Signal To Noise

Mexico City, 1988. Long before iTunes or MP3s, you said "I love you" with a mixtape. Meche, awkward and fifteen, discovers how to cast spells using music, and with her friends Sebastian and Daniela will piece together their broken families, and even find love... Two decades after abandoning the metropolis, Meche returns for her estranged father's funeral, reviving memories from her childhood she thought she buried a long time ago. What really happened back then? Is there any magic left?

"One of the more momentous books of the decade." —The New York Times Book Review Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair’s breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger—all by the time he was thirty. He solidified his standing as the nation's foremost political forecaster with his near perfect prediction of the 2012 election. Silver is the founder and editor in chief of the website FiveThirtyEight. Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data. Most predictions fail, often at great cost to society, because most of us have a poor understanding of probability and uncertainty. Both experts and laypeople mistake more confident predictions for more accurate ones. But overconfidence is often the reason for failure. If our appreciation of uncertainty improves, our predictions can get better too. This is the “prediction paradox”: The more humility we have about our ability to make predictions, the more successful we can be in planning for the future. In keeping with his own aim to seek truth from data, Silver visits the most successful forecasters in a range of areas, from hurricanes to baseball to global pandemics, from the poker table to the stock market, from Capitol Hill to the NBA. He explains and evaluates how these forecasters think and what bonds they share. What lies behind their success? Are they good—or just lucky? What patterns have they unraveled? And are their forecasts really right? He explores unanticipated commonalities and exposes unexpected juxtapositions. And sometimes, it is not so much how good a prediction is in an absolute sense that matters but how good it is relative to the competition. In other cases, prediction is still a very rudimentary—and dangerous—science. Silver observes that the most accurate forecasters tend to have a superior command of probability, and they tend to be both humble and hardworking. They distinguish the predictable from the unpredictable, and they notice a thousand little details that lead them closer to the truth. Because of their appreciation of probability, they can distinguish the signal from the noise. With everything from the health of the global economy to our ability to fight terrorism dependent on the quality of our predictions, Nate Silver’s insights are an essential read.

A film director is dying of cancer. His greatest film would have told the story of a European village as the last hour of 999 AD approached—bringing Armageddon. Now that story will never be told. But he’s still working it out in his head, making a film that no one will ever see.

Jack Potter puts computer cryptography to work for the highest bidder: sometimes for private corporations, sometimes for the government. Sometimes the work is legal; if not, Jack simply raises his price. But one day, Jack discovers something cloaked in the hiss of background radiation streaming past the Earth from deep space: a message from an alien civilization. One that's eager to do business with humanity -- and its representative. Before he knows it, Jack has entered into a partnership that will open a Pandora's Box of potential profit and loss. The governments, the multinationals, and mysterious players more powerful still, all want a piece of the action -- and they're willing to kill, even wage war, to get it. Now Jack is entangled shifting web of deceit and intrigue in which no one, not even his closest friends, can be trusted. For Earth's cloak-and-dagger business practices are writ large in the heavens...and hostile takeovers are just as common across light years as they are across boardroom tables.

This textbook introduces methods of geoscientific data acquisition using MATLAB in combination with inexpensive data acquisition hardware such as sensors in smartphones, sensors that come with the LEGO MINDSTORMS set, webcams with stereo microphones, and affordable spectral and thermal cameras. The text includes 35 exercises in data acquisition, such as using a smartphone to acquire stereo images of rock specimens from which to calculate point clouds, using visible and near-infrared spectral cameras to classify the minerals in rocks, using thermal cameras to differentiate between different types of surface such as between soil and vegetation, localizing a sound source using travel time differences between pairs of microphones to localize a sound source, quantifying the total harmonic distortion and signal-to-noise ratio of acoustic and elastic signals, acquiring and streaming meteorological data using application programming interfaces, wireless networks, and internet of things platforms, determining the spatial resolution of ultrasonic and optical sensors, and detecting magnetic anomalies using a smartphone magnetometer mounted on a LEGO MINDSTORMS scanner. The book’s electronic supplementary material (available online through Springer Link) contains recipes that include all the MATLAB commands featured in the book, the example data, the LEGO construction plans, photos and videos of the measurement procedures.

DIVExamines the role of media technologies in shaping urban Africa through an ethnographic study of popular culture in northern Nigeria./div

A succinct introduction to the physics and function of magnetic resonance imaging with an emphasis on practical information. This thoroughly revised second edition is clearly structured. The underlying physical principles of the MR experiment are described and the basic pulse sequences commonly used in clinical MRI. It progresses to more advanced techniques such as parallel imaging and cardiovascular MR imaging. An extensive glossary offers rapid access to MRI terminology and will help those seeking to understand this interesting fascinating subject.

Owing to its unique combination of high information content and ease of use, Raman spectroscopy, which uses different vibrational energy levels to excite molecules (as opposed to light spectra), has attracted much attention over the past fifteen years. This book covers all aspects of modern Raman spectroscopy, including its growing use in both the laboratory and industrial analysis.