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A revelatory and timely look at how technology boosts our cognitive abilities—making us smarter, more productive, and more creative than ever It’s undeniable—technology is changing the way we think. But is it for the better? Amid a chorus of doomsayers, Clive Thompson delivers a resounding “yes.” In Smarter Than You Think, Thompson shows that every technological innovation—from the written word to the printing press to the telegraph—has provoked the very same anxieties that plague us today. We panic that life will never be the same, that our attentions are eroding, that culture is being trivialized. But, as in the past, we adapt—learning to use the new and retaining what is good of the old. Smarter Than You Think embraces and extols this transformation, presenting an exciting vision of the present and the future.
Hello, world. Facebook's algorithms shaping the news. Self-driving cars roaming the streets. Revolution on Twitter and romance on Tinder. We live in a world constructed of code--and coders are the ones who built it for us. From acclaimed tech writer Clive Thompson comes a brilliant anthropological reckoning with the most powerful tribe in the world today, computer programmers, in a book that interrogates who they are, how they think, what qualifies as greatness in their world, and what should give us pause. They are the most quietly influential people on the planet, and Coders shines a light on their culture. In pop culture and media, the people who create the code that rules our world are r...
Fundamentals of Risk Management, now in its fourth edition, is a comprehensive introduction to commercial and business risk for students and a broad range of risk professionals. Providing extensive coverage of the core frameworks of business continuity planning, enterprise risk management and project risk management, this is the definitive guide to dealing with the different types of risk an organization faces. With relevant international case examples from both the private and public sectors, this revised edition of Fundamentals of Risk Management is completely aligned to ISO 31000 and provides a full analysis of changes in contemporary risk areas including supply chain, cyber risk, risk cu...
In his Introduction to this beautifully curated collection of essays, Steven Johnson heralds the arrival of a new generation of technology writing. Whether it is Nicholas Carr worrying that Google is making us stupid, Dana Goodyear chronicling the rise of the cellphone novel, Andrew Sullivan explaining the rewards of blogging, Dalton Conley lamenting the sprawling nature of work in the information age, or Clay Shirky marveling at the 'cognitive surplus' unleashed by the decline of the TV sitcom, this new generation does not waste time speculating about the future. Its attitude seems to be: Who needs the future? The present is plenty interesting on its own. Packed with sparkling essays culled from print and online publications, The Best Technology Writing 2009 announces a fresh brand of technology journalism, deeply immersed in the fascinating complexity of digital life.
A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'Cussler is hard to beat' Daily Mail The page-turning Dirk Pitt classic from multi-million-copy king of the adventure novel, Clive Cussler. May 1914. Two diplomats hurry home by sea and rail, each carrying a document of world-changing importance. Then the liner Empress of India is sunk in a collision, and the Manhattan-Line express plunges from a bridge - both dragging their VIP passengers to watery oblivion. Tragic coincidence or conspiracy? In the energy-starved, fear-torn 1980s, Dirk Pitt discovers that those long-lost papers could destroy whole nations, throwing him into his biggest challenge yet. Racing against hired killers, he launches his revolutionary deep-sea search craft and faces the horrors of the sea bed to hunt for the documents. 'Night Probe' has begun . . . 'Clive Cussler is the guy I read' Tom Clancy 'The Adventure King' Daily Express
A mistake by Danny leads to one of the Professor';s most startling inventions—ISIT, the Invisibility Simulator with Intromittent Transmission—a dragonfly-like probe which could be piloted with a telepresence helmet and gauntlet gloves. They all get to try it out. Irene uses it for bird watching. Joe investigates a bee hive. And Danny discovers a bully plans to cheat in a spelling bee. But none of them realizes the ISIT has military possibilities—until a general tries to sieze it!
The Twitter Diaries tells the story of pen pals for the 21st century. Two parallel lives separated by an ocean but united over a social network. Tuesday (@Tuesday Fields), a sports reporter and Stella (@StellaCavill), a men's shoe designer, are Brit 30-somethings who are introduced in NYC on NYE by a mutual friend, a notorious transatlantic TV presenter. They strike up an instant bond. Over the next 365 days, @TuesdayFields and @StellaCavill put the world to rights, one tweet at a time. From Melbourne to Monaco to Magaluf, the girls flirt and fall out with sportsmen, movie stars... and TV presenters. And then there's their mothers... December 31st of the same year and @TuesdayFields and @StellaCavill meet again, for the first time since the last time. A lot can happen in a year. It turns out just 140 characters can change everything. The Twitter Diaries is an instantly recognisable yet fictitious tale all generations can relate to, whether they are one of the world's 140 million and counting transfixed Twitter users or not. Accessible, funny and heart-warming, it's this summer's must read.
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "A brilliant and empathetic guide to the far corners of global capitalism." --Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing From FSGO x Logic: stories about rural China, food, and tech that reveal new truths about the globalized world In Blockchain Chicken Farm, the technologist and writer Xiaowei Wang explores the political and social entanglements of technology in rural China. 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...
A deeply informed, yet playful and ironic look at how the internet has changed human experience, memory, and our sense of self, and that belongs on the shelf with the best writings of Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard. “One day, as I was daydreaming on the boulevard Beaumarchais, I had the idea—it came and went in a flash, almost in spite of myself—of Googling to find out what I’d been up to and where I’d been two evenings before, at five o’clock, since I couldn’t remember on my own.” So begins Maël Renouard’s Fragments of an Infinite Memory, a provocative and elegant inquiry into life in a wireless world. Renouard is old enough to remember life before the internet but y...
From The New Yorker’s fiercely original, Pulitzer Prize-winning culture critic, a provocative collection of new and previously published essays arguing that we are what we watch. “Emily Nussbaum is the perfect critic—smart, engaging, funny, generous, and insightful.”—David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • Chicago Tribune • Esquire • Library Journal • Kirkus Reviews From her creation of the “Approval Matrix” in New York magazine in 2004 to her Pulitzer Prize–winning columns for The New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum has argued for a new way of looking at TV. In this collection, including two never-before-published ess...