This monograph presents a comprehensive treatment of the maximum-entropy sampling problem (MESP), which is a fascinating topic at the intersection of mathematical optimization and data science. The text situates MESP in information theory, as the algorithmic problem of calculating a sub-vector of pre-specificed size from a multivariate Gaussian random vector, so as to maximize Shannon's differential entropy. The text collects and expands on state-of-the-art algorithms for MESP, and addresses its application in the field of environmental monitoring. While MESP is a central optimization problem in the theory of statistical designs (particularly in the area of spatial monitoring), this book largely focuses on the unique challenges of its algorithmic side. From the perspective of mathematical-optimization methodology, MESP is rather unique (a 0/1 nonlinear program having a nonseparable objective function), and the algorithmic techniques employed are highly non-standard. In particular, successful techniques come from several disparate areas within the field of mathematical optimization; for example: convex optimization and duality, semidefinite programming, Lagrangian relaxation, dynamic programming, approximation algorithms, 0/1 optimization (e.g., branch-and-bound), extended formulation, and many aspects of matrix theory. The book is mainly aimed at graduate students and researchers in mathematical optimization and data analytics.

Many engineering, operations, and scientific applications include a mixture of discrete and continuous decision variables and nonlinear relationships involving the decision variables that have a pronounced effect on the set of feasible and optimal solutions. Mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problems combine the numerical difficulties of handling nonlinear functions with the challenge of optimizing in the context of nonconvex functions and discrete variables. MINLP is one of the most flexible modeling paradigms available for optimization; but because its scope is so broad, in the most general cases it is hopelessly intractable. Nonetheless, an expanding body of researchers and practitioners - including chemical engineers, operations researchers, industrial engineers, mechanical engineers, economists, statisticians, computer scientists, operations managers, and mathematical programmers - are interested in solving large-scale MINLP instances.

“There are photographs in this book that will stay in the hearts and minds of the people who view them, and who, like Corinne Dufka, will resolve to make it their life’s purpose to do what they can to help stop war.� — Jon Lee Anderson, staff writer, The New Yorker   This is War presents a tour de force of one of most celebrated women war photographers of her generation. From 1988 to 1999, Capa Gold Medal winner and Pulitzer Prize–nominated photographer Corinne Dufka covered some of the bloodiest conflicts of the late twentieth century. The devastatingly powerful and intimate images in this book chart revolutions and coups, separatist movements, and mass atrocities across nine different countries on three continents.  Starting in El Salvador during the Cold War, This Is War moves onto Bosnia, and then Africa, where Dufka reported on the Rwandan genocide and conflicts in South Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Ethiopia, and the Congo. Her photographs are as brutal as they are tender, as mournful as they are meaningful, and are, above all, a testament to the profound toll conflict leaves in its wake. Her images interrogate abuse of power, celebrate defiance, and seek out the humanity of civilians and combatants who lives were torn apart by war.    More than just a documentary, This is War is an extraordinary photographic record of war and personal enlightenment. It adds to the historical record of many under-covered conflicts and of the role of women in photojournalism, and urges the viewer to interrogate why conflict in many countries covered in the book, persist to this day.    After leaving photojournalism, Dufka went on to a career as a war crimes investigator, for which she was, in 2003, awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.  In her introduction to This is War, she notes: “These images beseech us to work harder to honor those who have perished and protect the rest of us from humanity’s worst, most abject failure: its capacity for war.�

"Humane yet often horrifying, Tell Me How It Ends offers a compelling, intimate look at a continuing crisis-and its ongoing cost in an age of increasing urgency." -Jeremy Garber, Powell's Books "Valeria Luiselli's extended essay on her volunteer work translating for child immigrants confronts with compassion and honesty the problem of the North American refugee crisis. It's a rare thing: a book everyone should read." -Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books"Tell Me How It Ends evokes empathy as it educates. It is a vital contribution to the body of post-Trump work being published in early 2017."-Katharine Solheim, Unabridged Bookstore "While this essay is brilliant for exactly what it depicts, it helps open larger questions, which we're ever more on the precipice of now, of where all of this will go, how all of this might end. Is this a story, or is this beyond a story? Valeria Luiselli is one of those brave and eloquent enough to help us see."-Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company "Appealing to the language of the United States' fraught immigration policy, Luiselli exposes the cracks in this foundation. Herself an immigrant, she highlights the human cost of its brokenness, as well as the hope that it (rather than walls) might be rebuilt."-Brad Johnson, Diesel Bookstore "The bureaucratic labyrinth of immigration, the dangers of searching for a better life, all of this and more is contained in this brief and profound work. Tell Me How It Ends is not just relevant, it's essential."-Mark Haber, Brazos Bookstore

