Selected by Business Week as one of the 10 best business books of the year, this text is "a major contribution to the debate about the causes and consequences of inequality in America."--The New York Times Book Review.

"If you want to understand the future before it happens, you'll love this book. If you want to change the future before it happens to you, this book is required reading." -Reed Hundt, former Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission "There is no simpler or clearer statement of the radical change that digital technologies will bring, nor any book that better prepares one for thinking about the next steps." -LawrenceLessig, Stanford Law School and Author of Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace "Blown to Bits will blow you away. In highly accessible and always fun prose, it explores all the nooks and crannies of the digital universe, exploring not only how this exploding space works but also what it means." -Debora Spar, President of Barnard College, Author of Ruling the Waves and The Baby Business "This is a wonderful book-probably the best since Hal Varian and Carl Schultz wrote Digital Rules. The authors are engineers, not economists. The result is a long, friendly talk with the genie, out of the lamp, and willing to help you avoid making the traditional mistake with that all-important third wish." -David Warsh, Author of Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations "Blown to Bits is one of the clearest expositions I've seen of the social and political issues arising from the Internet. Its remarkably clear explanations of how the Net actually works lets the hot air out of some seemingly endless debates. You've made explaining this stuff look easy. Congratulations!" -David Weinberger, Coauthor of The Cluetrain Manifesto and Author of Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. "Blown to Bits is a timely, important, and very readable take on how information is produced and consumed today, and more important, on the approaching sea change in the way that we as a society deal with the consequences." -Craig Silverstein, Director of Technology, Google, Inc. "This book gives an overview of the kinds of issues confronting society as we become increasingly dependent on the Internet and the World Wide Web. Every informed citizen should read this book and then form their own opinion on these and related issues. And after reading this book you will rethink how (and even whether) you use the Web to form your opinions..." -James S. Miller, Senior Director for Technology Policy and Strategy, Microsoft Corporation "Most writing about the digital world comes from techies writing about technical matter for other techies or from pundits whose turn of phrase greatly exceeds their technical knowledge. In Blown to Bits, experts in computer science address authoritatively the practical issues in which we all have keen interest." -Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Author of Multiple Intelligences and Changing Minds "Regardless of your experience with computers, Blown to Bits provides a uniquely entertaining and informative perspective from the computing industry's greatest minds. A fascinating, insightful and entertaining book that helps you understand computers and their impact on the world in a whole new way. This is a rare book that explains the impact of the digital explosion in a way that everyone can understand and, at the same time, challenges experts to think in new ways." -Anne Margulies, Assistant Secretary for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts "Blown to Bits is fun and fundamental. What a pleasure to see real teachers offering such excellent framework for students in a digital age to explore and understand their digital environment, code and law, starting with the insight of Claude Shannon. I look forward to you teaching in an open online school." -Professor Charles Nesson, Harvard Law School, Founder, Berkman Center for Internet and Society "To many of us, computers and the Internet are magic. We make stuff, send stuff, receive stuff, and buy stuff. It's all pointing, clicking, copying, and pasting. But it's all mysterious. This book explains in clear and comprehensive terms how all this gear on my desk works and why we should pay close attention to these revolutionary changes in our lives. It's a brilliant and necessary work for consumers, citizens, and students of all ages." -Siva Vaidhyanathan, cultural historian and media scholar at the University of Virginia and author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity "The world has turned into the proverbial elephant and we the blind men. The old and the young among us risk being controlled by, rather than in control of, events and technologies. Blown to Bits is a remarkable and essential Rosetta Stone for beginning to figure out how all of the pieces of the new world we have just begun to enter-law, technology, culture, information-are going to fit together. Will life explode with new possibilities, or contract under pressure of new horrors? The precipice is both exhilarating and frightening. Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, and Harry Lewis, together, have ably managed to describe the elephant. Readers of this compact book describing the beginning stages of a vast human adventure will be one jump ahead, for they will have a framework on which to hang new pieces that will continue to appear with remarkable speed. To say that this is a 'must read' sounds trite, but, this time, it's absolutely true." -Harvey Silverglate, criminal defense and civil liberties lawyer and writer Every day, billions of photographs, news stories, songs, X-rays, TV shows, phone calls, and emails are being scattered around the world as sequences of zeroes and ones: bits. We can't escape this explosion of digital information and few of us want to-the benefits are too seductive. The technology has enabled unprecedented innovation, collaboration, entertainment, and democratic participation. But the same engineering marvels are shattering centuries-old assumptions about privacy, identity, free expression, and personal control as more and more details of our lives are captured as digital data. Can you control who sees all that personal information about you? Can email be truly confidential, when nothing seems to be private? Shouldn't the Internet be censored the way radio and TV are? Is it really a federal crime to download music? When you use Google or Yahoo! to search for something, how do they decide which sites to show you? Do you still have free speech in the digital world? Do you have a voice in shaping government or corporate policies about any of this? Blown to Bits offers provocative answers to these questions and tells intriguing real-life stories. This book is a wake-up call to the human consequences of the digital explosion. Preface xiii Chapter 1: Digital Explosion: Why Is It Happening, and What Is at Stake? 1 Chapter 2: Naked in the Sunlight: Privacy Lost, Privacy Abandoned 19 Chapter 3: Ghosts in the Machine: Secrets and Surprises of Electronic Documents 73 Chapter 4: Needles in the Haystack: Google and Other Brokers in the Bits Bazaar 109 Chapter 5: Secret Bits: How Codes Became Unbreakable 161 Chapter 6: Balance Toppled: Who Owns the Bits? 195 Chapter 7: You Can't Say That on the Internet: Guarding the Frontiers of Digital Expression 229 Chapter 8: Bits in the Air: Old Metaphors, New Technologies, and Free Speech 259 Conclusion: After the Explosion 295 Appendix: The Internet as System and Spirit 301 Endnotes 317 Index 347

