Robert Finch

John Elder

W. W. Norton is pleased to announce that The Norton Book of Nature Writing is now available in a paperback college edition.

The Norton Book of Nature Writing

Giovanni Seni

Ensemble methods have been called the most influential development in Data Mining and Machine Learning in the past decade. They combine multiple models into one usually more accurate than the best of its components. Ensembles can provide a critical boost to industrial challenges -- from investment timing to drug discovery, and fraud detection to recommendation systems -- where predictive accuracy is more vital than model interpretability. Ensembles are useful with all modeling algorithms, but this book focuses on decision trees to explain them most clearly. After describing trees and their strengths and weaknesses, the authors provide an overview of regularization -- today understood to be a key reason for the superior performance of modern ensembling algorithms. The book continues with a clear description of two recent developments: Importance Sampling (IS) and Rule Ensembles (RE). IS reveals classic ensemble methods -- bagging, random forests, and boosting -- to be special cases of a single algorithm, thereby showing how to improve their accuracy and speed. REs are linear rule models derived from decision tree ensembles. They are the most interpretable version of ensembles, which is essential to applications such as credit scoring and fault diagnosis. Lastly, the authors explain the paradox of how ensembles achieve greater accuracy on new data despite their (apparently much greater) complexity. This book is aimed at novice and advanced analytic researchers and practitioners -- especially in Engineering, Statistics, and Computer Science. Those with little exposure to ensembles will learn why and how to employ this breakthrough method, and advanced practitioners will gain insight into building even more powerful models. Throughout, snippets of code in R are provided to illustrate the algorithms described and to encourage the reader to try the techniques. The authors are industry experts in data mining and machine learning who are also adjunct professors and popular speakers. Although early pioneers in discovering and using ensembles, they here distill and clarify the recent groundbreaking work of leading academics (such as Jerome Friedman) to bring the benefits of ensembles to practitioners. Table of Contents: Ensembles Discovered / Predictive Learning and Decision Trees / Model Complexity, Model Selection and Regularization / Importance Sampling and the Classic Ensemble Methods / Rule Ensembles and Interpretation Statistics / Ensemble Complexity

Improving Accuracy Through Combining Predictions

Ensemble Methods in Data Mining

Learning Ruby has never been this fast and easy, or fun!Veteran Codemy.com programmer John Elder walks you step by step through the ins and outs of Ruby Programming. Written for the absolute beginner, you don't need any programming experience to dive in and get started with this book. Follow along as John teaches you to set up a development environment and write your first program. You'll learn about Variables, Math, IF/THEN Statements, Array, Hashes, Loops, Methods and much more.By the end, you'll be well on your way to becoming a professional Ruby coder!Build on your skills with practice exercises at the end of each chapter and build a math flashcard game using all the skills you've learned throughout the book. It really is this easy to learn Ruby!*AUTHOR UPDATE: C9, the development environment we used in the book, was purchased by Amazon and is no longer accepting new users unless you sign up through my education account at Codemy.com/c9

Beginners Guide Series

Intro To Ruby Programming

More people are starting tech companies today than ever before. Tech Incubators are popping up all across the country, and shared office space is available everywhere. When people think about building a startup, they immediately jump on the seemingly tried and true path...find a co-founder, get into an incubator, start pitching venture capitalists on your business plan, then crush it! But there's another way...a better way...a smarter way....the Smart Startup way. In the Smart Startup, veteran serial entrepreneur John Elder describes his tried and true method for building startups without the need of a co-founder, an incubator, or venture capital money. John first started building Smart Startups in the mid 90's when he created one of the Internets earliest advertising exchanges and sold it to a publicly traded company at the height of the first dot-com boom. After that he built a b2b biotech company and sold it to a group of investment bankers before developing one of the earliest desktop SEO software titles used by over three million people. If you've ever dreamed of starting your own online business, this is the book for you.

How to Crush It Without Falling Into the Venture Capital Trap

The Smart Startup

Learning Ruby on Rails has never been this fast and easy, or fun! Veteran Codemy.com programmer John Elder walks you step by step through the ins and outs of Rails for Web Development. Written for the absolute beginner, you don't need any programming experience to dive in and get started with this book. Follow along as John builds a Pinterest-style website from start to finish that allows people to sign up, log in and out, edit their profile, upload images to the database and style those images on the screen. By the end, you'll be well on your way to becoming a professional Ruby on Rails coder!

Learn Rails the Fast and Easy Way!

Learn Ruby on Rails for Web Development

The Scribner Writers Series has set the standard for literary reference for more than 25 years. In addition to addressing the lives and careers of important writers, the articles discuss the themes and styles of major works and place them in pertinent historical, social and political contexts for today's readers. Novelists, playwrights, essayists, poets, short story writers, and more recently, genre writers in science fiction and mystery, are all expertly discussed in the more than 16 sets comprising this series.The essays in the set combine biography, criticism, and in some cases, original interviews to tell the story of each author. This set includes 70 biographical/critical essays on such writers as Rachel Carson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Gary Snyder and 12 general subject essays.

American Nature Writers

P. T. Barnum

They say it's easier to make money than it is to KEEP money. That may or may not be true. Either way, the "Golden Rules of Making Money" is filled with timeless advice for both making and keeping money. Written by famed showman P.T. Barnum and edited by renowned marketer John Elder (MarketingFool.com) this classic has been updated for present day. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: John Elder is a pioneer in Internet Marketing who created one of the first Internet advertising networks back in 1997. He sold it to a publicly traded company at the height of the dot com boom and then went on to create the best-selling Submission-Spider search engine submission software that's been used by over 3 million individuals and small businesses in over 45 countries. Today John writes a daily marketing blog at MarketingFool.com that focuses on Adsense and Affiliate marketing. He also runs FlatplanetMedia.com to handle his various business projects. John graduated with honors with a degree in economics from Washington University in St. Louis where he was an artsci scholar. You can contact him at JohnElder.org

Golden Rules of Making Money

A Book of Revelations about Patients' Rights, Complaints Handling and Compensation in the United Kingdom and Elsewhere in Europe

Fair Play and Foul?

This landmark work explores how our attitudes toward nature are mirrored in and influenced by poetry. Showing us a resurgent vision of harmony between nature and humanity in the work of some of our most widely read poets, Imagining the Earth reveals the power of poetry to identify, interpret, and celebrate a wide range of issues related to nature and our place in it.

Poetry and the Vision of Nature

Imagining the Earth

Presents a compilation of prose nature writing containing selections by such authors as Henry David Thoreau, Charles Darwin, Edward Hoagland, Annie Dillard, and Terry Tempest Williams.

The Tradition in English

Nature Writing

James Welsh

Jim Welsh

Introduction to Pascal

Copie of a Letter Sent Into Scotlande

Peter Hillary

A reflective memoir by a world-famous explorer delves into the astonishing adventures of his career, including his trips to the Himalayas, the Andes, the Arctic, and an almost fatal trip to the South Pole, as well as detailed accounts of travels with the likes of Neil Armstrong and his father. 50,000 first printing.

A Lifetime Spent on the Edge

In the Ghost Country

Using Robert Frost's poem "Directive" as a guide, the author reflects on nature as he experienced it on a series of hikes in Vermont's Green Mountains

Reading the Mountains of Home

Hertha Dawn Wong

Indigenous Tales of Nature from Around the WorldAn array of vivid responses to nature from indigenous oral traditions in Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia, and the Americas."A kind of Bible from the natural world." -Los Angeles Times

John Elder

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