You will be introduced to what is achievable today in technology that has massive implications and applications for senior living care and design. Imagine 19 years ago and your first experience with the internet, 7 years ago and your experience with your phone. How the internet and iPhone have changed our connection to each other and the information available to us in seconds, is a drop in the bucket to the disruptive changes coming. This is going to be a wonderful ride if you're prepared for it!
Every day, it seems, we hear stories about hackers. Hackers breaking into the computers of banks, governments, and corporations. Some are criminals, coding to exploit and destroy. Others are activists, using their tools to challenge institutions and fight for freedom. But often these characters linger in the shadows. Who are they? What makes them tick? Are they our allies, or our enemies?
For the past twenty years, author David Kushner has been exploring these questions, interviewing key players, and providing much-needed answers. “The World’s Most Dangerous Geek: And More True Hacking Stories” is a riveting collection of his exclusive reports from the online underworld. We meet a fugitive hacktivist from the notorious collective, Anonymous; a lonely Floridian who hacked the emails of the biggest celebrities in Hollywood; and two artificial intelligence researchers who were both found dead in the same mysterious way.
You will come away from these stories with an appreciation for the awesome power of the Internet both to make fortunes and erase them, to build lives and destroy them.
"A very entertaining book about a very serious problem. We deceive ourselves all the time with statistics, and it is time we wised up." -Robert J. Shiller, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics Did you know that baseball players whose names begin with the letter "D" are more likely to die young? Or that Asian Americans are most susceptible to heart attacks on the fourth day of the month? Or that drinking a full pot of coffee every morning will add years to your life, but one cup a day increases the risk of pancreatic cancer? All of these "facts" have been argued with a straight face by credentialed researchers and backed up with reams of data and convincing statistics. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase once cynically observed, "If you torture data long enough, it will confess." Lying with statistics is a time-honored con. In Standard Deviations, economics professor Gary Smith walks us through the various tricks and traps that people use to back up their own crackpot theories. Sometimes, the unscrupulous deliberately try to mislead us. Other times, the well-intentioned are blissfully unaware of the mischief they are committing. Today, data is so plentiful that researchers spend precious little time distinguishing between good, meaningful indicators and total rubbish. Not only do others use data to fool us, we fool ourselves. With the breakout success of Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise, the once humdrum subject of statistics has never been hotter. Drawing on breakthrough research in behavioral economics by luminaries like Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely and taking to task some of the conclusions of Freakonomics author Steven D. Levitt, Standard Deviations demystifies the science behind statistics and makes it easy to spot the fraud all around.
A sweeping, in-depth history of NSA, whose famous cult of silence has left the agency shrouded in mystery for decades The National Security Agency was born out of the legendary codebreaking programs of World War II that cracked the famed Enigma machine and other German and Japanese codes, thereby turning the tide of Allied victory. In the postwar years, as the United States developed a new enemy in the Soviet Union, our intelligence community found itself targeting not soldiers on the battlefield, but suspected spies, foreign leaders, and even American citizens. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, NSA played a vital, often fraught and controversial role in the major events of the Cold War, from the Korean War to the Cuban Missile Crisis to Vietnam and beyond. In Code Warriors, Stephen Budiansky a longtime expert in cryptology tells the fascinating story of how NSA came to be, from its roots in World War II through the fall of the Berlin Wall. Along the way, he guides us through the fascinating challenges faced by cryptanalysts, and how they broke some of the most complicated codes of the twentieth century. With access to new documents, Budiansky shows where the agency succeeded and failed during the Cold War, but his account also offers crucial perspective for assessing NSA today in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations. Budiansky shows how NSA's obsession with recording every bit of data and decoding every signal is far from a new development; throughout its history the depth and breadth of the agency's reach has resulted in both remarkable successes and destructive failures. Featuring a series of appendixes that explain the technical details of Soviet codes and how they were broken, this is a rich and riveting history of the underbelly of the Cold War, and an essential and timely read for all who seek to understand the origins of the modern NSA.From the Hardcover edition.
What are the chances? This is the question we ask ourselves when we encounter the strangest and most seemingly impossible coincidences, like the woman who won the lottery four times or the fact that Lincoln's dreams foreshadowed his own assassination. But, when we look at coincidences mathematically, the odds are a lot better than any of us would have thought.
In Fluke, mathematician Joseph Mazur takes a second look at the seemingly improbable, sharing with us an entertaining guide to the most surprising moments in our lives. He takes us on a tour of the mathematical concepts of probability, such as the law of large numbers and the birthday paradox, and combines these concepts with lively anecdotes of flukes from around the world. How do you explain finding your college copy of Moby Dick in a used bookstore on the Seine on your first visit to Paris? How can a jury be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that DNA found at the scene of a heinous crime did not get there by some fluke? Should we be surprised if strangers named Maria and Francisco, seeking each other in a hotel lobby, accidentally meet the wrong Francisco and the wrong Maria, another pair of strangers also looking for each other? As Mazur reveals, if there is any likelihood that something could happen, no matter how small, it is bound to happen to someone at some time.
In Fluke, Mazur offers us proof of the inevitability of the sublime and the unexpected. He has written a book that will appeal to anyone who has ever wondered how all of the tiny decisions that happen in our lives add up to improbable wholes. A must for math enthusiasts and storytellers alike, Fluke helps us to understand the true nature of chance.
