Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations


Clay Shirky - 2008
    'Here Comes Everybody' is an examination of how the spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form and exist within groups, with profound long-term economic and social effects, for good and for ill.

Twentieth-Century Harmony: Creative Aspects and Practice


Vincent Persichetti - 1961
    The author examines the nature of intervals in various contexts, discusses the modes and other scales employed in modern music, describes the formation and uses of chords by thirds, by fourths, and by seconds, of added-note chords and polychords; he deals with different types of harmonic motion, with harmonic rhythm and dynamic sand ornamentation, with harmonic behavior in tonality, polytonality, atonality and serial composition.

The Devil and Dr. Barnes: Portrait of an American Art Collector


Howard Greenfeld - 1987
    The Devil and Dr. Barnes traces the near-mythical journey of a man who was born into poverty, amassed a fortune through the promotion of a popular medicine, and acquired the premier private collection of works by such masters as Renoir, Matisse, Cézanne, and Picasso. Ostentatiously turning his back on the art establishment, Barnes challenged the aesthetic sensibilities of an uninitiated, often resistant and scoffing, American audience. In particular, he championed Matisse, Soutine, and Modigliani when they were obscure or in difficult straits. Analyzing what he saw as the formal relationships underlying all art, linking the old and the new, Barnes applied these principles in a rigorous course of study offered at his Merion foundation. Barnes's own mordant words, culled from the copious printed record, animate the narrative throughout, as do accounts of his associations with notables of the era--Gertrude and Leo Stein, Bertrand Russell, and John Dewey among them--many of whom he alienated with his appetite for passionate, public feuds. In this rounded portrait, Albert Barnes emerges as a complex, flawed man, who--blessed with an astute eye for greatness--has left us an incomparable treasure, gathered in one place and unforgettable to all who have seen it.

The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction


Trevor Hastie - 2001
    With it has come vast amounts of data in a variety of fields such as medicine, biology, finance, and marketing. The challenge of understanding these data has led to the development of new tools in the field of statistics, and spawned new areas such as data mining, machine learning, and bioinformatics. Many of these tools have common underpinnings but are often expressed with different terminology. This book describes the important ideas in these areas in a common conceptual framework. While the approach is statistical, the emphasis is on concepts rather than mathematics. Many examples are given, with a liberal use of color graphics. It should be a valuable resource for statisticians and anyone interested in data mining in science or industry. The book's coverage is broad, from supervised learning (prediction) to unsupervised learning. The many topics include neural networks, support vector machines, classification trees and boosting—the first comprehensive treatment of this topic in any book. Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, and Jerome Friedman are professors of statistics at Stanford University. They are prominent researchers in this area: Hastie and Tibshirani developed generalized additive models and wrote a popular book of that title. Hastie wrote much of the statistical modeling software in S-PLUS and invented principal curves and surfaces. Tibshirani proposed the Lasso and is co-author of the very successful An Introduction to the Bootstrap. Friedman is the co-inventor of many data-mining tools including CART, MARS, and projection pursuit.

We Have Never Been Modern


Bruno Latour - 1991
    But if we were to let go of this fond conviction, Bruno Latour asks, what would the world look like? His book, an anthropology of science, shows us how much of modernity is actually a matter of faith.What does it mean to be modern? What difference does the scientific method make? The difference, Latour explains, is in our careful distinctions between nature and society, between human and thing, distinctions that our benighted ancestors, in their world of alchemy, astrology, and phrenology, never made. But alongside this purifying practice that defines modernity, there exists another seemingly contrary one: the construction of systems that mix politics, science, technology, and nature. The ozone debate is such a hybrid, in Latour’s analysis, as are global warming, deforestation, even the idea of black holes. As these hybrids proliferate, the prospect of keeping nature and culture in their separate mental chambers becomes overwhelming—and rather than try, Latour suggests, we should rethink our distinctions, rethink the definition and constitution of modernity itself. His book offers a new explanation of science that finally recognizes the connections between nature and culture—and so, between our culture and others, past and present.Nothing short of a reworking of our mental landscape, We Have Never Been Modern blurs the boundaries among science, the humanities, and the social sciences to enhance understanding on all sides. A summation of the work of one of the most influential and provocative interpreters of science, it aims at saving what is good and valuable in modernity and replacing the rest with a broader, fairer, and finer sense of possibility.

Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty


Carl Schmitt - 1922
    Focusing on the relationships among political leadership, the norms of the legal order, and the state of political emergency, Schmitt argues in Political Theology that legal order ultimately rests upon the decisions of the sovereign. According to Schmitt, only the sovereign can meet the needs of an "exceptional" time and transcend legal order so that order can then be reestablished. Convinced that the state is governed by the ever-present possibility of conflict, Schmitt theorizes that the state exists only to maintain its integrity in order to ensure order and stability. Suggesting that all concepts of modern political thought are secularized theological concepts, Schmitt concludes Political Theology with a critique of liberalism and its attempt to depoliticize political thought by avoiding fundamental political decisions.

The Modern Lovers' The Modern Lovers


Sean L. Maloney - 2017
    One of punk rock's foundational documents, the archetype for indie obsession and all but disowned by its author, The Modern Lovers was an album doomed by its own coolness from day one. Powered by the two-chord wonder “Roadrunner” and its proclamation that “I'm in love with rock 'n' roll,”The Modern Lovers is the essential document of American alienation, an escape route from the cultural wasteland of postwar suburbia. The Modern Lovers is the bridge connecting the Velvet Underground and the Sex Pistols; they were peers of the New York Dolls and friends with Gram Parsons and they would splinter into Talking Heads, The Cars, and The Real Kids.But The Modern Lovers was never meant to be an album. A collection of demos, recorded in fits and starts as Jonathan Richman and his band negotiate modernity and the music industry. It is a collection of songs about a city and a society in flux, grappling with ancient corruptions and bright-eyed idealism. Richman observes a city all but abandoned by adults, ravaged by white flight and urban renewal, veering towards anarchy as old world social moors collide with new attitudes. It is a city stands in stark contrast to the the ranchstyle bedroom community where he was raised. All of these conflicts are churned through Richman's intellectual acuity and emotional unrest to create one of the 20th century's most enduring documents of post-adolescent malaise.

The Complete Watercolorist's Essential Notebook: A Treasury of Watercolor Secrets Discovered Through Decades of Painting and Expe Rimentation


Gordon MacKenzie - 2010
    Clarifying and simplifying the various aspects of painting with watercolor, Gordon MacKenzie's The Complete Watercolorist's Essential Notebook will encourage and challenge you with new possibilities.Rather than a list of rules, this is a collection of principles, concepts and general information designed to expand your creative process. Mackenzie shares with you tips, techniques, ideas and lessons for a sure path to creative fulfillment and better watercolor paintings.

Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening


Christopher Small - 1998
    In this new book, Small outlines a theory of what he terms "musicking," a verb that encompasses all musical activity from composing to performing to listening to a Walkman to singing in the shower.Using Gregory Bateson's philosophy of mind and a Geertzian thick description of a typical concert in a typical symphony hall, Small demonstrates how musicking forms a ritual through which all the participants explore and celebrate the relationships that constitute their social identity. This engaging and deftly written trip through the concert hall will have readers rethinking every aspect of their musical worlds.

Black Knight: Ritchie Blackmore


Jerry Bloom - 2006
    Dubbed the 'man in black', guitarist Ritchie Blackmore found fame with Seventies rock giants Deep Purple, then walked away from them to create Rainbow, only to abandon them and form another band in 1997 - Blackmore's Night.

