Books With Flair

This book teaches the ideas behind adding chords to melodies. It begins with basic chords and progressions, and moves to more complex ideas. With an introduction and two appendices. Two CDs of additional material.

"[A] provocative page-turner." —People “In Parkhurst’s deft treatment, Harmony becomes a story of our time. . . Parkhurst cements herself as a writer capable of astonishing humanity and exquisite prose.” —Washington Post “Gorgeously written and patently original.” —Jodi Picoult, New York Times bestselling author of Leaving Time From the New York Times bestselling author of The Dogs of Babel, a taut, emotionally wrenching story of how a seemingly "normal" family could become desperate enough to leave everything behind and move to a "family camp" in New Hampshire--a life-changing experience that alters them forever. How far will a mother go to save her family? The Hammond family is living in DC, where everything seems to be going just fine, until it becomes clear that the oldest daughter, Tilly, is developing abnormally--a mix of off-the-charts genius and social incompetence. Once Tilly--whose condition is deemed undiagnosable--is kicked out of the last school in the area, her mother Alexandra is out of ideas. The family turns to Camp Harmony and the wisdom of child behavior guru Scott Bean for a solution. But what they discover in the woods of New Hampshire will push them to the very limit. Told from the alternating perspectives of both Alexandra and her younger daughter Iris (the book's Nick Carraway), this is a unputdownable story about the strength of love, the bonds of family, and how you survive the unthinkable.

For the first time, His Royal Highness Charles, the Prince of Wales, shares his views on how mankind’s most pressing modern challenges are rooted in our disharmony with nature. In the vein of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and Van Jones’ Green Collar Economy, Prince Charles presents the compelling case that solutions to our most dire crises—from climate change to poverty—lie in regaining a balance with the world around us.

Calculus has been used in solving many scientific and engineering problems. For optimization problems, however, the differential calculus technique sometimes has a drawback when the objective function is step-wise, discontinuous, or multi-modal, or when decision variables are discrete rather than continuous. Thus, researchers have recently turned their interests into metaheuristic algorithms that have been inspired by natural phenomena such as evolution, animal behavior, or metallic annealing. This book especially focuses on a music-inspired metaheuristic algorithm, harmony search. Interestingly, there exists an analogy between music and optimization: each musical instrument corresponds to each decision variable; musical note corresponds to variable value; and harmony corresponds to solution vector. Just like musicians in Jazz improvisation play notes randomly or based on experiences in order to find fantastic harmony, variables in the harmony search algorithm have random values or previously-memorized good values in order to find optimal solution.

"If one can be balanced and harmonious in oneself, then the being that is fundamentally so is clear and aware, awake in quietude, accurate in action; thus one can respond to the less changes in the world." The Book of Balance and Harmony is a classic thirteenth-century anthology of Taoist writings, including essays, conversations, poetry, and songs from the School of Complete Reality. The writings combine the essences of Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism into an alchemical elixir teaching Vitality, Energy, and Spirit -- the "three treasures" of Taoism that promise mental and physical well-being. This first translation into English of a major text of Taoism is rered and introduced by Thomas Cleary, who has been called the premier translator of Buddhist and Taoist texts. Among his many published works are original translations of monuments of Oriental spirituality, such as The Flower Ornament Scripture, the most sophisticated and comprehensive of primary Buddhist sourcebooks; The Blue Cliff Record, one of the major literary classics of Zen Buddhism; and Understanding Reality, the definitive classic of Taoist spiritual alchemy.

The first paper describes a parallel model designed to solve a class of relatively simple problems from elementary physics, and discusses the implications for models of problem solving in general. The authors show how one of the most salient features of problem solving, sequentiality, can emerge naturally within a parallel model that has no explicit knowledge of how to sequence analysis. This model exploits a new type of parallel distributed processing that employs stochastic processors and is based on a formal mapping between parallel computation and thermal physics. The mathematical theory is this type of processing-harmony theory-is discussed in the second and third papers.

Assisted by Scott Olsen (Central Florida Community College, USA) This volume is a result of the author's four decades of research in the field of Fibonacci numbers and the Golden Section and their applications. It provides a broad introduction to the fascinating and beautiful subject of the ?Mathematics of Harmony,? a new interdisciplinary direction of modern science. This direction has its origins in ?The Elements? of Euclid and has many unexpected applications in contemporary mathematics (a new approach to a history of mathematics, the generalized Fibonacci numbers and the generalized golden proportions, the ?golden? algebraic equations, the generalized Binet formulas, Fibonacci and ?golden? matrices), theoretical physics (new hyperbolic models of Nature) and computer science (algorithmic measurement theory, number systems with irrational radices, Fibonacci computers, ternary mirror-symmetrical arithmetic, a new theory of coding and cryptography based on the Fibonacci and ?golden? matrices).The book is intended for a wide audience including mathematics teachers of high schools, students of colleges and universities and scientists in the field of mathematics, theoretical physics and computer science. The book may be used as an advanced textbook by graduate students and even ambitious undergraduates in mathematics and computer science.

The book covers different aspects of real-world applications of optimization algorithms. It provides insights from the Fourth International Conference on Harmony Search, Soft Computing and Applications held at BML Munjal University, Gurgaon, India on February 7–9, 2018. It consists of research articles on novel and newly proposed optimization algorithms; the theoretical study of nature-inspired optimization algorithms; numerically established results of nature-inspired optimization algorithms; and real-world applications of optimization algorithms and synthetic benchmarking of optimization algorithms.

This book is a timely evaluation of how a harmonious business environment can be created and managed successfully in an increasingly turbulent era. It illustrates how diversity within East-West business is valuable to the development of new approaches in managing harmony for practitioners.