The Power Law

From an award-winning financial historian comes the gripping, character-driven story of venture capital and the world it made Innovations rarely come from "experts." Jeff Bezos was not a bookseller; Elon Musk was not in the auto industry. When it comes to innovation, a legendary venture capitalist told Sebastian Mallaby, the future cannot be predicted, it can only be discovered. Most attempts at discovery fail, but a few succeed at such a scale that they more than make up for everything else. That extreme ratio of success and failure is the power law that drives venture capital, Silicon Valley, the tech sector, and, by extension, the world. Drawing on unprecedented access to the most celebrated venture capitalists of all time, award-winning financial historian Sebastian Mallaby tells the story of this strange tribe of financiers who have funded the world's most successful companies, from Google to SpaceX to Alibaba. With a riveting blend of storytelling and analysis, The Power Law makes sense of the seeming randomness of success in venture capital, an industry that relies, for good and ill, on gut instinct and personality rather than spreadsheets and data. We learn the unvarnished truth about some of the most iconic triumphs and infamous disasters in the history of tech, from the comedy of errors that was the birth of Apple to the venture funding that fostered hubris at WeWork and Uber to the industry's notorious lack of women and ethnic minorities. Now the power law echoes around the world: it has transformed China's digital economy beyond recognition, and London is one of the top cities for venture capital investment. By taking us so deeply into the VCs' game, The Power Law helps us think about our own future through their eyes.

Discover new theoretical connections between stochastic phenomena and the structure of natural language with this powerful volume! Information Theory Meets Power Laws: Stochastic Processes and Language Models presents readers with a novel subtype of a probabilistic approach to language, which is based on statistical laws of texts and their analysis by means of information theory. The distinguished author insightfully and rigorously examines the linguistic and mathematical subject matter while eschewing needlessly abstract and superfluous constructions. The book begins with a less formal treatment of its subjects in the first chapter, introducing its concepts to readers without mathematical training and allowing those unfamiliar with linguistics to learn the book’s motivations. Despite its inherent complexity, Information Theory Meets Power Laws: Stochastic Processes and Language Models is a surprisingly approachable treatment of idealized mathematical models of human language. The author succeeds in developing some of the theory underlying fundamental stochastic and semantic phenomena, like strong nonergodicity, in a way that has not previously been seriously attempted. In doing so, he covers topics including: Zipf’s and Herdan’s laws for natural language Power laws for information, repetitions, and correlations Markov, finite-state,and Santa Fe processes Bayesian and frequentist interpretations of probability Ergodic decomposition, Kolmogorov complexity, and universal coding Theorems about facts and words Information measures for fields Rényi entropies, recurrence times, and subword complexity Asymptotically mean stationary processes Written primarily for mathematics graduate students and professionals interested in information theory or discrete stochastic processes, Information Theory Meets Power Laws: Stochastic Processes and Language Models also belongs on the bookshelves of doctoral students and researchers in artificial intelligence, computational and quantitative linguistics as well as physics of complex systems.

This fascinating book explores the connections between chaos theory, physics, biology, and mathematics. Its award-winning computer graphics, optical illusions, and games illustrate the concept of self-similarity, a typical property of fractals. The author -- hailed by Publishers Weekly as a modern Lewis Carroll -- conveys memorable insights in the form of puns and puzzles. 1992 edition.

Politics of the State Grid Corporation of China -- Electricity -- From the ministry to a corporation -- Overseeing SGCC: the contested regimes of central agencies -- State Grid Corporation of China -- SGCC in action: as a policy entrepreneur -- SGCC in action: as technology innovator -- SGCC in action: internationalisation

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 33rd annual European Conference on Information Retrieval Research, ECIR 2011, held in Dublin, Ireland, in April 2010. The 45 revised full papers presented together with 24 poster papers, 17 short papers, and 6 tool demonstrations were carefully reviewed and selected from 223 full research paper submissions and 64 poster/demo submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on text categorization, recommender systems, Web IR, IR evaluation, IR for Social Networks, cross-language IR, IR theory, multimedia IR, IR applications, interactive IR, and question answering /NLP.

This work addresses the integration of today's infrastructure-based networks with infrastructure-less networks. The resulting Hybrid Routing System allows for communication over both network types and can help to overcome cost, communication, and overload problems. Mobility aspect resulting from infrastructure-less networks are analyzed and analytical models developed. For development and deployment of the Hybrid Routing System an overlay-based framework is presented.

The exceptional mechanical, optical, surface and biocompatibility properties of nanodiamond have gained it much interest. Exhibiting the outstanding bulk properties of diamond at the nanoscale in the form of a film or small particle makes it an inexpensive alternative for many applications. Nanodiamond is the first comprehensive book on the subject. The book reviews the state of the art of nanodiamond films and particles covering the fundamentals of growth, purification and spectroscopy and some of its diverse applications such as MEMS, drug delivery and biomarkers and biosensing. Specific chapters include the theory of nanodiamond, diamond nucleation, low temperature growth, diamond nanowires, electrochemistry of nanodiamond, nanodiamond flexible implants, and cell labelling with nanodiamond particles. Edited by a leading expert in nanodiamonds, this is the perfect resource for those new to, and active in, nanodiamond research and those interested in its applications.

