The Computer Revolution may be even more life-changing than the Industrial Revolution. We can do things with computers that could never be done before, and computers can do things for us that could never be done before.But our love of computers should not cloud our thinking about their limitations.We are told that computers are smarter than humans and that data mining can identify previously unknown truths, or make discoveries that will revolutionize our lives. Our lives may well be changed, but not necessarily for the better. Computers are very good at discovering patterns, but are uselessin judging whether the unearthed patterns are sensible because computers do not think the way humans think.We fear that super-intelligent machines will decide to protect themselves by enslaving or eliminating humans. But the real danger is not that computers are smarter than us, but that we think computers are smarter than us and, so, trust computers to make important decisions for us.The AI Delusion explains why we should not be intimidated into thinking that computers are infallible, that data-mining is knowledge discovery, and that black boxes should be trusted.

    You’re probably reading this because, well, you feel the same way.Perhaps you’re worried about one specific scenario (the death of the banking system, hyperinflation or something else) but then again, maybe you’re not able to identify specific threats. Instead, you just feel “something” is wrong. You feel it deep down inside and it haunts you.Rightfully so, in my opinion!The Age of Anomaly is here to provide much-needed clarity. My name is Andrei Polgar but a lot of you might know me as “the One Minute Economics guy on YouTube” and I’ve never been an economist who desperately wants to sound intelligent.Instead, through my work, I’ve had one goal and one goal only: making economics easy to understand, something traditional education has failed at remarkably. As time passes, my work is featured in more and more universities all over the world. Students love it, people who already graduated feel the same way and even those who aren’t necessarily interested in economics become fascinated by this often misunderstood but amazing field.Why do people like what I do?For one simple reason: because it works.Through The Age of Anomaly, I’ve made it clear that understanding financial calamities and being prepared doesn’t have to involve rocket science. Anyone can do it and frankly, everyone should do it.I’ve provided a “from A to Z” perspective by:1) Analyzing quite a few hand-picked economic calamities of the past, from the tulip mania to the Great Depression, the Great Recession and even case studies pretty much nobody heard of such as the short domain mania of 2015-20162) Drawing parallels and finding common denominators so as to provide tips that help readers become better and better at spotting financial storms3) Explaining that becoming better at spotting financial storms is just not enough. Even I may very well end up being caught off-guard by the next crash and as such, it makes sense to dedicate just at much energy to becoming more resilient in general so as to better withstand anything life throws your wayBy becoming good at spotting financial storms as well as resilient, you’ll be multiple orders of magnitude (and I consider even this the understatement of the century) better off than the average individual, who blissfully chooses to live in a bubble of ignorance!

    Underlining the importance of critical thinking in all matters numerical, Best illustrates his points with examples of good and bad statistics about such contemporary concerns as school shootings, fatal hospital errors, bullying, teen suicides, deaths at the World Trade Center, college ratings, the risks of divorce, racial profiling, and fatalities caused by falling coconuts."More Damned Lies and Statistics" encourages all of us to think in a more sophisticated and skeptical manner about how statistics are used to promote causes, create fear, and advance particular points of view.

    

    In Dataclysm, Christian Rudder uses it to show us who we truly are.   For centuries, we’ve relied on polling or small-scale lab experiments to study human behavior. Today, a new approach is possible. As we live more of our lives online, researchers can finally observe us directly, in vast numbers, and without filters. Data scientists have become the new demographers.   In this daring and original book, Rudder explains how Facebook "likes" can predict, with surprising accuracy, a person’s sexual orientation and even intelligence; how attractive women receive exponentially more interview requests; and why you must have haters to be hot. He charts the rise and fall of America’s most reviled word through Google Search and examines the new dynamics of collaborative rage on Twitter. He shows how people express themselves, both privately and publicly. What is the least Asian thing you can say? Do people bathe more in Vermont or New Jersey? What do black women think about Simon & Garfunkel? (Hint: they don’t think about Simon & Garfunkel.) Rudder also traces human migration over time, showing how groups of people move from certain small towns to the same big cities across the globe. And he grapples with the challenge of maintaining privacy in a world where these explorations are possible.   Visually arresting and full of wit and insight, Dataclysm is a new way of seeing ourselves—a brilliant alchemy, in which math is made human and numbers become the narrative of our time.

