Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart
by Ian Ayres
Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday
Life
by Robert B. Reich
Life as We Do Not Know It: The NASA Search for (and Synthesis of) Alien Life
by Peter Ward
Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
by Jessica Livingston
Ten Theories of Human Nature
by Leslie Stevenson and David L. Haberman
The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West
by Mark Lilla
Then We Came to the End: A Novel
by Joshua Ferris
The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies
by Bryan Caplan
American Mania: When More Is Not Enough
by Peter C. Whybrow
The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language
by Christine Kenneally
The Cult of Pharmacology: How America Became the World's Most Troubled Drug
Culture
by Richard DeGrandpre
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Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart
by Ian Ayres
From Publishers Weekly
Yale Law School professor and econometrician Ayres argues in this lively and
enjoyable book that the recent creation of huge data sets allows
knowledgeable individuals to make previously impossible predictions. He
calls the data set analysts super crunchers and discusses the changes
they're making to industries like medical diagnostics, air travel pricing,
screenwriting and online dating services. Although Ayres presents both sides
of this revolution, explaining how the corporate world tries to manipulate
consumer behavior and telling consumers how to fight back, his real mission
is to educate readers about the basics of statistics and hypothesis testing,
spending most of his time in an edifying and entertaining discussion of the
use of regression and randomization trials. He frequently asks whether
statistical methods are more accurate than the more intuitive conclusions
drawn by experts, and consistently concludes that they are. Ayres skillfully
demonstrates the importance that statistical literacy can play in our lives,
especially now that technology permits it to occur on a scale never before
imagined.
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Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday
Life
by Robert B. Reich
In this compelling and important analysis of the triumph of capitalism and
the decline of democracy, former labor secretary Reich urges us to rebalance
the roles of business and government. Power, he writes, has shifted away
from us in our capacities as citizens and toward us as consumers and
investors. While praising the spread of global capitalism, he laments that
supercapitalism has brought with it alienation from politics and community.
The solution: to separate capitalism from democracy, and guard the border
between them. Plainspoken and forceful, if somewhat repetitious, the book
urges new and strengthened laws and regulations to restore authority to the
citizens in us. Reich's proposals are anything but knee-jerk liberal: he
calls for abolishing the corporate income tax and labels the corporate
social responsibility movement distracting and even counterproductive. As in
2004's Reason, Reich exhibits perhaps too much confidence in Americans'
ability to think and act in their own best interests. But he refuses to
shift blame for corporations' dominance to the usual suspects, instead
pointing a finger at consumers like you and me who want better deals, and
from investors like us who want better returns, he writes. Provocatively
argued, this book could help begin a necessary national conversation.
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Life as We Do Not Know It: The NASA Search for (and Synthesis of) Alien Life
by Peter Ward
Ward's Rare Earth (coauthored with Donald Brownlee) suggested the
unlikelihood of our finding an alien race as complex and evolved as
humankind; if such beings exist, they're too far away for us to make contact
with. But what about more basic forms of life right here in our solar
system? Ward, an investigator with NASA's Astrobiology Institute, believes
researchers might be taking the wrong approach by looking only for earthly
DNA-based life forms. Truly alien life, he argues, might have completely
different origins; even Earth has untold numbers of viruses composed
entirely of RNA, and scientists have created similar genetic material in
laboratories, so who's to say silicon-based life-forms are impossible? After
introducing readers to the building blocks of life and the new ways they
might be arranged, Ward speculates on what types of microbes we might find
on other planets and their satellites. He recommends that future manned
space expeditions include paleontologists and biochemists to follow up on
suggestive evidence collected by space probes. The science is neatly laid
out, and readers willing to follow his daring, scientifically based
speculations will find their imaginations spurred.
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Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
by Jessica Livingston
Book Description
For would-be entrepreneurs, innovation managers or just anyone
fascinated by the special chemistry and drive that created some of the best
technology companies in the world, this book offers both wisdom and engaging
insights—straight from the source.
— Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, and author of The Long
Tail
"All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money
and (b) not having done it before, ever." —Steve Wozniak, Apple
Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days is a collection of
interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened
in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it
like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve
Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin
(PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about
their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to
build a company.
Where did they get the ideas that made them rich? How did they convince
investors to back them? What went wrong, and how did they recover?
Nearly all technical people have thought of one day starting or working for
a startup. For them, this book is the closest you can come to being a fly on
the wall at a successful startup, to learn how it's done.
But ultimately these interviews are required reading for anyone who wants to
understand business, because startups are business reduced to its essence.
The reason their founders become rich is that startups do what
businessesdo—create value—more intensively than almost any other part of the
economy. How? What are the secrets that make successful startups so insanely
productive? Read this book, and let the founders themselves tell you.
