Download or read book A Matter of Opinion written by Victor S. Navasky and published by Picador. This book was released on 2006-05-16 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2005 George Polk Book Award Victor S. Navasky is the renowned editor, writer, and educator who was at the helm of The Nation for almost thirty years. A Matter of Opinion, a scintillating reflection on his experiences, is an extraordinary political document--and a passionately written, irresistibly charming account of a great journalistic tradition.
Download or read book A Matter of Opinion written by Alan Ramsay and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2011-05-14 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than two decades, from mid-1987 to the end of 2008, no one had greater access to our national parliament and its politicians than Alan Ramsey. Informed, insightful and unafraid, his Wednesday and Saturday columns in The Sydney Morning Herald were always essential reading for many thousands of Australians. Here are 150 of his unflinching views of key political events of that era, among them; the often turbulent Hawke/Keating years, the 1990 recession 'we had to have', Labor's stunning dumping of Bob Hawke in December 1991 after he had led his party to four successive election victories in eight years, the Howard Government's slavish subservience to the Bush White House, the insidious channeling of Hansonism, John Howard's 'never ever' GST, the invasion of Iraq, the disintegration of the Democrats as a political force after the 1997 defection to Labor of its leader, Cheryl Kernot, the manipulation by both sides of politics of the 2001 children overboard incident, and the scandal of the Governor-General who ultimately resigned after the cover-up by the Anglican Church in Queensland of serial child abuse in church schools. Yet Ramsey's keen eye often observed with affection the values and behavior of others in national life, and he was as ready to give credit as he was to lay into the humbug, pomposity and deceit of political, personal and sectional self-interest. Some 'matters of opinion' of Alan Ramsey 'there is no one now, and no one coming along, who can write like this. 'David Marr' I' ll miss his profound dislike of hypocrisy and his instinct for plain speaking. 'Kerry O'Brien' A lion of a journalist in every way. 'Michelle Grattan' In an arena of journalism where sameness is a vice, Ramsey is entirely his own man. 'les Carlyon' For years his column has been an essential, often enjoyable, frequently uncomfortable, part of my Saturday morning regime. 'Kevin Rudd' He always added to my Saturday morning enjoyment. 'Peter Costello' A must read. 'Bob Brown' Grumpy old bastard. Seriously unique. 'Bill Heffernan Cover photograph; Andrew Taylor Cover design; Blue Cork.
Download or read book A Matter of Opinion written by Victor S. Navasky and published by Farrar Straus & Giroux. This book was released on 2005 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author reflects on his journalistic experiences and offers a spirited argument for independent journals of opinion as vital to the health of democracy.
Download or read book News That Matters written by Shanto Iyengar and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-10-15 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Almost twenty-five years ago, Shanto Iyengar and Donald R. Kinder first documented a series of sophisticated and innovative experiments that unobtrusively altered the order and emphasis of news stories in selected television broadcasts. Their resulting book News That Matters, now hailed as a classic by scholars of political science and public opinion alike, is here updated for the twenty-first century, with a new preface and epilogue by the authors. Backed by careful analysis of public opinion surveys, the authors show how, despite changing American politics, those issues that receive extended coverage in the national news become more important to viewers, while those that are ignored lose credibility. Moreover, those issues that are prominent in the news stream continue to loom more heavily as criteria for evaluating the president and for choosing between political candidates. “News That Matters does matter, because it demonstrates conclusively that television newscasts powerfully affect opinion. . . . All that follows, whether it supports, modifies, or challenges their conclusions, will have to begin here.”—The Public Interest
Download or read book The New Jim Crow written by Michelle Alexander and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named one of the most important nonfiction books of the 21st century by Entertainment Weekly‚ Slate‚ Chronicle of Higher Education‚ Literary Hub, Book Riot‚ and Zora A tenth-anniversary edition of the iconic bestseller—"one of the most influential books of the past 20 years," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education—with a new preface by the author "It is in no small part thanks to Alexander's account that civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter have focused so much of their energy on the criminal justice system." —Adam Shatz, London Review of Books Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is "undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S." Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.
