Best of
Technology

2019

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America


Christopher Wylie - 2019
    Bannon had long sensed that deep within America's soul lurked an explosive tension. Cambridge Analytica had the data to prove it, and in 2016 Bannon had a presidential campaign to use as his proving ground.Christopher Wylie might have seemed an unlikely figure to be at the center of such an operation. Canadian and liberal in his politics, he was only twenty-four when he got a job with a London firm that worked with the U.K. Ministry of Defense and was charged putatively with helping to build a team of data scientists to create new tools to identify and combat radical extremism online. In short order, those same military tools were turned to political purposes, and Cambridge Analytica was born. Wylie's decision to become a whistleblower prompted the largest data crime investigation in history. His story is both exposé and dire warning about a sudden problem born of very new and powerful capabilities. It has not only exposed the profound vulnerabilities and profound carelessness in the enormous companies that drive the attention economy, it has also exposed the profound vulnerabilities of democracy itself. What happened in 2016 was just a trial run. Ruthless actors are coming for your data, and they want to control what you think.

Permanent Record


Edward Snowden - 2019
    The result would be an unprecedented system of mass surveillance with the ability to pry into the private lives of every person on earth. Six years later, Snowden reveals for the very first time how he helped to build this system and why he was moved to expose it.Spanning the bucolic Beltway suburbs of his childhood and the clandestine CIA and NSA postings of his adulthood, Permanent Record is the extraordinary account of a bright young man who grew up online—a man who became a spy, a whistleblower, and, in exile, the Internet’s conscience. Written with wit, grace, passion, and an unflinching candor, Permanent Record is a crucial memoir of our digital age and destined to be a classic.

Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers


Andy Greenberg - 2019
    Targeting American utility companies, NATO, and electric grids in Eastern Europe, the strikes became ever more brazen, eventually leading to the first-ever blackouts triggered by hackers. They culminated in the summer of 2017 when malware known as NotPetya was unleashed, compromising, disrupting, and paralyzing some of the world's largest companies. At the attack's epicenter in Ukraine, ATMs froze. The railway and postal systems shut down. NotPetya spread around the world, inflicting an unprecedented ten billions of dollars in damage--the largest, most penetrating cyberattack the world had ever seen.The hackers behind these attacks are quickly gaining a reputation as the most dangerous team of cyberwarriors in the internet's history: Sandworm. Believed to be working in the service of Russia's military intelligence agency, they represent a persistent, highly skilled, state-sponsored hacking force, one whose talents are matched by their willingness to launch broad, unrestrained attacks on the most critical infrastructure of their adversaries. They target government and private sector, military and civilians alike.From WIRED senior writer Andy Greenberg comes Sandworm, the true story of the desperate hunt to identify and track those attackers. It considers the danger this force poses to our national stability and security. And as the Kremlin's role in manipulating foreign governments and sparking chaos globally comes into greater focus, Sandworm reveals the realities not just of Russia's global digital offensive, but of an era where warfare ceases to be waged on the battlefield--where the line between digital and physical conflict begins to blur, with world-shaking implications.

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans


Melanie Mitchell - 2019
    The award-winning author Melanie Mitchell, a leading computer scientist, now reveals AI’s turbulent history and the recent spate of apparent successes, grand hopes, and emerging fears surrounding it.In Artificial Intelligence, Mitchell turns to the most urgent questions concerning AI today: How intelligent—really—are the best AI programs? How do they work? What can they actually do, and when do they fail? How humanlike do we expect them to become, and how soon do we need to worry about them surpassing us? Along the way, she introduces the dominant models of modern AI and machine learning, describing cutting-edge AI programs, their human inventors, and the historical lines of thought underpinning recent achievements. She meets with fellow experts such as Douglas Hofstadter, the cognitive scientist and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of the modern classic Gödel, Escher, Bach, who explains why he is “terrified” about the future of AI. She explores the profound disconnect between the hype and the actual achievements in AI, providing a clear sense of what the field has accomplished and how much further it has to go.Interweaving stories about the science of AI and the people behind it, Artificial Intelligence brims with clear-sighted, captivating, and accessible accounts of the most interesting and provocative modern work in the field, flavored with Mitchell’s humor and personal observations. This frank, lively book is an indispensable guide to understanding today’s AI, its quest for “human-level” intelligence, and its impact on the future for us all.

Blockchain Bubble or Revolution: The Present and Future of Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies


Neel Mehta - 2019
    Authored by Product Managers from Google, Microsoft, and Facebook, Bubble or Revolution cuts through the hype to offer a balanced, comprehensive, and accessible analysis of blockchains and cryptocurrencies.You'll learn the core concepts of these technologies and understand their strengths and weaknesses from real-world case studies; dive deep into their technical, economic, political, and legal complexities; and gain insights about their future from exclusive interviews with dozens of tech industry leaders. No coding or math needed!Are cryptocurrencies and blockchains a bubble or a revolution? We'll help you decide for yourself.What's inside:Bitcoin and the blockchainHow Bitcoin and blockchains work from a technical perspective with no assumed technical knowledgeSatoshi Nakamoto and the history of Bitcoin, the original blockchainA thorough overview of crucial crypto concepts (eg. blocks, keys, mining, nodes, etc.)Frameworks for understanding when it actually makes sense to use blockchainMajor application scenarios for blockchain and cryptocurrencies and where it'll fall flatPublic blockchains and altcoinsEmerging trends in blockchain technologyWhat you should know before buying any cryptocurrencyAn overview of Etherum and smart contractsAn overview of the strengths and weaknesses of the top altcoins and stable coins, including Monero (XMR), Tether (USDT), and Bitcoin Cash (BCH)Alternatives to blockchain and cryptocurrenciesNew kinds of decentralized ledger technology (dlt)The economics of both traditional payment methods and cryptocurrenciesCryptocurrency security best practices and major breach case studiesPrivate blockchainsHow blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and traditional banking and finance will interact with one another in the futurePublic blockchains vs private blockchainsLimitations and shortcomings of public blockchains and cryptocurrenciesThe role of blockchain in the strategy of top tech companies like Facebook and MicrosoftCase studies of how non-tech companies are effectively utilizing blockchain (eg. Walmart using it to prevent foodborne illness)Business blockchain case studies ranging from gaming (e.g. Xbox) to cloud services (e.g. Microsoft Azure's blockchain-as-a-service and Amazon's AWS offering)Blockchain's use for big data, internet of things (IoT), and machine learning (ML)Cryptocurrency regulation and policyICOs vs STOs vs IPOsICOs' status as securitiesThe SEC's STO rules and Reg A+/CF/D/SKYC and AML lawsThe debate over whether cryptocurrencies are securitiesThe official stance of various countries on cryptoAn overview of crypto policy and regulatory hurdlesThe role of crypto in emerging markets and ChinaDigital democracy and voting on the blockchainThe future of decentralized technologyIf, how, and when the tokenization of national currencies will play outFacebook and WhatsApp's upcoming cryptocurrenciesCurrency tokenization and China's efforts to tokenize the yuanBlockchain, IoT, and the tangleCryptocurrencies vs. fiat vs. the gold standardPredictions about the future of money, business, and currencyWhy blockchains would do better on Mars than Earth

That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea


Marc Randolph - 2019
    Late fees were ubiquitous, video-streaming unheard was of, and widespread DVD adoption seemed about as imminent as flying cars. Indeed, these were the widely accepted laws of the land in 1997, when Marc Randolph had an idea. It was a simple thought—leveraging the internet to rent movies—and was just one of many more and far worse proposals, like personalized baseball bats and a shampoo delivery service, that Randolph would pitch to his business partner, Reed Hastings, on their commute to work each morning.But Hastings was intrigued, and the pair—with Hastings as the primary investor and Randolph as the CEO—founded a company. Now with over 150 million subscribers, Netflix's triumph feels inevitable, but the twenty first century's most disruptive start up began with few believers and calamity at every turn. From having to pitch his own mother on being an early investor, to the motel conference room that served as a first office, to server crashes on launch day, to the now-infamous meeting when Netflix brass pitched Blockbuster to acquire them, Marc Randolph's transformational journey exemplifies how anyone with grit, gut instincts, and determination can change the world—even with an idea that many think will never work.What emerges, though, isn't just the inside story of one of the world's most iconic companies. Full of counter-intuitive concepts and written in binge-worthy prose, it answers some of our most fundamental questions about taking that leap of faith in business or in life: How do you begin? How do you weather disappointment and failure? How do you deal with success? What even is success?From idea generation to team building to knowing when it's time to let go, That Will Never Work is not only the ultimate follow-your-dreams parable, but also one of the most dramatic and insightful entrepreneurial stories of our time.

Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code


Ruha Benjamin - 2019
    Presenting the concept of the "New Jim Code," she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life.This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture.If you adopt this book for classroom use in the 2019-2020 academic year, the author would be pleased to arrange to Skype to a session of your class. If interested, enter your details in this sign-up sheet https: //buff.ly/2wJsvZr

Inventing Bitcoin: The Technology Behind The First Truly Scarce and Decentralized Money Explained


Yan Pritzker - 2019
    Is it magical Internet money? Where does it come from? Who controls it? Why is it important? For me, understanding all the things that come together to make Bitcoin work - the physics, math, cryptography, game theory, economics, and computer science - was a profound moment. In this book, I hope to share this knowledge with you in a very simple and easy to understand way. With nothing but a high school level math background, we will walk through inventing bitcoin, step by step.

Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation


Andrew Marantz - 2019
     For several years, Andrew Marantz, a New Yorker staff writer, has been embedded in two worlds. The first is the world of social-media entrepreneurs, who, acting out of naïvete and reckless ambition, upended all traditional means of receiving and transmitting information. The second is the world of the people he calls "the gate crashers"—the conspiracists, white supremacists, and nihilist trolls who have become experts at using social media to advance their corrosive agenda. Antisocial ranges broadly—from the first mass-printed books to the trending hashtags of the present; from secret gatherings of neo-Fascists to the White House press briefing room—and traces how the unthinkable becomes thinkable, and then how it becomes reality. Combining the keen narrative detail of Bill Buford's Among the Thugs and the sweep of George Packer's The Unwinding, Antisocial reveals how the boundaries between technology, media, and politics have been erased, resulting in a deeply broken informational landscape—the landscape in which we all now live. Marantz shows how alienated young people are led down the rabbit hole of online radicalization, and how fringe ideas spread—from anonymous corners of social media to cable TV to the President's Twitter feed. Marantz also sits with the creators of social media as they start to reckon with the forces they've unleashed. Will they be able to solve the communication crisis they helped bring about, or are their interventions too little too late?

UNIX: A History and a Memoir


Brian W. Kernighan - 2019
    Brian Kernighan was a member of the original group of Unix developers, the creator of several fundamental Unix programs, and the co-author of classic books like "The C Programming Language" and "The Unix Programming Environment."

Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It


Scott Kupor - 2019
    That's where you'll find the biggest names in venture capital, including famed VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, where lawyer-turned-entrepreneur-turned-VC Scott Kupor serves as managing partner.Whether you're trying to get a new company off the ground or scale an existing business to the next level, you need to understand how VCs think. In Secrets of Sand Hill Road, Kupor explains exactly how VCs decide where and how much to invest, and how entrepreneurs can get the best possible deal and make the most of their relationships with VCs. Kupor explains, for instance:- Why most VCs typically invest in only one startup in a given business category.- Why the skill you need most when raising venture capital is the ability to tell a compelling story.- How to handle a "down round," when startups have to raise funds at a lower valuation than in the previous round.- What to do when VCs get too entangled in the day-to-day operations of the business.- Why you need to build relationships with potential acquirers long before you decide to sell.Filled with Kupor's firsthand experiences, insider advice, and practical takeaways, Secrets of Sand Hill Road is the guide every entrepreneur needs to turn their startup into the next unicorn.