With unprecedented access to the Cuban Government's archives and total co-operation from Che's widow, Aleida March, as well as access to hitherto unpublished documents, including several of Che's personal diaries, this biography of one of history's most fascinating figures by critically-acclaimed New York Times journalist Jon Lee Anderson is truly definitive and monumental - not least because its creation solved a twenty-eight-year-old mystery: the whereabouts of Che Guevara's body... 'Masterly and absorbing' -- The Sunday Times 'Brilliantly evoked... The portrait is now as complete as it will ever be' -- The Times Literary Supplement 'Absorbing and convincing... an indispensable work of contemporary history' ? Guardian 'Probably the best biography I have read' -- ***** Reader review 'It's hard to imagine that this work can be bettered' -- ***** Reader review 'Simply outstanding' -- ***** Reader review 'A terrific read and genuinely the type of book you can't put down after you start reading......' -- ***** Reader review *************************************************************** A myth in his own lifetime; an international martyr-figure upon his death; a revolutionary fighter; a military strategist; a social philosopher; an economist; a medical doctor; a friend and confidant of Fidel Castro. Che Guevara's dream was an epic one - to unite Latin America and the rest of the developing world through armed revolution, and to end once and for all the poverty, injustice and petty nationalisms that had bled it for centuries. In the end Che failed in his quest but he is recognized as that one-in-a-million personality who just might have pulled it off. Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life shuttles between the revolutionary capitals of Havana and Algiers to the battlegrounds of Bolivia and the Congo; from the halls of power in Moscow and Washington to the exile havens of Miami, Mexico and Guatemala, in a gripping tale of revolution, international intrigue and covert operations. It has an epic sweep as it evokes an era of tumultuous change, describing major events like the Bay of Pigs invasion, the October Missile crisis and Kennedy's assassination, weaving in a cast of historic personalities including Castro, Kennedy, Kruschev, Mao Tse-tung, Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. With its painstaking research, never-before-seen documentation and compelling narrative, this is really the ultimate biography of a unique man.

Jon Lee focuses on key mathematical ideas leading to useful models and algorithms, rather than on data structures and implementation details, in this introductory graduate-level text for students of operations research, mathematics, and computer science. The viewpoint is polyhedral, and Lee also uses matroids as a unifying idea. Topics include linear and integer programming, polytopes, matroids and matroid optimization, shortest paths, and network flows. Problems and exercises are included throughout as well as references for further study.

Che Guevara's legend is unmatched in the modern world. Since his assassination in 1967 at the age of 39, the Argentine revolutionary has become an internationally famed icon, as revered as he is controversial. A Marxist ideologue, he sought to end global inequality by bringing down the American capitalist empire through armed guerrilla warfare - and has few rivals in the Cold War era as an apostle of change. In Che: A Revolutionary Life, Jon Lee Anderson and Jose Hernandez reveal the man behind the myth, creating a complex portrait of this passionate idealist. Adapted from Anderson's masterwork, Che transports us from young Ernesto's medical school days to the battlefields of the Cuban revolution; from his place of power alongside Castro to his disastrous sojourn in the Congo, and his violent end in Bolivia. Through renowned Mexican artist Jose Hernandez's drawings, we feel the bullets fly past in Cuba; smell the smoke of Castro's cigars; and scrutinize the face of the weary guerrilla as he is called 'Comandante' for the first time. With astonishing precision, colour, and drama, Che makes us first-hand witnesses to the revolutionary life and times of this historic figure. Combining Anderson's unprecedented access and research with Hernandez's emotionally gripping artwork, Che resurrects the man for a new generation of readers.

Many engineering, operations, and scientific applications include a mixture of discrete and continuous decision variables and nonlinear relationships involving the decision variables that have a pronounced effect on the set of feasible and optimal solutions. Mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problems combine the numerical difficulties of handling nonlinear functions with the challenge of optimizing in the context of nonconvex functions and discrete variables. MINLP is one of the most flexible modeling paradigms available for optimization; but because its scope is so broad, in the most general cases it is hopelessly intractable. Nonetheless, an expanding body of researchers and practitioners - including chemical engineers, operations researchers, industrial engineers, mechanical engineers, economists, statisticians, computer scientists, operations managers, and mathematical programmers - are interested in solving large-scale MINLP instances.

