Figuring It Out

"Your life isn't over." My dad says this. "I mean, YOUR life isn't over. Beyond the kids. You'll go on living, doing things. This isn't it." I know, I assure him. I have the kids. They need me. They're my life now. "OK," he replies, then grunts—more of a brief hum. He only hums when he thinks I'm full of shit. Shockingly single. Amy Biancolli's life went off script more dramatically than most after her husband of twenty years jumped off the roof of a parking garage. Left with three children, a three-story house, and a pile of knotty psychological complications, Amy realizes the flooding dishwasher, dead car battery, rapidly growing lawn, basement sump pump, and broken doorknob aren't going to fix themselves. She also realizes that "figuring shit out" means accepting the horrors that came her way, rolling with them, slogging through them, helping others through theirs, and working her way through life with love and laughter. Amy Biancolli is an author and journalist whose column appears in the Albany Times Union. Before that, Amy served as film critic for the Houston Chronicle where her reviews, published around the country, won her the 2007 Comment and Criticism Award from the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors Association. Biancolli is the author of House of Holy Fools: A Family Portrait in Six Cracked Parts, which earned her Albany Author of the Year. Amy lives in Albany, New York, with her three children.

Information is easy. Understanding is hard. From incomprehensible tax policies to confusing medical explanations, we're swamped with information that we can'’t make sense of. Figure It Out shows us how to transform information into better presentations, better meetings, better software, and better decisions. So take heart: under the guidance of Anderson and Fast, we can, in fact, figure it out—for ourselves and for others.

A collection of fifteen original essays analyzing gender in the imagery of science.

The book begins with an extensive survey of the history of logic diagrams, including looking at possible diagrams from Aristotle, the development of both linear and closed figure diagrams by Leibniz, Lambert, Euler, Venn’s new system, Peirce’s Existential Graphs, and Frege’s two-dimensional notation as a kind of logic diagram system. During most of the 20th century, there was little regard for efforts to construct logic diagrams. However, since the 1980s there has been an increasing interest in such diagrams. Ever larger numbers of philosophers, logicians, mathematicians, computational scientists, and cognitive scientists have turned their attention to building, analyzing, using, or exploring in other ways systems of logic diagrams. The system offered here makes use of line segments and points and it enjoys a number of important advantages: it is simple, natural, and both expressively and inferentially powerful. It can be used to analyze syllogisms (including those involving relational terms) and arguments involving unanalyzed statements. Understanding such a system can shed valuable light on how ordinary people naturally reason.

Because fluency practice is not a worksheet. Fluency in mathematics is more than adeptly using basic facts or implementing algorithms. Real fluency involves reasoning and creativity, and it varies by the situation at hand. Figuring Out Fluency in Mathematics Teaching and Learning offers educators the inspiration to develop a deeper understanding of procedural fluency, along with a plethora of pragmatic tools for shifting classrooms toward a fluency approach. In a friendly and accessible style, this hands-on guide empowers educators to support students in acquiring the repertoire of reasoning strategies necessary to becoming versatile and nimble mathematical thinkers. It includes: "Seven Significant Strategies" to teach to students as they work toward procedural fluency. Activities, fluency routines, and games that encourage learning the efficiency, flexibility, and accuracy essential to real fluency. Reflection questions, connections to mathematical standards, and techniques for assessing all components of fluency. Suggestions for engaging families in understanding and supporting fluency. Fluency is more than a toolbox of strategies to choose from; it’s also a matter of equity and access for all learners. Give your students the knowledge and power to become confident mathematical thinkers.