You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place


Janelle Shane - 2019
    according to an artificial intelligence trained by scientist Janelle Shane, creator of the popular blog "AI Weirdness." She creates silly AIs that learn how to name paint colors, create the best recipes, and even flirt (badly) with humans--all to understand the technology that governs so much of our daily lives.We rely on AI every day for recommendations, for translations, and to put cat ears on our selfie videos. We also trust AI with matters of life and death, on the road and in our hospitals. But how smart is AI really, and how does it solve problems, understand humans, and even drive self-driving cars?Shane delivers the answers to every AI question you've ever asked, and some you definitely haven't--like, how can a computer design the perfect sandwich? What does robot-generated Harry Potter fan-fiction look like? And is the world's best Halloween costume really "Vampire Hog Bride"?In this smart, often hilarious introduction to the most interesting science of our time, Shane shows how these programs learn, fail, and adapt--and how they reflect the best and worst of humanity. You Look Like a Thing and I Love You is the perfect book for anyone curious about what the robots in our lives are thinking.

The Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book


Andriy Burkov - 2019
    During that week, you will learn almost everything modern machine learning has to offer. The author and other practitioners have spent years learning these concepts.Companion wiki — the book has a continuously updated wiki that extends some book chapters with additional information: Q&A, code snippets, further reading, tools, and other relevant resources.Flexible price and formats — choose from a variety of formats and price options: Kindle, hardcover, paperback, EPUB, PDF. If you buy an EPUB or a PDF, you decide the price you pay!Read first, buy later — download book chapters for free, read them and share with your friends and colleagues. Only if you liked the book or found it useful in your work, study or business, then buy it.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber


Mike Isaac - 2019
    Uber had catapulted to the top of the tech world, yet for many came to symbolize everything wrong with Silicon Valley.Award-winning New York Times technology correspondent Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped presents the dramatic rise and fall of Uber, set against an era of rapid upheaval in Silicon Valley. Backed by billions in venture capital dollars and led by a brash and ambitious founder, Uber promised to revolutionize the way we move people and goods through the world. A near instant “unicorn,” Uber seemed poised to take its place next to Amazon, Apple, and Google as a technology giant.What followed would become a corporate cautionary tale about the perils of startup culture and a vivid example of how blind worship of startup founders can go wildly wrong. Isaac recounts Uber’s pitched battles with taxi unions and drivers, the company’s toxic internal culture, and the bare-knuckle tactics it devised to overcome obstacles in its quest for dominance. With billions of dollars at stake, Isaac shows how venture capitalists asserted their power and seized control of the startup as it fought its way toward its fateful IPO.Based on hundreds of interviews with current and former Uber employees, along with previously unpublished documents, Super Pumped is a page-turning story of ambition and deception, obscene wealth, and bad behavior that explores how blistering technological and financial innovation culminated in one of the most catastrophic twelve-month periods in American corporate history.

Competing Spectacles: Treasuring Christ in the Media Age


Tony Reinke - 2019
    Maybe we don't want to ask it. But viral videos, digital images, and other spectacles surround us in every direction--competing for our time, our attention, our lust, and our money. So we let our lazy eyes feed on whatever comes our way. As a result, we never stop to consider the consequences of our visual diet on our habits, desires, and longings.Journalist Tony Reinke asked these hard questions himself--critiquing his own habits--and now invites us along to see what he discovered as he investigated the possibilities and the pitfalls of our image-centered world. In the end, he shares the beauty of a Greater Spectacle--capable of centering our souls, filling our hearts, and stabilizing our gaze in this age of the digital spectacle.

The Unicorn Project


Gene Kim - 2019
    In The Phoenix Project, Bill, an IT manager at Parts Unlimited, is tasked with a project critical to the future of the business, code named Phoenix Project. But the project is massively over budget and behind schedule. The CEO demands Bill fix the mess in ninety days or else Bill's entire department will be outsourced. In The Unicorn Project, we follow Maxine, a senior lead developer and architect, as she is exiled to the Phoenix Project, to the horror of her friends and colleagues, as punishment for contributing to a payroll outage. She tries to survive in what feels like a heartless and uncaring bureaucracy and to work within a system where no one can get anything done without endless committees, paperwork, and approvals. One day, she is approached by a ragtag bunch of misfits who say they want to overthrow the existing order, to liberate developers, to bring joy back to technology work, and to enable the business to win in a time of digital disruption. To her surprise, she finds herself drawn ever further into this movement, eventually becoming one of the leaders of the Rebellion, which puts her in the crosshairs of some familiar and very dangerous enemies. The Age of Software is here, and another mass extinction event looms--this is a story about "red shirt" developers and business leaders working together, racing against time to innovate, survive, and thrive in a time of unprecedented uncertainty...and opportunity.

One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon


Charles Fishman - 2019
    Kennedy astonished the world on May 25, 1961, when he announced to Congress that the United States should land a man on the Moon by 1970. No group was more surprised than the scientists and engineers at NASA, who suddenly had less than a decade to invent space travel. When Kennedy announced that goal, no one knew how to navigate to the Moon. No one knew how to build a rocket big enough to reach the Moon, or how to build a computer small enough (and powerful enough) to fly a spaceship there. No one knew what the surface of the Moon was like, or what astronauts could eat as they flew there. On the day of Kennedy’s historic speech, America had a total of fifteen minutes of spaceflight experience—with just five of those minutes outside the atmosphere. Russian dogs had more time in space than U.S. astronauts. Over the next decade, more than 400,000 scientists, engineers, and factory workers would send 24 astronauts to the Moon. Each hour of space flight would require one million hours of work back on Earth to get America to the Moon on July 20, 1969. More than fifty years later, One Giant Leap is the sweeping, definitive behind-the-scenes account of the furious race to complete one of mankind’s greatest achievements. It’s a story filled with surprises—from the item the astronauts almost forgot to take with them (the American flag), to the extraordinary impact Apollo would have back on Earth, and on the way we live today. Charles Fishman introduces readers to the men and women who had to solve 10,000 problems before astronauts could reach the Moon. From the research labs of MIT, where the eccentric and legendary pioneer Charles Draper created the tools to fly the Apollo spaceships, to the factories where dozens of women sewed spacesuits, parachutes, and even computer hardware by hand, Fishman captures the exceptional feats of these ordinary Americans. One Giant Leap is the captivating story of men and women charged with changing the world as we knew it—their leaders, their triumphs, their near disasters, all of which led to arguably the greatest success story, and the greatest adventure story, of the twentieth century.

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control


Stuart Russell - 2019
    Conflict between humans and machines is seen as inevitable and its outcome all too predictable.In this groundbreaking book, distinguished AI researcher Stuart Russell argues that this scenario can be avoided, but only if we rethink AI from the ground up. Russell begins by exploring the idea of intelligence in humans and in machines. He describes the near-term benefits we can expect, from intelligent personal assistants to vastly accelerated scientific research, and outlines the AI breakthroughs that still have to happen before we reach superhuman AI. He also spells out the ways humans are already finding to misuse AI, from lethal autonomous weapons to viral sabotage.If the predicted breakthroughs occur and superhuman AI emerges, we will have created entities far more powerful than ourselves. How can we ensure they never, ever, have power over us? Russell suggests that we can rebuild AI on a new foundation, according to which machines are designed to be inherently uncertain about the human preferences they are required to satisfy. Such machines would be humble, altruistic, and committed to pursue our objectives, not theirs. This new foundation would allow us to create machines that are provably deferential and provably beneficial.In a 2014 editorial co-authored with Stephen Hawking, Russell wrote, "Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last." Solving the problem of control over AI is not just possible; it is the key that unlocks a future of unlimited promise.

The Reality Bubble: Blind Spots, Hidden Truths, and the Dangerous Illusions That Shape Our World


Ziya Tong - 2019
    These animals live in the same world we do, but they see something quite different when they look around.With all of the curiosity and flair that drives her broadcasting, Ziya Tong illuminates this hidden world, and takes us on a journey to examine ten of humanity's biggest blind spots.First, we are introduced to the blind spots we are all born with, to see how technology reveals an astonishing world that exists beyond our human senses. It is with these new ways of seeing that today's scientists can image everything from an atom to a black hole.In Section Two, our collective blind spots are exposed. It's not that we can't see, Tong reminds us. It's that we don't. In the 21st century, there are cameras everywhere, except where our food comes from, where our energy comes from, and where our waste goes. Being in the dark when it comes to how we survive makes it impossible to navigate our future.Lastly, the scope widens to our civilizational blind spots. Here, the blurred lens of history reveals how we inherit ways of thinking about the world that seem natural or inevitable but are in fact little more than traditions, ways of seeing the world that have come to harm it.This vitally important new book shows how science, and the curiosity that drives it, can help civilization flourish by opening our eyes to the landscape laid out before us. Fast-paced, utterly fascinating, and deeply humane, The Reality Bubble gives voice to the sense we've all had -- that there is more to the world than meets the eye.

Monolith to Microservices: Sustaining Productivity While Detangling the System


Sam Newman - 2019
    You'll learn several tried and tested patterns and techniques that you can use as you migrate your existing architecture.*Ideal for organizations looking to transition to microservices, rather than rebuild*Helps companies determine whether to migrate, when to migrate, and where to begin*Addresses communication, integration, and the migration of legacy systems*Discusses multiple migration patterns and where they apply*Provides database migration examples, along with synchronization strategies*Explores application decomposition, including several architectural refactoring patterns*Delves into details of database decomposition, including the impact of breaking referential and transactional integrity, new failure modes, and more

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World


Cal Newport - 2019
    Digital minimalism applies this idea to our personal technology. It's the key to living a focused life in an increasingly noisy world.In this timely and enlightening book, the bestselling author of Deep Work introduces a philosophy for technology use that has already improved countless lives.Digital minimalists are all around us. They're the calm, happy people who can hold long conversations without furtive glances at their phones. They can get lost in a good book, a woodworking project, or a leisurely morning run. They can have fun with friends and family without the obsessive urge to document the experience. They stay informed about the news of the day, but don't feel overwhelmed by it. They don't experience "fear of missing out" because they already know which activities provide them meaning and satisfaction.Now, Newport gives us a name for this quiet movement, and makes a persuasive case for its urgency in our tech-saturated world. Common sense tips, like turning off notifications, or occasional rituals like observing a digital sabbath, don't go far enough in helping us take back control of our technological lives, and attempts to unplug completely are complicated by the demands of family, friends and work. What we need instead is a thoughtful method to decide what tools to use, for what purposes, and under what conditions.Drawing on a diverse array of real-life examples, from Amish farmers to harried parents to Silicon Valley programmers, Newport identifies the common practices of digital minimalists and the ideas that underpin them. He shows how digital minimalists are rethinking their relationship to social media, rediscovering the pleasures of the offline world, and reconnecting with their inner selves through regular periods of solitude. He then shares strategies for integrating these practices into your life, starting with a thirty-day "digital declutter" process that has already helped thousands feel less overwhelmed and more in control.Technology is intrinsically neither good nor bad. The key is using it to support your goals and values, rather than letting it use you. This book shows the way.

Journey to Mars: What Our Journey To the Red Planet Might Look Like ?


Peter Thiel - 2019
    Putting people into places and situations unprecedented in history is stirred the imagination while the human experience was expanding and redefining. Yet, space exploration compels humans to confront a hostile environment of cosmic radiations, radical changes in the gravity and magnetic fields, as well as social isolation. Therefore, any space traveller is submitted to relevant health-related threats. In the twenty-first century, human space flight is poised to continue, but it will enjoy the ongoing developments in science and technology. It will become more networked, more global, and more oriented toward primary goals. A novel international human space flight policy could help achieve these objectives by clarifying the rationale, the ethics of acceptable risk, the role of remote presence, and the need for balance between funding and ambition to justify the risk of human lives. In order to address such a challenge, a preliminary careful survey of the available scientific data is mandatory to set forth adequate countermeasures. Envisaged solutions should provide a sound and technically feasible approach for counteracting microgravity and cosmic rays effects, which represent the main health risk for space crews. This objective must necessarily be sustained by national/international space agencies, which would coordinate their common efforts into a defined international spaceflight program.

