Here are 100 books that Bursts fans have personally recommended if you like
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My passion for visions and pathways to a better world is based on three main cornerstones: (1) The discontent with the current state of affairs in our immediate cultural environment as well as in geopolitics. (2) My belief is that successful action needs visions, including scientific visions. (3) The experience that visions interact with their Implementation; they actually live by being put into (partial) existence. And since we are all parts of the same biological species, we are able to develop also via writing and reading.
This is a very old book–written when merchant capitalism just started to take off. It always impresses me–I have read it several times now–how 500 years ago, such an agglomeration of innovative ideas, of visions for a future society, could have been formulated.
A vision, that today is as vibrant and thought-provoking for an author and scientist like me, as it must have been at the time when it was written. Simply stupendous!
First published in Latin in 1516, Utopia was the work of Sir Thomas More (1477–1535), the brilliant humanist, scholar, and churchman executed by Henry VIII for his refusal to accept the king as the supreme head of the Church of England. In this work, which gave its name to the whole genre of books and movements hypothesizing an ideal society, More envisioned a patriarchal island kingdom that practiced religious tolerance, in which everybody worked, no one has more than his fellows, all goods were community-owned, and violence, bloodshed, and vice nonexistent. Based to some extent on the writings of Plato…
Many of the words used to describe disease ('infection', 'transmission', 'virus') are also used to characterize cyber security (for example: a computer is infected by a virus that can be transmitted to other currently uninfected computers). Using models from the population biology of disease shows this correspondence much deeper than…
I was sick as a child and bedridden for several months. This was before 24/7 TV and computers. I began to read A LOT. I read everything and anything that I could find, but my favorite topics were animals and nature. I also read science fiction and fantasy. It’s not a surprise that those topics merged into my writing and life. I currently live on five acres that I’ve left mostly for the wildlife. My nephew calls me his aunt who lives in the forest with reindeer. That is way cooler than my real life, so I’m good with that. All my books have nature and friendship as main themes.
I found this a fun and brilliant story. I actually read it to my three nieces when they were 5, 7, and 11. It was great hearing their opinions on the story. It’s one of those books that can be understood on different levels.
In the simplest form, it is exactly what is written on the pages—a story about some farm animals who take over the farm. However, there are many layers to this simple tale.
I love being able to re-read a book and understand it on a different level each time. To me, that is excellent writing, especially when combined with a fun and entertaining tale.
The perfect edition for any Orwell enthusiasts' collection, discover Orwell's classic dystopian masterpiece beautifully reimagined by renowned street artist Shepard Fairey
'All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others.'
Mr Jones of Manor Farm is so lazy and drunken that one day he forgets to feed his livestock. The ensuing rebellion under the leadership of the pigs Napoleon and Snowball leads to the animals taking over the farm. Vowing to eliminate the terrible inequities of the farmyard, the renamed Animal Farm is organised to benefit all who walk on four legs. But as time passes, the…
My passion for visions and pathways to a better world is based on three main cornerstones: (1) The discontent with the current state of affairs in our immediate cultural environment as well as in geopolitics. (2) My belief is that successful action needs visions, including scientific visions. (3) The experience that visions interact with their Implementation; they actually live by being put into (partial) existence. And since we are all parts of the same biological species, we are able to develop also via writing and reading.
In 2011, I spent a semester in London; I had arranged to meet Eric Hobsbawm, the famous historian whom I adored. Unfortunately, he was too ill when I arrived and died before I could meet him. In this book he did not only surprise me with his insight into episodes of rebellions and revolutions, what is even more scintillating is that he mixes all that with the evolving emergence of the particular world of jazz.
Rarely a personality with such broad scientific knowledge has managed to be so uncommonly common in its very specific empathy for a particular cultural obsession. The book shows how important it is to walk on two feet: The ordinary animal within its species and the extraordinary scientific observer, letting his spirit fly above singular events.
