Jim Davies

The first-ever book on the science of imagination, which sheds light on both the complex inner-workings of our mind and the ways in which we can channel imagination for a better life. We don’t think of imagination the way that we should. The word is often only associated with children, artists and daydreamers, but in reality, imagination is an integral part of almost every action and decision that we make. Simply put, imagination is a person’s ability to create scenarios in his or her head: this can include everything from planning a grocery list, to honing a golf swing, and even to having religious hallucinations. And while imagination has positive connotations, it can also lead to more pernicious outcomes including decreased productivity and cooperation, and much worse, the continuous reliving of past trauma. The human brain is remarkable in its ability to imagine—to create worlds and situations outside of its reality. We can imagine complex possible futures, fantasy worlds, and jars of peanut butter. We can use our imaginations to make us relaxed or anxious, and the most impressive feat of human imagination may be our ability to use it in creative endeavors. Sitting in a chair, with our eyes closed, we can imagine what the world might be, and construct elaborate plans. With such power, we have an obligation to use it for good?to make things better for ourselves, and for the world. People have been fascinated with the machination of the human brain and its ability to imagine for centuries, but until now, there have been no popular science books that are dedicated to imagination. There are books on creativity, dreams, memory, and the mind in general, but how exactly do we create those scenes in our head? With chapters ranging from hallucination and imaginary friends to how imagination can make you happier and more productive, Jim Davies' Imagination will help us explore the full potential of our own mind.

The Science of Your Mind's Greatest Power

Imagination

A crisp and sparkling blend of cognitive science and human behavior that offers meaningful and attainable pathways towards becoming our best selves. Why do we feel like in order to be productive, happy, or good, we must sacrifice everything else? Is it possible to feel all three at once? Without even knowing it, we’re doing things everyday to sabotage ourselves and our societies, habits that prevent us from optimizing long term happiness. Where most books imagine solutions that, when enacted, fail to fundamentally improve our lives, Jim Davies grounds his research in cognitive science to show you not only what works, but how much it works. Being the Person Your Dog Thinks You Are shows us how we can use science to become our best selves, using resources we already have within our own brains. Davies' book challenges and inspires us to approach the big picture while also staying mindful of the everyday details in real life. Davies proves why multitasking is bad for you, when a little unmindfulness can be good for you, how to best justify which charities to donate to, and how to hack your brain. The most surprising truth Davies offers us spreads across these pages like wildfire: you too can lead an optimally good life, not through uprooting your life from the ground up, but from adapting your mentality to your given present. A better life doesn’t need to look like a massive change—like our beloved dogs who already view us as our best selves, it’s already much closer than you think.

The Science of a Better You

Being the Person Your Dog Thinks You Are

A sweeping look at what grabs our attentions that pulls back the curtain on the psychological and evolutionary reasons that everyone is drawn to religion, conspiracy theories, and the news

Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One with the Universe

James Welch

Kevin Feeney

To be effective, data-intensive systems require extensive ongoing customisation to reflect changing user requirements, organisational policies, and the structure and interpretation of the data they hold. Manual customisation is expensive, time-consuming, and error-prone. In large complex systems, the value of the data can be such that exhaustive testing is necessary before any new feature can be added to the existing design. In most cases, the precise details of requirements, policies and data will change during the lifetime of the system, forcing a choice between expensive modification and continued operation with an inefficient design.Engineering Agile Big-Data Systems outlines an approach to dealing with these problems in software and data engineering, describing a methodology for aligning these processes throughout product lifecycles. It discusses tools which can be used to achieve these goals, and, in a number of case studies, shows how the tools and methodology have been used to improve a variety of academic and business systems.

Engineering Agile Big-Data Systems

Jeremy Gibbons

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Integrated Formal Methods, IFM 2007, held in Oxford, UK. It addresses all aspects of formal methods integration, including of a process of analysis or design application of formal methods to analysis or design, extension of one method based upon the inclusion of ideas or concepts from others, and semantic integration or practical application.

6th International Conference, IFM 2007, Oxford, UK, July 2-5, 2007, Proceedings

Integrated Formal Methods

Jim Woodcook

Jeannette M. Wing

Formal methods are coming of age. Mathematical techniques and tools are now regarded as an important part of the development process in a wide range of industrial and governmental organisations. A transfer of technology into the mainstream of systems development is slowly, but surely, taking place. FM’99, the First World Congress on Formal Methods in the Development of Computing Systems, is a result, and a measure, of this new-found maturity. It brings an impressive array of industrial and applications-oriented papers that show how formal methods have been used to tackle real problems. These proceedings are a record of the technical symposium ofFM’99:alo- side the papers describingapplicationsofformalmethods,youwill ndtechnical reports,papers,andabstracts detailing new advances in formaltechniques,from mathematical foundations to practical tools. The World Congress is the successor to the four Formal Methods Europe Symposia, which in turn succeeded the four VDM Europe Symposia. This s- cession re?ects an increasing openness within the international community of researchers and practitioners: papers were submitted covering a wide variety of formal methods and application areas. The programmecommittee re?ects the Congress’s international nature, with a membership of 84 leading researchersfrom 38 di erent countries.The comm- tee was divided into 19 tracks, each with its own chair to oversee the reviewing process. Our collective task was a di cult one: there were 259 high-quality s- missions from 35 di erent countries.

