Book picks similar to
Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age by Matthew J. Salganik
nonfiction
non-fiction
science
data-science
AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order
Kai-Fu Lee - 2018
Kai-Fu Lee—one of the world’s most respected experts on AI and China—reveals that China has suddenly caught up to the US at an astonishingly rapid and unexpected pace.In AI Superpowers, Kai-Fu Lee argues powerfully that because of these unprecedented developments in AI, dramatic changes will be happening much sooner than many of us expected. Indeed, as the US-Sino AI competition begins to heat up, Lee urges the US and China to both accept and to embrace the great responsibilities that come with significant technological power.Most experts already say that AI will have a devastating impact on blue-collar jobs. But Lee predicts that Chinese and American AI will have a strong impact on white-collar jobs as well. Is universal basic income the solution? In Lee’s opinion, probably not. But he provides a clear description of which jobs will be affected and how soon, which jobs can be enhanced with AI, and most importantly, how we can provide solutions to some of the most profound changes in human history that are coming soon.
The Industries of the Future
Alec J. Ross - 2016
In the next ten years, change will happen even faster. As Hillary Clinton's Senior Advisor for Innovation, Alec Ross travelled nearly a million miles to forty-one countries, the equivalent of two round-trips to the moon. From refugee camps in the Congo and Syrian war zones, to visiting the world's most powerful people in business and government, Ross's travels amounted to a four-year masterclass in the changing nature of innovation. In The Industries of the Future, Ross distils his observations on the forces that are changing the world. He highlights the best opportunities for progress and explains how countries thrive or sputter. Ross examines the specific fields that will most shape our economic future over the next ten years, including robotics, artificial intelligence, the commercialization of genomics, cybercrime and the impact of digital technology. Blending storytelling and economic analysis, he answers questions on how we will need to adapt. Ross gives readers a vivid and informed perspective on how sweeping global trends are affecting the ways we live, now and tomorrow.
Counting: How We Use Numbers to Decide What Matters
Deborah Stone - 2020
With help from Dr. Seuss and Cookie Monster, she explains why numbers can’t be objective: in order to count, one must first decide what counts. Every number is the ending to a story built on cultural assumptions, social conventions, and personal judgments.And yet, in this age of big data and metric mania, numbers shape almost every facet of our lives: whether we get hired, fired, or promoted; whether we get into college or out of prison; how our opinions are gathered and portrayed to politicians; or how government designs health and safety regulations. In warm and playful prose, Counting explores what happens when we measure nebulous notions like merit, race, poverty, pain, or productivity.When so much rides on numbers, they can become instruments of social welfare, justice, and democracy—or not. The citizens of Flint, Michigan, for instance, used numbers to prove how their household water got contaminated and to force their government to take remedial action. In stark contrast, the Founding Fathers finessed an intractable conflict by counting each slave as three-fifths of a person in the national census. They set a terrible precedent for today’s politicians who claim to solve moral and political dilemmas with arithmetic.Suffused with moral reflection and ending with a powerful epilogue on COVID-19’s dizzying statistics, Counting will forever change our relationship with numbers.
Mining of Massive Datasets
Anand Rajaraman - 2011
This book focuses on practical algorithms that have been used to solve key problems in data mining and which can be used on even the largest datasets. It begins with a discussion of the map-reduce framework, an important tool for parallelizing algorithms automatically. The authors explain the tricks of locality-sensitive hashing and stream processing algorithms for mining data that arrives too fast for exhaustive processing. The PageRank idea and related tricks for organizing the Web are covered next. Other chapters cover the problems of finding frequent itemsets and clustering. The final chapters cover two applications: recommendation systems and Web advertising, each vital in e-commerce. Written by two authorities in database and Web technologies, this book is essential reading for students and practitioners alike.
Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics
Nathan Yau - 2011
Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could actually visualize data in such a way that we could maximize its potential and tell a story in a clear, concise manner? Thanks to the creative genius of Nathan Yau, we can. With this full-color book, data visualization guru and author Nathan Yau uses step-by-step tutorials to show you how to visualize and tell stories with data. He explains how to gather, parse, and format data and then design high quality graphics that help you explore and present patterns, outliers, and relationships.Presents a unique approach to visualizing and telling stories with data, from a data visualization expert and the creator of flowingdata.com, Nathan Yau Offers step-by-step tutorials and practical design tips for creating statistical graphics, geographical maps, and information design to find meaning in the numbers Details tools that can be used to visualize data-native graphics for the Web, such as ActionScript, Flash libraries, PHP, and JavaScript and tools to design graphics for print, such as R and Illustrator Contains numerous examples and descriptions of patterns and outliers and explains how to show them Visualize This demonstrates how to explain data visually so that you can present your information in a way that is easy to understand and appealing.
Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
Norbert Wiener - 1948
It is a ‘ must’ book for those in every branch of science . . . in addition, economists, politicians, statesmen, and businessmen cannot afford to overlook cybernetics and its tremendous, even terrifying implications. "It is a beautifully written book, lucid, direct, and despite its complexity, as readable by the layman as the trained scientist." -- John B. Thurston, "The Saturday Review of Literature" Acclaimed one of the "seminal books . . . comparable in ultimate importance to . . . Galileo or Malthus or Rousseau or Mill," "Cybernetics" was judged by twenty-seven historians, economists, educators, and philosophers to be one of those books published during the "past four decades", which may have a substantial impact on public thought and action in the years ahead." -- Saturday Review
Natural Language Processing with Python
Steven Bird - 2009
With it, you'll learn how to write Python programs that work with large collections of unstructured text. You'll access richly annotated datasets using a comprehensive range of linguistic data structures, and you'll understand the main algorithms for analyzing the content and structure of written communication.Packed with examples and exercises, Natural Language Processing with Python will help you: Extract information from unstructured text, either to guess the topic or identify "named entities" Analyze linguistic structure in text, including parsing and semantic analysis Access popular linguistic databases, including WordNet and treebanks Integrate techniques drawn from fields as diverse as linguistics and artificial intelligenceThis book will help you gain practical skills in natural language processing using the Python programming language and the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) open source library. If you're interested in developing web applications, analyzing multilingual news sources, or documenting endangered languages -- or if you're simply curious to have a programmer's perspective on how human language works -- you'll find Natural Language Processing with Python both fascinating and immensely useful.
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
James Gleick - 2011
The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born. From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood talking drums of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information: Charles Babbage, the idiosyncratic inventor of the first great mechanical computer; Ada Byron, the brilliant and doomed daughter of the poet, who became the first true programmer; pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing; and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself. And then the information age arrives. Citizens of this world become experts willy-nilly: aficionados of bits and bytes. And we sometimes feel we are drowning, swept by a deluge of signs and signals, news and images, blogs and tweets. The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading.
The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better
Richard G. Wilkinson - 2009
Why do we mistrust people more in the UK than in Japan? Why do Americans have higher rates of teenage pregnancy than the French? What makes the Swedish thinner than the Greeks? The answer: inequality. This groundbreaking book, based on years of research, provides hard evidence to show how almost everything—-from life expectancy to depression levels, violence to illiteracy-—is affected not by how wealthy a society is, but how equal it is. Urgent, provocative and genuinely uplifting, The Spirit Level has been heralded as providing a new way of thinking about ourselves and our communities, and could change the way you see the world.
Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind
Geert Hofstede - 1993
Professor Geert Hofstede's 30 years of field research on cultural differences and the software of the mind helps us look at how we think - and how we fail to think - as members of groups. This newly revised and expanded edition is based on the latest data from Professor Hofstede ongoing field research, and provides detailed comparisons of cross-cultural differences among 70 nations. business, family, schools and political organizations. Professor Hofstede explains phenomena such as culture shock, ethnocentrism, stereotyping, differences in language and humor. Most importantly, he discusses the practical implications of the culture differences described in the book and how understanding these cultural differences can enable people from different cultures to work together more productively. parents. Melding powerful intellectual analysis and hard social, cultural, and organizational research, Hofstede gives a sobering picture of a world perilously lacking in self-knowledge - unaware of serious difference between the businesses, organizations, cultures, and nations that populate our planet despite the fact of globalization. But culture shock - whether between an individual and a new country, between organizations, between the sexes, or between opposing diplomats - can be turned to our advantage, Hofstede says-if we understand it. Cultures and Organizations helps to explain the differences in the way leaders and their followers think, offering practical solutions for those in business and politics to help solve conflict between different groups.
