The algorithm era arrives. More and more, machines rather than people are making the decisions that have an impact on our lives, such as where we attend school, whether we are able to obtain a job or a loan, and how much we pay for health insurance. Since everyone is subject to the same standards of evaluation, this ought to result in more fairness.
The mathematical models utilized today, however, are unregulated and unchallengeable, even when they are incorrect, as mathematician and data scientist Cathy O’Neil demonstrates. The worst part is that they legitimize discrimination by rewarding the fortunate, punishing the oppressed, and weakening our democracy.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Big Data processes codify the past. They do not invent the future. Doing that requires moral imagination, and that’s something only humans can provide. We have to explicitly embed better values into our algorithms, creating Big Data models that follow our ethical lead. Sometimes that will mean putting fairness ahead of profit.”
“Big Data processes codify the past. They do not invent the future.”
“In a system in which cheating is the norm, following the rules amounts to a handicap.”
“Justice cannot just be something that one part of society inflicts on the other.”
“However, when you create a model from proxies, it is far simpler for people to game it. This is because proxies are easier to manipulate than the complicated reality they represent.”
This essay describes the production of Blade Runner and its progressively better fortunes following its mixed reaction in 1982. The film is positioned in relation to the discussions surrounding postmodernism that have shaped the substantial body of criticism dedicated to it.
This ultimate insider’s guide, written by a veteran of the entertainment industry who has demonstrated that you can sell your script if you can rescue the cat, discloses the secrets that no one dares admit!
Best Quotes from this Book:
“True originality can’t begin until you know what you’re breaking away from.”
― Blake Snyder, Save the Cat!: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need
“To be a screenwriter is to deal with an ongoing tug of war between breathtaking megalomania and insecurity so deep it takes years of therapy just to be able to say “I’m a writer” out loud.”
― Blake Snyder, Save the Cat!: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need
“To know how to avoid the cliche, to know what tradition you are pushing forward, begins with knowing what that tradition is.”
― Blake Snyder, Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need
“But here’s my little trade secret that I put into every All Is Lost moment just for added spice, and it’s something that many hit movies have. I call it the whiff of death. I started to notice how many great movies use the All Is Lost point to kill someone. Obi Wan in Star Wars is the best example — what will Luke do now?? All Is Lost is the place where mentors go to die, presumably so their students can discover “they had it in them all along.” The mentor’s death clears the way to prove that. But what if you don’t have an Obi Wan character? What if death isn’t anywhere near your story? Doesn’t matter. At the All Is Lost moment, stick in something, anything that involves a death. It works every time. Whether it’s integral to the story or just something symbolic, hint at something dead here. It could be anything. A flower in a flower pot. A goldfish. News that a beloved aunt has passed away. It’s all the same.”
― Blake Snyder, Save the Cat!: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need
“Save the what? I call it the “Save the Cat” scene. They don’t put it into movies anymore. And it’s basic. It’s the scene where we meet the hero and the hero does something — like saving a cat — that defines who he is and makes us, the audience, like him.”
― Blake Snyder, Save the Cat!: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need
A true narrative of exhilarating adventure, in the vein of Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm and Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, follows two-weekend scuba divers as they risk it all to solve a significant historical mystery and go down in history as their own.
Richie Kohler and John Chatterton saw more in deep wreck diving than just a sport. They pushed themselves to the limit and beyond, nearly dying several times in the rusted hulks of sunken ships as they tested themselves against perilous currents, braved depths that caused hallucinogenic effects, and navigated through dangerous wrecks.
But even these brave divers were unprepared for what they discovered in the fall of 1991, 230 feet below the surface, sixty miles off the coast of New Jersey in the frigid Atlantic: a German U-boat from World War II, its wrecked interior a macabre wasteland of warped metal, tangled wires, and human bones buried beneath decades of accumulated sediment.
The few relics taken to the surface and the submarine both lacked any identifying markings. No historian, specialist, or government knew which U-boat the soldiers had discovered. In actuality, every one of the official records concurred that a sunken U-boat and crew just could not exist there.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“When things are easy a person doesn’t really learn about himself. It’s what a person does at the moment of his greatest struggle that shows him who he really is. Some people never get that moment. The U-Who is my moment. What I do now is what I am.”
“Most men, it seemed to them, went through life never really knowing themselves. A man might consider himself noble or brave or just, they believed, but until he was truly tested it would always be a mere opinion.”
