Most Popular Books by Robert West

What is a man? Are all persons born with immortal souls in them, or do only the saved put on immortality at the resurrection? Is a person a three part being, an animal body with both a soul and a spirit that one or both will live after the body is dead? This is one of the most important questions of all time. It has more influence on our conception of our nature, our view of life in this world, and our view of life after death than any other question.

Johan came from a past full of dark secrets. After his first love/best friend cheated on him, he left their rural town and lived for a fresh start in the nearby city, portraying an innocent persona. For years, he kept everyone out of his private life, but the mystery he''s hiding captivated Adrian, a man with an unsatisfied relationship with his girlfriend. Despite their apparent attraction to one another, a line kept them from acting on their feelings. But when Johan outed himself in a drunken confession, things took a drastic turn. On the day he decided to distance himself from his handsome workmate, Adrian appeared on his doorstep and invited him for a walk. Blinded by desire, Johan gets tangled in an insatiable affair that challenged his beliefs, awakened his feelings, and roused his fears. As they ventured between the boundaries of love, lust, and friendship, Johan''s secrets resurfaced one by one, and Adrian''s in for a wild, dangerous ride.

Network navigation constitutes a fundamental human behavior: in order to make use of the information and resources around us, we constantly explore, disentangle, and browse networks such as the Web, social networks, academic paper collections, and encyclopedias, among others. Studying the navigation patterns humans employ is important because it lets us better understand how humans reason about complex networks and lets us build more intuitively navigable and human-friendly information systems. In this dissertation, we study how humans navigate information networks by analyzing tens of thousands of navigation traces harvested from the human-computation game Wikispeedia, where participants are asked to navigate between two given Wikipedia articles in as few clicks as possible. We first shed light on human navigation strategies by describing the anatomy of typical human navigation traces. We then build on these results to develop models and tools for predicting the targets of human paths from only the first few clicks, learning to navigate automatically, and recommending the insertion of important missing hyperlinks. These are useful building blocks for designing more intuitively navigable information spaces and tools to help people find information. The navigation traces collected through the Wikispeedia game have the unique property of being labeled with users'' explicit navigation targets. In general, however, humans need not have a precise target in mind when navigating the Web. Records of such navigation traces are abundant in the logs kept by any web server software. We demonstrate the value of passively collected web server logs by presenting an algorithm that leverages such raw logs in order to improve website hyperlink structure. The resulting system is deployed on Wikipedia''s full server logs at terabyte scale, producing links that are clicked 12 times as frequently as the average link added by human Wikipedia editors.

"A report for no smoking day 1997".

Topics discussed include history of Lander, Wyoming; novels of John Jakes; writing and research; books and reading; and observations on politics and current events.