Their discoveries force them to challenge the standard idea that rural culture and people are backward, conservative, and intolerant. Instead, they find that rural China has not only adapted to rapid globalization but has actually innovated the technology we all use today.From pork farmers using AI to produce the perfect pig, to disruptive luxury counterfeits and the political intersections of e-commerce villages, Wang unravels the ties between globalization, technology, agriculture, and commerce in unprecedented fashion. Accompanied by humorous “Sinofuturist” recipes that frame meals as they transform under new technology, Blockchain Chicken Farm is an original and probing look into innovation, connectivity, and collaboration in the digitized rural world.FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.

    Over years of groundbreaking experiments, he has distilled remarkable discoveries significant enough to become the bedrock of a whole new scientific field: social physics. Humans have more in common with bees than we like to admit: We’re social creatures first and foremost. Our most important habits of action—and most basic notions of common sense—are wired into us through our coordination in social groups. Social physics is about idea flow, the way human social networks spread ideas and transform those ideas into behaviors. Thanks to the millions of digital bread crumbs people leave behind via smartphones, GPS devices, and the Internet, the amount of new information we have about human activity is truly profound. Until now, sociologists have depended on limited data sets and surveys that tell us how people say they think and behave, rather than what they actually do. As a result, we’ve been stuck with the same stale social structures—classes, markets—and a focus on individual actors, data snapshots, and steady states. Pentland shows that, in fact, humans respond much more powerfully to social incentives that involve rewarding others and strengthening the ties that bind than incentives that involve only their own economic self-interest. Pentland and his teams have found that they can study patterns of information exchange in a social network without any knowledge of the actual content of the information and predict with stunning accuracy how productive and effective that network is, whether it’s a business or an entire city. We can maximize a group’s collective intelligence to improve performance and use social incentives to create new organizations and guide them through disruptive change in a way that maximizes the good. At every level of interaction, from small groups to large cities, social networks can be tuned to increase exploration and engagement, thus vastly improving idea flow.  Social Physics will change the way we think about how we learn and how our social groups work—and can be made to work better, at every level of society. Pentland leads readers to the edge of the most important revolution in the study of social behavior in a generation, an entirely new way to look at life itself.

    But where should you start? Americans are slowly becoming ill from impaired glucose metabolism that manifests itself as a debilitating illness or chronic condition. You may try to manage one problem after another– diuretics to treat blood pressure, statins to lower cholesterol, metformin and insulin to treat diabetes--without fully realizing that the root of these issues is insulin resistance which revs up inflammation, damages the immune system, and disrupts the whole hormonal/chemical system in the body.It's time to feel better and get healthy by following a simple step-by-step plan to a healthy lifestyle. Rob Thompson, MD and Dana Carpender create the ultimate dream team in your journey to wellness.The Insulin Resistance Solution offers a step-by-step plan and 75 recipes for reversing even the most stubborn insulin resistance.The Program:- Reduce Your Body's Demand for Insulin: This is the stumbling block of many other plans/doctor recommendations. Even "healthy" and "moderate" carb intake can continue to fuel insulin resistance.- Fat is Not the Enemy: Stop Worrying about Fat, Cholesterol, and Salt- Exercise--the RIGHT way:- Use Carb Blockers: Eat and Supplement to Slow Glucose Digestion and Lower Insulin Levels- Safe, Effective Medication

    It quite literally underlies and underpins everything. Employing the keen intellect, insatiable curiosity, and narrative verve that are the foundations of his previous bestselling works, Simon Winchester examines what we human beings are doing—and have done—with the billions of acres that together make up the solid surface of our planet.Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World examines in depth how we acquire land, how we steward it, how and why we fight over it, and finally, how we can, and on occasion do, come to share it. Ultimately, Winchester confronts the essential question: who actually owns the world’s land—and why does it matter?

     How to Heal Your Metabolism will question everything you thought you knew about health and nutrition. If you are ready to understand nutrition and health in a completely different light, then you need to read this book.