World Congress on Formal Methods in the Developement of Computing Systems, Toulouse, France, September 20-24, 1999, Proceedings, Volume I

FM'99 - Formal Methods

Mike Barnett

Wolfram Schulte

Formal engineering methods are changing the way that software systems are - veloped.Withlanguageandtoolsupport,theyarebeingusedforautomaticcode generation, and for the automatic abstraction and checking of implementations. In the future, they will be used at every stage of development: requirements, speci?cation, design, implementation, testing, and documentation. The ICFEM series of conferences aims to bring together those interested in the application of formal engineering methods to computer systems. Researchers and practitioners, from industry, academia, and government, are encouraged to attend,andtohelpadvancethestateoftheart.Authorsarestronglyencouraged to make their ideas as accessible as possible, and there is a clear emphasis upon work that promises to bring practical, tangible bene?t: reports of case studies should have a conceptual message, theory papers should have a clear link to application, and papers describing tools should have an account of results. ICFEM 2004 was the sixth conference in the series, and the ?rst to be held in North America. Previous conferences were held in Singapore, China, UK, A- tralia, and Japan. The Programme Committee received 110 papers and selected 30forpresentation.The?nalversionsofthosepapersareincludedhere,together with 2-page abstracts for the 5 accepted tutorials, and shorter abstracts for the 4 invited talks.

6th International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods, ICFEM 2004, Seattle, WA, USA, November 8-12, 2004, Proceedings

Formal Methods and Software Engineering

Why do some things pass under the radar of our attention, but other things capture our interest? Why do some religions catch on and others fade away? What makes a story, a movie, or a book riveting? Why do some people keep watching the news even though it makes them anxious? The past 20 years have seen a remarkable flourishing of scientific research into exactly these kinds of questions. Professor Jim Davies' fascinating and highly accessible book, Riveted, reveals the evolutionary underpinnings of why we find things compelling, from art to religion and from sports to superstition. Compelling things fit our minds like keys in the ignition, turning us on and keeping us running, and yet we are often unaware of what makes these "keys" fit. What we like and don't like is almost always determined by subconscious forces, and when we try to consciously predict our own preferences we're often wrong. In one study of speed dating, people were asked what kinds of partners they found attractive. When the results came back, the participants' answers before the exercise had no correlation with who they actually found attractive in person! We are beginning to understand just how much the brain makes our decisions for us: we are rewarded with a rush of pleasure when we detect patterns, as the brain thinks we've discovered something significant; the mind urges us to linger on the news channel or rubberneck an accident in case it might pick up important survival information; it even pushes us to pick up People magazine in order to find out about changes in the social structure.Drawing on work from philosophy, anthropology, religious studies, psychology, economics, computer science, and biology, Davies offers a comprehensive explanation to show that in spite of the differences between the many things that we find compelling, they have similar effects on our minds and brains.

"For those on the home front, World War I was experienced primarily through words--yet people still wanted to see what the war was like. With photography still relatively new and complicated, and censorship limiting what could be shared, illustrators stepped into the breach. None produced work as remarkable as that of Fortunino Matania (1881-1963). Blessed with a photographic memory, and able to work at great speed, Matanie created illustrations that were unnervingly photographic in their realism. This book presents the entire collection of Matania's work from World War I for the first time. The works featured here are the result of regular trips to the Western Front as well as interviews with soldiers recovering in hospitals, where Matania would use toy soldiers to help him understand troop positions and movements. He would take that information back to his studio, where he had an enormous collection of uniforms, weapons, and other props to help make sure that every last detail of his finished picture was correct. The resulting images are an unmatched resource for understanding the war and how it was fought."

Matania and the First World War

Illustrating Armageddon

Rob Williams

John Simmons

Shakespeare's well-loved body of work is analyzed by 26 leading business writers, demonstrating how the truths of each play are still relevant in today's contemporary business world. In this fascinating collection of essays, themes as old as time—politics and power; double-speak and double-dealing; ambition and avarice—are brought to light with fresh insights into how modern management, workers, and corporations behave. Inspirational and thought-provoking, these pertinent observations serve to cultivate new and creative lessons for today's workplace.

Shakespeare's Role in Modern Business

The Bard & Co

Leila Silva

Adenilso Simao

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 13th Brazilian Symposium on Formal Methods, SBMF 2010, held in Natal, Brazil, in November 2010. The 18 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 55 submissions. The papers presented cover a broad range of foundational and methodological issues in formal methods for the design and analysis of software and hardware systems as well as applications in various domains.

13th Brazilian Symposium on Formal Methods, SBMF 2010, Natal, Brazil, November 8-11, 2010, Revised Selected Papers

Formal Methods: Foundations and Applications

Tarjei Bekkedal

Erika Szyszczak

Mads Andenæs

This is the third book in the series Legal Issues of Services of General Interest. The book focuses upon a set of research questions on the recent developments in the emergence of services of general interest (SGIs) as a distinct EU concept. This includes, inter alia, the emergence of universal service obligations and the way they are regulated in the EU in primary and secondary law, the range of soft law communications adopted by the Commission to create a distinctive EU concept of SGIs, the residual role of hard law in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), the special problems created by Social Services of General Economic Interest and the interaction of procurement and state aid law with SGIs. A new perspective is offered in this book: some of the issues faced by the EU in accommodating SGIs into a regulatory framework are found also in the policy of the WTO and in least developed countries (LDCs).

Jim Davies

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