New Releases by Milan

“Adaptive Digital Filters” presents an important discipline applied to the domain of speech processing. The book first makes the reader acquainted with the basic terms of filtering and adaptive filtering, before introducing the field of advanced modern algorithms, some of which are contributed by the authors themselves. Working in the field of adaptive signal processing requires the use of complex mathematical tools. The book offers a detailed presentation of the mathematical models that is clear and consistent, an approach that allows everyone with a college level of mathematics knowledge to successfully follow the mathematical derivations and descriptions of algorithms. The algorithms are presented in flow charts, which facilitates their practical implementation. The book presents many experimental results and treats the aspects of practical application of adaptive filtering in real systems, making it a valuable resource for both undergraduate and graduate students, and for all others interested in mastering this important field.

Many organizations struggle with the dynamics and the complexity of today''s social ecosystems that connect everyone and everything, everywhere and all the time. Facing challenges at the intersection of business models, technical developments, and human needs, modern enterprises must overcome the siloed thinking and isolated efforts of the past, and instead address their relationships to people holistically. In Intersection, Milan Guenther introduces a Strategic Design approach that aligns the overarching efforts of Branding, Enterprise Architecture, and Experience Design, and sets them on a common course to shape tomorrow''s enterprises.This book gives designers, entrepreneurs, innovators, and leaders a model and a comprehensive vocabulary for tackling such deep-rooted challenges. The Enterprise Design framework cuts through the complexity of Strategic Design work, showing how to navigate key aspects and bridge diverging viewpoints. In 9 case studies, the author looks at the way companies like SAP, BBVA, IKEA, and Jeppesen (a Boeing Company) apply design thinking and practice to shape their enterprises. Moving from strategy to conceptual design and concrete results, Intersection shows what is relevant at which point, and what expertise to involve. - Teaches how to align business strategy with Brand Identity, Customer Experience, and Enterprise Architecture initiatives as part of a consolidated enterprise-wide design practice to achieve stakeholder value - Provides a framework for designing systems, products and services as the building blocks of a consistent and coherent experience for all stakeholders in the wider enterprise, joining strategic considerations with the delivery of tangible outcomes - Explains how to make results such as websites, apps, objects, platforms, or environments part of a larger system that orchestrates enterprise touchpoints with people

What drives politics in dictatorships? Milan W. Svolik argues that all authoritarian regimes must resolve two fundamental conflicts. First, dictators face threats from the masses over which they rule - this is the problem of authoritarian control. A second, separate challenge arises from the elites with whom dictators rule - this is the problem of authoritarian power-sharing. Crucially, whether and how dictators resolve these two problems is shaped by the dismal environment in which authoritarian politics takes place: in a dictatorship, no independent authority has the power to enforce agreements among key actors and violence is the ultimate arbiter of conflict. Using the tools of game theory, Svolik explains why some dictators, such as Saddam Hussein, establish personal autocracy and stay in power for decades; why leadership changes elsewhere are regular and institutionalized, as in contemporary China; why some dictatorships are ruled by soldiers, as Uganda was under Idi Amin; why many authoritarian regimes, such as PRI-era Mexico, maintain regime-sanctioned political parties; and why a country''s authoritarian past casts a long shadow over its prospects for democracy, as the unfolding events of the Arab Spring reveal. When assessing his arguments, Svolik complements these and other historical case studies with the statistical analysis of comprehensive, original data on institutions, leaders, and ruling coalitions across all dictatorships from 1946 to 2008.

Severance pay, a program that provides compensation to workers on termination of employment, is the most widely used income protection program for the unemployed-yet it is often blamed for creating economic inefficiencies such as reducing employment and limiting access to jobs for disadvantaged groups. Reforming Severance Pay: An International Perspective fills the knowledge gap in evaluating the international experience by providing a collection of worldwide overviews and labor market impact assessments, theoretical analyses, and country case studies. The authors summarize the performance of existing severance pay arrangements around the world and discuss recent innovative severance pay reforms in Austria, Chile, and the Republic of Korea. Reforming Severance Pay proposes policy directions based on country characteristics such as folding severance pay of higher income countries into existing social insurance programs and making severance pay a contractual affair between market partners to live up to the efficiency-enhancing device in a knowledge-based economy. For lower income countries, the authors advise reforming severance pay toward realistic benefit levels, strengthening compliance of benefit payments by the employer, and safeguarding minimum benefits. This report will be of interest to policy makers and researchers working on labor market, unemployment benefit, and pension issues; economic policy reform; poverty reduction; and social analysis and policy.

One small change in how you love; one big change in your kids Having problems with your kids? What if you are the problem and you just can’t see it? How We Love Our Kids offers a unique approach, to help you as a parent transform your kids by making specific changes in how you love. It’s the only book specifically for parents that reveals the unseen forces that shape every interaction with your kids. • Identify which of the five love styles you have. • Discover the surprising dynamics that shape your parenting. • Get rid of your “buttons” so your kids can’t push them. • Create a close connection with your kids that will last a lifetime. • Learn the seven gifts every child needs. Based on years of research in the area of attachment and bonding, How We Love Our Kids shows parents how to overcome the predictable challenges that arise out of the five love styles and helps parents cultivate a secure, deep connection with a child of any age. Retool your reactions and refocus on how you love. Start today. Watch your kids flourish and thrive as they receive what was missing in your love. With four self-assessments and powerful application tools to use with children of all ages.

