books_with_metadata.json

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      {
        "title": "Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile",
        "author": "Eden Medina",
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            "title": "Cybernetic Revolutionaries",
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        "title": "Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discontents",
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        "title": "The Signal and the Noise",
        "author": "Nate Silver",
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        "title": "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution",
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        "title": "How to Do Things With Videogames",
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        "title": "Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City",
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        "title": "A Pattern Language",
        "author": "Christopher Alexander",
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        "title": "The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You",
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        "title": "Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology",
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            "story": "Few today realize that electric cabs dominated Manhattan's streets in the 1890s; that Boise, Idaho, had a geothermal heating system in 1910; or that the first megawatt turbine in the world was built in 1941 by the son of publishing magnate G. P. Putnam—a feat that would not be duplicated for another forty years. Likewise, while many remember the oil embargo of the 1970s, few are aware that it led to a corresponding explosion in green-technology research that was only derailed when energy prices later dropped. In other words: We've been here before. Although we may have failed, America has had the chance to put our world on a more sustainable path. Americans have, in fact, been inventing green for more than a century. Half compendium of lost opportunities, half hopeful look toward the future, Powering the Dream tells the stories of the brilliant, often irascible inventors who foresaw our current problems, tried to invent cheap and energy renewable solutions, and drew the blueprint for a green future.",
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        "date": "05-15-2011"
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        "title": "Extraordinary Perception",
        "author": "Unknown Author",
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        "title": "Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World",
        "author": "Jane McGonigal",
        "date": "03-15-2011"
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        "title": "The Architecture Machine",
        "author": "Nicholas Negroponte",
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            "title": "The Architecture Machine",
            "author": "Nicholas Negroponte",
            "story": "The use of computers to aid the architectural designer and urban planner is already beyond the experimental stage and part of the workaday routine of many professionals. There are, for example, machines that transform two-dimensional drawings into three-dimensional perspective displays and others that check myriad aspects of a design against specifications and tolerance requirements. The Architecture Machine looks several machine generations ahead of these to a future in which genuine man-machine dialogue is achieved, when man and machine will act together on something closer to equal terms toward a common goal, each contributing his-its own characteristic faculty.",
            "subtitle": " Toward a More Human Environment",
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        "date": "01-15-2011"
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        "title": "Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation",
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        "title": "Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production",
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            "story": "In this classic text, Taiichi Ohno—inventor of the Toyota Production System and Lean manufacturing—shares the genius that sets him apart as one of the most disciplined and creative thinkers of our time. Combining his candid insights with a rigorous analysis of Toyota's attempts at Lean production, Ohno's book explains how Lean principles can improve any production endeavor. A historical and philosophical description of just-in-time and Lean manufacturing, this work is a must read for all students of human progress. On a more practical level, it continues to provide inspiration and instruction for those seeking to improve efficiency through the elimination of waste.",
            "subtitle": " Beyond Large-Scale Production",
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        },
        "date": "09-15-2010"
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        "title": "Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose",
        "author": "Tony Hsieh",
        "date": "08-15-2010"
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      {
        "title": "Proust Was a Neuroscientist",
        "author": "Jonah Lehrer",
        "date": "07-15-2010"
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      {
        "title": "The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Live and Buy as They Do",
        "author": "Clotaire Rapaille",
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            "title": "The Culture Code",
            "author": "Clotaire Rapaille",
            "story": "In The Culture Code, Dr. Rapaille decodes two dozen of our most fundamental archetypes—ranging from sex to money to health to America itself—to give us “a new set of glasses” with which to view our actions and motivations. Why are we so often disillusioned by love? Why is fat a solution rather than a problem? Why do we reject the notion of perfection? Why is fast food in our lives to stay? The answers are in the Codes. Understanding the Codes gives us unprecedented freedom over our lives. It lets us do business in dramatically new ways. And it finally explains why people around the world really are different, and reveals the hidden clues to understanding us all.",
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        "date": "05-15-2010"
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        "title": "Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting",
        "author": "Robert McKee",
        "date": "03-15-2010"
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        "title": "A Theory of Fun for Game Design",