“In the United States, of the ten million certified scuba divers, it is likely that only a few hundred dive deep for shipwrecks. To those few, it is not a matter of if they will taste death, only of whether they’ll swallow.”
“In a world where even the moon had been traveled, the floor of the Atlantic remained an uncharted wilderness, its shipwrecks beacons for men compelled to look.”
“If a deep-wreck diver stays in the sport long enough, he will likely either come close to dying, watch another diver die, or die himself. There are times in this sport when it is difficult to say which of the three outcomes is worst.”
It’s considered by some to be one of the strangest books ever written. a unique art book in the art book genre. A peculiar, unsettling surreal parody. both repulsive and stunning. It’s incredibly challenging to explain. Italian artist Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus is a glimpse into a particular fantasy world, complete with its own distinctive (unintelligible) alphabet and a number of pictures that draw from the present day yet veer into the incredibly bizarre.
Franco Maria Ricci released it in two volumes for the first time in 1981. The images in this AbeBooks article are from the 370-page American edition of the Twilight Zone from 1983, which was released by Abbeville. Additionally, a 1993 single-volume edition and a more contemporary 2013 edition, both published by Rizzoli, exist. This most recent edition is the least expensive.
Hazards to your personal security are omnipresent in the increasingly hazardous environment we live in today. The danger is no longer confined to shady alleys or unstable areas, thanks to terrorist attacks, mass shootings, and the hidden (and occasionally virtual) matrix of everyday crime. Former Navy SEAL Clint Emerson wants you to be ready because potentially fatal situations can happen anywhere, at any time.
In order to help you respond to a variety of “worst case” scenarios, 100 Deadly Skills contains tried-and-true self-defense techniques, evasion strategies, and immobilizing techniques that have been modified from the world of black ops. These scenarios range from breaking out of a locked trunk to fooling facial recognition software. Emerson explains numerous life-saving techniques in depth and educates you on how to think and behave like a part of the special forces with clear instructions and images.
This comprehensive survival course shows you how to use low-tech to “no-tech” techniques to avoid being tracked, flee being kidnapped, escape from an active shooter, rappel down a building, incapacitate a bad man, defend oneself from cyber-criminals, and much more. 100 Deadly Skills is a priceless resource since it is clear, comprehensive, and presented in a way that is simple to comprehend and use. Because let’s face it, you don’t have time for lengthy instructions when danger is there.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“The goal in psychological warfare of any sort is to distort a target’s perception of reality in order to bring about a change in behavior.”
“Lighters and cigarettes are always carried, even by nonsmokers, as they may be used as a tool of escape or to create a distraction or diversion.”
“All that is needed to conceal valuable data, keys, or surveillance devices such as cameras and microphones are two ingredients commonly found in any household kitchen: milk and vinegar. Heated and strained so that the milk’s casein proteins coagulate into a rubbery, plasticlike substance, the mixture can be molded into any shape, drying to a claylike consistency.”
“Just as spies once concealed information-filled microdots on the head of a pin, today operatives embed text documents into digital images that must be decompressed to reveal their contents.”
“A knife that is not used safely provides no defense at all—it’s more likely to imperil the user than to wound his attacker.”
All About Love shows how love is intertwined in both our personal and professional lives, offering startling new perspectives on the subject. Hooks shows in eleven condensed chapters how our everyday ideas of what it means to give and receive love frequently fall short of our expectations and how these ideals are formed in infancy. She stresses the role of love in putting a stop to conflicts between people, in communities, and among societies, and presents a rethink of self-love (without narcissism) that will bring about peace and empathy to our personal and professional life.
Hooks challenges the widespread belief that romantic love is the most significant kind of love by going from the cultural to the personal and pointing out the connections between love and loss. Visionary and creative, hooks demonstrates how to love, which is the foundation of love and mercy and has the ability to overcome shame, may heal the wounds we all carry both personally and collectively.
All About Love is a wonderful book that will alter the way we think about love, our culture, and one another. It is required reading for readers who have found continual enjoyment and wisdom in bell hooks’ life and work as well as for those who are only now learning about her.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment.”
“But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”
“The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.”
“To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.”
“Honesty and openness is always the foundation of insightful dialogue.”
The Red Dead Redemption 2 Complete Official Guide Collector’s Edition is stuffed with information about every aspect of Rockstar Games’ epic story of outlaw life in America’s forgiving heartland, making it your indispensable travel companion to the farthest reaches of the deepest and most detailed Rockstar world yet.
