has worked in many countries, including Japan, and this novel reflects his knowledge of Japanese culture.

Following the Brush is the engaging story of an American''s experience as a student and observer of traditional Japanese culture. A professor of English, John Elder lived for a year with his family in Kyoto. As a cultural outsider and devoted amateur, Elder brings a distinctive and sympathetic eye to arts and institutions that are, as the author points out, peopled by Japanese who are these days themselves outsiders in an important sense, lovers of pursuits which have been "swirled off into eddies by the velocity of the economic mainstream". Elder''s portraits are detailed and dramatic. In the title essay, the author submits to the traditional Japanese approach to learning shodo, or calligraphy: week after week he patiently returns to class until, at the end, we can all see quite clearly "the outlines of a world that blossoms from the ink". We are given an insider''s look at a Japanese elementary school - attended by all three of the author''s children - that is both startling and admiring. There is a beautifully drawn portrait of a Noh actor, one of the very few women to establish herself at the highest professional level - a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman. Elder describes the sisterhood of Kyoto geishas as they "venture out, self-possessed and superbly eccentric, in their errands along the noisy streets of Japan". And we watch with fascination as Elder is allowed in as the only foreigner to a traditional Go club, where men only pursue "the austere beauty, and the pure competition, of the world''s most demanding game". Elder''s experience as a leading writer on nature leads him also to reflect in other essays on distinctly Japanese attachments to nature and wildness.

Relied upon by thousands of physicians, medical directors, underwriters and actuaries worldwide, Medical Selection of Life Risks, is the most trusted reference on medical risk selection ever published. The fourth edition has been completely updated and expanded to include nine new chapters and an increased emphasis on disability insurance. Part 1 covers the operation and principles of underwriting selection/risk identification. Part 2 deals, system by system with detailed methods of risk appraisal for a very wide range of diseases, presenting the latest available medical and comparative mortality information. All the most prominent disease and ailments presenting risks to life are pinpointed from high blood pressure and cardiovascular disorders, to diseases of the blood, kidneys and urinary tract, respiratory disorders, tumors, tropical diseases and AIDS.

Mathematics of Computing -- Parallelism.