        "author": "Raph Koster",
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        "title": "Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer",
        "author": "Bryan Eisenberg and John Quarto-vonTivadar",
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            "title": "Always Be Testing",
            "author": "Bryan Eisenberg and John Quarto-vonTivadar",
            "story": "Take the guesswork out of your online marketing efforts. Let Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer show you why you should test, how to test, and what to test on your site, and ultimately, help you discover what is best for your site and your bottom line.",
            "subtitle": " The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer",
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        "date": "01-15-2010"
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        "title": "Content Strategy for the Web",
        "author": "Kristina Halvorson",
        "date": "11-15-2009"
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      {
        "title": "The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas With Pictures",
        "author": "Dan Roam",
        "date": "10-15-2009"
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        "title": "Web Analytics: An Hour A Day",
        "author": "Avinash Kaushik",
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        "title": "Cybernetic Revolutionaries",
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        "story": "In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile's experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computer system that would manage Chile's economy. Neither vision was fully realized—Allende's government ended with a violent military coup; the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completely implemented—but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between technology and politics. Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews, Medina examines the cybernetic system envisioned by the Chilean government—which was to feature holistic system design, decentralized management, human-computer interaction, a national telex network, near real-time control of the growing industrial sector, and modeling the behavior of dynamic systems. She also describes, and documents with photographs, the network's Star Trek-like operations room, which featured swivel chairs with armrest control panels, a wall of screens displaying data, and flashing red lights to indicate economic emergencies. Studying project Cybersyn today helps us understand not only the technological ambitions of a government in the midst of political change but also the limitations of the Chilean revolution. This history further shows how human attempts to combine the political and the technological with the goal of creating a more just society can open new technological, intellectual, and political possibilities. Technologies, Medina writes, are historical texts; when we read them we are reading history.",
        "subtitle": " Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile",
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        "permalink": "the-signal-and-the-noise",
        "title": "The Signal and the Noise",
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        "story": "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. The New York Times now publishes FiveThirtyEight.com, where Silver is one of the nation’s most influential political forecasters. 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.",
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        "story": "A gleeful and exhilarating tale of global conspiracy, complex code-breaking, high-tech data visualization, young love, rollicking adventure, and the secret to eternal life—mostly set in a hole-in-the-wall San Francisco bookstore. The Great Recession has shuffled Clay Jannon out of his life as a San Francisco Web-design drone—and serendipity, sheer curiosity, and the ability to climb a ladder like a monkey has landed him a new gig working the night shift at Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. But after just a few days on the job, Clay begins to realize that this store is even more curious than the name suggests. With irresistible brio and dazzling intelligence, Robin Sloan has crafted a literary adventure story for the twenty-first century, evoking both the fairy-tale charm of Haruki Murakami and the enthusiastic novel-of-ideas wizardry of Neal Stephenson or a young Umberto Eco, but with a unique and feisty sensibility that’s rare to the world of literary fiction.",
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        "subtitle": " A Novel",
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        "title": "Hackers",
        "author": "Steven Levy",
        "story": "Hackers traces the exploits of innovators from the research labs in the late 1950s to the rise of the home computer in the mid-1980s. It's a fascinating story of brilliant and eccentric nerds such as Steve Wozniak, Ken Williams, and John Draper who took risks, bent the rules, and took the world in a radical new direction. “Hacker” is often a derogatory term today, but 40 years ago, it referred to people who found clever and unorthodox solutions to computer engineering problems—a practice that became known as “the hacker ethic.” In this book, Levy takes you from the true hackers of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club to the DIY culture that spawned the first personal computers -- the Altair and the Apple II -- and finally to the gaming culture of the early '80s. From students finagling access to clunky computer-card machines to engineers uncovering the secrets of what would become the Internet, Hackers captures a seminal period in history when underground activities blazed a trail for today's digital world. This book is not just for geeks—it's for everyone interested in origins of the computer revolution.",
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        "author": "Greg Grandin",
        "story": "Fordlandia is the story of Henry Ford's ill-advised attempt to transform raw Brazilian rainforest into homespun slices of Americana. With sales of his Model-T booming, the automotive tycoon saw an opportunity to expand his reach further by exploiting a downtrodden Brazilian rubber industry. His vision, the laughably-named Amazonian outpost of Fordlandia, would become an enviable symbol of efficiency and mark the Ford Motor Company as a player on the global stage. Or so he thought. With thoughtful and meticulous research, author Greg Grandin explores the astounding oversights (no botanists were consulted to confirm the colony's agricultural viability) and painful arrogance (little thought was paid to how native Brazilians would react to an American way of life) that hamstrung the project from the start. Instead of ushering in a new era of commerce, Fordlandia became a cautionary tale of a dream destroyed by hubris.",