    Nothing could be further from the truth. In Behind Every Good Decision, authors and analytics experts Piyanka Jain and Puneet Sharma demonstrate how professionals at any level can take the information at their disposal and leverage it to make better decisions. The authors’ streamlined frame work demystifies the process of business analytics and helps anyone move from data to decisions in just five steps…using only Excel as a tool. Readers will learn how to: Clarify the business question • Lay out a hypothesis-driven plan • Pull relevant data • Convert it to insights • Make decisions that make an impact Packed with examples and exercises, this refreshingly accessible book explains the four fundamental analytic techniques that can help solve a surprising 80% of all business problems. Business analytics isn’t rocket science—it’s a simple problem-solving tool that can help companies increase revenue, decrease costs, improve products, and delight customers. And who doesn’t want to do that?

    R has traditionally been difficult for non-statisticians to learn, and most R books assume far too much knowledge to be of help. R for Everyone is the solution. Drawing on his unsurpassed experience teaching new users, professional data scientist Jared P. Lander has written the perfect tutorial for anyone new to statistical programming and modeling. Organized to make learning easy and intuitive, this guide focuses on the 20 percent of R functionality you'll need to accomplish 80 percent of modern data tasks. Lander's self-contained chapters start with the absolute basics, offering extensive hands-on practice and sample code. You'll download and install R; navigate and use the R environment; master basic program control, data import, and manipulation; and walk through several essential tests. Then, building on this foundation, you'll construct several complete models, both linear and nonlinear, and use some data mining techniques. By the time you're done, you won't just know how to write R programs, you'll be ready to tackle the statistical problems you care about most. COVERAGE INCLUDES - Exploring R, RStudio, and R packages - Using R for math: variable types, vectors, calling functions, and more - Exploiting data structures, including data.frames, matrices, and lists - Creating attractive, intuitive statistical graphics - Writing user-defined functions - Controlling program flow with if, ifelse, and complex checks - Improving program efficiency with group manipulations - Combining and reshaping multiple datasets - Manipulating strings using R's facilities and regular expressions - Creating normal, binomial, and Poisson probability distributions - Programming basic statistics: mean, standard deviation, and t-tests - Building linear, generalized linear, and nonlinear models - Assessing the quality of models and variable selection - Preventing overfitting, using the Elastic Net and Bayesian methods - Analyzing univariate and multivariate time series data - Grouping data via K-means and hierarchical clustering - Preparing reports, slideshows, and web pages with knitr - Building reusable R packages with devtools and Rcpp - Getting involved with the R global community

    Full of insights, arguments and philosophical perspectives, the book covers an amazing array of topics. Beginning in antiquity with Democritus, it progresses through logic and set theory, computability and complexity theory, quantum computing, cryptography, the information content of quantum states and the interpretation of quantum mechanics. There are also extended discussions about time travel, Newcomb's Paradox, the anthropic principle and the views of Roger Penrose. Aaronson's informal style makes this fascinating book accessible to readers with scientific backgrounds, as well as students and researchers working in physics, computer science, mathematics and philosophy.

     Two hot topics team up in The Baseball Economist, and the result is a refreshing, clear- eyed survey of a playing field that has changed radically in recent years. Utilizing the latest economic methods and statistical analysis, writer, economics professor, and popular blogger J. C. Bradbury dissects burning baseball topics with his original Sabernomic perspective, such as: • Did steroids have nothing to do with the recent home run records? Incredibly, Bradbury's research, reviewed by Stanford economists, reveals steroids had little statistical significance. • Is the big-city versus small-city competition really lopsided? Bradbury shows why the Marlins and Indians are likely to dominate big-city franchises in the coming years. • Which players are ridiculously overvalued? Bradbury lists all players by team with their revenue value to the team listed in dollars—including a dishonor role of those players with negative values. • Is major league baseball a monopoly that can't govern itself? Bradbury sets out what rules the owners really need to play by, and what the players' union should be doing. • Does it help to lobby for balls and strikes? How would Babe Ruth perform in today's game? And who killed all the left-handed catchers, anyway? The Baseball Economist knows. Providing far more than a mere collection of numbers, Bradbury shines the light of his economic thinking on baseball, exposing the power of tradeoffs, competition, and incentives. Statistics alone aren't enough anymore. Fans, fantasy buffs, and players, as well as coaches at all levels who want to grasp what is really happening on the field today and in the coming years, will use and enjoy Bradbury's brilliant new understanding of the national pastime.