Computers are ubiquitous yet to many they remain objects of irreducible mystery. This text looks at the question of how today's computers can perform such a variety of tasks if computing is just glorified arithmetic. The author illustrates how the answer lies in the fact that computers are essentially engines of logic and that their hardware and software embody concepts developed over centuries by logicians. "Engines of Logic" gives the reader a clear explanation of how and why computers work.

Writing better software: 30 years of UNIX development wisdom In this book, five years in the making, the author encapsulates three decades of unwritten, hard-won software engineering wisdom. Raymond brings together for the first time the philosophy, design patterns, tools, culture, and traditions that make UNIX home to the world's best and most innovative software, and shows how these are carried forward in Linux and today's open-source movement. Using examples from leading open-source projects, he shows UNIX and Linux programmers how to apply this wisdom in building software that's more elegant, more portable, more reusable, and longer-lived.

This is a practical guide to building Kalman filters that shows how the filtering equations can be applied to real-life problems. Numerous examples are presented in detail, showing the many ways in which Kalman filters can be designed. Computer code written in FORTRAN, MATLAB[registered], and True BASIC accompanies all of the examples so that the interested reader can verify concepts and explore issues beyond the scope of the text. In certain instances, the authors intentionally introduce mistakes to the initial filter designs to show the reader what happens when the filter is not working properly. The text carefully sets up a problem before the Kalman filter is actually formulated, to give the reader an intuitive feel for the problem being addressed. Because real problems are seldom presented as differential equations, and usually do not have unique solutions, the authors illustrate several different filtering approaches. Readers will gain experience in software and performance tradeoffs for determining the best filtering approach. The material that has been added to this edition is in response to questions and feedback from readers. The third edition has three new chapters on unusual topics related to Kalman filtering and other filtering techniques based on the method of least squares. Chapter 17 presents a type of filter known as the fixed or finite memory filter, which only remembers a finite number of measurements from the past. Chapter 18 shows how the chain rule from calculus can be used for filter initialization or to avoid filtering altogether. A realistic three-dimensional GPS example is used to illustrate the chain-rule method for filter initialization. Finally, Chapter 19 shows how a bank of linear sine-wave Kalman filters, each one tuned to a different sine-wave frequency, can be used to estimate the actual frequency of noisy sinusoidal measurements and obtain estimates of the states of the sine wave when the measurement noise is low.

