Infinite games are more mysterious -- and ultimately more rewarding. They are unscripted and unpredictable; they are the source of true freedom.In this elegant and compelling work, James Carse explores what these games mean, and what they can mean to you. He offers stunning new insights into the nature of property and power, of culture and community, of sexuality and self-discovery, opening the door to a world of infinite delight and possibility."An extraordinary little book . . . a wise and intimate companion, an elegant reminder of the real."-- Brain/Mind Bulletin

    That’s a mistake, Tim Harford says in The Data Detective. We shouldn’t be suspicious of statistics—we need to understand what they mean and how they can improve our lives: they are, at heart, human behavior seen through the prism of numbers and are often “the only way of grasping much of what is going on around us.” If we can toss aside our fears and learn to approach them clearly—understanding how our own preconceptions lead us astray—statistics can point to ways we can live better and work smarter.As “perhaps the best popular economics writer in the world” (New Statesman), Tim Harford is an expert at taking complicated ideas and untangling them for millions of readers. In The Data Detective, he uses new research in science and psychology to set out ten strategies for using statistics to erase our biases and replace them with new ideas that use virtues like patience, curiosity, and good sense to better understand ourselves and the world. As a result, The Data Detective is a big-idea book about statistics and human behavior that is fresh, unexpected, and insightful.

    By weaving together their own research, interviews with pioneering scientists and Zach's trademark comics, the Weinersmiths investigate why these innovations are needed, how they would work, and what is standing in their way.

    As an AI researcher with 25 years of experience, professor Mike Wooldridge has learned to be obsessively cautious about such claims, while still promoting an intense optimism about the future of the field. There have been genuine scientific breakthroughs that have made AI systems possible in the past decade that the founders of the field would have hailed as miraculous. Driverless cars and automated translation tools are just two examples of AI technologies that have become a practical, everyday reality in the past few years, and which will have a huge impact on our world.While the dream of conscious machines remains, Professor Wooldridge believes, a distant prospect, the floodgates for AI have opened. Wooldridge's A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence is an exciting romp through the history of this groundbreaking field--a one-stop-shop for AI's past, present, and world-changing future.

    Before you’ve even switched off your alarm, a whole host of organisations have been alerted to when you woke up, where you slept, and with whom. As you check the weather, scroll through your ‘suggested friends’ on Facebook, you continually compromise your privacy.Without your permission, or even your awareness, tech companies are harvesting your information, your location, your likes, your habits, and sharing it amongst themselves. They're not just selling your data. They’re selling the power to influence you. Even when you’ve explicitly asked them not to. And it's not just you. It's all your contacts too.Digital technology is stealing our personal data and with it our power to make free choices. To reclaim that power and democracy, we must protect our privacy.What can we do? So much is at stake. Our phones, our TVs, even our washing machines are spies in our own homes. We need new regulation. We need to pressure policy-makers for red lines on the data economy. And we need to stop sharing and to adopt privacy-friendly alternatives to Google, WhatsApp and other online platforms.Short, terrifying, practical: Privacy is Power highlights the implications of our laid-back attitudes to data, and sets out how we can reclaim control.

    The calls to ban it were more or less instant.Re:cyclists is the tale of what happened next, of how we have spent two centuries wheeling our way about town and country on bikes--or on two-wheeled things that vaguely resembled what we now call bikes. Michael Hutchinson picks his way through those 200 years, discovering how cycling became a kinky vaudeville act for Parisians, how it became an American business empire, and how it went on to find a unique home in the British Isles. He considers the penny-farthing riders exploring the abandoned and lonely coaching roads during the railway era, and the Victorian high-society cyclists of the 1890s bicycle craze--a time when no aristocratic house party was without bicycles and when the Prince of Wales used to give himself an illicit thrill on a weekday afternoon by watching the women's riding-school in the Royal Albert Hall.Re:cyclists looks at how cycling became the sport, the pastime and the social life of millions of ordinary people, how it grew and how it suffered through the 1960s and '70s, and how at the dawn of the twenty-first century it rose again, much changed but still ultimately just someone careering along on two wheels.

    Your online and in-store purchasing patterns are recorded, and reveal if you're unemployed, sick, or pregnant. Your e-mails and texts expose your intimate and casual friends. Google knows what you’re thinking because it saves your private searches. Facebook can determine your sexual orientation without you ever mentioning it.The powers that surveil us do more than simply store this information. Corporations use surveillance to manipulate not only the news articles and advertisements we each see, but also the prices we’re offered. Governments use surveillance to discriminate, censor, chill free speech, and put people in danger worldwide. And both sides share this information with each other or, even worse, lose it to cybercriminals in huge data breaches.Much of this is voluntary: we cooperate with corporate surveillance because it promises us convenience, and we submit to government surveillance because it promises us protection. The result is a mass surveillance society of our own making. But have we given up more than we’ve gained? In Data and Goliath, security expert Bruce Schneier offers another path, one that values both security and privacy. He brings his bestseller up-to-date with a new preface covering the latest developments, and then shows us exactly what we can do to reform government surveillance programs, shake up surveillance-based business models, and protect our individual privacy. You'll never look at your phone, your computer, your credit cards, or even your car in the same way again.

