Today, more and more graphic designers, advertising agencies, motion designers, and artists work in this area. New techniques and forms of expression are being developed. Consequently, the demand for information on this topic has grown enormously. Data Flow 2 expands the definition of contemporary information graphics. The book features new possibilities for diagrams, maps, and charts. It investigates the visual and intuitive presentation of processes, data, and information. Concrete examples of research and art projects as well as commercial work illuminate how techniques such as simplification, abstraction, metaphor, and dramatization function. The book also includes interviews with experts such as The New York Times s Steve Duenes, Infosthetics's Andrew Vande Moere, Visualcomplexity's Manuel Lima, ART+COM's Joachim Sauter, and passionate cartographer Menno-Jan Kraak as well as text features by Johannes Schardt about the challenges in creating effective information graphics and about the relationship between complexity, clarity, content, and innovation. Offering practical advice, background information, case studies, and inspiration, Data Flow 2 is a valuable reference for anyone working with or interested in information graphics.

    The effects of homeopathy don’t go away under rigorous scientific conditions. The laws of nature aren’t what they used to be. Thirty years on, no one has an explanation for a seemingly intelligent signal received from outer space. The US Department of Energy is re-examining cold fusion because the experimental evidence seems too solid to ignore. The placebo effect is put to work in medicine while doctors can’t agree whether it even exists.In an age when science is supposed to be king, scientists are beset by experimental results they simply can’t explain. But, if the past is anything to go by, these anomalies contain the seeds of future revolutions. While taking readers on an entertaining tour d’horizon of the strangest of scientific findings – involving everything from our lack of free will to Martian methane that offers new evidence of life on the planet – Michael Brooks argues that the things we don’t understand are the key to what we are about to discover.This mind-boggling but entirely accessible survey of the outer limits of human knowledge is based on a short article by Michael Brooks for New Scientist magazine. It became the sixth most circulated story on the internet in 2005, and provoked widespread comment and compliments (Google “13 things that do not make sense” to see).Michael Brooks has now dug deeply into those mysteries, with extraordinary results.

     The Science Book covers every area of science--astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, math, and physics, and brings the greatest scientific ideas to life with fascinating text, quirky graphics, and pithy quotes.

    But in our zeal to instill the evaluation process with scientific rigor, we've gone from measuring performance to fixating on measuring itself. The result is a tyranny of metrics that threatens the quality of our lives and most important institutions. In this timely and powerful book, Jerry Muller uncovers the damage our obsession with metrics is causing--and shows how we can begin to fix the problem.Filled with examples from education, medicine, business and finance, government, the police and military, and philanthropy and foreign aid, this brief and accessible book explains why the seemingly irresistible pressure to quantify performance distorts and distracts, whether by encouraging "gaming the stats" or "teaching to the test." That's because what can and does get measured is not always worth measuring, may not be what we really want to know, and may draw effort away from the things we care about. Along the way, we learn why paying for measured performance doesn't work, why surgical scorecards may increase deaths, and much more. But metrics can be good when used as a complement to--rather than a replacement for--judgment based on personal experience, and Muller also gives examples of when metrics have been beneficial.Complete with a checklist of when and how to use metrics, The Tyranny of Metrics is an essential corrective to a rarely questioned trend that increasingly affects us all.

    A world that is as creative and complex as it is dangerous and disturbing. A world that is much closer than you think.The dark net is an underworld that stretches from popular social media sites to the most secretive corners of the encrypted web. It is a world that frequently appears in newspaper headlines, but one that is little understood, and rarely explored. The Dark Net is a revelatory examination of the internet today, and of its most innovative and dangerous subcultures: trolls and pornographers, drug dealers and hackers, political extremists and computer scientists, Bitcoin programmers and self-harmers, libertarians and vigilantes.Based on extensive first-hand experience, exclusive interviews and shocking documentary evidence, The Dark Net offers a startling glimpse of human nature under the conditions of freedom and anonymity, and shines a light on an enigmatic and ever-changing world.

