The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
from Random House
- ISBN13: 9781400063512
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Bestselling author Nassim Nicholas Taleb continues his exploration of randomness in his fascinating new book, The Black Swan, in which he examines the influence of highly improbable and unpredictable events that have massive impact. Engaging and enlightening, The Black Swan is a book that may change the way you think about the world, a book that Chris Anderson calls, "a delightful romp through history, economics, and the frailties of human nature." See Anderson's entire guest review below.
Guest Reviewer: Chris Anderson
Chris Anderson is editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and the author of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. Four hundred years ago, Francis Bacon warned that our minds are wired to deceive us. "Beware the fallacies into which undisciplined thinkers most easily fall--they are the real distorting prisms of human nature." Chief among them: "Assuming more order than exists in chaotic nature." Now consider the typical stock market report: "Today investors bid shares down out of concern over Iranian oil production." Sigh. We're still doing it.
Our brains are wired for narrative, not statistical uncertainty. And so we tell ourselves simple stories to explain complex thing we don't--and, most importantly, can't--know. The truth is that we have no idea why stock markets go up or down on any given day, and whatever reason we give is sure to be grossly simplified, if not flat out wrong.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb first made this argument in Fooled by Randomness, an engaging look at the history and reasons for our predilection for self-deception when it comes to statistics. Now, in The Black Swan: the Impact of the Highly Improbable, he focuses on that most dismal of sciences, predicting the future. Forecasting is not just at the heart of Wall Street, but itÂ’s something each of us does every time we make an insurance payment or strap on a seat belt.
The problem, Nassim explains, is that we place too much weight on the odds that past events will repeat (diligently trying to follow the path of the "millionaire next door," when unrepeatable chance is a better explanation). Instead, the really important events are rare and unpredictable. He calls them Black Swans, which is a reference to a 17th century philosophical thought experiment. In Europe all anyone had ever seen were white swans; indeed, "all swans are white" had long been used as the standard example of a scientific truth. So what was the chance of seeing a black one? Impossible to calculate, or at least they were until 1697, when explorers found Cygnus atratus in Australia.
Nassim argues that most of the really big events in our world are rare and unpredictable, and thus trying to extract generalizable stories to explain them may be emotionally satisfying, but it's practically useless. September 11th is one such example, and stock market crashes are another. Or, as he puts it, "History does not crawl, it jumps." Our assumptions grow out of the bell-curve predictability of what he calls "Mediocristan," while our world is really shaped by the wild powerlaw swings of "Extremistan."
In full disclosure, I'm a long admirer of Taleb's work and a few of my comments on drafts found their way into the book. I, too, look at the world through the powerlaw lens, and I too find that it reveals how many of our assumptions are wrong. But Taleb takes this to a new level with a delightful romp through history, economics, and the frailties of human nature. --Chris Anderson
A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives.
Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the “impossible.”
For years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. Now, in this revelatory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don’t know. He offers surprisingly simple tricks for dealing with black swans and benefiting from them.
Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications The Black Swan will change the way you look at the world. Taleb is a vastly entertaining writer, with wit, irreverence, and unusual stories to tell. He has a polymathic command of subjects ranging from cognitive science to business to probability theory. The Black Swan is a landmark book–itself a black swan.
*2nd Edition, With a new essay: "On Robustness and Fragility"
The Adobe Photoshop CS4 Book for Digital Photographers
by Scott Kelby
from New Riders Press
- ISBN13: 9780321580092
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
- Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
Scott Kelby, the best-selling Photoshop author in the world today, once again takes this book to a whole new level as he uncovers the latest, most important, and most exciting new Adobe Photoshop CS4 techniques for digital photographers. This major update to his award-winning, record-breaking book does something for digital photographers that's never been done before it cuts through the bull and shows you exactly "how to do it." It's not a bunch of theory; it doesn't challenge you to come up with your own settings or figure it out on your own. Instead, Scott shows you step-bystep the exact techniques used by today's cutting-edge digital photographers, and best of all, he shows you flat-out exactly which settings to use, when to use them, and why. That's why the previous editions of this book are widely used as the official study guide in photography courses at colleges and universities around the world.
Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity
by Avinash Kaushik
from Sybex
- ISBN13: 9780470529393
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Adeptly address today’s business challenges with this powerful new book from web analytics thought leader Avinash Kaushik. Web Analytics 2.0 presents a new framework that will permanently change how you think about analytics. It provides specific recommendations for creating an actionable strategy, applying analytical techniques correctly, solving challenges such as measuring social media and multichannel campaigns, achieving optimal success by leveraging experimentation, and employing tactics for truly listening to your customers. The book will help your organization become more data driven while you become a super analysis ninja!
Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.
slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations
by Nancy Duarte
from O'Reilly Media
- ISBN13: 9780596522346
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
No matter where you are on the organizational ladder, the odds are high that you've delivered a high-stakes presentation to your peers, your boss, your customers, or the general public. Presentation software is one of the few tools that requires professionals to think visually on an almost daily basis. But unlike verbal skills, effective visual expression is not easy, natural, or actively taught in schools or business training programs. slide:ology fills that void.
Written by Nancy Duarte, President and CEO of Duarte Design, the firm that created the presentation for Al Gore's Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth, this book is full of practical approaches to visual story development that can be applied by anyone. The book combines conceptual thinking and inspirational design, with insightful case studies from the world's leading brands. With slide:ology you'll learn to:
- Connect with specific audiences
- Turn ideas into informative graphics
- Use sketching and diagramming techniques effectively
- Create graphics that enable audiences to process information easily
- Develop truly influential presentations
- Utilize presentation technology to your advantage
Millions of presentations and billions of slides have been produced -- and most of them miss the mark. slide:ology will challenge your traditional approach to creating slides by teaching you how to be a visual thinker. And it will help your career by creating momentum for your cause.
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
by Douglas R. Hofstadter
from Basic Books
- ISBN13: 9780465026562
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Twenty years after it topped the bestseller charts, Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is still something of a marvel. Besides being a profound and entertaining meditation on human thought and creativity, this book looks at the surprising points of contact between the music of Bach, the artwork of Escher, and the mathematics of Gödel. It also looks at the prospects for computers and artificial intelligence (AI) for mimicking human thought. For the general reader and the computer techie alike, this book still sets a standard for thinking about the future of computers and their relation to the way we think.
Hofstadter's great achievement in Gödel, Escher, Bach was making abstruse mathematical topics (like undecidability, recursion, and 'strange loops') accessible and remarkably entertaining. Borrowing a page from Lewis Carroll (who might well have been a fan of this book), each chapter presents dialogue between the Tortoise and Achilles, as well as other characters who dramatize concepts discussed later in more detail. Allusions to Bach's music (centering on his Musical Offering) and Escher's continually paradoxical artwork are plentiful here. This more approachable material lets the author delve into serious number theory (concentrating on the ramifications of Gödel's Theorem of Incompleteness) while stopping along the way to ponder the work of a host of other mathematicians, artists, and thinkers.
The world has moved on since 1979, of course. The book predicted that computers probably won't ever beat humans in chess, though Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997. And the vinyl record, which serves for some of Hofstadter's best analogies, is now left to collectors. Sections on recursion and the graphs of certain functions from physics look tantalizing, like the fractals of recent chaos theory. And AI has moved on, of course, with mixed results. Yet Gödel, Escher, Bach remains a remarkable achievement. Its intellectual range and ability to let us visualize difficult mathematical concepts help make it one of this century's best for anyone who's interested in computers and their potential for real intelligence. --Richard Dragan
Topics Covered: J.S. Bach, M.C. Escher, Kurt Gödel: biographical information and work, artificial intelligence (AI) history and theories, strange loops and tangled hierarchies, formal and informal systems, number theory, form in mathematics, figure and ground, consistency, completeness, Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry, recursive structures, theories of meaning, propositional calculus, typographical number theory, Zen and mathematics, levels of description and computers; theory of mind: neurons, minds and thoughts; undecidability; self-reference and self-representation; Turing test for machine intelligence.
This groundbreaking Pulitzer Prize-winning book sets the standard for interdisciplinary writing, exploring the patterns and symbols in the thinking of mathematician Kurt Godel, artist M.C. Escher, and composer Johann Sebastian Bach.
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
by Erich Gamma
from Addison-Wesley Professional
- hardcover
Book is in perfect condition, never opened
Design Patterns is a modern classic in the literature of object-oriented development, offering timeless and elegant solutions to common problems in software design. It describes patterns for managing object creation, composing objects into larger structures, and coordinating control flow between objects. The book provides numerous examples where using composition rather than inheritance can improve the reusability and flexibility of code. Note, though, that it's not a tutorial but a catalog that you can use to find an object-oriented design pattern that's appropriate for the needs of your particular application--a selection for virtuoso programmers who appreciate (or require) consistent, well-engineered object-oriented designs.
Head First Design Patterns
by Elisabeth Freeman
from O'Reilly Media
You're not alone.
At any given moment, somewhere in the world someone struggles with the same software design problems you have. You know you don't want to reinvent the wheel (or worse, a flat tire), so you look to Design Patterns--the lessons learned by those who've faced the same problems. With Design Patterns, you get to take advantage of the best practices and experience of others, so that you can spend your time on... something else. Something more challenging. Something more complex. Something more fun.
You want to learn about the patterns that matter--why to use them, when to use them, how to use them (and when NOT to use them). But you don't just want to see how patterns look in a book, you want to know how they look "in the wild". In their native environment. In other words, in real world applications. You also want to learn how patterns are used in the Java API, and how to exploit Java's built-in pattern support in your own code.