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        "title": "A Pattern Language",
        "author": "Christopher Alexander",
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        "date_read": "2011-10-15",
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        "title": "The Filter Bubble",
        "author": "Eli Pariser",
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        "subtitle": " What the Internet Is Hiding from You",
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        "permalink_url": "http://www.amazon.com/The-Filter-Bubble-Internet-Hiding/dp/1594203008/",
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      {
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        "title": "Powering the Dream",
        "author": "Alexis Madrigal",
        "story": "Few today realize that electric cabs dominated Manhattan's streets in the 1890s; that Boise, Idaho, had a geothermal heating system in 1910; or that the first megawatt turbine in the world was built in 1941 by the son of publishing magnate G. P. Putnam—a feat that would not be duplicated for another forty years. Likewise, while many remember the oil embargo of the 1970s, few are aware that it led to a corresponding explosion in green-technology research that was only derailed when energy prices later dropped. In other words: We've been here before. Although we may have failed, America has had the chance to put our world on a more sustainable path. Americans have, in fact, been inventing green for more than a century. Half compendium of lost opportunities, half hopeful look toward the future, Powering the Dream tells the stories of the brilliant, often irascible inventors who foresaw our current problems, tried to invent cheap and energy renewable solutions, and drew the blueprint for a green future.",
        "subtitle": " The History and Promise of Green Technology",
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        "title": "The Culture Code",
        "author": "Clotaire Rapaille",
        "story": "In The Culture Code, Dr. Rapaille decodes two dozen of our most fundamental archetypes—ranging from sex to money to health to America itself—to give us “a new set of glasses” with which to view our actions and motivations. Why are we so often disillusioned by love? Why is fat a solution rather than a problem? Why do we reject the notion of perfection? Why is fast food in our lives to stay? The answers are in the Codes. Understanding the Codes gives us unprecedented freedom over our lives. It lets us do business in dramatically new ways. And it finally explains why people around the world really are different, and reveals the hidden clues to understanding us all.",
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        "title": "A Theory of Fun for Game Design",
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        "title": "Always Be Testing",
        "author": "Bryan Eisenberg and John Quarto-vonTivadar",
        "story": "Take the guesswork out of your online marketing efforts. Let Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer show you why you should test, how to test, and what to test on your site, and ultimately, help you discover what is best for your site and your bottom line.",
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        "title": "Content Strategy for the Web",
        "author": "Kristina Halvorson",
        "story": "If your website content is out of date, off-brand, and out of control, you're missing a huge opportunity to engage, convert, and retain customers online. Redesigning your home page won't help. Investing in a new content management system won't fix it, either. So, where do you start?  Without meaningful content, your website isn't worth much to your key audiences. But creating (and caring for) \"meaningful\" content is far more complicated than we're often willing to acknowledge. Content Strategy for the Web explains how to create and deliver useful, usable content for your online audiences, when and where they need it most. It also shares content best practices so you can get your next website redesign right, on time and on budget.",
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            "title": "Tenth of December",
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            "story": "Writing brilliantly and profoundly about class, sex, love, loss, work, despair, and war, Saunders cuts to the core of the contemporary experience. These stories take on the big questions and explore the fault lines of our own morality, delving into the questions of what makes us good and what makes us human. Unsettling, insightful, and hilarious, the stories in Tenth of December—through their manic energy, their focus on what is redeemable in human beings, and their generosity of spirit—not only entertain and delight; they fulfill Chekhov’s dictum that art should “prepare us for tenderness.”",
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        "title": "Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discontents",
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        "author": "James Barron",
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            "title": "Piano",
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        "date": "03-15-2012"
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        "title": "The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood",
        "author": "James Gleick",
        "date": "01-15-2012"
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      {
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            "title": "Lapham's Quarterly",
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            "title": "Newsgames",
            "author": "Ian Bogost, Simon Ferrari, and Bobby Schweizer",
            "story": "Journalism has embraced digital media in its struggle to survive. But most online journalism just translates existing practices to the Web: stories are written and edited as they are for print; video and audio features are produced as they would be for television and radio. The authors of Newsgames propose a new way of doing good journalism: videogames. Videogames are native to computers rather than a digitized form of prior media. Games simulate how things work by constructing interactive models; journalism as game involves more than just revisiting old forms of news production. Wired magazine's game Cutthroat Capitalism, for example, explains the economics of Somali piracy by putting the player in command of a pirate ship, offering choices for hostage negotiation strategies. Videogames do not offer a panacea for the ills of contemporary news organizations. But if the industry embraces them as a viable method of doing journalism—not just an occasional treat for online readers—newsgames can make a valuable contribution.",