Download or read book Your Opinion Doesn t Matter written by Andrew Ballard and published by Marketingatlas Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book demonstrates a simple and proven Market Analysis Positioning SystemTM (MAP) designed to develop growth strategies that help small businesses accelerate their sales and share. The MAP SystemTM has one purpose: to strengthen your market position by analyzing the voice of your customer. If you are a small business owner, startup, or entrepreneur anyone with marketing or sales responsibilities this book can help you deal with the unrelenting pressure of growing your business. The premise of Your Opinion Doesn't Matter is simple: A great idea, product or service isn't enough to survive in today's competitive marketplace; to truly thrive, you need to accept the fact that it's your customer's opinion that counts. This book melds the process of strategic planning with the practice of marketing. It is a practical and somewhat irreverent how to guide that demonstrates the Market Analysis Positioning SystemTM. A proven system designed to help grow your enterprise, it has been thoroughly researched and refined through hundreds of real world business situations. You'll learn how to: analyze your business and core competencies; collect voice of your customer data; expose competitor landscape opportunities; shape your position and align your promotion; and optimize results from your growth strategy.
Download or read book Love Your Enemies written by Arthur C. Brooks and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER To get ahead today, you have to be a jerk, right? Divisive politicians. Screaming heads on television. Angry campus activists. Twitter trolls. Today in America, there is an “outrage industrial complex” that prospers by setting American against American, creating a “culture of contempt”—the habit of seeing people who disagree with us not as merely incorrect, but as worthless and defective. Maybe, like more than nine out of ten Americans, you dislike it. But hey, either you play along, or you’ll be left behind, right? Wrong. In Love Your Enemies, social scientist and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller From Strength to Strength Arthur C. Brooks shows that abuse and outrage are not the right formula for lasting success. Brooks blends cutting-edge behavioral research, ancient wisdom, and a decade of experience leading one of America’s top policy think tanks in a work that offers a better way to lead based on bridging divides and mending relationships. Brooks’ prescriptions are unconventional. To bring America together, we shouldn’t try to agree more. There is no need for mushy moderation, because disagreement is the secret to excellence. Civility and tolerance shouldn’t be our goals, because they are hopelessly low standards. And our feelings toward our foes are irrelevant; what matters is how we choose to act. Love Your Enemies offers a clear strategy for victory for a new generation of leaders. It is a rallying cry for people hoping for a new era of American progress. Most of all, it is a roadmap to arrive at the happiness that comes when we choose to love one another, despite our differences.
Download or read book The Second Mountain written by David Brooks and published by Random House. This book was released on 2019-04-16 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Everybody tells you to live for a cause larger than yourself, but how exactly do you do it? The author of The Road to Character explores what it takes to lead a meaningful life in a self-centered world. “Deeply moving, frequently eloquent and extraordinarily incisive.”—The Washington Post Every so often, you meet people who radiate joy—who seem to know why they were put on this earth, who glow with a kind of inner light. Life, for these people, has often followed what we might think of as a two-mountain shape. They get out of school, they start a career, and they begin climbing the mountain they thought they were meant to climb. Their goals on this first mountain are the ones our culture endorses: to be a success, to make your mark, to experience personal happiness. But when they get to the top of that mountain, something happens. They look around and find the view . . . unsatisfying. They realize: This wasn’t my mountain after all. There’s another, bigger mountain out there that is actually my mountain. And so they embark on a new journey. On the second mountain, life moves from self-centered to other-centered. They want the things that are truly worth wanting, not the things other people tell them to want. They embrace a life of interdependence, not independence. They surrender to a life of commitment. In The Second Mountain, David Brooks explores the four commitments that define a life of meaning and purpose: to a spouse and family, to a vocation, to a philosophy or faith, and to a community. Our personal fulfillment depends on how well we choose and execute these commitments. Brooks looks at a range of people who have lived joyous, committed lives, and who have embraced the necessity and beauty of dependence. He gathers their wisdom on how to choose a partner, how to pick a vocation, how to live out a philosophy, and how we can begin to integrate our commitments into one overriding purpose. In short, this book is meant to help us all lead more meaningful lives. But it’s also a provocative social commentary. We live in a society, Brooks argues, that celebrates freedom, that tells us to be true to ourselves, at the expense of surrendering to a cause, rooting ourselves in a neighborhood, binding ourselves to others by social solidarity and love. We have taken individualism to the extreme—and in the process we have torn the social fabric in a thousand different ways. The path to repair is through making deeper commitments. In The Second Mountain, Brooks shows what can happen when we put commitment-making at the center of our lives.
