Vygotsky at work and play

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Robert R. Pagano

This book is the result of many years of teaching introductory statistics within the Psychology Department to undergraduates at the University of Washington. Most of the students have been psychology majors, but there also have been appreciable numbers from other areas such as education, business, nursing, kinesiology, political science, and so forth. This is an introductory textbook, covering both descriptive and inferential statistics. The emphasis is on inferential. At the heart of inferential statistics is the topic of hypothesis testing.

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Geoffrey Hinton and Terrence J. Sejnowski

This volume, on unsupervised learning algorithms, focuses on neural network learning algorithms that do not require an explicit teacher. The goal of unsupervised learning is to extract an efficient internal representation of the statistical structure implicit in the inputs. These algorithms provide insights into the development of the cerebral cortex and implicit learning in humans. They are also of interest to engineers working in areas such as computer vision and speech recognition who seek efficient representations of raw input data.

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Victor Saad and leapers from around the world

This adventure started with a single deep-seated desire to make a difference. It was this desire that hooked Victor Saad on pursuing a business degree around social enterprise. Yet as he researched MBA options, he wondered if business school was the most effective way to learn. Believing there had to be a better way, Victor decided to take the biggest leap of his life, quitting his job to design and pursue a self-made education; 12 experiences in 12 months, all centered around design, business development, and social innovation. Along the way, Victor realized he didn't want to leap alone, and began challenging others with one driving question, What risk would you take to change your life, your community, or your world for the better?

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Alex Kozulin

Alex Kozulin, translator of Vygotsky's work and distinguished Russian-American psychologist, has written the first major intellectual biography about Vygotsky's theories and their relationship to twentieth-century Russian and Western intellectual culture. He traces Vygotsky's ideas to their origins in his early essays on literary criticism, Jewish culture, and the psychology of art, and he explicates brilliantly his psychological theory of language, thought, and development. Kozulin's biography of Vygotsky also reflects many of the conflicts of twentieth-century psychology--from the early battles between introspectionists and reflexologists to the current argument concerning the cultural and social, rather than natural, construction of the human mind. Vygotsky was a contemporary of Freud and Piaget, and his tragically early death and the Stalinist suppression of his work ensured that his ideas did not have an immediate effect on Western psychology. But the last two decades have seen his psychology become highly influential while that of other theoretical giants has faded. --from back cover.