    The Song Machine goes behind the scenes to offer an insider’s look at the global hit factories manufacturing the songs that have everyone hooked. Full of vivid, unexpected characters—alongside industry heavy-hitters like Katy Perry, Rihanna, Max Martin, and Ester Dean—this fascinating journey into the strange world of pop music reveals how a new approach to crafting smash hits is transforming marketing, technology, and even listeners’ brains. You’ll never think about music the same way again.A Wall Street Journal Best Business Book

    Etcoff, a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and a practicing psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, skewers the enduring myth that the pursuit of beauty is a learned behavior.Etcoff puts forth that beauty is neither a cultural construction, an invention of the fashion industry, nor a backlash against feminism, but instead is in our biology. It's an essential and ineradicable part of human nature that is revered and ferociously pursued in nearly every civilizatoin--and for good reason. Those features to which we are most attracted are often signals of fertility and fecundity. When seen in the context of a Darwinian struggle for survival, our sometimes extreme attempts to attain beauty--both to become beautiful ourselves and to acquire an attractive partner--become understandable. Moreover, if we come to understand how the desire for beauty is innate, then we can begin to work in our interests, and not soley for the interests of our genetic tendencies.

    The long-anticipated revision of this best-selling text offers the most comprehensive, up-to-date introduction to the theory and practice of artificial intelligence. *NEW-Nontechnical learning material-Accompanies each part of the book. *NEW-The Internet as a sample application for intelligent systems-Added in several places including logical agents, planning, and natural language. *NEW-Increased coverage of material - Includes expanded coverage of: default reasoning and truth maintenance systems, including multi-agent/distributed AI and game theory; probabilistic approaches to learning including EM; more detailed descriptions of probabilistic inference algorithms. *NEW-Updated and expanded exercises-75% of the exercises are revised, with 100 new exercises. *NEW-On-line Java software. *Makes it easy for students to do projects on the web using intelligent agents. *A unified, agent-based approach to AI-Organizes the material around the task of building intelligent agents. *Comprehensive, up-to-date coverage-Includes a unified view of the field organized around the rational decision making pa

    This is a new view of mathematics, not the one we learned at school but a comprehensive guide to the patterns that recur through the universe and underlie human affairs. A Beginner's Guide to Constructing, the Universe shows you: Why cans, pizza, and manhole covers are round.Why one and two weren't considered numbers by the ancient Greeks.Why squares show up so often in goddess art and board games.What property makes the spiral the most widespread shape in nature, from embryos and hair curls to hurricanes and galaxies. How the human body shares the design of a bean plant and the solar system. How a snowflake is like Stonehenge, and a beehive like a calendar. How our ten fingers hold the secrets of both a lobster a cathedral, and much more.

    H. Evergreen, Effective Data Visualization shows readers how to create Excel charts and graphs that best communicate data findings. This comprehensive how-to guide functions as a set of blueprints--supported by research and the author's extensive experience with clients in industries all over the world--for conveying data in an impactful way. Delivered in Evergreen's humorous and approachable style, the book covers the spectrum of graph types available beyond the default options, how to determine which one most appropriately fits specific data stories, and easy steps for making the chosen graph in Excel.

    The Information Design Handbook celebrates graphics that are exemplars of communication and esthetics, and reveals the thought processes and design skills behind them. This comprehensive guide to creating information graphics is packed with essential design principles, case studies, color palettes, trouble-shooting tips, and much more. Designers will learn to achieve graphics that are visually striking yet concise and supremely funcitional with this must-have resource.

    Most of the time this math works quietly behind the scenes . . . until it doesn't. All sorts of seemingly innocuous mathematical mistakes can have significant consequences.Math is easy to ignore until a misplaced decimal point upends the stock market, a unit conversion error causes a plane to crash, or someone divides by zero and stalls a battleship in the middle of the ocean.Exploring and explaining a litany of glitches, near misses, and mathematical mishaps involving the internet, big data, elections, street signs, lotteries, the Roman Empire, and an Olympic team, Matt Parker uncovers the bizarre ways math trips us up, and what this reveals about its essential place in our world. Getting it wrong has never been more fun.

