Steven Peterson – författare

This book provides a careful examination of the possible influence of birth order on political achievement and behavior. The authors look at American presidents, Supreme Court justices, United States senators and representatives, and the careers of an entire West Point class. For a comparative dimension, they also study British Prime Ministers, U.N. Secretaries General, post-Renaissance popes, leaders of the U.S.S.R., and great generals through the ages. What the authors find is that there is no measurable relationship between birth order (and being first born) and political achievement and behavior. These findings cast considerable doubt on the long standing belief that birth order has an important impact on either achievement or behavior. The authors clarify that very few studies suggesting such a relationship do not stand up under careful scrutiny. This basic conclusion and other curious findings from the study make Birth Order And Political Behavior insightful reading for almost any behavioral scientist. The book will also be relevant to courses in child development, clinical psychology, psychiatry, political science, anthropology, and sociology.

A unique perspective on applied investment theory and risk management from the Senior Risk Officer of a major pension fund Investment Theory and Risk Management is a practical guide to today's investment environment. The book's sophisticated quantitative methods are examined by an author who uses these methods at the Virginia Retirement System and teaches them at the Virginia Commonwealth University. In addition to showing how investment performance can be evaluated, using Jensen's Alpha, Sharpe's Ratio, and DDM, he delves into four types of optimal portfolios (one that is fully invested, one with targeted returns, another with no short sales, and one with capped investment allocations).In addition, the book provides valuable insights on risk, and topics such as anomalies, factor models, and active portfolio management. Other chapters focus on private equity, structured credit, optimal rebalancing, data problems, and Monte Carlo simulation. Contains investment theory and risk management spreadsheet models based on the author's own real-world experience with stock, bonds, and alternative assetsOffers a down-to-earth guide that can be used on a daily basis for making common financial decisions with a new level of quantitative sophistication and rigorWritten by the Director of Research and Senior Risk Officer for the Virginia Retirement System and an Associate Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University's School of BusinessInvestment Theory and Risk Management empowers both the technical and non-technical reader with the essential knowledge necessary to understand and manage risks in any corporate or economic environment.

No matter what type of application you are writing, you will find something in this book to help you make your app that little bit cooler.The book opens with Wolfgang Ante, the developer behind the Frenzic puzzle game, showing how timers, animation, and intelligence are used to make game play engaging.

This book challenges the conventional idea of what constitutes the physical form of the contemporary city. Observing the absence of extended urban fabrics - the missing urbanism - in the new global cities developed today, it argues that these cities are merely statistical accumulations of density that lack the positive attributes of a genuine urban condition. Cities as urban places cannot be made by individual buildings alone but rather depend on the intertwined combination of an architecture that is bound to the creation of public spaces and streets, and engaged in the structure of urban blocks to form a complex field pattern of interactive solids and voids. Broad in scope, the book explores the nature of the fundamental relationship between architecture and urbanism as one of spatial formation. As an independently designed entity, the city forms the ordering framework in which architecture is partially subordinated to the mutual sustainability of the overall urban fabric. If a new urban architecture is to be an integral constituent of public place making, it must be composed using a radically different paradigm of positive, figurally constructed 'space' rather than the indefinite background of 'anti-space' as exemplified in the chapter on Mies van der Rohe's architectural quest for the ineffable modern void. These two different spatial models are explored in depth in the eponymous article, 'Space and Anti Space,' first published in the Harvard Architectural Review in 1980, which forms the core of the book and postulates that the underlying attitudes toward spatial formation, at both domestic and urban scales, determine our ability to shape place and human experience. In a series of essays, articles and urban projects extensively illustrated by plans, analytic diagrams, and dramatic images, this book makes a visual and verbal argument for the steps that need to be taken to re-urbanise the city in order to achieve an urbanity consisting of multiple discrete places that depend on the essential concept of contained geometrical space. These spatial ideas are illustrated in this book in three proposals: for Rome, in 'Roma Interrotta,' 1979; Paris, the 'Consultation Internationale pour L'Aménagement du Quartier des Halles,' 1980; and New York in the 'World Trade Center Site Innovative Design Study,' 2002.