Allan H. Meltzer's critically acclaimed history of the Federal Reserve is the most ambitious, most intensive, and most revealing investigation of the subject ever conducted. Its first volume, published to widespread critical acclaim in 2003, spanned the period from the institution's founding in 1913 to the restoration of its independence in 1951. This two-part second volume of the history chronicles the evolution and development of this institution from the Treasury - Federal Reserve accord in 1951 to the mid-1980s, when the great inflation ended. It reveals the inner workings of the Fed during a period of rapid and extensive change. An epilogue discusses the role of the Fed in resolving our current economic crisis and the needed reforms of the financial system. In rich detail, drawing on the Federal Reserve's own documents, Metlzer traces the relation between its decisions and economic and monetary theory, its experience as an institution independent of politics, and its role in tempering inflation. He explains, for example, how the Federal Reserve's independence was often compromised by the active policy-making roles of Congress, the Treasury Department, different presidents, and even White House staff, who often pressured the bank to take a short-term view of its responsibilities. With an eye on the present, Meltzer also offers solutions for improving the Federal Reserve, arguing that as a regulator of financial firms and lender of last resort, it should focus more attention on incentives for reform, medium-term consequences, and rule-like behavior for mitigating financial crises. Less attention should be paid, he contends, to command and control of the markets and the noise of quarterly data. At a time when the United States finds itself in an unprecedented financial crisis, Meltzer's fascinating history will be the source of record for scholars and policy makers navigating an uncertain economic future.

The 1980s was the most outrageous and turbulent era in the financial market since the crash of '29, not only on Wall Street but around the world. Michael Lewis, as a trainee at Salomon Brothers in New York and as an investment banker and later financial journalist, was uniquely positioned to chronicle the ambition and folly that fueled the decade.

For three decades in the fifth century b.c. the ancient world was torn apart by a conflict that was as dramatic, divisive, and destructive as the world wars of the twentieth century: the Peloponnesian War. Donald Kagan, one of the world’s most respected classical, political, and military historians, here presents a new account of this vicious war of Greek against Greek, Athenian against Spartan. The Peloponnesian War is a magisterial work of history written for general readers, offering a fresh examination of a pivotal moment in Western civilization. With a lively, readable narrative that conveys a richly detailed portrait of a vanished world while honoring its timeless relevance, The Peloponnesian War is a chronicle of the rise and fall of a great empire and of a dark time whose lessons still resonate today.

By lucidly revealing the common threads that connect the ancient confrontations between Athens and Sparta and between Rome and Carthage with the two calamitous world wars of the 20th century and the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kagan reveals new insights into the nature of war--and peace--that are vitally important and often surprising.

In this monumental account and brilliant new analysis of the Napoleonic era in Europe, Frederick W. Kagan, distinguished historian and military policy expert, reveals the complex interaction of continental politics and war that dominated Europe in the early nineteenth century. Using hitherto untapped archival materials from Austria, Prussia, France, and Russia, Kagan tells the story of Napoleon and Europe that is vastly different from previous histories. He presents these crucial years from the perspective of all the major players of Europe, as well as countless others. With clear and lively prose, Kagan deftly guides the reader through the intriguing and complex web of international politics and war. The End of the Old Order is the first in a new and comprehensive series of studies of Napoleon and Europe.

The word "German" was being used by the Romans as early as the mid–first century B.C. to describe tribes in the eastern Rhine valley. Nearly two thousand years later, the richness and complexity of German history have faded beneath the long shadow of the country's darkest hour in World War II. Now, award-winning historian Steven Ozment, whom The New Yorker has hailed as "a splendidly readable scholar," gives us the fullest portrait possible in this sweeping, original, and provocative history of the German people, from antiquity to the present, holding a mirror up to an entire civilization -- one that has been alternately Western Europe's most successful and most perilous.