Cartography and geographic information (GI) are remarkably appropriate for the requirements of early warning (EW) and crisis management (CM). The use of geospatial technology has increased tremendously in the last years. ICT has changed from just using maps created in advance, to new approaches, allowing individuals (decision-makers) to use cartography interactively, on the basis of individual user''s requirements. The new generation of cartographic visualizations based on standardisation, formal modelling, use of sensors, semantics and ontology, allows for the better adaptation of information to the needs of the users. In order to design a new framework in pre-disaster and disaster management safety/security/privacy aspects of institutions and citizens need to be considered. All this can only be achieved by demonstrating new research achievements, sharing best practices (e.g. in the health area) and working towards the wider acceptance of geospatial technology in society, with the help of education and media. This book will outline research frontiers and applications of cartography and GI in EW and CM and document their roles and potentials in wider processes going on in information/knowledge-based societies.

“A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world. Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight-errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose.” In this thought-provoking, endlessly enlightening, and entertaining essay on the art of the novel, renowned author Milan Kundera suggests that “the curtain” represents a ready-made perception of the world that each of us has—a pre-interpreted world. The job of the novelist, he argues, is to rip through the curtain and reveal what it hides. Here an incomparable literary artist cleverly sketches out his personal view of the history and value of the novel in Western civilization. In doing so, he celebrates a prose form that possesses the unique ability to transcend national and language boundaries in order to reveal some previously unknown aspect of human existence.

This book explores the historical and contemporary relationships of Protestant Puritanism to political and social authoritarianism. It focuses on Puritanism’s original, subsequent and modern influences on and legacies in political democracy and civil society within historically Puritan Western societies. There is emphasis on Great Britain and particularly America, from the 17th to the 21st century.

This is a book about modern liberal society and its adversaries. The book rediscovers and rehabilitates much maligned, especially in America, liberalism as the ideal system of liberty in relation to anti-liberalism as one of un-freedom. It rediscovers liberal modernity as a free, equal and just social system and time, thus most compatible with and enhancing of human civilization ushering in the 21st century. It exposes anti-liberal adversaries, especially conservatism, as ideologies and systems most inappropriate with and destructive of civilization. The book rediscovers liberal modernity as the master process and destination of Western civilization, and its anti-liberal adversaries, notably conservatism, as the ghosts of a dead past. The anti-liberal rumors of the ‘death’ of liberalism are ‘greatly exaggerated’. Milan Zafirovski, Ph.D. (1990) in Economics, University of Saint Cyril and Methodius, Macedonia, Ph.D. (1999) in Sociology, Florida International University, is Associate Professor of Sociology at University of North Texas. He has published several books, including Market and Society (Praeger, 2003).

This book reconsiders the relationship of modern free society-in particular political democracy and a free-market economy-and conservatism as its formidable adversary. Milan Zafirovski identifies and documents the several ways conservatism functions as the nemesis of the democracy and the free market. He provides discussion on forms of conservative government and the rise of nationalism, imperialism, and militarism, with special attention to wars of aggression and the threat of mutually assured destruction (MAD). Combining economic and sociological theories gives the book a solid interdisciplinary approach, allowing for a thorough analysis of conservatism''s overt and covert threats to modern free society. Zafirovski focuses on anti-democratic phenomena and uses historical and empirical evidence to support his assertions that the liberal-democratic ideal of individual and political liberty that most Western societies hold so dear is put at risk by the rise in conservatism on a global scale.

Probabilistic Conditional Independence Structures provides the mathematical description of probabilistic conditional independence structures; the author uses non-graphical methods of their description, and takes an algebraic approach. The monograph presents the methods of structural imsets and supermodular functions, and deals with independence implication and equivalence of structural imsets. Motivation, mathematical foundations and areas of application are included, and a rough overview of graphical methods is also given. In particular, the author has been careful to use suitable terminology, and presents the work so that it will be understood by both statisticians, and by researchers in artificial intelligence. The necessary elementary mathematical notions are recalled in an appendix.

Slovak-English edition of selected poems (64 poems) of Milan Rufus, poet laureate of Slovakia, translated from Slovak to English by Ewald Osers, and Viera and James Sutherland-Smith. This is a first English edition of the best poetry of Slovak poet laureate Milan Rufus, candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature, illustrated with twelve paintings by the Slovak-American artist Koloman Sokol.