This work provides an extensive analytic comparison between models and results from econophysics and financial economics in an accessible and common vocabulary. Unlike other publications dedicated to econophysics, it situates this field in the evolution of financial economics by laying the foundations for common theoretical framework and models.

Volume 2 presents the fundamental principles related to polymer processign operations including the processing of thermoplastic polymers and thermosets. The objective of this volume is not to provide recipies that necessarily guarantee better product quality. Rather, emphasis is placed on presenting a fundamental approach to effectively analyze processing operations. The specific polymer processing operations for thermoplastics include plasticating single-screw extrusion, morphology evolution during compounding of polymer blends, compatibilization of immiscible polymer blends, wire coating extrusion, fiber spinning, tubular film blowing, coextrusion, and thermoplastic foam extrusion. The specific polymer processing operations for thermosets include reaction injection molding, pultrusion of fiber-reinforced thermosets, and compression molding of thermoset composites.

This book has been written with the idea of providing the fundamentals for those who are interested in the field of heat transfer to non-Newtonian fluids. It is well recognized that non-Newtonian fluids are encountered in a number of transport processes and estimation of the heat transfer characteristics in the presence of these fluids requires analysis of equations that are far more complex than those encountered for Newtonian fluids. A deliberate effort has been made to demonstrate the methods of simplification of the complex equations and to put forth analytical expressions for the various heat transfer situations in as vivid a manner as possible. The book covers a broad range of topics from forced, natural and mixed convection without and with porous media. Laminar as well as turbulent flow heat transfer to non-Newtonian fluids have been treated and the criterion for transition from laminar to turbulent flow for natural convection has been established. The heat transfer characteristics of non-Newtonian fluids from inelastic power-law fluids to viscoelastic second-order fluids and mildly elastic drag reducing fluids are covered. This book can serve the needs of undergraduates, graduates and industry personnel from the fields of chemical engineering, material science and engineering, mechanical engineering and polymer engineering.

Questions of size effect and scaling on the integrity of structures have been around since at least the time of Leonardo da Vinci. Bazant (civil engineering and materials science, Northwestern U.) sketches the history of size effect studies before exploring size effect on fracture and crack mechanics in a number of materials. He explores applications of the known size effect law for the measurement of material fracture properties and the modeling of the size effect by the cohesive crack model, nonlocal finite element models, and discrete element models. Applications to quasibrittle materials, including concrete, fiber composites, sea ice, rocks, and ceramics are presented. The role of size effect in some famous structural catastrophes is then examined. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

This book provides an overview of the current state of research on development and application of methods, algorithms, tools and systems associated with the studies on man-machine interaction. Modern machines and computer systems are designed not only to process information, but also to work in dynamic environment, supporting or even replacing human activities in areas such as business, industry, medicine or military. The interdisciplinary field of research on man-machine interactions focuses on broad range of aspects related to the ways in which human make or use computational artifacts, systems and infrastructure. This monograph is the fourth edition in the series and presents new concepts concerning analysis, design and evaluation of man-machine systems. The selection of high-quality, original papers covers a wide scope of research topics focused on the main problems and challenges encountered within rapidly evolving new forms of human-machine relationships. The presented material is structured into following sections: human-computer interfaces, robot, control, embedded and navigation systems, bio-data analysis and mining, biomedical signal processing, image and motion data processing, decision support and expert systems, pattern recognition, fuzzy systems, algorithms and optimisation, computer networks and mobile technologies, and data management systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Combinatorial Optimization and Applications, COCOA 2014, held on the island of Maui, Hawaii, USA, in December 2014. The 56 full papers included in the book were carefully reviewed and selected from 133 submissions. Topics covered include classic combinatorial optimization; geometric optimization; network optimization; optimization in graphs; applied optimization; CSoNet; and complexity, cryptography, and games.

This book sets out to provide a guide, with examples, for those who wish to make predictions about the mechanical and thermal behaviour of non-Newtonian materials in engineering and processing technology. After an introductory survey of the field and a review of basic continuum mechanics, the radical differences between elongational and shear behaviour are shown. Two chapters, one based on a continuum approach and the other using microstructural approaches, lead to useful mathematical desriptions of materials for engineering applications. As examples of nearly-viscometric and nearly-elongational flows, there is a discussion of lubrication and related shearing flows, and fibre- spinning and film-blowing respectively. A long chapter is devoted to the important new field of computational rheology, and this is followed by chapters on stability and turbulence and the all-important temperature effects in flow. This new edition contains much new material not available in book form elsewhere-for example wall slip, suspension rheology, computational rheology and new results in stability theory.