A New York Times Notable Book of the year. Acclaimed around the world and a national best-seller, this is the definitive work on Che Guevara, the dashing rebel whose epic dream was to end poverty and injustice in Latin America and the developing world through armed revolution. Jon Lee Anderson's biography traces Che's extraordinary life, from his comfortable Argentine upbringing to the battlefields of the Cuban revolution, from the halls of power in Castro's government to his failed campaign in the Congo and assassination in the Bolivian jungle. Anderson has had unprecedented access to the personal archives maintained by Guevara's widow and carefully guarded Cuban government documents. He has conducted extensive interviews with Che's comrades--some of whom speak here for the first time--and with the CIA men and Bolivian officers who hunted him down. Anderson broke the story of where Guevara's body was buried, which led to the exhumation and state burial of the bones. Many of the details of Che's life have long been cloaked in secrecy and intrigue. Meticulously researched and full of exclusive information, Che Guevara illuminates as never before this mythic figure who embodied the high-water mark of revolutionary communism as a force in history.

Jon Lee focuses on key mathematical ideas leading to useful models and algorithms, rather than on data structures and implementation details, in this introductory graduate-level text for students of operations research, mathematics, and computer science. The viewpoint is polyhedral, and Lee also uses matroids as a unifying idea. Topics include linear and integer programming, polytopes, matroids and matroid optimization, shortest paths, and network flows. Problems and exercises are included throughout as well as references for further study.

New Yorker staff writer Jon Lee Anderson arrived in Afghanistan to report for the magazine ten days before U.S. bombers began pounding Al Qaeda and Taliban forces. His dispatches provide an unprecedented and riveting on-the-ground account of the Afghan conflict, and his e-mails to the magazine -- selections of which frame the pieces here -- paint a vivid behind-the-scenes portrait of war journalism. From the battle for the Taliban bastion of Kunduz and the interim government's clumsy takeover of Kabul, to the search for Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora caves and the truth of Al Qaeda's assassination of charismatic Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud -- two days before September 11, 2001 -- Anderson offers an unprecedented look into the forces that shape the conflict and the players who may threaten Afghanistan's future. In the distinguished tradition of New Yorker war reporting, The Lion's Grave illuminates a region to which we will be inextricably bound for some time to come.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Combinatorial Optimization, ISCO 2018, held in Marrakesh, Marocco, in April 2018. The 35 revised full papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 75 submissions. The symposium aims to bring together researchers from all the communities related to combinatorial optimization, including algorithms and complexity, mathematical programming and operations research.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Integer Programming and Combinatorial Optimization, IPCO 2014, held in Bonn, Germany, in June 2014. The 34 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 143 submissions. The conference is a forum for researchers and practitioners working on various aspects of integer programming and combinatorial optimization. The aim is to present recent developments in theory, computation, and applications in these areas. The scope of IPCO is viewed in a broad sense, to include algorithmic and structural results in integer programming and combinatorial optimization as well as revealing computational studies and novel applications of discrete optimization to practical problems.

During the years he spent among the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq Wilfred Thesiger came to understand, admire and share a way of life that had endured for many centuries. Travelling from village to village by canoe, he won acceptance by dispensing medicines and treating the sick. In this account of his time there he pays tribute to the hospitality, loyalty, courage and endurance of the people, describes their impressive reed houses, the waterways and lakes teeming with wildlife, the herding of buffalo and hunting of wild boar, moments of tragedy and moments of pure comedy, all in vivid, engaging detail. Untouched by the modern world until recently, these independent people, their way of life and their surroundings have suffered widespread destruction under the regime of Saddam Hussein. Wilfred Thesiger's magnificent account of his time spent among them is a moving testament to their now threatened culture and the landscape they inhabit.

