Search results for ""author william poundstone""

In Priceless, bestselling author William Poundstone reveals the hidden psychology of value and explores how we react to the most pervasive persuader of all: price. Charting the burgeoning growth of price-consultants who advise retailers from Nike to Nokia, Poundstone shows how behavioural decision theory has revolutionised the pricing strategies of major corporations. Informed by fascinating behavioural experiments and packed with real-life examples, Priceless explains why prices are so important, and the tricks that companies use to sell their goods. It will prove indispensable to anyone who buys, sells, or negotiates.

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You are shrunk to the height of a penny and thrown in a blender. The blades start moving in sixty seconds. What do you do? If you want to work at Google, or any of the world’s top employers, you’ll need to have a convincing answer to this and countless other baffling puzzles. Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google? Reveals the new extreme interview questions in the postcrash, hypercompetitive job-market and uncovers the extraordinary lengths to which the best companies will go to find the right staff. Bestselling author William Poundstone guides readers through the surprising solutions to over a hundred of the most challenging conundrums used in interviews, as well as covering the importance of creative thinking, what your Facebook page says about you, and what really goes on inside the Googleplex. How will you fare?

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‘An entertaining book we can all enjoy… highly informative and amusing.’ Daily Mail ‘Full of valuable insight…this is a must-read for those looking to nail their next interview.’ Publishers Weekly How Do You Fight a Horse-Sized Duck? explores the new world of interviewing at A-list employers like Apple, Netflix and Amazon. It reveals more than 70 outrageously perplexing riddles and puzzles and supplies both answers and general strategy for creative problem-solving. Questions like: Today is Tuesday. What day of the week will it be 10 years from now on this date? How would you empty a plane full of Skittles? How many times would you have to scoop the ocean with a bucket to cause sea levels to drop one foot? You have a broken calculator. The only number key that works is the 0. All the operator keys work. How can you get the number 24? How many dogs have the exact same number of hairs?

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Never before have we had so much information at our fingertips. You might think that we are better-informed than ever, but there’s one thing we can’t ask Google: ‘What should I be googling?’ The way we consume information in the digital age has been blamed for driving political polarisation and leaving us unable to agree on basic facts. It’s also making us stupider. Personalised news feeds and social media echo chambers narrow our potential knowledge base. By now, we don’t even know what we don’t know. In Head in the Cloud, William Poundstone investigates the true worth of knowledge. An entertaining manifesto underpinned by big data analysis and illustrated by eye-opening anecdotes, it reveals the surprising benefits of broadening your horizons and provides an unnerving look at the consequences of being ill-informed.

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We are hard-wired to believe that the world is more predictable than it is. We chase ‘winning streaks’ that are often just illusions, and we are all too predictable exactly when we try hardest not to be. In the 1970s, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky coined the phrase ‘representativeness’ to describe the psychology of this behaviour. Since then representativeness has been used by auditors to catch people fiddling their tax returns and by hedge fund managers to reap billions from the emotions of small investors. Now Poundstone for the first time makes these techniques fun, easy, and profitable for everyone, in the everyday situations that matter. You’ll learn how to tackle multiple choice tests, what internet passwords to avoid, how to up your odds of winning the office Premier League sweepstakes, and the best ways to invest your money.

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Microsoft's interview process is a notoriously gruelling sequence of brain-busting questions that separate the most creative thinkers from the merely brilliant. So effective is their technique that other leading corporations - from the high-tech industry to consulting and financial services - are modelling their own hiring practices on Bill Gates' unique approach. HOW WOULD YOU MOVE MOUNT FUJI? reveals for the first time more than 35 of Microsoft's puzzles and riddles, such as: * Why does a mirror reverse right and left but not up and down? * If you could eliminate one U.S. state, which would it be? * How many piano tuners are there in the world? And for the first time, this book supplies answers and approaches using creative analytical thinking that works. Anyone in business, and everyone who wants to be, will find this book a valuable new approach to hiring, identifying talent in an organization, and getting the job of a lifetime.

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How do you predict something that has never happened before? There's a useful calculation being employed by Wall Street, Silicon Valley and maths professors all over the world, and it predicts that the human species will become extinct in 760 years. Unfortunately, there is disagreement over how to apply the formula, and some argue that we might only have twenty years left. Originally devised by British clergyman Thomas Bayes, the theorem languished in obscurity for two hundred years before being resurrected as the lynchpin of the digital economy. With brief detours into archaeology, philology, and overdue library books, William Poundstone explains how we can use it to predict pretty much anything. What is the chance that there are multiple universes? How long will Hamilton run? Will the US stock market continue to perform as well this century as it has for the last hundred years? And are we really all doomed?

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‘An entertaining book we can all enjoy… highly informative and amusing.’ Daily Mail ‘Full of valuable insight…this is a must-read for those looking to nail their next interview.’ Publishers Weekly How Do You Fight a Horse-Sized Duck? explores the new world of interviewing at A-list employers like Apple, Netflix and Amazon. It reveals more than 70 outrageously perplexing riddles and puzzles and supplies both answers and general strategy for creative problem-solving. Questions like: Today is Tuesday. What day of the week will it be 10 years from now on this date? How would you empty a plane full of Skittles? How many times would you have to scoop the ocean with a bucket to cause sea levels to drop one foot? You have a broken calculator. The only number key that works is the 0. All the operator keys work. How can you get the number 24? How many dogs have the exact same number of hairs?

Read more less