The Signal

"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.

Winner of the Canadian National Business Book Award 2016 Shortlisted for the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award 2015 In 2009, BlackBerry controlled half of the US smartphone market. Today that number is less than one per cent. What went so wrong? Losing the Signal is the riveting story of a company that toppled global giants before succumbing to the ruthlessly competitive forces of Silicon Valley. This is not a conventional tale of modern business failure by fraud and greed; instead, the rise and fall of BlackBerry reveals the dangerous speed at which innovators race along the information superhighway. With unprecedented access to key players, senior executives, directors, and competitors, Losing the Signal unveils the remarkable rise of a company that started above a bagel store in a small Canadian city and went on to control half of the US smartphone market. However, at the very moment BlackBerry was ranked the world’s fastest-growing company, internal feuds and chaotic growth crippled the company as it faced its gravest test: the entry of Apple and Google into the mobile phone market. Expertly told by acclaimed journalists Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, this is an entertaining, whirlwind narrative that goes behind the scenes to reveal one of the most compelling business stories of the new century.

An anthology of writings, interviews, and images by artist Ed Ruscha. Ed Ruscha is among the most innovative artists of the last forty years. He is also one of the first Americans to introduce a critique of popular culture and an examination of language into the visual arts. Although he first made his reputation as a painter, Ruscha is also celebrated for his drawings (made both with conventional materials and with food, blood, gunpowder, and shellac), prints, films, photographs, and books. He is often associated with Los Angeles as a Pop and Conceptualist hub, but tends to regard such labels with a satirical, if not jaundiced, eye. Indeed, his work is characterized by the tensions between high and low, solemn and irreverent, and serious and nonsensical, and it draws on popular culture as well as Western art traditions. Leave Any Information at the Signal not only documents the work of this influential artist as he rose to prominence but also contains his writings and commentaries on other artistic developments of the period. The book is divided into three parts, each of which is arranged chronologically. Part one contains statements, letters, and other writings. Part two consists of more than fifty interviews, some of which have never before been published or translated into English. Part three contains sketchbook pages, word groupings, and other notes that chart how Ruscha develops ideas and solves artistic problems. They are published here for the first time. The book also contains more than eighty illustrations, selected and arranged by the artist.

Computers are the foundation of the information age, but communication technology is the foundation of the foundation. Without the theories and practical applications of theory brought to us by the pioneers of communication, the computer age would perhaps have remained in the back office, hidden away as infrastructure like electricity or running water – critical to modern life, but not as transforming as the combination of communications and computing. The information age exploded once machines were endowed with the ability to talk among themselves. The Signal connects everything to everything else, in both communication, and in the metaphorical sense as the link between and among people. Features Identifies the key ideas underlying modern communications technology, and documents the contributions of its inventors Explores the signal in communication, and also in the metaphorical sense as the link between and among people Leads the reader through a journey from ancient number systems to Voyager II to radio and MP3s to quantum cryptography Includes coverage of "Signals from Hell," including memes and "fake news" on the Internet Looks to the future of communication, with emergent 5G

"This monograph has been written to give officers of the Army at large, and all others who may be interested, a general idea of the growth in the United States and from April 6, 1917, to November 11, 1918, of the Signal Corps and Air Service. In this brief study no attempt has been made to describe detail subjects which would be of interest solely to technical students. Throughout the preparation of this paper many conferences were held with officials on duty in the Offices of the Chief Signal Officer and of the Chief of Air Service, and the files of both these offices as well as many others have been freely consulted. Monographs dealing with the work of specific services are, in general, prepared by the services themselves, with the advice and assistance of the Historical Section, The Army War College. Where, however, as in this case, the paper deals with two or more services, it is prepared in the Historical Section, with the advice and assistance of the services."--Preface.

A rancher and his wife face a conflict over his actions to preserve his family land. What was planned as a final trip together causes them to see their marriage in a new light.