Download or read book Numbers and the Making of Us written by Caleb Everett and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-13 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A fascinating book.” —James Ryerson, New York Times Book Review A Smithsonian Best Science Book of the Year Winner of the PROSE Award for Best Book in Language & Linguistics Carved into our past and woven into our present, numbers shape our perceptions of the world far more than we think. In this sweeping account of how the invention of numbers sparked a revolution in human thought and culture, Caleb Everett draws on new discoveries in psychology, anthropology, and linguistics to reveal the many things made possible by numbers, from the concept of time to writing, agriculture, and commerce. Numbers are a tool, like the wheel, developed and refined over millennia. They allow us to grasp quantities precisely, but recent research confirms that they are not innate—and without numbers, we could not fully grasp quantities greater than three. Everett considers the number systems that have developed in different societies as he shares insights from his fascinating work with indigenous Amazonians. “This is bold, heady stuff... The breadth of research Everett covers is impressive, and allows him to develop a narrative that is both global and compelling... Numbers is eye-opening, even eye-popping.” —New Scientist “A powerful and convincing case for Everett’s main thesis: that numbers are neither natural nor innate to humans.” —Wall Street Journal

Download or read book Education by the Numbers and the Making of Society written by Sverker Lindblad and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-03-19 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: International statistical comparisons of nations have become commonplace in the contemporary landscape of education policy and social science. This book discusses the emergence of these international comparisons as a particular style of reasoning about education, society and science. By examining how international educational assessments have come to dominate much of contemporary policymaking concerning school system performance, the authors provide concrete case studies highlighting the preeminent role of numbers in furthering neoliberal education reform. Demonstrating how numbers serve as ‘rationales’ to shape and fashion social issues, this text opens new avenues for thinking about institutional and epistemological factors that produce and shape educational policy, research and schooling in transnational contexts.

Download or read book Making Numbers Count written by Chip Heath and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A clear, practical, first-of-its-kind guide to communicating and understanding numbers and data—from bestselling business author Chip Heath. How much bigger is a billion than a million? Well, a million seconds is twelve days. A billion seconds is…thirty-two years. Understanding numbers is essential—but humans aren’t built to understand them. Until very recently, most languages had no words for numbers greater than five—anything from six to infinity was known as “lots.” While the numbers in our world have gotten increasingly complex, our brains are stuck in the past. How can we translate millions and billions and milliseconds and nanometers into things we can comprehend and use? Author Chip Heath has excelled at teaching others about making ideas stick and here, in Making Numbers Count, he outlines specific principles that reveal how to translate a number into our brain’s language. This book is filled with examples of extreme number makeovers, vivid before-and-after examples that take a dry number and present it in a way that people click in and say “Wow, now I get it!” You will learn principles such as: -SIMPLE PERSPECTIVE CUES: researchers at Microsoft found that adding one simple comparison sentence doubled how accurately users estimated statistics like population and area of countries. -VIVIDNESS: get perspective on the size of a nucleus by imagining a bee in a cathedral, or a pea in a racetrack, which are easier to envision than “1/100,000th of the size of an atom.” -CONVERT TO A PROCESS: capitalize on our intuitive sense of time (5 gigabytes of music storage turns into “2 months of commutes, without repeating a song”). -EMOTIONAL MEASURING STICKS: frame the number in a way that people already care about (“that medical protocol would save twice as many women as curing breast cancer”). Whether you’re interested in global problems like climate change, running a tech firm or a farm, or just explaining how many Cokes you’d have to drink if you burned calories like a hummingbird, this book will help math-lovers and math-haters alike translate the numbers that animate our world—allowing us to bring more data, more naturally, into decisions in our schools, our workplaces, and our society.

Download or read book Making Sense of Numbers written by Jane E. Miller and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2021-08-30 with total page 509 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making Sense of Numbers teaches students the skills they need to be both consumers and producers of quantitative research: able to read about, collect, calculate, and communicate numeric information for both everyday tasks and school or work assignments. The text teaches how to avoid making common errors of reasoning, calculation, or interpretation by introducing a systematic approach to working with numbers, showing students how to figure out what a particular number means. The text also demonstrates why it is important to apply a healthy dose of skepticism to the numbers we all encounter, so that we can understand how those numbers can (and cannot) be interpreted in their real-world context. Jane E. Miller uses annotated examples on a wide variety of topics to illustrate how to use new terms, concepts, and approaches to working with numbers. End-of-chapter engagement activities designed based on Miller’s three decades of teaching experience can be used in class or as homework assignments, with some for students to do individually and others intended for group discussion. The book is ideally suited for a range of courses, including quantitative reasoning, research methods, basic statistics, data analysis, and communicating quantitative information. An instructor website for the book includes a test bank, editable PowerPoint slides, and tables and figures from the book.