New Thinking: From Einstein to Artificial Intelligence, the Science and Technology that Transformed Our World


Dagogo Altraide - 2019
    Now, more than ever, it’s important to see how we got here. What hidden stories lie behind much of the technology we use today? What drove those who invented it to do so? What were those special moments that changed the world forever? New Thinking is the story of human innovation, the story of us―through war and peace, it is humanity at our most innovative.Disruptive technology and innovation: From the stories behind the steam engine revolution to the electric world of Tesla, to the first computers, to the invention of the internet and artificial intelligence, this book explores the hidden history of technology, discovering the secrets that have shaped our world. New Thinking brings you the stories of the men and women who thought in a new way to bring our world to where it is today.In New Thinking: The Technology and Science That Transformed Our World you will delight in learning and appreciating: How a technology can spawn a new technology, and how they influence each other How our modern world came to be Our incredible modern world and potential for the future If you've read books such as The Third Industrial Revolution, They Made America, or How We Got to Now, you're going to love New Thinking

User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play


Cliff Kuang - 2019
    Spanning over a century of sweeping changes, from women's rights to the Great Depression to World War II to the rise of the digital era, this book unpacks the ways in which the world has been--and continues to be--remade according to the principles of the once-obscure discipline of user-experience design.In this essential text, Kuang and Fabricant map the hidden rules of the designed world and shed light on how those rules have caused our world to change--an underappreciated but essential history that's pieced together for the first time. Combining the expertise and insight of a leading journalist and a pioneering designer, User Friendly provides a definitive, thoughtful, and practical perspective on a topic that has rapidly gone from arcane to urgent to inescapable. In User Friendly, Kuang and Fabricant tell the whole story for the first time--and you'll never interact with technology the same way again.

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language


Gretchen McCulloch - 2019
    Language is humanity's most spectacular open-source project, and the internet is making our language change faster and in more interesting ways than ever before. Internet conversations are structured by the shape of our apps and platforms, from the grammar of status updates to the protocols of comments and @replies. Linguistically inventive online communities spread new slang and jargon with dizzying speed. What's more, social media is a vast laboratory of unedited, unfiltered words where we can watch language evolve in real time.Even the most absurd-looking slang has genuine patterns behind it. Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch explores the deep forces that shape human language and influence the way we communicate with one another. She explains how your first social internet experience influences whether you prefer "LOL" or "lol," why ~sparkly tildes~ succeeded where centuries of proposals for irony punctuation had failed, what emoji have in common with physical gestures, and how the artfully disarrayed language of animal memes like lolcats and doggo made them more likely to spread.Because Internet is essential reading for anyone who's ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It's the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that's a good thing, and what our online interactions reveal about who we are.

Effective TypeScript: 62 Specific Ways to Improve Your TypeScript


Dan Vanderkam - 2019
    But TypeScript has a learning curve of its own, and understanding how to use it effectively can take time. This book guides you through 62 specific ways to improve your use of TypeScript.Author Dan Vanderkam, a principal software engineer at Sidewalk Labs, shows you how to apply these ideas, following the format popularized by Effective C++ and Effective Java (both from Addison-Wesley). You’ll advance from a beginning or intermediate user familiar with the basics to an advanced user who knows how to use the language well.Effective TypeScript is divided into eight chapters: Getting to Know TypeScript TypeScript’s Type System Type Inference Type Design Working with any Types Declarations and @types Writing and Running Your Code Migrating to TypeScript

The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design


Michael Kearns - 2019
    Algorithms have made our lives more efficient, more entertaining, and, sometimes, better informed. At the same time, complex algorithms are increasingly violating the basic rights of individual citizens. Allegedly anonymized datasets routinely leak our most sensitive personal information; statistical models for everything from mortgages to college admissions reflect racial and gender bias. Meanwhile, users manipulate algorithms to "game" search engines, spam filters, online reviewing services, and navigation apps.Understanding and improving the science behind the algorithms that run our lives is rapidly becoming one of the most pressing issues of this century. Traditional fixes, such as laws, regulations and watchdog groups, have proven woefully inadequate. Reporting from the cutting edge of scientific research, The Ethical Algorithm offers a new approach: a set of principled solutions based on the emerging and exciting science of socially aware algorithm design. Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth explain how we can better embed human principles into machine code - without halting the advance of data-driven scientific exploration. Weaving together innovative research with stories of citizens, scientists, and activists on the front lines, The Ethical Algorithm offers a compelling vision for a future, one in which we can better protect humans from the unintended impacts of algorithms while continuing to inspire wondrous advances in technology.

Alex Hoffmann: Five Exciting Thrillers, One Riveting Series


Leslie Wolfe - 2019
    Alex Hoffman. “In Alex Hoffman, Leslie Wolfe has created a character the equal of Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt and John Sanford's Lucas Davenport.” – Five-star review on Amazon. Five full-length, exciting action thrillers, one seriously gripping series. Discover Alex Hoffmann, the fearless rookie private investigator, and join her on a breathtaking ride that culminates with her facing off with the most dangerous intelligence asset the Russians have ever produced. It’s a hell of a ride. ExecutiveA rookie private investigator. An unexpected killer. Espionage, current technology, warfare, and a hint of greed. A friendly fire incident in Afghanistan takes a serious toll. A drone, out of control, brings death and wreaks havoc on a Florida highway. An apparently successful corporation comes under scrutiny. Devil’s MoveHere, at home, the enemy has a new target. We know the day of the attack, Election Day.We know very little else. America has overhauled its voting system using the latest technology. It was supposed to make our elections safer, but it’s only managed to make them a target. As we elect a President, conspiracies and murder take aim at our most cherished institutions. The Backup AssetEspionage has a new dimension. Everyone is gettable. The United States is in the crosshairs of an unstoppable enemy intelligence operation and everyone is gettable. It’s called the Cold War 2.0, but when someone steals the plans to America’s newest weapons system, the war threatens to get very hot indeed. Alex Hoffman puts everything on the line against unseen enemies in this gripping techno-thriller. Ghost PatternThere's no willpower, no intelligence, and no spirit that won't succumb to the right mix of drugs. When enemy interests employ the use of modern tools, weapons, tactics, and theories to achieve goals, the results have destructive, bone-chilling, and disturbing physical and emotional effects. Today’s enemy is tech-savvy, manipulative, powerful, well-funded, and supported by entire networks of global experts. Operation SunsetWe are under an unprecedented attack. There’s nowhere to run. It’s the inconceivable scenario. An unknown Russian isn’t threatening a building or a city, but the future of everyone in America for decades to come. Alex Hoffman is uncompromising and resourceful, but can she take out the greatest threat America has ever known when she doesn’t even know who it is? Fans of Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum, Ian Fleming, and Lee Child will love Leslie Wolfe.

Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again


Eric J. Topol - 2019
    The doctor-patient relationship--the heart of medicine--is broken: doctors are too distracted and overwhelmed to truly connect with their patients, and medical errors and misdiagnoses abound. In Deep Medicine, leading physician Eric Topol reveals how artificial intelligence can help. AI has the potential to transform everything doctors do, from notetaking and medical scans to diagnosis and treatment, greatly cutting down the cost of medicine and reducing human mortality. By freeing physicians from the tasks that interfere with human connection, AI will create space for the real healing that takes place between a doctor who can listen and a patient who needs to be heard.Innovative, provocative, and hopeful, Deep Medicine shows us how the awesome power of AI can make medicine better, for all the humans involved.

This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality


Peter Pomerantsev - 2019
    In this surreal atmosphere created to disorient us and undermine our sense of truth, we’ve lost not only our grip on peace and democracy — but our very notion of what those words even mean.Peter Pomerantsev takes us to the front lines of the disinformation age, where he meets Twitter revolutionaries and pop-up populists, “behavioral change” salesmen, Jihadi fanboys, Identitarians, truth cops, and many others. Forty years after his dissident parents were pursued by the KGB, Pomerantsev finds the Kremlin re-emerging as a great propaganda power. His research takes him back to Russia — but the answers he finds there are not what he expected.Blending reportage, family history, and intellectual adventure, This Is Not Propaganda explores how we can reimagine our politics and ourselves when reality seems to be coming apart.

Database Internals: A deep-dive into how distributed data systems work


Alex Petrov - 2019
    But with so many distributed databases and tools available today, it’s often difficult to understand what each one offers and how they differ. With this practical guide, Alex Petrov guides developers through the concepts behind modern database and storage engine internals.Throughout the book, you’ll explore relevant material gleaned from numerous books, papers, blog posts, and the source code of several open source databases. These resources are listed at the end of parts one and two. You’ll discover that the most significant distinctions among many modern databases reside in subsystems that determine how storage is organized and how data is distributed.This book examines:Storage engines: Explore storage classification and taxonomy, and dive into B-Tree-based and immutable log structured storage engines, with differences and use-cases for eachDistributed systems: Learn step-by-step how nodes and processes connect and build complex communication patterns, from UDP to reliable consensus protocolsDatabase clusters: Discover how to achieve consistent models for replicated data

Designed for Digital: How to Architect Your Business for Sustained Success


Jeanne W. Ross - 2019
    But few established companies are designed for digital. This book offers an essential guide for retooling organizations for digital success. In the digital economy, rapid pace of change in technology capabilities and customer desires means that business strategy must be fluid. As a result, the authors explain, business design has become a critical management responsibility. Effective business design enables a company to quickly pivot in response to new competitive threats and opportunities. Most leaders today, however, rely on organizational structure to implement strategy, unaware that structure inhibits, rather than enables, agility. In companies that are designed for digital, people, processes, data, and technology are synchronized to identify and deliver innovative customer solutions—and redefine strategy. Digital design, not strategy, is what separates winners from losers in the digital economy. Designed for Digital offers practical advice on digital transformation, with examples that include Amazon, BNY Mellon, DBS Bank, LEGO, Philips, Schneider Electric, USAA, and many other global organizations. Drawing on five years of research and in-depth case studies, the book is an essential guide for companies that want to disrupt rather than be disrupted in the new digital landscape.Five Building Blocks of Digital Business SuccessShared Customer InsightsOperational BackboneDigital PlatformAccountability FrameworkExternal Developer Platform

Where Will Man Take Us?: The bold story of the man technology is creating


Atul Jalan - 2019
    And the man who began this journey won't be the man who ends this journey. Where Will Man Take Us? explores the changes technology is bringing about in us as a society and as a species. What will the next generation turn into, what will it be like, how will the new Adam and Eve live and love?In this book, Atul Jalan tackles nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and genetics, seamlessly weaving the future of technology with the changing dynamics of human love, morality and ethics.

Raising a Screen-Smart Kid: Embrace the Good and Avoid the Bad in the Digital Age


Julianna Miner - 2019
    Making mistakes has always been a part of growing up, but how do parents help their kids navigate childhood and adolescence at a time when social media has the potential to magnify the consequences of those mistakes? Rather than spend all their time worrying about the worst-case scenario, readers get a bigger-picture understanding of their kids' digital landscape. Drawing on research and interviews with educators, psychologists, and kids themselves, Raising a Screen-Smart Kid offers practical advice on how parents can help their kids avoid the pitfalls and reap the benefits of the digital age by:- using social media to enhance connection with friends and family, instead of following strangers and celebrities, which is a predictor of loneliness and depression - finding online support and community for conditions such as depression and eating disorders, while avoiding potential triggers such as #Thinspiration Pinterest boards - learning and developing life skills through technology--for example, by problem-solving in online games--while avoiding inappropriate contentWritten by a public health expert and the creator of the popular blog Rants from Mommyland, this book shows parents how to help their kids navigate friendships, bullying, dating, self-esteem, and more online.

