Figures of Chance I: Chance in Literature and the Arts (16th–21st Centuries) proposes a transhistorical analysis that will serve as a reference work on the evolution of literary and artistic representations of chance and contingency. Alongside its multidisciplinary companion volume (Figures of Chance II), it considers how the projective and predictive capacity of societies is shaped by representations and cultural models of a reality that is understood, to varying degrees, to be contingent, unpredictable, or chaotic. Giving special emphasis to the French context while also developing broad cross-cultural comparisons, this volume examines the dialogue between evolving conceptions and changing representations of chance, from Renaissance figures of Fortune to the data-driven world of the present. Written by recognized specialists of each of the periods studied, it identifies and historicizes the main fictional and factual modes of portraying, narrating, and comprehending chance in the West.

“An amazing and brilliant instruction manual on how to find purpose, build a career, and live a life of fulfillment.” – DEEPAK CHOPRA A surefire guide to planning your next career move and discovering the job you really want. Jennifer Turliuk was dissatisfied in her corporate job, so she quit. But she had no idea what to do next. After university, she, like so many graduates, focused on just getting a job rather than figuring out the career she really wanted. Instead of getting another degree or going back to school to change her career path, Turliuk embarked on a “self-education journey,” interviewing and shadowing some of the world’s leading professors, founders, and investors from Silicon Valley companies such as Airbnb, Square, and Kiva. What she discovered was not only a way to find out what she really wanted to do with her own life, but also a career-design process that would help others do just the same. Turliuk’s career-prototyping framework uses tested strategies and exercises, including quantified self, design thinking, and lean methodology to help everyone from recent graduates to mid-career workers looking for a change. Let this book be your guide to finding a satisfying and passion-driven career that is right for you.

Need to know how to build and test models based on data? Intermediate Statistics For Dummies gives you the knowledge to estimate, investigate, correlate, and congregate certain variables based on the information at hand. The techniques you’ll learn in this book are the same techniques used by professionals in medical and scientific fields. Picking up right where Statistics For Dummies left off, this straightforward, easy-to-follow book guides you beyond Central Limit Theorem and hypothesis tests and immerses you in flavors of regression, ANOVA, and nonparametric procedures. Unlike regular statistics books, this guide provides full explanations of intermediate statistical ideas; computer input dissection; an extensive number of examples, tips, strategies, and warnings; and clear, concise step-by-step procedures—all in a language you can understand. You’ll soon discover how to: Analyze data and base models off of your data Make predictions using regression Compare many means with ANOVA Test models using Chi-square Dealing with abnormal data In addition, this book includes a list of wrong statistical conclusions and common questions that professors ask using computer output. This book also adopts a nonlinear approach, making it possible to skip to the information you need without having to read previous chapters. With Intermediate Statistics For Dummies, you’ll have all the tools you need to make important decisions in all types of professional areas—from biology and engineering to business and politics!

Before Raymond Chandler, before Dorothy Sayers or Agatha Christie, there was Metta Fuller Victor, the first American author—man or woman—of a full-length detective novel. This novel, The Dead Letter, is presented here along with another of Victor’s mysteries, The Figure Eight. Both written in the 1860s and published under the name Seeley Regester, these novels show how—by combining conventions of the mystery form first developed by Edgar Allan Poe with those of the domestic novel—Victor pioneered the domestic detective story and paved the way for generations of writers to follow. In The Dead Letter, Henry Moreland is killed by a single stab to the back. Against a background of post–Civil War politics, Richard Redfield, a young attorney, helps Burton, a legendary New York City detective, unravel the crime. In The Figure Eight, Joe Meredith undertakes a series of adventures and assumes a number of disguises to solve the mystery of the murder of his uncle and regain the lost fortune of his angelic cousin.

The stories in this collection were written mostly between 1888 and 1897, a time when Henry James’s writing was concerned with the art of fiction and the position of the artist in society. The motif and title story, ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, is an inspired joke, a masterpiece of double-entendre that demands the reader’s undivided love and attention and continues to baffle its critics. Also included are ‘The Author of Beltraffio’, an absorbing story of family infighting, authorship and tragedy, and ‘The Private Life’, a spirited tale that considers the contrast between the artist alone and at work. While many of these stories appear to be elaborate Jamesian games, all employ irony and humour to allegorize artistic creation.

To the man who, at any period of his days, has been bitten by that ferocious and fever-producing insect colloquially known as the “horse bug,” and likewise to the man whose nervous system has been racked by the depredations of the “poker microbe,” these tales of the turf and of the green cloth are sympathetically dedicated. The thoroughbred running horse is a peculiar animal. While he is often beaten, the very wisest veterans of the turf have a favorite maxim to the effect that “The ponies can’t be beat"—meaning the thoroughbred racers; which sounds paradoxical enough. Poker, too, is a mystifying affair, in that all men who play it appear, from their own statements, to lose at it persistently and perennially. There is surely something weird and uncanny about a game that numbers only losers among its devotees. However, poker-players are addicted to persiflage. The genuine, dyed-in-the-wool, blown-in-the-bottle pokerist rarely acknowledges that he is ahead of the game—until the day after. These stories, which were originally printed in the columns of the New York Sun, belong largely to the eminent domain of strict truthfulness. If they do not serve to show that the “horse bug” and the “poker microbe” are good things to steer clear of, they will by no means have failed of their purpose; for the writer had nothing didactic in view in setting them down as he heard them...FROM THE BOOKS.