Book picks similar to
Impure Science: Fraud, Compromise and Political Influence in Scientific Research by Robert Bell
politics-economics
public-policy
science
compromise
Test Of Greatness: Britain’s Struggle for the Atom Bomb
Brian Cathcart - 2016
He ordered a superhuman effort to make Britain a nuclear power. Although Britain had been a junior partner in the Manhattan Project which had produced the American bombs, no British scientist had more than partial knowledge of the complex physics involved. The war over, the Americans cut off all help. At a time of daunting economic difficulty and amid the growing tension of the Cold War, the project hurriedly took shape behind a cloak of almost paranoid secrecy and in an atmosphere of constant stringency and shortage. Brian Cathcart’s book ranges over politics, diplomacy, espionage and science, but above all it tells the story of the brilliant young scientist William Penney, his team and their struggle. The men who worked behind the security fences at Aldermaston have been allowed to speak. The tales include fearsome risks, vast resourcefulness, bureaucratic obstruction, naval intransigence and a measure of black humour. The veil is also lifted on the extraordinary contribution of Klaus Fuchs, the Soviet spy. Finally the high drama of the test itself, conducted off the coast of Australia after a naval operation which came close to total fiasco, is recounted in gripping detail. Test of Greatness draws on what at the time the book was published were newly declassified documents. Cathcart also speaks uses primary sources, such as the words of the participants, illustrating and illuminating in vivid, human terms a secret but crucial chapter of post-war British history. Praise for Brian Cathcart: ‘The story of the British bomb mixes science, politics, espionage, Essex and morality. A nation is changed for ever when it decides to become a nuclear power. Brian Cathcart takes this complicated array of factors and makes them rise out of the page and walk to a very wide audience.’ – Sir Peter Hennessy, military historian Brian Cathcart was Assistant Editor of the Independent on Sunday when he wrote Test of Greatness. Since then he has taken up a position at Kingston University London and founded Hacked Off in the aftermath of the tabloid phone-hacking scandal. He has just published his eighth book, The News from Waterloo. His previous works include accounts of the murders of Jill Dando and Stephen Lawrence.
Under the Surface: Fracking, Fortunes, and the Fate of the Marcellus Shale
Tom Wilber - 2012
It also contains one of the world's largest supplies of natural gas, a resource that has been dismissed as inaccessible until recently. Technological developments that combine horizontal drilling with hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") have removed physical and economic barriers to extracting hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of gas from bedrock deep below the Appalachian basin. Beginning in 2006, the first successful Marcellus gas wells by Range Resources, combined with a spike in the value of natural gas, spurred a modern-day gold rush a "gas rush" with profound ramifications for environmental policy, energy markets, political dynamics, and the lives of the people living in the Marcellus region. Under the Surface is the first book-length journalistic overview of shale gas development and the controversies surrounding it.Control over drilling rights is at stake in the heart of Marcellus country northeast Pennsylvania and central New York. The decisions by landowners to work with or against the companies and the resulting environmental and economic consequences are scrutinized by neighbors faced with similar decisions, by residents of cities whose water supply originates in the exploration area, and by those living across state lines with differing attitudes and policies concerning extraction industries. Wilber's evenhanded treatment gives a voice to all constituencies, including farmers and landowners tempted by the prospects of wealth but wary of the consequences, policymakers struggling with divisive issues, and activists coordinating campaigns based on their respective visions of economic salvation and environmental ruin. Wilber describes a landscape in which the battle over the Marcellus ranges from the very local yard signs proclaiming landowners' allegiances for or against shale gas development to often conflicting municipal, state, and federal legislation intended to accelerate, delay, or discourage exploration.For millions of people with a direct stake in shale gas exploration in the Marcellus or any number of other emerging shale resources in the United States and worldwide, or for those concerned about the global energy outlook, Under the Surface offers a worthwhile and engaging look at the issues.
Propaganda
Edward L. Bernays - 1928
Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”—Edward Bernays, PropagandaA seminal and controversial figure in the history of political thought and public relations, Edward Bernays (1891–1995), pioneered the scientific technique of shaping and manipulating public opinion, which he famously dubbed “engineering of consent.” During World War I, he was an integral part of the U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI), a powerful propaganda apparatus that was mobilized to package, advertise and sell the war to the American people as one that would “Make the World Safe for Democracy.” The CPI would become the blueprint in which marketing strategies for future wars would be based upon.Bernays applied the techniques he had learned in the CPI and, incorporating some of the ideas of Walter Lipmann, became an outspoken proponent of propaganda as a tool for democratic and corporate manipulation of the population. His 1928 bombshell Propaganda lays out his eerily prescient vision for using propaganda to regiment the collective mind in a variety of areas, including government, politics, art, science and education. To read this book today is to frightfully comprehend what our contemporary institutions of government and business have become in regards to organized manipulation of the masses.This is the first reprint of Propaganda in over 30 years and features an introduction by Mark Crispin Miller, author of The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder.