    A forward-thinking manifesto from three Stanford professors—experts who have worked at ground zero of the tech revolution for decades—which reveals how big tech’s obsession with optimization and efficiency has sacrificed fundamental human values and outlines steps we can take to change course, renew our democracy, and save ourselves.

    This overview has enabled students to make sense more easily of what instructors are doing when they produce proofs, theorems and formulas.

    Who should we trust? Who should we believe? How can we make sure we make the right choices This is the book that will help you through that data deluge and show you how to make better and smarter decisions.Internationally renowned thinker, forecaster, and bestselling author Noreena Hertz reveals the extent to which life's big decisions are made on the basis of flawed information, weak assumptions, corrupted data, insufficient scrutiny of others, and a lack of self-knowledge. Taking us on a journey that reveals the extent to which we cede our intellectual power at our peril, Hertz shows how errors in decision-making lead young people to under-save for retirement, doctors to miss tumors, CEOs to make catastrophic investments, governments to adopt the wrong economic policies, and parents to irreversibly traumatize their children.To avert such disasters, Hertz persuasively argues, we need to become empowered decision-makers, capable of making high-stakes choices and holding accountable those who advise us.By weaving together cutting-edge research with real-world examples from Hollywood to Harry Potter, NASA to World War Two spies, Hertz constructs a path to more astute and empowered decision-making in ten clear steps. With a razor-sharp intellect and an instinct for popular storytelling, she offers counterintuitive, actionable guidance for making better choices-whether you are a business-person, a professional, a patient , or a parent.

    How does professional baseball evaluate hitters? Is a singles hitter like Wade Boggs more valuable than a power hitter like David Ortiz? Should NFL teams pass or run more often on first downs? Could professional basketball have used statistics to expose the crooked referee Tim Donaghy? Does money buy performance in professional sports?In Mathletics, Wayne Winston describes the mathematical methods that top coaches and managers use to evaluate players and improve team performance, and gives math enthusiasts the practical tools they need to enhance their understanding and enjoyment of their favorite sports--and maybe even gain the outside edge to winning bets. Mathletics blends fun math problems with sports stories of actual games, teams, and players, along with personal anecdotes from Winston's work as a sports consultant. Winston uses easy-to-read tables and illustrations to illuminate the techniques and ideas he presents, and all the necessary math concepts--such as arithmetic, basic statistics and probability, and Monte Carlo simulations--are fully explained in the examples.After reading Mathletics, you will understand why baseball teams should almost never bunt, why football overtime systems are unfair, why points, rebounds, and assists aren't enough to determine who's the NBA's best player--and much, much more.

    . . like a pendulum? These may not look like math questions, but they are-because they all have to do with patterns. And mathematics, at heart, is the study of patterns. That realization changed Eddie Woo's life-by turning the "dry" subject he dreaded in high school into a boundless quest for discovery. Now an award-winning math teacher, Woo sees patterns everywhere: in the "branches" of blood vessels and lightning, in the growth of a savings account and a sunflower, even in his morning cup of tea! Here are twenty-six bite-size chapters on the hidden mathematical marvels that encrypt our email, enchant our senses, and even keep us alive-from the sine waves we hear as "music" to the mysterious golden ratio. This book will change your mind about what math can be. We are all born mathematicians-and It's a Numberful World.

    Now Wright attempts something even more ambitious: explaining the direction of evolution and human history–and discerning where history will lead us next.In Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Wright asserts that, ever since the primordial ooze, life has followed a basic pattern. Organisms and human societies alike have grown more complex by mastering the challenges of internal cooperation. Wright's narrative ranges from fossilized bacteria to vampire bats, from stone-age villages to the World Trade Organization, uncovering such surprises as the benefits of barbarian hordes and the useful stability of feudalism. Here is history endowed with moral significance–a way of looking at our biological and cultural evolution that suggests, refreshingly, that human morality has improved over time, and that our instinct to discover meaning may itself serve a higher purpose. Insightful, witty, profound, Nonzero offers breathtaking implications for what we believe and how we adapt to technology's ongoing transformation of the world.From the Trade Paperback edition.