100 Best Booksof the 21st Century

Punished By Rewards

There is a time to admire the grace and persuasive power of an influential idea, and there is a time to fear its hold over us. The time to worry is when the idea is so widely shared that we no longer even notice it, when it is so deeply rooted that it feels to us like plain common sense. At the point when objections are not answered anymore because they are no longer even raised, we are not in control: we do not have the idea, it has us.

This book is about an idea that has attained just such a status in our society. The idea is that the best way to get something done is to provide a reward to people when they act the way we want them to. Scholars have debated the meaning and traced the development of the intellectual traditio known as behaviourism. What interests me, though, is the popular (or pop) incarnation of this doctrine, the version that lives in our collective consciousness and affects what we do every day. - Alfie Kohn

www.ondemandbooks.com

On Demand Books LLC. is planning to become the first company to globally deploy a low cost, totally automatic book machine (The Espresso Book Machine), which can produce 15 - 20 library quality paperback books per hour, in any language, in quantities of one, without any human intervention. This technology and process will produce one each of ten different books at the same speed and cost as it can produce ten copies of the same book. ODB has two machines currently deployed (one at the World Bank InfoShop in Washington DC, and one at the Library of Alexandria in Egypt).

ODB is also finalizing technology to access a vast network of content that can be accessed and produced via The Espresso Book Machine Network. The content of this library will reside in numerous locations from a multitude of sources. Our system will accept multiple formats, and fully respect licenses and rights.

Books to Buy and perhaps read!

Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students

Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works, Second Edition

The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times And Ideas Of The Great Economic Thinkers

The Art of UNIX Programming

The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary

Head First Design Patterns

World Changing: book review

- I have a lack of confidence in the content soundness and at times felt it misleads the reader as to the really salient issues.

- seems to have been written by a bunch of energetic folk anxious to DO something but extra effort seems to have been spent on packaging the content rather than the content itself.

Crowdsourcing and other links

Using Crowd Power for R&D

http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/about.html

http://www.amazon.com/Out-Control-Biology-Machines-Economic/dp/0201483408/ref=sr_1_1/002-9497336-7880038?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1180400224&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/Stumbling-Happiness-Daniel-Gilbert/dp/1400042666

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/27/1428212

http://www.topcoder.com/

http://blog.mises.org/archives/006263.asp

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2007/07/crowdsourcing_soccer

Global Health : An introductory textbook, 2006

Is it possible to write a book on the health of all 6.5 billion persons living on the globe? Well we did it and now it is on sale from Monday 27/11 2006. We are six authors, but it was Ann Lindstrand who got it together and Birgitta Rubensson that brought it to print. Hundreds of students read and commented various versions.

We wrote it for those that in a short text want to learn:
-how the health of the world's population has changed over time;
-how the main determinants of health varied with time and place;
-how health can be measured;
about the causes of the main diseases in the world;
-what health care that exist around the world.

Our book is a summary of the works by greater scholars on global health. The pros with our book are the overviews; the cons are the simplifications and errors that are a consequence of our broad ambitions.

Making Comics: How to communicate visually

Magnificent! A work of genius. The best how-to manual ever published. I could keep piling on the superlatives because this book is simply a masterpiece. At one level, it is a comic book about how to make comics, and for that it is supreme; the best. It will walk you through every step of making a comic, including how to make them on the web, digitally, or in pen and ink. I've been working on a near-completed graphic novel, and every page has told me something important and spot on. With brilliant graphics, Scott McCloud combines the most profound insights from his two previous books, Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics. But in this book he raises your understanding of graphic communication further by making every lesson utterly practical and useful for both novice and expert. I can't imagine anyone ever doing a comic manual better.

However, even if you are not planning on making a graphic novel, this book is a gold mine. McCloud's section on constructing facial expressions and emotions is astounding, and worth the price of the book alone. The clever way McCloud arrays human expressions in one chart reminds me of the first time I saw all the colors arranged in a color wheel; it's the same aha! The insights McCloud extracts from comics and presents so vividly here are useful to novelists, sociologists, film makers, artists, roboticists -- anyone interested in human expression. That's probably you.

Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco (Paperback)

Burroughs and Helyar tell the story of the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco in gripping fashion, showing how greed and shortsightedness contributed to the biggest and worst-managed corporate takeover in history. The players: Salesman F. Ross Johnson of RJR vs. Henry Kravitz of KKR. Everything from a wild, rip-roaring potboiler novel is here: Secret deals, stock market manipulation, flouting of laws, surprise plot twists. All of it almost unbelievable, but all of it true.

The next time you wonder about how people could have been taken in by internet companies with insane stock prices who blew through venture capital as if it were funny money, read this book. It's well worth your time, effort, and energy.

KKR's 399 workers generated net income last year of $2.7 million per employee, compared with the $2.9 million average by Blackstone's 770 workers, according to SEC filings. Their profits per employee dwarf those of investment banks. New York-based Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the most profitable securities firm, earned $360,336 per employee in 2006.

Economics books

The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor--and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car! (Hardcover)


Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Paperback)

The Armchair Economist

Freakonomics blog

Should I Be Tested for Cancer?: Maybe Not

A review..

H. Gilbert Welch, MD, MPH, has written an unusually understandable revelation of the folly of testing for cancer in people with no symptoms. He explains how only a few people will benefit from common tests such as PSA, fecal blood, mammograms and others. He is enough of an insider to be able to explain the flaws in clinical trials being used by "authorities" to recommend extensive testing, and the lack of trials in some cases. The unneccessary biopsies, surgeries, radiations, chemotherapies for slow-growing cancers or even non-malignant ones are presented bravely. The uncertainty of testing is exposed where a positive for cancer may be wrong 1/3 of the time. And it is up to the patient to get second opinions.

The financial and legal pressures on MDs to test excessively are brought out. There is advice on talking or writing to your MD to indicate your unwillingness to undergo too many tests, and not to hold your MD liable if a cancer was "missed" - that is the big thing.

The deaths caused by cancer treatment are aired. This is something very few people, even MDs, know. Even when a treatment can cut the deaths from a particular cancer in half, most current treatments create non-cancer deaths, many of which will be improperly reported.

Welch is a special expert on the misleading nature of 5-year survival rates how they can rise because of early detection, yet with no change in the cancer plus cancer treatment mortality rate.

There are good explanations of how 5-year survival rates are calculated, how age-adjustments are made, how randomization for trials is done, and other things not even taught in medical school, but reserved for medical researchers. And quite easy to comprehend with clear figures and tables.

No errors that I can find; a really excellent book.

Death By Government

A Review..

Professor Rummel's work, Death By Government, is a product of eight years of research into the roots and causes of Democide - defined as the intentional killing by governments through genocide, politicide, and arbitrary mass murder of its people. The cornerstones of current U.S foreign policy - centered around fostering democratic freedom - are based upon Professor Rummel's correct observation, that liberal democracies promote the greater peace and they are essential to eliminating Democide and ending wars between nations. Through empirical research the evident truths become exposed and the reader is left with the overall understanding that absolute power corrupts and leads to the murder of a governments' people and that only through restricting and checking power can these horrors be restrained. Democracies virtually never make war on each other and the more democratic two governments, the less the likelihood of violence between them. So not only is democracy a solution to domestic democide, but globalizing democracy is also a solution to war. The existence and spread of liberal democracies (not just electoral democracies, but liberal democracies in terms of civil and political rights and liberties) provides the long run hope for the elimination of democide and war. Professor Rummel astutely notes that power's relationship to democide is on a continuum - the more absolute the power, the more democide. The problem is Power. The solution is democracy. The course of action is to foster freedom.

That America actively supports dictatorships is well-known. I wonder if this book includes genocide of Native Indians.