    What's more, its potential is nearly limitless--every hour the sun beams down more energy than the world uses in a year. But in Taming the Sun, energy expert Varun Sivaram warns that the world is not yet equipped to harness erratic sunshine to meet most of its energy needs. And if solar's current surge peters out, prospects for replacing fossil fuels and averting catastrophic climate change will dim.Innovation can brighten those prospects, Sivaram explains, drawing on firsthand experience and original research spanning science, business, and government. Financial innovation is already enticing deep-pocketed investors to fund solar projects around the world, from the sunniest deserts to the poorest villages. Technological innovation could replace today's solar panels with coatings as cheap as paint and employ artificial photosynthesis to store intermittent sunshine as convenient fuels. And systemic innovation could add flexibility to the world's power grids and other energy systems so they can dependably channel the sun's unreliable energy.Unleashing all this innovation will require visionary public policy: funding researchers developing next-generation solar technologies, refashioning energy systems and economic markets, and putting together a diverse clean energy portfolio. Although solar can't power the planet by itself, it can be the centerpiece of a global clean energy revolution.A Council on Foreign Relations Book

    But what truly motivates them? What kind of person devotes their life to building a death machine? What kind of customer is desperate to buy an artificially intelligent sex doll – and why? Who is campaigning against these advances, and how are they trying to stop them? And what about the many unintended consequences such inventions will inevitably unleash?Sex Robots & Vegan Meat is not science fiction. It’s not about what might happen one day – it’s about what is happening right now, and who is making it happen. In the end, it asks a simple question: are we about to change what it means to be human . . . for ever?

    Since then, that share has plummeted to where it was in 1900. As Richard Baldwin explains, this reversal of fortune reflects a new age of globalisation that is drastically different from the old.In the 1800s, globalisation leaped forward when steam power and international peace lowered the costs of moving goods across borders. This triggered a self-fueling cycle of industrial agglomeration and growth that propelled today's rich nations to dominance. That was the Great Divergence. The new globalisation is driven by information technology, which has radically reduced the cost of moving ideas across borders. This has made it practical for multinational firms to move labor-intensive work to developing nations. But to keep the whole manufacturing process in sync, the firms also shipped their marketing, managerial, and technical know-how abroad along with the offshored jobs. The new possibility of combining high tech with low wages propelled the rapid industrialisation of a handful of developing nations, the simultaneous deindustrialisation of developed nations, and a commodity supercycle that is only now petering out. The result is today's Great Convergence.Because globalisation is now driven by fast-paced technological change and the fragmentation of production, its impact is more sudden, more selective, more unpredictable, and more uncontrollable. As The Great Convergence shows, the new globalisation presents rich and developing nations alike with unprecedented policy challenges in their efforts to maintain reliable growth and social cohesion.

    This is our culture’s image of the perfect self. We see this person everywhere: in advertising, in the press, all over social media. We’re told that to be this person you just have to follow your dreams, that our potential is limitless, that we are the source of our own success. But this model of the perfect self can be extremely dangerous. People are suffering under the torture of this impossible fantasy. Unprecedented social pressure is leading to increases in depression and suicide. Where does this ideal come from? Why is it so powerful? Is there any way to break its spell? To answer these questions, Selfie by Will Storr takes us from the shores of Ancient Greece, through the Christian Middle Ages, to the self-esteem evangelists of 1980s California, the rise of narcissism and the selfie generation, and right up to the era of hyper-individualistic neoliberalism in which we live now. It tells the extraordinary story of the person we all know so intimately – our self.

    James Wallace brings readers up to date on the Gates saga to 1997 and reveals the inside story of the struggle to keep Microsoft on top in the World Wide Web game.

    It's not just a technical book or just a businessguide. Data is ubiquitous and it doesn't pay much attention toborders, so we've calibrated our coverage to follow it wherever itgoes.In the first edition of Big Data Now, the O'Reilly team tracked thebirth and early development of data tools and data science. Now, withthis second edition, we're seeing what happens when big data grows up:how it's being applied, where it's playing a role, and theconsequences -- good and bad alike -- of data's ascendance.We've organized the second edition of Big Data Now into five areas:Getting Up to Speed With Big Data -- Essential information on thestructures and definitions of big data.Big Data Tools, Techniques, and Strategies -- Expert guidance forturning big data theories into big data products.The Application of Big Data -- Examples of big data in action,including a look at the downside of data.What to Watch for in Big Data -- Thoughts on how big data will evolveand the role it will play across industries and domains.Big Data and Health Care -- A special section exploring thepossibilities that arise when data and health care come together.

    And it was an astronomer who finally explained what happened to the dinosaurs.Frans Johansson's The Medici Effect shows how breakthrough ideas most often occur when we bring concepts from one field into a new, unfamiliar territory, and offers examples how we can turn the ideas we discover into path-breaking innovations.

    One million people can create new market for a business, spark a social movement, or effect political change. In 1996, a microtrend identified by Penn ("soccer moms") was crucial in re-electing President Clinton. With years of experience as one of world's most highly regarded pollsters, Mark Penn identifies the new microtrends sweeping the world: *Single women by choice: More often than ever before, they aren't waiting for Mr. Right. They are raising children by themselves and buying their own homes.*Splitters: A growing number of middle-class residents are shuttling between two homes, creating new communities and dynamics in the real estate market.*Sun Haters: Environmentalists, skin cancer survivors, and parents concerned about the impact the sun is having on our health.*Philo-semites: A growing number of people want to date Jewish men and women.*Classical Music Dads: Older men who are fathers in their 40's and 50's and taking on a larger role in the nurturing of their children and becoming an important factor in consumer culture for kids. Penn highlights everything from religion to politics, from leisure pursuits to relationships. MICROTRENDS will take the reader deep into the worlds of polling, targeting, and psychographic analysis, reaching tantalizing conclusions through engaging analysis.