William Poundstone, Author . Little, Brown $22.95 (288p) ISBN 978-0-316-91916-6
Anyone who's interviewed for a job at Microsoft is intimately familiar with questions like the one in this book's title. They've probably also pondered such problems as why are manhole covers round? how do they make M&Ms? what does...
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William Poundstone, Author . Farrar, Straus & Giroux $25 (336p) ISBN 978-0-8090-4637-9
In 1961, MIT mathematics professor Ed Thorp made a small Vegas fortune by "counting cards"; his 1962 bestseller, Beat the Dealer
, made the phrase a household word. With Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, Thorp next conquered...
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William Poundstone, Author . Hill & Wang $25 (338p) ISBN 978-0-8090-4893-9
Behind the standard one man-one vote formula lies a labyrinth of bizarre dysfunction, according to this engaging study of the science of voting. America's system is “the least sensible way to vote,” argues Poundstone (Fortune's
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William Poundstone, Author . Hill and Wang $26 (336p) ISBN 978-0-8090-9469-1
Poundstone (Gaming the Vote
) dives into the latest psychological findings to investigate how and why prices are allocated. Beginning with the controversial lawsuit in which a jury awarded $2.9 million in damages to a woman who had spilled a...
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William Poundstone, Author Anchor Books $19 (288p) ISBN 978-0-385-24271-4
``In a dazzling tour de force, Poundstone leads us through a series of paradoxes that move from Sherlock Holmes's puzzles to time travel, from dismembered brains in vats to multiple worlds, from the libraries of Atlantis to black holes. Eminently...
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William Poundstone, Author Anchor Books $17 (320p) ISBN 978-0-385-41580-4
Poundstone's three-dimensional outline of game theory mathematics sketches the life of its inventor, John von Neumann, and his role in Cold War policy-making. Photos. (Feb.)
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William Poundstone, Author Doubleday Books $22.5 (290p) ISBN 978-0-385-41567-5
When it flourished in the 1950s, game theory, the construct of Hungarian-born mathematician John von Neumann (1903-1957), was the dominant metaphor for nuclear war debates. Game theorists today operate on more modest economic and organizational...
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William Poundstone, Author Doubleday Books $18.95 (274p) ISBN 978-0-385-24261-5
Paradoxes challenge our thinking about thought itself. By starting out with seemingly reasonable premises and then sabotaging them, paradoxes suggest that we may be deluded in ways we can't even imagine; they illuminate our uncertainties about the...
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William Poundstone, Author Doubleday Books $15 (315p) ISBN 978-0-385-24260-8
The author of Big Secrets and Bigger Secrets here presents another engaging volume that will settle some arguments and give rise to others. He offers resolutions to all manner of questions, from determining the most difficult holes in golf to the...
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William Poundstone, Author William Morrow & Company $20 (272p) ISBN 978-0-688-11529-6
Insatiable curiosity--his own and his readers'--powers Poundstone's ( Big Secrets ) pursuit of such carefully concealed data as the ages of celebrities such as Frank Sinatra and Estee Lauder, queen of the youth preservation business. Equally...
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William Poundstone. Little, Brown, $19.99 trade paper (288p) ISBN 978-0-316-09997-4
Google conducts some of the toughest job interviews: since its first recruiting campaign in 2004, the company has been using brainteasers and other open-ended mental challenges along with the standard behavioral questions to identify the candidates...
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William Poundstone. Little, Brown, $27 (320p) ISBN 978-0-316-22806-0
In this intriguing and immensely useful volume, Poundstone (Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?) examines how to outguess and outwit others in order to more accurately guess the outcomes of a variety of situations. In the first half of the tome,
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William Poundstone, Author, William Poundstone, Illustrator Henry Holt & Company $30 (496p) ISBN 978-0-8050-5766-9
It is impossible to be neutral about Carl Sagan (1934-1996). Though supporters and detractors agree that he was one of the most brilliant and influential scientists of the 20th century, they argue about the ways he handled his gifts, fame and...
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William Poundstone. Little, Brown Spark, $29 (320p) ISBN - 978-0-316-44070-7
Poundstone (How to Predict the Unpredictable), who studied physics at MIT, provides an intriguing, if less than revelatory, look at Bayes’ theorem as a useful way of predicting the probability of future events. Poundstone explains the theorem, the...
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William Poundstone. Little, Brown Spark, $28 (320p) ISBN 978-0-31649-454-0
Journalist Poundstone (The Doomsday Calculation) offers an astute primer on common interviewing tactics and tackling tough questions. “Both employees and employers are more selective than ever,” Poundstone writes, and with many job-seekers facing...
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