    Now, with "War on the Middle Class," Dobbs takes an impassioned and rousing stance on the all-out class war that is turning the American dream into a nightmare. The middle class has never been so vulnerable. Its every feature is under assault by politicians and the lobbyists who court them, big-business corporations that are sending their jobs overseas, and a media that relies on sensationalism instead of facts when reporting the news. In a sweeping analysis, Dobbs looks at every aspect of the decline of the middle class?from a lack of political representation to America's corrupt health-care system?to demonstrate how the gap between America's newest haves and have-nots is no longer merely financial, but instead includes the erosion of education, employment, government, and community. Dobbs proposes a series of measures to resolve each issue and incite people, whose future is being mortgaged to benefit a powerful few, to preserve their rights and dreams. "War on the Middle Class" is provocative, incendiary, and bound to be widely discussed?the perfect book to establish the terms of debate in this year's midterm elections.

    In this linear construct, you go to work for a week and at week’s end you are compensated for that work. The next week you do more work and are compensated for that work, and so on. This is a common agreement between employers and employees in many countries, including the United States. The purpose of this book is to challenge that construct. It is the author's intent to suggest a more profitable arrangement for the creator of the product — the worker. The notion is that one could work on a project for a certain amount of time but the product of that project could pay dividends for a longer term. One might work for a week and be paid for the product of that work every week for many years. Imagine how this construct would compound income week after week, project after project. At some point, with numerous streams of income from a growing number of completed projects, one would be able to discontinue taking on new projects if he or she desired, living off the residuals of the projects he or she created to that point. Indeed, one could take a vacation, still earning income from work he or she completed long ago. With the help of Dr. Frederick Von Greensburg, Thaddeus Cooper breaks down the concept of passive income and outlines a strategy for creating streams of this revenue to supplement or replace traditional income. A self-help book for the masses and a manifesto for the most creative among us, Don't Give Your Work Away For Free: A free ebook by Thaddeus Cooper is a MUST READ!

    But spending one night in the arms of this fascinating stranger is a fantasy too tempting to resist. For one night, she can pretend to be a femme fatale.Professional gambler Roy Beaujovais has made millions of dollars, but never enough to feel complete. He’d hoped the woman with whom he spends one magical night might be the answer, but she deserts him in the morning.Only after Valerie returns, and reluctantly admits she’s pregnant, does Roy know what will finally fill the lonely hole in his life: becoming a father. He’ll have to play his best hand ever, though, to get the skittish Valerie to include him in the game.

    In a bar brawl, he accidentally kills the vizier's eldest son. For punishment, the king renders an unusual verdict: life in the service of the dead at the weryt, the walled-off embalming compound.At the same time, young ladies at the pharaoh's court drop dead without obvious cause. When the corpses are brought to the weryt, Hori, now trained in embalming and organ removal, discovers the girls were murdered. Only he can't leave the place without turning his life sentence into a death sentence—or can he? An adventurous investigation unfolds.

    Now the retail banking business model looks set to be transformed too. In Bye Bye Banks? James Haycock and Shane Richmond describe these startups, and to which areas of the banking industry they are laying siege. It shows that this assault is already well underway and that many incumbents are poised to be displaced, diminished and disintermediated. It draws on extensive research and on-and-off the record interviews with senior executives in some of the biggest banks. Haycock and Richmond conclude with the recommendation that traditional banks need to reinvent themselves by launching a ‘Beta Bank’: a lean, stand-alone organisation fit for the future for which they provide a ten-point operating model. This short book is a bold, urgent and timely analysis of the forces shaping the future of financial services. Its message to industry leaders in the sector could not be more simple: adapt or prepare to be disrupted. “This work accurately and concisely captures the effects of the disruption brought to the banking industry by the digital revolution. The comments by other banking and innovation professionals about their own experiences are particularly intriguing.” - Alessandro Hatami, former Innovation Executive at Lloyds Banking Group “James Haycock is a key voice for how the banking industry should and will change.” - Tom Hopkins, Product Innovation Director, Experian Consumer Services “If you are an incumbent retail bank, read it, get on with it, make it happen.” - Lee Sankey, former Group Design Director, Barclays