Download or read book The Dying Art of Disagreement written by Bret Stephens and published by . This book was released on 2017-12-17 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2017 Lowy Institute Media Lecture
Download or read book A Matter Of Opinion written by Alan Hansen and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-07-31 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Football is a game of opinions. Alan Hansen knows this only too well. In his long, distinguished career with Liverpool he faced some fierce public criticism from the media. Now the boot is on the other foot and Hansen himself earns a living as one of football's most outspoken and popular pundits. Hansen's autobiography is as uncompromising as the man himself. Looking back at fourteen victorious years at Anfield, he focuses on the highlights and the inspirational characters - Paisley, Fagan, Dalglish, Rush - who were so instrumental in building the club's international success. Then there were the disappointments, and the darker days at Heysel and Hillsborough. Hansen reflects on the impact both incidents had on his life, and on the future for spectators of British football. In 1991 Hansen retired from football. He explains his reasons for not wanting to stay in the game, revealing a surprising lack of self-confidence. If he were starting his playing career now, who are the teams he would want to play for - and those he wouldn't? Which managers and players does he respect? Why does he admire Wimbledon above all other home teams? Hansen addresses these questions and, now that clubs are becoming multi-faceted business empires, looks at the future for the game in the UK. Until a knee injury ended his playing career, Hansen was one of the most successful British soccer players of all time. He captained Liverpool to an historic double in 1986, and is the only person to have won all of the honours available at club level at least twice. A keen tactical understanding of the game has made him a favourite on BBC TV Match of the Day, Grandstand and Sportsnight. Before embarking on his professional playing career, Hansen was awarded a place at Aberdeen University to read history. He lives with his family in Merseyside.
Download or read book Does Anything Really Matter written by Peter Singer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-12 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first two volumes of On What Matters Derek Parfit argues that there are objective moral truths, and other normative truths about what we have reasons to believe, and to want, and to do. He thus challenges a view of the role of reason in action that can be traced back to David Hume, and is widely assumed to be correct, not only by philosophers but also by economists. In defending his view, Parfit argues that if there are no objective normative truths, nihilism follows, and nothing matters. He criticizes, often forcefully, many leading contemporary philosophers working on the nature of ethics, including Simon Blackburn, Stephen Darwall, Allen Gibbard, Frank Jackson, Peter Railton, Mark Schroeder, Michael Smith, and Sharon Street. Does Anything Really Matter? gives these philosophers an opportunity to respond to Parfit's criticisms, and includes essays on Parfit's views by Richard Chappell, Andrew Huddleston, Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer, Bruce Russell, and Larry Temkin. A third volume of On What Matters, in which Parfit engages with his critics and breaks new ground in finding significant agreement between his own views and theirs, is appearing as a separate companion volume.
Download or read book Do Fathers Matter written by Paul Raeburn and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Do Fathers Matter? the award-winning journalist and father of five Paul Raeburn overturns the many myths and stereotypes of fatherhood as he examines the latest scientific findings on the parent we've often overlooked. Drawing on research from neuroscientists, animal behaviorists, geneticists, and developmental psychologists, among others, Raeburn takes us through the various stages of fatherhood, revealing the profound physiological connections between children and fathers, from conception through adolescence and into adulthood--and the importance of the relationship between mothers and fathers. In the process, he challenges the legacy of Freud and mainstream views of parental attachment, and also explains how we can become better parents ourselves."--www.Amazon.com.
Download or read book Dream Hoarders written by Richard V. Reeves and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dream Hoarders sparked a national conversation on the dangerous separation between the upper middle class and everyone else. Now in paperback and newly updated for the age of Trump, Brookings Institution senior fellow Richard Reeves is continuing to challenge the class system in America. In America, everyone knows that the top 1 percent are the villains. The rest of us, the 99 percent—we are the good guys. Not so, argues Reeves. The real class divide is not between the upper class and the upper middle class: it is between the upper middle class and everyone else. The separation of the upper middle class from everyone else is both economic and social, and the practice of “opportunity hoarding”—gaining exclusive access to scarce resources—is especially prevalent among parents who want to perpetuate privilege to the benefit of their children. While many families believe this is just good parenting, it is actually hurting others by reducing their chances of securing these opportunities. There is a glass floor created for each affluent child helped by his or her wealthy, stable family. That glass floor is a glass ceiling for another child. Throughout Dream Hoarders, Reeves explores the creation and perpetuation of opportunity hoarding, and what should be done to stop it, including controversial solutions such as ending legacy admissions to school. He offers specific steps toward reducing inequality and asks the upper middle class to pay for it. Convinced of their merit, members of the upper middle class believes they are entitled to those tax breaks and hoarded opportunities. After all, they aren't the 1 percent. The national obsession with the super rich allows the upper middle class to convince themselves that they are just like the rest of America. In Dream Hoarders, Reeves argues that in many ways, they are worse, and that changes in policy and social conscience are the only way to fix the broken system.
