Optimal Thinking

"The quantum leap beyond positive thinking, Optimal Thinking offers a whole new way of looking at life, business, and relationships. This prescriptive self-improvement book is filled with superlative information for every type of reader."

On the eve of my cardiothoracic surgery, on 4 February 2004, at the Care Hospital, Hyderabad, my friend Madhu Reddy presented me with Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace. Next morning when I woke up at 3 a.m, the surgery was many hours away. I decided not to pretend to sleep. I asked my wife Anjana to switch on the lights. She was but naturally anxious though outwardly calm. To avoid an emotional overflow from any conversation at that point of time, I picked up the book and started reading. The book opened with the scenes of the arrest of the last King of Myanmar, Thebaw, and Queen Supayalat, by the British Forces at Mandalay. I had read the first twenty pages. It was still not dawn, when my cardiologist and chief of the Care Hospital, Dr B Soma Raju, arrived. I read to him the following line from the Author’s Note: “Every life leaves behind an echo that is audible to those who take the trouble to listen.” Once out of this physical mess, I must undertake something of value that will endure beyond my life time, I thought. That was the beginning of my tryst with Myanmar.

Failed an exam, bungled an interview, screwed up a relationship, broken your diet, or stuffed up at work? Yur brain is the key to getting back on track. Change your life for the better. Learn how to ‘rubberise’ your brain, making it more flexible and resilient. Deal with challenges in an optimal way, and ‘bounce’ back from adversity. Your brain controls your conscious thoughts and behaviours, like deciding whether to study or party, or whether to get two scoops of gelato or six. And when you find yourself doing things that you wish you hadn’t done (like all that gelato), it’s likely your brain has indulged in what psychological scientists call suboptimal thinking. Essentially, your brain doesn’t always deliver the kind of thinking that leads to desired positive outcomes, such as maintaining supportive friendships, and doing well in your work, studies and social life. But you and your brain can do better. In this book, five leading psychological educators show you simple tools derived from solid science covering everything from positive psychology to goal setting, from mindfulness to CBT, and from emotional regulation to moral reasoning, to optimise your thinking. Using a model they have developed over years of study and application you can discover how resilience and psychological flexibility combine to allow you to choose ways of thinking in response to different situations that will produce the best outcome for you for that situation. Read this book and learn how to optimally tackle issues of motivation, stress, time-management, and relationship maintenance. Your mind will be clearer and your life better.

A thinking student is an engaged student Teachers often find it difficult to implement lessons that help students go beyond rote memorization and repetitive calculations. In fact, institutional norms and habits that permeate all classrooms can actually be enabling "non-thinking" student behavior. Sparked by observing teachers struggle to implement rich mathematics tasks to engage students in deep thinking, Peter Liljedahl has translated his 15 years of research into this practical guide on how to move toward a thinking classroom. Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, Grades K–12 helps teachers implement 14 optimal practices for thinking that create an ideal setting for deep mathematics learning to occur. This guide Provides the what, why, and how of each practice and answers teachers’ most frequently asked questions Includes firsthand accounts of how these practices foster thinking through teacher and student interviews and student work samples Offers a plethora of macro moves, micro moves, and rich tasks to get started Organizes the 14 practices into four toolkits that can be implemented in order and built on throughout the year When combined, these unique research-based practices create the optimal conditions for learner-centered, student-owned deep mathematical thinking and learning, and have the power to transform mathematics classrooms like never before.

How optimization took over the world and the urgent case for a new approach Optimization is the driving principle of our modern world. We now can manufacture, transport, and organize things more cheaply and faster than ever. Optimized models underlie everything from airline schedules to dating site matches. We strive for efficiency in our daily lives, obsessed with productivity and optimal performance. How did a mathematical concept take on such outsize cultural shape? And what is lost when efficiency is gained? Optimal Illusions traces the fascinating history of optimization from its roots in America’s founding principles to its modern manifestations, found in colorful stories of oil tycoons, wildlife ecologists, Silicon Valley technologists, lifestyle gurus, sugar beet farmers, and poker players. Optimization is now deeply embedded in the technologies and assumptions that have come to comprise not only our material reality but what we make of it. Coco Krumme’s work in mathematical modeling has made her acutely aware of optimization’s overreach. Streamlined systems are less resilient and more at risk of failure. They limit our options and narrow our perspectives. The malaise of living in an optimized society can feel profoundly inhumane. Optimal Illusions exposes the sizable bargains we have made in the name of optimization and asks us to consider what comes next.

52 fresh ideas for flexing mental muscle. Learn how to maximize brain power and access insight and creativity, at work and at play. From problem-solving to mind-mapping through story-telling and chattering, here are 52 brilliant ideas to turbo-charge the mind, including: - Idea #18: Kick-start your creativity - Idea #35: Food for thought - Idea #37: Become an ace storyteller - Idea #52: Maintain your brain

This textbook covers the fundamentals of optimization, including linear, mixed-integer linear, nonlinear, and dynamic optimization techniques, with a clear engineering focus. It carefully describes classical optimization models and algorithms using an engineering problem-solving perspective, and emphasizes modeling issues using many real-world examples related to a variety of application areas. Providing an appropriate blend of practical applications and optimization theory makes the text useful to both practitioners and students, and gives the reader a good sense of the power of optimization and the potential difficulties in applying optimization to modeling real-world systems. The book is intended for undergraduate and graduate-level teaching in industrial engineering and other engineering specialties. It is also of use to industry practitioners, due to the inclusion of real-world applications, opening the door to advanced courses on both modeling and algorithm development within the industrial engineering and operations research fields.