    From economic development, to healthcare, to education and public policy, we rely on numbers to allocate resources and make crucial decisions. But because so much data fails to take into account gender, because it treats men as the default and women as atypical, bias and discrimination are baked into our systems. And women pay tremendous costs for this bias, in time, money, and often with their lives.Celebrated feminist advocate Caroline Criado Perez investigates the shocking root cause of gender inequality and research in Invisible Women​, diving into women’s lives at home, the workplace, the public square, the doctor’s office, and more. Built on hundreds of studies in the US, the UK, and around the world, and written with energy, wit, and sparkling intelligence, this is a groundbreaking, unforgettable exposé that will change the way you look at the world.

    But how did we acquire the most advanced form of communication on Earth? Daniel L. Everett, a “bombshell” linguist and “instant folk hero” (Tom Wolfe, Harper’s), provides in this sweeping history a comprehensive examination of the evolutionary story of language, from the earliest speaking attempts by hominids to the more than seven thousand languages that exist today.Although fossil hunters and linguists have brought us closer to unearthing the true origins of language, Daniel Everett’s discoveries have upended the contemporary linguistic world, reverberating far beyond academic circles. While conducting field research in the Amazonian rainforest, Everett came across an age-old language nestled amongst a tribe of hunter-gatherers. Challenging long-standing principles in the field, Everett now builds on the theory that language was not intrinsic to our species. In order to truly understand its origins, a more interdisciplinary approach is needed—one that accounts as much for our propensity for culture as it does our biological makeup.Language began, Everett theorizes, with Homo Erectus, who catalyzed words through culturally invented symbols. Early humans, as their brains grew larger, incorporated gestures and voice intonations to communicate, all of which built on each other for 60,000 generations. Tracing crucial shifts and developments across the ages, Everett breaks down every component of speech, from harnessing control of more than a hundred respiratory muscles in the larynx and diaphragm, to mastering the use of the tongue. Moving on from biology to execution, Everett explores why elements such as grammar and storytelling are not nearly as critical to language as one might suspect.In the book’s final section, Cultural Evolution of Language, Everett takes the ever-debated “language gap” to task, delving into the chasm that separates “us” from “the animals.” He approaches the subject from various disciplines, including anthropology, neuroscience, and archaeology, to reveal that it was social complexity, as well as cultural, physiological, and neurological superiority, that allowed humans—with our clawless hands, breakable bones, and soft skin—to become the apex predator.How Language Began ultimately explains what we know, what we’d like to know, and what we likely never will know about how humans went from mere communication to language. Based on nearly forty years of fieldwork, Everett debunks long-held theories by some of history’s greatest thinkers, from Plato to Chomsky. The result is an invaluable study of what makes us human.

    He constructed a fleet of customized unicycles and a flamethrowing trumpet, outfoxed Vegas casinos, and built juggling robots. He also wrote the seminal text of the digital revolution, which has been called “the Magna Carta of the Information Age.” His discoveries would lead contemporaries to compare him to Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton. His work anticipated by decades the world we’d be living in today—and gave mathematicians and engineers the tools to bring that world to pass.In this elegantly written, exhaustively researched biography, Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman reveal Claude Shannon’s full story for the first time. It’s the story of a small-town Michigan boy whose career stretched from the era of room-sized computers powered by gears and string to the age of Apple. It’s the story of the origins of our digital world in the tunnels of MIT and the “idea factory” of Bell Labs, in the “scientists’ war” with Nazi Germany, and in the work of Shannon’s collaborators and rivals, thinkers like Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Vannevar Bush, and Norbert Wiener.And it’s the story of Shannon’s life as an often reclusive, always playful genius. With access to Shannon’s family and friends, A Mind at Play brings this singular innovator and creative genius to life.