Cloud Native Devops with Kubernetes: Building, Deploying, and Scaling Modern Applications in the Cloud


John Arundel - 2019
    In this friendly, pragmatic book, cloud experts John Arundel and Justin Domingus show you what Kubernetes can do--and what you can do with it.You'll learn all about the Kubernetes ecosystem, and use battle-tested solutions to everyday problems. You'll build, step by step, an example cloud native application and its supporting infrastructure, along with a development environment and continuous deployment pipeline that you can use for your own applications.Understand containers and Kubernetes from first principles; no experience necessaryRun your own clusters or choose a managed Kubernetes service from Amazon, Google, and othersUse Kubernetes to manage resource usage and the container lifecycleOptimize clusters for cost, performance, resilience, capacity, and scalabilityLearn the best tools for developing, testing, and deploying your applicationsApply the latest industry practices for security, observability, and monitoringAdopt DevOps principles to help make your development teams lean, fast, and effective

CCNA 200-301 Official Cert Guide, Volume 1


Wendell Odom - 2019
    They are built with the objective of providing assessment, review, and practice to help ensure you are fully prepared for your certification exam. This book, combined with the CCNA 200-301 Official Cert Guide Volume 2, cover all of exam topics on the CCNA 200-301 exam. CCNA 200-301 Official Cert Guide, Volume 1 presents you with an organized test-preparation routine using proven series elements and techniques. "Do I Know This Already?" quizzes open each chapter and enable you to decide how much time you need to spend on each section. Exam topic lists make referencing easy. Chapter-ending Exam Preparation Tasks help you drill on key concepts you must know thoroughly. - Master Cisco CCNA 200-301 exam topics - Assess your knowledge with chapter-opening quizzes - Review key concepts with exam preparation tasks - Practice with realistic exam questions in the practice test software CCNA 200-301 Official Cert Guide, Volume 1 from Cisco Press enables you to succeed on the exam the first time and is the only self-study resource approved by Cisco. Best-selling author and expert instructor Wendell Odom shares preparation hints and test-taking tips, helping you identify areas of weakness and improve both your conceptual knowledge and hands-on skills. This complete study package includes - A test-preparation routine proven to help you pass the exams - Do I Know This Already? quizzes, which enable you to decide how much time you need to spend on each section - Chapter-ending and part-ending exercises, which help you drill on key concepts you must know thoroughly -The powerful Pearson Test Prep Practice Test software, complete with hundreds of well-reviewed, exam-realistic questions, customization options, and detailed performance reports - A free copy of the CCNA 200-301 Volume 1 Network Simulator Lite software, complete with meaningful lab exercises that help you hone your hands-on skills with the command-line interface for routers and switches - Links to a series of hands-on config labs developed by the author - Online, interactive practice exercises that help you hone your knowledge - More than 90 minutes of video mentoring from the author - A final preparation chapter, which guides you through tools and resources to help you craft your review and test-taking strategies - Study plan suggestions and templates to help you organize and optimize your study time Well regarded for its level of detail, study plans, assessment features, challenging review questions and exercises, video instruction, and hands-on labs, this official study guide helps you master the concepts and techniques that ensure your exam success. The CCNA 200-301 Official Cert Guide, Volume 1, combined with CCNA 200-301 Official Cert Guide, Volume 2, walk you through all the exam topics found in the Cisco 200-301 exam. Topics covered in Volume 1 include: - Networking fundamentals - Implementing Ethernet LANs - Implementing VLANs and STP - IPv4 addressing - IPv4 routing - OSPF - IPv6 - Wireless LANs Companion Website The companion website contains more than 300 unique practice exam questions, CCNA Network Simulator Lite software, online practice exercises, and 90 minutes of video training. Includes Exclusive Offers For Up to 70% Off Video Training, Practice Tests, and more Also available from Cisco Press for CCNA study is the CCNA 200-301 Official Cert Guide, Volume 1 Premium Edition eBook and Practice Test. This digital-only certification preparation product combines an eBook with enhanced Pearson Test Prep Practice Test. This integrated learning package - Enables you to focus on individual topic areas or take complete, timed exams - Includes direct links from each question to detailed tutorials to help you understand the concepts behind the questions - Provides unique sets of exam-realistic practice questions - Tracks your performance and provides feedback on a module-by-module basis, laying out a complete assessment of your knowledge to help you focus your study where it is needed most In addition to the wealth of updated content, this new edition includes a series of free hands-on exercises to help you master several real-world configuration and troubleshooting activities. These exercises can be performed on the CCNA 200-301 Network Simulator Lite, Volume 1 software included for free on the companion website that accompanies this book. This software, which simulates the experience of working on actual Cisco routers and switches, contains the following 22 free lab exercises, covering topics in Part II and Part III, the first hands-on configuration sections of the book: 1. Configuring Local Usernames 2. Configuring Hostnames 3. Interface Status I 4. Interface Status II 5. Interface Status III 6. Interface Status IV 7. Configuring Switch IP Settings 8. Switch IP Address 9. Switch IP Connectivity I 10. Switch CLI Configuration Process I 11. Switch CLI Configuration Process II 12. Switch CLI Exec Mode 13. Setting Switch Passwords 14. Interface Settings I 15. Interface Settings II 16. Interface Settings III 17. Switch Forwarding I 18. Switch Security I 19. Switch Interfaces and Forwarding Configuration Scenario 20. Configuring VLANs Configuration Scenario 21. VLAN Troubleshooting

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation


Carl Benedikt Frey - 2019
    As Carl Benedikt Frey shows, the Industrial Revolution created unprecedented wealth and prosperity over the long run, but the immediate consequences of mechanization were devastating for large swaths of the population. Middle-income jobs withered, wages stagnated, the labor share of income fell, profits surged, and economic inequality skyrocketed. These trends, Frey documents, broadly mirror those in our current age of automation, which began with the Computer Revolution.Just as the Industrial Revolution eventually brought about extraordinary benefits for society, artificial intelligence systems have the potential to do the same. But Frey argues that this depends on how the short term is managed. In the nineteenth century, workers violently expressed their concerns over machines taking their jobs. The Luddite uprisings joined a long wave of machinery riots that swept across Europe and China. Today’s despairing middle class has not resorted to physical force, but their frustration has led to rising populism and the increasing fragmentation of society. As middle-class jobs continue to come under pressure, there’s no assurance that positive attitudes to technology will persist.The Industrial Revolution was a defining moment in history, but few grasped its enormous consequences at the time. The Technology Trap demonstrates that in the midst of another technological revolution, the lessons of the past can help us to more effectively face the present.

The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality


Blake J. Harris - 2019
    In The History of the Future, Harris once again deep-dives into a tech drama for the ages to expertly tell the larger-than-life true story of Oculus, the virtual reality company founded in 2012 that—less than two years later—would catch the attention of Mark Zuckerberg and wind up being bought by Facebook for over $2 billion dollars.This incredible underdog story begins with inventor Palmer Luckey, then just a nineteen-year-old dreamer, living alone in a camper trailer in Long Beach, California. At the time, virtual reality—long-hailed as the ultimate technology—was so costly and experimental that it was unattainable outside of a few research labs and military training facilities. But with the founding of Oculus, and the belief that his tantalizing vision of the future could one day be more than science fiction, Luckey put everything he had into creating a device that would allow gamers like him to step into virtual worlds and, in doing so, hopefully kickstart a VR revolution. With the help of an industry legend, a serial entrepreneur, and a slew of colorful characters—including those behind gaming sensations like Doom, Words with Friends, and Guitar Hero—Luckey’s scrappy startup would finally deliver the dream of immersive and affordable virtual reality to consumers, leading geeks and gamers to be excited in a way that they hadn’t been in years, and tech firms and investors scrambling to get in on the action before it was too late.Over the course of three years (and with unprecedented access from Oculus and Facebook), Harris conducted hundreds of interviews with key players in the VR revolution—including Luckey, his partners, and their cult of dreamers—to weave together a rich, cinematic narrative that captures the breakthroughs, breakdowns, and human drama of trying to change the world. The result is a supremely accessible, entertaining look at the birth of a new multi-billion-dollar industry; one full of heroes, villains, and twists at every corner. Take, for instance, Harris’ own discovery while writing this story. When he started this endeavor, he had no idea that this tale would somehow involve Donald Trump, billion-dollar lawsuits, illegal practices, and end with Luckey—eventually ousted from Facebook—as one of the most polarizing figures in Silicon Valley.

The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet


Jeff Kosseff - 2019
    "This book examines the history and future of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides websites extraordinary legal immunity for user-generated content and is responsible for the modern Internet in the United States"--

Comptia A+ Certification All-In-One Exam Guide, Exams 220-1001 & 220-1002


Mike Meyers - 2019
    You'll find learning objectives at the beginning of each chapter, exam tips, practice exam questions, and in-depth explanations. Designed to help you pass the CompTIA A+ exams with ease, this definitive guide also serves as an essential on-the-job IT reference. Covers all exam topics, including how to: - Work with CPUs, RAM, BIOS, motherboards, power supplies, and other personal computer components- Install, configure, and maintain hard drives- Manage input devices and removable media- Set up, upgrade, and maintain all versions of Windows- Troubleshoot and fix computer problems- Install printers and other peripherals- Configure and secure mobile devices- Connect to the Internet- Set up wired and wireless networks- Protect your personal computer and your network- Implement virtualization and cloud-based technologiesOnline content includes: - Practice exams for 1001 & 1002- More than one hour of free video training- TotalSim simulations of performance-based questions- Mike Meyers' favorite PC tools and utilities

Programming Bitcoin: Learn How to Program Bitcoin from Scratch


Jimmy Song - 2019
    Author Jimmy Song shows Python programmers and developers how to program a Bitcoin library from scratch. You'll learn how to work with the basics, including the math, blocks, network, and transactions behind this popular cryptocurrency and its blockchain payment system.By the end of the book, you'll understand how this cryptocurrency works under the hood by coding all the components necessary for a Bitcoin library. Learn how to create transactions, get the data you need from peers, and send transactions over the network. Whether you're exploring Bitcoin applications for your company or considering a new career path, this practical book will get you started.Parse, validate, and create bitcoin transactionsLearn Script, the smart contract language behind BitcoinDo exercises in each chapter to build a Bitcoin library from scratchUnderstand how proof-of-work secures the blockchainProgram Bitcoin using Python 3Understand how simplified payment verification and light wallets workWork with public-key cryptography and cryptographic primitives

Game Changer: AlphaZero's Groundbreaking Chess Strategies and the Promise of AI


Matthew Sadler - 2019
    The artificial intelligence system, created by DeepMind, had been fed nothing but the rules of the Royal Game when it beat the world’s strongest chess engine in a prolonged match. The selection of ten games published in December 2017 created a worldwide sensation: how was it possible to play in such a brilliant and risky style and not lose a single game against an opponent of superhuman strength?For Game Changer, Matthew Sadler and Natasha Regan investigated more than two thousand previously unpublished games by AlphaZero. They also had unparalleled access to its team of developers and were offered a unique look ‘under the bonnet’ to grasp the depth and breadth of AlphaZero’s search. Sadler and Regan reveal its thinking process and tell the story of the human motivation and the techniques that created AlphaZero.Game Changer also presents a collection of lucidly explained chess games of astonishing quality. Both professionals and club players will improve their game by studying AlphaZero’s stunning discoveries in every field that matters: opening preparation, piece mobility, initiative, attacking techniques, long-term sacrifices and much more.The story of AlphaZero has a wider impact. Game Changer offers intriguing insights into the opportunities and horizons of Artificial Intelligence. Not just in solving games, but in providing solutions for a wide variety of challenges in society.With a foreword by former World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov and an introduction by DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis.Matthew Sadler (1974) is a Grandmaster who twice won the British Championship and was awarded an individual Gold Medal at the 1996 Olympiad. He has authored several highly acclaimed books on chess and has been writing the famous ‘Sadler on Books’ column for New In Chess magazine for many years. Natasha Regan is a Women’s International Master from England who achieved a degree in mathematics from Cambridge University. Matthew Sadler and Natasha Regan won the English Chess Federation 2016 Book of the Award for their book Chess for Life.

Airplane Mode


Elliott Downing - 2019
    A state-of-the-art spy plane with no official owner circles over every city she visits. A darkened fighter jet lurks off the wing of her red-eye flight into Reno. On the ground, the surveillance apparatus of modern life seems to be taking a peculiar, specific interest in her.A reclusive computer hacker, recently fired from an agency without a name, summons Cassandra to a meeting in the middle of nowhere to share an urgent message: Something more than human has been growing in the cracks of our world, and it might not remain ours much longer…Airplane Mode is a tense and disorienting work of present-day science fiction, set in the nowhere land of air travel and the everywhere land of ubiquitous surveillance, that explores the darker contours of the technological world we've created and speculates about how it might end.