Download or read book Narrative and the Making of US National Security written by Ronald R. Krebs and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-27 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows how dominant narratives have shaped the national security policies of the United States.

Download or read book Mathsemantics written by Edward MacNeal and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1995-03-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is a whole new way of looking at math that liberates math phobes from their anxiety, enables business people to do their jobs more effectively, challenges and informs math buffs, and provides educators with the tools to teach math easily and effectively. How can it do all that? By reuniting numbers and meaning, two subjects that should never have been separated in the first place. Entertaining, anecdotal, and immensely practical, this extraordinary book offers a revolutionary way of looking at math as a language, something that we've all heard before but which has never made sense until now. Mathsemantics is that rare book that will change the way you look at the world—and provide the most sensible and inspiring answer yet to the problem of American innumeracy. "Eye opening . . . a good antidote to innumeracy."—Library Journal

Download or read book The Making of Americans written by Gertrude Stein and published by . This book was released on 1926 with total page 944 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Numbers Don t Lie written by Vaclav Smil and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Vaclav Smil is my favorite author… Numbers Don't Lie takes everything that makes his writing great and boils it down into an easy-to-read format. I unabashedly recommend this book to anyone who loves learning."--Bill Gates, GatesNotes From the author of How the World Really Works, an essential guide to understanding how numbers reveal the true state of our world--exploring a wide range of topics including energy, the environment, technology, transportation, and food production. Vaclav Smil's mission is to make facts matter. An environmental scientist, policy analyst, and a hugely prolific author, he is Bill Gates' go-to guy for making sense of our world. In Numbers Don't Lie, Smil answers questions such as: What's worse for the environment--your car or your phone? How much do the world's cows weigh (and what does it matter)? And what makes people happy? From data about our societies and populations, through measures of the fuels and foods that energize them, to the impact of transportation and inventions of our modern world--and how all of this affects the planet itself--in Numbers Don't Lie, Vaclav Smil takes us on a fact-finding adventure, using surprising statistics and illuminating graphs to challenge conventional thinking. Packed with fascinating information and memorable examples, Numbers Don't Lie reveals how the US is leading a rising worldwide trend in chicken consumption, that vaccination yields the best return on investment, and why electric cars aren't as great as we think (yet). Urgent and essential, with a mix of science, history, and wit--all in bite-sized chapters on a broad range of topics--Numbers Don't Lie inspires readers to interrogate what they take to be true.

Download or read book Num8ers written by Rachel Ward and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2010 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifteen-year-old Jem knows when she looks at someone the exact date they will die, so she avoids relationships and tries to keep out of the way, but when she meets a boy named Spider and they plan a day out together, they become more involved than either of them had planned.

Download or read book The Distribution of Prime Numbers written by Dimitris Koukoulopoulos and published by American Mathematical Soc.. This book was released on 2020-07-28 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prime numbers have fascinated mathematicians since the time of Euclid. This book presents some of our best tools to capture the properties of these fundamental objects, beginning with the most basic notions of asymptotic estimates and arriving at the forefront of mathematical research. Detailed proofs of the recent spectacular advances on small and large gaps between primes are made accessible for the first time in textbook form. Some other highlights include an introduction to probabilistic methods, a detailed study of sieves, and elements of the theory of pretentious multiplicative functions leading to a proof of Linnik's theorem. Throughout, the emphasis has been placed on explaining the main ideas rather than the most general results available. As a result, several methods are presented in terms of concrete examples that simplify technical details, and theorems are stated in a form that facilitates the understanding of their proof at the cost of sacrificing some generality. Each chapter concludes with numerous exercises of various levels of difficulty aimed to exemplify the material, as well as to expose the readers to more advanced topics and point them to further reading sources.