The New York Times bestseller is back! The career workbook Roadmap is better than ever. Roadmap has been updated and expanded with tons of brand new content—including chapters on changing directions mid-career and not letting your past define your future. Through inspirational stories and interviews, journal-like prompts, and practical career development information, this helpful resource will steer students, recent graduates, and career-changers toward an authentic, fulfilling life. • Features fresh perspectives from people like singer-songwriter John Legend, surfing world champion Layne Beachley, and MacArthur fellow and radio host Jad Abumrad • Full of advice for people seeking a fulfilling work life that will make them happy and keep them engaged • A self-mapped guide to creating a rewarding and satisfying work life Roadtrip Nation, based in Costa Mesa, was founded by Nathan Gebhard, Mike Marriner, and Brian McAllister in 2001, and has grown into a national career exploration movement, educational organization, and PBS series. Since its original publication in 2015, the team at Roadtrip Nation has continued to travel the world and interview accomplished individuals about their path to success. • Great for recent college graduates, interns, or anyone questioning their career path and in need of advice and a fresh perspective • Useful as a resource for career advisers, educators, and companies who want to foster an engaged workforce • Add it to the collection of books like What Color Is Your Parachute? 2019: A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers by Richard N. Bolles, Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, and How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life by Caroline Webb

“Whatever his subject―favorites include porn, punctuation and the poetry of Frank O’Hara―the goal is always to jigger logic and language free of its moorings . . . His great and singular appeal is this fealty to his own desire and imagination . . . Figuring it out, after all, is a life sentence." ––Parul Sehgal, The New York Times “Toward what goal do I aspire, ever, but collision? Always accident, concussion, bodies butting together . . . By collision I also mean metaphor and metonymy: operations of slide and slip and transfuse.” Through a collection of intimate reflections (on art, punctuation, eyeglasses, color, dreams, celebrity, corpses, porn, and translation) and “assignments” that encourage pleasure, attentiveness, and acts of playful making, poet, artist, critic, novelist, and performer Wayne Koestenbaum enacts twenty-six ecstatic collisions between his mind and the world. A subway passenger’s leather bracelet prompts musings on the German word for “stranger”; Montaigne leads to the memory of a fourth-grade friend’s stinky feet. Wayne dreams about a handjob from John Ashbery, swims next to Nicole Kidman, reclaims Robert Rauschenberg’s squeegee, and apotheosizes Marguerite Duras as a destroyer of sentences. He directly proposes assignments to readers: “Buy a one-dollar cactus, and start anthropomorphizing it. Call it Sabrina.” “Describe an ungenerous or unkind act you have committed.” “Find in every orgasm an encyclopedic richness . . . Reimagine doing the laundry as having an orgasm, and reinterpret orgasm as not a tiny experience, temporally limited, occurring in a single human body, but as an experience that somehow touches on all of human history.” Figure It Out is both a guidebook for, and the embodiment of, the practices of pleasure, attentiveness, art, and play from “one of the most original and relentlessly obsessed cultural spies writing today” (John Waters).

Figuring It Out is the fascinating memoir written by Elizabeth "Libby" Connolly Alexander, detailing her role in the meteoric rise of a company started from scratch by her father, a company that later went public at a significant market valuation and after that was sold at an even greater price tag. After graduating with a Bachelor's degree in History from Tulane University, Libby joined her father's payment integrity firm, Connolly, learned the business from the bottom up, and quickly advanced through the ranks. With her brother, Larry, and tech-savvy husband, Robert, they formed the proverbial "three-legged stool," the triumvirate that drove exponential growth by figuring it out. Figuring it out, indeed... Initially, the trio created a significant technological competitive advantage by establishing a personal computer-driven data mining and analytics capability. Then, they pivoted the company into the unknown healthcare payment integrity industry, harnessing a growth engine unlike any previously leveraged. Libby took the lead in establishing and building the healthcare business, serving as CEO of Connolly Healthcare and subsequently as CEO of the entire company. Thanks to Connolly's data analytics capabilities and the incredible growth prospects of its healthcare business, Advent International came aboard as a major private equity investor and strategic business partner. Advent helped Connolly engineer a synergistic acquisition of Atlanta-based iHealth Technologies, at which point both companies merged and Libby became vice chairman of the board of the new company, which was renamed Cotiviti. Cotiviti subsequently went public in May of 2016 at a market valuation of $2.55 billion. Two years later, in August, 2018, Cotiviti was acquired by Veritas Capital-backed healthcare data solutions provider Verscend, at a transaction value of $4.89 billion. That's called creating serious value... by figuring it out.