Rockin' in Time: A Social History of Rock-And-Roll


David P. Szatmary - 1986
    Rockin' in Time intrigues students by providing a social history of Rock and Roll music and explaining its influence. Story: This book was written to address an area that seldom has been discussed. Rather than a compellation of the many bands in rock history or a guide to teach the musical notation of rock, this book uncovers the reasons for the various trends and types of rock and roll. It places rock and roll in the context of the social issues that surround and shape it, dealing with the influence on rock music of such trends as technological advances, the development of the music business, demographic change and the baby boom, economic shifts, and the civil rights movement.

Blues People: Negro Music in White America


Amiri Baraka - 1963
    And I make my analogy through the slave citizen's music—through the music that is most closely associated with him: blues and a later, but parallel development, jazz... [If] the Negro represents, or is symbolic of, something in and about the nature of American culture, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music."So says Amiri Baraka in the Introduction to Blues People, his classic work on the place of jazz and blues in American social, musical, economic, and cultural history. From the music of African slaves in the United States through the music scene of the 1960's, Baraka traces the influence of what he calls "negro music" on white America—not only in the context of music and pop culture but also in terms of the values and perspectives passed on through the music. In tracing the music, he brilliantly illuminates the influence of African Americans on American culture and history.

Pointers from Nisargadatta Maharaj


Ramesh S. Balsekar - 1982
    He encouraged to inquire into the origin of consciousness and the illusory nature of arising phenomena. The primary reason for the book’s effectiveness is that the author enjoys a profound intuition of his teacher's realization."This sequel to I am That and Seeds of Consciousness continues the moving account of a genuine master of Advaita Vedanta."-David Diaman (The Laughing Man)

W.A.R.: The Unauthorized Biography of William Axl Rose


Mick Wall - 2007
    Axl RoseEven in the world of rock and roll, a figure like Axl Rose doesn't come along very often. Mercurial and brilliant, deluded and imperious, Rose defies easy description or analysis. Few people have studied Rose as closely as Mick Wall has. Traveling with Guns n' Roses and writing about them in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Wall first earned Axl's trust and later his fury."W.A.R." goes back to the beginning, revealing Rose's childhood influences (and how he got his name), and tracking the birth of the band and their enormous success with albums like "Appetite for Destruction" and "Use Your Illusion." With fame and money came substance abuse and infighting, and a lead singer who morphed from eccentric to seemingly unhinged. Wall's book is richly detailed and offers surprising new views on some celebrated Guns 'n Roses and Axl Rose incidents, including:--the death of two fans at a concert in Donington Park in England,--Rose's fall-out and eventual split from every one of the other original Gn'R band members,--fights with perceived enemies like Kurt Cobain, Motley Crue's Vince Neil and fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger,--Rose's consistent refusal to show up at concerts throughout his career,--Axl becoming a virtual recluse at his Malibu mansion for most of the past 15 years.The book goes right up to the present, to explore why a new Guns n' Roses--with a reconfigured band--has toured but still hasn't released their long-awaited album "Chinese Democracy," now over a decade in the making at a cost of over $13 million. "W.A.R." is about great music, bad relationships, and the public and private personas of one of the most controversial performers of our time.

Sonic Wonderland: A Scientific Odyssey of Sound


Trevor J. Cox - 2014
    Until the day he heard something so astonishing that he had an epiphany: rather than quashing rare or bizarre sounds, we should be celebrating these sonic treasures.This is the story of his investigation into the mysteries of these Sonic Wonders of the World. In the Mojave Desert he finds sand dunes that sing. In France he discovers an echo that tells jokes. In California he drives down a musical road that plays the William Tell Overture. In Cathedrals across the world he learns how acoustics changed the history of the Church.Touching on physics, music, archaeology, neuroscience, biology, and design, Cox explains how sound is made and altered by the environment and how our body reacts to peculiar noises – from the exotic sonic wonders he encounters on his journey, or the equally unique and surprising sounds of our everyday environment.In a world dominated by the visual, Sonic Wonderland encourages us to become better listeners and to open our ears to the glorious cacophony around us. Listen to a selection of astonishing sounds here: https://soundcloud.com/sonicwonderland