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Ten Theories of Human Nature
by Leslie Stevenson and David L. Haberman
Book Description
Over three previous editions, Ten Theories of Human Nature has been a
remarkably popular introduction to some of the most influential developments
in Western and Eastern thought. This thoroughly revised fourth edition
features substantial new chapters on Aristotle and on evolutionary theories
of human nature; the latter centers on Edward O. Wilson but also outlines
the ideas of Emile Durkheim, B. F. Skinner, Nikolaas Tinbergen, Konrad
Lorenz, Noam Chomsky, and recent evolutionary psychology. This edition also
includes a rewritten introduction that invites readers (even if inclined
toward fundamentalism, or to cultural relativism) to careful, critical
thought about human nature; a useful new section that summarizes the history
of ideas from the Stoics to the Enlightenment; and a new conclusion that
suggests a way to synthesize the various theories. Lucid and accessible, Ten
Theories of Human Nature, 4/e, compresses into a small space the essence of
such ancient traditions as Confucianism, Hinduism, and the Old and New
Testaments as well as the theories of Plato, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx,
Sigmund Freud, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The authors juxtapose the ideas of
these and other thinkers and traditions in a way that helps readers
understand how humanity has struggled to comprehend its nature. To encourage
readers to think critically for themselves and to underscore the
similarities and differences between the many theories, the book examines
each one on four points--the nature of the universe, the nature of humanity,
the diagnosis of the ills of humanity, and the proposed cure for these
problems. Ideal for introductory courses in human nature, philosophy,
religious studies, and intellectual history, Ten Theories of Human Nature,
4/e, will engage and motivate students and other readers to consider how we
can understand and improve both ourselves and human society.
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The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West
by Mark Lilla
This searching history of western thinking about the relationship between
religion and politics was inspired not by 9/11, but by Nazi Germany, where,
says University of Chicago professor Lilla (The Reckless Mind), politics and
religion were horrifyingly intertwined. To explain the emergence of Nazism's
political theology, Lilla reaches back to the early modern era, when
thinkers like Locke and Hume began to suggest that religion and politics
should be separate enterprises. Some theorists, convinced that Christianity
bred violence, argued that government must be totally detached from
religion. Others, who believed that rightly practiced religion could
contribute to modern life, promoted a liberal theology, which sought to
articulate Christianity and Judaism in the idiom of reason. (Lilla's reading
of liberal Jewish thinker Hermann Cohen is especially arresting.) Liberal
theologians, Lilla says, credulously assumed human society was progressive
and never dreamed that fanaticism could capture the imaginations of modern
people—assumptions that were proven wrong by Hitler. If Lilla castigates
liberal theology for its naïveté, he also praises America and Western Europe
for simultaneously separating religion from politics, creating space for
religion, and staving off sectarian violence and theocracy. Lilla's work,
which will influence discussions of politics and theology for the next
generation, makes clear how remarkable an accomplishment that is.
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Then We Came to the End: A Novel
by Joshua Ferris
In this wildly funny debut from former ad man Ferris, a group of copywriters
and designers at a Chicago ad agency face layoffs at the end of the '90s
boom. Indignation rises over the rightful owner of a particularly coveted
chair ("We felt deceived"). Gonzo e-mailer Tom Mota quotes Walt Whitman and
Ralph Waldo Emerson in the midst of his tirades, desperately trying to
retain a shred of integrity at a job that requires a ruthless attention to
what will make people buy things. Jealousy toward the aloof and
"inscrutable" middle manager Joe Pope spins out of control. Copywriter Chris
Yop secretly returns to the office after he's laid off to prove his worth.
Rumors that supervisor Lynn Mason has breast cancer inspire blood lust,
remorse, compassion. Ferris has the downward-spiraling office down cold, and
his use of the narrative "we" brilliantly conveys the collective fear,
pettiness, idiocy and also humanity of high-level office drones as anxiety
rises to a fever pitch. Only once does Ferris shift from the first person
plural (for an extended fugue on Lynn's realization that she may be ill),
and the perspective feels natural throughout. At once delightfully freakish
and entirely credible, Ferris's cast makes a real impression.
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The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies
by Bryan Caplan
Caplan, an associate professor of economics, believes that empirical proof
of voter irrationality is the key to a realistic picture of democracy and,
thus, how to approach and improve it. Focusing on how voters are
systematically mistaken in their grasp of economics-according to Caplan, the
No. 1 area of concern among voters in most election years-he effectively
refutes the "miracle" of aggregation, showing that an uninformed populace
will often vote against measures that benefit the majority. Drawing
extensively from the Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy,
Caplan discusses how rational consumers often make irrational voters, why
it's in politicians' interest to foment that irrationality, what economists
make of the (non) existence of systematic bias and how social science's
"misguided insistence that every model be a 'story without fools,' " has led
them to miss the crucial questions in politics, "where folly is central."