The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats


Richard A. Clarke - 2019
     America's next major war is likely to be provoked by a cyber attack. From well-covered stories like the Stuxnet virus, which helped slow Iran's nuclear program, to lesser-known tales like EternalBlue, the 2017 cyber battle that closed hospitals in Britain and froze shipping crates in Germany in midair, we have entered an age in which online threats carry real-world consequences. But we do not have to let autocrats and criminals run amok in the digital realm. We now know a great deal about how to make cyberspace far less dangerous--and about how to defend our security, economy, democracy, and privacy from cyber attack.This is a book about the realm in which nobody should ever want to fight a war: The Fifth Domain, the Pentagon's term for cyberspace. Our guides are two of America's top cybersecurity experts, seasoned practitioners who are as familiar with the White House Situation Room as they are with Fortune 500 boardrooms. Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake offer a vivid, engrossing tour of the often unfamiliar terrain of cyberspace, introducing us to the scientists, executives, and public servants who have learned through hard experience how government agencies and private firms can fend off cyber threats.Clarke and Knake take us inside quantum-computing labs racing to develop cyber superweapons; bring us into the boardrooms of the many firms that have been hacked and the few that have not; and walk us through the corridors of the U.S. intelligence community with officials working to defend America's elections from foreign malice. With a focus on solutions over scaremongering, they make a compelling case for "cyber resilience"--building systems that can resist most attacks, raising the costs on cyber criminals and the autocrats who often lurk behind them, and avoiding the trap of overreaction to digital attacks.Above all, Clarke and Knake show us how to keep The Fifth Domain a humming engine of economic growth and human progress, not give in to those who would turn it into a wasteland of conflict. Backed by decades of high-level experience in the White House and the private sector, this book delivers a riveting, agenda-setting insider look at what works in the struggle to avoid cyberwar.

Blackquest 40


Jeff Bond - 2019
    When she's told all employees must drop everything for some busywork exercise called Blackquest 40, it's an easy no.Trouble is, her bosses aren't really asking.Blackquest 40 is the mother of all corporate trainings. A near-impossible project to be completed in forty straight hours. No phones. No internet. Sleeping on cots. Nobody in, nobody out. Deb finds the whole setup creepy and authoritarian. When a Carebnb issue necessitates her leaving the office, she heads for the door. What's the worst that could happen?Armed commandos, HVAC-duct chases, a catastrophic master plan that gets darker by the hour Blackquest 40 is a fresh take on the Die Hard formula, layering smart-drones and a modern heroine onto the classic action tale.Stand down, Bruce. Deb's got this.

How Technology Works: The Facts Visually Explained


D.K. Publishing - 2019
    It includes inventions that have changed the course of history, like the internal combustion engine, as well as technologies that might hold the key to our future survival, including solar cells and new kinds of farming to feed a growing population. All the way through the book, step-by-step explanations are supported by simple and original graphics that take devices apart and show you how they work. The opening chapter explains principles that underpin lots of devices - from basic mechanics to electricity to digital technology. From there on, devices are grouped by application - such as the home, transport, and computing - making them easy to find and placing similar devices side by side. How Technology Works is perfect for anyone who didn't have a training in STEM subjects at school or is simply curious about how the modern world works.

Think Like Amazon: 50 1/2 Ideas to Become a Digital Leader


John Rossman - 2019
    In this step-by-step guide, he provides 50 1/2 answers drawn from his experience as an Amazon executive--and shows today's business leaders how to think like Amazon, strategize like Bezos, and beat the competition like nobody's business. Learn how to: Move forward to get back to Day 1--and change the status quo.Use the "working backwards" innovation and problem-solving approach to lead the way.Become a platform company--with the right platform strategy.Create customer obsession--and grant your customers superpowers.Experiment, fail, rinse, and repeat.Decentralize your way to digital greatness.Master the magic of small autonomous teams.Avoid the trap of past positions.Make better and faster decisions.Use metrics to create a culture of accountability and innovationUse AI and the Internet of Things to reinvent customer experiences.In addition to these targeted strategies, you'll receive a rare inside glimpse into how Jeff Bezos and Amazon take a remarkably consistent approach to innovate, explore new markets, and spark new growth. You'll understand the unique mindset and inner workings that drive Amazon's operational excellence, from its ground-up approach to new digital markets to its out-of-the-box attitudes on innovation. Along the way, you'll learn specific game-changing strategies that made Amazon stand out in a crowded digital world. These include actionable ideas that you can use to transform your culture, expand your business into digital, and become the kind of platform company that customers obsess over. Rossman also offers invaluable insights into the latest technologies, e-commerce marketing, online culture, and IoT disruptions that only an Amazon insider would know.If you want to compete and win in the digital era, you have to Think Like Amazon.

Leading Quality: How Great Leaders Deliver High-Quality Software and Accelerate Growth


Ronald Cummings-John - 2019
    You will learn the techniques successful leaders use to make their strategic decisions and you will be given the tools to ensure that your team is in alignment to achieving common goals. Leading Quality is the first book that teaches why quality is important and how to incorporate it within the workspace. Praise for Leading Quality:   “A quality mindset remains key to differentiating your product and your company. Leading Quality offers key lessons to develop this mindset.” - Michael Lopp, author of Managing Humans and VP of Product Engineering at Slack “Leading Quality communicates just how important a focus on quality is within your company and is one of the few titles that actually teaches how to lead quality in a clear yet captivating manner.”  - Shesh Patel, Engineering Manager at The New York Times “Three elements define any successful product: quality, quality, and quality. Leading Quality is a comprehensive and practical guide to embedding quality into the DNA of any product organization.” - Nick Caldwell, CPO at Looker and former VP of Engineering at Reddit

Kubernetes Patterns: Reusable Elements for Designing Cloud-Native Applications


Bilgin Ibryam - 2019
    These modern architectures use new primitives that require a different set of practices than most developers, tech leads, and architects are accustomed to. With this focused guide, Bilgin Ibryam and Roland Huß from Red Hat provide common reusable elements, patterns, principles, and practices for designing and implementing cloud-native applications on Kubernetes.Each pattern includes a description of the problem and a proposed solution with Kubernetes specifics. Many patterns are also backed by concrete code examples. This book is ideal for developers already familiar with basic Kubernetes concepts who want to learn common cloud-native patterns.You'll learn about the following pattern categories:Foundational patterns cover the core principles and practices for building container-based cloud-native applications.Behavioral patterns explore finer-grained concepts for managing various types of container and platform interactions.Structural patterns help you organize containers within a pod, the atom of the Kubernetes platform.Configuration patterns provide insight into how application configurations can be handled in Kubernetes.Advanced patterns cover more advanced topics such as extending the platform with operators.

Head First Kotlin: A Brain-Friendly Guide


Dawn Griffiths - 2019
    This hands-on book helps you learn the Kotlin language with a unique method that goes beyond syntax and how-to manuals and teaches you how to think like a great Kotlin developer. You'll learn everything from language fundamentals to collections, generics, lambdas, and higher-order functions. Along the way, you'll get to play with both object-oriented and functional programming. If you want to really understand Kotlin, this is the book for you.Why does this book look so different?Based on the latest research in cognitive science and learning theory, Head First Kotlin uses a visually rich format to engage your mind rather than a text-heavy approach that puts you to sleep. Why waste your time struggling with new concepts? This multisensory learning experience is designed for the way your brain really works.

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption


Ben Mezrich - 2019
    While nursing their wounds in Ibiza, they accidentally run into an eccentric character who tells them about a brand-new idea: cryptocurrency. Immersing themselves in what is then an obscure and sometimes sinister world, they begin to realize “crypto” is, in their own words, "either the next big thing or total bulls--t." There’s nothing left to do but make a bet.From the Silk Road to the halls of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Bitcoin Billionaires will take us on a wild and surprising ride while illuminating a tantalizing economic future. On November 26, 2017, the Winklevoss brothers became the first bitcoin billionaires. Here’s the story of how they got there—as only Ben Mezrich could tell it.

War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age


Mark Schwartz - 2019
    It is the relationship between the business and its IT organization, an uneasy and less than effective alliance born of misunderstandings, a hazy sense of shared mission, and nerds versus suits stereotypes. In War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age, Mark Schwartz, author of A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility and The Art of Business Value, shows why and how executives and business leaders must create a shared strategy with their IT organizations to drive innovation, enhance their competitive positioning, increase revenue, and delight customers.

Elements of Clojure


Zachary Tellman - 2019
    This is necessary because, in the words of Michael Polanyi, "we can know more than we can tell." Our design choices are not the result of an ineluctable chain of logic; they come from a deeper place, one which is visceral and inarticulate.Polanyi calls this "tacit knowledge", a thing which we only understand as part of something else. When we speak, we do not focus on making sounds, we focus on our words. We understand the muscular act of speech, but would struggle to explain it.To write software, we must learn where to draw boundaries. Good software is built through effective indirection. We seem to have decided that this skill can only be learned through practice; it cannot be taught, except by example. Our decisions may improve with time, but not our ability to explain them. It's true that the study of these questions cannot yield a closed-form solution for judging software design. We can make our software simple, but we cannot do the same to its problem domain, its users, or the physical world. Our tacit knowledge of this environment will always inform our designs.This doesn't mean that we can simply ignore our design process. Polanyi tells us that tacit knowledge only suffices until we fail, and the software industry is awash with failure. Our designs may never be provably correct, but we can give voice to the intuition that shaped them. Our process may always be visceral, but it doesn't have to be inarticulate.And so this book does not offer knowledge, it offers clarity. It is aimed at readers who know Clojure, but struggle to articulate the rationale of their designs to themselves and others. Readers who use other languages, but have a passing familiarity with Clojure, may also find this book useful.

Ramping Your Brand: How to Ride the Killer CPG Growth Curve


James F. Richardson - 2019
    It is based on years of anthropological research into how and why consumers pay for premium-priced CPG items and intensive 4P pattern analysis among an elite club of premium CPG brands that all reached $100M+ in less than a decade. Part 1. Designing to Command a Premium This is where many founders fail without realizing it. There is a cultural logic behind premium products that grow extremely fast. You should learn it. Part 2. Managing A Small Experiment Don’t hit the gas too early. Successful CPG startups manage a rolling, iterative experiment until key KPIs appear. You should learn this art. Part 3. Fine Tuning the Conversion Playbook Steady velocity growth is essential to ramping your brand.Your team needs to learn the art of sustaining it in key geographies, so that you don’t have to buy premature distribution to obtain growth. Part 4. Accelerating to Scale There are three best practices in acceleration. Two of them are counter-intuitive to CPG veterans not expert in the ramping of premium CPG businesses. You need to learn how to deploy them.

You asked for it...: A Pride & Prejudice Variation with a Twist


Sydney Salier - 2019
    When he arrives at Meryton, he flutters and flounces and gives his opinions to all and sundry in his own inimitable way. Even if they are not wanted. Or maybe, especially if they are not wanted. Will his perceptions make a difference? If they do, what will be the outcome of the changes? Or will he simply create chaos for the fun of it, since, with his powers, anything might happen? If you want a light-hearted romp through P&P with some unexpected twists, please enjoy. Warning: If you are a serious P&P fan, this story is probably not for you.

Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think


James Vlahos - 2019
    They know that whoever successfully creates it will revolutionize our relationship with technology—and make billions of dollars in the process. They call it conversational AI.   Computers that can speak and think like humans may seem like the stuff of science fiction, but they are rapidly moving toward reality. In Talk to Me, veteran tech journalist James Vlahos meets the researchers at Amazon, Google, and Apple who are leading the way. He explores how voice tech will transform every sector of society: handing untold new powers to businesses, overturning traditional notions of privacy, upending how we access information, and fundamentally altering the way we understand human consciousness. And he even tries to understand the significance of the voice-computing revolution first-hand — by building a chatbot version of his terminally ill father.   Vlahos’s research leads him to one fundamental question: What happens when our computers become as articulate, compassionate, and creative as we are?

