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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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Wave
4 critic reviews | 2 user reviews | Published: March 5, 2013
On the morning of December 26, 2004, on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, Sonali Deraniyagala lost her parents, her husband, and her two young sons in the tsunami she miraculously survived. In this brave and searingly frank memoir, she describes those first horrifying moments and her long journey since. She has written an engrossing, unsentimental, beautifully poised account: as she struggles through the first months following the tragedy, furiously clenched against a reality that she cannot face and cannot deny; and then, over the ensuing ye...
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The Genius of Dogs: How Dogs Are Smarter than You Think
4 critic reviews | Published: February 5, 2013
Brian Hare, dog researcher, evolutionary anthropologist, and founder of the Duke Canine Cognition Center, and Vanessa Woods offer revolutionary new insights into dog intelligence and the interior lives of our smartest pets. In the past decade, we have learned more about how dogs think than in the last century. Breakthroughs in cognitive science, pioneered by Brian Hare have proven dogs have a kind of genius for getting along with people that is unique in the animal kingdom. Brian Hare's stunning discovery is that when dogs domesticated thems...
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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 Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics
4 critic reviews | 3 user reviews | Published: January 29, 2013
A string theorist and a citizen scientist instruct lay readers on elementary principles of physics and associated math that amateur enthusiasts should know in order to study more advanced topics, in a reference that covers such topics as classical mechanics, electromagnetic fields and chaos theory.
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Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data
8 critic reviews | 23 user reviews | Published: January 7, 2013
The best-selling author of Naked Economics defies the odds with a book about statistics that you’ll welcome and enjoy. Once considered tedious, the field of statistics is rapidly evolving into a discipline Hal Varian, chief economist at Google, has actually called “sexy.” From batting averages and political polls to game shows and medical research, the real-world application of statistics continues to grow by leaps and bounds. How can we catch schools that cheat on standardized tests? How does Netflix know which movies you’ll like? What is c...
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Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes
4 critic reviews | 29 user reviews | Published: January 3, 2013
No fictional character is more renowned for his powers of thought and observation than Sherlock Holmes. But is his extraordinary intellect merely a gift of fiction, or can we learn to cultivate these abilities ourselves, to improve our lives at work and at home? We can, says psychologist and journalist Maria Konnikova, and in Mastermind she shows us how. Beginning with the “brain attic”—Holmes’s metaphor for how we store information and organize knowledge—Konnikova unpacks the mental strategies that lead to clearer thinking and deeper insigh...
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On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks
21 critic reviews | 9 user reviews | Published: December 27, 2012
The award-winning author of Just My Type examines the pivotal relationship between mapping and civilization, demonstrating the unique ways that maps relate and realign history in an account that also shares engaging cartography stories and map lore.
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The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World
13 critic reviews | 39 user reviews | Published: November 13, 2012
Scientists have just announced an historic discovery on a par with the splitting of the atom: the Higgs boson, the key to understanding why mass exists has been found. In The Particle at the End of the Universe, Caltech physicist and acclaimed writer Sean Carroll takes readers behind the scenes of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN to meet the scientists and explain this landmark event. The Higgs boson is the particle that more than six thousand scientists have been looking for using the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and highest ...
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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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