It's the ultimate in fantasy baseball: You get to pick the roster, set the lineup, and decide on strategies-with real players, in a real ballpark, in a real playoff race. That's what baseball analysts Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller got to do when an independent minor-league team in California, the Sonoma Stompers, offered them the chance to run its baseball operations according to the most advanced statistics. We tag along as Lindbergh and Miller apply their number-crunching insights to all aspects of assembling and running a team, following one cardinal rule for judging each innovation they try: it has to work. We meet colorful figures like general manager Theo Fightmaster and boundary-breakers like the first openly gay player in professional baseball. Even Jose Canseco makes a cameo appearance. Will their knowledge of numbers help Lindbergh and Miller bring the Stompers a championship, or will they fall on their faces? Will the team have a competitive advantage or is the sport's folk wisdom true after all? Will the players attract the attention of big-league scouts, or are they on a fast track to oblivion?
Andrew Hacker's 2012 New York Times op-ed questioning the requirement of advanced mathematics in our schools instantly became one of the paper's most widely circulated articles. Why, he wondered, do we inflict a full menu of mathematics on all young Americans, regardless of their interests or aptitudes? The Math Myth expands Hacker's scrutiny of many widely held assumptions, like the notions that mathematics broadens our minds and that the entire Common Core syllabus should be required of every student. He worries that a frenzied emphasis on STEM is diverting attention from other pursuits and subverting the spirit of the country. In fact, Hacker honors mathematics as a calling (he has been a professor of mathematics) and extols its glories and its goals. Yet he shows how mandating it for everyone prevents other talents from being developed and acts as an irrational barrier to graduation and careers. He proposes alternatives, including teaching facility with figures, quantitative reasoning, and understanding statistics.
Computers have changed since 1981, when Tracy Kidder memorably recorded the drama, comedy, and excitement of one companys efforts to bring a new microcomputer to market. What has not changed is the feverish pace of the high-tech industry, the go-for-broke approach to business that has caused so many computer companies to win big (or go belly up), and the cult of pursuing mind-bending technological innovations. The Soul of a New Machine is an essential chapter in the history of the machine that revolutionized the world in the twentieth century.
"Two companies. Two opposing cultures. One multi-billion-dollar video-game empire.
Stay Awhile and Listen: How Two Blizzards Unleashed Diablo and Forged a Video-Game Empire - Book 1 invites readers to discover the origin of Blizzard North, a studio built by gamers, for gamers, and Blizzard Entertainment, a convergence of designers driven to rule their industry.
Composed from exhaustive research and hundreds of personal interviews, the Stay Awhile and Listen series divulges the fated meeting that brought the two Blizzards together, the clashes that tore them apart, and their transformation from grassroots democracy to corporate empire. At the center of it all-Diablo, a hack-and-slash adventure through the darkest recesses of Hell that changed online gaming forever."
Britain's most famous mathematician takes us to the edge of knowledge to show us what we cannot know.
Is the universe infinite?
Do we know what happened before the Big Bang?
Where is human consciousness located in the brain?
And are there more undiscovered particles out there, beyond the Higgs boson?
In the modern world, science is king: weekly headlines proclaim the latest scientific breakthroughs and numerous mathematical problems, once indecipherable, have now been solved. But are there limits to what we can discover about our physical universe?
In this very personal journey to the edges of knowledge, Marcus du Sautoy investigates how leading experts in fields from quantum physics and cosmology, to sensory perception and neuroscience, have articulated the current lie of the land. In doing so, he travels to the very boundaries of understanding, questioning contradictory stories and consulting cutting edge data.
Is it possible that we will one day know everything? Or are there fields of research that will always lie beyond the bounds of human comprehension? And if so, how do we cope with living in a universe where there are things that will forever transcend our understanding?
In What We Cannot Know, Marcus du Sautoy leads us on a thought-provoking expedition to the furthest reaches of modern science. Prepare to be taken to the edge of knowledge to find out if there's anything we truly cannot know.
In old times, number theory was also known as arithmetic. However, now arithmetic and number theory are considered as separate branches from each other's, it was not same in old times. Number theory is one of the many important branches of pure mathematics. This branch is mainly dedicated and includes study about integers. This theory describes many fundamental and basic concepts of mathematics that were used to develop modern concepts. Thus, number theory is often referred as "Queen of Mathematics". In number theory, following concepts are described:
Concept of prime numbersProperties of objects that are derived through integersGeneralization of integersRational numbers and algebraic integers are significant concepts that are included in number theory. In number theory, integers are considered as a solution to a particular problem. This concept is known as Riemann Zeta Function. However, it is not necessary to consider them as solution only; they can also be considered in themselves. Study of analytical objects helps to understand questions in number theory. Properties of integers, prime numbers and number-theoretic objects are described in Riemann Zeta Function. These properties can be studied descriptively in a separated branch named analytic number theory. In Diophantine approximation, real numbers are learnt in ration to relational number.
In older terms, arithmetic was used to refer number theory. However, it was separated in early 20th century. Arithmetic word is now used to refer to general elementary calculations. Term arithmetic is now used in many fields such as:
Mathematical logicPeano arithmetic Computer scienceFloating point arithmeticIn late 20th century, French theorists leaved a noticeable impact on number theory. Due to their influence, they again related tern arithmetic with number theory. However, many theorists argued upon this and denied to accept this as it was already proven false in past time. However, term arithmetical is now considered as adjective to number-theoretic. Early 20th century was a golden time for development of number theory, especially the time span of 1930s and 1940s. Many important results were acquired in that period. Later on, 1970s was proven an important period as well with the development of computational complexity theory.
Number theory is an important branch of pure mathematics since it contains many basic concepts that are used to build up complex concepts of pure mathematics. One who is looking for a breakthrough in broad term mathematics is suggested to start from this theory. It will clear up basic concepts so it will be surprisingly easy to understand complex concepts. This short book describes all the basic concepts without going in too deep. So, one can use this basic knowledge to understand complex concepts easily and effectively.