Readers unfamiliar with economic theory and its attendant jargon may find
themselves occasionally (but only momentarily) lost; otherwise the text is
highly readable and Caplan's arguments are impressively original, shedding
new light on an age-old political economy conundrum.
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American Mania: When More Is Not Enough
by Peter C. Whybrow
The indictment of American society offered here—that America's supercharged
free-market capitalism shackles us to a treadmill of overwork and
overconsumption, frays family and community ties and leaves us anxious,
alienated and overweight—is familiar. What's more idiosyncratic and
compelling is the author's grounding his treatise in political economy
(citing everyone from Adam Smith to Thorstein Veblen) as well as in
neuropsychiatry, primatology and genetics. Psychiatrist Whybrow (Mood Apart)
diagnoses a form of clinical mania in which "the dopamine reward systems of
the brain are... hijacked" by pleasurable frenzies like the Internet bubble.
Genes are to blame: programmed to crave material rewards on the austere
savanna, they go bananas in an economy of superabundance. Americans are
particularly susceptible because they are descended from immigrants with a
higher frequency of the "exploratory and novelty-seeking D4-7 allele" in the
dopamine receptor system, which predisposes them to impulsivity and
addiction. The malady is "treatable," Whybrow asserts, not with Paxil but
with a vaguely defined program of communitarianism and recovery
therapeutics, exemplified by his friends Peanut, a farmer rooted in the
land, and Tom, a formerly manic entrepreneur who has learned to live in the
present moment. Whybrow's analysis of the contemporary rat race is acute,
and by medicalizing the problem he locates it in behavior and genetics—away
from the arena of conventional political and economic action where more
systemic solutions might surface, but toward a place where individual
responsibility can turn "self-interest into social fellowship."
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The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language
by Christine Kenneally
This book grows out of Kenneally's conviction that investigating the
evolution of language is a good and worthwhile pursuit—a stance that most in
the field of linguistics disparaged until about 20 years ago. The result is
a book that is as much about evolutionary biology as it is about
linguistics. We read about work with chimpanzees, bonobos, parrots and even
robots that are being programmed to develop language evolutionarily.
Kenneally, who has written about language, science and culture for the New
Yorker and Discover among others, has a breezily journalistic style that is
occasionally witty but more often pragmatic, as she tries to distill
academic and scientific discourses into terms the casual reader will
understand. She introduces the major players in the field of linguistics and
behavioral studies—Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and
Philip Lieberman—as well as countless other anthropologists, biologists and
linguists. Kenneally's insistence upon seeing human capacity for speech on
an evolutionary continuum of communication that includes all other animal
species provides a respite from ideological declamations about human
supremacy, but the book will appeal mainly to those who are drawn to the
nuts and bolts of scientific inquiry into language.
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The Cult of Pharmacology: How America Became the World's Most Troubled Drug
Culture
by Richard DeGrandpre
Why isn't Nicorette gum a street drug? The Food and Drug Administration
considers nicotine highly addictive. Tobacco companies seem to share this
view when they manipulate the level of nicotine in cigarettes. But the gum,
which packs a goodly dose of nicotine, appeals to almost no one. While we're
at it, if nicotine dependence is what stands in the way of quitting, why do
patched smokers -- their brains well-supplied with the substance -- still
crave the next drag?
If these questions have an answer, it is that addiction is not a simple
matter of chemical and receptor. Habit, ritual, social context and the means
of delivery all affect how the brain processes a drug and how we experience
it. As a result, drug research is replete with paradox. Charles Schuster, a
behavioral pharmacologist, demonstrated that if you pair a stimulus (such as
a colored light) with the administration of morphine, a test animal may
later respond to the stimulus alone as if it were getting the drug.
Conversely, Schuster found that presenting methadone in an unexpected flavor
of Kool-Aid causes some addicts to act as if they have been deprived of the
drug. Just as context makes a drug seem to be present, context can make it
seem to be absent.
In The Cult of Pharmacology, Richard DeGrandpre uses findings of this sort
-- the experiments he cites are more complicated ones -- to make the case
that, when it comes to drugs, symbol outweighs substance. Psychoactive
compounds, he writes, function "as mere stimuli, with more or less the same,
potentially great, powers as other stimuli one experiences and gives meaning
to." DeGrandpre derides a set of beliefs that he groups under the
infelicitous name "pharmacologicalism." This false ideology, he writes,
holds that "drugs contain potentialities that lie within the drug's chemical
structure . . . and when taken into the body, these potentialities take hold
of and transform both brain and behavior." According to DeGrandpre, drugs do
not work in any consistent, predictable way -- and we've been brainwashed if
we think that they do.