Computers & Technology
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To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
10 critic reviews | 3 user reviews | Published: March 5, 2013
In the very near future, smart” technologies and big data” will allow us to make large-scale and sophisticated interventions in politics, culture, and everyday life. Technology will allow us to solve problems in highly original ways and create new incentives to get more people to do the right thing. But how will such solutionism” affect our society, once deeply political, moral, and irresolvable dilemmas are recast as uncontroversial and easily manageable matters of technological efficiency? What if some such problems are simply vice...
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The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change
10 critic reviews | 21 user reviews | Published: January 29, 2013
From the former vice president and #1 New York Times bestselling author comes An Inconvenient Truth for everything—a frank and clear-eyed assessment of six critical drivers of global change in the decades to come. Ours is a time of revolutionary change that has no precedent in history. With the same passion he brought to the challenge of climate change, and with his decades of experience on the front lines of global policy, Al Gore surveys our planet’s beclouded horizon and offers a sober, learned, and ultimately hopeful forecast in the visi...
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The Most Human Human : What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive
5 critic reviews | 71 user reviews | Published: January 7, 2013
Each year, the AI community convenes to administer the famous (and famously controversial) Turing test, pitting sophisticated software programs against humans to determine if a computer can “think.” The machine that most often fools the judges wins the Most Human Computer Award. But there is also a prize, strange and intriguing, for the “Most Human Human.” Brian Christian—a young poet with degrees in computer science and philosophy—was chosen to participate in a recent competition. This playful, profound book is not only a testament to h...
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Guinness World Records 2013 Gamer's Edition
7 critic reviews | 4 user reviews | Published: December 18, 2012
The Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition is the ultimate and complete guide to videogames. The brand new 2013 Edition is packed full of the most up-to-date news, achievements and developments in the gaming world, illustrated with the best and most exciting imagery from this year's top titles. Complete with fascinating facts and figures and full features on the most popular games, the 2013 edition also includes gameplay tips and hints, retro facts from classic games and the results of our reader's poll on the top 50 most visually stunning g...
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed
11 critic reviews | 112 user reviews | Published: November 13, 2012
The bold futurist and bestselling author explores the limitless potential of reverse-engineering the human brain Ray Kurzweil is arguably today’s most influential—and often controversial—futurist. In How to Create a Mind, Kurzweil presents a provocative exploration of the most important project in human-machine civilization—reverse engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works and using that knowledge to create even more intelligent machines. Kurzweil discusses how the brain functions, how the mind emerges from the brain, and th...
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The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail but Some Don't
19 critic reviews | 551 user reviews | Published: September 27, 2012
"Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise is The Soul of a New Machine for the 21st century." —Rachel Maddow, author of Drift Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair’s breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger—all by the time he was thirty. The New York Times now publishes FiveThirtyEight.com, where Silver is one of the nation’s most influential political forecasters. Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction, investi...
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Tubes
19 critic reviews | 110 user reviews | Published: May 29, 2012
"Like some heroic cartographer from a Borges story, Andrew Blum plunges into the unseen but real ether of the Internet in a journey both compelling and profound. For the first time, Tubes brings the 'network of networks' into stirring, and surprising, relief. You will never open an e-mail in quite the same way again."-Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic We are all connected now. But connected to what, exactly? In Tubes, journalist Andrew Blum takes readers on an engaging narrative tour behind the scenes of our everyday lives to see the he...
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Freedom Is Blogging in Your Underwear
6 critic reviews | 19 user reviews | Published: April 26, 2012
A witty manifesto, with cartoons, on how the Internet has expanded our experience of freedomSeveral years ago Hugh MacLeod was watching a television interview with punk rocker Henry Rollins. In response to an inane question, Rollins quipped, “I thought rock & roll was about freedom,” and something clicked. MacLeod thought, “Freedom. That's also what the Internet is really about, isn't it?”MacLeod's hugely popular blog, gapingvoid.com, is now ten years old. It enabled him to meet his girlfriend, his business partners, and all of his clients; ...
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Turing's Cathedral : The Origins of the Digital Universe
20 critic reviews | 86 user reviews | Published: March 6, 2012
"It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence," twenty-four-year-old Alan Turing announced in 1936. In Turing's Cathedral, George Dyson focuses on a small group of men and women, led by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who built one of the first computers to realize Alan Turing's vision of a Universal Machine. Their work would break the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things-and our universe would never be the same...
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Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired--and Secretive--Company Really Works
9 critic reviews | 690 user reviews | Published: January 25, 2012
INSIDE APPLE reveals the secret systems, tactics and leadership strategies that allowed Steve Jobs and his company to churn out hit after hit and inspire a cult-like following for its products. If Apple is Silicon Valley's answer to Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, then author Adam Lashinsky provides readers with a golden ticket to step inside. In this primer on leadership and innovation, the author will introduce readers to concepts like the "DRI" (Apple's practice of assigning a Directly Responsible Individual to every task) and the Top 10...
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