Books

= Books =

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Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal pangram,* “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island’s Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop. As the letters progressively drop from the statue they also disappear from the novel. The result is both a hilarious and moving story of one girl’s fight for freedom of expression, as well as a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhere.======

Mlodinow, Leonard. __The Drunkard's Walk.__ New York, pantheon Books, 2008
Review by Philip Brewer posted on http://www.wisebread.com/book-review-the-drunkards-walk The human brain has a powerful capability to spot patterns. It's so good at spotting patterns, it can spot patterns that aren't even there. It's this fact that makes randomness--the topic of Mlodinow's new book--so interesting and so confusing. Let's say you're a subject in this experiment: A scientist has rigged up a light to flash red or green, and arranged things so that it flashes red twice as often as green. You guess whether it will be red or green--and you get a reward every time you're right. What do you do? Well, if you're a rat, you observe that the red is the most common and then always guess red--that maximizes the reward. If you're a human, though, you study the sequences and try to figure out a pattern. If there **is** a pattern, and it's not too complex for you to figure it out, this can be a winning strategy--you can get the reward every time. If there is no pattern, though, you'll be routinely beaten by the rat. Mlodinow's book is a fascinating excursion into the realm of random events, and a surprisingly interesting history of the mathematical tools that people have come up with to analyze events that are or might be random. (It's also the only book that has ever made me think, "Gee, I should get a good statistics text--the math here is really interesting.") These issues matter in the real world. Take, for example, drug testing. Let's say you have a test for (illegal or performance-enhancing) drug users that's a pretty good test--it detects 90% of the drug users while only fingering an innocent person 0.1% of the time. Suppose you give this test to 100 student athletes at a school who are suspected of drug use. If 20 of the students actually are drug users, odds are that you'll catch 18 of them, and do so without accusing an innocent student. Suppose, though, that you give the same test to a much larger population that includes very few drug users--perhaps a large technical facility with 20,000 scientists and engineers, only a dozen of whom are drug users. Look at what your results are now: You successful detect 10 or 11 of the drug users, but you also "detect" 20 people who aren't drug users at all--you've got more false positives than true positives! (People who don't understand randomness make this sort of mistake all the time.) In addition to providing an interesting walk through the history of people's understanding of randomness, and an introduction to the mathematics of dealing with these problems, Mlodinow provides some useful tips on being successful in a world where random chance has a lot to do with success. (The gist of which is summed up in a quote from IBM pioneer Thomas Watson: "If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.") Some things in life are random and other things aren't. [|//The Drunkard's Walk//] is filled with interesting stories of just how far astray people can go when they don't have the tools and the insight to figure out which situation they're in.

by Max Brockman (Author)
These essays are easy to read (for the most part), packed full of fascinating information, and, while not directly focussed on TOK themes, they describe many of the the latest discoveries about the ways in which we gather, process and evaluate information. From Publishers WeeklyEditor Brockman, an agent at a "literary and software agency," approached some of the world's rising science stars in a disciplines to explain how they're "tackling some of science's toughest questions and raising new ones." The 18 new essays that resulted evoke a fantastic cross-section of societal concerns, focusing largely on issues of ethics and the human mind. German neuroscientist Christian Keysers explains how mirror neurons, located in the brain's center of voluntary action and body-control, allow us to have vicarious experiences and use them to choose "good and not evil" when dealing with others. Psychologist Jason Mitchell expands this idea to "social thought," in which humans achieve sophisticated coordination with the actions of others in order to, for instance, "design, construct, and operate an airplane." Biologist Vanessa Woods and anthropologist Brian Hare team up to explain how dogs evolved an ability to read human minds superior to even our closest primate relatives. Other articles cover quantum field theory, climate change, the ecological niche of viruses, social insects and interdisciplinary science. This absorbing collection makes easy-to-read but thought-provoking material for even casual science buffs. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review“A preview of the ideas you're going to be reading about in ten years.” —Steven Pinker, author of The Stuff of Thought “If these authors are the future of science, then the science of the future will be one exciting ride! Find out what the best minds of the new generation are thinking before the Nobel Committee does” —Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness
 * Editorial Reviews**