When The Unbearable Lightness of Being was first published in English, it was hailed as "a work of the boldest mastery, originality, and richness" by critic Elizabeth Hardwick and named one of the best books of 1984 by the New York Times Book Review. It went on to win the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and quickly became an international bestseller. Twenty years later, the novel has established itself as a modern classic. To commemorate the anniversary of its first English-language publication, HarperCollins is proud to offer a special hardcover edition. A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover -- these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel. Controlled by day, Tereza''s jealousy awakens by night, transformed into ineffably sad death-dreams, while Tomas, a successful surgeon, alternates loving devotion to the dependent Tereza with the ardent pursuit of other women. Sabina, an independent, free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals -- of parents, husband, country, love itself -- whereas her lover, the intellectual Franz, loses all because of his earnest goodness and fidelity. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel, says the novelist, "the unbearable lightness of being" -- not only as the consequence of our private acts but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine. This magnificent novel encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, and embraces, it seems, all aspects of human existence. It juxtaposes geographically distant places (Prague, Geneva, Paris, Thailand, the United States, a forlorn Bohemian village); brilliant and playful reflections (on "eternal return," on kitsch, on man and animals -- Tomas and Tereza have a beloved doe named Karenin); and a variety of styles (from the farcical to the elegiac) to take its place as perhaps the major achievement of one of the world''s truly great writers.

Treating the market as a complex social category, and not just as a purely economic phenomenon, this book presents two frameworks for analyzing the market in relation to society. After presenting first the economic framework and then the sociological framework, the author combines the two and, when feasible and sensible, integrates them. The result is an original and enlightening examination of such subjects as the nature of the market, market laws, equilibrium, and prices.

Kundera brilliantly examines the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Musil. He is especially penetrating on Hermann Broch, and his exploration of the world of Kafka''s novels vividly reveals the comic terror of Kafka''s bureaucratized universe. Kundera''s discussion of his own work includes his views on the role of historical events in fiction, the meaning of action, and the creation of character in the post-psychological novel.

During one of his several adventurous voyages in the 1600s, an Englishman becomes the sole survivor of a shipwreck and lives on a deserted island for more than twenty-eight years.

Annotation Applies an alternative, sociological approach to exchange and related economic phenomena.

The author initially intended to call this novel The Lyrical Age. The lyrical age, according to Kundera, is youth, and this novel, above all, is an epic of adolescence; an ironic epic that tenderly erodes sacrosanct values: childhood, motherhood, revolution, and even poetry. Jaromil is in fact a poet. His mother made him a poet and accompanies him (figuratively) to his love bed and (literally) to his deathbed. A ridiculous and touching character, horrifying and totally innocent ("innocence with its bloody smile"!), Jaromil is at the same time a true poet. He''s no creep, he''s Rimbaud. Rimbaud entrapped by the communist revolution, entrapped in a somber farce.

Il y a aujourd''hui près de 250 bouquinistes parisiens qui proposent pêle-mêle des livres patinés, jaunis, du vieux, du neuf, des classiques, des raretés, des journaux d''époque, des cartes parcheminées, des disques ... Ce livre, qui invite à une flânerie le long de la Seine, conte la vie des bouquinistes à travers un calendrier imaginaire.

Morphogeny of the nasal skull was investigated in 92 embryos of 13 species of Cetacea. Compared to the original nasal capsule of land mammals, the nasal structures of Cetacea show many weighty transformations. As a result, the nostrils are translocated from the tip of the snout to the vertex of the head. Several structures of the embryonic nasal skull remain preserved even in adult cetaceans. The translocation of the nostrils to the highest point of the surfacing body is among the most perfect adaptations of cetaceans to the aquatic life habits. The morphogeny of the nasal skull suggests that all cetaceans are of common origin and form a single monophyletic order. The hitherto usual division of this order into two suborders, Mysticeti and Odontoceti, appears to be unsubstantiated. Rather, at least three closely related superfamilies should be distinguished within the order Cetacea, viz., Balaenopteroidea, Physeteroidea, and Delphinoidea. The results are in a

In this dark farce of a novel, set in an old-fashioned Central European spa town, eight characters are swept up in an accelerating dance: a pretty nurse and her repairman boyfriend; an oddball gynecologist; a rich American (at once saint and Don Juan); a popular trumpeter and his beautiful, obsessively jealous wife; an disillusioned former political prisoner about to leave his country and his young woman ward.Perhaps the most brilliantly plotted and sheer entertaining of Milan Kundera''s novels, Farewell Waltz poses the most serious questions with a blasphemous lightness that makes us see that the modern world has deprived us even of the right to tragedy. Written in Bohemia in 1969-70, this book was first published (in 1976) in France under the title La valse aux adieux (Farewell Waltz), and later in thirty-four other countries. This beautiful new translation, made from the French text prepared by the novelist himself, fully reflects his own tone and intentions. As such it offers an opportunity for both the discovery and the rediscovery of one of the very best of a great writer''s works.

The short eventful life of a Czechoslovakian Marxist poet who deludes himself about the meaning of duty.

A survey of Noam Chomsky''s political writing. This book is an introduction to the basic ideas underlying this intellectual''s critiques of the mass media and the new world order. It includes a summary of his visions of the future and his own brand of libertarian socialism.

This is the first novel by the author of "Immortality", which won "The Independent" Award for Foreign Fiction in 1991. Milan Kundera is also the author of "The Book of Laughter and Fogetting".