The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future


Ben Green - 2019
    We are promised that apps, algorithms, and artificial intelligence will relieve congestion, restore democracy, prevent crime, and improve public services. In The Smart Enough City, Ben Green warns against seeing the city only through the lens of technology; taking an exclusively technical view of urban life will lead to cities that appear smart but under the surface are rife with injustice and inequality. He proposes instead that cities strive to be "smart enough" to embrace technology as a powerful tool when used in conjunction with other forms of social change--but not to value technology as an end in itself.In a technology-centric smart city, self-driving cars have the run of downtown and force out pedestrians, civic engagement is limited to requesting services through an app, police use algorithms to justify and perpetuate racist practices, and governments and private companies surveil public space to control behavior. Green describes smart city efforts gone wrong but also smart enough alternatives, attainable with the help of technology but not reducible to technology: a livable city, a democratic city, a just city, a responsible city, and an innovative city. By recognizing the complexity of urban life rather than merely seeing the city as something to optimize, these Smart Enough Cities successfully incorporate technology into a holistic vision of justice and equity.

From an Idea to Google: How Innovation at Google Changed the World


Lowey Bundy Sichol - 2019
    With humorous black & white illustrations throughout, learn about the company that even earned its own catchphrase: Google it!Today, Google is the number one internet search engine and the most visited website in the world. But a long time ago, two college friends, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, started out with just an idea. Find out more about Google’s history, the business, and the brand in this illustrated nonfiction book! Find out where the name “Google” came from. (Hint: It involves a LOT of zeros!) Discover how Google became the fastest and most popular internet search engine of all time. Explore how Google transformed from a tiny startup (in someone’s garage!) into one of the most powerful companies in the world.

Object Design Style Guide


Matthias Noback - 2019
    Applying best practices for object design means that your code will be easy to read, write, and maintain. Object Design Style Guide captures dozens of techniques for creating pro-quality OO code that can stand the test of time. Examples are in an instantly-familiar pseudocode, teaching techniques you can apply to any OO language, from C++ to PHP.

The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life


Paul C.W. Davies - 2019
    if you want to understand how the concept of life is changing, read this' Professor Andrew Briggs, University of OxfordWhen Darwin set out to explain the origin of species, he made no attempt to answer the deeper question: what is life? For generations, scientists have struggled to make sense of this fundamental question. Life really does look like magic: even a humble bacterium accomplishes things so dazzling that no human engineer can match it. And yet, huge advances in molecular biology over the past few decades have served only to deepen the mystery. So can life be explained by known physics and chemistry, or do we need something fundamentally new?In this penetrating and wide-ranging new analysis, world-renowned physicist and science communicator Paul Davies searches for answers in a field so new and fast-moving that it lacks a name, a domain where computing, chemistry, quantum physics and nanotechnology intersect. At the heart of these diverse fields, Davies explains, is the concept of information: a quantity with the power to unify biology with physics, transform technology and medicine, and even to illuminate the age-old question of whether we are alone in the universe.From life's murky origins to the microscopic engines that run the cells of our bodies, The Demon in the Machine is a breath-taking journey across the landscape of physics, biology, logic and computing. Weaving together cancer and consciousness, two-headed worms and bird navigation, Davies reveals how biological organisms garner and process information to conjure order out of chaos, opening a window on the secret of life itself.

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World


Clive Thompson - 2019
    And this may sound weirdly obvious, but every single one of those pieces of software was written by a programmer. Programmers are thus among the most quietly influential people on the planet. As we live in a world made of software, they're the architects. The decisions they make guide our behavior. When they make something newly easy to do, we do a lot more of it. If they make it hard or impossible to do something, we do less of it.If we want to understand how today's world works, we ought to understand something about coders. Who exactly are the people that are building today's world? What makes them tick? What type of personality is drawn to writing software? And perhaps most interestingly -- what does it do to them?One of the first pieces of coding a newbie learns is the program to make the computer say "Hello, world!" Like that piece of code, Clive Thompson's book is a delightful place to begin to understand this vocation, which is both a profession and a way of life, and which essentially didn't exist little more than a generation ago, but now is considered just about the only safe bet we can make about what the future holds. Thompson takes us close to some of the great coders of our time, and unpacks the surprising history of the field, beginning with the first great coders, who were women. Ironically, if we're going to traffic in stereotypes, women are arguably "naturally" better at coding than men, but they were written out of the history, and shoved out of the seats, for reasons that are illuminating. Now programming is indeed, if not a pure brotopia, at least an awfully homogenous community, which attracts people from a very narrow band of backgrounds and personality types. As Thompson learns, the consequences of that are significant - not least being a fetish for disruption at scale that doesn't leave much time for pondering larger moral issues of collateral damage. At the same time, coding is a marvelous new art form that has improved the world in innumerable ways, and Thompson reckons deeply, as no one before him has, with what great coding in fact looks like, who creates it, and where they come from. To get as close to his subject has he can, he picks up the thread of his own long-abandoned coding practice, and tries his mightiest to up his game, with some surprising results.More and more, any serious engagement with the world demands an engagement with code and its consequences, and to understand code, we must understand coders. In that regard, Clive Thompson's Hello, World! is a marvelous and delightful master class.

The Great Firewall of China: How to Build and Control an Alternative Version of the Internet


James Griffiths - 2019
    Even as the Chinese internet grows and online businesses thrive, speech is controlled, dissent quashed, and any attempts to organise outside the official Communist Party are quickly stamped out. But the effects of the Great Firewall are not confined to China itself. More and more, China is threatening global internet freedoms as it seeks to shore up its censorship regime, with methods that are providing inspiration for aspiring autocrats the world over.As censorship, distortion and fake news gain traction around the world, and internet giants such as Facebook show ever greater willingness to compromise internet freedoms in pursuit of the Chinese market, James Griffiths takes a look inside the Great Firewall and explores just how far it has spread, arguing that its influence can only be countered by initiating a radical new vision of online liberty.

Rethinking Real Estate: A Roadmap to Technology’s Impact on the World’s Largest Asset Class


Dror Poleg - 2019
    It is democratizing access to capital and information, changing the way tenants use space, and eroding the power of regulation. Billions of dollars are funding these new real estate technologies and operating models. Value is shifting away from the assets themselves toward those who understand the needs of specific end-users and can use technology to deliver comprehensive, on-demand solutions. With all of these developments, there is an urgent need for a resource that helps industry practitioners think differently about their investment, customers, and competition.Rethinking Real Estate answers that call. It explores the impact of technology on all asset types — from retail projects, through lodging and residential properties, to office buildings and industrial facilities. Based on the author’s two decades of experience working across four continents alongside the world’s leading real estate investors, as well as hundreds of conversations with start-up founders and venture capitalists, this book provides practitioners with key insights, methodologies, and practical strategies to identify risks, take advantage of emerging opportunities, evaluate new competitors, and transform their organization, project, venture, or career. Whether you are an investor, developer, operator, broker, lender, facility manager, designer, planner, or technology entrepreneur, this book will help you navigate the exciting period ahead.

Hidden London: Discovering the Forgotten Underground


David Bownes - 2019
    It provides the first narrative of a previously secret and barely understood aspect of London’s history. Behind locked doors and lost entrances lies a secret world of abandoned stations, redundant passageways, empty elevator shafts, and cavernous ventilation ducts. The Tube is an ever-expanding network that has left in its wake hidden places and spaces. Hidden London opens up the lost worlds of London’s Underground and offers a fascinating analysis of why Underground spaces—including the deep-level shelter at Clapham South, the closed Aldwych station, the lost tunnels of Euston—have fallen into disuse and how they have been repurposed. With access to previously unseen archives, architectural drawings, and images, the authors create an authoritative account of London’s hidden Underground story. This surprising and at times myth-breaking narrative interweaves spectacular, newly commissioned photography of disused stations and Underground structures today.

The Technology Fallacy: How People Are the Real Key to Digital Transformation


Gerald C. Kane - 2019
    This book offers managers and business leaders a guide for surviving digital disruptions--but it is not a book about technology. It is about the organizational changes required to harness the power of technology. The authors argue that digital disruption is primarily about people and that effective digital transformation involves changes to organizational dynamics and how work gets done. A focus only on selecting and implementing the right digital technologies is not likely to lead to success. The best way to respond to digital disruption is by changing the company culture to be more agile, risk tolerant, and experimental.The authors draw on four years of research, conducted in partnership with MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte, surveying more than 16,000 people and conducting interviews with managers at such companies as Walmart, Google, and Salesforce. They introduce the concept of digital maturity--the ability to take advantage of opportunities offered by the new technology--and address the specifics of digital transformation, including cultivating a digital environment, enabling intentional collaboration, and fostering an experimental mindset. Every organization needs to understand its "digital DNA" in order to stop "doing digital" and start "being digital."Digital disruption won't end anytime soon; the average worker will probably experience numerous waves of disruption during the course of a career. The insights offered by The Technology Fallacy will hold true through them all.A book in the Management on the Cutting Edge series, published in cooperation with MIT Sloan Management Review.

The Deceased


Francis Morrow - 2019
    The miracles of mind interface technology will bring them together. James Conroy is an Angel Officer in the Renaissance Police Department, a veteran of hundreds of death tech interfaces. No other Angel has journeyed deeper into the valley of the shadow of death. A late night call from Conroy's precinct chief can mean only one thing: another murder victim to be interviewed. Laura Ashe – the deceased – was a talented eidolon artist, a rising star in the Renaissance firmament. But beneath the golden exterior, Ashe was, and still is, hiding many secrets, and sometimes for good reason. In life, Ashe drew every eye, but not all of her admirers had good intentions. As the death horizon approaches, violence swirls, conspiracies emerge, and the suspects only seem to multiply. Will Conroy be able to identify the killer before Ashe's second and final death? Buy The Deceased to see a murder case solved from beyond the grave.

NASA Mission AS-506 Apollo 11 Owners' Workshop Manual: 50th Anniversary of 1st Moon Landing - 1969


Christopher Riley - 2019
    NASA Mission AS-506 Apollo 11 Owners' Workshop Manual is the story of the Apollo 11 mission and the ‘space hardware’ that made it all possible. This manual looks at the evolution and design of the mighty Saturn V rocket, the Command and Service Modules, and the Lunar Module. It describes the space suits worn by the crew and their special life support and communications systems. We learn about how the Apollo 11 mission was flown - from launch procedures to ‘flying’ the Saturn V and the ‘LEM’, and from moon walking to the earth re-entry procedure. This new edition of the book celebrates the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

DK Life Stories Albert Einstein


Wil Mara - 2019
    His many theories and discoveries changed the way scientists think and work, and the way in which we look at and understand things. Learn all about Einstein's family and education, his travels and troubles, and the special compass he was given as a young boy that first set him on the path to questioning the world around him. This new biography series from DK goes beyond the basic facts to tell the true life stories of history's most interesting people. Full-color photographs and hand-drawn illustrations complement thoughtfully written, age-appropriate text to create an engaging book children will enjoy reading. Definition boxes, information sidebars, maps, inspiring quotes, and other nonfiction text features add depth, and a handy reference section at the back makes this the one biography series every teacher and librarian will want to collect. Each book also includes an author's introduction letter, a glossary, and an index.

31 Fantastic Adventures in Science: Women Scientists in India


Aashima Freidog - 2019
    But there are thousands of women scientists in India, who perform experiments in laboratories, peer through powerful telescopes and camp out in harsh and extreme conditions.This unique book presents the stories of thirty-one of these trailblazing women who work in a diverse array of fields, from environmental biotechnology to particle physics, palaeobiology to astrophysics. Through their research, they uncover the mysteries of the universe, find more sustainable ways of living, cure life-threatening diseases and study animals and plants that are long gone.Find out what drew them to science, read about how they deal with the difficulties and pressures of their work, and learn how they push the boundaries of human knowledge further and further every day.

Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream


Jonathan Gruber - 2019
    The American economy glitters on the outside, but the reality is quite different. Job opportunities and economic growth are increasingly concentrated in a few crowded coastal enclaves. Corporations and investors are disproportionately developing technologies that benefit the wealthiest Americans in the most prosperous areas -- and destroying middle class jobs elsewhere. To turn this tide, we must look to a brilliant and all-but-forgotten American success story and embark on a plan that will create the industries of the future -- and the jobs that go with them. Beginning in 1940, massive public investment generated breakthroughs in science and technology that first helped win WWII and then created the most successful economy the world has ever seen. Private enterprise then built on these breakthroughs to create new industries -- such as radar, jet engines, digital computers, mobile telecommunications, life-saving medicines, and the internet-- that became the catalyst for broader economic growth that generated millions of good jobs. We lifted almost all boats, not just the yachts. Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson tell the story of this first American growth engine and provide the blueprint for a second. It's a visionary, pragmatic, sure-to-be controversial plan that will lead to job growth and a new American economy in places now left behind.

The Twittering Machine


Richard Seymour - 2019
    Leading political writer and broadcaster Richard Seymour, author of Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics argues that this is a chilling metaphor for our relationship with social media.Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. We are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience.Through journalism, psychoanalytic reflection and insights from users, developers, security experts and others, Seymour probes the human side of the machine, asking what we’re getting out of it, and what we’re getting into.

Cat Breed Guide: A complete reference to your purr-fect best friend


Stephanie Warren Drimmer - 2019
    Each profile includes the breed's "cat stats": country of origin, size, coat colour and pattern, grooming difficulty, and cat-titude. With the help of veterinarian Dr. Gary Weitzman and cat behaviorist Mieshelle Nagelschneider, kids will also learn how to choose the right cat for them, how to take care of their new feline friend, and how to understand its behavior. Fun feature spreads cover cats in popular culture, prehistoric cats, and the house cat's wild cousins. This comprehensive guide is perfect for the cat-crazy kid, and is an excellent reference for families who are adopting their first furry family member.

The Creativity Code: How AI Is Learning to Write, Paint and Think


Marcus du Sautoy - 2019
    They can navigate more data than a doctor or lawyer and act with greater precision. For many years we’ve taken solace in the notion that they can’t create. But now that algorithms can learn and adapt, does the future of creativity belong to machines, too?It is hard to imagine a better guide to the bewildering world of artificial intelligence than Marcus du Sautoy, a celebrated Oxford mathematician whose work on symmetry in the ninth dimension has taken him to the vertiginous edge of mathematical understanding. In The Creativity Code he considers what machine learning means for the future of creativity. The Pollockizer can produce drip paintings in the style of Jackson Pollock, Botnik spins off fanciful (if improbable) scenes inspired by J. K. Rowling, and the music-composing algorithm Emmy managed to fool a panel of Bach experts. But do these programs just mimic, or do they have what it takes to create? Du Sautoy argues that to answer this question, we need to understand how the algorithms that drive them work―and this brings him back to his own subject of mathematics, with its puzzles, constraints, and enticing possibilities.While most recent books on AI focus on the future of work, The Creativity Code moves us to the forefront of creative new technologies and offers a more positive and unexpected vision of our future cohabitation with machines. It challenges us to reconsider what it means to be human―and to crack the creativity code.

Artificial Intelligence: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review (HBR Insights Series)


Harvard Business Review - 2019
    What should you and your company be doing today to ensure that you're poised for success and keeping up with your competitors in the age of AI?Artificial Intelligence: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review brings you today's most essential thinking on AI and explains how to launch the right initiatives at your company to capitalize on the opportunity of the machine intelligence revolution.Business is changing. Will you adapt or be left behind?Get up to speed and deepen your understanding of the topics that are shaping your company's future with the Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review series. Featuring HBR's smartest thinking on fast-moving issues--blockchain, cybersecurity, AI, and more--each book provides the foundational introduction and practical case studies your organization needs to compete today and collects the best research, interviews, and analysis to get it ready for tomorrow. You can't afford to ignore how these issues will transform the landscape of business and society. The Insights You Need series will help you grasp these critical ideas--and prepare you and your company for the future.

The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child


Morgan G. Ames - 2019
    In reality, the project fell short in many ways--starting with the hand crank, which never materialized. Yet the project remained charismatic to many who were captivated by its claims of access to educational opportunities previously out of reach. Behind its promises, OLPC, like many technology projects that make similarly grand claims, had a fundamentally flawed vision of who the computer was made for and what role technology should play in learning.Drawing on fifty years of history and a seven-month study of a model OLPC project in Paraguay, Ames reveals that the laptops were not only frustrating to use, easy to break, and hard to repair, they were designed for "technically precocious boys"--idealized younger versions of the developers themselves--rather than the children who were actually using them. The Charisma Machine offers a cautionary tale about the allure of technology hype and the problems that result when utopian dreams drive technology development.

First on the Moon: The Apollo 11 50th Anniversary Experience


Rod Pyle - 2019
    Acclaimed science author Rod Pyle (Missions to the Moon) returns with a beautiful and insightful book commemorating Apollo 11. First on the Moon offers an exciting behind-the-scenes look at America’s journey to the Moon—from the space race to the landing on the Sea of Tranquility to splashdown on Earth and the aftermath. Pyle spent years combing NASA archives and private collections for memorabilia from the mission, and the book includes everything from accessible explanations of the enormous challenges facing NASA to reproductions of original 1969 documents. It also features a number of specially commissioned photocompositions created from NASA Apollo images released in 2015. Many were parts of photomontages taken by the astronauts, and these compositions have now been carefully restored to their originally intended montage formats. With compelling firsthand accounts and a gripping narrative, this gorgeously designed volume fully immerses readers in the Space Age. Includes a foreword by Buzz Aldrin, and exclusive interviews with the adult children of the Apollo 11 astronauts.

Extreme Privacy: What It Takes to Disappear in America


Michael Bazzell - 2019
    For the past five years, Michael Bazzell has been helping celebrities, billionaires, and everyday citizens disappear completely from public view. He is now known in Hollywood as the guy that “fixes” things. His previous books about privacy were mostly REACTIVE and he focused on ways to hide information, clean up an online presence, and sanitize public records to avoid unwanted exposure. This 370-page textbook is PROACTIVE. It is about starting over. It is the complete guide that he would give to any new client in an extreme situation. It leaves nothing out, and provides explicit details of every step he takes to make someone completely disappear, including document templates and a chronological order of events. The information shared in this book is based on real experiences with his actual clients, and is unlike any content ever released in his other books. The stories are all true, with the exception of changed names, locations, and minor details in order to protect the privacy of those described.

Living by the Code


Enrique López Mañas - 2019
    It’s like chatting over coffee with your favorite people in tech — but better!It’s hard to make it as a developer in today’s tech world, and even harder to find mentors who can give you the straight advice on what it takes to go from good, to great, to amazing.But — what if you could pick the brains of today’s top developers, leaders and innovators in tech......discovering the paths each person took to get where they are today......learning from the mistakes and pivots they’ve made in their careers......and start using the exact tips and techniques that keep them at the top of their game?Living by the Code brings the experiences and insights of over 40 of these influencers together in one single book, to help you grow your career in today’s ever-changing technical landscape.If you’re struggling to make your mark in the competitive tech industry, then this book is what you need to make your best career move — no matter whether you’re a developer for a big corporation, a scrappy solo entrepreneur, or someone in between.It’s like having dozens of tech’s best mentors — right at your fingertips.Be your best by learning from the best: including Felix Krause, Annyce Davis, Fernando Cejas, Cate Huston, Huyen Tue Dao, John Sundell, Ash Furrow, Zarah Dominguez, Hadi Hariri & many more!

C++ Crash Course


Josh Lospinoso - 2019
    Learn core language concepts, the C++ Standard Library, and the Boost Libraries.C++ is one of the most widely used languages for real-world software. Wherever performance matters, C++ is the de facto standard. It's the language behind operating systems, embedded devices, games, web browsers, and virtual reality systems. As a C++ developer, you can program efficient software on virtually any platform.C++ Crash Course cuts through the weeds to get you straight to the core of C++17, the current revision of the ISO standard. In Part I, you'll learn the essential core language features. Part II introduces you to the C++ Standard Library and Boost Libraries, where you'll learn about testing and mocking frameworks, containers, concurrency, and more. Part III contains extended examples that weave to-gether the lessons from Parts I and II.You'll learn all the major features of modern C++, including:- Fundamental types such as integers, floating point, characters, Booleans, bytes, voids, arrays, c-style strings and ASCII- The object lifecycle, including storage duration, memory management, static and thread-local variables, exceptions, call stacks, and the RAII (resource acquisition is initialization) paradigm- Compile-time polymorphism and generic programming with templates, including a discussion of the proposed C++20 feature "concepts" and the Origins Library- Smart pointers like scoped, unique, and shared pointer, data structures from the stdlib like op-tional, pair, tuple, and any, plus many from Boost Libraries such as Variant, Tribool, and CompressedPair

Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life


Ruha Benjamin - 2019
    Rooted in the logics of racial disparity and subjugation, these purportedly unbiased technologies not only extend prison spaces into the public sphere but also deepen racial hierarchies and engender new systems for social control. The contributors to Captivating Technology examine how carceral technologies are being deployed to classify and coerce specific populations and whether these innovations can be resisted and reimagined for more liberatory ends. Moving from traditional sites of imprisonment to the arenas of everyday life being reshaped by carceral technoscience, this volume culminates in a sustained focus on justice-oriented approaches to science and technology that blends historical, speculative, and biographical methods to envision new futures made possible. Contributors. Ruha Benjamin, Troy Duster, Ron Eglash, Nettrice Gaskins, Anthony Ryan Hatch, Andrea Miller, Alondra Nelson, Tamara K. Nopper, Christopher Perreira, Winifred R. Poster, Dorothy E. Roberts, Lorna Roth, Britt Rusert, R. Joshua Scannell, Mitali Thakor, Madison Van Oort

Minecraft: Maps: An Explorer's Guide to Minecraft


Mojang AB - 2019
    Explore each of the fifteen major biomes through highly detailed, illustrated maps, then read the explorer's notes about the unique features and discover an inspirational themed build idea for each.A beautifully illustrated visual guide in its own right, Minecraft: Maps is also a survival tool. You'll learn which biomes are home to the most dangerous mobs, where to look for exclusive blocks, how to find naturally generated structures and the best places to search for loot. Once you've discovered each biome you can get building--construct an ice palace in the ice plains biome and an entire village suspended in the tree canopy above the jungle floor.Biomes: Badlands, Dark Forest, Desert, Forest, Jungle, Mountains, Mushroom Fields, Ocean, Plains, Savanna, Snowy Tundra, Swamp, Taiga, The Nether, The End

Your First Year in Code


Isaac LymanSabrina Gannon - 2019
    Whether you're switching careers, joining a bootcamp, starting a C.S. degree, or learning on your own, Your First Year in Code can help, with practical advice on topics like code reviews, resume writing, fitting in, ethics, and finding your dream job.

Official Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect Study Guide


Dan Sullivan - 2019
    Clear and accurate chapters cover 100% of exam objectives—helping you gain the knowledge and confidence to succeed on exam day. A pre-book assessment quiz helps you evaluate your skills, while chapter review questions emphasize critical points of learning. Detailed explanations of crucial topics include analyzing and defining technical and business processes, migration planning, and designing storage systems, networks, and compute resources. Written by Dan Sullivan—a well-known author and software architect specializing in analytics, machine learning, and cloud computing—this invaluable study guide includes access to the Sybex interactive online learning environment, which includes complete practice tests, electronic flash cards, a searchable glossary, and more. Providing services suitable for a wide range of applications, particularly in high-growth areas of analytics and machine learning, Google Cloud is rapidly gaining market share in the cloud computing world. Organizations are seeking certified IT professionals with the ability to deploy and operate infrastructure, services, and networks in the Google Cloud. Take your career to the next level by validating your skills and earning certification. Design and plan cloud solution architecture Manage and provision cloud infrastructure Ensure legal compliance and security standards Understand options for implementing hybrid clouds Develop solutions that meet reliability, business, and technical requirements The Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect Study Guide is a must-have for IT professionals preparing for certification to deploy and manage Google cloud services.