These 26 essays range over the history of working men and women between the late18th century and the present day. They include Hobsbawm's pioneering studies in labour history and social protest - the formation of the British workin class, labour custom and traditions, the political radicalism of 19th century shoemakers, male and female images in revolutionary movements, the machine-breakers, revolution and sex, peasants and politics, the rules of violence, the common-sense of Tom Paine. There are more recent reflections: on the May Day holiday; the Vietnam War; socialism and the avantgarde; Mario Puzo, the Mafia and the Sicilian bandit Salvatore…
Many of the words used to describe disease ('infection', 'transmission', 'virus') are also used to characterize cyber security (for example: a computer is infected by a virus that can be transmitted to other currently uninfected computers). Using models from the population biology of disease shows this correspondence much deeper than…
My passion for visions and pathways to a better world is based on three main cornerstones: (1) The discontent with the current state of affairs in our immediate cultural environment as well as in geopolitics. (2) My belief is that successful action needs visions, including scientific visions. (3) The experience that visions interact with their Implementation; they actually live by being put into (partial) existence. And since we are all parts of the same biological species, we are able to develop also via writing and reading.
This book reached me when I was a young rebellious man in 1971, and it had an immediate impact on my behavior. The youth revolt that we not only could watch on TV since 1968, but which we also could live with our anti-authoritarian behavior at schools, universities, and at work, this new style was given a fresh and funny voice in this book.
Later, Frank Zappa elevated it to more intellectual grounds in lyrics and Jazz-Rock. But for me, Rubin's book still is the best starter for getting the original spirit of the youth revolt of 68.
Slight damage to frt corners, Split 2" down bk cvr from top of bk edge of spine, old sticker removed inside frt cvr. Btm of spine taped. Good reading copy. Intro by Eldridge Cleaver. Insight into the 1960's social change.
In my career as an academic librarian, I was often asked to teach students to think about the credibility of the information they incorporate into their academic, professional, personal, and civic lives. In my teaching and writing, I have struggled to make sense of the complex and nuanced factors that make some information more credible and other information less so. I don’t have all the answers for dealing with problematic information, but I try hard to convince people to think carefully about the information they encounter before accepting any of it as credible or dismissing any of it as non-credible.
I constantly recommend The Data Detective because it serves as an unmatched handbook for making sense of the statistical data to which we are constantly exposed.
What I like about it, besides its lively, readable style, is that the book convincingly and clearly explains 1) why we need statistical data to make informed decisions, 2) the factors that go into producing reliable statistics, 3) the factors that can produce unreliable statistics, and 4) how any statistics, reliable or not, can be misused to deceive us.
The author, Tim Harford, is an economist who writes for the Financial Times and hosts the brilliant podcast Cautionary Tales.
From “one of the great (greatest?) contemporary popular writers on economics” (Tyler Cowen) comes a smart, lively, and encouraging rethinking of how to use statistics.
Today we think statistics are the enemy, numbers used to mislead and confuse us. That’s a mistake, Tim Harford says in The Data Detective. We shouldn’t be suspicious of statistics—we need to understand what they mean and how they can improve our lives: they are, at heart, human behavior seen through the prism of numbers and are often “the only way of grasping much of what is going on around us.” If we can toss…
Throughout my academic career, my chief scholarly interest has been to assess public policy using coherent theory and rigorous empirical method.The economics of crime and justice offers a powerful framework for achieving these ends.
This book applies economic theory and econometric methods to problems in criminology.
It is divided into three parts. Part I discusses models of criminal recidivism. Part II describes the economic model of crime. Part III estimates cost functions for prisons.
Specific chapters cover statistical analysis of qualitative outcomes; analysis of two measures of criminal activity – the arrest rate and the conviction rate; and long-run estimates of cost functions for a group of Federal Correctional Institutions.
I currently teach in the management department of the London School of Economics, and I often need to communicate economic ideas to non-economists. Honestly, I was very nervous about writing (yet another) book about economics. Especially since there are so many around. Two things made me have a go. I really wanted to convey the key arguments with simplicity, translating often complicated and abstruse ideas into straightforward language in a way that didn’t dumb down. Second the world has changed so much in recent years that you need to keep up to date. Quantitative easing, modern monetary theory, and Bitcoin are ideas that just did not exist until recently.
All politicians should be forced to read this book. Anyone who reads a newspaper should be forced to read this book. My favourite radio programme in the world is Tim Harford’sMore or Less. And this book is every bit as good. Harford is clear, incisive, and always interesting. In a world crowded with disinformation and fake news, he shows you how to evaluate the numbers that are thrown at you. To read him is to become a little cleverer. Make this man prime minister someone.