El Salvador and Honduras have had the highest homicide rates in the world over the past ten years, with Guatemala close behind. Every day more than 1,000 people-men, women, and children-flee these three countries for North America. Oscar Martinez, author of The Beast, named one of the best books of the year by the Economist, Mother Jones, and the Financial Times, fleshes out these stark figures with true stories, producing a jarringly beautiful and immersive account of life in deadly locations. Martinez travels to Nicaraguan fishing towns, southern Mexican brothels where Central American women are trafficked, isolated Guatemalan jungle villages, and crime-ridden Salvadoran slums. With his precise and empathetic reporting, he explores the underbelly of these troubled places. He goes undercover to drink with narcos, accompanies police patrols, rides in trafficking boats and hides out with a gang informer. The result is an unforgettable portrait of a region of fear and a subtle analysis of the North American roots and reach of the crisis, helping to explain why this history of violence should matter to all of us.

Bill Thomas co-writes and directs this military thriller. As the Napoleonic Wars rage across Europe, wounded British soldier John Cross (Matthew Neal) is forced to go back behind enemy lines to investigate a mysterious illness rumoured to be plaguing his fellow fighters. After being captured by French soldiers, John discovers a plot to resurrect fallen soldiers and meets a prisoner willing to reveal the truth about its origins...

(Editorial Award - A*: full book-length; professionally proofread; with no extremism)

For sample pages see www.classyliterature.com

"This is the story of a knowing scoundrel, and of what became of him."

A Coward in Modern China is a travel comedy, crime caper and adventure - based on the escapades of a willful rascal: bogus professor Robert Runworth. Set largely in contemporary Beijing, and partly in California, it is raunchy and mischievous in its plot and action. Yet the pages are also classically stylish; and historically detailed in their account of life in China today. The book is always entertaining, by its exotic setting and fascinating insights as much as its farcical humor.

Here is a good old-fashioned yarn in the tradition of the Flashman series. Indeed, Runworth is of mixed American and British ancestry. The narrator's voice has both an up-to-date quality and the timeless feel of more classical literature. Its main character is a thoughtful villain, rather like Dexter.

Therefore, like all truly entertaining but serious literature, and laugh-out-loud comedies, the 'A Coward in. . .' series is not for the politically correct.

Written by British author, Jon Lee Junior, who has lived and taught in Asia for 12 years.

Plot Summary

Main Plot: Runworth was originally a trainee police officer with LAPD. However, he was fired and had to turn to teaching English abroad because he was an "accidental and peripheral" figure in the Rodney King incident. This book sees him twenty years on, and in need of settling down and getting married. As an ex-pat in China, the laughable scoundrel hopes for a few more un-threatening years of 'living like a lord' amongst the local poor. Professor Runworth has two more secrets. One is that he continues to (fraudulently) claim a disability benefit from the State of California, for an alleged back injury. The second is that although Robert Runworth is a big man physically - he is also a born coward. His bad luck, then, is that he always seems to find himself in confrontations which he'd rather avoid. At one point, the hefty and rotund westerner is faced down by a Chinese peasant with restricted growth syndrome.

Sub-plot: The college in which Runworth is teaching is involved in an illegal immigration scam for Chinese students entering the US. Of course, the rascally Professor Runworth would not hold any ethical issues with this. However, the campus mailman accidentally confuses some letters containing Runworth's disability checks from California with a package of forged US passports. Also, the Beijing Police and immigration authorities are suspicious that something is afoot in the college. When they look into Runworth's background, they realize that they can blackmail him with the threat of disclosing his past in America. Runworth has no choice but to help them, as a stoolie.

The Plots Intertwine: The criminal gang which operate the illegal visa scheme decide to ice the bungling professor who has accidentally intercepted their mail. Runworth is caught three times by the gang of conmen. However, they underestimate his cowardliness and ability to run fast. The first time, he flees from an intended trap of a bar brawl. The second time, the gang capture Runworth and decide to feed him to a herd of racing pigs. But, to the shock of the slender Chinese, the overweight Westerner outruns both the pigs and his human pursuers.

Indeed, one of the humorous themes of the book is how the (usually slim) Chinese see us (often overweight) westerners.

Runworth's Women: The bogus Professor of English is an old-fashioned "licentious rake," and proud of the fact. However, because he is also a well-paid academic with US citizenship, the Chinese women he dates always intend to marry him - rather than only to sleep with him. Eventually, Runworth uses the on-going scam of illegal student visas at his college to marry two women: one for money & one for af

Complete 144 poems all in one book created over a few years that have been inspired and truly dedicated by brief moments in peoples lives.