Download or read book A Matter of Opinion Etc written by Edward Alexander WILSON and published by . This book was released on 1955 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Alignment Problem Machine Learning and Human Values written by Brian Christian and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A jaw-dropping exploration of everything that goes wrong when we build AI systems and the movement to fix them. Today’s “machine-learning” systems, trained by data, are so effective that we’ve invited them to see and hear for us—and to make decisions on our behalf. But alarm bells are ringing. Recent years have seen an eruption of concern as the field of machine learning advances. When the systems we attempt to teach will not, in the end, do what we want or what we expect, ethical and potentially existential risks emerge. Researchers call this the alignment problem. Systems cull résumés until, years later, we discover that they have inherent gender biases. Algorithms decide bail and parole—and appear to assess Black and White defendants differently. We can no longer assume that our mortgage application, or even our medical tests, will be seen by human eyes. And as autonomous vehicles share our streets, we are increasingly putting our lives in their hands. The mathematical and computational models driving these changes range in complexity from something that can fit on a spreadsheet to a complex system that might credibly be called “artificial intelligence.” They are steadily replacing both human judgment and explicitly programmed software. In best-selling author Brian Christian’s riveting account, we meet the alignment problem’s “first-responders,” and learn their ambitious plan to solve it before our hands are completely off the wheel. In a masterful blend of history and on-the ground reporting, Christian traces the explosive growth in the field of machine learning and surveys its current, sprawling frontier. Readers encounter a discipline finding its legs amid exhilarating and sometimes terrifying progress. Whether they—and we—succeed or fail in solving the alignment problem will be a defining human story. The Alignment Problem offers an unflinching reckoning with humanity’s biases and blind spots, our own unstated assumptions and often contradictory goals. A dazzlingly interdisciplinary work, it takes a hard look not only at our technology but at our culture—and finds a story by turns harrowing and hopeful.
Download or read book Words That Matter written by Leticia Bode and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2020-05-26 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the 2016 news media environment allowed Trump to win the presidency The 2016 presidential election campaign might have seemed to be all about one man. He certainly did everything possible to reinforce that impression. But to an unprecedented degree the campaign also was about the news media and its relationships with the man who won and the woman he defeated. Words that Matter assesses how the news media covered the extraordinary 2016 election and, more important, what information—true, false, or somewhere in between—actually helped voters make up their minds. Using journalists' real-time tweets and published news coverage of campaign events, along with Gallup polling data measuring how voters perceived that reporting, the book traces the flow of information from candidates and their campaigns to journalists and to the public. The evidence uncovered shows how Donald Trump's victory, and Hillary Clinton's loss, resulted in large part from how the news media responded to these two unique candidates. Both candidates were unusual in their own ways, and thus presented a long list of possible issues for the media to focus on. Which of these many topics got communicated to voters made a big difference outcome. What people heard about these two candidates during the campaign was quite different. Coverage of Trump was scattered among many different issues, and while many of those issues were negative, no single negative narrative came to dominate the coverage of the man who would be elected the 45th president of the United States. Clinton, by contrast, faced an almost unrelenting news media focus on one negative issue—her alleged misuse of e-mails—that captured public attention in a way that the more numerous questions about Trump did not. Some news media coverage of the campaign was insightful and helpful to voters who really wanted serious information to help them make the most important decision a democracy offers. But this book also demonstrates how the modern media environment can exacerbate the kind of pack journalism that leads some issues to dominate the news while others of equal or greater importance get almost no attention, making it hard for voters to make informed choices.
Download or read book The Matter of Facts written by Gareth Leng and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-03-18 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How biases, the desire for a good narrative, reliance on citation metrics, and other problems undermine confidence in modern science. Modern science is built on experimental evidence, yet scientists are often very selective in deciding what evidence to use and tend to disagree about how to interpret it. In The Matter of Facts, Gareth and Rhodri Leng explore how scientists produce and use evidence. They do so to contextualize an array of problems confronting modern science that have raised concerns about its reliability: the widespread use of inappropriate statistical tests, a shortage of replication studies, and a bias in both publishing and citing “positive” results. Before these problems can be addressed meaningfully, the authors argue, we must understand what makes science work and what leads it astray. The myth of science is that scientists constantly challenge their own thinking. But in reality, all scientists are in the business of persuading other scientists of the importance of their own ideas, and they do so by combining reason with rhetoric. Often, they look for evidence that will support their ideas, not for evidence that might contradict them; often, they present evidence in a way that makes it appear to be supportive; and often, they ignore inconvenient evidence. In a series of essays focusing on controversies, disputes, and discoveries, the authors vividly portray science as a human activity, driven by passion as well as by reason. By analyzing the fluidity of scientific concepts and the dynamic and unpredictable development of scientific fields, the authors paint a picture of modern science and the pressures it faces.