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Widely considered one of the best practical guides to programming, Steve McConnells original CODE COMPLETE has been helping developers write better software for more than a decade. Now this classic book has been fully updated and revised with leading-edge practicesand hundreds of new code samplesillustrating the art and science of software construction. Capturing the body of knowledge available from research, academia, and everyday commercial practice, McConnell synthesizes the most effective techniques and must-know principles into clear, pragmatic guidance. No matter what your experience level, development environment, or project size, this book will inform and stimulate your thinkingand help you build the highest quality code. Discover the timeless techniques and strategies that help you: Design for minimum complexity and maximum creativity Reap the benefits of collaborative development Apply defensive programming techniques to reduce and flush out errors Exploit opportunities to refactoror evolvecode, and do it safely Use construction practices that are right-weight for your project Debug problems quickly and effectively Resolve critical construction issues early and correctly Build quality into the beginning, middle, and end of your project
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Refactoring is about improving the design of existing code. It is the process of changing a software system in such a way that it does not alter the external behavior of the code, yet improves its internal structure. With refactoring you can even take a bad design and rework it into a good one. This book offers a thorough discussion of the principles of refactoring, including where to spot opportunities for refactoring, and how to set up the required tests. There is also a catalog of more than 40 proven refactorings with details as to when and why to use the refactoring, step by step instructions for implementing it, and an example illustrating how it works The book is written using Java as its principle language, but the ideas are applicable to any OO language.

A Small Matter of Programming asks why it has been so difficult for end users to command programming power and explores the problems of end user-driven application development that must be solved to afford end users greater computational power.Drawing on empirical research on existing end user systems, A Small Matter of Programming analyzes cognitive, social, and technical issues of end user programming. In particular, it examines the importance of task-specific programming languages, visual application frameworks, and collaborative work practices for end user computing, with the goal of helping designers and programmers understand and better satisfy the needs of end users who want the capability to create, customize, and extend their applications software.The ideas in the book are based on the author's research on two successful end user programming systems - spreadsheets and CAD systems - as well as other empirical research. Nardi concentrates on broad issues in end user programming, especially end users' strengths and problems, introducing tools and techniques as they are related to higher-level user issues.Bonnie A. Nardi is a Member of the Technical Staff at Hewlett Packard Laboratories.

Robert P. Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), challenges us to grasp the profound political and cultural consequences of a new reality—that America is no longer a majority white Christian nation.
For most of our nation’s history, White Christian America (WCA)—the cultural and political edifice built primarily by white Protestant Christians—set the tone for our national policy and shaped American ideals. But especially since the 1990s, WCA has steadily lost influence, following declines within both its mainline and evangelical branches. Today, America is no longer demographically or culturally a majority white Christian nation.
Drawing on more than four decades of polling data, The End of White Christian America explains and analyzes the waning vitality of WCA. Jones argues that the visceral nature of today’s most heated issues—the vociferous arguments around same-sex marriage and religious liberty, the rise of the Tea Party following the election of our first black president, and stark disagreements between black and white Americans over the fairness of the criminal justice system—can only be understood against the backdrop of white Christians’ anxieties as America’s racial and religious topography shifts around them.
In 2016 and beyond, the descendants of WCA will lack the political power they once had to set the terms of the nation’s debate over values and morals and to determine election outcomes. Looking ahead, Jones forecasts the ways that they might adjust to find their place in the new America—and the consequences for us all if they don’t.

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Evidence–Based Technical Analysis examines how you can apply the scientific method, and recently developed statistical tests, to determine the true effectiveness of technical trading signals. Throughout the book, expert David Aronson provides you with comprehensive coverage of this new methodology, which is specifically designed for evaluating the performance of rules/signals that are discovered by data mining.