You want to learn the real OO design principles and why everything your boss told you about inheritance might be wrong (and what to do instead). You want to learn how those principles will help the next time you're up a creek without a design paddle pattern.
Most importantly, you want to learn the "secret language" of Design Patterns so that you can hold your own with your co-worker (and impress cocktail party guests) when he casually mentions his stunningly clever use of Command, Facade, Proxy, and Factory in between sips of a martini. You'll easily counter with your deep understanding of why Singleton isn't as simple as it sounds, how the Factory is so often misunderstood, or on the real relationship between Decorator, Facade and Adapter.
With Head First Design Patterns, you'll avoid the embarrassment of thinking Decorator is something from the "Trading Spaces" show. Best of all, in a way that won't put you to sleep! We think your time is too important (and too short) to spend it struggling with academic texts.
If you've read a Head First book, you know what to expect - a visually-rich format designed for the way your brain works. Using the latest research in neurobiology, cognitive science, and learning theory, Head First Design Patterns will load patterns into your brain in a way that sticks. In a way that lets you put them to work immediately. In a way that makes you better at solving software design problems, and better at speaking the language of patterns with others on your team.
CompTIA Network+ All-in-One Exam Guide, Fourth Edition
by Michael Meyers
from McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
All-in-One is All You Need
Get complete coverage of all the material included on the latest release of the CompTIA Network+ exam inside this fully updated, comprehensive resource. Written by CompTIA certification and training expert Mike Meyers, this authoritative exam guide features learning objectives at the beginning of each chapter, exam tips, practice questions, and in-depth explanations. Designed to help you pass the CompTIA Network+ exam with ease, this definitive volume also serves as an essential on-the-job reference.
Covers all exam topics, including how to:
- Build a network with the OSI seven-layer model
- Configure network hardware, topologies, and cabling
- Connect multiple Ethernet components
- Configure wireless networks
- Work with network protocols, including TCP/IP, DNS, SIP, and IMAP
- Configure IPv4 and IPv6 routing protocols
- Share and access network resources
- Interconnect network operating systems-Windows, Mac OS, UNIX/Linux
- Set up clients and servers for remote access
- Monitor and troubleshoot networks
- Secure networks with firewalls, packet filtering, encryption, authentication, and other methods
The CD-ROM features
- Hundreds of practice questions
- Video introduction to CompTIA Network+
- A collection of Mike's favorite shareware and freeware networking tools and utilities
- Complete electronic book
Programming Massively Parallel Processors: A Hands-on Approach
by David B. Kirk
from Morgan Kaufmann
Multi-core processors are no longer the future of computing-they are the present day reality. A typical mass-produced CPU features multiple processor cores, while a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) may have hundreds or even thousands of cores. With the rise of multi-core architectures has come the need to teach advanced programmers a new and essential skill: how to program massively parallel processors.
Programming Massively Parallel Processors: A Hands-on Approach shows both student and professional alike the basic concepts of parallel programming and GPU architecture. Various techniques for constructing parallel programs are explored in detail. Case studies demonstrate the development process, which begins with computational thinking and ends with effective and efficient parallel programs.
- Teaches computational thinking and problem-solving techniques that facilitate high-performance parallel computing.
- Utilizes CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture), NVIDIA's software development tool created specifically for massively parallel environments.
- Shows you how to achieve both high-performance and high-reliability using the CUDA programming model as well as OpenCL.
MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536): Microsoft® .NET Framework Application Development Foundation, Second edition
by Tony Northrup
from Microsoft Press
Your 2-in-1 Self-Paced Training Kit. Fully updated and revised! Ace your preparation for the skills measured by MCTS Exam 70-536—and on the job. With this official Microsoft study guide, you’ll work at your own pace through a series of lessons and reviews that fully cover each exam objective. Then reinforce and apply what you’ve learned through real-world case scenarios and practice exercises.
Maximize your performance on the exam by learning to:
- Develop applications that use system types and collections
- Validate input, reformat text, and extract data with regular expressions
- Create services and multi-threaded applications
- Implement code-access security and role-based security
- Implement serialization to read and write complex objects
- Leverage legacy code using interoperability
- Monitor and troubleshoot applications
- Create applications for a global audience
PRACTICE TESTS Assess your skills with practice tests on CD. You can work through hundreds of questions using multiple testing modes to meet your specific learning needs. You get detailed explanations for right and wrong answers?including a customized learning path that describes how and where to focus your studies.
Your kit includes:
- 15% exam discount from Microsoft. Offer expires 12/31/13.
- Official self-paced study guide.
- Practice tests with multiple, customizable testing options and a learning plan based on your results.
- 300+ practice and review questions.
- Code samples in Microsoft Visual Basic and Visual C# on CD.
- Case scenarios, exercises, and best practices.
- 90-day evaluation of Microsoft Visual Studio Professional 2008.
- Fully searchable eBook of this guide.
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