The book gives an accessible account of modern probabilistic methods for analyzing combinatorial structures and algorithms. It will be an useful guide for graduate students and researchers.Special features included: a simple treatment of Talagrand's inequalities and their applications; an overview and many carefully worked out examples of the probabilistic analysis of combinatorial algorithms; a discussion of the "exact simulation" algorithm (in the context of Markov Chain Monte Carlo Methods); a general method for finding asymptotically optimal or near optimal graph colouring, showing how the probabilistic method may be fine-tuned to exploit the structure of the underlying graph; a succinct treatment of randomized algorithms and derandomization techniques.

An intimate examination of the everyday lives and suffering of Mexican migrants and indigenous people in our contemporary food system.   An anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, Seth Holmes shows how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and healthcare. Holmes’s material is visceral and powerful. He trekked with his companions illegally through the desert into Arizona and was jailed with them before they were deported. He lived with indigenous families in the mountains of Oaxaca and in farm labor camps in the United States, planted and harvested corn, picked strawberries, and accompanied sick workers to clinics and hospitals. This “embodied anthropology� deepens our theoretical understanding of how health equity is undermined by a normalization of migrant suffering, the natural endpoint of systemic dehumanization, exploitation, and oppression that clouds any sense of empathy for “invisible workers.�   Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies is far more than an ethnography or supplementary labor studies text; Holmes tells the stories of food production workers from as close to the ground as possible, revealing often theoretically discussed social inequalities as irreparable bodily damage done. This book substantiates the suffering of those facing the danger of crossing the border, threatened with deportation, or otherwise caught up in the structural violence of a system promising work but endangering or ignoring the human rights and health of its workers. All of the book award money and royalties from the sales of this book have been donated to farm worker unions, farm worker organizations, and farm worker projects in consultation with farm workers who appear in the book.

Leave nothing to chance. This cliche embodies the common belief that ran domness has no place in carefully planned methodologies, every step should be spelled out, each i dotted and each t crossed. In discrete mathematics at least, nothing could be further from the truth. Introducing random choices into algorithms can improve their performance. The application of proba bilistic tools has led to the resolution of combinatorial problems which had resisted attack for decades. The chapters in this volume explore and celebrate this fact. Our intention was to bring together, for the first time, accessible discus sions of the disparate ways in which probabilistic ideas are enriching discrete mathematics. These discussions are aimed at mathematicians with a good combinatorial background but require only a passing acquaintance with the basic definitions in probability (e.g. expected value, conditional probability). A reader who already has a firm grasp on the area will be interested in the original research, novel syntheses, and discussions of ongoing developments scattered throughout the book. Some of the most convincing demonstrations of the power of these tech niques are randomized algorithms for estimating quantities which are hard to compute exactly. One example is the randomized algorithm of Dyer, Frieze and Kannan for estimating the volume of a polyhedron. To illustrate these techniques, we consider a simple related problem. Suppose S is some region of the unit square defined by a system of polynomial inequalities: Pi (x. y) ~ o.

An intimate examination of the everyday lives and suffering of Mexican migrants and indigenous people in our contemporary food system.   An anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, Seth Holmes shows how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and healthcare. Holmes’s material is visceral and powerful. He trekked with his companions illegally through the desert into Arizona and was jailed with them before they were deported. He lived with indigenous families in the mountains of Oaxaca and in farm labor camps in the United States, planted and harvested corn, picked strawberries, and accompanied sick workers to clinics and hospitals. This “embodied anthropology� deepens our theoretical understanding of how health equity is undermined by a normalization of migrant suffering, the natural endpoint of systemic dehumanization, exploitation, and oppression that clouds any sense of empathy for “invisible workers.�   Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies is far more than an ethnography or supplementary labor studies text; Holmes tells the stories of food production workers from as close to the ground as possible, revealing often theoretically discussed social inequalities as irreparable bodily damage done. This book substantiates the suffering of those facing the danger of crossing the border, threatened with deportation, or otherwise caught up in the structural violence of a system promising work but endangering or ignoring the human rights and health of its workers. All of the book award money and royalties from the sales of this book have been donated to farm worker unions, farm worker organizations, and farm worker projects in consultation with farm workers who appear in the book.