Liberalism: The Classical Tradition
Ludwig von Mises - 1927
Liberalism is not a political party; it is a system of social organization. The liberal program aims at securing equality under law and freedom of opportunity for everyone to make their own choices and decisions, so long as they do not interfere with the equal rights of others; it offers no special privileges to anyone. Under liberalism, the role of government would be limited to protecting the lives, property, and freedom of its citizens to pursue their own ends and goals. Mises is more specific here than elsewhere in applying the liberal program to economic policy, domestic and foreign. Also in this book, Mises contrasts liberalism with other conceivable systems of social organization such as socialism, communism, and fascism.Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) was the leading spokesman of the Austrian School of Economics throughout most of the twentieth century. He earned his doctorate in law and economics from the University of Vienna in 1906. In 1926, Mises founded the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research. From 1909 to 1934, he was an economist for the Vienna Chamber of Commerce. Before the Anschluss, in 1934 Mises left for Geneva, where he was a professor at the Graduate Institute of International Studies until 1940, when he emigrated to New York City. From 1948 to 1969, he was a visiting professor at New York University.Bettina Bien Greaves is a former resident scholar, trustee, and longtime staff member of the Foundation for Economic Education. She has written and lectured extensively on topics of free market economics. Her articles have appeared in such journals as Human Events, Reason, and The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty. A student of Mises, Greaves has become an expert on his work in particular and that of the Austrian School of economics in general. She has translated several Mises monographs, compiled an annotated bibliography of his work, and edited collections of papers by Mises and other members of the Austrian School.
Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time
Carroll Quigley - 1966
With clarity, perspective, and cumulative impact, Professor Quigley examines the nature of that transition through two world wars and a worldwide economic depression. As an interpretative historian, he tries to show each event in the full complexity of its historical context. The result is a unique work, notable in several ways. It gives a picture of the world in terms of the influence of different cultures and outlooks upon each other; it shows, more completely than in any similar work, the influence of science and technology on human life; and it explains, with unprecedented clarity, how the intricate financial and commercial patterns of the West prior to 1914 influenced the development of today's world.
What's Left?
Nick Cohen - 2007
He comes from the Left. When he was a child, his mother would search supermarket shelves for politically reputable citrus fruit, and despair. Aged 13, when he learned his kind and thoughtful English teacher voted Conservative, he nearly fell off his chair: 'To be good, you had to be on the Left.' Today he's no less confused. When he looks around him, in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, he sees a community of Left-leaning liberals standing on their heads. Why do apologies for a militant Islam standing for everything the liberal-Left is against come from a section of it? After the US/UK wars in Bosnia and Kosovo against Milosevic's ethnic cleansers, why were some on the Left denying the existence of Serb concentration camps? Why is Palestine a cause for the liberal-Left, but not, for instance, China, the Sudan, Zimbabwe or North Korea? Why can't those who say they support the Palestinian cause tell you what type of Palestine they'd like to see? After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington DC, why were you as likely to read that a conspiracy of Jews controlled US or UK foreign policy in a liberal literary journal as in a neo-Nazi rag? It's easy to know what the Left is fighting against--the evils of Bush and corporations--but what and who are they fighting for? As he tours the follies of the Left, he asks us to reconsider what it means to be liberal today. With the angry satire of Swift, he reclaims the values of democracy and solidarity that united the movement against fascism, asking: What's Left?.
Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism
Lawrence W. Reed - 2015
True progress happens when humans are free, yet the Progressive agenda substantially diminishes freedom while promising the unachievable. Excuse Me, Professor provides a handy reference for anyone actively engaged in advancing liberty, with essential essays debunking more than 50 Progressive clichés.Does the free market truly ignore the poor? Are humans really destroying the Earth? Is the government truly the first best source to relieve distress?Compiled and edited by Lawrence W. Reed in collaboration with the Foundation for Economic Education and Young America's Foundation, this anthology is an indispensable addition to every freedom lover's arsenal of intellectual ammunition.
Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism
Michelle Goldberg - 2006
Before the 2004 election, and during the ensuing months when many Americans were trying to understand how an administration marked by cronyism, disregard for the national budget, and poorly disguised self-interest had been reinstated, Goldberg traveled through the heartland of a country in the grips of a fevered religious radicalism: the America of our time. From the classroom to the mega-church to the federal court, she saw how the growing influence of dominionism-the doctrine that Christians have the right to rule nonbelievers-is threatening the foundations of democracy.In Kingdom Coming, Goldberg demonstrates how an increasingly bellicose fundamentalism is gaining traction throughout our national life, taking us on a tour of the parallel right-wing evangelical culture that is buoyed by Republican political patronage. Deep within the red zones of a divided America, we meet military retirees pledging to seize the nation in Christ's name, perfidious congressmen courting the confidence of neo-confederates and proponents of theocracy, and leaders of federally funded programs offering Jesus as the solution to the country's social problems.With her trenchant interviews and the telling testimonies of the people behind this movement, Goldberg gains access into the hearts and minds of citizens who are striving to remake the secular Republic bequeathed by our founders into a Christian nation run according to their interpretation of scripture. In her examination of the ever-widening divide between believers and nonbelievers, Goldberg illustrates the subversive effect of this conservative stranglehold nationwide. In an age when faith rather than reason is heralded and the values of the Enlightenment are threatened by a mystical nationalism claiming divine sanction, Kingdom Coming brings us face to face with the irrational forces that are remaking much of America.
Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization
Parag Khanna - 2016
Mankind is reengineering the planet, investing up to ten trillion dollars per year in transportation, energy, and communications infrastructure linking the world’s burgeoning megacities together. This has profound consequences for geopolitics, economics, demographics, the environment, and social identity. Connectivity, not geography, is our destiny. In Connectography, visionary strategist Parag Khanna travels from Ukraine to Iran, Mongolia to North Korea, Pakistan to Nigeria, and across the Arctic Circle and the South China Sea to explain the rapid and unprecedented changes affecting every part of the planet. He shows how militaries are deployed to protect supply chains as much as borders, and how nations are less at war over territory than engaged in tugs-of-war over pipelines, railways, shipping lanes, and Internet cables. The new arms race is to connect to the most markets—a race China is now winning, having launched a wave of infrastructure investments to unite Eurasia around its new Silk Roads. The United States can only regain ground by fusing with its neighbors into a super-continental North American Union of shared resources and prosperity.Connectography offers a unique and hopeful vision for the future. Khanna argues that new energy discoveries and technologies have eliminated the need for resource wars; ambitious transport corridors and power grids are unscrambling Africa’s fraught colonial borders; even the Arab world is evolving a more peaceful map as it builds resource and trade routes across its war-torn landscape. At the same time, thriving hubs such as Singapore and Dubai are injecting dynamism into young and heavily populated regions, cyber-communities empower commerce across vast distances, and the world’s ballooning financial assets are being wisely invested into building an inclusive global society. Beneath the chaos of a world that appears to be falling apart is a new foundation of connectivity pulling it together.Advance praise for Connectography“Connectography is ahead of the curve in seeing the battlefield of the future and the new kind of tug-of-war being waged on it. Khanna’s scholarship and foresight are world-class. . . . A must-read for the next president.”—Chuck Hagel, former U.S. secretary of defense “This bold reframing is an exciting addition to our ongoing debate about geopolitics and the future of globalization.”—Dominic Barton, global managing partner, McKinsey & Company “This is probably the most global book ever written. It is intensely specific while remaining broad and wide. Its takeaway is that infrastructure is destiny: Follow the supply lines outlined in this book to see where the future flows.”—Kevin Kelly, co-founder, Wired “There’s no better guide than Khanna to show us all the possibilities of this new hyperconnected world.”—Mathew Burrows, director, Strategic Foresight Initiative at the Atlantic Council, and former counselor, U.S. National Intelligence Council “This book is an invaluable resource for anyone involved in business, science, arts, or any other field.”—Mark Mobius, executive chairman, Templeton Emerging Markets Group “A must-read for anyone who wants to understand the future of humanity.”—Sandy Pentland, professor, MIT Media Lab
Hidden In Plain Sight 10: How To Program A Quantum Computer
Andrew H. Thomas - 2018
This book contains an introduction to quantum mechanics, with complete instructions and videos showing you how to program a real quantum computer, provided by IBM.
Google Hacking: An Ethical Hacking Guide To Google
Ankit Fadia - 2007
Google Hacking teaches people how to get the most out of this revolutionary search engine. Not only will this book teach readers how Google works, but it will also empower them with the necessary skills to make their everyday searches easier, more efficient, and more productive. Google Hacking also demonstrates how Google can be used for negative means. It's immense searching power, means that everyone, including cyber criminals, can feasibly access confidential data, such as company presentations, budgets, blueprints, even credit card numbers, with just the click of a mouse. Using numerous examples, case studies, and screenshots, this book explains the art of ethical Google Hacking -- it not only teaches readers how Google works, but it provides them with the knowledge they need to protect their data and systems from getting Google Hacked. This is the only book you need to maximize (and protect yourself) from Google searches!
Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
Paul Mason - 2015
Over the past two centuries or so, capitalism has undergone continual change - economic cycles that lurch from boom to bust - and has always emerged transformed and strengthened. Surveying this turbulent history, Paul Mason wonders whether today we are on the brink of a change so big, so profound, that this time capitalism itself, the immensely complex system by which entire societies function, has reached its limits and is changing into something wholly new.At the heart of this change is information technology: a revolution that, as Mason shows, has the potential to reshape utterly our familiar notions of work, production and value; and to destroy an economy based on markets and private ownership - in fact, he contends, it is already doing so. Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, whole swathes of economic life are changing.. Goods and services that no longer respond to the dictates of neoliberalism are appearing, from parallel currencies and time banks, to cooperatives and self-managed online spaces. Vast numbers of people are changing their behaviour, discovering new forms of ownership, lending and doing business that are distinct from, and contrary to, the current system of state-backed corporate capitalism.In this groundbreaking book Mason shows how, from the ashes of the recent financial crisis, we have the chance to create a more socially just and sustainable global economy. Moving beyond capitalism, he shows, is no longer a utopian dream. This is the first time in human history in which, equipped with an understanding of what is happening around us, we can predict and shape, rather than simply react to, seismic change.
The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions
Jason Hickel - 2017
In The Divide, Jason Hickel brilliantly lays it out, layer upon layer, until you are left reeling with the outrage of it all.’ - Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut EconomicsFor decades we have been told a story about the divide between rich countries and poor countries. We have been told that development is working: that the global South is catching up to the North, that poverty has been cut in half over the past thirty years, and will be eradicated by 2030. It’s a comforting tale, and one that is endorsed by the world’s most powerful governments and corporations. But is it true?Since 1960, the income gap between the North and South has roughly tripled in size. Today 4.3 billion people, 60 per cent of the world's population, live on less than $5 per day. Some 1 billion live on less than $1 a day. The richest eight people now control the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world combined.What is causing this growing divide? We are told that poverty is a natural phenomenon that can be fixed with aid. But in reality it is a political problem: poverty doesn’t just exist, it has been created.Poor countries are poor because they are integrated into the global economic system on unequal terms. Aid only works to hide the deep patterns of wealth extraction that cause poverty and inequality in the first place: rigged trade deals, tax evasion, land grabs and the costs associated with climate change. The Divide tracks the evolution of this system, from the expeditions of Christopher Columbus in the 1490s to the international debt regime, which has allowed a handful of rich countries to effectively control economic policies in the rest of the world.Because poverty is a political problem, it requires political solutions. The Divide offers a range of revelatory answers, but also explains that something much more radical is needed – a revolution in our way of thinking. Drawing on pioneering research, detailed analysis and years of first-hand experience, The Divide is a provocative, urgent and ultimately uplifting account of how the world works, and how it can change.
GIS Tutorial 1: Basic Workbook
Wilpen L. Gorr - 2010
By combining ArcGIS tutorials with self-study exercises intended to gradually build upon basic skills, the GIS Tutorial 1 is fully adaptable to individual needs, as well as the classroom setting. The tutorial demonstrates a range of GIS functionality, from creating maps and collecting data to using geoprocessing tools and models as well as ArcGIS 3D Analyst and ArcGIS Spatial Analyst extensions for further analysis. GIS Tutorial 1 includes a data CD for working through the exercises and fully functioning 180-day trial DVD of ArcGIS Desktop10 software, making it the smart choice for GIS beginners.
The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power
Melanie Phillips - 2010
An astonishing number of people subscribe to celebrity endorsed cults, Mayan armageddon prophecies, scientism, and other varieties of new age, anti-enlightenment philosophies. Millions more advance popular conspiracy theories: AIDS was created in a CIA laboratory, Princess Diana was assassinated, and the 9/11 attacks were an inside job.In The World Turned Upside Down, Melanie Phillips explains that the basic cause of this explosion of irrationality is the slow but steady marginalization of religion. We tell ourselves that faith and reason are incompatible, but the opposite is the case. It was Christianity and the Hebrew Bible, Phillips asserts, that gave us our concepts of reason, progress, and an orderly world on which science and modernity are based.Without its religious traditions, the West has drifted into mass derangement where truth and lies, right and wrong, victim and aggressor are all turned upside down. Scientists skeptical of global warming are hounded from their posts, Israel is demonized, and the US is vilified over the war on terror—all on the basis of blatant falsehoods and obscene propaganda.Worst of all, asserts Phillips, this abandonment of rationality leaves the West vulnerable to its legitimate threats. Faced with the very real challenges of spiraling demographics and violent, confrontational Islamism, the West is no longer willing or able to defend the modernity and rationalism that it once brought into being.