    In 2017, they face the problems of underemployment, unaffordable housing and economists who write crap columns telling them that it's their fault for taking an Uber to brunch.Today, the future's so dark, we need night vision goggles, not a few liberal guys shining a torch on a sandwich. Maybe today, we could use the light of Karl Marx.Marx may not have had much to say about brunch in the twenty-first century, but he sure had some powerful thoughts about where the system of capitalism would land us. Over time, it would produce a series of crises, he said, before pushing the wealth so decisively up, a top-heavy system would come crashing down with a push.Pushy old communist Helen Razer offers an introduction to the thought of Marx for Millennials, and anyone else tired of wage stagnation, growing global poverty and economists writing desperate columns saying everything would work better, if only we stopped eating sandwiches. Brunchers of the world must unite! They have nothing to lose but a life lived for the wealth of a few. Both for themselves and their comrades in the Global South, they have a world to win.

    How can we catch schools that cheat on standardized tests? How does Netflix know which movies you’ll like? What is causing the rising incidence of autism? As best-selling author Charles Wheelan shows us in Naked Statistics, the right data and a few well-chosen statistical tools can help us answer these questions and more.For those who slept through Stats 101, this book is a lifesaver. Wheelan strips away the arcane and technical details and focuses on the underlying intuition that drives statistical analysis. He clarifies key concepts such as inference, correlation, and regression analysis, reveals how biased or careless parties can manipulate or misrepresent data, and shows us how brilliant and creative researchers are exploiting the valuable data from natural experiments to tackle thorny questions.And in Wheelan’s trademark style, there’s not a dull page in sight. You’ll encounter clever Schlitz Beer marketers leveraging basic probability, an International Sausage Festival illuminating the tenets of the central limit theorem, and a head-scratching choice from the famous game show Let’s Make a Deal—and you’ll come away with insights each time. With the wit, accessibility, and sheer fun that turned Naked Economics into a bestseller, Wheelan defies the odds yet again by bringing another essential, formerly unglamorous discipline to life.

    Baseball Prospectus 2015 brings together an elite group of analysts to provide the definitive look at the upcoming season in critical essays and commentary on the thirty teams, their managers, and more than sixty players and prospects from each team.Baseball Prospectus 2015contains critical essays on each of the thirty teams and player comments for some sixty players for each of those teams; projects each player's stats for the coming season using the groundbreaking PECOTA projection system, which has been called "perhaps the game's most accurate projection model" (Sports Illustrated). Now in its twentieth edition, this New York Times bestselling insider's guide from Baseball Prospectus, America's leading provider of statistical analysis for baseball, remains hands down the most authoritative and entertaining book of its kind.

    Most of the time this math works quietly behind the scenes . . . until it doesn't. All sorts of seemingly innocuous mathematical mistakes can have significant consequences.Math is easy to ignore until a misplaced decimal point upends the stock market, a unit conversion error causes a plane to crash, or someone divides by zero and stalls a battleship in the middle of the ocean.Exploring and explaining a litany of glitches, near misses, and mathematical mishaps involving the internet, big data, elections, street signs, lotteries, the Roman Empire, and an Olympic team, Matt Parker uncovers the bizarre ways math trips us up, and what this reveals about its essential place in our world. Getting it wrong has never been more fun.

     During a single historic weekend (September 12-14, 2008) the fate of Lehman Brothers was sealed, Merrill Lynch barely survived, and AIG became a ward of the federal government. Top CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo spent the entire weekend taking frantic phone calls from the most powerful players on Wall Street and in Washington, as they toiled to keep the economy from complete collapse. Those CEOs and dozens of other sources gave Bartiromo behind-the-scenes details unavailable to other members of the media, of the crisis and its aftermath. Now she draws on her high-level network to provide an eyewitness account of the biggest events of the financial crisis including at length interviews with former treasury secretary Henry Paulson, former AIG chairman Hank Greenberg, former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain, and JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, among many others. Writing with both authority and dramatic flair, Bartiromo weaves a thrilling narrative that will make news. She also tackles the big questions: how did an unmatched period of market euphoria and growth turn sour, catapulting the economy into a dangerous slide? And in the long run, how will the near-catastrophe really change Wall Street?