Author: Terryl L. Givens File Type: pdf In People of Paradox, Terryl Givens traces the rise and development of Mormon culture from the days of Joseph Smith in upstate New York, through Brigham Youngs founding of the Territory of Deseret on the shores of Great Salt Lake, to the spread of the Latter-Day Saints around the globe. Throughout the last century and a half, Givens notes, distinctive traditions have emerged among the Latter-Day Saints, shaped by dynamic tensions--or paradoxes--that give Mormon cultural expression much of its vitality. Here is a religion shaped by a rigid authoritarian hierarchy and radical individualism by prophetic certainty and a celebration of learning and intellectual investigation by existence in exile and a yearning for integration and acceptance by the larger world. Givens divides Mormon history into two periods, separated by the renunciation of polygamy in 1890. In each, he explores the life of the mind, the emphasis on education, the importance of architecture and urban planning (so apparent in Salt Lake City and Mormon temples around the world), and Mormon accomplishments in music and dance, theater, film, literature, and the visual arts. He situates such cultural practices in the context of the society of the larger nation and, in more recent years, the world. Today, he observes, only fourteen percent of Mormon believers live in the United States. Mormonism has never been more prominent in public life. But there is a rich inner life beneath the public surface, one deftly captured in this sympathetic, nuanced account by a leading authority on Mormon history and thought. **

Author: Anand Rajaraman File Type: pdf The popularity of the Web and Internet commerce provides many extremely large datasets from which information can be gleaned by data mining. This book focuses on practical algorithms that have been used to solve key problems in data mining and which can be used on even the largest datasets. It begins with a discussion of the map-reduce framework, an important tool for parallelizing algorithms automatically. The authors explain the tricks of locality-sensitive hashing and stream processing algorithms for mining data that arrives too fast for exhaustive processing. The PageRank idea and related tricks for organizing the Web are covered next. Other chapters cover the problems of finding frequent itemsets and clustering. The final chapters cover two applications recommendation systems and Web advertising, each vital in e-commerce. Written by two authorities in database and Web technologies, this book is essential reading for students and practitioners alike.Book DescriptionWritten by two authorities in database and Web technologies, this book is essential reading for students and practitioners alike. It teaches algorithms that have been used in practice to solve key problems in data mining and includes exercises suitable for students from the advanced undergraduate level and beyond. About the AuthorAnand Rajaraman is CEO of Kosmix Inc., a website which organizes the Internet by topic. He is also a consulting assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. In 1996, together with four other engineers, Rajaraman founded Junglee Corp., which pioneered Internet comparison shopping. It was acquired by Amazon.com Inc. in August 1998 for 1.6 million shares of stock valued at $250 million. Rajaraman went on to become Director of Technology at Amazon.com, where he was responsible for technology strategy. He helped launch the transformation of Amazon.com from a retailer into a retail platform, enabling third-party retailers to sell on Amazon.coms website. Third-party transactions now account for almost 25% of all US transactions, and represent Amazons fastest-growing and most profitable business segment. Rajaraman was also an inventor of the concept underlying Amazon.coms Mechanical Turk. Rajaraman and his business partner, Venky Harinarayan, co-founded Cambrian Ventures, an early stage VC fund, in 2000. Cambrian went on to back several companies later acquired by Google and has funded companies like Mobissimo, Aster Data Systems and TheFind.com. Jeffrey David Ullman is the Stanford W. Ascherman Professor of Computer Science (Emeritus) at Stanford University. He is also the CEO of Gradiance. Ullmans research interests include database theory, data integration, data mining and education using the information infrastructure. He is one of the founders of the field of database theory and was the doctoral advisor of an entire generation of students who later became leading database theorists in their own right. He was also the Ph.D. advisor of Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders of Google, and served on Googles technical advisory board. In 1995 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and in 2000 he was awarded the Knuth Prize. Ullman is also the co-recipient (with John Hopcroft) of the 2010 IEEE John von Neumann Medal, for laying the foundations for the fields of automata and language theory and many seminal contributions to theoretical computer science.