A "skillful and lucid" (The Wall Street Journal) way of thinking about efficiency, challenging our obsession with it—and offering a new understanding of how to benefit from the powerful potential of serendipity. Algorithms, multitasking, the sharing economy, life hacks: our culture can't get enough of efficiency. One of the great promises of the Internet and big data revolutions is the idea that we can improve the processes and routines of our work and personal lives to get more done in less time than we ever have before. There is no doubt that we're performing at higher levels and moving at unprecedented speed, but what if we're headed in the wrong direction? Melding the long-term history of technology with the latest headlines and findings of computer science and social science, The Efficiency Paradox questions our ingrained assumptions about efficiency, persuasively showing how relying on the algorithms of digital platforms can in fact lead to wasted efforts, missed opportunities, and, above all, an inability to break out of established patterns. Edward Tenner reveals what we and our institutions, when equipped with an astute combination of artificial intelligence and trained intuition, can learn from the random and unexpected.

Early intervention services are essential for infants and toddlers who are visually impaired and have some functional vision that they will be able to use for everyday activities--not only to ensure their early development but also to help them learn to use their vision with maximum effectiveness, right from the start. Everyday Activities to Promote Visual Efficiency offers guiding principles for early intervention with very young children who are visually impaired and who may also have additional disabilities. This important new resource provides simple activities that can be incorporated easily by families and service providers into the everyday routines of a baby or child to facilitate early visual development and use of functional vision.

This book gathers a collection of multidisciplinary essays by Jess Huerta de Soto, examining the dynamic processes of social cooperation which characterize the market, with particular emphasis on the role of both entrepreneurship and institutions.

Do you have enough time? Do you have enough money? Efficiency is a way to get more of both. It's not a compromise; it's an optimization that makes everything better. It's a way to live more lightly on the planet, and at the same time to live more comfortably. It's quality verses quantity.Efficiency rewards you the way a financial investment grows. Just as compound interest allows your money to grow over time, efficiency's benefits continue to accumulate. Efficiency has a better return with a higher guarantee than any financial investment. To get results just replace some old, bad habits with new, better ones.This book has three major sections. 1. The first third can help you organize your life so you have more time and money.2. The middle third will help you build or buy a better house. This section includes many practical details to help you design a new home or improve the efficiency of your existing one.3. If you work in a corporation and want to improve your buildings, systems, or work processes, then the final third is for you.Could you use more joy in your life? The tips in this book could provide the secret you've been missing - the joy of efficiency.

Energy Efficiency of Vehicles educates readers about energy and the environment and the relationship between the energy we use and the environment. The world is at a point in time when people need to make very important decisions about energy in the next few decades. This book enables readers to utilize our scientific knowledge to make good rational decisions. Energy Efficiency of Vehicles provides information on: Calculations related to energy, power, and efficiency, and the impact of using different types of energy on the environment. Environmental consequences of consuming energy. Models related to impact of city driving on the energy efficiency and fuel economy of cars and trucks.

American democratic capitalism is in danger. How can we save it? For its first two hundred years, the American economy exhibited truly impressive performance. The combination of democratically elected governments and a capitalist system worked, with ever-increasing levels of efficiency spurred by division of labor, international trade, and scientific management of companies. By the nation's bicentennial celebration in 1976, the American economy was the envy of the world. But since then, outcomes have changed dramatically. Growth in the economic prosperity of the average American family has slowed to a crawl, while the wealth of the richest Americans has skyrocketed. This imbalance threatens the American democratic capitalist system and our way of life. In this bracing yet constructive book, world-renowned business thinker Roger Martin starkly outlines the fundamental problem: We have treated the economy as a machine, pursuing ever-greater efficiency as an inherent good. But efficiency has become too much of a good thing. Our obsession with it has inadvertently shifted the shape of our economy, from a large middle class and smaller numbers of rich and poor (think of a bell-shaped curve) to a greater share of benefits accruing to a thin tail of already-rich Americans (a Pareto distribution). With lucid analysis and engaging anecdotes, Martin argues that we must stop treating the economy as a perfectible machine and shift toward viewing it as a complex adaptive system in which we seek a fundamental balance of efficiency with resilience. To achieve this, we need to keep in mind the whole while working on the component parts; pursue improvement, not perfection; and relentlessly tweak instead of attempting to find permanent solutions. Filled with keen economic insight and advice for citizens, executives, policy makers, and educators, When More Is Not Better is the must-read guide for saving democratic capitalism.