Data Analysis with Open Source Tools: A Hands-On Guide for Programmers and Data Scientists
Philipp K. Janert - 2010
With this insightful book, intermediate to experienced programmers interested in data analysis will learn techniques for working with data in a business environment. You'll learn how to look at data to discover what it contains, how to capture those ideas in conceptual models, and then feed your understanding back into the organization through business plans, metrics dashboards, and other applications.Along the way, you'll experiment with concepts through hands-on workshops at the end of each chapter. Above all, you'll learn how to think about the results you want to achieve -- rather than rely on tools to think for you.Use graphics to describe data with one, two, or dozens of variablesDevelop conceptual models using back-of-the-envelope calculations, as well asscaling and probability argumentsMine data with computationally intensive methods such as simulation and clusteringMake your conclusions understandable through reports, dashboards, and other metrics programsUnderstand financial calculations, including the time-value of moneyUse dimensionality reduction techniques or predictive analytics to conquer challenging data analysis situationsBecome familiar with different open source programming environments for data analysisFinally, a concise reference for understanding how to conquer piles of data.--Austin King, Senior Web Developer, MozillaAn indispensable text for aspiring data scientists.--Michael E. Driscoll, CEO/Founder, Dataspora
The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century
David Salsburg - 2001
At a summer tea party in Cambridge, England, a guest states that tea poured into milk tastes different from milk poured into tea. Her notion is shouted down by the scientific minds of the group. But one man, Ronald Fisher, proposes to scientifically test the hypothesis. There is no better person to conduct such an experiment, for Fisher is a pioneer in the field of statistics.The Lady Tasting Tea spotlights not only Fisher's theories but also the revolutionary ideas of dozens of men and women which affect our modern everyday lives. Writing with verve and wit, David Salsburg traces breakthroughs ranging from the rise and fall of Karl Pearson's theories to the methods of quality control that rebuilt postwar Japan's economy, including a pivotal early study on the capacity of a small beer cask at the Guinness brewing factory. Brimming with intriguing tidbits and colorful characters, The Lady Tasting Tea salutes the spirit of those who dared to look at the world in a new way.
Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning
Thomas H. Davenport - 2007
But are you using it to “out-think” your rivals? If not, you may be missing out on a potent competitive tool.In Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris argue that the frontier for using data to make decisions has shifted dramatically. Certain high-performing enterprises are now building their competitive strategies around data-driven insights that in turn generate impressive business results. Their secret weapon? Analytics: sophisticated quantitative and statistical analysis and predictive modeling.Exemplars of analytics are using new tools to identify their most profitable customers and offer them the right price, to accelerate product innovation, to optimize supply chains, and to identify the true drivers of financial performance. A wealth of examples—from organizations as diverse as Amazon, Barclay’s, Capital One, Harrah’s, Procter & Gamble, Wachovia, and the Boston Red Sox—illuminate how to leverage the power of analytics.
Networks, Crowds, and Markets
David Easley - 2010
This connectedness is found in many incarnations: in the rapid growth of the Internet, in the ease with which global communication takes place, and in the ability of news and information as well as epidemics and financial crises to spread with surprising speed and intensity. These are phenomena that involve networks, incentives, and the aggregate behavior of groups of people; they are based on the links that connect us and the ways in which our decisions can have subtle consequences for others. This introductory undergraduate textbook takes an interdisciplinary look at economics, sociology, computing and information science, and applied mathematics to understand networks and behavior. It describes the emerging field of study that is growing at the interface of these areas, addressing fundamental questions about how the social, economic, and technological worlds are connected.
Micromotives and Macrobehavior
Thomas C. Schelling - 1978
And the subject of these stories—how small and seemingly meaningless decisions and actions by individuals often lead to significant unintended consequences for a large group—is more important than ever. In one famous example, Thomas C. Schelling shows that a slight-but-not-malicious preference to have neighbors of the same race eventually leads to completely segregated populations.The updated edition of this landmark book contains a new preface and the author's Nobel Prize acceptance speech.