Download or read book Book of Numbers written by Joshua Cohen and published by Random House. This book was released on 2015-06-09 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “More impressive than all but a few novels published so far this decade . . . a wheeling meditation on the wired life, on privacy, on what being human in the age of binary code might mean . . . [Joshua] Cohen, all of thirty-four, emerges as a major American writer.”—The New York Times NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY VULTURE AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND THE WALL STREET JOURNAL “Book of Numbers . . . is shatteringly powerful. I cannot think of anything by anyone in [Cohen’s] generation that is so frighteningly relevant and composed with such continuous eloquence. There are moments in it that seem to transcend our impasse.”—Harold Bloom The enigmatic billionaire founder of Tetration, the world’s most powerful tech company, hires a failed novelist, Josh Cohen, to ghostwrite his memoirs. The mogul, known as Principal, brings Josh behind the digital veil, tracing the rise of Tetration, which started in the earliest days of the Internet by revolutionizing the search engine before venturing into smartphones, computers, and the surveillance of American citizens. Principal takes Josh on a mind-bending world tour from Palo Alto to Dubai and beyond, initiating him into the secret pretext of the autobiography project and the life-or-death stakes that surround its publication. Insider tech exposé, leaked memoir-in-progress, international thriller, family drama, sex comedy, and biblical allegory, Book of Numbers renders the full range of modern experience both online and off. Embodying the Internet in its language, it finds the humanity underlying the virtual. Featuring one of the most unforgettable characters in contemporary fiction, Book of Numbers is an epic of the digital age, a triumph of a new generation of writers, and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do. Praise for Book of Numbers “The Great American Internet Novel is here. . . . Book of Numbers is a fascinating look at the dark heart of the Web. . . . A page-turner about life under the veil of digital surveillance . . . one of the best novels ever written about the Internet.”—Rolling Stone “A startlingly talented novelist.”—The Wall Street Journal “Remarkable . . . dazzling . . . Cohen’s literary gifts . . . suggest that something is possible, that something still might be done to safeguard whatever it is that makes us human.”—Francine Prose, The New York Review of Books

Download or read book The Strength in Numbers written by Barry Bozeman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why collaborations in STEM fields succeed or fail and how to ensure success Once upon a time, it was the lone scientist who achieved brilliant breakthroughs. No longer. Today, science is done in teams of as many as hundreds of researchers who may be scattered across continents. These collaborations can be powerful, but they also demand new ways of thinking. The Strength in Numbers illuminates the nascent science of team science by synthesizing the results of the most far-reaching study to date on collaboration among university scientists. Drawing on a national survey with responses from researchers at more than one hundred universities, archival data, and extensive interviews with scientists and engineers in over a dozen STEM disciplines, Barry Bozeman and Jan Youtie establish a framework for characterizing different collaborations and their outcomes, and lay out what they have found to be the gold-standard approach: consultative collaboration management. The Strength in Numbers is an indispensable guide for scientists interested in maximizing collaborative success.

Download or read book Making up Numbers A History of Invention in Mathematics written by Ekkehard Kopp and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2020-10-23 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making up Numbers: A History of Invention in Mathematics offers a detailed but accessible account of a wide range of mathematical ideas. Starting with elementary concepts, it leads the reader towards aspects of current mathematical research. The book explains how conceptual hurdles in the development of numbers and number systems were overcome in the course of history, from Babylon to Classical Greece, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, and so to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The narrative moves from the Pythagorean insistence on positive multiples to the gradual acceptance of negative numbers, irrationals and complex numbers as essential tools in quantitative analysis. Within this chronological framework, chapters are organised thematically, covering a variety of topics and contexts: writing and solving equations, geometric construction, coordinates and complex numbers, perceptions of ‘infinity’ and its permissible uses in mathematics, number systems, and evolving views of the role of axioms. Through this approach, the author demonstrates that changes in our understanding of numbers have often relied on the breaking of long-held conventions to make way for new inventions at once providing greater clarity and widening mathematical horizons. Viewed from this historical perspective, mathematical abstraction emerges as neither mysterious nor immutable, but as a contingent, developing human activity. Making up Numbers will be of great interest to undergraduate and A-level students of mathematics, as well as secondary school teachers of the subject. In virtue of its detailed treatment of mathematical ideas, it will be of value to anyone seeking to learn more about the development of the subject.