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        "story": "A gleeful and exhilarating tale of global conspiracy, complex code-breaking, high-tech data visualization, young love, rollicking adventure, and the secret to eternal life—mostly set in a hole-in-the-wall San Francisco bookstore. The Great Recession has shuffled Clay Jannon out of his life as a San Francisco Web-design drone—and serendipity, sheer curiosity, and the ability to climb a ladder like a monkey has landed him a new gig working the night shift at Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. But after just a few days on the job, Clay begins to realize that this store is even more curious than the name suggests. With irresistible brio and dazzling intelligence, Robin Sloan has crafted a literary adventure story for the twenty-first century, evoking both the fairy-tale charm of Haruki Murakami and the enthusiastic novel-of-ideas wizardry of Neal Stephenson or a young Umberto Eco, but with a unique and feisty sensibility that’s rare to the world of literary fiction. ",
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        "story": "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was published in 1968. Grim and foreboding, even today it is a masterpiece ahead of its time. By 2021, the World War had killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remained coveted any living creature, and for people who couldn't afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulacrae: horses, birds, cats, sheep…they even built humans. Emigrees to Mars received androids so sophisticated it was impossible to tell them from true men or women. Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans could wreak, the government banned them from Earth. But when androids didn't want to be identified, they just blended in. Rick Deckard was an officially sanctioned bounty hunter whose job was to find rogue androids, and to retire them. But cornered, androids tended to fight back, with deadly results.",
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        "title": "Piano",
        "author": "James Barron",
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        "story": "James Gleick, the author of the bestsellers Chaos and Ge­nius, brings us his crowning work: a revelatory chronicle that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.  The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanished as soon as it was born. From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long misunderstood “talk­ing drums” of Africa, James Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable develop­ment of our modern understanding of information: Charles Babbage, the idiosyncratic inventor of the first great mechanical computer; Ada Byron, the po­et’s brilliant and doomed daughter, who became the first true programmer; pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing; and Claude Shannon, the cre­ator of information theory itself.  And then the information age comes upon us. Citi­zens of this world become experts willy-nilly: aficiona­dos of bits and bytes. And they sometimes feel they are drowning, swept by a deluge of signs and signals, news and images, blogs and tweets. The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading. It will transform readers’ view of its subject.",
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        "title": "Lapham's Quarterly",
        "author": "Lewis H. Lapham",
        "story": "By way of lifting the siege of dismal prophecy, this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly draws on the teaching of history to show the future as a land of make-believe, a work of the imagination, shaped by the emotion of the present and situated somewhere over the rainbow of a deconstructed past. Time flows upstream as well as down, which is the message brought to Oedipus by blind Tiresias and by St. Augustine’s noticing that both past and future, “wherever they are, whatever they are,” exist nowhere else except in the minds of their beholders. John Crowley completes the thought sixteen centuries further along the road to who knows where, finding that “the future, as always, is now,” a reflection in the mirror as opposed to a sighting in a crystal ball.",
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        "title": "River of Shadows",
        "author": "Rebecca Solnit",
        "story": "The world as we know it today began in California in the late 1800s, and Eadweard Muybridge had a lot to do with it. This striking assertion is at the heart of Rebecca Solnit’s new book, which weaves together biography, history, and fascinating insights into art and technology to create a boldly original portrait of America on the threshold of modernity. The story of Muybridge—who in 1872 succeeded in capturing high-speed motion photographically—becomes a lens for a larger story about the acceleration and industrialization of everyday life. Solnit shows how the peculiar freedoms and opportunities of post–Civil War California led directly to the two industries—Hollywood and Silicon Valley—that have most powerfully defined contemporary society.",
        "subtitle": " Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West",
        "date_read": "2011-09-15",
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        "title": "Newsgames",
        "author": "Ian Bogost, Simon Ferrari, and Bobby Schweizer",
        "story": "Journalism has embraced digital media in its struggle to survive. But most online journalism just translates existing practices to the Web: stories are written and edited as they are for print; video and audio features are produced as they would be for television and radio. The authors of Newsgames propose a new way of doing good journalism: videogames. Videogames are native to computers rather than a digitized form of prior media. Games simulate how things work by constructing interactive models; journalism as game involves more than just revisiting old forms of news production. Wired magazine's game Cutthroat Capitalism, for example, explains the economics of Somali piracy by putting the player in command of a pirate ship, offering choices for hostage negotiation strategies. Videogames do not offer a panacea for the ills of contemporary news organizations. But if the industry embraces them as a viable method of doing journalism—not just an occasional treat for online readers—newsgames can make a valuable contribution.",
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