The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes


David Robson - 2019
    This is the "intelligence trap," the subject of David Robson’s fascinating and provocative book.The Intelligence Trap explores cutting-edge ideas in our understanding of intelligence and expertise, including "strategic ignorance," "meta-forgetfulness," and "functional stupidity." Robson reveals the surprising ways that even the brightest minds and most talented organizations can go wrong—from some of Thomas Edison’s worst ideas to failures at NASA, Nokia, and the FBI. And he offers practical advice to avoid mistakes based on the timeless lessons of Benjamin Franklin, Richard Feynman, and Daniel Kahneman.

The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing


Sonia Faleiro - 2021
    Sixteen-year-old Padma sparked and burned. Fourteen-year-old Lalli was an incorrigible romantic.They grew up in Katra Sadatganj, an eye-blink of a village in western Uttar Pradesh crammed into less than one square mile of land. It was out in the fields, in the middle of mango season, that the rumors started.Then one night in the summer of 2014 the girls went missing; and hours later they were found hanging in the orchard. Who they were, and what had happened to them, was already less important than what their disappearance meant to the people left behind.In the ensuing months, the investigation into their deaths would implode everything that their small community held to be true, and instigate a national conversation about sex and violence. Slipping deftly behind political maneuvering, caste systems and codes of honor in a village in northern India, The Good Girls returns to the scene of Padma and Lalli's short lives and shameful deaths, and dares to ask: what is the human cost of shame?

Criminology


Tim Newburn - 2007
    It provides the basis of study for undergraduate students, new postgraduate students, and those who need a foundation knowledge of criminology for other relevant courses including access and foundation degree courses in colleges and universities, courses in law, probation, policing, criminal and forensic investigation and on other aspects of crime and the criminal justice system. Key points include:fully comprehensive covering all major areas of criminology and criminal justice as well as guidance on disseration/long-essay writing authoritative written by a leading criminologist and experienced teacher broad approach moves beyond sociological approaches to crime and criminal justice to take account of the contribution of other disciplines up-to-date informed by QAA subject benchmarks for the teaching of criminology extensively illustrated with photographs, charts, tables and diagrams and a range of questions for students to discuss and debate additional website support for students and teachers."

Cuckservative: How "Conservatives" Betrayed America


John Red Eagle - 2015
    With virtually no debate, Congress passed the most radical change to immigration law in American history. Since 1965, America has endured the biggest mass migration of people in human history, twice the size of the great wave of immigration into the USA between 1870 and 1930. As a result, Americans are being displaced in their own land by an ongoing invasion that dwarfs Operation Barbarossa, is two orders of magnitude larger than the Mongol hordes, and is one thousand times larger than the First Crusade.America's so-called conservative leaders and the conservative media have joined forces with liberal internationalists in openly celebrating this massive invasion, relying on bad theology, outdated economics, and historical myths to falsely claim that immigration is a moral imperative, an economic necessity, and in the national interest. Cuckservative: How "Conservatives" Betrayed America is a powerful defense of America's right to exist as a nation by two Native American authors, as well as a damning indictment of a conservatism that has failed to conserve America's culture and traditions. This powerful and remorseless book addresses the myth of the Melting Pot, proves that mass immigration is a net negative for the U.S. economy, and exposes the anti-Christian ideology behind the Christian establishment's support for multiculturalism and open borders. It even shows how 50 years of immigration have lowered America's average IQ. The authors pull no punches in conclusively demonstrating that it is not right, it is not moral, it is not economically beneficial, and it is not Constitutional to betray America's posterity.In Cuckservative, John Red Eagle and Vox Day warn Americans that if they do not defend their culture, their posterity, and their nation, they will eventually find themselves on their own Trail of Tears.

Jihad vs. McWorld


Benjamin R. Barber - 1995
    Although capitalism could have only grown to current levels in the soil of democracies, Benjamin Barber argues that global capitalism now tends to work against the very concept of citizenship, of people thinking for themselves and with their neighbors. Too often now, how we think is the product of a transnational corporation (increasingly, a media corporation) with headquarters elsewhere. And although self-determination is one of the most fundamental of democratic principles, unchecked it has lead to a tribalism (think Bosnia, think Rwanda) in which virtually no one besides the local power elite gets a fair shake. The antidote, Barber concludes, is to work everywhere to resuscitate the non-governmental, non-business spaces in life--he calls them "civic spaces" (such as the village green, voluntary associations of every sort, churches, community schools)--where true citizenship thrives.

Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer


Duncan J. Watts - 2011
    As sociologist and network science pioneer Duncan Watts explains in this provocative book, the explanations that we give for the outcomes that we observe in life—explanation that seem obvious once we know the answer—are less useful than they seem.Drawing on the latest scientific research, along with a wealth of historical and contemporary examples, Watts shows how common sense reasoning and history conspire to mislead us into believing that we understand more about the world of human behavior than we do; and in turn, why attempts to predict, manage, or manipulate social and economic systems so often go awry.It seems obvious, for example, that people respond to incentives; yet policy makers and managers alike frequently fail to anticipate how people will respond to the incentives they create. Social trends often seem to have been driven by certain influential people; yet marketers have been unable to identify these “influencers” in advance. And although successful products or companies always seem in retrospect to have succeeded because of their unique qualities, predicting the qualities of the next hit product or hot company is notoriously difficult even for experienced professionals.Only by understanding how and when common sense fails, Watts argues, can we improve how we plan for the future, as well as understand the present—an argument that has important implications in politics, business, and marketing, as well as in science and everyday life.

Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age


Cory Doctorow - 2014
    Can small artists still thrive in the Internet era? Can giant record labels avoid alienating their audiences? This is a book about the pitfalls and the opportunities that creative industries (and individuals) are confronting today — about how the old models have failed or found new footing, and about what might soon replace them. An essential read for anyone with a stake in the future of the arts, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free offers a vivid guide to the ways creativity and the Internet interact today, and to what might be coming next.

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy


Cathy O'Neil - 2016
    Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives--where we go to school, whether we can get a job or a loan, how much we pay for health insurance--are being made not by humans, but by machines. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules.But as mathematician and data scientist Cathy O'Neil reveals, the mathematical models being used today are unregulated and uncontestable, even when they're wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination--propping up the lucky, punishing the downtrodden, and undermining our democracy in the process.

Cries in the Desert


John Glatt - 2002
    She was chained to a padlocked metal collar. The tale she told authorities--of being beaten, raped, and tortured with electric shock--was unthinkable. Until she led them to 59-year-old David Parker Ray, his 39-year-old fiancee Cindy Hendy--and the lakeside trailer they called their "toy box". What the FBI uncovered was unprecedented in the annals of serial crime: restraining devices, elaborate implements of torture, books on human anatomy, medical equipment, scalpels, and a gynecologist's examination table. But these horrors were only part of the shocking story that would unfold in a stunning trial...

Young Blood: The Story of the Family Murders


Bob R. O'Brien - 2002
    After years of speculation and rumour, for the first time the real-life expose about this famous series of murders in Adelaide can be told by the man who solved the case. South Australia has an international reputation for being the home of some very strange murders. But during the 1970s this capital city was shocked when a series of young men, all fit and healthy, disappeared from its streets one by one. their bodies were found dumped in the countryside outside the city. All were mutilated and some were dismembered. A group of prominent SA judges and businessmen, believed to be gay, were suspected of being involved with the killings (they weren t). this group were dubbed the Family. the author he detective who investigated the murder of the most high profile of the victims (the son of the city s pre-eminent tV newsreaders) ventually arrested accountant Bevan Von Einem, who is still in gaol for his crimes.

What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America


Thomas Frank - 2004
    . . the only way to understand why so many Americans have decided to vote against their own economic and political interests" (Molly Ivins)Hailed as "dazzlingly insightful and wonderfully sardonic" (Chicago Tribune), "very funny and very painful" (San Francisco Chronicle), and "in a different league from most political books" (The New York Observer), What's the Matter with Kansas? unravels the great political mystery of our day: Why do so many Americans vote against their economic and social interests? With his acclaimed wit and acuity, Thomas Frank answers the riddle by examining his home state, Kansas-a place once famous for its radicalism that now ranks among the nation's most eager participants in the culture wars. Charting what he calls the "thirty-year backlash"-the popular revolt against a supposedly liberal establishment-Frank reveals how conservatism, once a marker of class privilege, became the creed of millions of ordinary Americans.A brilliant analysis-and funny to boot-What's the Matter with Kansas? is a vivid portrait of an upside-down world where blue-collar patriots recite the Pledge while they strangle their life chances; where small farmers cast their votes for a Wall Street order that will eventually push them off their land; and where a group of frat boys, lawyers, and CEOs has managed to convince the country that it speaks on behalf of the People.