'Tim Harford is one of my favourite writers in the world. His storytelling is gripping but never overdone, his intellectual honesty is rare and inspiring, and his ability to make complex things simple - but not simplistic - is exceptional. How to Make the World Add Up is another one of his gems. If you're looking for an addictive pageturner that will make you smarter, this is your book' Rutger Bregman, author of Humankind
'Tim Harford could well be Britain's Malcolm Gladwell' Alex Bellos, author of Alex's Adventures in Numberland
I’ve been fascinated by information technology since I was a child–whether in the form of books, libraries, computers, or cell phones! Living through a massive expansion in the volume of data, I believe it is essential to study the long history of information to make sense of our current data-driven times–which is why I became a historian of data, which I teach and write about full time. Here are some of the most informative and insightful books that have helped me make sense of our issues, ranging from information overload and artificial intelligence to privacy and data justice.
Finding yourself overwhelmed, confused, or just plain curious about artificial intelligence?
Then this is the book for you! Wiggins and Jones provide a lucid, comprehensive overview of how we arrived at our current data-saturated times and how artificial intelligence emerged from the political climate of the Cold War as one attempt in a longer history of the ties between political power and information.
I found myself constantly surprised and enlightened by the history of data sketched out by Wiggins and Jones!
From facial recognition-capable of checking us onto flights or identifying undocumented residents-to automated decision systems that inform everything from who gets loans to who receives bail, each of us moves through a world determined by data-empowered algorithms. But these technologies didn't just appear: they are part of a history that goes back centuries, from the birth of eugenics in Victorian Britain to the development of Google search.
Expanding on the popular course they created at Columbia University, Chris Wiggins and Matthew Jones illuminate the ways in which data has long been used as a tool and a weapon in arguing…
My professional life has been focused on teaching and research on chemical food safety as well as scientific applications of mathematics to animal and human health. The books on this list were riveting and eye-opening examples of how complex mathematical concepts, including zero and nothing, often get misused when applied to practical problems such as food safety and cancer. This misapplication is often a result of the unique properties and history of numbers like zero, which are hard to translate into practical endpoints. These books have given me a better understanding of this issue, as well as plunging me into the fascinating history of numbers through Eastern and Western civilizations.
This book was my first exposure to the practical application of many scientific principles to societal issues and their laws.
As a scientist who fully understands the limitations of certain statistical tests and chemical assays, I was shocked to see how these could be so misapplied. This book presents numerous examples of how statistics improperly conducted or interpreted can be simply wrong when they are taken out of context.
This foray into the popular literature transformed my thinking on the application of mathematical principles to everyday problems.
Here, by popular demand, is the updated edition to Joel Best's classic guide to understanding how numbers can confuse us. In his new afterword, Best uses examples from recent policy debates to reflect on the challenges to improving statistical literacy. Since its publication ten years ago, Damned Lies and Statistics has emerged as the go-to handbook for spotting bad statistics and learning to think critically about these influential numbers.
I’m an applied statistician and academic researcher/lecturer at New Zealand’s oldest university – the University of Otago. R facilitates everything I do – research, academic publication, and teaching. It’s the latter part of my job that motivated my own book on R. From first-year statistics students who have never seen R to my own Ph.D. students using R to implement novel and highly complex statistical methods and models, my experience is that all ultimately love the ease with which the R language permits exploration, visualisation, analysis, and inference of one’s data. The ever-growing need in today’s society for skilled statisticians and data scientists means there's never been a better time to learn this essential language.
This provides a superb balance between technical aspects of R coding and the statistical methods that motivate its use. It's rare to find a book on topics like this that are written with Kabacoff's easygoing yet precise style, which makes it ideal for beginners. From my own experience, it is obvious the author has spent many years teaching this type of content, knowing where things deserve extra explanation up front and where other more technical details can be relegated to more advanced texts.
R is a powerful language for statistical computing and graphics that can handle virtually any data-crunching task. It runs on all important platforms and provides thousands of useful specialized modules and utilities. This makes R a great way to get meaningful information from mountains of raw data.
R in Action, Second Edition is language tutorial focused on practical problems. Written by a research methodologist, it takes a direct and modular approach to quickly give readers the information they need to produce useful results. Focusing on realistic data analyses and a comprehensive integration of graphics, it follows the steps that…