Download or read book G Man Pulitzer Prize Winner written by Beverly Gage and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-11-22 with total page 897 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Biography Winner of the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography, the 2023 Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy, and the 43rd LA Times Book Prize in Biography | Finalist for the 2023 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Named a Best Book of 2022 by The Atlantic, The Washington Post and Smithsonian Magazine and a New York Times Top 100 Notable Books of 2022 “Masterful…This book is an enduring, formidable accomplishment, a monument to the power of biography [that] now becomes the definitive work”—The Washington Post “A nuanced portrait in a league with the best of Ron Chernow and David McCullough.”—The Wall Street Journal A major new biography of J Edgar Hoover that draws from never-before-seen sources to create a groundbreaking portrait of a colossus who dominated half a century of American history and planted the seeds for much of today's conservative political landscape. We remember him as a bulldog--squat frame, bulging wide-set eyes, fearsome jowls--but in 1924, when he became director of the FBI, he had been the trim, dazzling wunderkind of the administrative state, buzzing with energy and big ideas for reform. He transformed a failing law-enforcement backwater, riddled with scandal, into a modern machine. He believed in the power of the federal government to do great things for the nation and its citizens. He also believed that certain people--many of them communists or racial minorities or both-- did not deserve to be included in that American project. Hoover rose to power and then stayed there, decade after decade, using the tools of state to create a personal fiefdom unrivaled in U.S. history. Beverly Gage’s monumental work explores the full sweep of Hoover’s life and career, from his birth in 1895 to a modest Washington civil-service family through his death in 1972. In her nuanced and definitive portrait, Gage shows how Hoover was more than a one-dimensional tyrant and schemer who strong-armed the rest of the country into submission. As FBI director from 1924 through his death in 1972, he was a confidant, counselor, and adversary to eight U.S. presidents, four Republicans and four Democrats. Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson did the most to empower him, yet his closest friend among the eight was fellow anticommunist warrior Richard Nixon. Hoover was not above blackmail and intimidation, but he also embodied conservative values ranging from anticommunism to white supremacy to a crusading and politicized interpretation of Christianity. This garnered him the admiration of millions of Americans. He stayed in office for so long because many people, from the highest reaches of government down to the grassroots, wanted him there and supported what he was doing, thus creating the template that the political right has followed to transform its party. G-Man places Hoover back where he once stood in American political history--not at the fringes, but at the center--and uses his story to explain the trajectories of governance, policing, race, ideology, political culture, and federal power as they evolved over the course of the 20th century.

Download or read book Really Big Numbers written by Richard Evan Schwartz and published by American Mathematical Soc.. This book was released on 2014-06-30 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the American Mathematical Society's first-ever book for kids (and kids at heart), mathematician and author Richard Evan Schwartz leads math lovers of all ages on an innovative and strikingly illustrated journey through the infinite number system. By means of engaging, imaginative visuals and endearing narration, Schwartz manages the monumental task of presenting the complex concept of Big Numbers in fresh and relatable ways. The book begins with small, easily observable numbers before building up to truly gigantic ones, like a nonillion, a tredecillion, a googol, and even ones too huge for names! Any person, regardless of age, can benefit from reading this book. Readers will find themselves returning to its pages for a very long time, perpetually learning from and growing with the narrative as their knowledge deepens. Really Big Numbers is a wonderful enrichment for any math education program and is enthusiastically recommended to every teacher, parent and grandparent, student, child, or other individual interested in exploring the vast universe of numbers.

Download or read book Thinking in Numbers written by Daniel Tammet and published by . This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book that Daniel Tammet, bestselling author and mathematical savant, was born to write. In Tammet's world, numbers are beautiful and mathematics illuminates our lives and minds. Using anecdotes, everyday examples, and ruminations on history, literature, and more, Tammet allows us to share his unique insights and delight in the way numbers, fractions, and equations underpin all our lives. His idiosyncratic worldview gives us new perspecttives on the universal questions of what it is to be human and how we make meaning. This book will change the way you think about math and fire your imagination to see the world with fresh eyes.--From publisher description.

Download or read book The Crayons Book of Numbers written by Drew Daywalt and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-10-18 with total page 11 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Counting is as easy as 1... 2... purple?... in this charming book of numbers from the creators of the #1 New York Times Best Sellers, The Day the Crayons Quit and The Day the Crayons Came Home. Poor Duncan can't catch a break! First, his crayons go on strike. Then, they come back home. Now his favorite colors are missing once again! Can you count up all the crayons that are missing from his box? From the creative minds behind the The Day the Crayons Quit and The Day the Crayons Came Home comes a colorful board book introducing young readers to numbers.