A wonderful and alluring reading experience. This best-selling account of a seductive Southern metropolis (though a flop as a movie). ~ The early hours of May 2, 1981, in the foggy early morning, shots rang out in Savannah’s greatest home. Was it self-defense or murder? The shooting and its aftermath echoed through this city of moss-hung trees and shadowed squares for almost ten years. The story by John Berendt reads like a truly captivating novel despite being nonfiction. The first-person narrative of life in this remote outpost of the Old South is woven by Berendt with the unforeseen turns of a famous murder investigation.
The Married Woman’s Card Club’s well-to-do society ladies, the erratic young redneck gigolo, the helpless recluse who possesses a poison potent enough to kill every man, woman, and child in Savannah, the elderly and profane Southern belle who is the “soul of pampered self-absorption,” the riotous black drag queen, the snide and conceited antique dealer, the sweet-talking, piano-play These residents of Savannah, along with others, serve as a Greek chorus as Berendt reveals the alliances, rivalries, and conspiracies that proliferate in a community where everyone understands everyone else.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Rule number one: Always stick around for one more drink. That’s when things happen. That’s when you find out everything you want to know.”
“She was a marvel. She did exactly as she pleased all her life, God bless her.”
“Someone once wrote that musicians are touched on the shoulder by God, and I think it’s true. You can make other people happy with music, but you can make yourself happy too. Because of my music, I have never known loneliness and never been depressed.”
“But I never think about dead people. Looking at these old graves makes me think how generation after generation of the same family are all gathered together. And that makes me think about how life goes on, but not about dying. I never think about dying.”
“Black magic never stops. What goes from you comes to you. Once you start this shit, you gotta keep it up. Just like the utility bill. Just like the grocery store. Or they kill you. You got to keep it up. Two, five, ten, twenty years.”
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn uncovers the complete Soviet repression apparatus—the state within the state that controlled all powerfully—drawing on information from his own imprisonment and exile, as well as from more than 200 other prisoners and Soviet archives. We learn about secret police operations, work camps, and prisons; the uprooting or elimination of entire populations; and the welcome that awaited Russian soldiers who had been German prisoners of war through really Shakespearean pictures of its victims—men, women, and children. However, we also see the incredible moral fortitude of the incorruptible, and helpless, who endured severe abuse and degrading treatment. A new introduction to The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956, a gruesome indictment of a system transformed into a true literary miracle, has been added. It now takes into account the fall of the Soviet Union and Solzhenitsyn’s return to Russia.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
“Thus it is that no cruelty whatsoever passes by without impact. Thus it is that we always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.”
“Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.”
“Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.”
“Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”
Jared Diamond successfully argues that geographic and environmental forces shaped the modern world in this “artful, insightful, and enjoyable” book. Food-producing societies progressed past the hunter-gatherer stage, developed writing, technology, government, and organized religion, along with terrible viruses and powerful weapons of war, and set off on sea and land adventures to conquer and wipe out preliterate cultures.
Guns, Germs, and Steel charts the development of the modern world and shockingly debunks racially based views of human history. It represents a significant advancement in our knowledge of humanity’s cultures. Awarded the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, and the Gold Medal by the Commonwealth Club of California.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves”
“Much of human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between the haves and the have-nots.”
“[W]hat makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy.”
“It’s striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans in return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that Indians received from the Old World.”
“My two main conclusions are that technology develops cumulatively, rather than in isolated heroic acts, and that it finds most of its uses after it has been invented, rather than being invented to meet a foreseen need.”
The words “landmark,” “breakthrough,” and “classic” hardly do The Feminine Mystique’s avant-garde vision and enduring influence credit. Insidious ideas and systems that damaged women’s confidence in their intellectual talents and kept them at home were precisely described in this 1963 publication as “the problem that has no name.” Betty Friedan caught the disappointments and dashed hopes of a generation in her writing during a time when the average woman got married for the first time in her teens and 60% of female college students left school to get married. She also provided guidance on how women may take back their lives.
The Feminine Mystique, social history, and manifesto rolled into one, is chock full of inspiring stories, interviews, and insights. A new introduction by Gail Collins and an afterword by bestselling author Anna Quindlen are included in this edition’s 50th anniversary.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.”
“Chosen motherhood is the real liberation. The choice to have a child makes the whole experience of motherhood different, and the choice to be generative in other ways can at last be made, and is being made by many women now, without guilt.”
“Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves? Who knows what women’s intelligence will contribute when it can be nourished without denying love?”
“The feminists had destroyed the old image of woman, but they could not erase the hostility, the prejudice, the discrimination that still remained.”
“When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity, she finally began to enjoy being a woman.”
Legendary grammarian Norman Lewis developed Word Power Made Easy, a comprehensive vocabulary-building approach that offers a straightforward, step-by-step process for improving your knowledge and command of the English language. The greatest and quickest way to increase your vocabulary in English is to use Word Power Made Easy. You will learn how to determine if you are using the correct word as well as how to speak and spell it as you complete the tasks in this book. Additionally, you’ll discover how to talk appropriately and refrain from using illiterate terms.
Word Power Made Easy is a comprehensive guide to increasing your vocabulary that teaches you how to read more accurately and effectively as well as how to speak and write with confidence. You’ll pick up information more rapidly, make more friends, and have more money thanks to it. A summary concludes each chapter. A cumulative check comes at the end of each section. You will be able to increase and maintain your information by taking many tests. Word Power Made Easy imparts ideas and a strategy for expanding your knowledge as a crucial component of the vocabulary growth process. It does more than just add words to your vocabulary.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Your method was the essence of simplicity: day in and day out you kept learning; you kept squeezing every possible ounce of learning out of every waking moment; you were an eternal question box, for you had a constant and insatiable desire to know and understand.”
“Philadelphia is the City of Brotherly Love”
“All normal human beings are born with a powerful urge to learn. Almost all of them lose this urge, even before they have reached maturity. It is only the few … who are so constituted that lack of learning becomes a nuisance. This is perhaps the most insidious of human tragedies.”
“your vocabulary indicates the alertness and range of your mind. The words you know show the extent of your understanding of what’s going on in the world. The size of your vocabulary varies directly with the degree to which you are growing intellectually.”
David Macaulay’s nonfiction book The Way Things Work, published in 1988, features technical writing by Neil Ardley. This collection offers a fantastic survey of the tools and innovations that have shaped our lives, from levers to lasers, cameras to computers, and it is humorously delivered with a lot of Macaulay’s wit and charm. illustrations in full color.
The greatest of their favorite stories and collected anecdotes that have moved people all over the world are shared by two of America’s most well-liked inspirational speakers. To help you get through the difficult times in life, Canfield and Hansen provide you with wit, insight, hope, and empowerment.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Don’t worry about failures, worry about the chances you miss when you don’t even try.”
“There is no right reaction. There is only your reaction.”
“You don’t want to get to the top of the ladder only to find out you had it leaning up against the wrong wall.”
“The dynamics that are required to make any relationship work: Just keep putting your love out there.”
“We need 4 hugs a day for survival. We need 8 hugs a day for maintenance. We need 12 hugs a day for growth.”
A passionate appeal to action against the most ubiquitous human rights violation of our time—the subjugation of women and girls in the undeveloped nations from two of our most fervently moral voices. We embark on an odyssey through Africa and Asia with Pulitzer Prize winners Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn as our guides to meet the extraordinary women fighting there, including a Cambodian teenager sold into sex slavery and an Ethiopian woman who suffered terrible injuries during childbirth. Kristof and WuDunn portray our world with rage, anguish, clarity, and eventually optimism by drawing on the depth of their collective reporting experience.
They demonstrate how little assistance may significantly improve the lives of women and girls worldwide. After eventually breaking free from her brothel, the Cambodian girl established a successful retail store that provides for her family with the aid of an aid organization. The Ethiopian woman got her wounds fixed, and eventually, she graduated to become a surgeon. A Zimbabwean mother of five who was advised to go back to school eventually received her doctorate and worked as an AIDS specialist.
By telling these examples, Kristof and WuDunn make it clear that empowering women is the path to economic advancement. They make it apparent how many people contributed to achieving that goal and how every one of us may play a role in it.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth century, it was the battle against totalitarianism. We believe that in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality around the world.”
“Our focus has to be on changing reality, not changing laws.”
“It’s no accident that the countries that have enjoyed an economic take off have been those that educated girls and then gave them the autonomy to move to the cities to find work”
“Women aren’t the problem but the solution. The plight of girls is no more a tragedy than an opportunity.”
“One of the great failings of the American education system (in our view) is that young people can graduate from university without any understanding of poverty at home or abroad.”