Murder in the Family


Burl Barer - 2000
    In a modest downtown apartment, they found Nancy Newman's brutally beaten corpse sprawled across her bed. In other rooms were the bodies of her eight-year-old daughter, Melissa, and her three-year-old, Angie, whose throat was slit from ear to ear. Both Nancy and Melissa had been sexually assaulted. After an intense investigation, the police narrowed the principle suspect down to 23-year-old Kirby Anthoney a troubled drifter who had turned to his uncle, Nancy's husband John, for help and a place to stay. Little did John know that the nephew he took in was a murderous sociopath capable of slaughtering his beloved family. This true story, shocking and tragic, stunned Anchorage's residents and motivated the Major Crimes Unit of the Anchorage Police Department to do everything right in their investigation. Feeling the heat as the police built their case, Kirby bolted for the Canadian border. But the cops were on to him. First they hunted him down; then the cops and a tenacious prosecutor began their long, bitter battle to convict him up against an equally tough defense lawyer, as well as the egomaniacal defendant himself. This shocking tale reached its climax in a controversial trial where for the first time an FBI profiler was allowed to testify and the controversial, pre-DNA science of allotyping was presented to a jury. But justice would not be served until after the psychopathic Kirby Anthoney took the stand in his own defense - and showed the world the monster he truly was.

The History of Torture


Brian Innes - 1998
    Yet, however repugnant the practice of torture appears to us today, it was legal for at least 3,000 years, and formed a part of most legal codes in Europe and the Far East. In The History of Torture the complete story of torture is told, from its earliest uses right through to the present day.This book explains the many tools and techniques of torture, which range from blatantly vicious methods to the most subtle of mental cruelties. The rack is one of the most enduring torture tools: first written of in Ancient Greece, it was used to stretch the victim's body from either end. Thumbscrews were introduced to Western Europe from Russia in the seventeenth century. With the twentieth century came the use of new technologies: electrodes were attached to various parts of the victim's body to administer electric shocks, while a number of drugs, including hallucinogens, have been used to elicit confessions.The History of Torture is a meticulously researched account, its detailed text enhanced by over 100 etchings, paintings, and photographs. It offers a remarkable overview of man's inhumanity to man and the use and abuse of power, both outside and within the legal system.

The Soprano State: New Jersey's Culture of Corruption


Bob Ingle - 2008
    From Jimmy Hoffa purportedly being buried somewhere beneath the end zone in Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands, through allegations of a thoroughly corrupt medical and dental university, through Mafia influence at all levels, to a governor who suddenly declares himself a "gay American" and resigns, the Garden State might indeed be better named after the HBO mobsters.Where else would:- A state attorney general show up after police pulled over her boyfriend who was driving without a valid license?- A state senator and mayor of Newark (the same guy) spend thousands of dollars of taxpayers' money on a junket to Rio days before leaving office?- A politically connected developer hire a prostitute to tape sex acts with his own brother-in-law and then send the tape to his sister?Only in the Soprano State.

Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America


Adam Winkler - 2011
    In the tradition of Gideon's Trumpet, Adam Winkler uses the landmark 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller, which invalidated a law banning handguns in the nation's capital, as a springboard for a groundbreaking historical narrative. From the Founding Fathers and the Second Amendment to the origins of the Klan, ironically as a gun control organization, the debate over guns has always generated controversy. Whether examining the Black Panthers' role in provoking the modern gun rights movement or Ronald Reagan's efforts to curtail gun ownership, Winkler brilliantly weaves together the dramatic stories of gun rights advocates and gun control lobbyists, providing often unexpected insights into the venomous debate that now cleaves our nation.