National Trust Step Inside Homes Through History


Goldie Hawk - 2019
    In this beautifully detailed, laser-cut book, you can travel back in time and explore seven different homes, from a Late Middle Ages manor house to a present day eco-home.

Humans 2.0: Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Perspectives on Transhumanism


Fazale Rana - 2019
    Should we discourage advances in biotechnology and bioengineering that can be used for human enhancement? Or should we take control of our own “evolution” and usher in a posthuman age? Is there another option? In Humans 2.0, authors Fazale “Fuz” Rana and Kenneth Richard Samples open a window to the new world of human enhancement technologies and transhumanism—their promises, potential, and pitfalls.“What would it mean for humanity if technology’s advances merged with the human passion to be superhuman? Would we play God to extend our lives indefinitely or create genetically modified ‘designer babies’? If we could, should we? Showing how to examine these and other questions is an ambitious—and successful—endeavor of this book. It culminates in a reflection on how the desire for a complete human merging with technology—transhumanism—bears an unexpected relationship to the Christian gospel. Everyone concerned about the future of ‘human enhancement’ and its serious implications should read this book now while the crucial decisions to be made are still in our power to make.” –Mark R. Perez, Philosopher of Science

Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet


David Kaye - 2019
    Kaye analyzes several examples of how online content producers are targeted for varied reasons, how platforms such as YouTube and Facebook have attempted to police forms of content on their servers, and how the culture of responsibility for Internet governance has shifted in the past last years. Kaye also covers fake news and the increased efforts by platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to root out these posts via automation--specifically AI. At the same time, Kaye brilliantly layers analysis of the politicization of content on platforms and the growth of efforts, mostly in Europe, to regulate these private, mostly American companies. All the while, Kaye makes sure readers are aware of the complexities and how free speech may be embattled if some of these regulations are put into effect at scale.

Quantum Computing for Everyone


Chris Bernhardt - 2019
    In this book, Chris Bernhardt offers an introduction to quantum computing that is accessible to anyone who is comfortable with high school mathematics. He explains qubits, entanglement, quantum teleportation, quantum algorithms, and other quantum-related topics as clearly as possible for the general reader. Bernhardt, a mathematician himself, simplifies the mathematics as much as he can and provides elementary examples that illustrate both how the math works and what it means.Bernhardt introduces the basic unit of quantum computing, the qubit, and explains how the qubit can be measured; discusses entanglement--which, he says, is easier to describe mathematically than verbally--and what it means when two qubits are entangled (citing Einstein's characterization of what happens when the measurement of one entangled qubit affects the second as "spooky action at a distance"); and introduces quantum cryptography. He recaps standard topics in classical computing--bits, gates, and logic--and describes Edward Fredkin's ingenious billiard ball computer. He defines quantum gates, considers the speed of quantum algorithms, and describes the building of quantum computers. By the end of the book, readers understand that quantum computing and classical computing are not two distinct disciplines, and that quantum computing is the fundamental form of computing. The basic unit of computation is the qubit, not the bit.

Running Serverless


Gojko Adzic - 2019
    Lambda is Amazon’s engine for running event-driven functions, and SAM is an open-source toolkit that greatly simplifies deploying Lambda services. Together, they make it easy to create auto-scaling APIs and cloud services designed for serverless...

Crushing YouTube: How to Start a YouTube Channel, Launch Your YouTube Business and Make Money


Joseph Hogue - 2019
     If you're serious about starting a YouTube business and want to make money on YouTube, I can show you the way. I've doubled my monthly income by creating a YouTube channel. Thousands of people watch each video and I've built a community that supports and motivates me every day...and that's all in less than two years! Is it Too Late to Start a YouTube Business? I"ve been developing online businesses since 2012 but was late to the game on YouTube. By the time I started my YouTube channel, people were already saying, "YouTube is dead!"; People were saying you couldn"t grow on YouTube anymore and that small channels couldn't win in the YouTube algorithm. I'm living proof you CAN start a YouTube business and be successful. I average $3,500 a month on ads alone (June 2019) and another three- to four-thousand on sponsorships, affiliates and my own products. In fact, I believe we’re just coming into the Age of YouTube with the rollout of 5G and every business owner needs a video presence. A YouTube How-To from Someone that's Been There I've seen the frustration for small YouTubers, trying to compete and get views against the million-subscriber monsters. I know what it’s like to start a channel from nothing. I’ll not only show you how to set up your channel to look professional, I’ll reveal the secrets even some of the biggest YouTube creators don’t know. In this book, you'll learn: How to get YouTube video ideas and hack the most popular videos for viral success (Pg 49) Five steps to building a YouTube channel brand that creates an army of supporters (Pg 69) The easy way to record videos, even if you don't like to be on camera (Pg 85) Five income streams that guarantee you WILL make money on YouTube (Pg 135) Since starting my YouTube channel, I've consulted and helped other video influencers grow their channels for millions of views. I’ve helped them find sponsorships and make enough money to quit their day job to make YouTube a full-time business. I can do the same for you with this book. I can show you the way but YOU have to get started. Scroll back up and click Buy Now to create your YouTube business and start making money on YouTube.

The Six Habits of Highly Effective Sales Engineers


Chris White - 2019
    Add it to your cart NOW to permanently improve your software demos and sales results.

The Secret to Cybersecurity: A Simple Plan to Protect Your Family and Business from Cybercrime


Scott Augenbaum - 2019
    Is that you? What about your online banking passwords, are they safe? Has your email account or bank/debit card ever been compromised? In 2018, there were data breaches at several major companies—If those companies have your credit or debit information, that affects you.  There are bad people in the world, and they are on the internet. They want to hurt you. They are based all over the world, so they’re hard at “work” when even you’re sleeping. They use automated programs to probe for weaknesses in your internet security programs. And they never stop.  Cybercrime is on the increase internationally, and it’s up to you to protect yourself. But how? The Secret to Cybersecurity is the simple and straightforward plan to keep you, your family, and your business safe. Written by Scott Augenbaum, a 29-year veteran of the FBI who specialized in cybercrimes, it uses real-life examples to educate and inform readers, explaining who/why/how so you’ll have a specific takeaway to put into action for your family. Learn about the scams, methods, and ways that cyber criminals operate—and learn how to avoid being the next cyber victim.

Vintage Innovation: Leveraging Retro Tools and Classic Ideas to Design Deeper Learning Experiences


John Spencer - 2019
    

The Extraordinary Life of Neil Armstrong (Extraordinary Lives)


Martin Howard - 2019
    From his childhood playing with model planes to becoming one of the most famous astronauts of all time, discover the incredible story of Neil Armstrong's life in this beautifully illustrated book, complete with narrative biography, facts and timelines.

Cognition


Jacques St-Malo - 2019
    When research suggests how to harness brain evolution, a hunt ensues for a missing link―one that allows to design humans with skills that prodigies of old would have envied.As germline engineering and biological enhancement have become routine, ancient doubts have emerged under new guises: Who are we? Is there a purpose to life? Why is there so much suffering? When faith and science fail to answer these questions, personal greed and national interest quickly fill the void. But gene selection is expensive, and many are excluded from its benefits. The stage is set for tribalism and social discontent on a scale without precedent, and those caught in the fray, whether by choice or by chance, must play roles not always to their liking in the struggle of all creatures against the arbitrariness of existence.

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism


Nick Couldry - 2019
    But this convenience is not free--it is purchased with vast amounts of personal data transferred through shadowy backchannels to corporations using it to generate profit. The Costs of Connection uncovers this process, this "data colonialism," and its designs for controlling our lives--our ways of knowing; our means of production; our political participation.Colonialism might seem like a thing of the past, but this book shows that the historic appropriation of land, bodies, and natural resources is mirrored today in this new era of pervasive datafication. Apps, platforms, and smart objects capture and translate our lives into data, and then extract information that is fed into capitalist enterprises and sold back to us. The authors argue that this development foreshadows the creation of a new social order emerging globally--and it must be challenged. Confronting the alarming degree of surveillance already tolerated, they offer a stirring call to decolonize the internet and emancipate our desire for connection.

Property-Based Testing with PropEr, Erlang, and Elixir: Find Bugs Before Your Users Do


Fred Hebert - 2019
    By using the PropEr framework in both Erlang and Elixir, this book teaches you how to automatically generate test cases, test stateful programs, and change how you design your software for more principled and reliable approaches. You will be able to better explore the problem space, validate the assumptions you make when coming up with program behavior, and expose unexpected weaknesses in your design. PropEr will even show you how to reproduce the bugs it found. With this book, you will be writing efficient property-based tests in no time.Most tests only demonstrate that the code behaves how the developer expected it to behave, and therefore carry the same blind spots as their authors when special conditions or edge cases show up. Learn how to see things differently with property tests written in PropEr.Start with the basics of property tests, such as writing stateless properties, and using the default generators to generate test cases automatically. More importantly, learn how to think in properties. Improve your properties, write custom data generators, and discover what your code can or cannot do. Learn when to use property tests and when to stick with example tests with real-world sample projects. Explore various testing approaches to find the one that's best for your code. Shrink failing test cases to their simpler expression to highlight exactly what breaks in your code, and generate highly relevant data through targeted properties. Uncover the trickiest bugs you can think of with nearly no code at all with two special types of properties based on state transitions and finite state machines.Write Erlang and Elixir properties that generate the most effective tests you'll see, whether they are unit tests or complex integration and system tests.What You NeedBasic knowledge of Erlang, optionally ElixirFor Erlang tests: Erlang/OTP >= 20.0, with Rebar >= 3.4.0For Elixir tests: Erlang/OTP >= 20.0, Elixir >= 1.5.0

All Data Are Local: Thinking Critically in a Data-Driven Society


Yanni Alexander Loukissas - 2019
    Instead, Yanni Loukissas argues in All Data Are Local, we should approach data sets with an awareness that data are created by humans and their dutiful machines, at a time, in a place, with the instruments at hand, for audiences that are conditioned to receive them. The term data set implies something discrete, complete, and portable, but it is none of those things. Examining a series of data sources important for understanding the state of public life in the United States—Harvard's Arnold Arboretum, the Digital Public Library of America, UCLA's Television News Archive, and the real estate marketplace Zillow—Loukissas shows us how to analyze data settings rather than data sets.Loukissas sets out six principles: all data are local; data have complex attachments to place; data are collected from heterogeneous sources; data and algorithms are inextricably entangled; interfaces recontextualize data; and data are indexes to local knowledge. He then provides a set of practical guidelines to follow. To make his argument, Loukissas employs a combination of qualitative research on data cultures and exploratory data visualizations. Rebutting the “myth of digital universalism,” Loukissas reminds us of the meaning-making power of the local.

The Essential Guide to Intellectual Property


Aram Sinnreich - 2019
    By granting exclusive rights to publish, manufacture, copy, or distribute information and technology, IP laws shape our cultures, our industries, and our politics in countless ways, with consequences for everyone, including artists, inventors, entrepreneurs, and citizens at large. In this engaging, accessible study, Aram Sinnreich uncovers what’s behind current debates and what the future holds for copyrights, patents, and trademarks.

Every Layout: Relearn CSS layout, by example


Heydon Pickering - 2019
    Through a series of simple, composable layouts, Every Layout will teach you how to better harness the built-in algorithms that power browsers and CSS.Employing algorithmic layout design means doing away with @media breakpoints, “magic numbers”, and other hacks, to create context-independent layout components. Your future design systems will be more consistent, terser in code, and more malleable in the hands of your users and their devices.

The New Media Epidemic: The Undermining of Society, Family, and Our Own Soul


Jean-Claude Larchet - 2019
    Writing in an accessible and straightforward manner he examines the harm and illusion brought by the invasion of digital devices—from radio to networked smart phones and beyond. He analyzes their all-encompassing impact on society and personal life. This meticulous diagnosis of new media's insidious effects — bodily, psychological, intellectual, and spiritual —concludes with a discussion of the ways individuals might limit and counteract the most deleterious of these, with the aim that they might “discover once more the authentically human and spiritual communion that we have lost.”